Like a small collection of like-minded people I was pretty excited when I heard about Apple’s brand new social network aimed at bringing fans and music closer together. I went over to Google who told me that I already have Ping on my iTunes which made me happy – I wouldn’t even have to spend all that time downloading it and setting it up! Nodding a little nod I loaded up iTunes and looked about for a bit. I couldn’t find anything that resembled it so I tried typing it into the search bar. All that came up was ‘Jumping All Over the World’ by Scooter. Turns out Google was wrong and in fact I’d have to spend even more time downloading the new iTunes, restarting my computer, deleting ‘Jumping All over the World’ along with the rest of Scooter’s discography AND setting up Ping.

But now it’s all set up, I have a profile picture – albeit one I was forced to take with my iMac’s built in webcam at 3am – and I’m following a bunch of bands that I like and ignoring all of the people I don’t. And the first thing that strikes me is how similar its functions are to Facebook’s music and artists facilities. The top of my recent news feed tells me that Jimmy Eat World like ‘America, Fuck Yeah’ by Team America. The top of my Facebook recent news feed tells me that my mate Big Steve likes McDonald’s. I already know both of these things; Steve’s fucking huge, and everyone likes ‘America, Fuck Yeah’. Nothing new there then. But the thing that differs between Jimmy Eat World’s Facebook page and their Ping page is the big old lettering that tells me that I can purchase ‘America, Fuck Yeah’ for only 79p. How convenient.

What isn’t so convenient is that Ping isn’t exactly the easiest software in the world to use. I’ve been stumbling around it for at least half an hour today and I’m still more confused than Jedward in a house of mirrors. For example, I was trying to find Jedward’s profile so I could mock it on here and for five minutes all I could figure out was that I have none of their tracks on my computer and that if I wanted to, which I don’t, it would only cost me £7.99. Turns out Jedward don’t have a Ping yet, which I suppose is good thing, but seeing as this is Apple, it should be a hell of a lot more straightforward to find this out than they’ve made it.

What Apple are doing, of course, is to try to get the websites of every band and artist in the world and put it all in one place within a music player. They’ve forgotten that the internet has already done that at least twice. What Apple have actually done is set a very restrictive infrastructure in which they can limit the amount of information that bands and artists can play with and then plastered their prices all over the top of it. What they need to do is separate each individual page from the iTunes Store and allow the artist space to devise a more interactive, creative area that fans will actually want to come back to. When I click on Jimmy Eat World’s page I don’t want to see how much each of their songs will cost me – if I wanted to do that I’d go to the iTunes store. If Apple could load a band’s official website within iTunes which contains interesting things like biographies, blogs and tour dates then I wouldn’t mind the occasional reminder that their album ‘Bleed American’ will set me back just over a fiver.

To Apple, Ping is clearly just the second half of a word they’re much more interested in – Shopping. No matter what I do when I’m using it I’m constantly reminded on the top right corner that I only have 37p in my account, and I can’t help noticing that the Ping link is nestled comfortably in-between the iTunes Store and the list of things I’ve already bought. I’m sure that if Microsoft followed suit and offered the world a similar product, it would be called something along the lines of ‘Windows Shopping’. I’m also a bit hazy as to why a company that specialises in making computers would choose for the name of a venture that is supposed to be cutting edge and up-to-date a word that’s tech-speak for latency. But all in all, I’ve learned two things from Ping in the short space of time that it’s been around they’re both things I already knew. First – I really, really hate Jedward. And second – Apple never falls far from the fee.

My eyebrows were happy to have something to do because if I have a surprised face, I probably made it then. Turns out 30 Seconds to Mars collected thousands of pictures of thousands of fans and friends and printed them onto different CDs in what they call the ‘Faces of Mars’ campaign. Here’s a little blog by Jared Leto, the band’s frontman, if you want to see what I’m chatting about: http://tinyurl.com/yeuv3h2. Needless to say, I put the whole stack of CDs in my trolley and scooted off to find Keith to show him what I’d found. He was in the special selection nodding appreciatively at the ingredients in a bottle of Truffle Oil which is probably why he was so enthusiastic about my findings.

I love the lengths that bands and artists are going to nowadays to get noticed. Back in August, for example, Pixie Lott’s label rented an entire Boeing 757, painted her name all over it and flew a load of fans and journalists to Germany to play a show. Angels and Airwaves are releasing a full length cinematic movie to aid the sales of their next album called Love. Even Susan Boyle’s performance in Britain’s Got Talent thrust her into a whole new world of press coverage ready for her to release her debut album.

Another band with an interesting marketing strategy is Metro Station; Miley Cyrus’ brother’s band. They, at some point in the not too distant past, have clearly sat down with their record label and their manager and made the conscious decision to go out and ruin everything. Everything. I’m not talking about ‘Ooh, let’s go and do something that our fans will find new and interesting while maintaining our band’s identity so as not to alienate the people who have supported us from the start’, I mean that they are actually going out into the world and physically ruining everything in it, one step at a time. Watch this video: http://tinyurl.com/ya7559t. I used to like Christmas. Not anymore. Metro Station Ruined it ruined for me. Cribs used to be a good show, too. Then I saw Metro Station making their own version of it and now I’d rather watch Loose Women.

But at least it’s working for them. For everything they ruin for me, they make a little better from some chubby 14 year old girl somewhere so whatever.

The point is that bands simply can’t get away with releasing an album along with a couple of radio interviews and a limited edition T-shirt anymore. There is such an immense pressure to be innovative and keep ahead of the curve that the bands that don’t are running a real risk of falling off the radar. One artist in particular that I will be watching over the next month or so is Ke$ha. Her album – Animal – is the lastest offering from Dr Luke and Benny Blanco; the guys behind Katy Perry, Britney Spears, Kelly Clarkson, in fact most successful pop music out there, and it’s set to be huge. But what fascinates me is that if the label aren’t clever with how they release it, it could end up in the bargain buckets of HMV faster than you can say ‘Jedward have taken up far too much space in the papers lately and people should stop talking about them because they’ve long since been kicked off the overrated talent contest that spawned them so maliciously in the first place’. So if you’re in a band and you’re trying to get famous, don’t just sit there doing what everybody else is doing because that’s just not going to work anymore. It’s by doing what nobody else is doing that’s going to get you noticed.

Now I’m going to Asda to look at some Wattleseed Sauce before Metro Station get there and ruin that too.

Next month we will be looking at their seventh studio album – their seventh shot at something that they probably should have stopped doing a long time ago – and we will probably still be trying to figure out if it counts as the Sugarbabes or not. This record will catalogue the combined efforts of  Heidi, Amelle and Jade almost a decade after Siobhan, Keisha and Mutya made musical history with “One Touch”. I use the term ‘musical history’ in the same way that Hovis made ‘bread history’ when they invented bread that was half brown and half white – I just mean that we know that it happened at some point once.

How well this record will do is debatable. The group have had some recent chart success with “Get Sexy” or whatever it’s called, and they have been working with RedOne – the guy responsible for “Poker Face” and “Just Dance” – on their new material. But will their fan base remain loyal? Will the fans who supported the band back in their “Angels With Dirty Faces” years, back when it was Heidi, Munter and Keisha, still want to go to the shows now that they are going to be performed by the blonde one and a couple of strangers? Or has the fan base – like the band – been completely replaced by people who think that “Overload” is when you nearly break your washing machine?

The thing is, I don’t think any of these questions really matter. After about a year with the band, Amelle has already lent her vocals to a very successful Tinchy Stryder song; “Never Leave You”; an ironic name for a track that Berrabah’s very involvement in most likely lead to Keisha’s departure. It’s only a matter of time before Amelle moves on to bigger and better things, the band will indeed miss her – like a ‘hole in the head’ – and that will be it for Britain’s favourite chameleon pop-group.

So what should the label do? I have an idea. Someone should go to whatever supermarket Siobhan is working in, put her in a car with Keisha and Mutya and drive them to a recording studio. Because I bet that there are more than a handful of people out there who would pay at least £10 to go to Brixton Academy to see the original Sugarbabes the way they should always have been.

My guess is that the label always wanted to eventually give one of them a solo career and simply picked the cream of the crop. Thing is, when the harvest isn’t anything special, the ‘cream’ of the crop amounts to ‘semi-skimmed’. But this is fine – Tweedy is still talented which is more than can be said about some ‘artists’ – the problem to me is the song choice for her first single; ‘Fight for This Love’. Sure, it’s catchy after you’ve listened to it a good dozen times and it sounds Ok on the radio, but play it on any dancefloor this side of the Tyne anywhere near Lady Gaga or Tinchy Stryder and it’ll reduce the crowd from an energetic tumult to a polite shuffle. On top of this, on their own, most of the lyrics are pretty damn cheesy. Not to ‘milk’ the dairy metaphor or anything…

Don’t get me wrong – I think she’s going to do fairly well for herself – there just doesn’t seem to be the same energy and playability with her as there was with her band.

So does this spell the end for Girls Aloud? I’m not so sure. Unless her solo career takes off with the same vigour as that of Robbie Williams’, I think the band still have at least one more album in them. And besides, Cheryl just doesn’t seem to be The ‘Leaving’ Kind. Her success, I reckon, will always be as part of a band and, after a brief spell on her own, that is probably where she will stay.

Cheryl ‘Cravendale’ Cole – she’s good, but the rest of the cows will eventually want her back.

On top of this, as far as allergies go, it isn’t even useful. I’m sure that being allergic to a dog could stop it mauling you. A nut allergy could stop you from choking to death on honey roasted cashews. I’m allergic to fucking flowers. What use is that? Nature’s way of saying “Ooh, careful, there might be a bee about…”? It’s bollocks. I would rather be allergic to the bee. Since Jade Goody died, I can think of no other deserving cause than hay-fever to be stricken from the world of existence.

There are several types of hay-fever. You can be allergic to flowers, or trees, or fungus (which is fair enough…), or the most abundant living thing in the whole entire world; grass. Being allergic to grass is, to say the least, limiting. It means that you can never play football in a park without losing sight of the ball through your streaming eyes as it flies at your face. Never can you roll yourself up in one of those rolls of turf you see on the back of articulated lorries and at Homebase and roll down a hill (not a great loss, but I’d like the option). But the worst bit is that you can never, ever get excited at the prospect of a lawn-mower. Lawn-mowers are incredible. They can hover, be powered by petrol, they can even compact the grass into a tiny little square that you can throw at your brother. One day, they may even invent a sit-on, petrol powered hover-mo. And that will be beautiful. But I will never be able to ride it. And that is just not right.

I will end on one final note to anyone reading this who happens to work for Kleenex – if half of the people who buy your tissues hate flowers, don’t cover your tissues in a floral pattern. That’s like putting a picture of a baby on a box of condoms. Or a delicious cake on a tub of Slim-Fast. Or a red nosed, puffy eyed pillock on the box of a brand new lawn-mower.

‘Eagle Eye’, however, was epic!

And I fixed Microsoft Office. So now my excuse for not doing my dissertation is that I was up all night fixing Word.

Which leads me to today’s eggs.

Now I know it may seem like I fucking love eggs or something; I don’t. Sure, I think they are pretty neat, but it is merely a coincidence that all of my blogs are heavily weighted around the nifty little capsules of protein. Thing is, I used 5 eggs today. And not one of my eggscapades resulted in satisfaction of any sort. That’s a pretty high failure rate for me.

The first two went into an omelette. “Damian,” I said, “can I use some of your cooking oil? I’m making an omelette”. “No.” was his witty reply.

He figured it would be better if I used some of my own butter, so having not listened to him about the poaching thing, I thought I would see if he knows what he is talking about.

I burnt the butter, I wont be taking his advice on eggs in the near future. I also found that my cheese went off on the 25th March. In all seriousness, it was the worst omelette ever.

The following is a reconstruction of what happened to the third egg: http://twitpic.com/2mjmx. It’s graphic, and I apologize. I just feel that, in this case, pictures of my eggtions speak louder than words.

I tried to scramble the last two eggs. It was like egg fried rice – sans rice. I just don’t understand what went wrong… the butter was only slightly burnt, the frying pan was hot and I scrambled them like a pro. This was the result: http://twitpic.com/2mjyz.

It was a tasty treat, I’ll admit that much, but how the hell can you scramble eggs wrong?

Anyway, I’m going to watch the rest of ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’. That can’t go wrong.

Damian told me that the best way to poach an egg was to stir some boiling water in a pan and drop the egg in, so I went straight to Google and asked it for the best way to poach an egg. It eventually told me to line a cup with cling film, put the egg in, tie it up into a little eggy parcel, and then drop the little package of yolk and white with its carcinogenic membrane into a pan of boiling water. So I did it Google’s way.

If you have read this far, you have committed. You’ve read the best part of 200 words about me making some lunch so, rather than cutting your losses and going elsewhere, you are probably going to read on in the hope that your commitment will earn you some kind of satisfaction. And you would be right to. For here is a picture of my egg, poaching away in its own little envelope of transparent filminess: http://twitpic.com/2gxkt

Needless to say I was worried. The water had boiled in the kettle, but was not yet on a hob hot enough to carry its molten momentum past a sultry simmer. In my eggcitement (so sorry), I dropped the egg into the pan like you would a goldfish won at the fair into a half arsed fish tank, and immediately regretted it. It just bobbed there with its one orange eye staring up at me. Nothing happened. I poked it, to no avail. I looked down at it, just lying there, and took a photo. Then a couple more; one of Keith taking his food out of the oven ( http://twitpic.com/2hhkn ) , and another of him smiling at his culinary achievement ( http://twitpic.com/2hhlw ).

This distraction gave my egg time to do something. It began to turn white within its synthetic scrotum, and I was well happy. Soon the water began to bubble, and within minutes my anxious complexion had been replaced with that of an eggcited, hungry 21 year old.

Eventually, I removed the thing from the pan and unwrapped it onto a plate. Or a bowl. I don’t know what it is to be honest, it’s either a plate that’s too curved or a bowl that’s too shallow, but either way, it was holding the prime specimen that was my very first poached egg: http://twitpic.com/2gy8s .

The rest of the day was pretty boring by comparison.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is my first ever blog. Please don’t try to claim back the few minutes you have spent reading this, for they are gone for good. Instead, try to learn something from it. Or, at the very least, let me know what the hell piece of crockery that plate/bowl thing thinks it is.

Have a great day.