Volume 67
16 Oct 2005
Interesting stuff about adwords at the end of this Cringley piece. (However, it still beats me why anyone would actually click on a google ad, let alone actually decide to see them - it is very easy to avoid them, indeed I am not sure that I have ever conciously seen one. I certainly have never clicked on one)
15 Oct 2005
Just watched Zoolander on Channel 4 - it was really rather funny in places.
Baby got back Sadly (or possibly not) I'm not familiar with the original. This is almost as good as Nina Gordon's Straight out of Compton
The Fallen Legion (some of you will have heard of som eof these people I presume - I have no idea who any of them are)
14 Oct 2005
Wholesome wear - a US equivalent of the Islamic swimwear site that was doing the rounds recently.
Interestingly I just a full discharge of my iBook battery and a recharge and it is now 48% of original rather than 31%. SO worth doing methinks.
Ah, the Easy Club doing "Black is the Colour" - Rod Patterson has such a great voice and they swing it so easily. Just a perfect piece of music. (Can't find it online anywhere though)
Reading the sleeve notes to a Charlie Poole box set. It's amazing how people's value systems are all awry wrt money in times past: "wages in the mills were appalling, some sources quote a sum of three dollars a week" and then further down "once he was working, however, he purchased a proper instrument for the princely some of one dollar fifty cents". So he bought a banjo that cost him half a week's wages, which suggests that his 3 dollars wasn't that out of line with costs.
Great - I want one. I still have two Gryphon T-shirts bought the first time I ever was in California, one of them a plain Gryphon logo one and the other a sort of psychedelic Peter Rowan riding a Gryphon (I think). This is one is just brilliant.
13 Oct 2005
iTunes just decided to pick all these slow tunes and things with singing - random numbers are just so unreliable.
Aokubidaikon (what does aokubi mean? and why do the words Wabi Sabi pop up (I know what they mean))
Google Reader may not be quite what everyone has looking for but it has made Bloglines add key-based navigation pretty sharpish! (and it is useful - much quicker to get through all those subscriptions...)
12 Oct 2005
Why would I want to pay 1.89UKP to download a (DRMed) pop video - which is really just an advert for a song when you think about it.
I just found all these ebay items (musical instruments) with starting bids of 99p but which have the postage set at 150pounds. Quelle scam.
I linked to Red Hot Jazz yesterday and have done so before because it is a great source of information. It also has thousands of recordings that you can listen to - including Singin' the Blues
Pixar outtakes - I can't make up mind if these are funny or not. Funny in some abstract way that doesn't involve laughter or humour or anything possible. Very clever of course.
11 Oct 2005
I've been listening to Bix and Tram's Singin' the Blues tonight. What a fine piece of playing. Doesn't sound remotely as though it were 80 years ago. I have a transcription of Bix's solo which I was trying to play but I haven't got my fingers round it yet. (Probably easier on a horn of some kind)
10 Oct 2005
Hmmm, the Daily Show is a little laboured I feel.
Going to watch the Daily Show on More 4
My daughter said this morning : "the way it's going, the world is going to destroy itself before we get a chance to"
It's my brother's birthday today.
9 Oct 2005
Paragraph NY - what the Lit & Phil does rather well in Newcastle (and has done for 150+ years). The quiet room is the quietest place I have ever been.
8 Oct 2005
Banjo pics (pics are fantastic but the politics that are floating around are not to my taste....and there is terrible MIDI as well)
7 Oct 2005
The video is up on bbc.co.uk - News player >> UK >> hacker story, I come in about 54 secs in.
BTW google reader was link 10001 in my database.
So will the world and her husband (or possibly female life partner) beat a path from bloglines, rojo, findory etc. etc. etc. to google reader? (which wont talk to me - presumably snowed under by all the people moving from bloglines, rojo, findory, etc. etc. etc.)
Ole tells me I was on the Radio 4 news at 18:00. Don't know if they used the video footage or not yet. (Local TV used it - see comment)
There is definitely some kind of profile rot in Firefox. In the middle of a session today logins to sites just stopped working, a change of profile fixed it.
The BBC item is something to do with hackers who are on trial in Newcastle at the moment.
Oh, was there some big Jewish festival on Tuesday? The Hasiddim were out in force in Gateshead, all in their best clothes and hats and obviously heading towards some event.
10 ways to annoy telemarketers - I get nearly no calls since the UK "do not call" list seems to work pretty well. Indeed the other day my wife answered and it was clearly someone doing marketing disguised a s a questionnaire and I said to her, quite loudly, that they shouldn't be calling because of the list and the person at the other end heard and terminated the call PDQ. (You can get on the list in the UK by signing up for (free) BT Privacy or else at or else at http://www.tpsonline.org.uk/
6 Oct 2005
I was MC for a National Poetry Day event at the Lit & Phil tonight. It was a complicated event involving poets and scientists. Anyway one of th epoets came up with the line : "The Scopes Mokney didn't do it!!" Well, it made me laugh.
Catch me on the BBC national news some time tomorrow. Possibly
And Ethiopia : riv.et is available! (Sadly they don't allow it since they have standard second level domains)
I wonder where I can buy a name in the Lesotho domain.
No need to worry, Hmmmm, and Good Grief haven't gone away! A change is as good as a rest you know.
5 Oct 2005
The Internet's hottest rumours (I'm slightly suspicous that this might have spyware but I haven't seen anything, but there again I have a lot of layers of protection)
4 Oct 2005
3 Oct 2005
I discovered that they are selling earth shoes again. I love earth shoes. Nobody sells them near here though and the website in the UK that sells them doesn't stock the colour I want.
From the people at Bloglines when questioned about developments : "We'll continue to out small improvements as well until we complete the scaling work; next week, for example, we'll be adding horoscopes and lottery feeds to the system" Horoscopes and lottery! Wow, my life is now complete.
2 Oct 2005
Ole's Someone Ole knows' tomato crop 2005 over several years (I'm still picking, though they are not ripening as fast or getting as big. Got two little aubergines coming on too)
1 Oct 2005
30 Sep 2005
And the battery in my phone is flat anyway.....
Damn I need my white board to think on and it is covered with other thinks. And I don't think the camera in my phone is up to taking a good enough image and I don't have my other camera and I am too lazy to copy all the stuff down......
29 Sep 2005
I'm looking for some wiki code in PHP that I can just plug in to another system (samer for a bulletin board as well) but everything I can find is always built to be standalone and has complicated registration and authentication stuff that turns out to be really hard to strip out. It's all very well telling people not to reinvent the wheel, but all the wheels seem to come immovably attached to juggernauts.
My Japanese class seems not to be running this year which is annoying. (Chappie playing at the moment : Derikashi no kakeru - one of my favourites)
Listening to the Magic Band 21st Century Mirror Men 
- excellent stuff.
Fainting - the obvious conclusion is that weddings make people faint, but of course, all it is is that weddings get filmed more than other events.
28 Sep 2005
27 Sep 2005
Barry Scott - I have no idea who he is and I've never seen any of his adverts, but I have used the weirdly named product and it does work.
Donald Rumsfeld is giving the president his daily briefing: "Yesterday, terrorists killed 2 Brazilian civilians in Iraq.""OH NO!" the president exclaims. "That's not supposed to happen! How will we ever explain that?"His staff sits stunned at this unusual display of emotion and concern, nervously watching as the president sits, wringing his hands. Finally, the president looks up and asks, "How many is a brazillion?" (via Mr Barrett)
Retouching (this has been around for ages but it is both skillful and revealing of how bizarre our society is)
RIP Don Adams - as Chris says : The cone of silence descends forever.
26 Sep 2005
25 Sep 2005
Great photo of the indoor pool at San Simeon - it is one of the most amazing places I have ever been. The blue of the tiles is just incredible. I was told the pool was designed to be use in moonlight. (Via Hemaworstje)
"Also to breasts. Jenny McCarthy has a technologically splendid bosom that should, in my opinion, be put to a better use than being vomited upon"
24 Sep 2005
23 Sep 2005
I only just noticed that Ian Dury's Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll is sung to a tune which is pretty well Old Joe Clark.
22 Sep 2005
"The mayor of Galveston, in a press conference yesterday, was asked how she is handling the pressure of the situation since the island is likely to be devastated. Her response : the bar at the San Luis is as good as people have heard." (The San Luis also has a hurricane bunker built to withstand a category 5) I never knew Galveston was on an island.
Yay, my Jazz evening class starts again tonight!
Maria Muldaur (I'm listening to her eponymous first album - one we always listened to in the car when travelling when it first came out)
21 Sep 2005
I had a fantastic idea for a new Internet service today but I don't know if I have the time to build it (or run it : it wouldn't quite run itself yet). There is a good domain available too. Very Web 2.0 as well..... (And if I described it here, someone would be sure to steal it!!!!)
I really need to get rid of some of the old textbooks on my shelves at work, but I still haven't found a good place to recycle books : these are books that are really not useful to anyone since they are usually contain wildly out of date information.
20 Sep 2005
Fretless Zithers (The whole Washington Phillips thing is fascinating and his recordings are fantastic - Denomination Blues has long been one of my favourite tunes)
Coconut Battery tells me my iBook battery is at 31% of its original capacity. How bad is that? I really must fork out for a new one I suppose. (Battery not iBook - that is way beyond resources)
I'm using Opera on the iBook at the moment. Just to see if it is nippier than t'fox since the beast is decidely underpowered
Way hay!!! Hoots mon. Does he prefer peat to heather? (I just saw the price!!!! Ridiculous - is the man included?)