In 2011, I set myself the goal of cycling 2,011 miles. This was my BHAG: a big hairy audacious goal. I’d bought myself a decent bike in mid-2010 (Fuji Roubaix 2.0, a Shimano Tiagra clad road-bike), and while I managed a few long rides, and used it regularly for commuting, it was too easy to find excuses to leave the bike at home. I needed an aim, and so the BHAG was born. It worked out at just under 168 miles a month, so it wasn’t a horrendously high target, but still one that was going to take effort and commitment. The BHAG was terrific fun, and really spurred me on to becoming a better, far fitter cyclist and to explore my local area.

I documented the BHAG in detail on my blog, The Wired Jester.

I got into photography because I didn’t want to be a page boy at the age of 26. My Mum was getting remarried, and wanted me to be part of the wedding – so why not do something with that interest in photography of yours, she asked? Why not indeed. Got myself a Nikon D40 and haven’t stopped taking photos since. Now graduated to a Nikon D90, with the 18-200 VR super zoom and the 85mm f1.8d for portraits. Lightroom to make things look good. Plenty of iPhone pictures too. It’s always with me, after all. I used to use Flickr a lot, but it started to seem like a lot of work, involving a lot of almost SEO style tricks to get comments and favourites. A waste of time. So now I stick a few photos on Facebook every now and then, or show them to friends and family on the iPad, or you can check out my photo Tumblr: Malevolent Aesthetic Bacon Takedown.

Here is some stuff about me. Job, career

Maybe a picture

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I work at Dennis Publishing, where I’m the Head of App Development. My team is called Dennis Media Factory.

If you have a digital music collection, you’ve probably got tens of thousands of songs sitting on your hard disk – days, weeks and months of music. You probably don’t listen to it all. You probably can’t hum all the songs or remember the choruses. But I bet you remember where they came from, and what the songs meant at the time.

A Month In Music is the story of what happened when I decided to retrace the story of all my music, to listen to every single song he owned, all in one go: a whole month of music. It’s the story of someone replaying their life in music as in real life, things break down; what it means when music remains as time passes and people change.

“There are 10,513 MP3s on my hard disk. According to iTunes, that’s nearly 30 days worth of music. It has taken 15 years to build this collection, but I’m going to listen to every track as one continuous concert, playing 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The only choice I made was the first track. After that, the computer randomly decided what was going to play. There was no stopping, no skipping and initially at least, no changing the volume.”

A Month In Music is a music memoir with a difference: it’s about the listening, not the playing, the collection as much as the songs, and the role of the technology as well as the audio itself. It was originally published online as a blog, but I’ve since collected all the posts and photos and published it as a Kindle book.

Praise and other comments about A Month In Music:
“Phenomenal writing. The fact that he played a month’s worth of music isn’t what’s interesting here. It’s pretty hard to make one’s personal musings on popular music compelling stuff, but this was a great read.”

“The author plays his entire iTunes collection (around 30 days worth) non-stop on random. This reveals a lot about his adult life and how music has played a part in that… Overall an excellent book, don’t be put off by the low price as it’s a great read. It may even change the way you listen to music.”

“But playing all his stuff in one go? That guy’s nuts.”