Harry's Blog

William Arthur Neary, originally uploaded by Harry Neary.

This is our beautiful son Will who was born today at 15:25. He weighed 7 lb 13 oz. Mum and baby are doing really well.

Today I've made a slight change to the organisation of the site. I've merged the Photography and Grumpygamer blogs.

From now on Grumpygamer is where all my waffle about toys, games, gadgets, cameras and the like will appear.

And to start the new merged blog off I've written a brief review of the Cowon S9 32GB personal music player.

My wife is a brave woman, she's nine months pregnant and yet decides to give the twins their first go at painting. But I guess with the rain pouring down that teacher training has stepped in and she's gone into "wet break" mode. What a trooper.

Dorset Sunset 1, originally uploaded by Harry Neary.

I must admit there's a little bit of HDR going on here. Three bracketed handheld exposures were combined. But the aim wasn't to create one of those weird halo-ruined monstrosities you mostly associate with the technique. The aim was to capture what I saw with my own eyes - and this is pretty close.

I had a lovely day today surrounded by my wife and children. The twins and I spent quite a bit of time this morning seeing how tall a pile of wooden blocks we could build before the epic crash of it falling to earth.

Then we went out and bought Pat at space rocket and Kitty a little toy house. Both loved their new toys, in fact it's all Pat could talk about all the way home from the shops.

And later I cooked roast beef and the four of us sat down together and celebrated what should be called Family Day in future.

Next time we do this there will be five of us. In fact there may be five of us this time next week. To some the idea of having a family is perhaps the dullest thing in the world, the bastion of conformity.

But for those of us in the know, we know that it's the most exciting and rewarding thing in the world.

Goodnight folks. See you tomorrow.

My day job is holding the role of editor for a successful commercial videogames website. I spend quite a lot of my time talking to publishers and third-party PR reps who handle the promotion of their portfolio of games.

The vast majority of these PR bods are very knowledgeable and also work hard to make sure they get their game mentioned in the press as much as possible. Sites like the one I run do receive review copies of the latest games, and contrary to popular opinion are not badgered into giving good reviews. However publishers do expect their review copies to go to good homes.

After all, there's no point sending a disk to some tiny website with three readers. And while the disks themselves aren't really worth anything the time PR people spend dealing with you is expensive. I know from personal experience that you need unique readership figures in the tens of thousands, and in some cases hundreds of thousands, to expect to do business with certain games publishers.

Which makes my new experience in the realm of what we'll call "mummy blogging" all the more odd. The PR reps that deal with mummy bloggers are clearly completely out of their mind. I constantly see bloggers being offered free foreign holidays and expensive baby equipment despite probably having a readership of a few hundred unique visitors a day (and I'm being generous there).

You know when a song gets into your head and you find yourself humming it all the time? That's currently what's happening with me and this song Cry for the Moon by Epica. I absolutely love Simone Simon's voice and the dynamic contrast in the instrumentation.

Most of my favourite stuff at the moment is of this ilk, as my wife calls it "the girl singer and the shouty man." But yes, I find myself listening to lots of Nightwish, Epica, Within Temptation, Delain, After Forever, Sirenia etc.

I've been listening to Nightwish longer than the others though I'm not one of those bitter fans who can't move on now that long-term vocalist Tarja has left the group. I'm quite happy for the band to now have a singer that doesn't mispronounce the English lyrics so much and I think Dark Passion Play is a super album.

Anyway, enough yacking. Here's Epica's Cry for the Moon.