Skins

With hindsight, this should have bee yesterdays blog but nevermind. Today saw the return of Skins to out TV screens and whilst I still don't think the last series was anywhere near as good as the first two, it was still better than a lot of the rubbish that gets churned out in this genre. For me the best part of the show isn't even the pictures on the screen. It's the music that is behind it and the amount of research and passion that goes into finding the right tracks to go with the scenes without simply using the same old songs over and over again.

It is great that the new and emerging artists have an outlet in the form of MySpace and YouTube but seriously, who has the time to go trawling through the thousands of music pages from the unsigned bands on the off chance that you will discover a gem. You might get a tip off from your friend that someone is particularly good perhaps but without that, the chances of you finding something that is any good are relatively slim. Thankfully, the people behind Skins have a man in charge of the music and it would seem that it is his job to do precisely this. Trawling through the pages of rubbish (although presumable he has some inside information) and bringing the best of it directly to us. I even had one of the songs featured on the show as my single of the week here and this series they have started a YouTube channel with a lot of the tracks in one place for you to listen to. Even better, they have links to free downloads of the tracks - I have no idea how they have managed to get away with this but they seem to have done. They have also improved their track listings page which now includes links to download the music from iTunes. I wish they had links to other stores as well - assuming the tracks are available elsewhere, I couldn't track many of them down on We7 of Spotify and I refuse to use iTunes out of principle. The link to the channel page is here and the track-listings page for series 4 is here.

A low note to end the day on, my whiteboard pen is officially out of ink. I ordered some new ones from eBay yesterday and despite the promise that they might be here the next day, there is no sign of them and more worryingly, no word from the seller. This means that I have invested a bit more time into my prototype flash cards program and now works with my algorithms. If I ever make it usable to those who don't speak ActionScript, I will post it here for you to download and use but this is likely to be over Easter or the summer depending on the quantity of coursework I have and how far behind I inevitably will be with my dissertation.