That’s as in juggling.

Basecamp has just announced that some people are experiencing slow downs due to “some people on the Premium plan are amassing hundreds and hundreds of projects”.

Blimey. I’m truly staggered that some people have hundreds of projects. I would expect that the number of projects is some function of the number of people you have in a company, its business type and its turnover. Maybe Basecamp is being used by multinational window cleaners? Or perhaps some people are using it as their main contact repository – which would require one project per contact.

In any eventuality, I’d bet that these people just don’t know how or why they are using Basecamp. For example, we don’t plug every enquiry into Basecamp, and any prospect or job that goes cold we archive. Perhaps Basecamp should automatically archive projects that are abandoned: unvisited in say 30 days, without upcoming milestones?

About this time last year I slyly linked my love of trance to the sorry state of commercial songwriting. Today, the 50th Ivor Novello Awards nominations were announced. This time I must not only protest against the sorry state of commercial songwriting but also the nonsense that the British Academy of Composers and Songwriters nominates.

You see, there is no problem with the state of songwriting in this country, or any country for that matter. The problem is that the likes of the British Academy are driven by commercial (corporate) aims which requires nominations to be commercially successful and known to the general public. This way nominees get their names and faces in the media, their music is bought and record companies (and all the other despicable hangers-on) are satisfied. Which means the true class of songwriting is never made known to the public, and the British Academy ends up being little more than a PR company.

So without further ado, I sat down this evening and laughed at the nominations for ‘Best song musically and lyrically’ and ‘Best contemporary song’:

Best song musically and lyrically:
Dry Your Eyes Performed by The Streets. Written by Mike Skinner.
These Words Performed by Natasha Bedingfield. Written by Stephen Kipner/Andrew Frampton/Natasha Bedingfield/Wayne Wilkins.
Everybody’s Changing Performed by Keane. Written by Tim Rice-Oxley/Tom Chaplin/Richard Hughes.

Best contemporary song:
For Lovers Performed by Wolfman Featuring Pete Doherty. Written by Peter Wolfe/Peter Doherty/Julian Taylor/Edmund Scott/Matt White/David Banks/Matt Scott.
Blinded By The Lights Performed by The Streets. Written by Mike Skinner.
Take Me Out Performed by Franz Ferdinand. Written by Robert Hardy/Alex Kapranos/Nick McCarthy.

Sony have come out with a new Network Walkman. I previously wrote about their multimedia player with its, um, unique, navigation system, so it was with great interest that I learnt that they have a new MP3 player. (Actually, I wasn’t interested that much)

It’s called the NW-HD5 and gosh, doesn’t it look awful?

A lot of people, myself included, sometimes spell things wrong. Fortunately we have spell checkers and dictionaries to keep down the errors. But there’s one word that really bugs me if it’s mis-spelt:

Losing

Most often, it’s mis-spelt as Loosing (as in, to let loose), and it irritates me a lot.