The Blonde Kid: "There's only four things I want...although they are quite expensive" Me: "What are they then?" 1. "A Ben 10 decorated bedroom" 2. "An M3P player or an iPod to listen to my music on" (I think he means MP3 player!) 3. "Virgin Media/Sky (Cable TV) in my bedroom" 4. "A Laptop computer to play Club Penguin on" Not much of an ask then? Suppose we'd better get saving...son of a geek you say?

How do you to do? I mean, you have stuff to do, right? How do you remember to do it? Do you have the brain/memory capacity to remember everything you need to do each day? Or do you forgot lots of things? Maybe you have the ultimate to do list system? And do you worry about forgetting to do things? Or maybe you just don't worry about not doing, to do's?

I've been asking myself all of these question of late. There have been a couple of blog posts that got me thinking about this, one of which is here  (check out my rambling comment!).

The one conclusion that I have come to is that I have relied on technology to remind me to do things for so long now, I'm incapable of doing it myself - my brain can't handle it, most likely because it's out of practice (it hasn't been used in this way, so it's forgotten), and possibly because it hasn't been allowed to adapt to a world where there are literally hundreds of bits of 'mini information' being thrown at it from all directions at the same time, courtesy of the aforementioned technology.

I always have lots of things 'to do' but I suck at doing them. I make to do lists; most are in my email, some are in an online 'to do list manager' (which is embedded in my email), many are saved as reminders in my mobile phone, and very occasionally there'll be one or two in my head. But as my to do list manager (software called Remember The Milk) so often reminds me, my 'overdue' list is always longer than my 'to do' list.

So, how do I fix this? Do I need to adopt a super-strict routine when it comes to 'to do's', or perhaps I need to stop worry about it, and in the words of Nike 'just do it'? Either way I'm not sure, and I'm swimming in a sea of 'to do's'.

How do you make sure you remember to get everything done?

I spent a good portion of today annoyed. I've been annoyed by lots of different things, some important, some not important. Non of these things really matter, not in the long run any way. They just seem important at the time.

I've said it time and time again and will probably continue to do so, but I love how listening to music can change your mood. There's nothing else like it as far as I'm concerned...you put on an album you love and it can lift all types of doom and gloom and makes things seem so much better in just a few short minutes.

Right now, and for the last few minutes I've been listening to the instrumental version of Imogen Heap's 'Speak For Yourself' album - I'm fortunate to have this as it's not really widely available. It's a truly beautiful album...and whilst a BIG part of the album is Immi's wonderful voice, it's also an amazing piece of music without her voice. So many intricacies that you just don't notice on the normal version because of the layers of vocals that hide things. 'Just For Now' is a masterpiece, and the strings and orchestral parts throughout the album are nothing short of stunning. I've known this for a long time, but Immi is a genius. She's also one of the kindest people I know to.

Today I received an email via her website from dance tutor - one of the tutor's young students has recently been killed in a car crash - the student was apparently a big fan of Imogen's and performed several dance routines to her songs. The tutor emailed us asking if there was any way she could get hold of an instrumental version of the song 'The Moment I Said It'....apparently this song was a favourite of the student, and her family had asked that a video of the student's solo be played at the recital to honour her, with the instrumental version of the song as the music.

Now, Imogen has had a bit of a rough ride in the past few days, but despite all of what she's had going on personally, she still responded very quickly and asked me to send the track. Whilst this may not seem like a big deal, it's just another little example of what a special and caring kind of person Immi is. Someone I'm glad to call a friend. Bless you Immi x

I've upgraded my blog to Wordpress version 2.5, so I thought I'd test the built in gallery function with a few photos from a recent stag do my brothers and I went on... [gallery]

About a month ago we had the big party to celebrate my youngest brother Alex's 18th Birthday. We hired a venue, invited 100+ people and put on a great night of music, food and drink. I can't remember the last time I had so much fun, all of my close friends and family were there, and it was the best 18th Birthday party I've ever attended!For one night only the band 'Manimal' was born - this consisted of myself, my brothers (Stat and Al), our cousin Steve, long suffering front-man The Dicko, and as previously mentioned a special guest appearance by my Dad aka 'Fishman'. We played a 15 song set which included a couple of original tunes from our regular band 'Scrat' and a bunch of party-friendly covers. Check out the video above of us performing Bryan Adam's 'Summer of '69', which ironically was the year my Dad left school...more video can be found on my YouTube Channel here.

'The Middle Of Yesterday' is no more, I'm now blogging under a new domain name; 'www.jamesdclarke.com'. I've decided to switch my blog over to a new domain name - my own name! I've done this for a couple of reasons, firstly because it's becoming harder and harder to get your hands on good dot com domain name, and secondly in an attempt to build my online profile/brand - something that is becoming more and more important these days (or so I am told), especially when using the internet to make a living as I do. There's a lot of James Clarkes with an 'E' out there - so I decided the time was right to bag my name whilst I still could. Hopefully my Mom will be pleased about the 'D' for Douglas as I was rather ashamed of my middle name as a kid. I remember vividly the only time I got a proper slap around the face from her - I was 10 or 11 years old and we were in the car on the way home from my birthday party at McDonald's (I was too young to know any better then), my two best mates were in the car and grilling me about my middle name. I was tight lipped, however my Mother (ever the protagonist) told them both, to which I quickly yelled "you bitch!" and SLAP, there it was! So, I apologise for calling you a bitch Mom, but you shouldn't have wound me up. I hope you like my new domain name!