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Edinburgh Travelodge

Last weekend was the first weekend I had off work since December, so the two of us decided to take a visit to Edinburgh. After all, there was no way work could call me in at the last minute if I was out of the city.

Generally the trip was very good, if a little short.  I’ve only ever been in Edinburgh for at most a couple of hours, so it was nice to spend the weekend doing the touristy things. I have noticed the large amounts of tartan and bagpipes to be found there. Americans would love it.

I will make my feelings known about Edinburgh Zoo and how much of a waste of money it was in a blog post later, but I want to use this post to have a rant about the Edinburgh Central Travelodge.

During the week I received an e-mail from Travelodge asking me to rate my stay.  I had to answer honestly.  We didn’t expect luxury or 5 star accommodation, but we did expect a little bit better than what we got.

The problem was, Travelodge seems to be a haven for people on boozy weekends and stag/hen weekends.  I think there were at least 3 hen weekends staying on the same floor as us.  Emma and I had been up early to get the train on Saturday morning so by 2am in the night we were fast asleep, until all the boozers came back to the Travelodge.

Suddenly it was like being 14 again, in a youth hostel on a school trip.  People standing at their doors shouting down the corridors to their mates at the other end of the hall.  The only difference was that unlike the school trips, Travelodge didn’t have Mr Smith policing the corridors late at night.

I know it would probably be very difficult to administrate, but when booking it would be nice to have a tick box titled “If you plan on getting blind drunk and making lots of noise and generally being a bit of a disgrace tick here”.  Then stick them all on the same floor and leave us folk who are trying to have a quiet weekend a bit of peace.  I felt sorry the next morning for the scores of families with young kids who all looked incredibly tired.

We paid £80 for the night (ok, £20 of that was for early check in and late check out), and being a Travelodge we didn’t expect too much, but I’m sure for the same amount of money we could have found an as luxurious hotel with less revellers staying.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely is it that you’d rate Travelodge to a friend or colleague, 1 being not at all likely, 10 being extremely likely… I gave it a 2.

No April Fools

What a day it has been news wise. Firstly, during the day I was glued to the rolling news channels as they brought coverage of the G20 protests in London. Two thoughts ran through my head while I watched.

It must have been great being a burglar in London today. All the police seemed to be in the city centre.  And why were they targeting the RBS?  As a tax payer they own that building. Saying that, they probably don’t pay tax as they clearly didn’t have jobs to go to.

Watching the #G20 hashtag on Twitter provided excellent commentary while I watched the TV.

And then on my walk to work at around 2 o’clock, Twitter once again proved to be an invaluable tool for news coverage, breaking the story of a helicopter crashing in the North Sea a while before anyone else had it.

It didn’t take long for this story to over shadow my G20 watching.

It took a few hours for it to be confirmed that there had been at least 8 casualties (still the confirmed number at the time of writing) but by the time 7 o’clock came I was handling on air a massive tragedy to hit the North East.

Fingers crossed tomorrow is a little more peaceful.

Celtic Identity Film

As mentioned a few days ago, here’s Simon’s Celtic Identify Film for the Celtic Media Festival.

From a presenting point of view, I’m quite proud of it.

Particular highlights:

0:21″ – The arms out shot. It’s this part that will land me a job on Blue Peter.

0:29″ – The Whisky was actually watered down Irn Bru. We could have made it more realistic with real Whisky, I am over 18 after all.

0:50″ – Looking rather uncomfortable in this shot.

Aberdeen

When it rains, Aberdeen is dull, horrible, grey and an awful place to live. When the sun shines, like it did today, my view of the granite city has a massive swing in the opposite direction.

I had my first ice cream and bbq of the year so far, and it’s only March 31st. I’m not getting my hopes up quite yet.

Celtic Film Festival

A still from the Celtic Identity film at the beach in Aberdeen

If you are heading to the Celtic Media Festival in Wales sometime between now and the weekend, lookout for the section on one minute Celtic Identity films.  The above still shot was from a film made by my college colleague Simon Rochfort and features me as presenter.  I’m not sure if, when or where it will be shown, but it’s worth a watch none the less.

People often say “David, do you prefer doing TV or Radio?”. I’ll let you be the judge of that when I tell you that on the first day of filming for the One minute film, we managed to get a whopping 18 seconds of usable footage.  They don’t call me “David one take Lewis” for nothing.

I’ll stick the film up here to watch once the festival is over.  It will also double up as my Blue Peter audition tape should I ever feel the need to apply.

David

P.S. As you can see from above, it’s impossible to get a decent looking still from the film.  But trust me, it looks good when watching it.

Programming a radio station with an IPhone

We had  staff night out on Saturday night.  I say “staff night out”, it was more six of us in the pub round the corner having a few drinks.

We laughed, we joked, we all commented how great the evening presenter between seven and ten is, we drank and I got constant reminders every 10 minutes that I was supposed to be on air at six am the next morning.

And then we got to about twenty to eleven and there was a sudden realisation between me and a colleague that a very important piece of work had been forgotten about. There had been crossed wires. He thought I was going to do it, I thought he was doing it.  Essentially in twenty minutes time the playout machine was going to hit a stumbling block.

Every song that goes out on air is carefully selected.  The computer picks a whole load of music and the programme controller goes through it and chops and changes bits as he feels appropriate.  But the computer doesn’t do this picking the music automatically, it has to be told to do it first, and that was the bit we’d forgotten about. As a result the eleven to twelve hour was music-less.

Now at this point you are probably thinking “how unprofessional and careless”. But it wasn’t a massive problem as the system that handles the playout of the music should randomly pull music in to fit and everything should sound fine… “in theory”. But the computer doesn’t listen to songs, it just knows them by name.

When done manually, all the songs are chosen in the correct order to sound good on air, so there is no extreme opposites. Eminem followed by Aled Jones, that sort of thing. (we don’t play either of those artists, that was just an example). The computer can’t do that.  As a result the following hour could be a very spiky and ever so slightly obscure listen.  Equally the computer could happen to select a perfect mix of tracks.  Could we trust it?

Even after a few drinks we had decided no, we couldn’t trust it. It runs on Windows for a start. Now with fifteen minutes spare alarm bells were ringing, what would we do?  And after a few minutes pondering, I asked another one of my colleagues if I could “borrow” their IPhone.  Another few minutes had passed and I had downloaded a free application from the App store, and I’d managed to remember the remote login details and hey presto, we were sitting in the pub round the corner with the music scheduling system for work in front of us.

By the time eleven o’clock came, music was coming out the radio and everyone in listener land would be  none the wiser that the music had been chosen from the pub.

And I know what you are thinking “a night out, and you end up all crowding round an IPhone trying to schedule music for your radio station sounds a bit boring”.  It was actually a fun game, trying to work out what decades songs came from as not to break any of our music policies.

I may have been a bit hasty having a dig at the IPhone in the past. It saved the day on Saturday and could be a serious contender for my new phone when my contract comes up for renewal in a few months.  Although there is a new offering from Nokia on the way, and I’ve been eyeing up Blackberry’s recently to.  It’ll be a close call.

A severe lack of updates

I apologise to all those people that visit every day (according to the statistics that’s about 10 of you) . I’ve been a bit poor with this recently.

When I first started this blog (that’s mostly all the posts that are now hidden and will be used as research for my memoirs in years to come) I was a student who was in class 10 hours a week…… and that was it.

I’m now a student who’s in class about 20 hours a week. And in work on the radio 7 days a week. I’ve gone from being someone who constantly spent the day in bed to someone who very rarely has the time to go anywhere near bed.

And that’s my excuse.  I’m 3 months away from leaving the education system for good, and while I enjoy every second of it, I will breath a massive sigh of relief when it’s over as I’ll be able to concentrate on the radio properly… and this blog… but mainly the radio show.

David

The Original 106 Fugitive

The Original 106 Fugitive was let lose on the North East of Scotland yesterday, and after only 2 days, the hunt to find him is taking the area by storm.

Each day there will be differnet bounty periods where the Fugitive will be in different locations. Each bounty period has a clue with it. Find him within the right time and ask the question “Are you the Original 106 Fugitive?” and you could walk away with a wod of cash.  Today each bounty was sitting at £1500.

My involvement with all this?  Well, as well as the Fugitive featuring on my radio shows, I was also given the task of creating the Original 106 Fugitive “minisite”.

One of my proudest pieces of web work to date, certainly considering I was a bit rusty when it came to designing websites.  Also my first attempt at a Web 2.0 esque site.  After we got radio web wizzard Matt Degan involved,  the site was integrated into WordPress to allow the Fugitive himself to update the site, post photos and comments from wherever he may be hiding in the North East.

What’s also fascinating is watching Twitter to see what people are saying about the Original 106 Fugitive, and watching as they desperately try to locate him and win some money.  The Fugitive himself is posting after hacking the Original 106 Twitter page @originalfm

Will be interesting to see how the site pans out over the next few weeks.

Interview with Twitchhiker

Paul Smith (aka Twitch Hiker)

It has taken me a week to get this online, so I apologise, but it is my telephone interview I did with a man called Paul Smith.  He is better known as the Twitchhiker. It was broadcast on my Sunday breakfast show on Original 106 last week.

He is using the ‘micro blogging’ site Twitter to attempt to travel as far away from his home as possible during March.  He can only accept donations of accommodation and travel through people on Twitter, and he’s doing it all for charity.

For more information, you can visit http://www.twitchhiker.com