Music for funerals

Choosing songs for funerals can be perilous. Anything you choose gets bestowed with added significance. Anything you choose will likely trigger people to cry - which is normally a good thing. Some funerals I've been to had amazing, and purely subconscious, choices of music. Free fallin' for a drowning victim. I believe I can fly, for someone runover whilst running across the road. On neither occasions did i consider the irony of the music until afterwards.

All this is a preamble for the choice of music for my own funeral. Lets say there are spots for two songs at either end of whatever ritual Lou or the kids decide to have. I had thought about having Ken Ishii's brilliant "Endless Season" (not in itunes) which encompasses beautiful circle-of-life rhythms. The only problem is that at 10 minutes its a bit long. The same kind of feel is available in Air's "Alone in Kyoto" but I find that a bit too melancholic, but the piano bit at the end with the sea would be super-appropriate at a funeral, just maybe not my funeral.

So they're OK, but on they're own they are a bit too pretentious - so I need something to balance it up. To cut a long internal story short, as my concentration span is nearing its 15 minute borders, may I suggest this. Totally seriously.

Coming in to
"Sexy motherfucker" - Prince
Please don't chicken out.

Going out to
"Endless Season" - Ken Ishii
I choose this in the full knowledge that everyone will have left after the first minute, and I'll be listening to the next 9 minutes on my own. Thats OK.

Down with the kids - part 3

lightboxes

I'm suitably impressed with the Sitooterie by Thomas Heatherwick's studio (above). It's a more extroverted version of John Newlings 1998 Physics of place with spikes. I'd love to see how the light plays on the inside in daylight.

ITV special: When logos turn bad

I can't even bring myself to put this logo on the page - but you have GOT to see it. I thought it must be a pisstake but there is even a picture of it on the building. Who had the last laugh? The designers must have put this in for fun, imagine their horror as it got approved. hehe. Someone should tell them.

Surprising campaign

I'm throwing my considerable weight behind this new campaign. Everyone's getting involved from Tony Blair down, although I'm slightly surprised that teachers have got involved. But finally everyone is beginning to see the light.

I mean what the fuck is poetry all about! I couldn't put it better - MAKE POETRY HISTORY.

Caravan fun

We picked up the caravan on Friday and went camping for the weekend.

I nearly wiped out both the caravan and someone's car within a minute of collecting the caravan. I picked it up from a behind a petrol garage and I had to maneouvre it between the pumps. I wasn't used to how wide you have to turn in order to get it round stuff. I looked in my mirrors and I was about a cm away from hitting the front of a car, so i slammed on the brakes reversed a bit and managed to get round OK. Luckily EVERYONE at the garage was watching, so that wasn't embarrassing at all. After a couple of other close shaves I managed to get onto the open road.

Roundabouts are the most difficult thing to master. Anyway - eventually, and remarkably without damage, we arrived at the campsite about 6-ish, just as it was getting dark.

"Do you think we should get a torch", "NOOO", "Are you sure", "Of COURSE I'm sure"

FuckShitBollocksWank when you do not know how anything works on a caravan, it makes it easier if you have the power of vision. Not for me, that's just not hard or embarrassing enough. An hour and a half later I've just about managed to work light, heat and water out. It would take me another day and a significant amount of stink to work out I'd not sorted the chemical toilet out. Nice.

Despite all this we had a lovely weekend. The kids got up at 4.15am on the Saturday and we had a lie in until 5.30am on the Sunday. Laura and Nathan joined us on Sunday, and we went home so the kids would get a decent nights sleep, leaving the caravan until Monday when we were putting it into storage. All the stresses of setting up were behind us and now it was plain sailing. WRONG.

In the general spirit of total unpreparedness that I pride myself on, I took James to pick up the caravan at 6am on Monday morning. It took me 20 minutes or so to get hooked up and then we were ready to go, and I was feeling pretty pleased with myself - until we tried to go. The field was very wet and the car just dug into the ground. Rather than accept failure I tried several maneouvres, each time ploughing up a new line in the field. Get some wood under the tyres? No. Carpet? No. Nothing worked.

Wait 2 hours until the farm hands are awake and get the tractors to tow you out, past the other caravans like a grand parade of fuckwittery? Yes that'll do it. Thank God, I won't be going there again.

Spike Jonze ad

Beautiful ad.

But I'm most intrigued by the music.

Apparently "Composed by Squeak E. Clean and featuring Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeah"

Sexuality

In answer to Neil's question in the pub on Friday, and with the help of this photo - I don't think I would.

Although the more I look at it...

International shoe size chart

Hmmmm

Boo.com

Amazingly its nearly 5 years since boo.com went bust. I'm thinking about it again as I look afresh at buying on the web.

Would anyone even attempt anything as Flash based even now? I don't think so. The only reason I would is the easy scaling, all of which can be done with DHTML just not as easily.

Selling music

I'm tidying up my links today. Here is another great article about how to get your stuff sold on Amazon.

I'm more interested on getting stuff onto iTMS - it seems the best route is to get a CD done with CDBaby and then give them your digital distribution rights. They only take 9% of what you make. At the moment I can't see anyway of getting stuff distributed without having a CD made, but I guess there has to be some monetary deterrent from allowing everyones Garageband masterpiece getting onto Itunes. I guess there is also a quality control step in actually what gets put on anyway.

USPTO blues

If there was ever a web application crying out to be made its at the US Patent and Trademark office.

You CANNOT understand what you've got to do in order to get a patent without ringing the inventors assistance line, and from the UK thats no joke.

There is some software to do electronic filing but it is only used for utility patents not for design patents.

I'm going to have to spend some time over the weekend trying to figure it out. When this process is over (maybe when we're away) I'll post a how-to.

Mean business

Two great business articles.

On email
"Yes, ignore e-mail. If something's important, you'll hear about it again. Trust me. And people will gradually be trained to pick up the phone or drop by if they have something to say. After all, if it's not important enough for them to tear their gaze away from the hypnotic world of Microsoft Windows, it's certainly not important enough for you to take the time to read."

On startups
"I learned something valuable from that. It's worth trying very, very hard to make technology easy to use. Hackers are so used to computers that they have no idea how horrifying software seems to normal people. Stephen Hawking's editor told him that every equation he included in his book would cut sales in half. When you work on making technology easier to use, you're riding that curve up instead of down. A 10% improvement in ease of use doesn't just increase your sales 10%. It's more likely to double your sales"

Chiaroscuro: swan

I bought a new camera from the states. Its a Pentax Optio mx4. Its a 10 optical 4MP still and 640x480 30fps movie camera. It doesn't use tapes just records directly onto a SD card.

Its got a good lens, the only problem I've not got over yet is setting the white balance for indoors when shooting a movie. Overall I'm delighted. It cost £140 and I already had a 512Mb SD card so that isn't a problem.

Anyway, we went to Shipley Country Park at the weekend - where I took this shot, just before the swan bit Anna. Hmmm.

Unfortunately you can't see all the subtlety of the feathers and the light through the water droplets on a compressed version,but you get the idea. I'll post a movie when I've sorted the WB as there isn't many decent demo movies on the web.

Photo of Lara

My quoting formula

(guess * ((2 + number of things you haven't done before)/2)) * guessfactor

where guessfactor is how good you are at guessing. perfect = 1 & 1.5 pretty bad.

The Bravery

Joy Division meets Duran Duran in a New York Goth club.

Fockin fantastic.

Also checkout the cheap 80's synth magic on the superdiscount remix.

By this time next year I'm gunna git me some of my tracks on iTMS.

Lehrgelt

There is no equivalent word in english for this. Literally translated it means "learning money".

First introduced to me by my sister-in-law Jane, it's used to describe the times where you have to write off money that you've spent where its been a mistake or in hindsight you should have spent it on something else.

Anti-snow

A couple of definitions this morning. On the way up from the car park at Midland it felt like I was trapped in a Victorian Christmas card. There was a lot of snow - and um, I found myself travelling on a penny farthing. Who'd have thought it.

Anyway - a lot different to the normal snowfall which has been half an hour of normal snow followed by half an hour of anti-snow. Snow that reduces the amount of snow on the ground.

Toby as of 1st March

I've never been more interested in...
a)Dollar/pound exchange rates
b)Chinese manufacturing
c)Patenting and trademarking
d)Image libraries
e)Tax liabilities