Too much of a good thing?

I keep all my digital data on an external hard drive - that’s movies, photos, music, writing - everything. Or at least I did until it died last week.

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Do we need politicians

A while ago I was listening to Joanna Newsom watching the waves crash against the sea wall and pondering politics.

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What happened to time?

When I was younger, so much younger than today - a day felt like a week, a week felt like a month and a month like year.

Back then time seemed to go by so much more slowly than it does today.

I swear I’ve been put into some bizarre time machine while sleeping and taken a year into the future – It really does only feel like a week a go that it was New Years Eve 2007.

Basically what I’m getting at is – my wife is nine months pregnant and our new baby is due on Friday 11 January – that’s just a few days away.

Of course as this is our third child I know all to well that it probably won’t arrive until towards the end of NEXT week but you never know.

What this means is – when the baby comes, for at least a fortnight posts are going to be few and far between.

I’m taking two weeks off work as paternity leave to help my wife out and to bond with the new baby, and so I can still be alive during the day while surviving on about an hours sleep a night.

I will try to post here whenever I can, or when I feel awake enough to write a few words down – or at least when my brain is operating well enough to put two words together.

I’m hoping to come back in full force in about three weeks with a new look, a new logo and a new, more streamlined approach – I’m hoping to turn Up Your Ego into a blog looking at New Media, Citizen Journalism and media generally in the UK.

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Money to play with

Earlier this year I was visiting my parents in England and popped into a ‘Game’ shop to see if I could get a few cheap games to take back to Jersey with me - they do some pretty good deals on PC and DS games.

While I was looking around a shop assistant asked me if I needed any help, this then turned to a conversation which eventually ended up in my telling him I live in Jersey - at which point, for some reason he asked me why I was buying games here if I lived in Jersey.

The point of his question was that “you’ve got Play in Jersey, thats about as cheap as it gets”, assuming that we have Play shops around the island (we don’t).

I used to work on the same industrial estate that Play.com was based, in fact I passed it every morning while walking to work and I’d order products from Play.com that would then get sent around the houses before eventually arriving on my desk - I couldn’t just pop in and pick it up.

There are a number of companies based in Jersey a bit like play - that make the most of the islands low tax status and the fact that its outside the EU (if you buy a product from outside the EU you don’t pay VAT when importing it if its under £18).

But these are all Play Lites - much smaller versions of the big one that really started it all and Play really is something a bit different. Of all the services Play is the one most likely to survive if the £18 loophole where to be closed and the most likely to stay opperating in the island.

Well now Play.com seems to be growing pretty quickly, according the The Times the company is forecasting a turnover of £340 by the end of 12 months on 31 January and saw a growth of 24% over the Christmas period on the same time last year.

This all while the high street is suffering pretty big slumps and forecasting losses for the year ahead.

In fact Play are growing and this is the one that is inspiring me the most.

Like Amazon and HMV before them they’re going to have a pop at iTunes by launching their own music download service called PlayDigital sometime in the next year.

The reason I think PlayDigital will do well compared the comparitive failure of the other two is that Play.com enjoys a bit of a cult status, something Amazon and HMV don’t - people see those two as places to buy stuff whereas Play is more part of the ‘culture’ that will cause people to talk about it.

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