Thom Lawrence

Is it possible that the only real motivation for Everton to spend £15m in the space of two weeks is to make it absolutely impossible for the FA to take away our Champions League place? Like, you can’t have our place, we’ve already spent the money? Who knows. All good signings though.

I’m sure this won’t make up for the fact that I never email her, but Vikki very kindly passed this on to me.

Total volume of music files on my computer:

15GB at work, about 30MB on my laptop (I stupidly bought Pacer by
The Amps off of MSN Music and it only downloads on this machine) and
500MB on my phone

The last CD I bought was:

Frank Black - Frank Black Francis

Song playing right now:

The Fallout Trust - When We Are Gone

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me:

• Pixies - Letter to Memphis
• Animals that Swim - Madame Yevonde
• Dusty Springfield - Son of a Preacher Man
• DJ Shadow - You Can’t Go Home Again
• Veruca Salt - Sleeping Where I Want

Five people I’m passing the baton to:

Erm, I don’t really know any other bloggers, but Thomas Neill put me in the same blogroll as Hugh MacLeod, which is great (cheers, Thomas).

Could it be the start of Channel 9 at the BBC? On the 26th of May, the BBC’s going to televise one of its editorial meetings. Pete Clifton, editor of of the the BBC News website, says:

It may well produce the lowest viewing figures in our history, but we
can make the meeting available live and produce an edited version
afterwards - but only if you want us to.

There’s a poll up so you can say whether you think this is a good idea or not.

Joe Duffy demonstrates how to use C# 2.0’s iterators to implement ultra-lightweight concurrency.

Very, very nice, but you can’t help but wonder if hiding so much magic behind the new yield keyword (and elsewhere - C# is dripping with syntactic syrup) makes it easier and easier to fall into the same trap as Schlemiel the painter.

If you’re only just getting into C#/.NET 2.0 (like me, sadly) you could do worse than print out the last few months of Joe’s Technology posts, grab a bottle of wine and a laptop, and lock yourself in your bedroom for a while to see what’s possible.

Started seeing http://www.topicblogs.com/
crawling the site. Only one mention on Technorati. Topic blogs, eh? Maybe
some uber-related-tags kind of thing? Who knows. WHOIS and Google
suggest this guy. Good luck!

Scroll down a bit for an excellent discussion of WikiNames and the Fibonnaci series.

Plus, via Hamish, a different kind of aptitude test.

Finally! The Today Programme has one of these: . Never again will you miss John Humphrys’ 8:10 argument clinic.

Super! I’m the top result on Google for frightening attacks. Update: No longer. Oh, Google. How fickle you are. Maybe you can give me my name soon?

I should be writing more here, but I’m not finding the time. Trying desperately to finish all my niggling projects in .NET 1.1 so I can get some time to play with the Visual Studio 2005 Beta (”Experience”) that was finally delivered today (not to mention having a proper look at Rails and Ajax). I’m glad it’s the Saviours of Kamigawa pre-release at the weekend, so I can geek out and relax.

Anyway. Towards the weekend I will be overhauling the wiki side of the site and getting tons of code up. Perhaps I’ll create some self-indulgent how-to type posts to talk about some of it, eh? Look out for them!

Well, the BBC’s updated the list of programmes available to download. As far as I can tell, there aren’t any new RSS-enclosurised, genuine, 100% podcasts. I’ll check again tomorrow.

Update: you’ll probably want this list of available shows.

There are no words to describe how cool and earth-shatteringly significant backstage.bbc.co.uk is. One of the world’s biggest media organisations just opened the door very, very wide.

Now, in fairness, a lot of this is down to things like the Graf report but they’re saying all the right things.

You want the Long Tail? The BBC’s OPML file is 103 printed A4 pages long. That long enough?