Spotify

I've found Spotify. I found it because someone posted on HotUKDeals that Spotify had the new U2 album available for streaming this week (i.e. prior to release) and I thought I'd give Spotify a try.

Well, I'm impressed. I've used last.fm on and off but it seems to stream me lots of stuff I don't like and it's catalogue doesn't seem to have all the stuff it want to listen to. Spotify is different. To start with you can programme the music you want - none of this "XYZ Station" stuff which gives you a track by "XYZ" every fifteen minutes. 1-nil to Spotify. The catalogue is pretty good - I've noticed the absence of Richard and Linda Thomspon's "Shoot Out The Lights" - and it is just so good being able to explore music at whim. I particularly like being able play several versions of a song. For example, there are versions  of  "I Only Want To Be With You" by Dusty Springfield (*****), The Bay City Rollers (*),  The Tourists (****), Tina Area(**),  Nicolette Larson (*), Michell (* German but she sounds Japanese to me), Michael Poss (nil points - worse than the BCR).

Well worth a try out.

Harvester

On the right is a picture of the special, limited edition of the Blue Aeroplanes "Harvester" which I bought last night at their gig in Bristol. Despite appearances, it is a CD. In fact, the side which gets played is black - pretty amazing although I understand I'm behind the times as I hadn't seen a black CD before.

The front looks like a vinyl 45rpm single, even down to have mock grooves in the black area. Neat.


The second picture is of Wire's "Outdoor miner". This is a vinyl 45rpm single - a white one. I've included it in this post because one of the cover tracks on "Harvester" is "Outdoor Miner". Also, as "Outdoor Miner" is on the Harvest label, you can compare the 100% authentic original "Harvest Moon" logo with the one on "Harvester". Neat.

Brie is not a cheese

I thought I'd recount a story that one of my friends told me last week. The setting is a large company, where slowly the Corporate IT department is standardizing everything it can. For whatever reasons, the computers in my friend's workgroup were all named after cheeses: cheddar, stilton, etc.

However, when the time came to add another machine, the IT department said "We're sorry, you can't call it after a cheese, we have to follow the corporate standard naming convention. Now, the machine is located in Bristol, so the first three letters of its name are B-R-I. And then, as it's an engineering machine, the next letter is E, followed by a three digit serial code. So the name of your new machine is B-R-I-E-1-3-4".