It’s been sometime since I’ve posted to this blog. I think it’s actually pure coincidence that the last post was about my new born son, Stan. He’s not taken up as much time as the lack of fresh content on this blog may lead you to believe.

To fill in the gap between that post, and something actually worth while I thought I’d stick up some of the finest lyrics I’ve heard/read in a long time.

The song is “The Rake’s Song” by the band The Decemberists. The music itself is every bit as good as the lyrics, with great tribal style drumming.

When I first heard this song I got to the line “Until her womb start spilling out babies” and thought “Christ, this song was meant for me at this moment in my life!”, especially as not only did we have Stan on the way, but we got married last year too (see the start of the song). Then the song took a turn (literally with the next line) and I started hoping that the similarities end there.

I love sick lyrics like this. I love the lyric “Mercifully taking her mother along”. That’s taking idea of silver linings too far.

of Montreal’s Skeletal Lamping is another album that’s full of lyrics you wouldn’t want to live out.

Anyway, here’s The Rake Song. I strongly recommend you use Spotify or something to listen to it.

I had entered into a marriage
In the summer of my twenty-first year
And the bells rang for our wedding
Only now do I remember it clear
Alright, alright, alright

No more a rake and no more a bachelor
I was wedded and it whetted my thirst
Until her womb start spilling out babies
Only then did I reckon my curse
Alright, alright, alright
Alright, alright, alright

First came Isaiah with his crinkled little fingers
Then came Charlotte and that wretched girl Dawn
Ugly Myfanwy died on delivery
Mercifully taking her mother along
Alright, alright, alright

What can one do when one is widower
Shamefully saddled with three little pests
All that I wanted was the freedom of a new life
So my burden I began to divest
Alright, alright, alright
Alright, alright, alright

Charlotte I buried after feeding her foxglove
Dawn was easy, she was drowned in the bath
Isaiah fought but was easily bested
Burned his body for incurring my wrath
Alright, alright, alright

And that’s how I came your humble narrator
To be living so easy and free
Expect you think that I should be haunted
But it never really bothers me
Alright, alright, alright
Alright, alright, alright

If my new born son Stan follows in his Dad’s footsteps, and assuming Object Orientated Programming will still be of use in 18 years time, he might appreciate this bit of geekery. I’m sure I’m not the first to do it, but as I thought it up without seeing it before, I’m pleased with it

class Stan extends Greg, Becky {
   // Constructor
   function Stan () {
      print "Hello World!";
      print "I was born at... 1247991540";
   }
}

It’s already been a huge pleasure getting to know you Stan, can’t wait to do more of it

At the moment I’m using the tool Evernote a fair bit, and I’m finding myself strangely intrigued by the adverts they publish to end users of their product.

Evernote offer two tiers of service: Free and Premium. Among other features, the premium allows you to turn off adverts from within its desktop application.

These adverts seem to serve a purpose greater than just raking in the cents per click.

First of all, the majority of adverts are in-house adverts (ie. they relate to Evernote itself). Evernote is the kind of tool that is so versatile, one of the fun things about using it is discovering a new way to use it. Evernote the company help you with this by linking to blogs that offer inspiration, writing case studies on their own blog and also through their monthly podcast. All this encourages the user to use Evernote more and more and also encourages loyalty, which can only be good thing for them.

These in-house ads appear to be an extension of that process. The ads highlight features of Evernote and also services and products which are good companions to Evernote.

Apart from two exceptions (gmail and google search), I think they’re the only ads I don’t mind seeing.

The fact that the ads could be classed as enjoyable has a side-effect though. This is something I believe Google takes advantage of too in Gmail (where they too offer additional information in the same spot that ads appear).

As a result of the ads being relatively enjoyable, when I have time to think and I have Evernote on screen, I find my eyes wondering to that area of the screen. This means that when they do chuck in a traditional ad (ie. from an unrelated company who are attempting to sell their wares), I’m far more likely to see it. This is the complete opposite of when I browse the net and my eyes instinctively avoid adverts.

To improve things further, Evernote have mentioned that the ads are hand picked to avoid any trashy ads (eg. whack the money), which must further increase the chances of them getting a click through.

All round very clever I thought.

Yesterday I finally got my iPhone – its fantastic! But that’s a post for another time.

One of the apps I’ve downloaded for it is Shazam.

I remember hearing about Shazam (or at least a service like it) a few years back. The idea was, you hear a song but you don’t know what its called. You ring a number, put the phone’s voice piece to the speaker and Shazam would tell you what it was. Neat, but at the time I considered it a novelty. To inconvenient to be useful.

Jump forward a few years and Apple have changed the smart phone market with their iPhone. Suddenly Shazam is more convenient to use, and thanks to the open web has more information to back the service up (beyond the name of the song).

I’ve been trying to think of when I’d use Shazam. First thought was when listening to the radio. The thing is, if the DAB Digital radio display doesn’t tell you what the song is, the DJ likely will.

Hollyoaks

Earlier today though I remembered that every time I watch Hollyoaks, there tends to be a song in the soundtrack (it sounds wrong calling it a soundtrack as its just a tv show!) that I really like. It happened the other day with a song that sounded like Coldplay doing a decent impression of Radiohead (and sounding better than usual as a result). I tried to find out the artist/song but the unusually the www was unable to help. So it occured to me, why not put Shazam to use on Hollyoaks.

So at the start of tonight’s episode I got Shazam going and touched ‘Tag Now’ (strange terminology). I had the phone with me on the sofa (ie. I didn’t put it up to the speaker) and shockingly it got it right! (Turin Brakes). Amazing!

So hopefully now I’ve thought of a use that works for me, I’ll actually use it and it will go beyond novelty status.

last.fm

I think a better use could be found for Shazam though. I try to scrobble as much music on last.fm as possible. I like stats. This works fine when I’m either listening to my iPod, or iTunes on my PC. However, if I’m listening to a CD or record (as I often do), my listens go unscrobbled. Wouldn’t it be neat if last.fm used Shazam to scrobble the music I listen to beyond my PC?

I read this great blog post over the weekened by Zoho basicially explaining why people don’t trust (or like for that matter) Microsoft, but do trust Google. Funnily enough they say it all boils down to karma.

As someone who’s believing more and more in “doing good things and good things will happen to you” (and its not just ‘Earl’ that makes me believe this – its several things that I might write a blog post about one day), it was quite pleasing to read. Here it is:

http://blogs.zoho.com/general/microsoft-silverlight-vs-google-wave-a-study-in-contrasts

I’ve created a really enjoyable itunes ’smart playlist’, which I’m listening to now whilst sorting the garden out.

I’m not a big fan of hammering a tune so this ones ideal. Basically its a playlist of songs I like but don’t listen to much for one reason or another.

Its all songs with 3 stars or more with less than 4 plays.

Its bringing up some great old songs I’d forgotten about (ie. I rated them without listening because I know they’re great) and songs I loved on first listen but forgot about.

Usually when I read an article that interests me I’ll simply share it via my Google Reader shared items, but some are worth highlighting on this blog too.

Over in America – during the past two or three months it seems – things seem to be heating up with regards to the discussion of saving the newspaper.

I’ve been fascinated by this for some time now. Although its not completely cut and dry, more often than not it seems bloggers have a better understanding of the situation than the newspapers.

This has been no more apparent than this blogger’s (Techdirt) reply to this newspaper’s (The Washington Post) article by two lawyers who propose changes to the law to help save the newspaper.

The choice quote on the part of the lawyers is:

Bring copyright laws into the age of the search engine. Taking a portion of a copyrighted work can be protected under the “fair use” doctrine. But the kind of fair use in news reports, academics and the arts — republishing a quote to comment on it, for example — is not what search engines practice when they crawl the Web and ingest everything in their path.

Publishers should not have to choose between protecting their copyrights and shunning the search-engine databases that map the Internet. Journalism therefore needs a bright line imposed by statute: that the taking of entire Web pages by search engines, which is what powers their search functions, is not fair use but infringement.

What the lawyers suggest would result in search engines becoming useless and if enforced would pratically bring the web to a halt.

The choice quote from the Techdirt article is when they highlight this user’s (Dale Harrison) comment which was submitted on the Washington Post’s article. It makes an excellent point:

A lesson worth remembering is at the turn of the 20th century people had a transportation problem… and the solution turned out not to be a “faster horse”… but a Ford.

And one should note that the Ford didn’t arise out of the “Horse Industry Revitalization Act”.

I think the future of the media business will look as different as Ford and Toyota’s operations look from horse traders and blacksmiths.

Imagine what the passage of such ill-conceived legislation would have done to the car industry a century ago.

It would have strangled the nascent auto industry at birth, postponing its inevitable rise while sheltering a dying industry, only postponing its inevitable demise… doing great damage to both. Newspapers need to be encouraged to adapt to the future, not retreat behind legislative walls hoping the future will go away.

The newspaper industry’s troubles go to the very core of their historical business model.

What’s historically given value to editorial content is the relative scarcity of distribution versus readers. Newspapers have enjoyed natural localized economic monopolies that allowed each of them to exercise monopoly control over the amount of content (and advertising) they allowed into their local marketplaces.

Monopoly constraint of distribution and supply will always lead to prices (and profits) significantly above open market rates. Newspapers then built costly organizational structures commensurate with that stream of monopoly profits (think AT&T in the 1970’s).

The dynamics of content replication and distribution on the Internet destroys this artificial constraint of distribution and re-aligns advertising (and subscription) prices back down to competitive open market rates. The often heard complaint of Internet ad rates being “too low” is inverted… the real issue is that traditional ad rates have been artificially boosted for enough decades for participants to assume this represents the long-term norm.

An individual reader now has access to essentially an infinite amount of content on any given topic or story. All those silos of isolated editorial content have been dumped into the giant Internet bucket. Once there, any given piece of content can be infinitely replicated and re-distributed to thousands of sites at zero marginal costs. This breaks the back of old media’s monopoly control of distribution and supply.

The core problem for the newspapers is that in a world of infinite supply, the ability to monetize the value in any piece of editorial content will be driven to zero… infinite supply pushes price levels to zero!

What this implies is that no one can marshal enough market power to monetize the value of content in the face of such an infinite supply and such massively fragmented distribution. Pay-walls, lawsuits and ill conceived legislation won’t allow the monopoly conditions to be re-constructed.

There are certainly ways to make online news profitable… and many of us are working to develop such approaches… but I can assure you they don’t involve inventing a “faster horse”…

The artcles can be found here – the Techdirt one in particular is worth a read. It does a great job of debunking the suggestions made by the writers of The Washington Post article:

• Washington Post – Laws That Could Save Journalism
• Techdirt – Lawyers: To Save Newspapers, Let’s Destroy Pretty Much Everything Else Good

If I ever get a call from a number I don’t recognise, using the browser on my mobile I’ll often perform a search on Google and nine times out of ten there is a post which states its a scam (also nine times out of ten its the first result in Google that tells me this).

This happened earlier today with the number ‘02920 359001′, and sure enough it appears to be a scam.

This made me think: wouldn’t it be neat if my phone did this for me whenever a number not in my address book calls me? If it comes up as a scam, then it would note it on screen. Given the speed in which it can get this information (at current mobile connection speeds), it might be that the information may only be available when you check your missed calls, but that’s better than nothing.

Whenever I do one of these Google searches it usually points to a user generated site, so a wiki of sorts would be an ideal host of this information. Obviously, in order for the phone to be able to access this information, an API should be written so phone developers can easily access the information.

The next obvious step then is for a tool such as Google Voice (which sadly isn’t available in the UK) to offer the option to outright block such calls coming through (much like gmail blocks a massive amount of spam mail). If such a block takes place, an SMS/Email/Tweet/etc would be sent to you to say that a call has been blocked. You are then free to act on it as you please.

The possible downside to this idea is the fact the public control the data which blocks calls. That obviously leaves the door open to abuse. The ideallist inside me though believes this wouldn’t be a large issue.

I’d be curious to know whether an app could be written for one of the more modern smart phones out there (eg. iPhone, an android based device or the new Palm Pre) to perform this. Do developers have such access to those phones?

A few weeks back we bought a new (well, second hand) car. It was one of the more painful shopping experiences I’ve had, and its not because I have no interest in cars.

We went to a local dealer called Somerset Cars Sales. It was a painful, frustrating, demoralising experience for one reason: the cars were not priced up.

Instead we were given a printed price list which you can use to match up the make/number plate.

At a guess there were between 100-300 cars and it wasn’t easy finding the price.

As we were on a budget (as most people are), it was quite a demotivating process. We’d see a car we’d like, eventually find the price and then realise its too much. This happened again, and again, and again. Eventually we found three cars in our price range that we didn’t mind – but none of which we wanted to buy. There may have been many more in our price range – one of which we might have bought – but it was simply too much hassle. It wasn’t a pleasant shopping experience at all.

We then went to some other dealers who had prices shown. This was soooo much easier and enjoyable. Right from the start we could see what we could get and there was no disapointment.

Why would you want to encourage disapointment? I hope at the very least its a logistical reason (ie. To many prices to maintain) rather some kind of sales trick (ie. Before the customer realises it costs just a little too much, let them fall in love with it).

We eventually purchased are car from a dealer called Brian Plowright. He didn’t have a huge selection, but if he does have what you need then I highly recommend him.

He’s a great salesmen in that he’s very friendly, goes above and beyond what’s required to make a sale and doesn’t push the sale.

Certain people in mobile phone shops could learn a lot from him. None of this ‘as I’m you’re new best mate, and cause I like you (,and cause my boss says I have this much scope for discount to make a sale) I’m going to throw in this discount’ bullshit. No in your face, jump on you when you enter the store.

For example, the car we bought had a small dent in it. We asked whether we could either get a discount or have it fixed by him. He told us we’re getting a good deal anyway, so no. Fair enough really – he knew he’d made the sale. However, when we went to collect the car a week later he’d had it fixed at no extra cost.

That’s how to generate good word of mouth. Unlike Somerset Car Sales which I can’t put down enough.

This blog rarely gets updated.

Quite often I’ll be walking to catch the train and come up with a blog post. Or perhaps be sitting on the sofa and come up with one. However, by the time I’m sat back in front of a PC (more to the point, a PC not in work) the urge to write a blog entry has gone.

In fact sometimes during my lunch hour I’ll write a post, email it home and still not bother to post it once home as again, the urge has gone. The moment has passed.

That’s why I’m really pleased to find out that blogging on my Blackberry really isn’t that painful now (see my previous post). Something I didn’t mention in that post was WordPress’ simple, yet functional m.wordpress.com interface.

Now when I get the urge I can type and post it there an then. The first such post is this one.

I purchased my Blackberry Curve around 16 months ago. At the time I couldn’t afford an iPhone so looked for the next best thing.

I should say now that’s I’ve not regretted the Blackberry (BB) purchase, however I’ve since saved up to get an iPhone once my 18 month contract is up.

Before getting my BB, I remember a friend telling me he purchased a BB over an iPhone because he wanted a keyboard he could blog on.

Soon after getting my BB I pointed out to him my one disappointment with it was that the keyboard was just too fiddly to write anything lengthy on.

And its because of that, I find it ironic that an hour ago – after writing a lengthy blog comment – that I figured that writing a blog post on the BB would be a piece of cake, and that I should start doing it.

And so here is my first Blackberry written blog post. Apart from the fact its hard to include hyperlinks, its worked nicely.

Its just a shame that in a couple months time I’ll switch to the iPhone and likely dislike that keypad even more until then though I hope to write more posts than I’ve been doing of late.

When working at the PC, I find Cheat Sheets (or Crib Sheets) extremely useful.

In work, my desk is surrounded by Vi, Regex, and SED Cheat Sheets, and they’re always coming in handy for quick reference. If I had somewhere to stick them at home, I’d have PHP, MySQL, Javascript and CSS ones there too.

About a year ago I did a search to see whether an UltraEdit one exists, as I’m constantly using the App for one thing or another, so it helps to have the shortcuts to hand, ideally on an A4 sheet of paper. I couldn’t find one, so I knocked one up myself in MS Word. Its taken me this long to get around to publishing it on the net but I’ve now done it. I’ve used Google Docs (which I’m appreciating more and more every day I use it) to create a PDF UltraEdit Cheat Sheet that anyone can download.

For the time being its just keyboard shortcuts, but if anyone has any ideas I’d be more than happy to add to it. Just post a comment below.

Whilst on the topic of Cheat Sheets, here’s a couple links you might find of use:

• My Delicious Cheat Sheet Tag Page (From Vi to Excel)
• Added Bytes Cheat Sheet Collection (very useful link to keep)

Its that time again! To make it sound dramatic, records are being ’smashed’ on this blog (today sees its busiest day to date), and its not because I’ve written a clever, insightful technology related post linked to from Techmeme.. Its all because the band Elbow are back on tour.

Back in April of last year I posted a review of an Elbow gig, and a couple days later the set-list for the gig. And every time they tour, those posts get what I consider to be a reasonable number of hits.

Already today, the blog has had 40 new visitors, and during ‘Elbow Touring Season’ it averages around 30 a day. Its not a huge amount, but its much larger than I ever thought would look at this blog.

The set-list post has now received 1,347 hits – that’s more than half the number of visits to this blog. I sometimes wonder whether anyone has stuck around since reading it? Anyone bookmarked me? Added me to your RSS reader? If so, feel free to comment below.

I posted the link partially because I thought it would be useful info for others, but also to see if there was demand for set-lists. At the time, I didn’t know if there were any sites out there dedicated to the task. I thought, if there was demand it might be worth setting up a set-list wiki where people can add setlists to the gigs they’ve been to in order to help others. Given the response to the post, I started putting the plan into action. I got so far, then decided to Google for such a site just in case, and found setlist.fm. As with all the good ideas, someone’s already beaten me to it and done a much better job.

Easy come, easy go.

A colleague in work occasionally comes across the same problem of his Java application failing because he spelt integer with a capital ‘I’ rather than a lowercase i. This was caused by UltraEdit auto correcting it for him each time. Basically it was too clever for its own good. One of the very few flaws of Ultraedit imho.

I did a quick Google to see whether there was an obvious solution for this but couldn’t find one. As I couldn’t find anything, I thought it would be wise to write about the workaround I figured out.

In short, edit the Wordfile so the word ‘Integer’ is no longer considered a keyword for Java. The side effect is the word ‘Integer’ will no longer appear with syntax highlights.

Below is a breakdown of how to achieve this.

This assumes you have a relatively standard ‘wordfile’. It’s quite simple and equally as obvious.

• Open up UltraEdit
• Select Advanced > Configuration > Editor Display > Syntax Highlighting
• Click ‘Open’ – a document should open up in the background.
• Click ‘Cancel’.
• Press ctrl+f and enter “Java” into the search field. Press return and it should find “Java”.
• Now press ctrl+f again and enter “Integer” into the search field. Press enter.
• You might find other instances of Interger (such as BigInteger). You are looking for plain old ‘Integer’. Press F3 until you find it.
• Once you’ve found it, delete it and save the document.

This issue should now stop happening.

I’m not sure whether there’s actually a name for this, but until someone suggests otherwise I’ll refer to it as ‘Intuitive Design’. For me, what that represents is when a developer almost pre-empts the way you’re going to subconsciously use something by coding for non obvious situations (catchy, no?).

They must think to themselves “I think the user is going to try and do x because s/he thinks it should work that way.”, and I really like it when they do that.

I came across an example over the weekend by Microsoft of all people in Windows Messenger of all applications.

I wanted to send a screenshot to a mate using Messenger. Usually what I do is:

• press the Print Screen key
• open up Paint
• ctrl+v to paste my screenshot
• Save it off
• Locate the file using Explorer
• Drag it on to the chat window with my mate (an example of intuitive design in fact) and it sends the file (that’s providing the app doesn’t get too clever for its own good and decide on my mate’s behalf that he doesn’t really want to risk opening it – it does my head in when MS takes that approach!).

On this occasion though, without really thinking I:

• pressed the Print Screen key
• in the chat window, hit Ctrl+V to paste and as if by magic it sent the screenshot as a file to my mate.

Amazing (in a non-jesus changing water in to wine kind of way)! Over time that could be a time-saver, and to me and my subconscious self makes perfect sense.

So hats off to the MS developer who did that.

Another example is between iTunes and Winamp.

Until recently, I’d have Winamp open at all times on the 2nd monitor. To begin with I use to drag files from Explorer on to Winamp and placed it in the right place on the Playlist. Winamp knew what to do with this content being dragged in (another minor example).

Soon after buying an iPod – and as a result – starting rating things in iTunes, I began to listen to music based on those ratings. Not in a smart-playlist kind of way, but in a “Lets look at this band and pick a song I rated highly/haven’t rated” kind of way.

I dragged the song from iTunes and on to Winamp and quite surprisingly, Winamp lapped it up and added the song the playlist.

For me, that’s another great example of pre-empting what I want to do and how my subconscious self thinks it should be done.

I think this is one area where Web Apps show their (lack-of) age. It will be a while yet before one web app can talk to another without the user having to give it much thought. It will happen though, I don’t doubt it.

I’ve recently started reading blog posts by a chap called Clay Shirky. He appears to be up there with the likes of Tim O’Reilly (no, not him from Fox News!) in terms of insight into where the Internet is at, and where its going.

Here are a couple of lengthy pieces I’m really pleased I read:

• Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
• Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

I’m reading an interesting and strangely inspiring article on creating a well thought out store by Robert Scoble. I really like the following example from Apple stores. If you have a gmail account and don’t delete emails you’ll never lose this receipt:

Copy Apple and get rid of checkout lines. I hate standing in line at BestBuy. In fact I’ve walked out more than once leaving my purchase right there. That’s lame. Apple’s employees walk around with little computers in their hands. They ring you up right there without making you stand in line. They email me my receipt. Forcing paper on customers is totally lame, especially in this time where we’re supposed to be conserving paper.

via What Microsoft Can Learn About Retail from Apple and Best Buy | Robert Scoble’s innovator’s and geeks’ blog | Fast Company.

I do like this Douglas Adams quote from a Tech Dirt article I read. Generally speaking its true. Hope I don’t fall into the trap though:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

I just wrote this for Facebook. Given that I’ve put some time and effort into it, I’d just as well post it here too.

Here’s 25 things about me:

1. I was born with one nut. So too was someone else in school. Strangely, he got loads of stick for it and I got none. I’m to old to care about it now so knock yourselves out. For the record, I’m now fully armed and operational in the man sack department. When I was a kid, I had an operation which rescued my stray ball.
2. I’m a very shy person and it pains me to publish this list.
3. I feel guilty over the daftest things. I remember as a kid, me and some friends broke some bird eggs by mistake. I think I went home and cried to my mum over it. I haven’t changed much, although I can hold back the tears better now.
4. I’m really anal with copied media. I won’t watch copied films, I won’t listen to copied music. When I say “Oh, I’ve got that album!” I want that to mean I took the time to buy and own it. Nobody gets me where this is concerned.
5. My folks never hit me as a kid. I was ruled by the word “disapointed”. To this day I still fear disapointing my folks.
6. Glastonbury may only be on for 5 days a year, but its been home to so many highlights in my life.
7. I love music in an indescribable ways, but I’d still give it up to keep Becky (I would resent her if she made me choose though )
8. As I get older, I’m appreciating family more and more.
9. In certain ways I’m lazy. I think that ties in with my love of technology.
10. On New Years eve this year I wore tights to keep warm in a very cold London (and as a joke with Becky). Ignoring the technicallities of it all, its probably the most liberating thing I’ve done to date. Including it in this list ranks 2nd. My cross-dressing days end their though.
11. Contrary to the usual pattern, the older I’m getting, the more left wing I’m getting.
12. Old people who whinge about young people annoy me. I don’t class myself as young, so its not a defensive thing.
13. I’m classist in the sense that I’ll forgive someone who’s working class for doing something, but dispise someone who’s middle class for doing the same thing.
14. The most exciting album I’ve heard in the past couple years is Of Montreal’s Skeletal Lamping. Prior to that it was Modest Mouse’s “Good News for People Who Like Bad News”. Finding the next one is what keeps me buying music week in, week out.
15. I’m a news-junkie. For me, watching news is no longer watching other people’s lives. Its more like fiction where no-one gets really gets hurt (<Loud Homer Simson Whisper Voice>I realise they doooo</>). I think my junkie tendencies come from missing 9/11 take place live on TV. I don’t want to miss the next big event.
16. I probably surf the net more on my Blackburry than I do my desktop or laptop. With that in mind I want an iPhone.
17. I seem to do most of my thinking walking to and from work. If I did as much thinking sat at a keyboard, I’d have a frequently updated blog.
18. After years of thinking, as it stands the tunes I want played at my funeral are Arcade Fire’s “My Body Is A Cage” and The Flaming Lips’ “Do You Realize?”. If I was pushed for a third – right here right now – I’d say Pixies’ “Monkey Gone To Heaven”. The title speaks for itself. Curse you all if it doesn’t happen. A bonus would be having Gogol Bordello’s “Gypsy Punk” album played at my wake, with people being in the right spirit to dance and drink to it. That only happens on TV though.
19. I’ve probably spent more time in my life thinking about what songs to have played at my funeral than any other subject. I won’t even be there to witness it.
20. The thing I love most about technology (ignoring the fact it saves me time and effort) are the possibilities it brings. It gets the creative juices flowing just thinking about it.
21. At the time, I was the first person I knew who had the Internet. Dial-up and Amiga didn’t really do it justice. Firefox, it wasn’t.
22. More often than not, I’m not overly fond of my job, but when its good I really enjoy it. I’ve never had that in any other job, so I think I’m on to a good thing.
23. I now understand why the media keeps on barking on about young people having disposable income. I still don’t regret not saving mine when I had it, no matter what my mother says.
24. I can’t wait to have my baby in my arms. Can’t explain why. Just cause.

25. Despite what everyone says to me, the day will never come where I actually appreciate getting ID’ed. It also seems possible that the day will never come that I don’t get ID’ed.

Any company worth their salt now-a-days have someone searching the blogs and twitter for mentions of their company. Its with that in mind that I write this.

A few months back Teletext finally launched a search feature on their web site, and with it they made it possible to find old reviews, interviews and news from Planet Sound. The prospect of this thrilled me. Their reviews mean a lot to me, so when I’ve bought an album I’m always keen to see what they thought of it. Same goes if I’m thinking of buying an album.

The theory is great. However, the search is so poorly designed/executed that its practically unusable. I’m not expecting Google, but they’ve made two big mistakes that could easily be fixed with a tiny bit of investment:

1) I wish they’d aggregate their results! What do I mean by this? Check out this search for Elbow:

10 results, all for the same ruddy page. The only difference that I can see is the date, sometimes only seconds apart. Couldn’t they group all those together and select the one with the latest date? Unless I’m missing an important detail (given that I don’t work there, that is more than possible) it seems such a simple thing to do.

2) On the left hand side they offer the chance to narrow your results down by feed. The problem is, they only seem to offer two options (today that’s Sport Betting News and Weather). Would it kill them to offer a few more? Even if its at a high-level (eg. News, Sport, Entertainment, Weather etc) it would make life much easier searching it.

As a developer, it hurts and baffles to see something like this being released, especially by a company that’s home to so much great content.