I am about to sit down and spend the afternoon writing and started thinking about what music I would like to accompany me. I was tempted to tweet for recommendations and then I thought no.

When I write I need music that I can enjoy, music I can lose myself in but music that doesn’t require much of my thoughts to enjoy. This is clearly not the time to break in a new band or album. Like running a marathon in brand new trainers, new music won’t help. So I will be turning to the old reliables to keep me fuelled this afternoon. These would include:

Tubular Bells & Incantations by Mike Oldfield – pretty much vocal-less and well worn in.

1999 by Prince. Once the first two tracks have settled down there are long periods of quite introspective music. I’ve been listening to this album for over 20 years now so there are no surprises to knock me.

Brian Eno – like Mike Oldfield, some of his work can be very melodic and calming. ‘Background music’ some people may call it but I find it works in harmony with my moods, allowing me a comfortable base to think. Music for Airports would be the obvious choice but all his ambient recordings are worthy on this list.

On the ambient theme, Kate Bush’s last album Aerial had an amazing second disk ‘a Sky of Honey’ is a beautiful tapestry of a Spring Day that is both inspirational and uplifting. At 42 minutes long it is regularly on repeat.

Genesis, being one of my all time favourite bands would obviously feature with The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway an easy way to lose yourself for two hours, although I would not recommend this for newcomers – it may need some breaking in before acting as your accompaniment. Trespass is also a wonderful album from very early on (their third album I think, pre Phil Collins.)

Talk Talk – now I only really got into their albums last year whilst I was writing a lot for the agency. I had always loved Natural History but had never really got into their albums. It’s My Life and The Colour of Spring are the ones to lose yourself in.

The KLF Chillout is also awesome, a bit like the Future Sound of London Radio 1 Sessions, very deep layered soundscapes – sadly not available on Spotify.

Rounding off the list is Clutching at Straws, the last studio album Marillion made with Fish before parting company. Just the first few bars make me feel like there is a warm blanket wrapped around me and we’re off for a great 45 minutes.

I guess a lot of these albums could be seen as quite introspective, dare I say ‘down’? But there is a balance, get really down and miserable and bang goes the inspiration – Lou Reed’s Berlin of course springs to mind but doesn’t appear here (I save that for long journeys) nor does Roger Water’s Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking which is also worth of discovery.

Do you have favourite albums to write to, work to? Fancy sharing them? I love new music and always keen to add to the roster of writing music. Leave a comment if you would be kind enough.

Title Song: Classic, Adrian Gurvitz (Spotify | YouTube)

These are my bookmarks for July 2nd from 09:51 to 09:54:

• famfamfam.com: Home – Welcome to famfamfam.com, personal site and web playground of Birmingham (UK) based developer Mark James.
• Mobile Device Icons by ~pierocksmysocks on deviantART – A great collection of mobile device icons
• famfamfam.com: Hopping with Shortstat – Shaun Inman's ShortStat software is nothing but addictive, especially with the addition of the PathStats extension. But never one to be satiated, and always one to be aroused by interactive visualisation of just this kind of data, I have quickly knocked together the TravelStats extension, which displays a directed graph of the pages on the site, with the thickness of the lines displaying the relative amount of people who 'hopped' between pages.
• 40 Professional Icon Sets For Free Download | Graphics | Smashing Magazine – The motherload of beautiful icons

These are my bookmarks for June 23rd from 11:11 to 12:55:

• AIM and Beejive Instant Messaging iPhone Apps Updated with Push Notifications – Mac Rumors – Two major instant messaging clients (AIM and Beejive) for the iPhone and iPod Touch were updated tonight with support for Push notifications. Instant messaging was always cited as one of the major reasons the iPhone and iPod Touch needed some form of background processing. Prior to iPhone 3.0, if you were to switch out of these applications, there was no easy way for the applications to notify you of an incoming message.
• 35+ Horizontal Websites for Your Design Inspiration | Vandelay Design Blog – Websites that use horizontal scrolling in addition to, or instead of, vertical scrolling are becoming more popular. While this trend isn’t a good idea in every situation, the sites showcased here may give you some ideas or inspiration for using this approach in one of your own projects.
• Powerful Images to Give Lessons Punch | The Whiteboard Blog – One of the benefits of having an Interactive Whiteboard in the classroom (or even just a data projector) is the opportunity to display full colour high quality images instead of grainy acetates or posters. With a powerful image you can really add some “punch” to your lesson. Put images up while students are coming into the room – use them as part of a lesson starter – stimulate questions.

These are my bookmarks for June 23rd from 10:20 to 11:48:

• 35+ Horizontal Websites for Your Design Inspiration | Vandelay Design Blog – Websites that use horizontal scrolling in addition to, or instead of, vertical scrolling are becoming more popular. While this trend isn’t a good idea in every situation, the sites showcased here may give you some ideas or inspiration for using this approach in one of your own projects.
• Powerful Images to Give Lessons Punch | The Whiteboard Blog – One of the benefits of having an Interactive Whiteboard in the classroom (or even just a data projector) is the opportunity to display full colour high quality images instead of grainy acetates or posters. With a powerful image you can really add some “punch” to your lesson. Put images up while students are coming into the room – use them as part of a lesson starter – stimulate questions.
• Shop for music tee shirts, men’s tee shirts, women’s tee shirts and lyric tee shirts – i/denti/tee – lyric inspired T-Shirts. Beautiful

These are my links for June 7th through June 8th:

• Channel 4 beats BBC in race to place its archive online for free | News – The broadcaster will become Britain's first to offer its archived content – beating the BBC, which screens programmes for seven days after they air via its iPlayer service.
• Fergiland – Your place for ploughs, parts, grass cutters and mowers for your vintage Ferguson T20 or MF35 tractor.
• Boomtown – xbox – Xbox 360 – LONDON & DUBLIN – 28 May 2009: Millions of entertainment fans will soon have the way they watch TV transformed, as Xbox 360 and Sky announce a ground-breaking partnership which will enable, for the first time ever, premium live television to be watched through a games console.
• Tweet My Gaming: Tracking game popularity trends on Twitter. – Tweet My Gaming is a real-time feed of video game conversations happening on Twitter.
• Scan Your Books And Search Them On Google – One of the most useful, if often-overlooked, features of Google Book Search is the ability to enter your own books and create a personal library which you can then search if Google has scanned those books. (And chances are it probably has). If you are trying to find a passage or a factoid you once read but can’t remember the book no matter how hard you wrack your brain, the ability to search your personal library can come in handy. Except who wants to enter each book one at a time?
• Watch Internet TV – Live Streaming Video From Livestream.com – looks like a webcam service – interesting.
• A Map Of Social (Network) Dominance – Even on the Web, world dominance must be achieved one country at a time. While Facebook has long been the largest social network in the world, and should soon pass MySpace in the U.S., it is not the largest social network in every country. The map above created by Vincenzo Cosenza resembles more a game of Risk, with Facebook sweeping across the globe from the West.
• Friends of Ferguson Heritage Ltd. – The Friends of Ferguson Heritage Ltd. exists to encourage and assist enthusiasts in their interest in the engineering achievements of the late Harry Ferguson. The club made a healthy start, and has grown rapidly since the first magazine was published (issue one was for Spring/Summer 1994), and the excellent magazine (pictured right) is now received three times a year by members. The internet came too late for Harry Ferguson, otherwise he would, no doubt, have made good use of it.

These are my links for June 1st through June 2nd:

• 37 Data-ish Blogs You Should Know About | FlowingData – You might not know it, but there are actually a ton of data and visualization blogs out there. I'm a bit of a feed addict subscribing to just about anything with a chart or a mention of statistics on it (and naturally have to do some feed-cleaning every now and then). In a follow up to my short list last year, here are the data-ish blogs, some old and some new, that continue to post interesting stuff.
• Wesabe > Your Money. Your Community. – We want to help you get rid of credit card debt and start saving for college for your kids. We are tired of getting stung by stupid fees from banks and credit cards. We believe pooling information on where we all spend can help you make better financial decisions and ultimately take control of your money to reach financial goals.
• Google Local Lures Small Businesses With Their Own Web Dashboard – Google wants more small businesses to claim their listing profiles on Google Local (which is basically listings that pop up in Google Maps and local search results). To entice them, starting tomorrow it will give local businesses in the real world with physical addresses a free dashboard akin to what Websites get for free with Google Analytics (see screenshot above). Except that it will show stats such as how many times their business comes up as a search result, how often people click through, as well as how many times people generate driving directions to their business son Google Maps and where those people come from.
• Show Pages – Backstory – CNN.com – We show you the story behind the story, revealing a side of news that is rarely seen. To accomplish this, we capture the passion and emotion of witness accounts. We hear how correspondents deal with the challenges and human emotions they confront. And we showcase the worldwide reach and resources of CNN
• Mobile Internet makes its way into cars – Auto Tech- msnbc.com – Just as radios evolved from hulking home consoles into expected accessories in virtually all cars, so may Wi-Fi Internet access break free to become a commonplace automotive feature. That’s the hope of Autonet Mobile, a company that supplies in-car Wi-Fi routers that let passengers use laptops and other mobile devices in their vehicles.
• Build Unlimited Affiliate Datafeed eCommerce Stores | datafeedr.com – In just minutes from now, you're going to learn about Datafeedr, a powerful push-button store creation system that makes it fast and easy for affiliate marketers just like you to set up, manage and update a complete affiliate store WITHOUT touching any clunky datafeed files, learning a programming language or hiring a programmer.
• Warmer, Fuzzier – The Refreshed Logo – NYTimes.com – A great article on the new refined logos which are represented a warmer, 'fuzzier' feeling for their brand.
• 60+ Amazing Poster and Advertisment Tutorials | Tutorials | Smashing Magazine – In this article, we have collected a mixture of Photoshop and Illustrator tutorials related to posters and advertisements. You will find some are intermediate and some are very advanced, but they’ll all give you a lot of direction with photo composition, illustration, coloring processing, typography techniques, pen tool tricks, shapes processing and much more.
• A Collection Of Resources For Motion Graphics Addicts | Spyre Studios – I have always loved motion graphics and animation and I’m sure many of you web and graphic designers do too (if not, don’t worry, it’ll grow on you!) So, I thought I’d make a list of resources, sites and blogs on the topic since it’s something I really enjoy, I hope you find it useful!

These are my links for May 31st through June 1st:

• Google Wave Drips With Ambition. A New Communication Platform For A New Web. – Yesterday, during the Google I/O keynote, Google’s VP of Engineering, Vic Gundotra, laid out a grand vision for the direction Google sees the web heading towards with the move to the HTML 5 standard. While we’re not there yet, all the major browser players besides Microsoft are aligned and ready for the next phase, which will include such things as the ability to run 3D games and movies in the browser without additional plug-ins. But Google wants to take it one step further with a brand new method of communication for this new era. It’s called Google Wave.
• Micro Persuasion: Visits to Twitter Search Soar, Indicating Social Search Has Arrived – According to data from Compete.com visits to the Twitter search page grew more than 400% in the last six months. This sub-domain alone recorded 2.7M unique visitors in April, up from just shy of 536,000 in October. Even more remarkable, traffic to the site, which is tucked away, grew 24% in April.
• Freshen me up – A nice blog about stuff…
• 100+ Incredible Twitter Backgrounds | cheth Studios – As the Title suggests these are the Best designed, kickass Twitter Backgrounds! I know that I cannot make justice to this I might have missed out some great ones, so do comment and let us know!
• Monday Note – media, tech and business stories – A potentially interesting blog
• Revealed: where Google’s data centres are around the world | Technology | guardian.co.uk – Analysis of data released by Google shows where its data centres – the places that keep it going .
• Zivity » The home of independent artists, models and rock-stars. GET EXPOSED. – A social network for artists, models & musicians. By paying a $10 subscription one gets the ability to view great work and vote whilst generating micro income for content providers. So fr the majority of the images on the homepage (I have not subscribed) include scantily clad females..
• New Economics of Advertising: 101 Twitter Tools to Help You Achieve All Your Goals – Twitter has become an incredible tool not just for communication, but for improving your life. Anyone can use it to expand their social circle, promote their side business, keep their coursework organized, and more. Whether you want to achieve your Twitter goals, or just use it as a tool to achieve others, these tools will help you get there.

These are my links for May 26th through May 28th:

• The Forrester Blog For Interactive Marketing Professionals – Microsoft announced today its Bing search engine, a "decision engine" that will replace live.com worldwide as of June 3. A distant third place in the search engine game, Microsoft hopes that this engine will help it gain more searcher share by delivering results and content more relevant to how users actually search. What makes Bing different from existing search engines?
• Micropayments for content and services | Contenture – Every time a Contenture user visits your web site, you make money. Your slice of every visitor's monthly payment is based on how many visits they made to your site divided by the total number of visits they made to all Contenture sites.
• Mozilla Labs Jetpack | Exploring new ways to extend and personalize the Web – Jetpack is a newly formed experiment in using open Web technologies to enhance the browser, with the goal of allowing anyone who can build a Web site to participate in making the Web a better place to work, communicate and play
• Linkbait Writing Services | Unique linkbait writing services to help your website grow and get more traffic. – At Linkbait Writing Services, we are determined to bring your website or blog more traffic by creating quality linkbait articles. Our small team of writers strive to create linkbait articles that will not only help you reach the front page of social bookmarking sites like Digg and Stumble Upon, but also bring you traffic for the lifetime of your blog. Save your time for marketing your blog and interaction with your readers and let us take care of the time consuming task of building linkbait articles.
• WordPress Designers – Premium WordPress Themes – WordPress Designers is a small team of talented developers and creative designers. We pride ourselves on our intimate knowledge or WordPress and our ability to push it to its limits. Since discovering the WordPress platform several years ago, we have strived to learn as much as we could about it so that we could bring you some of the most creative and well coded themes on the market.
• Outlaw Design Blog » 34 Brilliant Ads on Semi Trucks – a great post showing loads of advertising designs on lorries
• ConceptShare: – ConceptShare is a simple, cost-effective tool for gathering feedback from team members and clients.
• 5 Basic Rules for Creating an Effective About Page — Des Walsh dot Com – This short list of basic rules for creating an effective About page has been prompted by my frustration with the number of blogs and other websites that either do not have an About page or, more commonly in my experience, do not put their About page to work effectively in the interests of their business.
• Small Screen Blog: All about mobile – (by MoFuse) – If you believe that mobile is a strong medium to reach your customers – you need to be thinking about how your brand will evolve on the mobile web. Today you have a few interesting options and they are not mutually exclusive.
  As consumers wake up to the idea that they can actually reach the internet on their phone, we are about to see an explosion of new mobile devices; ITouch, Kindle, “netbooks” and even Sony Playstation Portable already are rapidly changing the ‘connection’ landscape.
• D u s t y T u n e s | Let your music collection see the light…. – Dusty Tunes automatically creates your own personal web page with a list of all the music in your iTunes library (although you can cheat). It will organise it all into a nice list and provide you with links so you can share it with your friends, on blogs, forums, websites, digg, facebook or simply keep it as a personal reference. You can come back at any time and update your page with all your latest tracks.
• WordPress › SEO Ultimate « WordPress Plugins – SEO Ultimate was developed with WordPress plugin "best practices" in mind:

  * Integration with WordPress's contextual help system
  * Internationalization support
  * Nonce security
  * An uninstall routine
  * Integration with the new WordPress 2.7 menu

• Privacy Policy Plugin For WordPress – At the end of February, 2008, Google started requiring AdSense publishers to display a privacy policy on all sites that displayed AdSense ads or search boxes. Since many WordPress blogs are monetized with AdSense, I decided to write a plugin that would automate the creation of AdSense-compliant privacy policies for WordPress users. Thus the Privacy Policy Plugin for WordPress was born.
• WordPress › CMS Navigation « WordPress Plugins – Do you want to use WordPress to create a full website, with easy navigation and menus? This plugin will let you add essential navigation functions to your template.
• WordPress › WordPress Navigation List Plugin NAVT « WordPress Plugins – The WordPress Navigation Tool (NAVT) plugin is a powerful tool designed to provide you with complete control over the creation, styling and contents of your web site's navigation.
• Why Twitter beats RSS: Context + Content = Added Value – broadstuff – Twitter

These are my bookmarks for May 13th from 16:57 to 21:56:

• Podcast Audience Growing Faster Than Podcast Advertising – Podcasting News –
• Laptop skins – Make your laptop unique with an individual vinyl design sticker laptop skin. – cool skins for your laptop. Works on Mac and PC