The picture on the left is of a small piece of plastic that comes with the Apple iPod Touch. Initially I had no idea exactly what it was for and the lack of any instructions meant that for quite a while it just sat in the box. Then I also noticed that the box stated that included was a “stand” but I could find nothing in the box that fitted that description. Then a friend of mine who also has a touch pointed out that that bit of clear plastic was the stand I was searching for. A quick trial showed that, despite it’s simplicity, it does indeed function as a rudimentary stand, as shown below. Simple but effective. However, the plastic itself is tiny and could be easily lost. Of course, Apple have the answer to this too. The back section of the stand is just the right size to act as a cap for the sync cable – brilliant! All in all it is a very clever piece of design.

Mind you given the price of an iPod Touch you might be left feeling a little bit cheated that all you got was a tiny piece of plastic that can’t be worth more than one pence when what you were really expecting was a Stand.

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A few weeks ago our eldest son wrote to Kerrang magazine stating that he had been to see Zebrahead in concert a couple of times and on both occasions the friends that he had gone with had come away with some piece of memorabilia. Basically he felt that this wasn’t right as it was him that was the real fan and the others were there for the ride.

Proving that sometimes you do get what you ask for his letter was published (see below) and not only that they had arranged for him to go back stage before a gig and meet the band. True to their word last Wednesday Alex travelled to London and before the concert went back stage where the gave him tour merchandise, picks and some beer(!) . He was able to “hang out” with the band and have his picture taken.

I am currently penning a letter to Kerrang to ask if they can fix it for me to go back stage and meet Genesis c. 1973.

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Formula One is to be shown on the BBC for the first time in twelve years it was announced yesterday. This is great news for the following reasons:

1) no more adverts breaking up the action

2) Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” will (probably) return as the theme music.

Lots of people (well my Dad actually) have said that ITV have done a lot to improve the coverage for the lay person. However, as I only watch the race and not the build up I cannot comment on that. What I will say is that Martin Brundle is excellent and I will be very disapointed if he does not come across to the BBC.

The FIA have made some positive changes to the coverage this year by including a “ticker tape” showing current positions scrolling at the bottom of the page. They have also started including pictures and mini-stats of the drivers which helps people recognise who is in which car. Both these ideas have been nicked from NASCAR that has been doing it like this for years.

So what improvements can the BBC make to the coverage? Well for me it would be greater integration with digital services, such as the Internet. Including, real time statistics while the race is on would be fantastic. Some of this is already available on the F1 website but if the BBC could do a deal with the teams to provide an even greater level of detail which the viewer could personalise that would just be the icing on the cake. We await further news to see what the Beeb intend to do.

Read the official announcement here…

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So the first race of the 2008 Formula 1 season is out of the way with a great haul of points for the Williams team. With so few finishers it will be interesting to see if they can keep up the momentum next weekend in Malaysia. I suspect that it could be a little more difficult as by rights you would expect both Ferraris to finish ahead of the Williams under normal circumstances.

There was plenty of action and quite a few “incidents” that caused plenty of angst in the pit lane. One of the most amusing must be the following comment from David Coulthard following his coming together with Felipe Massa. Apparently this went out live when Coulthard was interviewed by Louise Goodman but was edited out by the afternoons replay:

“I screwed up the same way with Alex (Wurz) last year and took full responsibility for it. I would expect Felipe to do the same.

“If he doesn’t, then I’m going to kick three colours of shit out of the little bastard…”

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I have recently been trialling emoze, a free push email solution, for delivering my personal email to my Nokia phone. I’ll blog about that at some point in the future. However, using it has highlighted an interesting issue with Outlook- it never closes. Yes, it appears to close but the outlook.exe process is still running. This has a number of unwanted side effects beside continuing to use vast quantities of memory. In my case if continued to download my mail preventing emoze from working correctly.

Searching the net I found a good article about the problem on Mike Swanson’s blog. While this didn’t give a way of actually solving the problem it did highlight a few ways of dealing with it, including a small system tray utility called KnockOut which allows the problem to be managed. The root cause may well be to do with an Outlook plug in with SyncMyCal or iTunes being likely culprits. No one knows, or perhaps no one is saying, who is to blame. Is it that the plug in doesn’t release Outlook correctly or the other way round? Whatever the only sure fire way of getting rid of it is to kill the process.

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My iPod is messing with my head. It has taken a real liking to Peter Gabriel, Genesis and Pink Floyd. On the whole not bad choices but I do strive for a bit of variety in my music. Now, I would be the first to admit that I have more than my fair share of Genesis tracks on the player. It would, therefore, be reasonable to expect that in any shuffled playlist of all tracks that Genesis would appear with some regularity but Pink Floyd? I have Echoes and nothing else. To put it in some perspective I have 75 tracks by Crowded House and 26 by Floyd. Crowded House never seems to come up – why is that? And before anyone answers that with the comment that the iPod is simply acting as some arbiter of good taste remember that I moderate all comments…

Of course the real reason is that computers are absolutely hopeless at generating truly random numbers. What we get is a pseudorandom number which is more often than not based upon the internal clock and nothing like as random as I would hope. All of this leads to what appears to be a human behaviour, a passion for Steve Hackett guitar solos and a fumbling in the pocket to skip to another track. Bugger, it’s Genesis again!

This phenomenon was also observed by my mate Dirk who put it far more eloquently than me. His iPod also seems to be more sophisticated than mine in that his matches the same track by different artists – neat!

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Yesterday saw the launch of a new online magazine iGizmo. This is a magazine in the traditional sense of the word in that it is presented as an electronic view with pages to turn just like the real thing. Of course being online allows it to do other neat things like embed videos and link to websites – both of which iGizmo makes good use of.

This seems to be the latest thing as I have been invited to “subscribe” to several online mags in the last few weeks. These include the aforementioned iGizmo (gadgets) GP Mag (motor sport) and idiomag (music). The latter is interesting in that it (allegedly) tailors its content to your musical tastes. You give it the name of three artists you like (or point it at your musical profile on, say, Last.fm) and it then tailors the output.

In general I like this advance in publishing options and it brings with it a couple of clear advantages over print magazines: 1) they are more regularly updated, or contain more up-to-date information and 2) they are (generally) free. Of course the downside is that you cannot (easily) read them on the train as they need a laptop and an internet connection. The question is whether they provide any information that cannot be obtained from a traditional website with a good RSS feed.

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Yesterday saw the launch of a new online magazine iGizmo. This is a magazine in the traditional sense of the word in that it is presented as an electronic view with pages to turn just like the real thing. Of course being online allows it to do other neat things like embed videos and link to websites – both of which iGizmo makes good use of.

This seems to be the latest thing as I have been invited to “subscribe” to several online mags in the last few weeks. These include the aforementioned iGizmo (gadgets) GP Mag (motor sport) and idiomag (music). The latter is interesting in that it (allegedly) tailors its content to your musical tastes. You give it the name of three artists you like (or point it at your musical profile on, say, Last.fm) and it then tailors the output.

In general I like this advance in publishing options and it brings with it a couple of clear advantages over print magazines: 1) they are more regularly updated, or contain more up-to-date information and 2) they are (generally) free. Of course the downside is that you cannot (easily) read them on the train as they need a laptop and an internet connection. The question is whether they provide any information that cannot be obtained from a traditional website with a good RSS feed.

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As part of the McLaren F1 teams punishment for “cheating” last season was that they were stripped of all their world championship points thereby finishing last with nil points. The way that F1 works is that the best place to be in the pits is in the garages closest to the exit. This gives the teams both a tactical advantage and (usually) more space. So you would expect McLaren to be at the far end of the pit lane where you need binoculars to see them. However, it seems that this will not be the case. When the teams set-up ready for next weekends opening Australian Grand Prix McLaren were between Williams and Red Bull (i.e in fifth position). Rumour has it that the big white chief (Bernie Eccelstone) negotiated with the teams to get them moved up the pits. The story goes that Eccelstone wanted McLaren higher but Williams refused to give up their slot.

Now Autosport is reporting that not only is it true that McLaren are being moved up the pit lane but that the reason is because their very large motorhome would not fit at the far end. Now, you would think that this would be McLarens problem and not anyone else’s and that they would have to downsize. However, given that the motor homes are used for wining and dining sponsors and McLaren’s are pretty blue chip I suspect a deal has been done.

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