Magic in the dining room

Jake summons his minions to lay waste to Hannah’s troops

For some reason, after about a five year hiatus, Jake suddenly went digging through our never-unpacked boxes of stuff from New Zealand for his Magic The Gathering cards.

He and I used to play and collect a long time ago and he’s got the bug again. Fortunately, we’d hung onto them.

We have thousands. I’m not exaggerating either. Thousands. Which is just as well, because half the fun is assembling the decks. You stack your deck with combinations of creatures and spells that you think will work together well in a particular strategic way to crush your opponent. And when it all goes wrong, you go back to the drawing board and re-tweak your deck, adding and removing cards.

The 100 albums I carry around with me

This is what your iTunes library looks like when you’re a bit OCD

I don’t have one of those big iPods that can fit tens of thousands of tunes on them. I have a little clip-on one that can take about 200 songs, a larger one that can take about 50 albums – and now I have my iPhone, which can comfortably carry 100 albums.

And 100 is one of those numbers that you just have to make lists out of. Take it from me. I’m one of those people who like lists of things. And I know for a fact that there are at least several people reading this who also like lists – and, like me, enjoy looking through other people’s records and books.

So – I’m going to list them (they’re all full, commercially-available albums – no partial albums or single tracks) for no other reason than I happen to have them handy. If you’re not fascinated by lists, there’s probably nothing interesting to look at here. And before you point out the obvious… yes – there’s hardly any jazz in the list at all, because that’s not really what I feel like listening to at the moment.

Of course, some people will make comments pointing out that album X by artist B is better than their Y album I’ve chosen – or will want to know “Why on earth would you listen to that dreadful band Q?”, but that’s kind of the point. Let’s have a conversation about pop music.

Late adopter

This is a bit of a test.

Yesterday, after months of wanting one – arguably needing one – I finally managed to get myself an iPhone. And to be honest, now that I have one, I’m not entirely sure how I managed to go this long without.

I’ve only had it around 12 hours so far, and I’m not as fast or as accurate as I’d like to be typing on the touch screen, but I did manage to knock out this blog post on it in just a few minutes. Haven’t yet worked out how to link to anything – but the mere fact that I can put together and publish a blog post on my phone is impressive enough for me.

I can also take videos, find my way around on the map, listen to music, play games and all that other clever stuff that iPhones can do… But this is the thing that’s impressed me most so far.