1) The person you don’t want to be is Great Britain’s big hope for a medal on the very first morning of competition because you’re almost inevitably doomed. Craig Fallon in the Judo ?

2) Maddest commentator – Gary Herbert at the rowing, by some distance. Followed by Hugh Porter at the Cycling. In fairness, they’ve had stuff to go mad about...

3) Can’t believe that we were watching (and getting excited by) Windsurfing the other morning. It’s like how you’d only ever watch Angola v Poland when it’s part of the World Cup.

4) Is Athletics a bit like the football of the Olympics ? Hogs the attention as soon as it starts and, for some people, is all that matters ? And will probably continue to get the lion’s share of the money despite other sports doing better.

5) Various sailing medallists swearing live on Olympic Breakfast – hilarious. And that’s why you shouldn’t attempt to interview anyone immediately after they’ve finished.

6) I know we’re resigned to everyone coming here ‘to medal’ or ‘to get a PB’ but when did it become “the 400 IM” in swimming ? And when did they become “P-Bars” in gymnastics ?

7) The footage of the presenters watching the Women’s 400m and hearing Sue Barker’s terribly polite “come on Christine… come on Christine…”, slightly out of place with Colin Jackson practically doing a lap of honour within the limited space available to him.

8) I wonder how much bad news the government has buried while this has been going on.

9) Right now people are locked in BBC editing suites putting together ‘best bits’ montages for the last day. Do you think they’ll be crashingly obvious and use “Bicycle Race” for the Cycling Team ?

I've got a lot of CDs from the late 80s early 90s when they were mastered a lot quieter than they are now and it means that when something quieter and slower from one of them comes on shuffle, I have to really turn the volume up as high as it will go and even then can’t hear it very well above the background noise.

Within the settings, I can set the iPod to "Normalise volume across all songs" but it picks the quietest level rather than boosting all the quiet songs.

Can you get the iPod to normalise volume, picking the louder level rather than the quieter one ? Or is there some other way of doing it ? Is this where something like the Levelator would help ?

Sky+ is fantastic. Series Link. Winding through adverts at 30x. It even copes with overrunning sporting events. However the one thing it can't deal with is the BBC doing an unscheduled switching of channels halfway through a game, like they did with Andy Murray's match last night.

We set it to record (Mrs H didn't get in till 7.15) and started watching after putting young Master H to bed and saw Andy Murray clinch the 3rd set in thrilling fashion at about 9.40, at which point the Sky+ recording ran out, the game itself had finished, there was no BBC1+1 and we were left to find out the result from BBCi.

And I was interested to read this morning Paul Davies, BBC Sport's executive producer at Wimbledon, saying "It's fantastic that such a great sporting event was brought to a wider audience. The decision to switch it to BBC One was vindicated by so many viewers watching the climax of the match." Maybe he would like to have been in our house last night where Mrs H would happily have vindicated his decision, probably in extremely painful fashion.

Could they not put a trailer on BBC1 instead that says "you might be interested to know that there's a bloody amazing tennis match going on right now on BBC2", for all the apparent millions who don't understand that such a channel exists ?

Note to selves – watch sport live whenever possible.

Loading the Now Hear This CD into the iPod and noticed that the Half Man Half Biscuit track was listed as "Blue Badger Abuser" – still sounds like a Half Man Half Biscuit song title, albeit more surreal and unsavoury...

Had to e-mail someone called Rhiannon at work today. Is there another name so identified with a band as Rhiannon ? Whenever we hear of someone with that name, we always end up thinking "her parents were Fleetwood Mac fans then".

Well the Word Website has made it to the dizzy heights of Page 3 of today's Ipswich Evening Star which devotes the entire page to the recent website thread http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk/content/suffolk-soul-probably-not-all-nigh... about just how uncool Ipswich's nightlife is.

It lists the 'events' that were featured on the thread (Charity Jigsaw Event and all), has a big picture of Michael Stipe (after all, R.E.M. played at Portman Road football ground back in 2005) and then rounds up some people at the bottom of the page, posing the question "is town's nightlife a yawn ?" (they're all under 30 and all say yes).

And it makes the Editorial Opinion on the next page as well - "Ipswich might not have the musical reputation of London or some of the large northern cities, but it is a bit rich to find the town tagged as dull by a national guide..." - you're a National Guide now !

I would provide a link but it's not made it to the Evening Star website - had to make way for "Chip pan disaster averted"

Young Master H is nearly 4 and has now taken to picking his own choice of music, which means wandering over to the CD shelf and deciding what he likes the look of. This weekend it was the turn of the one with the chunky diagonal black & yellow stripes on the back which, despite his mother's assurances to the contrary, he decided would be really good and well worth a listen. So it is that East 17's 1994 magnum opus "Steam" has been rescued from the darker recesses of Mrs H's CD collection (the ones that didn't make it to the iPod and never will). I guess it makes a change from McFly...

Which makes me think...
1) we clearly need to vet the CDs that are 'on show' so that they are (a) nothing with a parental advisory sticker and (b) things that we're prepared to listen to, sometimes repeatedly. I've already heard this album twice, which is twice more than I ever would have expected to.
2) who needs complicated cover art when chunky yellow & black stripes will grab an audience just as effectively ? Maybe Hard-Fi and their 'No Cover Art' sleeve had a point after all…

Went to see Eagles tribute band The Illegal Eagles with the In-Laws last night (father-in-law's choice, and they were paying so...) and they were pretty good. Several thoughts as the evening progressed.

1) I don't know whether tribute bands generally try and look like the band they're doing but this lot didn't look remotely like the Eagles. Instead we had:-
Lead singer / guitarist who has Nuno Bettencourt of Extreme's hair.
Bass player - a cross between a pre-headband Mark Knopfler & Charlton manager Alan Pardew
Guitar / keyboards - Steven Gerrard in about 20 years
Drums - David Blunkett
Lead guitar / double necked 'Hotel California' guitar - Richard Stilgoe with Lieutenant Dan's haircut.

2) "Y'all got the new album ? Pretty good huh ?" (obviously hasn't read the Word review or correspondence about it - suspect the band probably got it thinking "man I hope this doesn't suck")
"Anybody been to see 'em on tour ? We''d like to but we can't afford it !" (Ho ho)
"Anyway we're gonna play a song off the new album..." (really wanted to shout 'do some old' but decided against it.)

3) Who would buy tribute band merchandise ? They plugged their double CD 'available in the foyer' - why buy that when you've probably got all the Eagles you could want at home, done by the actual band. And they're filming a live DVD on this tour. The mind boggles...

4) Didn't suffer from any of the concert going problems I've been reading about - there were no mobile phones being held aloft and everyone seemed to be there to listen to the band playing these songs we know and love, rather than get hammered or try and film it or chat all the way through. I wonder what the audience at the proper Eagles concerts were like in comparison.

Mrs H got this week's OK Magazine and this is how they reported the Brit Awards.

THE BEST OF BRITISH
But it's a bleeding unlucky night for Leona

She might have ended the night empty-handed, but Leona Lewis stole the show at the BRIT awards with a goosebump-giving rendition of her hit 'Bleeding Love'. While the clean-living X Factor songbird outshone every other act, it was clear that some of her fellow guests had a bit too much to drink on the night - step forward Amy Winehouse and the Arctic Monkeys. But it was the oldies who put their younger rivals to shame in the chaos stakes as comedian Vic Reeves and Kylie Minogue's performance needed a 'bit of work' and a fuming Sharon Osbourne barged him to one side screeching "Shut up ! You're p**sed, p**s off you b*****d". Feisty Sharon also threatened to lick Jonathan Rhys Meyers all over and introduced Chris Moyles as her future son-in-law - much to the bemusement of daughter Kelly !

Mika, Mark Ronson, Sir Paul McCartney, Kate Nash, Kylie and Adele - wearing the same dress in public for the third time in a week - all picked up gongs, as well as Take That. When accepting their gong, Jason Orange said "I'm still trying to dance at 37 years old with arthritic knees and a slipped disc. We appear before you bruised and battered but dead chuffed". But the best performance of the night clearly went to Leona Lewis. "With or without an award she was the star of the show" said one audience member.

Now, we put the show on Sky+ to watch the next day, and by then, I'd been on here and found out about it and decided not to bother. Therefore I can't comment on the accuracy of the above piece but does this bear much (or indeed any) resemblance to the ceremony that you all saw and ripped to pieces in highly amusing fashion ?

Spot the Intro
Got what I thought was "Los Endos" by Genesis (from "A Trick Of The Tail") only to find, as it got going, that it was actually "How High" by Madonna (from "Confessions on a Dancefloor"). I'm sure that there's a more radical difference of styles to be had but I can't think of it at the moment.

Right song, wrong ambience
"Knights of Cydonia" by Muse - there are bits of it that, in the right circumstances, you can imagine rocking out to like the cast of Wayne's World doing "Bohemian Rhapsody", but not if the track comes on while you're in the childcare section of Waterstones.

The QI of iPod tracks ?
"Chasing Cars" came on shuffle last night - don't actually remember putting it on there, maybe it just appears by default. I had this overwhelming feeling that Stephen Fry was about to appear and deduct lots of points from me. At least I don't have "Rock Your Body" by Justin Timberlake, otherwise I truly would have been in danger of turning into a local radio station.

In the mix-tape thread, I made mention of Graham-at-work. Graham likes to think himself a music fan and knows what he likes. Trouble is that he only really likes what he knows, and we're doing our best to chip away at his occasionally blinkered view of what good music is.

He was a teenager during the punk / disco / new wave era and he's followed his music over the years via the singles chart & Top of the Pops, but he isn't really much of an albums buyer. He'll usually get one once the 3rd or 4th decent single has been released (eg "The Bends") or if it's by someone like R.E.M. who he's previously bought albums by.

We're trying our best to help him learn about generally accepted classic albums and have recently lent him "Ziggy Stardust", "Bat Out Of Hell", "Dark Side Of The Moon" and (believe it or not) "Revolver" & "Sgt Pepper", some of which he can see the fuss about, others of which have fallen on deaf ears.

We've not given up on Pink Floyd (discussing Pink Floyd's impending appearance at Live8, his singles-knowledge-only contribution was "well, once they've played 'Arnold Layne' and 'See Emily Play', they're going to struggle a bit for material aren't they ?") and Led Zeppelin remain a challenge we're working up to (it'll probably be a compilation CD made up from the tracks suggested in the "One Track Mind" thread).

He's usually prepared to listen to most things we give him (Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits has recently been returned - shan't bore you with the details, suffice to say he wasn't very impressed with Dylan's cover of 'Mr Tambourine Man'), although his knowledge of rock history is sometimes a bit wide of the mark - his theory that the Beatles broke up because 'Come Together' only made number 4 in the charts and they couldn't cope with not getting to number 1 any more resulted in me having to be restrained from beating him soundly with a rolled up copy of "Revolution in the Head".

Now I know that it takes all sorts, each to their own, wouldn't it be dull if we all liked the same thing. However, we're struggling with:-

Jimi Hendrix - after he was extensively featured on BBC2's Seven Ages of Rock, Graham couldn't see what the fuss was about. "Just because he apparently invented a new way of playing the guitar, does that mean we have to listen to the resulting racket ? It's like if Vanessa Mae invented a new way of playing the violin, would we all be worshipping her in the same fashion ?"

Bruce Springsteen - "Bruce Springsteen ? If it's not 'Streets of Philadelphia' why are you even bothering to listen to it ?" At which point, amid much spluttering into our lunches, Andy began making a case for 'Thunder Road', to which Graham replied "The only Thunder Road that matters is the one John Travolta drove down in Grease", to which we really had no answer.

Whilst I'm reasonably familiar with them, I don't know enough Hendrix or Springsteen to be able to convey to him why they're worth the bother and where he should start.

Help ? Or is he beyond help ?

Is there some special training that DJs who either do radio or instore programmes go on so that they know when failing to back-announce a song will really annoy the listener ? (or at least cause a slightly disgruntled case of "well I wonder if I'll ever find out what that was...")

Have just been in HMV at lunchtime and found myself liking what was on the instore radio - it then went straight into "Your Love Alone" by the Manics. On comes the announcer at the end of that one and tells me exactly what the Manics was and which album it's on but no mention at all of the storming track that went before that I now can't remember anything of so I guess I'll never know. Radio DJs do it all the time - yes I know that was Justin Timberlake, what was the one before it though ?

Of course, I could have asked the staff but I wasn't sure they'd have known either - that's the thing with instore radio as opposed to the "now playing" display where they've loaded six CDs into a multi-changer and stuck it on random, at least you can see what they're playing and go and have a look at it.

Faced with a trip to Birmingham for a (hugely exciting !) meeting, I decided on a themed music day and realised that I have every Pink Floyd album from "Meddle" onwards. So out they all came and I worked my way through them as I travelled up and down the A14, allowing me to draw the following conclusions:-
1) "Animals" is much better than I initally realised.
2) "The Final Cut" really doesn't work as driving music.
3) If I decide to do this again, I'll be making a special "Highlights from The Wall" CD for the occasion. While he sometimes has a sublime way with words, Roger Waters could moan for Britain at the Olympics and it was the only one that I found myself skipping tracks on.
4) Listening to 'The Dogs of War' (from "Momentary Lapse") with the knowledge that it's been voted worst Floyd track ever on more than one occasion makes you realise how really-not-very-good it is.

So "I'm A Celebrity" was on last night (not my choice, I hasten to add !) and it kicks off with a quick 'coming up' montage of people jumping out of helicopters, being covered in creepy crawlies and arguing with each other (I know ! on a reality programme - who'd have guessed ?), all soundtracked by that piece of music that is currently everywhere - the dramatic string music from the film "Requiem for a Dream".

It first started cropping up in film trailers and now it's gradually seeped in to become as much of a staple of reality tv programmes as "Fix You" and "Chasing Cars", and then a couple of months ago, Sky Sports News adopted it as their music to lead into a commercial break, all of them trying to convey that the telly you're about to watch is the most exciting thing you'll ever, ever see.

Composer Clint Mansell probably doesn't mind as he's almost certainly raking in the PRS payments. I've only seen "Requiem For A Dream" once but I'm starting to think that next time I watch it, the film won't have any real impact because, rather than conveying the dramatic descent in heroin fuelled madness, in my head I'll be hearing some Sky Sports presenter trying to convince me to stay with them for a round up of the latest rotation policy in Rafael Benitez' sock drawer...

1) I'm sure you've experienced it - walking along, minding your own business, car races up the road, windows down (regardless of the weather), music blaring forth to everyone within earshot but it's almost always some bass-heavy dance monstrosity that you've never heard of and which you'll have no chance of identifying as it carries on down the road. So imagine how refreshing it was to be assailed in this fashion by "Johnny B Goode" by Chuck Berry.

2) Have you ever unwisely allowed your other half to have charge of the in-car entertainment and found yourself having to turn it down whilst in a built-up area so that nobody realises what you're listening to ? Can anyone top the debut album by X Factor monstrosities Journey South (a truly grim listen...)