Oscar The Grouch's Oscar Picks

Oscar makes some interesting picks, though I would choose The King's Speech for best picture.

Chicken Soup vs Boney M.

A catchy number from DJ Doug Laurent. Great follow up to his Barbra Streisand (The Most Wanted Women).

James Last - Traditional English Songs Medley

This track is a medley of some traditional English songs performed by James Last and his Orchestra. Songs, in order as played, are:
I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles
Down At The Old Bull And Bush
My Old Man Said Follow The Van
Land Of Hope And Glory

This is a great James Last arrangement of these songs, recorded at The Royal Albert Hall, during James Last's UK tour in 1979. It's good to hear James Last playing music from around the world, and to my mind shows how good he is at engaging with his audience by including songs specific to a particular country at concerts in that country - another "English" song he played during this concert was the Floral Dance from Cornwall. Currently when James Last is performing in the UK at the Albert Hall, he plays Land Of Hope And Glory - a track that's not played at any other concert venue in the UK or overseas again showcasing how he tailor makes the music of the concert, to the country he is playing in.

Changes

Made a change tonight to my personal website, changed the layout of the About Me page, adding a link to my blog at Blogger and removed all the rest of the pages, making my site much better, and easier to update, as from now my blog will be her on Blogger at also at the My Opera community (to allow those on a mobile etc to see my site in an easy to view way).

I'm hoping this year to increase my blog postings to at least once a month including topics that interest me, posting videos I like and other things, in the past I have not got round to posting to my blog, but this year I'm gonna try and make the time to do it!

Mobile App Stores

Have been looking at mobile apps from some of the websites I visit, and find it really annoying that in almost 95% of the sites I visit, they have made an App for the iPhone but not for any other smartphone. I find this strange since Nokia, Blackberry and Android smartphones as I understand it have just as good a market share as the iPhone.

This led me to wondering whether big businesses who create apps for a particular smartphone should be expected to make an app for all major smartphones - perhaps smartphone operating systems developers could help get apps out from big business for their smartphones. I for one would like to be able to have a Starbucks and Thames Clippers app on my phone, but can't as I don't have an iPhone, only an Android, which doesn't have any of these apps. However I did mange to find an App for Subway stores, but that wasn't made by Subway - another Android software developer made it as Subway had only made an iPhone app.

I read somewhere that in the USA developers will be required to make their apps work on all the major smartphone brands, although I cannot find the page I read it on. However I think this is a good idea, as it means that no matter what smartphone you use, if a major business such as Starbucks has made an app for smartphones, it will work on ur phone.

Timescape

Recently I purchased a new Sony Ericsson Xperia X8 mobile phone, to replace my old phone a ZTE Racer with a hard to use resistive touch screen. On my new Xperia there is a great app called Timescape that integrates with your contact list, thus enabling you to click on a contact and not only see the text messages they have sent you, along with a call log, you also see their Facebook and Twitter updates as well all in one nice timeline - something that other Android phone manufacturers should look at integrating - on my ZTE Racer I had to look a different apps to see Twitter and Facebook posts etc.

Timescape is a great addition to the Android OS, but has one drawback that I feel needs addressing by Sony Ericsson - it's good having a widget that shows the latest text message, Facebook and Twitter status messages from your contacts and people you follow on Twitter or are friends with on Facebook, but I think the widget and Timescape could be improved by allowing you to speicify for example to only show posts from those in your contact list etc.

It would also be useful if Sony Ericsson provided more plugins for Timescape, I use Google Buzz and it would be good to be able to see Google Buzz messages and post to Google Buzz via Timescape, and also have access to Sony Ericsson's rival to BlackBerry Messenger Hanashi - http://www.hanashi.se