I donate to a couple of charities via Direct Debit, mainly for the reasons mentioned here: it allows me to assuage my guilt without breaking a sweat or, in the case of most months, actually thinking about it.  (And let me tell you that thatnks to my Catholic upbringing I have a highly developed sense of guilt.)  It does annoy me that Oxfam send the majority of my donation back to me in the form of marketing bumpf, and the discovery that they are now phoning people up makes it even worse.  Should I receive such a call they are nearly guaranteed an increase in my donation, mainly with the vain hope that it will cover the cost of hiring a telemarketing company.  I think Adrian has blogged about Oxfam’s marketing habits before, ending with the question, is there an amount of money you can give above which they stop asking for more?  I’m wondering if Gordon Brown reached it.

Not sure how I managed to miss this, but Lightbox JS looks like a nice way of integrating photos into a site. If most of the photos I show weren’t hosted on flickr, I’d probably use it here.

I went out last night.  I know, on a school night as well.  Town was surprisingly busy: Kyla and I couldn’t work out whether this was a reaction to having to do Mother’s Day things on the weekend so people thought they were owed a few drinks, or whether everyone put off celebrating Mother’s Day until the Monday, hence avoiding the rush.  Anyway, we went to the Bun Shop, where there was an evening of acoustic singer-songwriter type stuff, though with a jazzy theme.  The first couple of acts were nothing special, but the third, Rebecca Heyne, was very impressive.  Backed by a couple of guitarists (one of whom happens to live down my street), she had a belter of a voice and some well-written, melodic songs.  That link is to her myspace page, where you can check out some of her music.

RFID-blocking wallets from DIFRWEAR (d’you see what they did there?) I don’t think this is really necessary; the RFID enabled ski-passes that are now being used in the Alps were blocked by having pretty much any electronic equipment (phone, mp3 player etc.) in the same pocket. In fact with the explosion in personal mp3 player ownership I wonder how many of these RFID chips will ever signal correctly.

No updates for a few days because I’ve been falling on my arse in the French Alps for a week. (I used the “post-to-the-future” option in Wordpress to give y’all a few morsels while I was away.) I’m getting better at this whole “dicks on sticks” malarkey, though I still have an urge to try being a “gay on a tray”; I gave one of the guys a hand carrying his board, and he looked at me and said, “You know, holding that, you look ever-so-slightly cooler.”

Most of this holiday was spent trying to hold the umpteen different facets of a parallel turn in my head without falling over during the actual execution of one. One the way there were a couple of impressive sites; firstly the Couloirs of Courchevel, a series of black runs accessible from Saulire. Here’s a photo looking down the spine of rock one must traverse to reach the runs themselves; there was no chance I was getting any closer than this.

Secondly, here’s the panorama from the Sommet des Pistes in Val Thorens (well, strictly it’s in the unofficial fourth valley of the Three Valleys resort):

Breath-taking stuff, particularly the un-bashed red run it was necessary to take to get down from there!

This was a misguided pre-Christmas purchase. After a friend once bought me some chilli-flavoured cordial, this year I thought I’d return the favour and give him Chili Beer when we met up for New Year’s Eve, after I had spotted it for sale in the ever-wonderful Bacchanalia down on Mill Road.

Of course, I forgot it. And now I’m stuck with it. Not that I’m not tempted to try it. I like chilli and I like beer, so maybe their vectors add up in this bottle to bring me that much closer to happiness. Alternatively, it might well be fucking rank. This could be Schrodinger’s beer, its taste an unknown, locked unobservable in a cage of clear glass and worryingly cheaply printed label.

Don’t invite me to a party at your house, I will bring this and I will leave it there (and probably drink all your nice stuff). This could be Casting The Runes for boozehounds.

Bit of a video round-up post, kick started by this post over on Music Thing. Tom then went on to spot a few Stevie Wonder videos over on You Tube, kicking off with Superstition, and moving onto As (apparently the keen of eye can spot Herbie Hancock on a Fender Rhodes right at the end, but you’ve got to be quick!) and then moving onto quite a few more, including Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing. I’ve always wondered what the backing singers are singing at the end, I’ve always sung “Don’t be ashamed of it,” but in the video that is obviously wrong. A quick google says that the answer is apparently “chevere,” variously meaning “cool” or “groovy/great.”

I joked about the fifth Beatle effect when I left the AHB, but I just heard from Russ that they’ve made it through to the final of the Cambridge Band Competition!  Just reading that site, I’m pretty fucked off to note that the final is on the same night as a Casa gig, so it’s unlikely I’ll get to go.  Damn it, that would have rocked!  Good luck guys, I’m sure you’ll kick a lot of arse.

Pongy whisky rocks. How many other food stuffs include a pronounciation guide in the packaging? Bruichladdich (brook-laddy) is non chill-filtered (a process I was unaware of prior to reading Complicity) and bloody lovely. I’m hardly a whisky connoisseur though, I can’t do a blind taste test and tell you what was what, or even from which region. However I find it’s difficult to learn as I buy a bottle and it usually lasts for about six months, so by the time I get a replacement it is difficult to compare the taste to my memory of the previous bottle. The one good chance I had was in my college bar, which carried about four different malts plus three different sorts of Glenmorangie, but as I was a poor student at the time I couldn’t afford to conduct the experiment. To be brutally honest, half the time I’m not even certain how to pronounce the name of the whiskies I see in bars; my favourite whisky is either OH-ban or o-BAHn, and one day I’ll check which is correct. Until then, I’m sticking to Jura.

An excerpt from the Casa email list:

Diccon: I just bought a steel guitar. Finally an instrument that does more damage to doors than doors do to it.
Joe (perc.): see timps. way ahead of you…
Andy (trumpet): Well, ever since I heard about Joshua I’ve been working on trying to demolish walls with my trumpeting… If only I could play louder and higher…

That’ll explain that ringing in the ears I always get after standing near Andy in gigs.

Heh, scratch that last comment about needing my own wireless network; I borrowed a laptop from work last night and using that I found three networks from the comfort of my sofa, one of which isn’t secured.  Time to host a porn site on someone else’s connection!  Of course I’m sure there’s a way of watching who’s using your connection, so perhaps I will be nice and find some way of letting them know that their connection is open to all and sundry rather than cheekily stealing their bandwidth.

More Microsoft mockery with the What if MS made the iPod packaging video, which I spotted just before news that MS actually are finally getting into the handheld arena with the Origami.  As the BBC article says, that video advert was made a year ago, so the actual size and shape may well be different.  They’d better hope so, because that beast looks slightly larger than the tablet PC our sysadmin at work is always showing off with.  Looks interesting, though I’m not the kind of person to rush into buying the latest gadget; my mobile phone is a model from a few years ago (and in consequence is smaller than current camera phones and I bet the battery life is pretty good as it only has a monochrome screen) and I’m still proudly living down the technological cul-de-sac that is the mini-disc player (which I bought a couple of years ago, choosing MD over mp3 because at the time there weren’t any mp3 players with decent mic pre-amps onboard, and I wanted to use the player to record rehearsals; I hear that these days the iRiver mp3 players can do this quite well.)

Don’t get the wrong idea; I’m not a Microsoft hater, despite these two posts.  I use Windows at work and at home, and have no trouble at all.  Doesn’t stop me wanting a Mac just to play with; I hear the iBook laptops have a good longevity, so maybe I’ll pick up a secondhand one.  Of course then I’d have to set up a WiFi network so I could surf from the sofa, and make sure it won’t throw a wobbly with both a Mac and a Windows box using it… Networking is a closed book to me, as far I’m concerned it Just Happens.  I suspect it’s more complicated than that, and I’m certain I don’t want to find out how much more.