That’s right, baby. To My Song by Captain Comatose is the feelgood hit of the summer. At least it is round these parts. (Free download, innit?) And judging by the glorious sunshine flooding through our kitchen window, summer may - finally - be here. Yay.
Archive for May, 2005
A musical baton has been passed to me by Neil "51.67GB" Lee and at last I’ve found the will to grasp the candle and bang on…
Total volume of music files on my computer: 32.24GB, 4951 songs, 15.4 days.
The last CD I bought was: Optimo Presents Psyche Out, on the wildly obscure Eskimo label, straight outta Belgium. It’s awesome. A mix CD with a difference, seamlessly blending minimal german house music with, erm, Hawkwind and the Temptations, all beautifully mixed with, I strongly suspect, Ableton Live.
Song Playing Right Now: Beats In Space radio show playlist by Tim Sweeney. If you visit the aforementioned link you can listen too, since he posts his shows online in downloadble MP3 format. Tim is DJing at Our Disco tonight, which I’m really looking forward to, having belatedly got into the whole electro(cl**sh) type thing. Eclectic is the word. Good is the other word.
Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me:
(This is, of course, wildly arbitrary)
- Nighttime/Anytime (It’s Alright) by The Constantines. Toronto’s finest band, who deserve to be huge. Always reminds me of skating - somewhat stoned - through a moonlit night in downtown T.O.
- Cause = Time by Broken Social Scene. Toronto’s other finest band. It’s just a rockin’ good track and they are one of the finest live bands I’ve ever seen. Particularly when all 13 of them are onstage together, as at the free gig they did at the Harbourfront centre in Toronto, the week we arrived there.
- You Don’t Need A Weatherman (Superpitcher Remix) - Carsten Jost. From the Godlike Immer Mix CD by Michael Mayer, head honco of the mighty Kompakt label outta Koln; superstar DJ and minimal pasta enthusiast. It reminds me of a jaguar stalking sleekly through the rainforest. Wearing some jaguar headphones and wiggling it’s jaguar hips slinkily. Go figure. Immer is great for night driving, also.
- What’s Going On - Marvin Gaye. Genius. That is all.
- Ice Cream - New Young Pony Club. Fabulously obscure, probably only available on ultra-limited 7" white label, and I only ever hear at the frequently mentioned Our Disco. But it sticks in my head and makes me shake my booty, man. What can I say? Oh, you can buy it here. Sadly, I don’t own a ‘record player’.
That’s me done. I’ll pass the baton on to…um. I can’t think of anyone. Let me know if you want a baton…
Sometimes, you have to stop. The skate is very well organised, with numerous marshals who race ahead to ’secure’ junctions and stop traffic. However, if everyone has to stop suddenly due to accident or whatever, folks lift up both arms to indicate such and there are very rarely any ’shunts’. Which isn’t to say there aren’t any spills - I saw at least 3 fairly impressive falls last night, one from a young girl who looked quite upset. To her credit I saw her later and she was still enjoying herself. When several hundred of you are caning it through London, a helmet and pads is probably a good idea if you aren’t supremely confident in your abilities. Like me. Yeah, right. Just so you know, I’ll be starting a London skating specifi blog any day now. In fact, I ‘moblogged’ these photos to flickr from the skate last night. It seems to me I need to take my proper camera along as well - these phonecam photos aren’t particularly impressive, are they?
Last night’s Wednesday Night Skate in London was most excellent. This is us (about 250 of us) setting off from Hyde Park Corner for a 14 mile loop through Barnes, Putney and some other places I didn’t recognise. This is the second time I’ve been on the skate and I fear I am already addicted. There is something extremely liberating in skating on London’s roads at about 20mph with several hundred other nutters. You should come, too.
This is the route we took: Barnes Route.
BBC Backstage has launched, and very exciting it is too, providing content feeds for anyone to build cool stuff with. Headshift has built a rather funky ’shared tags’ tool for BBC News stories, which allows you to apply your own tags to any story, see what tags other users have applied, view other stories with similar tags, and see feeds from del.icio.us, flickr and technorati with similar tags. All done in almost-real-time through the magic of XMLHttpRequest (aka AJAX). Pretty nifty, huh? Please note that it is a prototype and as such is being improved all the time.
Check it out, dudes.
Flickr Graph is just ridiculously cool. A social network graphing tool for flickr users with a swanky flash interface. The innovations just keep on comin’!I wish *I* had an API so that people could hack enhancements for me…
Aardvark is a highly useful extension to the Firefox web browser (which we all use, right?), which allows you to do lots of fun things like view the divs in a page (v. handy for web designers/developers wanting to understand how a page is structured) and the source of any divs. You can also use it to delete any parts of a page you don’t want to see - for example you can remove banner ads or tidy up a page prior to printing. As an intarwebs designer I use it constantly, but regular non-geeky folks might find it handy, too.
Greasemonkey is another great Firefox extension, which allows you to add ‘user scripts’ to specific web pages. For example, you might want to try Book Burro, which shows prices for books on competing websites when you are on an amazon book page. Suh-weet! Or add persistent/saved searches to gmail…or look for related tags when uploading photos to flickr…where will the madness end?
I love all the cross-pollination of web apps, as I believe I mentioned earlier. Jon Udell has an interesting take in his article
Nobody expects the spontaneous integration.
Hm, it’s almost enough to make me want to learn to program…
Geobloggers combines your flickr photos with google maps, very neat. I love all this cross-pollination between web apps. Where will it all end? How about integrating ‘mososos‘ like dodgeball or playtxt with google maps? I’d do it, but I can’t be arsed…
UPDATE: Google acquires Dodgeball. I should become a web 2.0 pundit! I suspect some extremely interesting fruit from this pairing.
I had the funniest dream last night, that the latest craze to hit the UK was getting high by sniffing a mink. Specifically, one had to sniff behind the mink’s front legs, in it’s little armpits, and do so before 6:30pm in the evening. There were stories on BBC news and everything. It was all highly detailed.
However, I suspect if you did try to sniff a mink you would get your face bittten off. They may look cute, but remember, they kill for fun.
I’ve really been enjoying living in London lately, largely because we are living in a great part of town. We live in Dalston, which I had always imagined was a bit of a dump - if you only see Dalston Kingsland High Street you would concur, it being a poverty stricken, filthy, crimetastic strip of fried-chicken outlet infested nastiness - but as is often the case in London, just a few blocks away is a delightful residential area where we share a lovely Victorian house with our Canadian friends Catharine and Ian. One of the main reasons I enjoy living where we do is our proximity to Broadway Market (lovely website by my talented friend Ronny at tape). Not only is this small, somewhat obscure street home to more than it’s fair share of excellent restaurants (including two Argentian, a Georgian, Turkish and Indian) and pubs (The Dove and Cat and Mutton), it also hosts the most completely excellent saturday open market. Think of it as a scaled-down, less pretentious Borough Market.There are more ‘artisan’ foodstalls than you can shake a big stick at, and it has become my saturday ritual, after a hard night of boogying down at our disco to reinvigorate myself by wandering up and down the market in a daze, gorging myself on the many tasty comestibles on offer and often meeting up with my fellow hungover Market denizens. There’s nothing like an organic sausage butty followed by a freshly ground organic coffee and Portuguese organic custard tart to set you on the road to recovery. And maybe a swift glass of Duvel at The Dove.
This weekend marks the first anniversary of the market’s rebirth so should be even more fun than usual, with tug-of-war, fancy dress and other larks promised. Broadway Market regulars are proud and somewhat protective of their little gem, and it has a positive community vibe which is increasingly rare in this day and age… If you live nearby, it’s well worth checking out.
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