Bonjour 2019

For some reason I thought it was 2020, probably working in a Finance Department in the Financial Year 2019 for the last eight months. I do believe that tax and accountancy is just an annoying situation where a bunch of ex council pedants make up rules to make life difficult for everyone else.

Anyway less work talk and here we are on the first day of 2019 with my first post before my first sleep of the New Year. I' will go for (like I probably did last year) "New Year's Day" by U2 from the "Under A Blood Red Sky" album that I bought from Woolworth's in Goole when I was on my first contract at Hygena coding COBOL on a DEC/VAX . I was quite amazed when there was all the palaver about the Millenium Bug because I'd been programming since 1980 catering for the millenium, so how come programming in the late nineties didn't see the Millenium coming. Still "Under A Blood Red Sky" is one of my favourite U2 albums which I still play today

Not to worry, we are still here despite the morons in the USA and UK Governments at the moment and sure that we will deal with these like our bodies deal with infections, we will purge them.

Welcome to 2019 everybody.

Goodbye 2018 Hello 2019

Yes it's still New Year's Eve and I have been pondering the decline in visits since the end of October. Up to then I would get 30-50 hits for each post now it's 14-20 for each post with no apparent reason for the decline. However the real oddity is that the overall number of visits is staying at around 2m200 a month , that's roughly 520 a week or 70 a day, and given that I post maybe five times a week that implies more hits than I am getting.

The conclusion that I'm drawing is that Google visit logging is slightly disfunctional. The overal stats show that my most visited page is here with 879 visits (this figure keeps declining) however when I check the individual page it's had 1,899 visits when this one here shows as my second most visited with 679 visits but checking the page it's actually hit 2,114 visits. So really I need to take this fall with a rather big pinch of salt.

So although this is just about blog statistics, it is another excuse to share some rather excellent music with you though I'm not sure what that should be.

One thing with technology is that you don't had the problem of dating your cheques any more, I don't know why that flashed into my mind.

Everyone is posting various New Year Greetings on Social Media and out enjoying parties, and I binge watched Killing Eve, which was a very good way to spend New Year's Eve.

The weather has still been grey and uninspiring so we won't go into 2019 with a flurry of snow, but no doubt there will be noise and fireworks, so maybe I will choose "Fireworks"  by Siouxsie & the Banshees as my 2018 play out song, Happy New Year All.

One One Two Zero One Eight

Happy new year and an obvious song to welcome in the New Year would be U2's "New Year's Day", but that is a bit obvious, and I'm currently working therough "Songs of Experience" their latest album which I was completely unaware of until my friend John Scott mentioned he was listening to it. It's a follow up to "Songs of Innocence" , the one they deposited free into everyone's iTunes accounts that people then couldn't easily get rid off which turned a lot of people into your typical red top readers being offended by something that , at worst , was just an annoyance.

The new album is very listenable all though there it's nothing that hits you like a hammer and the first ten songs have very low key production although toward the end you begin to hear U2 signatures such as the duplo guitar and Bono starting to actually stretch his vocal chords. My favourite song so far is "Lights of Home" which sound more like an old blues song with a wonderful guitar sound and ruff.

Today I've seen a rainbow, and been out to the Co Op and it's another month to start my steps but I don't think I will hit my 11K today.

So it's a  start to a New Year and I have just found another reason to hate iTunes , tryied to play the beautiful "To Ohio" by The Low Anthem then I had to log in to play it, then it told me my computer wasn't authorised, so I had to autorise it (two logins to play one song), I do hate Apple, they may look good but their systems are full of holes and stupidity.

Anyway I found a live version of "To Ohio" and that I think is a great start to 2018. Start having a good New Year now.