"It gives Highfield a kind of power that probably no-one at Microsoft’s UK web operation has wielded until now - responsible for sales, marketing, content and programming, business development, partner efforts and operations for Windows, Windows Mobile, Windows Live, MSN, Live Search and Microsoft Advertising"

Acoustic treat are just ace. Ant Music is worth checking out too. In fact it all is!

After the inconvenience of using meow to discover a) how bad I was at perl these days and b) how much I hate blackberry keyboards, I'm back for another go. although through a web browser - yay for progress.

obviously most of today's journey has gone on just setting up the bookmark, but we'll see how we get on tomorrow!

I might be tired, but life is really rather good indeed.

I just thought I'd let everyone know.

I've also mentioned in various other quarters that I've got that rarest of things next week - a week off, totally to myself. Pure leisure, in a pre-parenting style.

So many things I could do - spending the week in the pub, the studio in the cellar, sitting in the Rothko room at the Tate, watching films in the middle of the day because I can, taking a train up to Edinburgh purely for the purposes of looking out of the window.

Any thoughts to the comments box or the usual email address...

Guillemots - Red

Blimey that was a good song. And Clarion's not bad. Vicky might have a point that they're sometimes a bit self-consciously 'clever' and verge on novelty, but that's just part of trying to do new stuff to me. I'll take the rough with the smooth. I think the first album may be slightly better - there's a great Billy Joel 'homage' on it. Have a listen.

Captain

Oh good golly these guys are good. I spent ages chasing after the album this is on, only to find out it's not out yet. Their first, Trevor Horn-produced, album "Welcome to Hazelville" is a blinder, and this is looking better.
Pendulum

Pendulum were a real shock to me. Their myspace stuff is just great - I'm so glad that drum'n'bass didn't just die out. (although I think the video's a little suspect)

And then, of course, there's Frost*...

But the question that seems to be on many people's lips (well, tweets or status updates or plingrhax or whatever the latest thing is) is "um, how do I get started again".

We've all got so used to this tiny microcosm of microscopic messages - reading nuances into the tiniest text - that to start something as substantial as a blog post feels like jumping straight from Janet and John to Ulysses.

My solution is just to start typing crap and hope that a new pattern emerges. Much as Richard Herring got writers block and started 'warming up' as a way of clearing it, I think I just have to accept my blogging block and confront it head on. Many people who didn't stop are blogging away just as furiously as before. Hymn, MildlyDiverting, Skip, you're all still going great guns.

Of course the game has been rather upped by the likes of the video bloggers:

Planetfrost is pure genius, mixing geekery, prog and really excessive comedy in one perfect package. For comedy and vintage gear try this:

I don't know if I have the time or self-promotional (in the nicest way) incentive to be working at this level of production, but who knows. Perhaps when I get the new mac and I have enough disk space to really get into iMovie...

But in the meantime, please pardon me while I just wazzock on for a bit. You're all lovely.

Too busy to blog. Too busy to read RSS feeds.

Life is a mere cloud of impressionistic tweets. Or in my case a small creature emitting 'danger' pheremones.

But the last document of terror goes out of the door on Sunday.

And then I shall play. Oh boy shall I play.

Our dishwasher had packed up - wouldn't empty, time to complete indicator numbers going upwards, plates coming out with gubbins still all over them.

I've been pretty cavalier in the past about fixing washing machines, in fact my tips for how to unblock the pump on a hotpoint remains one of the most popular posts on this blog.

But dishwashers? Um...

It's like the difference between manual and automatic gearboxes. There's all this extra stuff going on that you never had to worry about before. Things that are definitely 'mechanisms'.

However, I was a little reluctant to pay a fortune for a man to come out just to fix a part which was most likely only twenty quid.

So, after a lot of poking around online, googling various combinations of "repair bosch dishwasher" "Not emptying" and "SGS66A02GB/17" I found this wonderful bit of advice on how to open the main pump and clean the inlet. I managed to find the tiny packet of Torx drivers I bought for upgrading the TiVo in a cobwebby corner of the cellar and...

Sleepyhead, I salute you. Two lemon pips nearly cost us a hundred quid...

I suspect that, like many of those who first rushed into the internet, email and the anonymity of digital media gave a chance to practice social skills who'd never been much good at it in the first place. Some of us didn't get any better and desceneded into ranty madness, some of us grasped at this second chance we'd been given with both hands.

And as a result, after fourteen years of being online, I'm largely able to function in Real Life.

In many ways, I have come full circle and now have the skills and attitudes that enabled others to look at this new-fangled internet in 1994 and wonder why I was so excited about it and what people might actually use it for.

Like many others recently, I've become part of the cult of facebook, and then the newer cult of twitter. (Sadly I only know about four people on bebo, and so it's still not quite gelling for me as an experience) And I have to admit, I really rather like the ability to summarise my current state of mind in a witty epithet. It's only having to come up with a cool riff, but not have the hassle of turning it into an actual song.

And I've also been surprised at just how much subtext others have been able to infer from my status updates. This 160-character bursts out into the ether have subliminally conveyed an enormous amount of information about me, to those with the ability to understand it and the context which might make me respond to that.

(I'm assuming someone far cleverer than me has long ago made the comparison with synapses and the very simple messages that pass between them? "Oooh, for braincell 484,322,198 to be issuing that chemical out of that nerve-ending they must be seriously worried about the new wallpaper". Matt Locke had a phase of regularly citing an old Heinlein story about the computers running a city starting to treat humans as mere objects in a network to be optimised. And Steven Johnson referred to the collective intelligence of ants by saying "you wouldn't want one of your braincells to become sentient on its own, would you?")

Existential paranoia aside, because even if there is a wider game afoot it wouldn't actually make any practical difference, it does make me wonder the relative purposes of these platforms.

For a while I'd trusted in technology to fix it for me, enabling me to make the most of my rare contemplative moments on the train. But sadly it seems that the blogging tools on the Nokia N95 will only ever get better at posting rich media, not enabling you to add mere text to MovableType. (I even considered digging out my old coding goggles to crack that one)

This route would also have another issue - that I would be condemned to purely broadcast, not to read refer and comment on what's going on elsewhere out there on the net. And while I'm pretty self-absorbed (haven't fixed that bit in the 14 years online) I still need the occasional external stimulus...but I'm not sure I can really be arsed to keep up with every one of these RSS feeds any more.

So for now, I've decided that the blog will get used, but it's for the sheer hell of occasionally doing something the hard way and stringing ideas together in a logical order. For pleasure, or maybe catharsis, rather than as part of making a powerpoint for work.

So if you are one of the rare readers of this blog (and bless you for keeping this dormant nonsense in your blogroll if so) from now on you might need to imagine me writing this with a quill pen, in ink, at a stand-up victorian writing desk.

And perhaps with a small glass of madeira close by...

Jane McGonigal saves SXSW for me « Kitten Fluff

The thing about games and virtual story worlds - no matter how graphically sophisticated (or not) they are - is at least they give you feedback and points for doing things. That way we know instantly what our strengths and weaknesses are, and how we are doing. We don’t really get that in everyday life.

Again, via Dan Hon