Life since has been incredibly hard. I only knew Velcro for the last three years of her life but she turned round my fear of dogs into love, gave me rhythm, shared a lot of unconditional love and made me a very happy person. Obviously she liked to sneeze and fart and roll in fox poo, as dogs do, and I’ll miss those things too. Things are quieter now, too quiet. No claws tapping on the wooden floor, no howly yawns, no sleepwoofing, no wagging her tail against the radiator. It’s going to take a long time to get used to.

I know she’s busy chasing squirrels and rolling around in nice smells in her dreams. We’re missing you, lady V.

Was totally obsessed by Ellie Goulding’s debut album this year, as well as Gorillaz Plastic Beach and Underworld.

Over at Meish, for the tenth year running (!) Meg has asked folk to share their year in no more than 24 words for the Mayfly Project 2010. Here’s mine:

Ran a lot, broke hand, finished marathon, cried, burnt at Glastonbury, burnt in Nevada, no redundancy, new job, hard work. Content. Big challenges ahead.

How was your year?

Here’s my to-do list so far:

• Sleep a bit more.
• Go and see the 2010 Turner Prize exhibition. It’s always more fun to balk at the madness / marvel at the wonder before a winner is selected.
• Play with the hound (which is also a good excuse for a gratuitous Velcro pic)
• Go to bikram yoga. Three reviews I’ve heard of it:
  “It’s like going on holiday”
  “You will feel sick”
  “I like bikram but you do get a lot of control freak moon worshipers. Fortunately it’s so hot you can’t think.”
• Show my arduino kit some love
• Finish uploading pictures
• Take some new pictures
• Start preparing for having seven people round for Christmas (wah!)
• Make Christmas puddings. Luckily I know how to do this already.
• Finish reading The Color Purple. I read the first half on a Eurostar journey so this won’t take long, but I need to buy tissues first
• Play balloonacy
• Find some circuit training / boot camp shenanigans to go to
• Enter another half marathon
• Write a bit about being a product owner and Scrum. This is what I have been doing for a living and over the last few years I’ve gathered a few thoughts to share.
• Fall off the productivity wagon by accidentally spending a day drinking gin and watching Trisha

What else should I add to my list? And can you help me achieve any of them?

Obviously as the internet (and procrastionation) knows no bounds, someone has already created a playlist of You’ve Been Framed style treadmill capers. Watch and wince.

Things I learned this week:

1. Eating cherries can reduce muscle pain
2. 94% of runners are College/University educated, and 20% say their favourite restaurant chain is McDonalds. This and other statistics from the 2007 Running USA Conference in San Diego can be found over at Dean Karnazes’ blog
3. Whilst running long distances, the body cannot, in fact, reabsorb waste water from the bladder, as my dubious running book told me. However, Frogs can reabsorb glucose from their bladders.

Next week: it’s all about the sponsorship…

• Days to go: 84
• Miles this week: a lowly 13, as I missed my long run last weekend…
• Eating: an astonishing amount of pasta, and jelly babies (cherries aren’t in season)
• Listening to: Four Tet – There Is Love In You

Inspired by David’s marathon blog (and success!), I thought I’d post up a few thoughts here in the run up to the race. This will be my second half marathon – I completed my first in Windsor last September in lush, green, sunny and sweaty circumstances. It was a moving experience – reaching the finish line to the sound of Fleetwood Mac was euphoric – so much so that the following 10 minutes is some sort of endorphin-fuelled blur before being fed some Guinness.

Training began in earnest a couple of weeks ago, and immediately I started I succumbed to pesky chest-infection from hell. Things have picked up again though now I’m better and last week I managed a 4k, 6k and 10k set of runs as well as a rather misty Body Pump class.

So it’s onwards and upwards for the next 6 weeks or so – with sporadic progress updates here. In the meantime, Mr Jones and his knees are taking part in the Helsinki half marathon this weekend – and he needs your sponsorship goodness!

Here’s what I’ve got so far:

• Martika’s Kitchen – Martika
• The Boy Does Nothing – Alesha Dixon
• Dishwasher – Fujiya & Miyagi
• Soul Kitchen – The Doors
• Wash Your Face In My Sink – Dream Warriors
• I Get Wet – Andrew W.K. (remember him?!)
• Soft And Wet – Prince
• High And Dry – Radiohead

Got any suggestions? Add them to this spotify playlist.

And now back to the grind.

What I listened to in 2008, originally uploaded by minor9th.

I’ve also created a playlist of things which I enjoyed or discovered in 2008, which is presented below with mp3 links where I could find them. I’m sure I can help you out if you’re after an easier-to-digest version of the below…

1. Feel the love – Cut Copy
2. Paris Is Burning (Cut Copy Remix) – Ladyhawke
3. How We Became – Jeremy Warmsley
4. Quiet Houses – Fleet Foxes
5. Falling out of Reach – Guillemots
6. Grounds For Divorce – Elbow
7. Ada – The National
8. Edith and the Kingpin – Joni Mitchell
9. The Rip – Portishead
10. Black And Gold – Sam Sparro
11. Bring It Home – Nitin Sawhney feat. Imogen Heap
12. Lump Sum – Bon Iver
13. Sex On Fire – Kings Of Leon
14. Bleeding All Over You – Martha Wainwright
15. Possibly Maybe – Final Fantasy & Ed Droste
16. Hiphopopotamus Vs. Rhymenoceros (Featuring Rhymenoceros and the Hiphopopotamus) – Flight Of The Conchords
17. A-Punk – Vampire Weekend

Over the last month or so I’ve been flat-hunting extensively, crossing the threshold of various abodes listening to the same estate agent spiel.

Sadly the experience was nothing out of the ordinary, and despite what anyone says, garden flats will always be a bit dark; rooms remain the same size regardless of which way around you put the bed; if there are bars on the window there’s probably a good reason why; 15 minutes walk from the tube normally means 15 minute bus ride.

But most entertainment has come from dodgy ads on Gumtree, where property marketing through exquisite photography is the name of the game. These pictures represent just a few of the classy pads on offer in London this August.

Being an estate agent places stringent demands on the memory – it’s a job where the turnover of faces is high. But our charming, gelled-up letting agent Dan should really have realised that when I’m about to part with a large wodge of cash I’d rather not have my hand shaken by someone who calls me Peter.

Luckily we’ve found somewhere a little more inspiring than the above. And this post is the sole result of acute procrastination from packing.

• Check out more bad property listings…
• I customised a basic Yahoo! pipe to filter Gumtree rental ads by location. With a bit of tinkering it should work for whoever wants it. Unfortunately their RSS feed isn’t sophisticated enough to also filter by price – if anyone knows how to do this I’m all ears!

So I’m making only one modest addition to last year’s good intentions. After a brief trip to Paris at the end of November I half-resolved that it’d be bloody marvellous to live there for a while at some point. The city feels a little headier and more compact than London, and so I’ve been listening to the not-great-but-not-terrible learn french by podcast podcast, and I’ll be picking up a 12-week course from February to brush up on my “mais oui” and “bien sur”.

Incidentally, one of the things that amuses me about podcasts is that lots of them seem to have ever-so-slightly self-conscious theme music that doesn’t really seem to know what it’s there for. And it’s apparently a small industry in its own right – the creators of the Twit (This Week In Tech) podcast theme say “A theme song will make your podcast sound professional right from the start”. Well. That’s me told.

More incidentally – if you’re a bit of a geek and haven’t yet subscribed to the Guardian’s Tech weekly podcast, do so now. First episode was a little down on 2007 but was pretty insightful and very-well put together.

To finish, here’s a reassuring list of nice things that I lack the skill to weave into a paragraph:

• In a post very reminiscent of one I made well over six years ago, I can happily confirm that the bitch is back! Again! Hooray!
• Auto top-up. What a drunken queue-beating revelation. And the current promotion of having five free iTunes downloads when you purchase it has enabled me to jiggle around the flat to the sound of Acceptable in the 80s by Calvin Harris without feeling 79 pence worth of guilt (watch him move around awkwardly with a large reptile thing if you like)
• Cinzano: justsayno.
• Actually, there’s one more new year resolution, and that’s to make mushy peas. Just like Calvin Harris: so wrong, yet so right.

Hope everyone’s having a restful time of things today. I’m a bit drunk already. More soon.

“What if Simon Amstell were to present Countdown?”

Channel 4 would doubtless pay the saviour of Never Mind The Buzzcocks a vast sum of money to sit in for a week, throw withering comments at a cowering Carol Vorderman and reduce the already-timid dictionary corner to page-quivering wrecks. Surely ratings would soar as tantalised television viewers at home collectively held their breath in anticipation of the dreaded taboo: the tawdry yet inevitable puns on Richard Whiteley’s untimely death, and the resulting gasps of disapproval from a loyal studio audience of grieving would-be widows.

Yes – it’s all downhill from here. When the only constructive conversation that can be had involves cruel, questionable make-believe television programmes, you know there’s not long before all that’s left is to babble in a nondescript manner about the weather (and haven’t we had a dreadful summer!). And I’m not the only one whose marbles are rolling away: other housemate is cramming his mouth with last year’s Christmas pudding smeared with Flora and bathed in milk.

It’s all going terribly wrong. Send help.

• A beef and mustard sandwich
• A Sega Mega Drive in original box with one controller and Sonic The Hedgehog
• A 61-key Yamaha keyboard
• A midi hifi system from the shallow depths of 1999 with two(!) tape decks, minidisc *and* three CD changer
• A new set of Fall Out Boy lyrics: #this ain’t a scene, it’s a goddamn arms race part-time ostrich
• A new-found appreciation for running in hilly areas
• A mental map of Glossop Tesco
• Some pictures of me wrestling a cat:

All of the above are up for grabs. Drop me a line if you’re interested!

Update: sandwich has gone. Yum.

• Get fitter, enter and run a half marathon
  

  I’ve entered the Great North Run on September 30th, and I’ll be running for Sue Ryder care. So far my training schedule hasn’t set the world on fire, but now the weather’s less dubious I’m beginning to ramp up my efforts, helped in no small part by runningahead, a great website which logs running stats on your behalf and graphs them. Neat.

• Take a photography course, and if money permits, buy a digital SLR
  Money’s been tighter than I thought, but I have joined the photography club at work (aaw) and so far been learning all about F-stops and whatnots.
• See more live music (already lined up for January-June 2007: Imogen Heap, Scott Matthews, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!, Regina Spektor, The Shins, Muse, Metric and Ray Lamontagne)
  Add to this: Cinematic Orchestra, and a trip to Glastonbury, and I’d say things are shaping up pretty well…
• Write a song
  I’m currently keyboard-phobic. I have a beautiful one set up in my room and every time I go near it I worry about how awful I’ll be through lack of practice. It’s a viscious circle.
• Visit Brugges (before June)
  Erm…
• Move minor9th.com to wordpress and write about music more (by April)
  Done!

Stranger than Sherrybaby
So I was watching Stranger Than Fiction on the trip to LAX, and getting quite engrossed in the lightweight story about Harold Crick (played by the affable Will Ferrell) and his love interest Ana Pascal (played by Maggie Gyllenhaal) when all of a sudden, Ana – a Harvard dropout who has opened a cake shop – turns out also to be a single mother with a bit of a drug problem. Deep! Mysteriously, she has also become the film’s main protagonist. Will Ferrell and his comic relief are nowhere to be seen. I start to feel a bit uncomfortable. Ana’s situation gets worse when she is forced to go into rehab. 20 minutes pass before I realise that the generously-sized german man next to me leaned on the remote, flipping me from Stranger Than Fiction to Sherrybaby without me noticing. Note to British Airways – don’t put two Maggie Gyllenhaal movies on adjacent channels please (I know that wide-enough seats is rather too much to ask)

Weatlh gradients
So in London you can be walking down one street where the houses are worth millions, turn the corner and end up in some of the roughest areas of the city. The same is definitely true in California – San Diego and LA are both cities where haves and have-nots live on completely different planes. However, nowhere has the difference between wealth and poverty been so raw as in this picture of myself sitting next to the brilliant Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of amazon.com:

Simon and Jeff at ETech 07, originally uploaded by plasticbag.

Braaaaaains
… is what I spent a large proportion of last week saying whilst playing Werewolf. I blame the Sonic Body Pong pioneer, Tikva Morowati (who incidentally has the most infectious laugh known to man)

“That’s out of hand”
Apparently this means “that’s rather silly and slightly unbelievable”

“ridiculous”
… this means “very good indeed, old chap”

EekTech
Normally I consider myself to be reasonably technically au-fait, but this conference blew me away. From the lovely Marc Escobosa who showed me how to use my MacBook like less of a n00b, to Scott Berkun the project management guru, to Danah Boyd whose insight into social networks is incredible – all these people and more made me realise just how much good stuff is out there and how much I need to catch up.

Surfliner
In terms of scenery, this train journey is pretty awesome, travelling through some pretty bleak parts of LA before hugging the coast with largely uninterrupted views of the Pacific. Beautiful stuff. I stopped off on the way back from San Diego to LA at the imaginatively named Oceanside – which is right next to the ocean. The locals sneered at me (pasty and carrying a laptop and a scraggy backpack) and I couldn’t shake my booty with the beach bums and bumettes (is that a word?) but fun was had nonetheless.

My first-ever glimpse of the Pacific ocean, originally uploaded by minor9th.

Hi, my name’s Stereo Mic
Drinking several Surfers on Acid in Rick’s bar on Main St in Santa Monica messed with my head rather a lot. I lay the blame squarely on Kerry, who also surreptitiously got me into watching Top Design, playing Wario on the Wii and cycling along the beach. None of which was half bad at all. Yay Kerry.

Getty outta town
The Getty Center is a billion-dollar beauty, impossibly located a million miles away from sidewalks on a hill overlooking Bel Air (I walked through a very American Dream neighbourhood to get to it). The tour guides are called docents, which means they are more knowledgeable but also more cynical, which was fun.

Santa Monica pier is a busy place at night
Unlike its portrayal by 24 – in Season 5 there’s a bit of a chase on the deserted pier in the 9-10pm hour. I can report that it’s a misleading episode! Loads of people around. All on the ferris wheel, too.

Pacific wheel on Santa Monica pier, originally uploaded by minor9th.

Hollywood history museum
… was slightly disappointing. Sorry guys – but despite being located in the old Max Factor building, and having a hell of a lot of Cool Stuff From Films (including ruby slippers and Brokeback Mountain shirts) I was a bit weirded out. The little old lady at the front desk was way too excitable, too.

I want that one
I’ll forever be baffled by the people who, at baggage reclaim, wander up to the most conspicuous bag on the carousel (you know, the red one with the pink polka dots and pictures of sausages stuck on it), paw the sides, grasp the handle, check the label tag, and then decide it’s not theirs after all. I refrained from collecting photographic evidence as I thought some burly anti-terror policemen would come and bop me on the nose.

So I totally fell in love with the Californian lifestyle. If I could
do something about my ineptitude with motor vehicles and the extreme whiteness of my skin which makes it reflect all sunlight, perhaps I’d have a chance of living there. In the meantime I’ll hang on to fond memories and bask in London’s freakishly beautiful springtime.

Guy 2: Nah, not yet. What’s it about?

Guy 1: Oh, y’know, it’s a bit like Solaris. Kindof boring drift through space with some weird stuff. It’s not action, it’s not even a thriller.

Guy 2: Doesn’t sound great.

Guy 1: The worst of it is that Chris Evans is in it, and he doesn’t take his top off.

Guy 2: Oh well there’s no point in seeing it at all then.

Guy 1: Indeed.

Things I noticed whilst buying my sugar high:

• A medium 99 with a flake and a little bit of strawberry goop now costs £1.60.
• Ice cream men all look the same: curly mullet and massive hands.
• Strawberry goop still not on sale as a delicious treat by itself apart from in supermarkets (where it’s not the same anyway) Darn.

Just a post-travel, pre-Easter-chocolate-fest thought…

Many a happy Monday evening was enjoyed until the pub introduced a league. A bloody league. The smell of competition drove the hardcore regulars wild: they started sneaking home from work at lunchtime in order to bag a table before the points-hungry masses turned up, leaving us tardy city-types scrabbling for discarded barstools at 8pm. Alas, this week the pub reached capacity, and we had to settle for a non-trivial pint a few doors down instead, where the barmaid was mostly absent and the seat in the corner smelt of sick.

It’s not the winning, it’s the taking part that counts, eh? Right. Whatever.

1. I have a forked uvula

   A rather strange trait that my sister and I share is our strange bifid uvula: that is, the dangly bit at the back of our throat splits in two. Apparently it can be associated with submucous cleft palate, but it’s not a big deal and doesn’t mean we’re freaks.

2. Gabriel Yared once asked me to get naked with him in front of a 50-strong audience

   That’s right: he composed the music for Betty Blue, The English Patient and Cold Mountain and then, one day in March 2005, he asked me to join him in disrobing before a group of surprised University students. I should point out that he was using it as an endearing turn of phrase, and what he actually wanted was a nice bit of musical deconstruction, not a spell of piano-top fornication. Just as well – his beard is pretty terrifying.

3. In 1990, I asked a serious question about diarrhoea in front of 200 people

   Poor 7-year-old me. I’d just had my first experience of horrendous fizzy gravy. A week or two later, at a school assembly about fire alarm procedure, I thought it only prudent to ask the headmaster – in front of the entire school and staff – what to do in a fire emergency if you’re stuck on the loo. Minutes of laughter and years of name-calling ensued. And, ironically, a fire. But my bowels were behaving themselves that day. Phew.

4. I failed my cycling proficiency test

   Evil thing. I failed this because I was crap at cycling slowly and couldn’t control my bike without falling off or having to put a foot down. I now have a slightly loathing of cyclists.

5. Our school band played for the Queen and her hubby

   Somehow, Wrexham managed to bag the Queen to open a revamped leisure centre in the middle of the town (with a rather distinctive roof structure). In a slight talent mismatch, they also asked our school wind band to play at the event. Clearly we got rained on and nearly froze to death, and Duke made some innuendo small talk about fingers and clarinet holes. A day to remember. Or not.

And five more people to do this: Vic, Will, Kat, Mary, and Dan.