Well the launch of Sky Player on XBL was a complete disaster! I logged in straight away on the day of launch and downloaded the app only to be greeted with various network errors whenever I tried to use it. I had a look on-line and there were hundreds of stories from people in the same situation. It turned out to be a problem at the Sky end, they massively underestimated how many people would be checking this out the minute it launched and as a result it took down all their servers!

The deal is this: If you’re already a Sky subscriber then whatever package you pay for you can stream for free as long as you have Multiroom or Broadband Unlimited. Current Sky subscribers can pay an additional £9.75 per month to stream for free if they don’t have either Multiroom or Broadband Unlimited. If you’re not a current Sky subscriber you can pay £15 per month to have access to the basic package. On top of this there are options to rent some programmes for £0.98 per programme. That seemed fairly reasonable to me, though I certainly wouldn’t want to pay for a series like that. It’s more suited to one off documentaries. Films would’ve been good, but maybe Microsoft thought it would be in direct competition with their revamped Zune HD Marketplace.

You don’t use MS points to buy any of the programmes either, you need to sign up for a SKY iD and create an on-line payment account. This links in to your 360 so you don’t have to sign in every time (although there is a security feature to enable that).

You can only use Sky Player on one console per account. It’s linked to the actual machine not your xbox account. I believe you can change this on the web-page for your Sky account if you need to (new console/replaced console, etc.) but I think that’s limited to one change per month.

Watching the sample channel now (Sky News) and even on High Quality I have to say it looks horrible Certainly nowhere near as crisp as Freeview. I’m also disappointed with the programmes I could purchase as PAYG. Hardly anything on Sky One at all. There were a couple of History documentaries that looked interesting, but they also looked quite old so would probably end up on freeview very soon if they hadn’t already. Not as impressed with this as I’d hoped, but in fairness it is the first time they’ve tried it and if they have the technical side working now maybe this will open the door for more. I would love to see a browser on the 360 (even Internet Explorer) just so more opportunities become available for us. iPlayer on the 360 would be great.

There are some voucher codes to make it a little cheaper to check out the features, these are the ones I know of:

One month free Sky Player Multiroom for Sky TV customers: XBOX1MONTHFREE

Three months Sky Player TV for the price of 2 for non-Sky TV customers: XBOX3FOR2

As above but from the Sky site: SKY3FOR2

I can’t believe it, I got on to another XBL Preview! Yay! This one is for the new Twitter/Facebook/LastFM apps and the new Zune HD Marketplace. I use Facebook, Twitter and LastFM quite a lot so this has been quite interesting for me to have a play around with.

I do like it so far, although there are some niggly bits. The social networking apps seem to be removed from the 360 experience itself which I think detracts from the point of them a little.

I did enjoy logging in to LastFM and listening to my music library there, although I have upnp media servers installed so could listen to my own music anyway. Nice that it scrobbles though.

Facebook looks like it’s had the most time spent on it. I think it works pretty well. As I’ve got my XBL account linked to my Facebook account now I’d have expected it to update when I got an achievement or at least have the option to do this. It doesn’t, although this is no big deal as I already have a Facebook app which does this.

Twitter isn’t all that useful for me at the moment, not because I don’t use it, I do. A lot. The 360 isn’t the best place to use it though as it has no browser so every time I saw a tweet with a link I had to use my netbook to look at it instead. It also doesn’t tie in with your XBL account so it won’t update when you get achievements (there are some services around which do this though).

I was really excited about the Zune HD marketplace as I’ve read that they’ve really improved streaming for people with less than great internet connections (that’d be me). Sadly there’s nothing there I want to watch. I’ve either seen them, got them, or I have no interest in the films available. Might’ve been nice to add a short free HD clip we could test with.

I couldn’t check out the Inside News feature as it’s US only.

The Facebook and LastFM apps benefit from being things you can just sign into and forget until you’re feeling lazy and want to use them (seeing Facebook photos on my big TV was pretty nice). The Twitter one falls down here because even if I decide to use it just to check tweets rather than post them, I can’t with about 80% of them because they contain links and photos. I also don’t like the way Twitter doesn’t automatically log you in. It remembers your details but sits waiting for you to press the login button. MS needs to add a browser. It’ll make all this stuff so much better. Twitter without a browser is so neutered.

On the Friday afternoon I met up with Janine and saw Tim Minchin. Well I say ‘saw’, unless we jumped up and down we couldn’t actually see anything as they’d draped black fabric over the metal fencing. He was great as usual. Caught some of Streetlight Manifesto and then The Horrors, saw a little of the Deftones. Saw Florence and the Machine and she was brilliant, I was really impressed. Soulsavers were really good too. But the highlight of Friday was definitely Faith No More. For all the people who said having them play inside a tent was a stupid idea because it would be rammed… nuh-uh! I went to the loos in plenty of time before they were on stage (which were awesome, clean and I didn’t have to queue for them at all over the WHOLE weekend, a festival first!). The loos were right near the tent so when I came out I could see the tent was really empty with spaces at the front so I made the most of it! Stood at the barrier at the front left and waited for them to come on. WOW! They were amazing! Absolutely loved it, although it wasn’t right seeing a guitarist who wasn’t Big Jim. Maybe I should’ve stood on the right and blocked my view of him with a post so I could pretend it was him! It took ages to get out of the festival site that night, but at first I really didn’t care because I’d finally seen FnM! I was meant to go to their infamous Brixton Academy show in 1990 but for some reason didn’t go. I don’t think I could afford it at the time. A lot of my friends went and are visible on the You Fat Bastards video. I am still jealous!The queue for the taxis was immense. I’ve never seen it that huge. Ever. I’d got blisters on my feet on the way to the festival site from the station at 12:00 so by 00:30 they were killing me. I knew I had 2 large blisters on each heel that rubbed with every step. I’d had plasters on them but they’d rubbed off over the course of the day. It was the first time I hadn’t taken my chair to a festival either, thinking I’d just buy one in the arena. Except this year they decided not to sell ANY chairs in the arena. Madness! Not sitting down all day coupled with blisters made walking a slow nightmare. Queueing for a taxi for two and a half hours was bad enough… but spending that time with idiots shouting “Haha! You don’t know how to get to the station! It’s only 10 minutes walk you fucking morons!” made me get really, really angry. I KNOW HOW TO GET TO THE STATION! It would have taken me about three hours to get there considering I could only shuffle in agony and even if I got to the station, what then? No more trains that night. They really didn’t consider that not everyone was getting a cab into the town centre, I was getting a cab in the opposite direction! Eugh… RETARDS!

Saturday I got to sleep in a bit, first band I wanted to see was Eagles of Death Metal at 14:35. they rocked as usual. Always makes me feel good seeing them live, they seem so happy! Jesse dedicated a song to his little girl who was sat at the back of the stage in ear defenders on Dave Grohl’s knee. She went really shy and hid from the cameras. Bless! There was an hour of rushing around, bumping into people and getting food before the band of the day, Them Crooked Vultures! Although I’d heard of the collaboration, I didn’t know that was their name until Claire & Tony told me on the Thursday, along with the rumour that they would be playing. Sure enough a big X appeared in the field on google maps on the Friday \m/ They were in the same tent as FnM the previous night but it was a whole different story. We got there fairly early and already it was pretty rammed. We got in a little way so we could just about see the stage and the screens, then it got ridiculous. As the band came on stage huge waves of people forced into the tent. I got annoyed that there was hardly a sound for each member of the band until Dave Grohl walked on stage and they went insane. We even heard people express their confusion that he was drumming and not singing, “who the hell was the ginger bloke with the mic” *sigh* Then another wave of people barged in sending me flying and pushing Claire over into Tony. I had enough. I just shoulder barged my way out. I no longer cared if I annoyed anyone. I set up my chair outside and watched on the screen, it was a better view and I could sit down and eat at the same time. Claire & Tone joined me soon afterwards. They were the last band I need to see that day really so I spent the rest of the night walking about looking at stalls and checking out smaller bands in the little tents.

Got in on the Sunday late again, which was silly really as I knew I was going home really early that night and getting a lift home from outside the Orange campsite entrance. No traffic made it bliss and made me feel smug Got into the Dance tent for deadmau5 and he was amazing. Unfortunately I couldn’t see the stage or screen at first for the evilmau5 entrance, the tent was rammed. I’ve never known such a polite crowd though! I was at the edge of the tent and everyone who walked past me said excuse me and thank you. I was really impressed. After that I spent the day wandering about catching bits of bands and bumping into people again. I couldn’t believe I was leaving while Bloc Party were playing. It was about the earliest I’d left a festival since my ex started hassling me after I saw Butthole Surfers one year. I only saw that one band that year but as the day ticket was about £20 back then it wasn’t much a big deal! Oh how times have changed! I wandered around the camp-sites for a bit, bought some ear-rings (I always have to buy at least one thing from every festival as a souvenir) and wandered out for my lift.

It was an awesome festival this year and even though I didn’t see many full sets I caught performances by countless bands,  wandered an awful lot, met some great people and had a fantastic time. The new layout of the arena was really impressive. There was a HUGE space set aside for toilets, I’ve never seen so many! No queuing and there was always loo roll and soap! Amazing! They also had some tents a little closer together this year but had big metal fences between them which did a really good job of stopping the sound merging. Great work. I’d been dreading this festival as I had a real sense of foreboding but it turned out to be unfounded. Roll on next year!

Recently there’s been a lot of talk about Spotify. I have to admit it took longer for me to check it out than normal because it was being compared to Pandora, and try as I might I just didn’t along with Pandora. I occasionally used LastFM‘s radio feature, but I own a hell of a lot of music. I’ve been buying CDs since I got my first CD player in 1989, they take up a lot of room.

Unlike a lot of people I don’t hate iTunes, it is a bit slow with the amount of music I have, and since I got my new iPod Touch I am no longer able to use iTunes on my win2k server machine. This means most of the music is run from a network directory making iTunes on my XP PC even slower. Not great… it also skips sometimes if I have FireFox open. I used to use foobar2k but as I have an iPod that needs this PC to sync now I ended up using iTunes more and more. I gave SongBird a go but found it slow and it was worse at dealing with networked music than iTunes.

Anyway, I finally gave Spotify a go the other night. Signed up for the free account as I wanted to see how the ads worked. I was impressed. Linking it up to my lastFM account made me happy as I really love my lastFM and probably wouldn’t use anything that didn’t update it. It’s very quick, it hasn’t skipped on me at all yet which is good as my internet connection is pretty dire speedwise and most things give me the dreaded ‘buffering’ messages. The image/text ads are really small and unobtrusive. I didn’t get very many of them either. It took a good while to get my first audio advert. This is where it really impressed me. It’s not particularly clever, it’s just a small thing that pleased me greatly. When you get the audio ads (mine were nearly all about Climate Change awareness so I’m fine with that!) you can’t skip them, that’s expected, but the best things I found were that they aren’t scrobbled to lastFM and also they don’t show up in your IM status if you have ‘currently playing’ selected. Awesome! How good is that?! So simple, yet it made me really happy.

One downside I’ve found is that the radio options aren’t very good for me. They don’t seem to be all that accurate. You can skip as much as you like though. The best use I’ve found for it is to create your own playlist (or find one on the vast number of spotfy playlist sites sprouting up) and preview albums/artists you’ve wanted to give a go, but don’t want to buy just in case you don’t like them.

It’s been a while! I did get the BlackBerry Bold 9000 on the 2nd of January. I had one hell of a wait in the T-Mobile store! There was a different set of staff to the last time I went in and as we soon discovered everyone had been told to come back on Friday 2nd January for their upgrade… I felt so sorry for the staff they were clearly shattered. Words really cannot describe how much I love this thing. I’m a total BlackBerry fan anyway, but the Bold is just awesome. Everything about it is lush. You really have to see the screen on these things to believe it. I keep loading the same pictures on both the Bold and the iPod and the difference is staggering. They’ve also fixed the issue with the memory filling up and just wiping all your texts with no warning. Now you can set it to free up memory in the background (the dreaded ninja wipe) or just let it warn you. Soooo much better. Took a while to get used to the full QWERTY, but I’m there now. It’s bliss having WiFi and GPS on a phone too. They’re two things I’ve not had before because I kept hold of the BlackBerry Pearl 8100g instead of upgrading for a few years.

I’ve stuck a fair few apps on it already. Actually managed to get TwitterBerry and BerryStore to run which was nice. Would love a decent IRC client for it, but as I have the iPod Touch with me all the time anyway it’s no biggie. A lot of people have moaned about the poor battery life of the Bold compared to other BlackBerry devices, but once you get the latest firmware and manage your power settings it’s actually pretty good. I can get about 8 days out of it with WiFi/BlueTooth/3G only switched on when I need them. Admittedly I never make phone calls, rarely receive phone calls and haven’t been texting so much lately, but it does a fair amount of e-mail receiving. I also put it in bedside mode every night. Compare this with the iPod Touch which needs charging every 2 days or so even when it spends most of the day powered off! The thought of having to charge a phone every day horrifies me.

I’ve been playing Rock Band a fair bit since I got it a few weeks ago and… I LOVE IT! The Guitar controller is a MUCH better shape for me and although the strumbar having no clicky sound throws me a bit I think it’s probably better and wish I’d started out with a silent strumbar so I’d be used to it.

The drums are really good fun, but sadly I have ELs so they have no sensitivity whatsoever (no sock mod for me). I haven’t even got around to finishing the Easy Drum Tour yet, but there is another reason for this. The drums are pretty loud to people downstairs (and I can’t do a lot about it since I have ELs) so I can only play during the day. This means I play the guitar tours mostly… but… and this shocks me. When people are out I’m actually finding the Vocal Tours the most fun! Took me a while to get into it. I don’t sing unless I really have to, which is usually never, I mimed my way through assemblies at primary school. It shows that whilst I obviously can’t sing my guess of the pitch is pretty spot on (which is all RB cares about). I am slightly worried about the ones I keep 100%ing though. I mean ‘Maps‘ (Yeah Yeah Yeahs) is easy so that’s expected, but ‘Celebrity Skin‘ (Hole), ‘In Bloom‘ (Nirvana), ‘Black Hole Sun‘ (Soundgarden) and ‘Enter Sandman‘ (Metallica)..! Is there a grunge kid trying to get out here? Am I reliving my flannel-shirted teens?? ‘Sabotage‘ (Beastie Boys) is a nightmare for me though as it doesn’t seem to think I’m saying the words right and there’s no actual singing in it. You’d think it would be easier… but no. Maybe I need to put on my NY accent for that song.

It’s such a natural progression from GHII as well. I know they’re releasing Guitar Hero: World Tour, but really… as soon as they add in Co-Op Career on-line I’m content with Rock Band and just getting DLC for it every now and then. Talking of the downloadable tracks – wow! There are millions! OK, slight exaggeration, but there’s a bit of everything in there. I’m not downloading any (except GLaDOS’ ‘Still Alive‘) until I get to the point in it where I’m totally at my level and have to try to pass songs. I’m working my way through Easy-Medium-Hard-Expert on all the instruments to get the most out of the game. Such a shame I’ll never get any of the Band Tour achievements though. No-one ever comes here, and I’m not lugging the instruments into town. On-line co-op career would be perfect.

Another thing that I absolutely love is the character customization. Soooo much better now I can have my characters looking like me! My guitarist one is scary, she really does look like (a thinner version of) me. I love the way the band interacts too. With guitarists singing along on parts of the song. Looks so much nicer than GHIII. The guitar parts are a lot easier though. In a way it’s good, but also I don’t feel like I’ve achieved quite so much being halfway through the Guitar Tour on Expert.

I really need to update my ScoreHero now, but there’s singing to be done!

Saw the first episode of the BBCs follow up to Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes, last night.

This one is set in 1981, so I do actually remember a lot of stuff from that time. The Audi Quattro certainly brings back memories as does the creepy Pierrot clown. A cousin of mine decked out her entire bedroom with them back in the 80s. She had the dolls on her shelves, they were on her pillows, her duvet, the rug…. eugh. Creepy things!

I can’t say I like DI Alex Drake anywhere near as much as I liked Sam, but we’ll see if she gets less annoying as it goes on. None of that really matters though, because it could all just be a blank screen without Gene Hunt. He makes me grin like an idiot. “You. In leather… holding that. Gives me the ‘orn.”

A few years ago I heard about a film called Survive Style 5+ and it sounded pretty cool so I wrote down the name on a notepad. As time went by I moved it to my WishList. It stayed there for a couple of years, but no-one bought it for me. As my folks were in Florida and I was sick of getting no post, I ordered it from Play.com. I watched it about a week ago…

WOW! It is now in my top 5 films list! I love it! It’s completely mental, really laugh out loud funny the whole way through. The fight scenes look brilliant. The colours are magical. It even manages to have a real lump-in-throat moment near the end. It bombards you with mentalness and then suddenly BAM! Hits you full on with something so wonderful it makes you want to cry. It’s likened to Pulp Fiction quite a bit due to the 5 seemingly unrelated stories intertwining, and Pulp Fiction is also one of my favourite films… but I think Survive Style 5+ tops it. The soundtrack is fantastic and upbeat, I’m going to try and get hold of as much of it as I can.

The storylines go like this:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Finally got round to playing this last night (haven’t played a real game in years, it’s been all about Guitar Hero, Peggle Deluxe, etc. for me recently), can’t say I find it that great. The climbing and diving into bales of hay is cool and the killing is cool, but the walking about everywhere bores me silly. I’d only been playing for about half an hour when I got the 360 achievement for staying alive in battle for over 10 minutes… mainly because I was so bored of walking/riding I just killed… Yahtzee was spot on, it should be called Faffing-About Creed. And yeah, that FUCKING hill is well annoying.

It’s really lovely to look at (although Kristen Bells’ cross-eyed face in Heroes is bad enough without seeing it in all the lab bits too) so now I think I’ll stick doing just that, watching my mate play through it and telling him when I spot flags and stuff.

I did have fun though, when I ‘parked’ my horse next to another horse while I climbed up to a View Point, came back and some mad woman was twirling about around my horse!