Author: Carrie

  • The USB mix tape: what a brilliant little idea

    This made me laugh. Yours for £17. 

  • Arguing with RJ Ellory

    I don’t usually edit or remove posts, no matter how much of an arse they make me look, but I’m making an exception this time: I went off the deep end about a series of tweets by the novelist RJ Ellory, and in doing so I made an arse of myself. The tweets were about…

  • The REM best-of is superb value for money

    The deluxe version of the REM best-of (“Part Lies, Part Truth, Part Garbage 1982-2011) on iTunes is superb value for money: 40 songs and a further twelve videos for £11.99. If you’re interested, the videos are for Radio Free Europe, Talk About The Passion, Fall On Me, The One I Love, Orange Crush, Losing My…

  • Coffin Dodgers: can I call it a bestseller now?

    Update: Coffin Dodgers became a proper bestseller in February 2012, topping Amazon UK’s humour chart and breaking into the overall top 40 too. I’m quite delighted to see that Coffin Dodgers is currently number 20 in Amazon UK’s Books > Fiction > Humour chart, as well as number 33 in Kindle Store > Books >…

  • Ryanair’s porn plan is a smokescreen to hide price hikes

    Whenever I see a stupid Ryanair story, I wonder what bit of financial news it’s drawing your attention away from. There’s a good example this week. The real story, in the Irish Times: the average cost of a Ryanair flight increased by 13% over the last year, and it’s about to go up again. At a…

  • The slippery slope: now BT’s being urged to block The Pirate Bay

    It’s not a surprise, but it’s still deeply worrying: BT, the UK’s biggest ISP, is under pressure to block The Pirate Bay.  The BPI chief executive, Geoff Taylor, said The Pirate Bay was “no more than a huge scam” defrauding the global creative sector. “We would not tolerate Counterfeits R Us on the high street…

  • In which I compare Internet Explorer to Sugababes

    Oh yes. On the face of it, Internet Explorer doesn’t have much in common with Sugababes: IE isn’t beautiful, doesn’t sing and isn’t likely to dress in a primary-coloured PVC dominatrix outfit to perform at G-A-Y. However, they’re not as different as you might think.

  • The downsides of stopping smoking

    Robyn Wilder’s description of being an ex-smoker is perfect. I am a retired cigarette enthusiast, which brings with it the following woes: Getting up from my desk at the end of the day and all my joints cracking at once because cigarette breaks are the only breaks I know Dreaming that I had a cigarette, and…

  • The angry face of DCI Banks

    I’m hopeless at catching programmes when they’re actually broadcast, so it’s taken me a while to get round to watching the DCI Banks adaptations of Peter Robinson’s books. I like the books, but I encountered exactly the same problem I had with the recent dramatisation of Mark Billingham’s DI Thorne novels. No, not the annoying…

  • Free ebooks from a new publisher

    A new ebook publisher launches later today: Blasted Heath. I need to declare an interest – one of the founders is a friend of mine who occasionally pays me to write things – but I think what they’re doing is really interesting: they’re picking authors who they believe deserve a bigger profile and marketing the…