Today is blog number 696, that’s 696 consecutive days of blogging, as you can imagine, trying to find something different to write about on day 696 is proving a little difficult – day 695, well, that was easy – in fact you couldn’t shut me up – day 696 that’s a completely different story!
Trawling through the press, there are more and more posts about a new 46 Megapixel camera from Canon, so much so that there is little doubt that this behemoth machine will be announced at the end of October at the same show where last year Canon announced the 1D X. There is also talk of two new lenses and final confirmation regarding the release schedule of Canon’s 200-400mm lens.
Around the same time as this important camera will be launched, there will be another possibly more important announcement from a giant in it’s own market space… Microsoft. It doesn’t seem five minutes since the release of Windows 7, but towards the end of October the next version of Microsoft’s operating system, Windows 8 will be released. After years of various OS manufactures extolling the virtues of The Desktop, this new version is trying to shy away from that analogy moving more to the phone paradigm of buttons for services but I suspect whilst most people expect this on a phone, it’s going to feel rather limiting on their workstation – it’s a feature which can be disabled which I’ll be doing when i do get to install it on my laptop, though that won’t be straight away.
This year sees the re-release of the Sex Pistols seminal album “Never Mind The… “ (I’ve truncated the full album title for reader of a nervous disposition… it’s THAT album.. the one they were taken to court because of the next word in the title) and here’s the irony… 35 years after it’s initial release. Punk was never about longevity, so to celebrate it after such a long time seems a bit strange however, it’s been remastered and remixed and having heard a few such re-releases I’ll be interested to hear the results. Whilst we’re at it, another seminal album is also celebrating a major milestone… twenty-one years ago Nirvana released their magnum opus album “Never Mind” containing the track they are probably best known for “Smells like Teen Spirit”. (strange co-incidence that two such influential bands should have similar sounding albums!). Despite such angst ridden lyrics, Nirvana’s song wasn’t about The Teenage Spirit but was named after a female antiperspirant product! It could have equally been called “Smells like Lynx effect” if that product had been available.
* a line of the chorus from Smells Like Teen Spirit.
Andrew Skelton: 
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