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Happy New Year, y’all… I’ve loads to blog about but too little time right now, so for now.. how about a musical look back at 2009?

And who better to provide it than DJ Earworm – with his United States of Pop 2009 mashup – the top 25 songs of 2009 mashed together… this is NOT easy to do but he makes it seem like it is. Great work.

So Christmas is upon us!

In the spirit of the recession, I’m going to recycle this image from a previous post from last year (but the feeling is still there in full!)…

By the way, as you may know if you know me (or if you follow me on twitter!), I’ve been on Christmas FM presenting “Christmas Stories” as part of the Breakfast Show for the past few weeks. Tomorrow, Christmas Day itself, I’m on for a very special show – which I’m presenting myself – from 9 to 10am. I may even go in dressed as Santa Claus! (- like I did in work… see pic below!)

So, if you’re in Dublin or Cork – unwrap your presents with me on your radio! The station is on 100.3FM in Dublin and 106.7FM in Cork. If you’re anywhere else in the world, you can tune in via the web site. You can also read the news team blog there and check out some of the stories we’ve been reading out in the mornings!

A very happy and safe Christmas to you all!

The Hercules DJ Console Mk2 (pictured, right) is one of my toys – I use it for basic DJ’ing, mixing, etc. and it’s a handy little piece of kit. The other day, though, half of it died. It sill worked as an external sound card box for my laptop, but the controller part (the knobs, faders, dials, etc.) stopped working and wouldn’t control my DJ software (Virtual DJ 5) any more. Looking around on the ‘net, I saw there were a fair few other people (mostly on the Virtual DJ forums) with the same problem, so I thought I’d post the solution – which I arrived at with the help of the lovely Hercules Tech Support people.

First off, I’d tried updating the firmware, as described here – and the audio firmware updated fine, as expected – but the controller firmware failed to update, bringing back an error of ‘fail during update process of PROC’… which was meaningless to me. So, as that didn’t work, I got onto Hercules who – after a few emails suggested the following method, which involved opening up the box and doing some really very minor tinkering with the components inside:

I was in Athlone last night, producing a 3 hour talk show. All was going great and we were following the running order I wrote up perfectly to the minute with our “Top of the Hour” marker idents hitting at bang-on the top of the hour and everything else going perfectly. The presenter was on top form, the interviews were interesting, we were getting loads of text feedback… the show sounded great…

That is, until 11.50pm when the studio automation system (the usually excellent RCS Master Control) decided to throw a wobbly (i.e.: crash completely). This, for someone standing in to produce a live show on a large commercial station on their own for the first time could have signalled panic stations…

Been neglecting my blog recently, and that’s due to continue for a while yet as I’ve been concentrating on the Switch FM web site. It’s the radio station for the college course I’m doing – things are really starting to pick up momentum there and it’s basically sucking up my life … not that I’m complaining!

I’ll be DJ’ing at the “Switch-It-On!” fundraiser gig on Thursday. If you’re in Dublin, check it out!