Russell Davies

Snappy title

"An author owns a snappy title, and then the snappy title owns the author"

I think this is equally true of those instantly catchy strategy lines. Seductive, but often more trouble than they're worth.

Rockford

 

We went to see Tranmere on Boxing Day. We were in the area. They beat Fylde 4-1. It was festive.

We were slightly mystified by the music they played when the teams came out. Couldn't place it. And I've just remembered to look it up. It's The Rockford Files theme! For no especially good reason. 

I love this stuff.

Speechifiying

Here's yesterday's newsletter. For the RSS crew. It's all old news for you lot, except for the Speechification nostalgia.....

Thousands of years ago I did Speechification with Steve Bowbrick and Roo Reynolds. It was a podcast of interesting speech radio. Other people's radio. We didn't own the rights but it was the days when no one even understood what we were doing so it didn't seem to matter. Then, slowly it started to matter and we got scared and stopped. But people loved it because 'discovery' for interesting bits of radio is hard. It's still hard.

The twitter account still sits there. I'm not sure who has the login details. The links have all broken. And there's a tumblr from a point when we tried to make it into a 'curation' of Radio 4 rather than a pure rip-off, so a lot of those links still work. There was a Facebook group too, I occasionally get a notification about that.

It's still an itch I want to scratch so I've started 41256. A similar thing but with fragments of audio, not whole programmes. It's less than 5 minutes long, that seems an under-explored podcast length. You can subscribe via iTunesor find it on Soundcloud. Let's see how long this lasts before I get scared.

Between The Years

Tom has made this album and it's lovely.

Steps - 5,6,7,8

Back in 2012 I started pursuing the widely discredited and laughably souveillancey target of trying to do an average of 10,000 steps a day. I managed that and have since raised my sights by 1,000 steps-per-day every year since.

This year I just, only just, managed 15,000 steps per day. It was not easy.

So, I'm going to settle for that. I'm going to continue at 15,000. If nothing else it makes me realise that I'm very lucky in all of those years not to have had an extensive period of injury or illness that would have meant days or weeks with no steps at all. That would have made it impossible.

15,000 steps is about 7 miles a day. That's a lot. It's also a substantial amount of time just walking. I need to think about using that time to do more than just trudge.

For the record:

2012: 4,432,605 (12,110 per day)

2013: 4,256,213 (11,660 per day)

2014: 4,945,382 (13,548 per day)

2015: 6,029,183 (16,518 per day)

2016: 5,393,867 (14,737 per day)

2017: 5,478,141 (15,008 per day)

I gave up on the Withings Go halfway through the year. Somewhere. It was too unreliable. I'm relying on my phone and watch, using the Pedometer++ app. That means I have to manually update my spreadsheet and the silly little dashboard I've made

Ideally I need a steps API out of IOS that connects to Zapier or something I can connect to a Google spreadsheet. A project for when I'm not walking.

Legit podcast

I got an automated email from Apple! 41256 is now approved and in the iTunes store. So you can subscribe to it via Apple products.

Apparently that means it will also soon show up in many of the podcast enablers of your choice.

Old Fitzrovians 2017

It's not at all traditional at this time of year to write a review of the season. But Old Fitzrovians is not a normal football club so I'm doing it now, because I want to.

A bit of background:

Probably triggered by the Barclay's ads I went and played Walking Football up at Arsenal. It was excellent fun. The team was featured in the match programme once, and I made a pass once to Liam Brady that was approved of with a thumbs up. But, it wasn't quite the experience I was after. I wanted something closer to home and more akin to the co-ed matches I used to play in when I lived in Portland.

So, since there's a 5-side pitch near us, I booked a few pitches and asked some people along to play.

Perhaps more importantly, I also made a website and we got some t-shirts made, all magnificently designed by Mark. There's even an instagram account.

Season One

We've played 6 games so far. The first was in August. Two of them were abandoned because only Hilary and I turned up. Hilary has won the 2017 Player of the Year award because of her dedicated commitment to turning up and her steadfast defensive work.

We've had one 'proper'opponent - Futurelearn, who we managed to beat reasonably efficiently. Interestingly, they would definitely have beaten us if we'd been playing proper running football but even after only a couple of games we'd managed to acclimatise more effectively to the slower-paced game.

Season One also confirmed my suspicion that Walking Football can be much more inclusive than the running game. The reduced emphasis on physicality levels the playing field along some more axis. I like that. It means it's not just a game for Sunday League blokes with dodgy knees.

Come and play! Our fixtures are all online, along with match reports from previous games.

41256

It's been many years since I did any podcasting so I thought I'd have another go. I have a few plans, but here's the first go.

I'm, rather pretentiously, describing it as an 'audio commonplace'. ie it's fragments of interesting radio/podcasts/sound. And it's short. Just under 4 minutes 13 seconds.

Right now it's just on Soundcloud. I'm waiting for Apple to approve it for the iTunes podcast store. I wonder if they will. It seems a rather opaque process.

It will be updated every Sunday at 4:12:56.

December 2017

December 2017 from russelldavies on Vimeo.

Small screen, big type

Most of my leisure reading, these days, is done on a Kindle with the type size dialled up REALLY BIG. My eyesight has gotten so I need to do that. It makes for a more kinetic experience, it feels more frenetic, faster, like you're racing through. Not a bad thing, necessarily, but it feels like there's an opportunity to actively design for this kind of experience, not just let it be an accident of the optional settings.

Something akin to Clive Thompson's thoughts on the Octavo format.

Maybe something like a Tap Essay.