I’m really lucky not to live next door to noisy neighbours at the moment, but it’s happened in the past. I don’t expect neighbours to be silent like some people do – if you’re living in a semi detached or a flat then that’s the price you pay for cheaper homes – but some common decency would be nice.

For example, in my last house there was a guy next door who used to play music very loudly. I have no problem with that during the day – everyone does it – but he played it at full volume most nights at around 1am. I guess that he came back from the pub and put the music on, without thinking that the houses either side of him might be trying to sleep.

I was living with a few other people at the time, and we decided he might just not realise, so we went and asked him to keep it down after midnight. That seemed to work for a while, only for him to start playing it again a few weeks later. Luckily, he didn’t live there for that long so we didn’t have to put up with it, but he was a pretty bad neighbour.

With that said, I know there are definitely a lot worse. What’s your worst neighbour story? I’m sure you can beat mine.

My favourite bass player of all time is  Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I’m not saying he is the best bass player ever – far from it in fact – but I don’t think that music is all about technical ability or speed. Flea is a fantastically talented bass player, but he’s also innovative and is willing to push the boundaries of his instrument in a way that not many other people do. You only have to listen to some of the old Chlii Pepper albums to hear how good he is.

Flea is also fantastic live. He is well known for his manic stage act, but this is backed up by some great bass playing and a real feel for the music. All in all, there’s a lot to like about Flea. I don’t agree with people who say that he’s got the best chops of any bass player – because that obviously isn’t true, or if it is, he doesn’t show it – but who wants to listen to a bassist playing as fast as possible? I think the term “best” can mean a lot of different things when it comes to music. Not only that, but music shouldn’t be a competition – it’s not a sport, it’s an art.

The new Google Instant doesn’t seem to have made the impact that everyone thought it would. It is a pretty cool piece of technology, I have to admit that, but it seems to me that it’s innovation for innovations sake. Are you really telling me that people actually couldn’t be bothered to click the search button on Google? Or that they are now going to choose Google over Bing because of the instant results? I can’t see it happening personally, and I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that.

The other problem with Instant is that it tries to guess what you want. I don’t think I know what I want to type most of the time, so I doubt Google is able to guess better than I can. This leads to me having to get lots of unrelated results for a while until I get to the end of my search query – which is exactly what I would have done to begin with.

I think Google has to be praised for a lot of its technology. I use Gmail every single day, and there aren’t many free software that you can say that about. Even so, that doesn’t mean I like everything they do, in fact this is one example where I think they got it wrong. Google Wave was probably the other example – it could have been very good if it had been marketed at the right people. Hopefully they will integrate the technology into some of their other apps so all that development time doesn’t go to waste.