This song happens on the highway

I caught Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds at an HMV in-store last week. The next day I put the few pictures we took up on Flickr, and by the next morning had over 50 views.

I was quite surprised by this.

A number of things resulted:

• I started following the increasing views like the last minutes of a desperate eBay bid
• I bought myself a new camera
• I came up with the probably unoriginal idea of the Flickr band popularity rating

I have quite a few band pics up on Flickr; I enjoy taking shots at gigs, especially when I get one that's either good or in focus. Part of the new camera thing was to have something decent when I go to see R.E.M. in a couple of weeks. That and the refund from Orange I'm getting that'll cover most of the cost.

So I decided to work out how popular each band is based on how they fare on Flickr. The simple, and no doubt highly mathematically suspect equation for this is to take the number of views per band and divide them by the number of pictures. All figures are accurate as of about an hour ago.

I have 184 shots of 28 bands with 1288 views so far (the views don't include my own, or there's no way Kasabian would be up there at 3). The most shots I have is for Elbow at 35, and the highest number of views is Nick Cave at 257 and rising. But apply the maths and it's a very strange story indeed. So without further ado, on with the results. And the winner is:

Band / Shots / Views / Rating
1. Eels 1 / 34 / 34
2. The Mooney Suzuki 1 / 27 / 27
3. Kasabian 1 / 26 / 26
4. R.E.M. 6 / 143 / 23.8
5. Nick Cave 12 / 257 / 21.4
6. Weird War 1 / 11 / 11
7. Part Chimp 2 / 17 / 8.5
8. The Who 10 / 81 / 8.1
9. Okkervil River 22 / 162 / 7.3
10= Four Day Hombre 2 / 14 / 7
10= The Marshalls 1 / 7 / 7
12. Broken Family Band 3 / 19 / 6.3
13. Shirley Bassey 1 / 6 / 6
14. The Duke Spirit 27 / 146 / 5.4
15= Sun O))) 3 / 16 / 5.3
15= Earth 3 / 16 / 5.3
17. Elbow 35 / 161 / 4.6
18= Tinariwen 2 / 8 / 4
18= Ordinary Boys 2 / 8 / 4
18= Secret Machines 1 / 4 / 4
18= Mycodenamis:milo 1 / 4 / 4
18= Arcade Fire 1 / 4 / 4
18= Air 1 / 4 / 4
24. Maximo Park 16 / 53 / 3.3
25. Iced Earth 4 / 12 / 3
26= Lamb Of God 4 / 9 / 2.25
26= Super Furry Animals 4 / 9 / 2.25
27. Heaven & Hell 17 / 30 / 1.7

And yeah, I know I could have built a nice little HTML table to line everything up.

Anyway, that was fun. For me. Maybe this will take off. Maybe someone will develop a nice little Flickr tool to do the analysis using complex algorithms (or should it be algorhythms...) rather than a calculator.

My new camera should have arrived yesterday. It didn't.


Listening to: Neil Young's Greendale

Living well's the best revenge

Friday was a tough one.

My final clearance arrived last Saturday, and on Tuesday I agreed a start date for my new job with the National Archive. I've been sitting on this for the last month, waiting for the clearances to go through, and it's not always been easy carrying on like nothing was happening, making plans that won't ever be realised, at least not by me.

It took a couple more days for the stars to fall in to alignment, at least, for my manager to be back in the office, and then the deed could be done. I handed my notice in. After 8 years in STM publishing (science-technical-medical), and 3 and a half at BMC (give or take a sabatical), I'm off and out in to the rest of the really real world.

It's a great job, great prospects, a huge challenge. It's not so much a step out of my comfort zone, more taking it apart with a Polaris missile. And yet I know this is the right move because at no time have I ever experienced any hesitation about taking it on. I have more trouble deciding what pants to wear in the morning.

None of which made telling either my team, or my friends there any easier. Judging from the looks on their faces, this was not expected. I've been on the flip side too many times not to know the score, smiley congratulations on the outside, feeling righteously pissed off on the in. Still, as Bryan said, there's never a good time to leave, but at least this is the least bad time. I still felt a little guilty though.

OR has been my baby. I may not have been there at conception, but I carried it, gave birth to it, nurtured it, and watched it grow. I was there when it took its first steps, when it said its first words, and watched it blossom into something none of us ever expected, beautiful and amazing.

But now, I'm afraid, mummy and daddy don't love each other any more, even though we still love the children. We'll remember Christmas and birthdays and we'll still talk, we just won't be seeing each other as much.

And if that duck outside keeps on quacking like it's doing, it's going to end up in a fucking sandwich.