Dan McNeil's Blog

Clocks stop when people die. It happened to Richard Feynman's wife. However, he wasn't the sort to believe that the two events were connected in any supernatural way. A quick Google on the subject will lead you to numerous accounts of his earthly explanation for what actually happened. My problem is less about clocks stopping, and more to do with earphones becoming muffled. I listen to a lot of music. Every day, I spend about 45 minutes each way on the walk to/from work listening to music from my phone. I have a problem finding earphones which don't fall out of my ears as I'm walking - I probably have especially slippery ears, or weirdly shaped ears - who knows. In any case, I've found several sets now which don't fall out. However, within a couple of months, every set I have suffers the same problem. It's happened to earphones from Bose, Sennheiser and even the cheap £4.99 ones from Dixons. After a couple of months, the left earpiece becomes muffled. ...

The story is a familiar one. A TV series finishes, a band breaks up or a writer stops writing. Then, ten years later, then either the royalties have stopped pouring in, or old hatchets have been buried, the cast/band/writer gather themselves together and decide to have a comeback. I'm not talking about an artist taking a couple of years between albums (which the press now seem to deem a comeback) but I'm talking about The Eagles recording "Hell Freezes Over" or Pink Floyd playing at Live8. I'm also talking about "Red Dwarf: Back To Earth" which was shown on Dave here in the UK over this weekend. More often that not, the result of a comeback is not an incredible return to form. And certainly the new work very rarely reaches the expectations of the fans who are clamouring for the return in the first place. This weekend was a case in point. Red Dwarf: Return to Earth certainly wasn't diabolical. It had a good central idea, and a few good jokes. B...

It’s Easter already – it’s amazing just how quickly this year is flying by.  It may be Easter Sunday, but I have so far managed to keep my chocolate cravings at bay and only flirted slightly with them by giving in to the temptation of a hot chocolate in Victoria Park earlier today. Since I last wrote in here, I’ve decided to give Twitter a go again.  I tried a long while ago, but ran out of steam after writing a few tweets.  I’ve tried to embed a twitter thing in this page, so hopefully you can see some of my Tweets are you’re reading this, but if you can’t, you’ll find me at http://www.twitter.com/dan_mcneil   You can follow me on twitter too, if you like – I’m not ashamed to beg for people to follow me so I can look popular… ;-) I’m finding Twitter quite interesting.  I think it’s harder to be funny/interesting/whatever in just a hundred-and-something characters compared with the endless space given over to writing in here.  Let’s see whether I mana...

I'm rarely riled these days. I tend to let life wash over me and avoid getting too het about anything if I can avoid it. But this morning, whilst lying half-awake watching breakfast TV in bed, a story caught my eye which was interesting. And then an "expert" in the studio riled me to the point of turning the television off in disgust. One of my pet hates is "bad science". Ben Goldacre writings both in print and in the Guardian are worth seeking out if you've never read them. But they're probably not the best read if you are a follower of alternative medicine. Anyway, back to the story. NCP (who run the car parks) are going to start piping smells into the stairwells of their carparks in order to stop them developing the smell with which we're all too familiar in car park stairwells. Good idea. However, a botanist and smell expert (!) is quoted as saying the following on the BBC website, which is pretty much identical to what he said on BBC Bre...

... then I'm not sure I want to know what the question was! The question - of course - is how I get music onto my N78. But, a diversion today from the world of mobile devices, and a delve into the world of popular music. After a few months of relatively sparse gig attendance, we've got a few interesting tickets lined up for this summer. Pet Shop Boys, Bruce Springsteen, Blur, AC/DC and even Michael Jackson feature in my diary for the summer months this year. The Michael Jackson was an obvious one to me. Someone like Michael Jackson has, somewhere in him, the capacity to put on a fantastic gig. Regardless of the other weirdness and controversy around him over the past few years, there was a time when he produced some amazing music and put on some amazing concerts. Time may have changed him in some respects, but he is still the same person who wrote Thriller and produced the album Dangerous, and to my mind, 75 pounds is a small price to pay for the chance to see him recapatu...

I've recently started a new job, and one of the things which comes along with a job in the mobile industry is a mobile phone. I've always felt uneasy about the need to install "special software" onto my laptop in order to share data between it and my mobile device. It's a symptom of the modern world, I believe, that my heart drops whenever I open a package containing any new piece of technology and find a CD with software which is vital in order for me to use the product fully. And I'm no different when I open the box of my shiny new mobile phone. But, of course, the world has changed and these days it’s not so much a question as having your data shared between computer and mobile device, but of having your data accessible wherever you are and from whatever device you happen to be using. The actual location of the data is largely unimportant these days. My contacts list and email archives live somewhere on the internet. I know the URLs to find t...

I looked at the sky this evening. It's amazing. At the moment, I'm not in London - which is where I usually find myself - and so the sky is not quite so obscured with yellow light. I'm not in the middle of the countryside here - it's in a fairly urban area. And yet, as a plane leaving Liverpool Airport was flying overhead, the trail of the plane was just at the right place in the sky to reflect the moonlight, giving a single white line across the dark blue sky. To the other side of the moon, the clouds had formed a lovely pattern which, again, was reflecting the moonlight back at me giving a wispy form across the other side of the sky. Turning around, I could see stars which in London are hidden behind a fog of ambient light leaking from the sprawling conurbation polluting the beauty of the Universe and hiding it behind a fog of our creation. I guess my reading material recently has what inspired me to look upwards and see what's up there in the sky - I've b...