“Whenever I want to hear music that’s just a strange cacophony of sometimes melodic stuff, sometimes abstract stuff, i listen to that.”

I have it as my all time fave album not because of any personal relating to me lyrics or emotional chord structures – all the usual stuff I like music for – but for the complete whacked out trip I get by listening to it. It’s like real alien music – like nothing else I know – It makes me uncomfortable because it takes me places I don’t know, and that’s scary. No other music does this to me. It’s kaleidoscopic, fractured yet all together at the same time. If you haven’t heard it and you have an hour to yourself – put your headphones on and prepare for a journey to somewhere you never knew existed.

Here’s a blast from the album on Youtube

Anyway, having a look at available apps (ideally I want to record stuff on the go) nothing really stood out and I thought I could probably knock something together using free existing tools. So, using a combination of Twitter, WordPress and Your Flowing Data. I have a basic mood tracker which can provide me extremely dull information about myself, as long as I remember to input my feelings.

When I want to record a mood, I go to the mood tracker page which I set up on this blog. That basically gives me a list of emotions to choose from. Choosing one of them fires a tweet direct to Your Flowing Data which records the details. You can add extra bits in at this point too. This gets added to the other data and makes it all available in a number of snazzy ways. So I could see how often I’ve been happy on a Monday, for instance.

I’m not really confident it will work due to my cockeyed approach to using tech stuff but we’ll see. It’s usually about having a bash at things. I guess it’s set up so anyone can give it a go if you set up a Your Flowing Data account and you’re on Twitter.

Add this link to your phone to record stuff on the go: http://bit.ly/grumpo. It just about works ok on my 3G I Phone.

Here’s my latest recorded emotion

I built a memory vessel out of love – much more than a crate for growing salad, time will see to that.

Anyways, following on from this, my Dad handed over a load of old family photographs a few months ago and I thought i’d have a bash at some online archive thing (which i’m still procrastinating over) but in amongst the photos were a few letters written to my Mom by my late sister, Jane who died at the age of 23 from leukaemia, back in 1986. Reading these obviously brought on a right old mix of emotions which eventually settled down to an overriding sense of joy. I thought then, it’s only letters that really have this power, they’re physical objects, personal, they age – really wonderful things. So I promised myself that I would write a letter to my boy at least once a month so that maybe he might feel that same sense of joy or something similar, however many years down the line. Also, he likes it when the postman delivers the letters at the moment so it’s nice that he gets something from time to time.

I’m keen to watch how it takes off and develop, if I manage to get a number of contributors, to see what kind of stuff they want to put up there. I have a few people in mind initially to contribute but i’m currently thinking about building some recognition.

One of my concerns with the whole hyper local thing, is longevity. I wonder whether a year or two down the line, will we have a load of ‘ghost’ blogs where no one continues to contribute. It will be interesting to see how the sites are curated and if plans are put into place to ensure they continue to be used.