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I am so excited! I just found out that Ben Folds is going to tour the UK in November!! My own personal angst-ridden, piano-playing hero will be here!

ben folds and a piano tour
2004 uk/ireland dates
11/12/04 - leicester, england (de montford hall)
11/14/04 - manchester, england (lowery)
11/15/04 - dublin, ireland (vicar street)
11/16/04 - glasgow, scotland (royal concert hall)
11/18/04 - sheffield, england (octagon)
11/19/04 - brighton, england (dome)
11/20/04 - warwick, england (arts centre)
11/21/04 - southampton, england (guildhall)
11/23/04 - cambridge, england (corn exchange)
11/25/04 - london, england (barbican)

I last saw Ben when Ben Folds Five were still together, playing at the Royal Albert Hall, and that was a fantastic gig…

I’ll definitely be going to the Southampton gig, and maybe the Barbican one too (although I guess that’ll be more of a sit-down concert rather than an actual gig). SO EXCITING!!

It’s really spooky, because only yesterday my copies of his latest two EP’s (Speed Graphic and Sunny 16) were delivered. And now I find out he’s going to be in Southampton too!

*bounces around*

The new PalmOne Zire 72 uses the IBM Websphere Micro Edition JVM, which I’m on the development team for!

So, buy one. If it crashes you can blame me…

It looks to be a pretty cool piece of kit, too. Built-in digital camera amongst other goodies. Unfortunately it uses SD cards for expansion which isn’t my favourite format, but it does look mighty cool. Intel ARM clone inside…

A few years ago desktops had less computing power than this thing - it seems crazy that J2ME now includes support for video and audio playback in the class-libraries. Onwards and upwards…

Music trivia of the day: did you know that the Father Ted theme was written by Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy?? I didn’t…

Oh joy, oh joy! News was just posted on uk.tech.broadcast that the BBC is considering rolling out HDTV in the UK. They definitely have to do this.

I’ve just got a new telly recently, and when I connected my FreeView box to it, some of the problems with the low bit-rates were really noticeable.. Especially with the amount of snooker that’s on BBC2 at the moment, there are lots of visible MPEG artifacts. For some reason Channel 5 has shedloads of bits, god knows why.

More and more people are “upgrading” to digital and watching it on bigger televisions. They’re not going to be happy when they see some of the problems there are with picture quality at the moment (don’t even get me started on the fact that BBC Parliament is only quarter-screen because there aren’t enough bits to go around…)

Is it me, or do Franz Ferdinand sound like The Coral crossed with Spandau Ballet??

I went into town today for a bit of shopping, and I noticed something that kind of bugged me. Now, I’m a fairly tolerant guy. It doesn’t really bother me what people choose to wear. But recently I’ve seen more and more items of clothing with what are basically offensive statements on them.

It all started a few years ago, fairly innocuously. T-shirts said “fcuk” on them in relatively small type. I could cope with this.

But, French Connection obviously wanted to extend the meme. So, soon they were selling clothing that said “good fcuk” or “fcuk football”. Then I saw one that said “fcuk of the century”. This was pushing it (it’s almost tempting to ask the person wearing it to prove such a statement).

French Connection clothing was becoming so ubiquitous, so common-place, that gradually it started to annoy me. And this afternoon was the final straw.

I was in town, and some bloke was wearing a top which said (I’m not joking here) “fcuk you, you fcuking fcuk”.

It’s not just French Connection (although they’re the worst offenders). Someone else I saw this afternoon had selected a T-shirt which proclaimed (in four-inch high letters) “MASTURBATION IS NOT A CRIME”. The mind truly boggles.

Is it me, or is all this actually a step too far when you’re walking down the high street??

I’m not really sure whether to post about this… It feels kind of strange, maybe you could email me some advice.

Way back in the mists of time, when L and I were going out (aside: sometimes “way back” seems about a thousand years ago, and sometimes about two days) I got her a present. A typically geeky present, but a present nonetheless. It was her own domain name (yes, you can run screaming from the room now).

At work today we were having some DNS problems with the machines in Canada, which meant I ended up typing quite a few whois and dig queries, checking on the status of domains and their hosting. So I was tip-tapping away trying to solve the problems, and I started randomly checking the status of a few of my domains too: whois poncho.org.uk etc. etc.

And I don’t know why, but I suddenly thought “I wonder if L’s domain is still registered?”. So I checked that too, and yes, it was. And then I thought “I wonder if she uses it?”. So I visited it, and found out for the first time that she has a website too. A weblog, not dissimilar to this. I wasn’t expecting to find anything there, because when I set up the domain name for her she didn’t have her own website, so I just pointed it at the site we had together (I can code, she has an eye for graphic design). That site’s since fallen off the net, so I thought the domain would be pointing into a black hole. Plus I guess I thought it would be disused, since it’s something I got for her..

So anyway, I found this site today. And now I feel really really bad. I’m not sure why, I mean, I just stumbled onto it, but somehow it makes me feel like some scary stalker ex type person, which isn’t the case at all. I mean, I was really really surprised to find it, and I’m thinking things like “would she mind that I found it?” and “would she mind that I read it?” and “should I let her know I read it???” (probably a bad idea this last one).

Erm, so anyway, that’s what’s running round in my head tonight… I know the best advice is probably “chill, don’t do anything” but it just feels really weird…

This is only of any real interest if you know who both IBM and SCO are, and why the latter is sueing the former.

There’s a great article about the latest developments at ZDNet.

SCO’s biggest problem is Darl McBride’s mouth. Every time the man breathes out, the sparks of controversy burst into flame. He and his cronies have been cruising the world in search of soapboxes from which to shrilly preach their fundamentalist stance; that SCO begat Unix and Unix begat Linux and by golly it’s time to honor thy grandfather. Normally, supporting your company in public is a perfectly respectable pastime, but when you’re trying to build a house of cards, the last thing you should do is blow hard and wave your hands like a madman.

Fantastic. In other news, IBM subpoenas virtually everyone.

I reckon this only has a few more months in it… Which is a shame, because it’s been causing us huge amounts of mirth in the office.

You should read this story on Kuro5hin.

It’s the best (and most accurate) rant I’ve read in a long time. Try not to trip over the trolls in the comments though; they’re getting worse on K5.

There’s a few things I generally don’t talk about on here, one of which is religion. Whilst it’s an interesting topic, it’s not one that generally gets anywhere when you discuss it. However, there was one thing lately that caught my eye.

If you watch Channel 4 at all, you’ve likely seen one of these. They appear after a program has finished, and go something like this:

For daily sex tips direct to your mobile, text LOVE to 83188 Texts cost 25p plus standard rate

I first noticed these after episodes of Sex and the City. I don’t have a particular problem with it, although in the case of Sex and the City it does seem a waste of money, as you could instead reenact some of the content of the episode you’ve just seen. I’m not sure who would want daily sex tips either, but that’s another matter. Some people must just not be very inventive..

So, in general, I have no problems with these. They’re obviously a money-spinner, but hey, fair enough, if someone wants to waste their money on it then that’s okay by me.

However, I saw another one the other day. It went something like:

For daily Christian thinking direct to your mobile, text DIVINE to 83188 Texts cost 25p plus standard rate

Is it only me that finds that slightly offensive? I mean, put aside the fact that what they’re effectively doing is exploiting religion to make a cheap buck and instead think about the content of these messages.. Who’s writing them? The Archbishop of Canterbury? The Pope? I somehow doubt it. I bet it’s some overworked Channel 4 hack who’s nipped down to Waterstone’s and bought a Christian book. They then pump the contents back at unwitting Christians for 25p a time. I was genuinely a little shocked…

Is it me, or is that a little exploitative?