Found these videos on YouTube, Planet Claire was their third encore. Whoever filmed that one must have been stood just in front of us.

Went to see the B-52s last night at Birmingham Academy. We learned several things; GPS hardware doesn’t like those underpass road bits they like in Brum and that maybe it would make more sense to go on the train - if they weren’t so shite that is.

We got to the place at 7pm and joined the line outside. As there was no supporting act there was a bit of a wait till the B’s hit the stage at 9.15ish. They played a good mix of old and new songs, plus Love Shack and an encore of Rock Lobster. It was awesome :) Well worth enduring the headache inducing lights, particularly during Strobe Light, a good test of my migraine reflecting green glasses of power.

So finally the iPhone/iPod Touch App Store is finally official. Having a quick look through there are a few apps that interest me:

Outliner
I’m a sucker for a task list, it would be nice to have a proper app instead of using Notes. Outliner has indented lists, I think this is the one I’d go for.

Bejeweled 2
I love this game, I had it on my Palm, got it on the xBox 360, it only makes sense I’d want it on my iPod.

BookZ Text Reader
An ebook reader with bookmarks.

Just as soon as someone cracks the 2.0 Software Update so I can install these on my jailbroken iPod I’ll be a customer. I’m not prepared to lose my last.fm MobileScobbler or Wiki software yet.

I’ve been designing and building websites for 10 years now and in all that time I’ve used a Mac as my working machine along with a PC to test on for IE. Having a spare copy of Windows XP about I bought a copy of the Parallels virtualisation software. I installed Parallels along with XP on an iMac with 1Gb of RAM, it does run on 1Gb but it is fairly slow. I immediately upgraded my iMac to the maximum 3Gb (I really didn’t need much in the way of persuasion). With 3Gb available I set the ‘PC’ to use 1Gb of this, it made massive difference in the speed, it’s every bit as fast as the actual PC I had been using for testing.

I now have a ‘PC’ with XP SP2 and IE6 as well as a ‘PC’ with XP SP3 and IE7 along with the multiple IE hack running. I also threw on Firefox 3 for good measure. The great thing about using Parallels is the ability to copy the entire PC thus avoiding any cockups with rogue software. I’ll probably set up a software testing PC that won’t matter if I screw it up. XP uses my existing Mac internet connection so I didn’t even have to bother with setting up any of the networking.

I had a go at installing Xubuntu, it did install but so far has no net connection. I will have to look at this further, it would be great to be able to test Linux browser compatibility too.

Finally I can design, build and test websites on one machine.

Last week I finally got around to buying a digital radio. Usually I’m all over new technology being a gadget freak but I’d held off digital radio mostly due to the poor sounding radio channels available on digital TV. Not wishing to spend a lot of cash on this exploratory purchase I grabbed a second hand Pure One DAB/FM Portable Radio.

My main reason for buying the radio was to listen to Nights with Alice Cooper, a breakfast show on the Planet Rock station. But I’ve found myself listening to quite a lot more radio than this one show. The extra stations seem to have reinvigorated my interest in radio.