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Amazon (UK) recently announced an online music store and a £3 discount on all music downloads on Christmas Day and Boxing Day. To download an album, you need the Amazon Download utility and the music is MP3 format encoded at 256kbps. Best of all, the music is DRM free so you can transfer, copy and play on any device. Normally, I like to buy an actual CD so I can rip into whatever format I need and also as a backup so ‘The Seldom Seen Kid’ by ‘Elbow’ was my first ever purchase of online music....

Just been down to Asda. Not because I am a Nineties man but mainly because the element on the kettle just blew. I went fully equipped with what I believe is known as a ‘shopping list’. I managed to decipher all of the entries (some were written by Norma) and successfully secured everything. I was debating whether to pay at a till or risk self-service where you swipe your own goods....

Pownce (a microblogging service) has been sold to SixApart and decided to close the service on December 15 which is a nice early Christmas present for all their users - both freeloaders (like me) and ‘Pro’ users who pay $20 per year. Although I have a dormant Pownce account, I don’t actively use the service. However, I find it odd that Pownce have decided to close the service and provide all their users with just two weeks notice to extract all their data and find another home....

Yesterday was 1 December and an innocuous post on identi.ca about an Advent calendar immediately reminded me of an amusing (and completely true) blog post I wrote two years ago. This, in turn, prompted me to write this short note on identi.ca and the post on identi.ca subsequently appeared on my FriendFeed stream. Normally, when I post a new blog entry, the post gets visited by a handful of people - presumably a subset of those subscribed to this blog....

Don’t bother with my slow, tortuous methods, Just be Stephen Fry.

Dear Prudence That’s excellent news. I am glad to hear you have managed to get PDO installed and now have Habari up and running on your site. As for how I happened to stumble across your site, well…. There’s an army of committed, passionate Habari enthusiasts who routinely conduct Twitter, Web and blog searches for every single mention of the word ‘Habari’. In addition, one of the primary responsibilities of the mysterious organisation - the Cabal - is to infiltrate Government intelligence agencies worldwide (GCHQ, NSA, Mossad, KGB) and access transcripts of all mobile phone conversations and SMS text messages....

Last week, I travelled to Hamburg, near Germany, on business. As Mark Burgess (lead singer of The Chameleons) now lives there, I took the opportunity to send an email to one of my all-time heroes (even though he is a City fan). Unfortunately, I guess Mark must be busy with his musical commitments as I haven’t had the courtesy of a reply (yet). Hi Mark Excuse the intrusion but I am coming to Hamburg tomorrow on business....

My support for the Disqus commenting system used on this blog is well documented. I have also had great support whenever I have had minor issues with a service I paid precisely nothing for. Disqus are a small company with less than 10 employees. However, Disqus are not a cottage industry operating out of Daniel Ha’s garage. Disqus are funded by venture capital (Union Square and angel investors) and raised $500,000 in the last round of funding (March 2008)....

This is the first in a series of ‘open letters’ when I send emails to people who I admire or have had a major influence on my life. I will post my ‘open letter’ and subsequently will post the individual’s response (with their permission). To kick things off, an open letter sent in February 2008 to Tony Hawks (UK author, comedian and occasional ’talking head’ on those interminable BBC series that look back to the 1980’s)....

The gift that simply keeps on giving. ‘914 scam’ - if you don’t know the correct name, you may already be doomed to failure. ‘reasons for isolation’ - spending too much time on the Internet searching for ‘reasons for isolation’. “craig gordon” “ian curtis” - odd combination of a dead pop star and a living Sunderland goalkeeper. ‘my wife’s shapely legs’ - yeah right. Take those stockings off. Now. “(“current vacancy” or vacancies or opportunity or careers or “working with” or “working for”) and (“oracle dba” or oracle dba )and london” - with such a superlative grasp of search term syntax and semantics, you would simply be wasted as an Oracle DBA....