Last May I wrote about working from home and seeing the Google Street View car pass my house. Now, some ten months later, the results are in and the pictures have been uploaded and there I am at our window, standing like some shadowy Norman Bates.

You can quite clearly see that I am holding a cup of tea but it also looks like I have positioned it to protect my genitals! Maybe I misunderstood those articles about Google taking your privacy and thought they meant privates!

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My eldest son is currently completing the final piece of coursework for his A Level English which is looking at the the language used in pre and post watershed TV. To do this he is looking at various measures such as the complexity of words. One of the things he wanted to do was to look at the number of words by the number of letters. No problem I thought I must be able to find something on the web to do that. But an extensive Google search turned up nothing, perhaps because it is difficult to describe.

At that point I decided that I could do it myself and set off to write a PHP script to do it and you can see the results here! Cut and paste some text into the box below and hit the submit button and you will see a very crude set of results and a great looking bar chart courtesy of Google Charts.

It’s not perfect, it will only work for Western European characters and only for words up to 20 characters in length but it does the trick - enjoy!

Oh, and this is the chart for this article

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Having been at Bush Hall only a few weeks previously to see Liam Finn Mat and I were back again last night to see Liam’s Dad and he was just superb. The venue is tiny and there were only 350 tickets available to the public and all of them were snapped up by members of the fan club.

The great thing about Finn is that he is such a natural showman, so easy and relaxed on stage and no two shows are ever the same. Last night with only a piano and acoustic guitar he worked his way through his extensive catalogue. The playlist list quickly went out the window as more and more requests were shouted from the crowd and Finn agreed to songs that he hadn’t played in a while and the audience helped out with the lyrics.

Another great thing that makes Finn so engaging is how he is happy to share the stage with audience members and last night three got the opportunity to go up including one on the piano who brilliant played my favourite Crowded House song, Love you ’til the day i die.

The only disappointment was Finn wasn’t able to raise anyone on Skype which would have been fun to see.

I’m really looking forward to the Crowded House gigs coming up in the summer.

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Spent last night at my first concert of the year at a chilly Shepherd’s Bush Empire seeing OK GO. I had been in two minds as to whether to go as the weather was grotty still but Mat was keen to go and so we went and I am glad that I did. For a start there was virtually no snow in London and secondly OK GO were just great.

I have been to see some bands who have been great on record (remember those?) and not up to much on tour (see Genesis and John Mayer). Others meanwhile put a bit of effort into it. I have been to many Crowded House concerts and each one has been entertaining and different. OK GO certainly fall into the latter category. As you can see from the photos below it was a well staged and visually stunning show which included ticker tape, mic mounted cameras, video walls and hand bells. You might feel that all of this distracts from the music but it complemented it well and was a great evening.

If you get a chance to see them you should GO, OK?

More pictures and a video of OK GO on hand bells here!

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The “offer” left was spotted by boy 2 while in WH Smiths - mind you I would have to be paid to take New Kids on the Block CD!

As Mat would say “Fail!”

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