So probably the most anticipated music of the year for me arrived a couple of weeks back in the form of the Foo Fighter’s first studio album in two years.

If you know I’m a big fan, you probably won’t be surprised to learn I pre-ordered and played the thing on repeat for a couple of days and on a couple of longish train journeys.

For me, The Foos are at their best when on their ‘rock’ setting – I didn’t buy the Skin and Bones album which was released last year – not that I wouldn’t want it to make a complete set, but I wasn’t overly impressed with the second (acoustic) CD from their In Your Honour album.

Maybe they overdid it, providing too much material to digest, but thankfully their newest (one CD album) really impresses, including the slower stuff.

Knowing that I love their stuff anyway, writing an unbiased review is not straight forward, although I can be pragmatic comparing it their back catalogue, and overall I think it falls perfectly.

I won’t individually dissect all the tracks on the album, but here are my pick:

• The Pretender – The first track released, the first on the album. A piece that crescendos to a great punchy and scream-along chorus.
• Statues – The slowest pace I like from the Foos, this is one of the more relaxed pieces, and very easy listening.
• Long Road To Ruin – Starts with some fantastic opening lyrics, soon launching into a memorable chorus and although I didn’t warm to it immediately, now my second favourite track.
• Summer’s End – Ok, so other’s have called this country and western but I think that’s unfair. A late-summer feel good track (like Stereophonics – Daktota) that seems to be keeping it’s appeal now the nights are drawing in.
• Erase/Replace – Rock again, feels like something from One By One and really enjoyable. Only problem is the title – Erase/Replace reminds me of Erase and Rewind by The Cardigans, a song I mysteriously find hard to tolerate for no good reason.
• Cheer Up Boys (Your Make Up Is Running) – Poking fun at the Emo crowd apparently, I just like the chorus…

So that’s my recommendation, and in terms of the album as a whole, a big thumbs up and most certainly some of their best stuff ever. It’s one of the main reasons I love this band – they can’t stop (at least partially) improving on their prior work.

It’s been a while since I went to see a stand up show. I used to go quite regularly to the circuit-nights at uni, but the last proper show with a single comic was probably when I still was at school.

Russell Howard played the Wulfrun Hall in Wolverhampton last night and I arranged to go with Will, who had never seen live comedy, so seemed a suitable person to expose to it’s wonders.

I’ve been wanting to see this show for a while; both as a 6music listener, and a general follower of the fringe/comedy scene, albeit slightly remotely. I’ve managed to miss past appearances for various reasons so I was pleased to finally make it.

And I wasn’t disappointed. I was thoroughly entertained for the whole set, and it only makes me wish I had been to gigs more regularly in recent times.

This morning (after yesterday’s speedy departure from The Lakes) saw me in central London, in a suit. Not just in general central London, but more specifically in Microsoft HQ on the first floor of some huge glass-clad building in Victoria.

I was given the opportunity of tickets for this small event not too long ago, and thinking it might be good chance to hear some big names speak, snapped them up.

It had been arranged (or at least was being compared) by Ryan Carson of Future Of… fame and the idea was for the speakers to express ideas about the relationship between software, services and Web 2.0 companies in the UK.

The talks were opened by Lars Lindstedt, MS Software Economist and probably the least known of the major speakers. He referenced research which essentially said that in recent years enterprise productivity has been going downwards, but that trend can be bucked by the use of software (basically a justification for more systems I assume) and discussed the way Microsoft is predicting that the way enterprise-level systems will evolve into something called the cloud (essentially using S3 / EC2 / distributed services – except later on we discovered Microsoft will be launching their own competing version on similar lines to these existing products – this will apparently be good for the users as it will keep prices competitive in the marketplace).

Following Lars was Brent Hoberman, the guy who is most famous for the creation of the practically prehistoric lastminute.com which was one of the handful of truly successful companies that survived the dot com bust. He was passionate about innovation, and scathing about marketing, saying it should be the product that generates it’s own publicity. His main tips for web entrepreneurs were to remain incredibly over ambitious, to go for big markets and to create buzz with great products and constantly improving interface. He also disclosed that he is now working on another start up in home furnishing.

The ‘keynote’ (although I don’t think that word is ever used at Microsoft anymore) was delivered by an industry heavyweight. Steve Ballmer who replaced Bill Gates at the CEO of Microsoft in 2000 talked about a range of new products and introduced a demonstration of the new Silverlight, Seadragon, Popfly and Photosynth technologies/software.

Until now I hadn’t really seen Silverlight in action, but it looked similar to what Flash can already do, though I do understand it does develop on concepts. I had been initially quick to dismiss the impact this technology might have, but thinking about it, it could make a dent in Adobe’s market if people are prepared to develop applications on Windows boxes (big .NET firms) as Microsoft intends. Flash has been a bit of problem on Internet Explorer for a while due to that patent case they lost, and I can only assume the next version of the browser will be bundling Silverlight.

That said, it won’t kill Flash (too many people develop don’t use MS coding platforms), but it will be highly adopted on client machines because of this, which could let it see success.

They demo-ed some mash-up stuff too using a web based app (called Popfly, built on Silverlight) that made the whole process of linking different services look incredibly simple, but I’m still not sure of it’s relevance to the everyday user. To me it looked a little bit too much eye-candy and not enough substance for most developers, but maybe they will find a niche for it.

They also demoed SeaDragon – a technology that allows seamless browsing of vast quantities of data through streaming. It was quite impressive and the example they used was a quantity of text that would have required a table the size of Wembley Stadium and a 14 Terrapixel digital camera. Apparently Curry’s don’t stock a camera like that, but IKEA do sell that table (joke directly from MS).

Ballmer took Q&A and mentioned a few strategy points. He said Office and other Microsoft apps will never be fully web based, but will remain an amalgam of both web and installed technologies, although he discuss the streaming of software (like that Windows-in-your-browser that appeared on the web a while ago) and said categorically that they have no intention of opening up development of MS languages/tools to other platforms (although Silverlight will be deployable to Windows/OSX/Linux/Mobile).

Overall it was entertaining and he had no problem in slating Google’s advertising methods in GMail or Oracle’s databases. It made it worth listening too though. I still feel MS are not an innovative company as yet, though they do appear to be doing more and pioneering work, none of it yet appears to have made it to market. They certainly are covering all bases though; this morning they also announced collaboration spaces (Basecamp anyone?) and showed an entire raft of products to cover all needs.

Clearly Adobe are getting defensive too, with today news that they have acquired a Writely clone, maybe we will see them branching into other realms of software too.

Finally there was a panel discussion, chaired by Ryan Carson and consisting of Ben Way from Rainmakers (who appeared on Secret Millionaire if that helps put a face to a name), Saul Klein (Seedcamp) and Cary Marsh (Mydeo). It mainly discussed how to start-up, manage money and deal with failure. A good way to wrap up, but not as insightful as some of the previous discussions.

It was then lunch and the 100 or so attendees milled around eating sandwiches, canapes and drinking Microsoft bottled water (I was going to get a photo, but it looked a little odd lurking around the drinks table). There weren’t many developers there by the looks of things, mostly VCs, industry types and NCGE types, but I did bump into Jeremy Keith who was there with Andy Budd and Simon Willison. I had wanted to talk to a couple of the speakers, but as I was pressed for time I had to leave DDS to himself and head back to the trains.

On Thursday morning I made my way to Lichfield to meet up with Deako and started on our way up to the Lake District. My first venture up there in four or so years (since the days of Duke of Edinburgh walks), this was a photography trip. I haven’t had a proper break since mid May so it was a chance to grab a few days of semi-rest too.

We covered a lot of distance in the three days we were there, picking up a good number of shots (which I’ve yet to Flickrise). On the first night we spent time over at Rydal Water, Grasmere and then Langdale where we ate at The Sticklebarn (a place I stayed during the residential part of the aforementioned DofE award).

The roads are hilly and the weather cold at times, but really we couldn’t complain – it was decent walking weather and the light seemed to hold. We didn’t even get rained on. On the second day we went out on the Kirkdale pass to the coast over the mountains out to Wast Water then onto Scafell Pike and walked the nearby Great Gable.

While we were at the top of this last mountain we were overflown by what looked like four Spitfires/Hurricanes at about 60ft, but I’m now fairly convinced these were just training planes. Still, we didn’t get our cameras out in time, but I did managed to catch one good shot of one of them heading out of the other end of the valley.

On the Saturday (and after a better night’s sleep for the lack of snoring we had had to endure on the Thursday night in the hostel) we went out to Derwent Water, Keswick, Thurlmere, Buttermere, Borrowdale and Ullswater, doing a couple of shorter walks up near Honiston Pass.

Deako shoots a EOS 10D which is a couple of levels up from the 350D I use, and it was good to compare the results. I probably will upgrade the camera body at some point (even though I’ve been very pleased with it so far), but as things only get exponentially more expensive from this point on, it probably won’t be that soon.

We got back down to the Midlands on Sunday morning and only in a couple of hours (which is pretty good going) and despite a late night in Penrith with Bev (a friend of James’) and her fiance, Kev. I have to say I was more than impressed with Penrith (considering it isn’t really somewhere I would have considered going out), but it wasn’t bad at all.

So after all that I have a large stack of images to sift through, tag and upload, not to mention responding to the backlog of voicemails that are filling up my phone.