According to El Reg, the servers have been stolen from the data centre where they've been running both his and the WOMAD sites...

Maybe someone was listening to this song as they walked off with the hardware...

I know something about opening windows and doors
I know how to move quietly to creep across creaky wooden floors
I know where to find precious things in all your cupboards and drawers
Slipping the clippers
Slipping the clippers through the telephone wires
The sense of isolation inspires
Inspires me
I like to feel the suspense when I'm certain you know I am there
I like you lying awake, your baited breath charging the air
I like the touch and the smell of all the pretty dresses you wear
Intruders happy in the dark
Intruder come
Intruder come and leave his mark, leave his mark

Still, the site is slowly coming back - so score one for data recovery.

Oddly Gabriel is keynoting at Salesforce.com's European DreamForce event in London this week. I don't think this makes him quite the poster boy for SaaS!

One of the more fun TV shows around is The Big Bang Theory, a sitcom about four physicists and a waitress. It's pretty funny, and it's also pretty geeky (the show employs a consultant physicist).

The (science themed) theme tune is sung by the Canadian band Barenaked Ladies, and they've released a full length version:



Our whole universe was in a hot dense state,
Then nearly fourteen billion years ago expansion started.
Wait...
The Earth began to cool,
The autotrophs began to drool,
Neanderthals developed tools,
We built a wall (we built the pyramids),
Math, science, history, unravelling the mystery,
That all started with the big bang!

"Since the dawn of man" is really not that long,
As every galaxy was formed in less time than it takes to sing this song.
A fraction of a second and the elements were made.
The bipeds stood up straight,
The dinosaurs all met their fate,
They tried to leap but they were late
And they all died (they froze their asses off)
The oceans and Pangea
See ya, wouldn't wanna be ya
Set in motion by the same big bang!

It all started with the big BANG!

It's expanding ever outward but one day
It will pause and start to go the other way,
Collapsing ever inward, we won't be here, it won't be heard
Our best and brightest figure that it'll make an even bigger bang!

Australopithecus would really have been sick of us
Debating how we're here
They're catching deer (we're catching viruses)
Religion or astronomy, Descartes or Deuteronomy
It all started with the big bang!

Music and mythology, Einstein and astrology
It all started with the big bang!
It all started with the big BANG!

I know one or two of you out there enjoy the musical stylings of those likeable wags The Kleptones.

They've just "released" a live album (with some new tracks), from their appearance at Bestival - along with a video of their appearance.



Fire up your torrents!

It's one large MP3 with a cue file for anyone wishing to split into individual tracks.

In other Kleptone related news, I found a DJ playing War Of Confusion at a press event earlier this week...

I have a secret obsession that many of you already know about - because many of you share it.

I collect songs about Apollo and the moon landings. Sometimes they appear at just the right moment. We were driving through the high desert plains of Utah last weekend, through red rocks and green trees, and I was reminded of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars books, watching plants struglge to grow in thin air and dry red soils, as ice pellets fell from a cold blue sky. I found myself thinking that I'd never see that fantastic landscape for real, that as wonderful as robots on Mars were, there's nothing that beats the images of people walking on a new world - exploring that old high frontier.

The high plains were once that frontier, and it seems we have turned our back on the new one...

Then this song came up on the old iPod shuffle, an apt piece of poetry from the Bard of Barking:

When I was young I told my mum
I'm going to walk on the Moon someday
Armstrong and Aldrin spoke to me
From Houston and Cape Kennedy
And I watched the Eagle landing
On a night when the Moon was full
And as it tugged at the tides, I knew deep inside
I too could feel its pull

I lay in my bed and dreamed I walked
On the Sea of Tranquillity
I knew that someday soon we'd all sail to the moon
On the high tide of technology
But the dreams have all been taken
And the window seats taken too
And 2001 has almost come and gone
What am I supposed to do?

Now that the space race is over
It's been and it's gone and I'll never get to the moon
Because the space race is over
And I can't help but feel we've all grown up too soon

Now my dreams have all been shattered
And my wings are tattered too
And I can still fly but not half as high
As once I wanted to

Now that the space race is over
It's been and it's gone and I'll never get to the moon
Because the space race is over
And I can't help but feel we've all grown up too soon

My son and I stand beneath the great night sky
And gaze up in wonder
I tell him the tale of Apollo And he says
"Why did they ever go?"
It may look like some empty gesture
To go all that way just to come back
But don't offer me a place out in cyberspace
Cos where in the hell's that at?

Now that the space race is over
It's been and it's gone and I'll never get out of my room
Because the space race is over
And I can't help but feel we're all just going nowhere

At his best (and this is one of his best), Billy Bragg can capture a complex feeling in just a few words. You can find a live version of the song here.

I guess I'll still keep dreaming...

3,000 entries and still going strong!

A spoof 80s pop video from his latest Drew Barrymore romcom.

For those of us who lived through Top of the Pops in the 80s...



Via Whatever.

For all the Thomas Dolby fans reading, TMDR just announced on his blog that the Sole Inhabitant DVD and CD are now available - on CD Baby and iTunes (I'm not sure if it's on the UK iTunes store yet).

Order quickly to get one of the limited edition signed copies!
I did!

Thomas Dolby has posted a new track online, performed at the TED conference last year.

One of the presenters this year was Peter Gabriel, who was there to talk about a cause that’s dear to his heart. I’d met Peter before and found him very affable, so I took the liberty of sampling one of his most famous tunes and mashing it up with a new piece of my own. The session was entitled ‘The World Flattens’ so I triggered some sound bytes from my own Flat Earth Lecture. I think Peter was sitting in the front row when I played it. As TED is for a good cause I’m sure Peter won’t mind if I put a recording of my performance up online! Download it, link to it if you like, but please don’t recirculate it without asking me.

Good stuff.

[Link to the track on his blog entry].

...there's a new Kleptones album on the torrents...

w00t, I say. It's a double, too...

(and today we fly from Las Vegas to Dallas)

...came from Microsoft's UK developer tools team, with the heading "Music to code to".

The survey of more than 100 developers revealed that rock is the preferred music to code by for professional developers of all ages. Those surveyed were also keen chart watchers with the votes for top band going to four big hitters of 2005 - in first place Chris Martin's band 'Coldplay', followed by U2, third most popular were Manchester boys 'Oasis' and in forth position, Stereophonics.

Of the developers surveyed more than 29% claim that rap or hip hop was the most off-putting music to code by. The other genres that developers were least likely to listen to whilst working were country music (12 %), ambient music (9%) and opera (8%).

An odd selection. Me, I code and write best to both ambient and trance. So thank goodness for the nice folk at Platipus records (where Art of Trance have started recording again).

HMV has a "Music to code to" radio station on its web site. So, if you really need wall to wall Coldplay...

Paddy McAloon's "I Trawl The Megahertz" is an underrated masterpiece, an album of melancholy and bleak despair enlivened by hope of light. This is McAloon's response to the debilitating illness that temporarily robbed him of sight.

The title track is a 21 minute spoken word piece, a calm female voice reads snippets transcribed from short wave radio, turned into poetry, accompanied by music.

Hers is the wing span of the quotidian angel,
so her feet are sore from the walk
to the well of human kindness,
but she gives you a name and you grow into it.

And echoing the poetry of the stars.

They are listening for smudged echoes
of the moment of creation.
They are listening for the ghost of a chance.
They may help us make sense of who we are
and where we came from;
and, as a compassionate side effect,
teach us that nothing is ever lost.

It's wonderful.

I know I have talked about this album before, but the title track just came up on our massive random play list, and made me sit back for 20 minutes wonderful minutes.

The folk behind the Music Genome Project are using their database to drive a new service at Pandora.com.

Type in the name of a band or a song, and Pandora (a little box in the middle of your browser) will generate a personalised Internet radio station that plays music related or similar to your request. It's quite fascinating to sit there and click the forward button to see what's next (and occasionally wonder just why that one was chosen...). And of course you get the option to rate or buy the music you've just heard.

An interesting experiment, which has the prospect of hours of fun...

I had a horrible experience yesterday. Too horrible to speak about. Far too horrible to even think about.

So I'm going to make you all read it.

Leaving a press round table at the Savoy I took a wrong turn, and very nearly gatecrashed a launch party for...

...The Choirboys

[FX: runs away screaming]

At least they weren't singing "Walking In The Air"...

This morning's thunder seems to have finally reset my body clock. As a result, a quick update.

Boston: good fun, thanks to a day wandering around the delights of Cambridge with teddywolf. There's a good quote from the day, but I said I'd leave it to him. I was surprised that all the various containers of chai syrup I'd picked up didn't lead to my case being opened by the TSA. Much book shopping also occurred, as did a sweep through the sales in the mall next to my hotel (£18 for a jacket? £10 for chinos? I do like the current state of the dollar...).

My real reason for heading over, the two days of press conference, also proved useful, and should lead to some interesting articles in the future.

Billy Bragg: the hot weather I'd missed in Boston arrived with a vengeance as I stepped off the plane at 7.15 on Saturday morning. The best way to keep jet-lag at bay is to be busy, and Saturday was a most active day. Lunch al fresco with marypcb's sister and her fiancé, followed by rupertg's 40^th birthday drinks in a dark Soho pub (where we briefly saw codepope). There was some time to kill, so we filled up with sushi in a park before heading over the river to Billy Bragg's Meltdown 2005 gig at the QEH.

Much fun was had by one and all in the concrete depths of the South Bank. A semi-acoustic gig with a bunch of the Blokes, Billy's set veered off into new directions and new arrangements of familiar songs. The highlight was a mash-up of "John Barleycorn" and "England Half English" performed with Eliza Carthy. A righteous dose of politics, some Woody Guthrie and a mix of new and old songs made it a gig well worth staying awake for, even in the heat of a summer evening...

An excellent support too - I missed his name, but he was from the East End, and mixed rap, folk, blues and rock with an anger and energy I've not seen for a long while. I'm going to have to do some research.

Down by the river: yesterday afternoon was spent picnicking and lazing on the banks of the Thames down at Ham, reading the papers, and some more of karentraviss's Hard Contact (one of my Boston book purchases). Extremely hot and sunny, but there was some shade, and a touch of a breeze off the river.