The new Google Nexus One is the first phone that includes both a 1 Ghz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and a state-of-the-art WebKit-based browser. The iPhone 3GS has a different (but, as far as I can tell, similar) processor that runs at 600 Mhz, and also has a WebKit-based browser. I thought it would interesting to compare the performance of the Nexus One browser against that of the iPhone 3GS. Medialets ran the SunSpider 0.9 Javascript benchmark on the 3GS when it came out about six months ago and posted their results. I couldn’t find any Nexus One benchmarks, so I ran them myself.

Methodology: SunSpider 0.9 benchmarks were run on a freshly-unboxed Nexus One with no third-party apps installed; a Google account was set up and synced before the test was run; the screen was set to full brightness and a 30-minute timeout so that it wouldn’t dim during the test; all other settings were left at their defaults (including Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, which were left switched off); the phone was connected via 3G (O2 UK’s HSDPA network, to be precise); external power was disconnected.

Here are the results:

Google Nexus One firmware 2.1 build number ERD79: 13859.4ms +/- 0.6%

That compares with Medialets’s 16500 ms result for the iPhone 3GS. I should caution that those results were from the 3.0 version of the iPhone software, which is now six months old, so there may have been improvements since then. If anyone would like to contribute test results for the latest version of the iPhone 3GS OS, that would be very welcome.

I also ran the benchmark on a first generation iPod touch, which is the slowest device that runs the iPhone OS. This one does have OS 3.0 installed, though, so it is a relatively recent version of the browser:

Apple iPod touch OS 3.0: 45726.2ms +/- 2.2%

Just for reference, I tried the tests on my PC (2.33 Ghz Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit) on the current versions of the popular browsers:

Mozilla Firefox 3.5.7: 1126.8ms +/- 1.1%

Google Chrome 3.0.195.38: 522.4ms +/- 2.9%

Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.0.7600.1638: 5013.8ms +/- 1.0%

Apple Safari 4.0.4 (531.21.10): 507.2ms +/- 0.4%

As you can see, the Nexus One is still a very long way from matching the best of the desktop browsers on a typical computer in Javascript performance, but I think it’s remarkable that it is only 2.8 times slower than the slowest of the desktop browsers that I tested.

The not-many-more-words review: “Star Trek” far exceeded my expectations. It’s not perfect, but it has many, many great moments, including some which are just magnificent.

• The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951, natch)
• All the Pixar movies, especially Toy Story, Toy Story 2 and Monsters, Inc.
• All the Kevin Smith movies, especially Clerks and Chasing Amy
• The Big Lebowski
• Some of the Woody Allen movies, especially Annie Hall
• All The Star Wars’s, especially Episode IV: A New Hope
• Amélie
• American Beauty
• Dr. Strangelove
  

I thought I’d make a post here, firstly to celebrate one relapse-free month, and secondly to record the little insight that it’s given me into addiction:

In the past I’ve sometimes scoffed at other people’s addictions. After all, what could be easier than not doing something? If you’ve acknowledged it as an addiction then you already know that’s it’s harmful, so just don’t do it, alright dummy? But obviously it’s not that easy.

Actually, it is that easy… 90% of the time. The difficulty is that temptation is a steady and unwavering companion. It’s there when you’re feeling fine and busy so you don’t even notice it, but it’s also there when you’re feeling your worst: tired and lonely and in a trough of self-confidence. It’s those times when it becomes a genuine battle.

I’ve done a bit of self-analysis, and my decision-making process for determining whether to buy a particular item goes something like this:

1. Do I have enough available balance right now in my bank account or credit card?
2. Awesome! Buy it!

That was workable when I was about 10, but I fear that adulthood demands something with a tad more sophistication.

Recently I made what is apparently a classic mistake: The interest rate on my credit card had gradually crept up and up until it was at a ridiculously high level. I decided to get a loan to pay it all off, on the grounds that the loan would have much lower interest and because the loan amount is fixed, so I wouldn’t be able to simply borrow each month what I had paid back the month before, as has been my habit with credit cards. Great idea, right? Well, it was until I decided that I wouldn’t cancel the credit card that I’d paid off using the loan. I figured that it would be wise (ha!) to keep some credit available for emergencies. After all, it doesn’t cost anything if you don’t use it, and I might have some unexpected expenses soon. What if I needed to fly somewhere for a business meeting? (Hey, a boy can dream!)

That worked out fine… for about a month. The problem is that while I can make good decisions about money in the short term (‘keep that credit for emergencies’), those decisions can’t withstand the daily wear and tear of the temptation that comes with having a bunch of someone else’s money sitting on a card in my pocket. It happened like this: I’ve been wanting to get a high-definition TV for a very long time (like, since before they were actually available). I’ve never been able to afford one. Now, I didn’t just wake up one day and say, “screw the consequences, I’m going to spend my emergency money on a new TV”. The evil consumer credit industry is a lot more subtle than that. What actually happened is that I went to a supermarket. As part of their ongoing quest to duplicate Walmart’s business model, all the British supermarkets have started selling stuff like TVs too, and so occasionally when I’m out food shopping I go and have a wander around the electronics section and fantasize about having a TV as big as the Grand Canyon. No harm in window shopping, right? Well, there isn’t too much harm if you haven’t got any money, but if you’ve got some money that you know you shouldn’t spend, then the threat level increases substantially.

So, to cut a long story short, over a few weeks I managed to convince myself that it wasn’t that expensive, and the minimum repayments wouldn’t be that bad, and now I’m the sometimes-proud and often-ashamed owner of a high-definition television that, in all likelihood, I’ll still be paying for when I’m 30.

And what have I learned from this? Firstly, I’m simply not able to deal with having credit immediately available without using it. This has happened enough times now that I’m forced to recognize the pattern and I can no longer kid myself that I’ll do better next time. I have to get credit cards out of my life. They’re simply not compatible with me. It would seem like the best thing to do would be to get another loan (when possible) to pay off the card, but obviously that’s how I got into this mess in the first place and I could just end up doubling my debt again. I still think that’s what I’ll do, though, because as I said earlier I am capable of doing things right in the short term (and this time I would cut up the card immediately when it’s paid off). My failing is that I’m not able to withstand the sustained temptation over a period of time. I’m too good at rationalizing things, and given some time, effort and motivation, I could probably make any bad idea seem like a good one.

This was in the first shop that I saw when I got off the train at the main station in central Berlin (Hauptbahnhof). I’m guessing they kinda like this Obama guy, huh?

This is the slightly bizarre pedestrian crossing guy that they have in Berlin. Crossing ist verboten!

Something exciting seemed to be happening here, because there were lots of people and professional cameras looking through these gates, but I couldn’t figure out what the heck it was:

It may have had something to do with these kids, who were just standing around as far as I could see:

I got to to the center of town a few hours before the speech venue gates were opening, so I decided to zoom around the city’s sights first. This is the Reichstag, where the government hangs out. It’s looking better than it did in 1945:

This is the Brandenburg Gate:

This is just up the road from the gate and exciting stuff was going on here too — this time with many Polizei, but again I couldn’t figure out what it was so I moved on:

The bollards here are sentient. Driving ist verboten!

This is commonly called the “Holocaust Memorial”, which is kinda euphemistic for it’s blunt full title of “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe”. I’m glad that they have this memorial, not because I want the German people to feel guity (and goodness knows that the British have our fair share of historical sins to feel bad about), but it’s good that there’s such a substantial concrete reminder of those abhorable things, perhaps as a statement of the majority opinion against those who would deny that they took place.

I found the memorial rather more impressive in person than I did from looking at the pictures on Wikipedia. As that article says, it certainly is unnerving walking through it, because you constantly feel like you’re going to bump into somebody who is walking in a row perpendicular to the one which you are in. I felt a bit claustrophobic after a while.

The next one is of Hitler’s bunker. As far as I could see there wasn’t actually anything to see. Now it’s just an apartment block with an information board nearby. I thought it must be odd to live there, with tour groups constantly passing through. There were four separate groups walking around when I was there.

Ahh! I was wondering where all the Frauen were!

This is some Soviet propaganda on the wall of one of the government buildings. Look at all the happy communists!

Nowadays it has this huge photo print next to it, showing the actual miserableness of aforementioned communists. Free markets FTW!

Here’s one of the still-standing stretches of the Berlin wall. I found it amusing that it now has it’s own wall (well, fence) to protect it from being broken down any further:

This is Checkpoint Charlie, which has these recreations of the historical items like this sign and the wooden checkpoint booth, because the originals are long gone:

By this time it was around half-past-one, and the gates were to open at four o’clock, so I decided to make my way over to the park where the speech was going to take place.

The speech was going to be at that statue in the distance, but even this far away there were these temporary food and drink stalls. It looked like a concert:

These are the gates an hour and twenty minutes before they opened:

At that point I was feeling very, very tired, because I’d been traveling for a long time, and then walking around the city, all with only a couple of hours sleep the night before. I decided to nip off into the park and have a lie down, and I fell asleep after a couple of minutes. I set the alarm on my phone for 15:55 and when I came back out to the gates they opened at that exact moment and people started rushing forward. There were security checks and another set of gates further down the road, and that took quite a while to get through. They took my bottle of water, which annoyed me somewhat. There was a stall inside the secure area selling more, but I didn’t want to get any because I only had a 50 Euro note and I thought it would be rude to ask some stallholder for that much change. So I took my place in the crowd, pretty close to the front:

I sat down and got down to reading the issue of Newsweek that I had bought at Luton Airport earlier. Three hours is a long-ass time to wait, and I read it on the outward plane too, so I read very-nearly every article in that magazine. I’m now ridiculously well informed about world affairs (for this week, anyway, as my Dad pointed out). Ask me about Nicolas Sarkozy’s Middle-East strategy, or why Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are having difficulties. Go on; I dare you!

After about an hour of reading with the afternoon sun beating down straight on me, I caved in and decided to get a bottle of water after all, sadly giving up my place in the crowd. It turned out that the dude didn’t mind breaking my fifty at all, perhaps because I attempted to order in German (“Wasser, bitte”), even though we had to fall back to English to resolve the still/sparkling question. I did German for two years at school, so I quite enjoyed trying it out. I got a little kick every time I could decipher a sign or poster, although it was usually dashed a few seconds later when I realized that there was an English version of said sign just to the right.

So anyway, I got back in the crowd, and my place wasn’t quite as good, but not too bad either:

I sat around and waited some more… I win at photography:

Eventually Obama came on stage to a loud, but perhaps not deafening, welcome, and gave his speech about international relations, and the “trans-Atlantic alliance” in particular:

I thought it was a very good speech. He had to be very careful because he was simultaneously speaking to multiple audiences, including most importantly the electorate back home. He needed to appear knowledgeable about the world, and liked and respected, but without seeming like one of those wussy pinko Europeans. I thought he handled that very well by sticking to talking about the things about which the world really does need to cooperate, like climate change.

All in all, I suppose it was a bit strange to travel for about 14 hours just to see a 25 minute speech, but I think I would have regretted not being there if I was just watching it on TV, and this is probably the closest I’ll ever get to see Barack Obama. After reading (most of) his book about his politics, I feel very, very good about supporting him. I really do think he will be a fantastic president. Not only does he have the charisma and eloquence to inspire people, but he also has the intelligence and thoughtfulness to back it up, along with a pragmatism to get things done. To be frank, all the next president needs to do to make up with the world is to finish with Iraq, start respecting human rights again, and start being serious about climate change. Obama can set that agenda and start doing those things in his first month in office. Everything after that is gravy.

Anyway, back to the narrative: The crowd by the end was huge. Apparently the police estimated that there were 200,000 people in all. That’s amazing, and I think it might be the biggest crowd Obama has ever pulled:

It seemed that we were all supposed to leave the way we came, and the crowd slowly crawled back towards the gate. But those Berliners are apparently crazy for tearing down walls these days, and some enterprising guys started deconstructing the fence so that we could disperse into the park. I had a plane to catch, so I pretended not to understand the announcements telling us to stop doing that, and followed them through the opening:

“I’ve been looking for freedom!!!” etc.

By now it was 20:07 and I had to be at my plane departure gate at 21:30, which is a bit tight to say the least! I ran along the banks of the river Spree, which was a pleasant little jog.

I got to the Hauptbahnhof again with about ten minutes to go before my train. So I waited for the train… and waited… and it didn’t come! Gah! Just my luck for the famously efficient European trains to fail me in my moment of need! At that point I panicked and ran outside to catch a taxi, with about 50 minutes to go now before my flight gate closed and the airport apparently a 40 minute drive away. I got to practice a bit more German:

“Flughafen Schönefeld, bitte.” I said.

“Flughafen Schönefeld?” he said, as in “Why the heck don’t you just take the train, dummy? It’s faster and much cheaper.”

“Ja.” I said, as in “I know what I’m doing, taxi-man; now step on it!”

Thankfully there was zero traffic so we got there in about 30 minutes. I dashed through the airport (just like in the movies, innit), and made it to the gate with five minutes to spare! Phew! Of course, my achievement was dampened somewhat by the fact that the plane was delayed and the gate didn’t actually close for about another 35 minutes, but nevermind that!

So, another plane, another train, and another lift from the station later and I was home (and comically sunburned: sorry! No pictures of that!) Then two days later I made this blog post. And that was that!

Anyway, the entire reason I mention it is that today I was reading this web comic called “pictures for sad children” (as linked to by Paperlilies), and one of the strips totally reminded me of that ego-inflating experience:

I was really, really looking forward to seeing “Hancock” after watching the trailer. Unfortunately, before the film came out I saw snippets of a couple of negative reviews that dented my enthusiasm. But I went to see it ASAP anyway with my usual movie-going friend.

I enjoyed the first 40 minutes or so immensely. It was fun and cool and I thought there was a nice undertone about adulthood, fatherhood and accepting responsibility. The redemption (as it often does in movies) actually made me well up a little bit. I was looking forward to coming home and writing about how wrong the critics were.

But then, halfway through the film, there’s a plot twist. The twist itself was pretty interesting, but at that point the movie just started to fall apart for me. I didn’t feel like the twist or its consequences were adequately explained, and frankly, I found the Hancock character much more interesting without the half-baked hints of an origin story. There’s also an under-developed bad-guy who I didn’t find remotely interesting, and for the second half of the film nothing funny happens and nothing cool happens, which is in stark contrast to the first half where the funny cool things are coming thick and fast.

The studio is clearly aiming for a franchise (and by “clearly”, I mean that they almost stick a big banner up saying “SEQUEL IN 2010!” at the end), but I don’t know how well that will work. The character was interesting because of his (considerable) flaws, but if they want the flaws back then they would have to undo the redemption, and then redeem him again without it seeming like the same movie. That would be tricky, I imagine.

Apple have also started doing movie rentals from their iTunes Store, and they’ve just launched in the UK, so I’ll be comparing how it matches up with the Xbox Live Marketplace (although I haven’t actually tried Apple’s service yet, so I’m just talking about specifications and such at this point). I’ve also recently started renting DVDs and Blu-Ray discs from LOVEFiLM (just like a UK version of Netflix), so I’ll be comparing with that, too.

I realize that this is a long article, so if you just want the highlights: the video and audio quality is good, but not as good as Blu-Ray, and the price seems very expensive when compared with disc rental services.

If you want the (glorious?) detail, please read on!

What’s good?

The movie I rented was “I Am Legend”, which is 100 minutes long and the HD version was a 4.54GB file. I was expecting that to take a while to download, so I started it downloading last night, planning to leave it going while I went out food shopping. To my surprise, though, the movie said it was ready to play about 3 minutes after I started downloading it, so the movie can play even when it’s only partially downloaded. That’s a great, great feature, so I’m surprised that Microsoft doesn’t make a big deal about it. It’s particularly important that they should be clear about this, because when you download a regular video file from Xbox Live (such as a game trailer) those have to be downloaded completely before you can start watching them, so I think that most Xbox Live users would expect movie rentals to work the same way. Dividing 4.54GB by 100 minutes gives a bitrate of 6.5Mbps, so anyone with broadband faster than about 7Mbps (including a margin for download overheads and such) should be able to watch the film as soon as they’ve purchased it.

The huge convenience of being able to rent and watch very quickly is the main advantage of the download services, since DVD rental by post requires you to wait at least a day to get your disc, and old-fashioned bricks-and-mortar rental shops require you to expend a certain amount of time and effort to rent, and then more time and effort to return afterwards. Apple also allows you to start watching while downloading, and they also do a lousy job of telling potential customers about that advantage.

I don’t have one of the Xbox media remotes, so I was using the standard controller to watch the movie. That was actually perfectly fine; the functions are sensibly mapped to buttons and it just took a minute of experimenting to figure out what was what. The only niggle is that the controller switches itself off if you don’t use it for 15 minutes, so it has to be turned back on next time you use it by holding down the start button for a few seconds.

What’s not so good?

As I mentioned before, the movie is encoded at approximately 6.5Mbps. That’s probably 6Mbps for the video and 448kbps for the audio. The video is 720p (1280×720) and the audio is Dolby Digital 5.1. It’s actually a lower bitrate than a typical standard definition DVD, but the resolution and quality are higher because it is using a more efficient encoding (Windows Media Video, aka VC-1). How does that compare with the competition? Well, the iTunes HD rentals are also 720p, but apparently their file sizes are a bit smaller (~4GB versus ~6GB) so presumably their bitrate is lower. Xbox rentals don’t compare so well with Blu-Ray, though. Blu-Ray discs can store up to 50GB so they can be very luxurious with the encodings. The “Juno” Blu-Ray I’ve rented, for example, has 1080p video (1920×1080) at around 35Mbps.

Subjectively, the video quality of “I Am Legend” was exactly what I was expecting: better than DVD, but not as good as Blu-Ray. I didn’t notice any encoding artifacts, and everything looked very good, on the whole. I’ve already been spoilt by Blu-Ray though, because I did notice at times that things were a little “soft”, compared with the sharpness of 1080p on Blu-Ray.

The sound is a similar story to the video. As I mentioned, it’s Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound at around 448kbps, which is exactly the same as you’d get on a DVD, and from Apple’s HD rentals. Blu-Ray’s extra capacity comes in handy again, here, and they can manage 7.1 channel uncompressed audio at higher than CD quality. I’m not too fussy about that at the moment, because my audio system isn’t fancy enough to take advantage of that.

What’s bad?

The video/audio quality described in the section above is an understandable compromise given the equipment and bandwidth that the majority of Microsoft’s customers will have available today. Unfortunately the problems in this section are less forgivable, because they are oversights that could and should be corrected:

This first point might bother you, because it describes a small technical problem that you’ve probably never noticed before, but you might notice it every time you watch a film after you’ve been told about it, so you might want to skip this paragraph if that’s the sort of thing that bothers you. Still here? Cool. As you might know, films are recorded at 24 frames per second. Most TVs, on the other hand, display 60 frames per second (fps), so to display a film on a TV we have to do something a bit odd. On a 60 fps HDTV, we have to repeat the frames. The first frame is shown twice and then the second frame is shown three times. That pattern repeats so that 24 frames fit into 60. That works okay, and most people don’t notice that the motion is not completely smooth (I’ve found it’s most noticeable on slow panning shots and during scrolling credits). In the last few years, however, TVs have started coming out that have a mode that actually displays 24 frames per second (usually referred to as 24Hz, and unfortunately you have to very careful to ensure that a TV can actually do 24Hz display, because some of them will accept a 24Hz signal, but then display it at 60 fps as described above). This is great and marvelous, because we can finally watch movies just the same as they are on the big screen. Unfortunately, though, the Xbox 360 doesn’t know how to output 24 fps, so you don’t get the benefit of a smoother picture even if you have a fancy-pants TV. Likewise, Apple TV can’t output 24 fps, but Blu-Ray wins again because it definitely does support 24 fps (hallelujah!) I really hope that this can be fixed with a software update on the Xbox 360 and Apple TV, because it’s one of the small things that really bugs perfectionists like me.

As anyone who’s ever played a DVD knows, most of them come with plenty of bonus features, such as making-of documentaries and commentaries, and even the most basic disc comes with chapter marks and subtitles. So what did my download rental of “I Am Legend” come with? Not a thing! There’s no reason why extra videos and commentaries shouldn’t be available as additional downloads, and I was really surprised that the movie didn’t even have subtitles. That was mildly annoying for me, as I sometimes use subtitles to catch inaudible dialogue, but if I was deaf you can bet I’d be fuming right now about accessibility and equal rights. The Xbox 360 video player does have options for alternate sound tracks and subtitles, but they simply weren’t used. Obviously all that material is prepared for the DVD release, so the fact that is wasn’t available with the download just seems lazy, like the download is done as an afterthought.

If you have a 360 then you’ve probably noticed that it’s a noisy son-of-a-gun, with the cooling fans doing a passable impression of a wind tunnel. My 360 is one of the newer models that is supposedly cooler and quieter than the old ones, so I dread to think what they were like. Playing a movie shouldn’t be a particularly stressful task for this console, so I was hoping that the system would be smart enough to slow down its processor and the cooling fans, but it doesn’t do so. In fact, bizarrely enough, it seemed that it kept the game disc spinning (albeit at a slow speed) even while the movie was playing from the hard disk. That’s easily enough fixed by taking the disc out, but it’s mildly annoying and contributes to the impresssion that the movie downloads are a bit half-assed. While I was watching the movie the fan noise did fade into the background mostly, but I did notice it a few times during quiet scenes. Again, I really hope this can fixed by a software update.

When downloading a movie from the Xbox Live Marketplace the user is reminded about the “usage rights” that they have with regard to the download. Now, I’m totally opposed to all DRM when it comes to things that are purchased for keeps, but I can accept that it’s necessary when dealing with rentals (I can’t imagine the honor system working too well in this case). For the Xbox Live movie rentals you have to start watching the movie within 14 days of downloading it, and you can watch it as much as you like for 24 hours after you first press play. That’s pretty reasonable, I think. What’s annoying is that the download is locked to the console you downloaded it on and can’t be transferred to a PC or a portable device. That’s particularly annoying for me because I have a nice quiet computer hooked up to my TV (and it can do 24 fps too!), but I can’t use it, presumably because the movie studios are paranoid and irrational about copyright infringement. It’s odd that Microsoft has this fairly nice movie rental service, but it isn’t available to people using PCs. I know that not many people have a PC connected to their TV, but I also know that lots of people have laptops, and lots of people like watching movies on planes and in hotel rooms and such. Apple doesn’t shine on this front either, unfortunately, because although you can use their movie rental service on PCs or Macs, you can only download HD movies using their Apple TV device, and when you do that you can’t transfer them back to a computer. Basically, this is yet another pain in the neck caused by the hyper-protectiveness of copyright owners. Dear Hollywood, The latest snake-oil “copy-protection” systems that you signed up to are already broken. Anyone that wants your movies for free can get them already. Please stop annoying the people who actually want to give you money. Yours sincerely, Common Sense.

I’ve left the biggest problem for last, but it’s the first one I noticed when renting the movie. It is, of course, the price. The HD rental that I bought costs 600 “Microsoft Points”. Using a handy calculator, that works out as £5.10, or $7.50 for Americans. No, I’m not going to complain that £5.10 is a third more than $7.50: I get that you can’t compare prices across different economies with widely different tax structures (Euro-users may like to complain, however, that they’re paying 8% more than we are in the UK: that may well be illegal). What I am going to complain about is that it’s much more expensive than the alternatives. Apple’s rentals cost £4.49 for a new HD release. Okay, that’s not much better, but at least I don’t have to buy 1000 Microsoft “points” in order to pay for it (thus letting Microsoft hold on to £3.40 of my money for me). LOVEFiLM, though, is hugely more attractive from a price point-of-view, because their rentals are basically £2 each, including postage both ways. The price varies depending on exactly which package you use or how many credits you buy in advance, but it’s clearly structured around £2 per rental. So for £2 I could have rented the Blu-Ray edition of “I Am Legend”, with substantially better video and audio quality, and with commentaries, subtitles and special features (including, as I’ve just annoyingly read, an interesting-sounding alternate ending). There’s also no difference in price between renting DVDs and renting Blu-Ray discs at LOVEFiLM. Microsoft charges an extra £1.02 for the HD version of a film. They would argue that it costs more because they’re sending me more data, which is a fair point, but I just did the calculations using the prices that Amazon charges for their data hosting service, and it would cost approximately £0.25 to send me the extra 3.2GB for the HD file.

Conclusions?

So close, but yet so far. I feel like I’ve been waiting for too many years already for online movie rentals to become available, so it’s frustrating that both Apple and Microsoft have made available interesting but flawed products. I’m definitely going to stick with getting most of my movies from LOVEFiLM. I might have been able to accept the lower quality of the downloads for the sake of the convenience of being able to decide what to watch spontaneously, but paying more than double for the lower quality option is simply too hard to stomach on a regular basis. I might still use the Xbox Live Movie rentals occasionally, perhaps if I’m particularly in the mood for a certain film right now, for example, but I’ll continue to hope that Microsoft or Apple (or someone else) will fix the problems and put out the online rental service that I really want.

“it sets our military commanders the impossible task of proving to a civilian court … that evidence supports the confinement of each and every enemy prisoner”.

Wow. Imagine that; having to prove that you have a good reason for confining every prisoner! Every single one! What a bunch of unreasonable bastards those other Supreme Court judges are! Personally, I’d just take George’s word for it that they’re evil-doers and throw away the key, but I guess those other judges just ain’t patriotic enough to trust the President!

So, did she do any of that?

NO SHE FUCKING DID NOT!

She continued to campaign! She continued to make her claim that she has more of the popular vote. That claim requires you to ignore the caucus states which do not release official vote totals. The claim isn’t accepted by anyone outside her campaign, but she refuses to stop making it. She continued to make her case that she’d do better in a general election. That claim doesn’t have any merit either, because, as the pollsters themselves say, polls five months before an election are not predictive. Even if it did have merit, it doesn’t matter! She lost the primary! At one point her supporters started chanting “Denver! Denver!”, indicating that she should continue to campaign all the way to the national convention in August, trying to change the minds of the Super Delegates who could still theoretically change sides. Did she calm them down and say that she wouldn’t dream of being so silly? Nope! She just smiled!

I can’t believe how stubborn Clinton is being. It’s a huge missed opportunity. It’s disgustingly ungracious. She said that she’s not making any decisions tonight, but there isn’t a decision to make! When the referee blows the whistle and you have less points, you don’t get to decide if you lost or not! You get on with it and shake hands with the winner… unless you’re a complete asshat.

GRRRRRRRR!

Calming thoughts… calming thoughts…

But let’s look on the bright side. Today is the first time that a black candidate has been nominated for President by a major American political party. That’s a wonderful achievement that will be remembered for a long time. If Obama goes on to win the general election (and he could use a little help, Clintons!), then that will be remembered forever.

Firstly, I need to prioritize. I find lots of different things interesting. I can follow my nose and click about on Wikipedia or YouTube and lose hours and hours. There are lots of different types of music that I enjoy. Same with films and games. So what happens is that I aimlessly stumble around, find something interesting and do that. Sounds fine, but I’m worried that in the process I’m missing out on the really good stuff by just focussing on whatever I have to hand. For instance, I bought the game Worms for the Xbox 360 a few weeks ago and spent a good few hours playing it. It’s a pretty cool game, but at the same time I’ve barely scratched the surface of Super Mario Galaxy, which is a sublimely good game that I’ve been meaning to make time for ever since it came out six months ago. So I think I need to simply up my standards and stop accepting “this is interesting” as adequate justification for spending time on things. It needs to be — y’know — very interesting. Today I walked past someone watching the news and there was an item about the most complete dinosaur skeleton ever found in the UK. I paused to watch it because it looked interesting, but then I decided that paleontology is not one of my primary interests, and if it was then there are probably more interesting things that I could be learning about it, so I kept on walking.

Secondly, I feel like I waste an awful lot of time by doing things slowly. In my life at the moment there are very few deadlines to worry about. That sounds very luxurious, and I don’t mean to complain, but it does make it hard to get things done. Tasks tend to fill up whatever time is available for them, and when there’s no deadline at all, that means that trivial things can end up taking far too long. I also tend to pay a lot of attention to detail in everything I do, even when it there really isn’t any benefit to doing so. By way of example, the other day I was shopping online for a USB hub. Those things are plain old commodities these days: the difference between the best one in the world and the worst one in the world is not worth caring about. But that didn’t stop me from spending a few hours looking for the best looking, best priced one from the most reputable seller and brand.

So what I’ve decided to do is to keep a log of what I spend my time doing. Each time I start a new activity I’m going to make a note of the time and what it is I’m doing. I highly doubt that I’ll ever go back and analyze the logs, but I hope that just the act of making them will help to focus my mind on how much time I’m spending on things and force me to make conscious decisions about what to do, rather than just idly procrastinating with whatever shininess catches my eye. I might also notice some useful trends. For instance, today it was 3 hours and 35 minutes from when I woke up to when I started working: far too long by any standard!

So… wish me luck! (PS The first person to point out the irony of writing about time-wasting on a blog that no one reads gets a free slap).

Flobots – Handlebars

I love it to pieces. It’s the first time in a long time that I’ve heard a song that is so interesting in a, let’s say, “literary” way, such that it provokes thoughts and invites interpretation. The video is also very appealing in its own right. The visual style reminds me of The Second Renaissance from The Animatrix.

The band’s latest album is being re-released on a major label on Tuesday in the US. It’s crazy cheap at Amazon; I didn’t realize that CDs had fallen in price so much over there (although the current exchange rate helps, of course).

Conservative radio talk show host and CNN contributor Bill Bennett spoke with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer about GOP mistakes on “Late Edition.” He told Blitzer that Republicans like Rep. Tom Davis are making a mistake by publicly admitting that the party is in trouble. “A lot of Republicans say we’re in serious trouble, we’re doing the wrong thing,” Bennett said. “They’ve got to stop behaving this way.”

Over the last few months Hillary Clinton has been running what her campaign has called a “kitchen-sink” strategy, whereby she has thrown everything she could think of at Obama, in the hope that something would stick. At times that has meant going very close to the line of what is acceptable to say about someone on the same team as you, and sometimes it meant blatantly crossing that line, like when she suggested that the other party’s nominee John McCain is more qualified than Obama (43 second video).

Well, guess what? That sort of thing works. Not well enough to win, in this instance, but well enough to galvanize her supporters sufficiently against Obama that over half of them said in the last exit polls that they wouldn’t vote for Obama in the general election. I was reading the user comments on an ABC News election article a few days ago, and some of the Clinton supporters are vitriolic about Obama. I probably don’t need to say it, but that’s a disaster.

So it seems to me that Clinton now wields an enormous amount of power. There’s no doubt that she’ll support Obama when he’s finally nominated, but I think the enthusiasm and believability of that support will be crucial. I really hope that she spends every day for the next six months telling the world that Obama is the best thing since sliced bread, because I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that her influence over her supporters could very well decide the result of the general election.

It’s nearly exactly the way I described such a thing in my blog post in January last year (I was $1 out on the pricing).

So, I guess Steve reads my blog… or maybe they actually read their “Contact us” feedback over at Apple? Crazy talk. Either way, I clearly rule.

(By the way, I said in that post that I’d be “there in a flash” if they made such a program. Well, since then I’ve soured on the iPhone, so I probably won’t be there be at all, in actual fact. Why don’t I like the iPhone anymore? Well, it’s missing some important stuff, like 3G, a proper keyboard, and upgradeable storage, and it’s missing some things that would be nice, like GPS, MMS, and Bluetooth headphone support. But the main problem is that it’s ludicrously expensive. The cheapest price plan available is £35/month with an 18 month contract and the phone costs £269 on top of that. That’s £899! Granted, that includes phone service, so if you use your phone a lot it might work out reasonably okay. For me it’s a disaster. I don’t use my phone very much at all, so I use a pay-as-you-go price plan and spend a few pounds a month on it. So for me the premium that I’d pay for using an iPhone would be ridiculously large. I guess I’ll just have to stick with my new contract-free, unlockable Windows Mobile phone that has every one of the features mentioned above, and yet costs less than even the £269 basic price of the iPhone.)

I was planning to get to the festival as soon as possible after it opened on Wednesday morning but, as it turned out, that would have meant about 2 hours sleep and having to rush packing so I picked the sensible option and left later. Unfortunately I left a bit too late so I hit the early evening rush hour and my train ticket was no longer valid so I had to wait at Paddington for an hour and a half for the end of the peak time period. I eventually arrived at the festival just as the sun was going down at about half-past nine.

I had been looking for good places to camp on the map beforehand and one of those that I’d picked out was right near the festival gates, but when I got there it was a little crowded so I went looking for other places (carrying my tent, clothes, wellies and all the rest).

There was a bizarre phenomenon happening on Wednesday night where spontaneous cheering would erupt somewhere and ripple across the site. I guess we were all just chuffed to be there.

Here’s what the Pyramid Stage (the main one) looks like before everything has started:

After an hour or two of walking around I couldn’t find anywhere better to camp and by that time my arms were killing me so I trudged back up to near the entrance and found a spot just big enough for my tent. It went up without much hassle, which was good because I was expecting it to be difficult in the dark. By the time I’d put the tent up it was about 1am and I decided to give my aching shoulders a rest and try and get some sleep.

It turns out my choice of camping position wasn’t that brilliant. I was right next to a path which had people walking past all night, but actually they weren’t very loud or bothersome all weekend. The much bigger problem was that Jeeps kept driving past, one every couple of hours, and they woke me up every time for the first couple of nights. I also had a slight fear that one of them was going to come off the road for some reason and run straight over my tent, but I got over that fear eventually.

On Thursday I just spent the whole day walking around, trying to see as much as possible and get my bearings. The site is just colossal, which I knew already from looking at the map and from hearing that it takes an hour to walk from one end to the other. Even knowing that I was still surprised and hugely impressed by the size of the thing. I’m an absolutely useless navigator so I was constantly checking my map all the way through the festival. I don’t think I saw anyone else checking a map the whole time, so either everyone else has amazing navigation skills or they don’t really care where they are (probably a bit of both).

I found a stall selling “Vegan & Vegetarian” food, and it was nice to find that early on because I always knew there were somewhere I could go to get some food without worrying about it. There were three stalls run by the same business around the place and I had just about everything on their menu over the weekend. All the food was way more expensive than I was expecting (£3.90 for a burger without any fries or anything). There were a few “bargains” to be had around a place, like a liter of water for £1.50, instead of the usual £1.80-£2 for a half liter at most of the stalls. There was also a stand selling fresh fruit for 50p a piece which would have come in very handy in a budgetary crisis. I reckon I spent a bit less than £15 a day on food, and I had taken some filling snacks with me (two chocolate bars, a half loaf of bread and several packets of peanuts and Bombay mix).

On Thursday night the open-air cinema started showing films. It was a bit cold but I watched Ghostbusters (which I’d shamefully never seen before) and The Blues Brothers. Both were very cool with tons of audience participation and singing along (although the guy who shouted out “Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re our only hope” whenever Carrie Fisher came on got a bit tiresome after the third time). Pulp Fiction (one of my all-time favorites) was also showing on Thursday night in a second smaller cinema screen inside a marquee, but unfortunately it wasn’t starting until around 3am. I had a peek in at about a quarter to four, and there were still a few hundred people there, but I’d already seen two films that night and was starting to feel the cold and tiredness so I didn’t stay very long. Still, I saw the whole Vince and Mia sequence so that was probably the best bit to watch. Some people got up and danced in front of the screen during the dancing scene and that was fun.

Watching some films was a nice way to spend an evening, but to be honest by this point I was getting a little bored, so I was ready on Friday for the festival to start properly.

In the afternoon I found myself at The Acoustic Stage and watched someone called “Emmy The Great“. She had a beautiful voice and had these beautiful sounding songs, at least some of which, if I’m not very much mistaken, had subtly filthy lyrics, which is nice. I’ve just noticed on her MySpace that she lists the first three Weezer albums as her (only) influences so that’s always a plus.

This is what the Pyramid Stage looks like in the early evening when someone is coming on stage soon:

This is The Other Stage shortly afterwards when someone was playing. It’s not quite as impressive but still a huge number of people.

In the afternoon I went to see Bright Eyes on that stage. I only really knew one of his songs and I watched a couple of others on YouTube before I left for the festival but it was pretty cool nonetheless. I’d like to get some of his stuff soon (particularly this song and this one).

So at about half past nine I was wandering about (I didn’t have anything I particularly wanted to see until the headliners) and I found myself at The Park. This was a new area at this year’s festival and it’s a little self-contained mini-festival run by Michael Eavis’ daughter Emily. It had some really nice touches like a bunch of sheltered sofas to sit on, and a 20 meter tall viewing tower which is apparently the highest point on the whole site. I was queueing up to go up the tower (about a 45 minute wait) when the compere came on stage and announced that Eavis himself would be coming on to cut a ribbon to officially launch the Park Stage and announcing a very special guest. Sounded cool, I thought, but when he did come on stage he only announced that Lily bloody Allen was the special guest! I was second from the front of the queue but I abandoned it and trundled down to the stage (it was mercifully easy to get to the front) and watched Lily do a really nice 5-song acoustic set. Unfortunately you can’t see it in the only decent picture I got below, but she was wearing these nifty pure-white wellies to match the dress: looked very good.

I had an inkling that Lily was playing a secret show because even though there was nothing on the official line-up, she had an entry on her MySpace tour listings for something on Friday at Glastonbury (as well as her official slot on the Pyramid Stage on Saturday). Even so, it was pure fluke that I happened to be at the right place at the right time so it was a lovely serendipity.

This is one of the many little art installations that were about the place at the festival. It’s made entirely out of sand (no, I don’t know what she did when it rained).

So, after Lily finished I grabbed some falafel for sustenance and rushed back over to the Pyramid Stage for the Arctic Monkeys. They’re one of my favorite bands and I’ve not seen them live before so I was really looking forward to it. I’m afraid none of the pictures came out well so you’ll just have to imagine what it looked like… Well done. The show was really great; I had a decent position with enthusiastic people around and the band played all my favorite songs.

This is what the Pyramid Stage arena looked like a few hours after they’d finished playing:

The mud is obviously the main thing that gets written about regarding the festival, but honestly it wasn’t that bad, from my point of view. The vast majority of the rain was during the night and the days and evenings were almost all comfortably warm. Wearing wellies was not fun; they hurt my feet in all manner of ways, and after half a day of wearing them I had to buy a new pair that fit better (20 bloody quid; it was quite painful to hand that money over). The mud makes it take three times as long to walk anywhere, but I could learn to live with that. All in all it was hardly ideal, but well worth it for the fun of the festival.

I’d heard that one of the “must-do” things at Glastonbury is to watch the sunrise from the King’s Meadow/Sacred Space. This is a grassy hill (and it miraculously stayed pretty grassy even after all the rain!) at the southern end of the site. There are a couple of art installations (photos below) and some protest banners around the edge but it’s basically a place where people sit and relax and light fires.

There were also a bunch of people inhaling something from balloons, which I didn’t know what it was at the time. I’ve now learnt that it’s laughing gas (nitrous oxide), which is some sort of nearly-legal high (legal to buy and possess it because it’s used in things like whipped-cream dispensers, but probably not legal to sell it for the purposes of inhaling it recreationally). There were a couple of people walking around with their little dispensers filling up balloons for people for a quid a go. That’s the only overt drug-selling that I saw in the whole festival, perhaps because the area is a triangular hill enclosed on two sides, so when you’re sitting at the top you could see any police coming from a great distance.

So, back to the chronology: When I got back to my tent on Friday night/Saturday morning at about 2am it looked like it was going to be a dry night so I thought I’d get a couple hours of kip and get up at 4am to make it down there for the 4:55 sunrise (yes, I looked it up before I left). Of course, I failed to realize that it actually starts getting light long before the actual sunrise, but it was still worth going to see hundreds of people chilling out at 5am with some guy pounding away on a drum.

This is Stonehenge made out of Portaloos, put up by Banksy and with the graffiti added by festival attendees:

Some other bits of art in the vicinity:

Perhaps this is a prediction of the effect of climate change on sea levels? Or perhaps it’s just a cow in a tree…

Here is the Pyramid Stage arena at around 6am on Saturday on the way back to my tent. This is probably my favorite photo. I like the litter scattered about in the distance:

This is the open-air cinema and the tent in the background is the smaller “Marquee Cinema”. Notice that there’s still some grass to be found at this point.

Here’s my tent. It was sold as a four-person tent but it suited me quite well as a spacious one-person tent. The porch in the front was good for keeping my wellies in so that it was mostly mud-free inside.

Here are some other tents in the vicinity. I was up in the northwest of the site in an area called “Wicket Ground”. Overall I’d probably recommend it, but being right next to the road wasn’t ideal (as mentioned above) and the films at the nearby cinema go on until at least half-past three in the morning and — depending on the prevailing winds — they can be heard quite clearly from here (to be more precise, the rear channels of the surround sound can be heard quite clearly so there’s lots of rumbling and crashing and other sound effects, but the dialogue is not nearly as noticeable).

So, I went back to bed at around 6am on Saturday and got up again in the early afternoon. At this point I was getting quite used to the noise and didn’t have much trouble sleeping through most things. Also the sun must have been mercifully mild because on some days it was roasting inside the tent by 9am.

It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen my reflection since I left arrived on Wednesday (there simply weren’t any mirrors about). I wanted to check if my hair was a mess yet to see whether I should tie it back, so I took this hugely flattering self-portrait:

On that evidence I amazingly decided that another day with the hair down would be fine. Oh well.

I was quite excited on Saturday because two of the bands I was most looking forward to were on. First up was CSS at 15:50 on The Other Stage and then Lily Allen immediately afterwards at 16:30 at The Pyramid.

CSS were bloody fantastic. They were probably my favourite discovery of last year but I’ve shamefully managed to miss all the live performances they’ve done in London so I was eager to make amends. The lead singer — Lovefoxxx — is a marvelous performer. She was wearing this technicolored skintight suit and danced about the stage in the way that everybody would dance if there were no inhibitions or self-conciousness in the world. They also played a cover of L7’s “Pretend We’re Dead” which suited their sound very well (there’s a mashup of “Pretend We’re Dead” and the CSS song “Alala” on CSS’s MySpace).

After CSS I ran (yes, ran, in the mud) over to The Pyramid Stage to watch Lily Allen. FYI it takes 9 and a half minutes to do that journey in a hurry when a band is just finishing (so there’s a lot of foot traffic) and the mud is as thick as it’s gunna get.

I got there half-way through the first song and I approached from the side at the front of the crowd which worked out alright, but not brilliantly, ‘cos as you can see I was near the front and could just about see Lily, but I couldn’t see either of the screens because just to my right there was a tall wall.

It was nice to see her playing her main stage performance because she’s a Glastonbury veteran (she was 5 weeks old the first time she went and has been to every festival since) and it was clearly quite special for her to finally be there as a performer.

Check out below who was in the audience for Lily’s performance:

“Only me!”

There’s a bit of a story there because he (comedian Harry Enfield, if you don’t recognize him) was in a relationship with Lily’s mum and lived with them for a time so he was a stepdad figure to Lily for a while.

This photo is of the one of the “Herbal Highs” stands (“Legal Ecstacy! Legal Speed!”). The sign in the middle of the picture made me laugh out loud so I thought I’d take a photo.

I fell asleep early on Saturday evening, which is perhaps not very surprising given the running between stages (I actually ran back to The Other Stage after Lily Allen in hopes of seeing The Klaxons, but they were just finishing by the time I got there). I woke up at about 21:30 and had a look in the programme for something to do. To my annoyance Annie Mac’s DJ set had already been going on for an hour. She’s my favorite DJ on the radio. She plays a wonderful mix of all sorts of dance, electronic and alternative stuff, and is very unpretentious and “accessible”, despite the fact that I know just about zero about dance music (I couldn’t tell you the difference between House and Drum & Bass, or identify examples of either).

I hoofed off down to the Dance Area (which was mercifully close to my tent) and caught the last 15 minutes of her set. I was amused by how suprised I was when she said the F word on stage. The DJs on Radio 1 aren’t allowed to swear (even late at night) so it was strangely jarring to hear someone whose voice you know well saying rude words for the first time: very much like hearing your parents swear.

After Annie Mac I had a bit of a look round the Dance Area and Mika was finishing off so I caught his last two songs (including Grace Kelly). He was one of a few artists who were playing multiple times throughout the festival on different stages.

So that was it for Saturday, oddly enough. I wasn’t enthusiastic about any of the headliners, so I decided to go see a film and get a relatively early night. The film was Hot Fuzz which was showing at 23:15 and was apparently to be followed by a Q&A with “stars from the film”, which I presumed meant Simon Pegg and Nick Frost so that sounded fun. Unfortunately when I got there the sound was down way too low (I later learned this was probably because unusual weather was making the sound carry to the village and they had to turn it down to comply with the festival license; The Killers on The Pyramid apparently had the same problem). I could just about hear the dialogue but every 10th word or so was inaudible so it was an effort to piece it together. After about 10 minutes it was too frustrating so I left and got a very early night and a very welcome 12 hours of sleep.

On Sunday afternoon on the way back from the toilets I snapped a picture of this amusingly-soiled tent, but it was right next to the camp site helpers’ caravan so I have my suspicions that it was set up deliberately as a warning/modern art piece:

There wasn’t any music of interest to me on Sunday afternoon so instead I went down to the “Left Field” tent (left as in left-wing politics) and went to see Tony Benn speaking (another of those “must-see” Glastonbury occasions that I’d heard about). He’s a ledge, even if I don’t agree with everything he says and despite the fact that he has some unusual views about Hiroshima (I can’t find a good quotation online, but he basically said that the US dropped the bombs despite the Japanese having already offered to surrender. Needless to say, that is not the mainstream historical view). I still found several things he said that I could enthusiastically applaud to (like his condemnation of the cancelling of the BAE/Saudi Arabia probe).

After Tony Benn were the nice surprises of Shazia Mirza (who was wickedly funny: “Primark is like bisexuality, no-one wants to admit to it, but we all have a dabble”) and Mark Thomas (who is just as angry as he was when his show was on TV, and thankfully just as funny with it). Afterwards some band came on but I’d been put in the mood for comedy so I headed for the Cabaret Stage to see what was going on there. Shortly after I got there a guy calling himself “Reverend Obadiah Steppenwolfe III”; a southern-US preacher character who is extremely un-PC. He pulled off the not-unformidable task of actually offending me, so kudos to him for that.

I only caught about 10 minutes of that performance before I left because the next band I wanted to see was coming up soon and I really wanted to get a good position.

One of the downsides of solo festival-going: no pictures of yourself! But never fear: timer technology and a conveniently-tall menu board outside a café to the rescue:

Next up were The Go! Team, who were one of my favourite bands of 2005. I’ve seen them a few times but they were always great fun so I was looking forward to seeing them again. They played at the last Glastonbury in 2005 but apparently they suffered heartbreaking equipment failure during their set, so I think they were compensated by getting a higher billing this time around than their popularity would normally dictate.

They rose to the occasion brilliantly though. Ninja, the frontwoman, spends much of the set enthusiastically encouraging the audience to dance more (even in the rain!) which could potentially be annoying but it’s just the right side of nagging. They made the risky move of playing lots of new songs off their soon-to-be-released album, but they all had that “single quality” whereby they sound good the first time you hear them, so it worked fine. The rain was coming down during this performance: enough to have the poncho hood up but not enough to call it heavy rain. It was alright, though; I think the band’s summer-filled sound was a fine antidote for the weather.

The trick to getting a reasonably good position is basically to be in the area and ready when the band before the one you want to see goes off stage. Then, approach from the side near the front and keep a hawkish eye out for streams of people leaving the area. When the stream stops you can zoom in before the gap closes and get closer without causing any significant bother because you didn’t have to push past anyone. Just repeat that and jump into any spaces that appear and pretty soon you’ll be acceptably close to the front.

I have to admit that on Sunday afternoon I did consider leaving early after The Go! Team. My sleeping bag was, let’s say, dirty, so I wasn’t keen to get back into it. I might have just been able to make it to the last train back to London, but it would have been a horrendous rush and everything would have had to have gone perfectly. In the end I was glad I stayed to see one of the final headliners so that I could say I had the full Glastonbury experience from Wednesday to Monday. I turned my sleeping bag inside out on Sunday night and got a few more hours use out of it before chucking it on a skip on Monday morning.

I managed to go the whole festival without having to use any of the legendary chemical toilets or “long drops”. “How?”, you ask? In the north of the site, up by the farm, there is this wonderful sanctuary of civilization in the form of a block of actual flushing toilets. It’s out of the way and not sign-posted so it seems that not many people know about it. I didn’t have to queue once, although to be fair I only saw any toilet queues about two or three times throughout the whole festival.

The other secret to my excretory success was an apparently recent invention called the Travel John. They are little resealable bags that contain a gel that absorbs liquid, and together with wet wipes and hand-sanitizing gel they let me go number one in the privacy of my own tent, which was frankly a godsend (the sound isn’t as loud as you’d think so no-one outside could tell what was going on). If you do ever use a Travel John in a tent, be sure to be careful when you’ve just woken up, otherwise things might not go where they’re supposed to, and you might end up with a sleeping bag that you’ll want to throw out (don’t make that face! You didn’t want me to sugar-coat the festival experience did you?)

So, we’re up to Sunday night. There were a couple of things that I wanted to see so I had to choose between Pendulum and KT Tunstall (hey, I have broad tastes!). I went for Ms. Tunstall at The Acoustic Tent, mainly because I had doubts about being able to see Pendulum and get back to the main area for the headliners. When I got to The Acoustic Tent it wasn’t so great. It was raining so the tent was packed and the audience area for that stage is completely flat, so it was very difficult to see anything. I decided to leave after about 10 minutes to get something to eat and concentrate my efforts on getting a good position for the headliner. So all that was left was to pick which one to see. I went for The Chemical Brothers over The Who, since I only know one song by The Who, and I could think of four from The Chemical Brothers (they didn’t play my favorite, though!)

I’ve never been to see a dance act live before so it was quite a strange experience. The two guys stand on a dark stage bashing away on synthesizers and sequencers and twiddling knobs on racks of audio equipment for an hour and a half. One of them didn’t even seem to be doing much of the bashing, although maybe they were changing roles for different songs and I just didn’t notice.

A major part of the performance is the light show which accompanies the music. It’s displayed on the normal stage screens as well as on a giant screen that fills the whole width and height of the stage area and plays video pieces that the music is synchronized to. Many of them were beautiful trippy patterns but there was one of a grotesque clown face that I really didn’t like.

The guy standing next to me in the crowd was popping pills which I thought was terribly clichéd. There was also a guy standing behind me who spoiled things by continuously bumping into me with his backpack, or his shoulders or whatever. He was one of those people who insists on turning around and facing the wrong way and having conversations and generally being the worst sort of person to stand near in a crowd. He didn’t respond to any of the usual ways of dealing with people continuously bumping into you (standing firmly so that they absorb the brunt of the impact rather than you, and looking round with a severe look on your face), so I guess he was out of his head too. Despite that, it was still a very worthwhile experience; I’ve learned that I can bluff my way through a dance act performance by rocking my shoulders around a little bit and bouncing up and down for the bassy parts, so maybe I can go see Daft Punk one day.

Here’s a rubbish picture of a part where the screens were dark but some of the lasers were blasting out:

After the headliners there was still a certain amount of activity about the place, so I thought I’d head down to The Park and try going up the Ribbon Tower again. The queue wasn’t quite as bad this time, and the nighttime view was still pretty impressive, what with all the little rows of lights:

So that was the end of the festival. Unfortunately it was raining quite a lot during The Chemical Brothers so despite the poncho my jeans were quite wet. I went back to the tent and got a few hours sleep. All through the night I could hear the announcer at the nearby coach station calling out over a megaphone, “coach 105 to Leeds, now boarding” and such. Still, I got a couple of hours of sleep before waking up at 6:15. I’d followed some good advice I’d read and kept a clean set of clothes to go home in. At least I thought I did. I couldn’t find the clean pair of jeans and briefly entertained the idea that they might have been stolen (yeah, ripped 522s are a real hot ticket for the tent thieves… They don’t make them any more; maybe they’re vintage!) Turns out, of course, that they were still sitting in my wardrobe when I got back home. So, unfortunately, I had to put back on my slightly damp jeans to go home in. Next time I go to something like this I’ll definitely be investing in some waterproof trousers and a waterproof jacket. Any concept of style goes out the window very soon after the rain starts and practicality quickly becomes king.

It took me a little longer than I was expecting to throw out my rubbish and get everything ready to go. Then I got out of the tent and unfortunately it was raining quite hard at this point. I didn’t have much choice so I got to work packing up the tent. That would have been difficult wearing the poncho or even my coat so unfortunately I was doing this in just my hoody (and the hood doesn’t stay up, so bare-headed). Have you noticed how many times I’ve used the word “unfortunately” recently? Yeah, there’s more to come. Taking the tent down was less than fun but it all went into the bag eventually. The zip wouldn’t do up but no-one’s perfect. At this point I actually uttered a few expletives out loud directed at the now-vanquished tent and took one last picture to record my achievement:

I headed off to the nearest camp site helpers to donate my tent (apparently they’re used for camping trips by youth groups and the like). I was glad to get that weight off my shoulders so I was travelling significantly lighter on the way back than I was on the outward journey.

I headed over to the bus and coach station to catch my bus to the train station, which would surely be waiting for me when I arrived, just like the one on the way to festival, right? Not so much… It took me several minutes to even find the correct queue for the train station bus, and the queue looked painfully long, even though it was only about 7:30 at this point and the vast majority of tents were still up in the camp site, so I assumed that I’d gotten away early.

The next two hours were easily, hands-down the worst part of the festival. The queue was outside in the exposed cold and still heavy rain. The ground was about two inches of water, so I didn’t want to put my bags down for fear of getting the contents drenched. The queue was almost entirely a sea of silent misery and disappointment, with the exception of a handful of people who managed to quietly sing some ironic songs (“I’m walking on sunshine, whoahoahoah” etc.) as we got close to the goal. The insides of my wellies were wet at this point, so each step was uncomfortable and standing still wasn’t much better. All I could do was occupy my mind with tasks like trying to remember all the member states of the EU (I memorized them for no particular reason a year or two ago) or remembering all the acts I’d seen over the weekend and putting them in order of coolness.

Eventually we got to a bus and the driver looked at the boarding passengers with a look of sheer pity, which was welcome, frankly. The bus was nice and warm and the collective feeling of relief on the twenty minute ride to the train station was palpable. Along the roads there were numerous people who’d decided (as I had considered doing) to just walk to the train station. Thankfully though, I remembered looking up the journey on Google Maps before I left, and remembered that it was nine miles, which is a very long way even when you’re not carrying three bags. The number of people walking along the side of the road dwindled as we got closer to the station so I don’t know if anyone actually made it along that route. I imagine the misery involved there was even greater than for those of us waiting in the bus queue.

When the bus pulled up to the station, the feeling of relief vanished immediately. There was another queue for the train and this one looked nearly as long as the bus queue back at the festival! However, I had forgotten an important fact, which is that trains have a lot more seats than buses, and it actually wasn’t more than 15 minutes before I was sitting on a train to Swindon. At Swindon there was a connecting train for Paddington waiting for us to arrive, and from there the journey was plain sailing and relatively warm and comfortable. It felt so good at the Paddington tube station to be walking in my soft trainers on hard ground instead of walking in my hard wellies on soft mud as I had been all weekend. I got back home in the middle of the afternoon but unfortunately over the rest of the day I felt a cold developing and it arrived the next morning so I’ve been nursing it for the four days since then.

The festival makes a big deal of trying to persuade people to use public transport (for the environmental reasons, but also because the huge local traffic during the festival is a big issue for the council who issue the festival’s license). However, it would be impossible to recommend it to anyone after that experience. The queues may be bad if you leave at the wrong time in a car (apparently it can take 9 hours in the busiest periods), but cars have roofs and heaters and I’ll bet that no-one in a car caught a cold on the way out. I’d also bet that a significant percentage of those travelling by coach or train did. From what I’ve read I was actually an early bird and the wait for buses and coaches did get much worse during the rest of Monday. The main problem would be solved by putting huge marquees over the waiting areas, and I’m going to write to suggest that, but I don’t know whether the cost would be reasonable or not.

Despite the ending being disappointing, overall I had a really great time at the festival. I was hugely impressed by the whole thing, not least the scale, which is hard to convey. I saw loads of great acts and a few times I had that rare feeling that I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else in the world at that moment.

Camping is not my thing, but it was made tolerable by the Travel Johns and finding the proper toilets. It also wasn’t as bad as you might think going to the festival on my own; the whole time I was either doing something, on the way somewhere or too tired to do anything but sleep, so there wasn’t a lot of time to sit about feeling lonely. It would have been nice to share it all, of course, but going alone does have the advantage that you don’t have to negotiate what to do between several people with conflicting priorities.

Will I go again next year? It’s hard to imagine another festival lineup being as good as this one from my point of view, but who knows. I’ll wait for the memories of the camping and the travelling to fade a little before thinking about next year. I had originally planned to hire a campervan this year, but my finances didn’t work out quite to plan so I couldn’t do that, but it seems like an even better idea now than it did before going. The thought of having a warm, soft bed to go to would make a significant difference, I think, and driving right up to the parking space without having to carry a single thing sounds hugely luxurious. Someone suggested that the campervan areas at festivals are less social than the regular camping areas, and I suspect that’s true but I don’t think it’s important. At Glastonbury, at least, if you’re in a camping area then you’re missing something interesting that’s happening elsewhere: the only good reason to go back to the tent is to sleep.

But nevermind that — that’s not what this post is about. The hawk-eyed amongst you may have noticed that the letters U, T and C don’t actually stand for Coordinated Universal Time; they’re in the wrong order. So what the heck do they stand for? Well, nothing.

Y’see, back in 1970 some scientists got together to figure out the details of the new time system. Some people wanted to call it CUT for coordinated universal time, and some other people wanted to call it TUC, for temps universel coordonné. In the end they couldn’t come to an agreement so they decided to call it UTC (which nobody wanted and which doesn’t stand for anything).

Some people would call that a compromise, but I’d call that bullshit. In a rational world, they’d have taken a vote and used whichever one was more popular. In a less rational world, they’d have flipped a coin and decided randomly. But in the actual world, they came up with a meaningless third option and chose that instead. I wonder if that tells us something about human nature. When faced with an opponent, we’d rather both lose than have the spoils go to the enemy. I suppose a stalemate beats a loss any day of the week.

Last week I was looking around online trying to see if I could open a bank account in the USA because I think this would be useful for my business. I’d like to be able to withdraw money from PayPal in dollars and earn interest on it without the risk and cost of converting it to a different currency (if you were wondering: no, the business isn’t quite ready to launch yet, and yes, I am getting ahead of myself). I eventually found a bank account that’s available to foreigners, and I thought I’d blog about it, because it doesn’t seem to be well-known about and there are a few places online who are trying to sell this information for between $10 and $250.

The bank is E*TRADE, which is an online stock broker which has diversified into other financial services. Oddly, I couldn’t find their bank accounts by just browsing around their site (I suspect they’re selectively showing information based on the location of the visitor), but a Google search for “etrade bank account” turned up the right page. They offer a choice between two checking accounts which both come with a debit card but have different rates of interest and different minimum balances, and a savings account with a higher rate of interest but no debit card. International users have to apply by post (here’s the application form) and are asked to phone them first (I believe this is just so that they can tell you to enclose a photocopy of you passport as ID, but best to phone and check).

So I Googled RipGuard and found their page advertising it. It’s a system that’s supposed to stop people from being able to rip their DVDs onto computers, either to make copies or to convert them into smaller files for sharing online. That’s been possible ever since the weak copy-protection that’s built into the DVD standard was broken back in 1999. So the first paragraph of Macrovision’s page is:

Each year, studios lose up to one billion dollars through the digital hole. We created RipGuard DVD to help you get most of it back.

Okay, they only claim to be able to get “most” of it back. That’s a nice way of saying “okay, so we can’t actually prevent copying”, and it’s good that they admit that right off the bat. Still, if they can get back most of a billion dollars, that’s still a heck of a lot, so let’s keep reading. Two paragraphs later:

RipGuard DVD does this by blocking ripping among the majority of real-world DeCSS ripper market share. Implemented today, RipGuard DVD gives studios back 97% of this lost revenue.

Whoah! Back up there. They claim to be able to block the majority of ripping software. To then say that this will give studios back 97% of their lost revenue is an unbelievable non sequitur. With digital copying and Internet distribution, only one person needs to be able to make a copy and then the whole system is broken. It doesn’t matter to the person downloading whether the original disc had RipGuard on it, or whether it was kept in a safe surrounded with hungry dogs and men with guns. It only matters that some James Bond figured out how to get at the delicious data inside, and so now everyone can. There’s also the minor issue that people aren’t idiots. If someone’s ripping software stops working, then they’re perfectly capable of going back to wherever they got it from and getting the new version that fixes the problem.

So, Mr. Macrovision, you’re either stunningly incompetent if you didn’t realise that, or shockingly dishonest if you did. I’m feeling generous; you can choose which.

Of course, there are a few disappointing things left for the malcontents among us:

• The unprotected tracks are 20p/30¢ more than the protected versions, but thankfully the unprotected versions of albums are the same price as they always were. Suprisingly, there is an option to “upgrade” your old tracks by paying the difference between the unprotected price and the protected price. I’ve got at least 16 or so EMI tracks that I’ve bought from iTunes and I’ll be upgrading them all on day one just to show support for the new DRM-free world.
• I’d still personally prefer that the tracks were losslessly compressed (meaning exactly the same quality that you get on a CD), but 256kbps AAC is certainly an improvement and, from what I understand, even people with golden ears and expensive Hi-Fis start to be satisfied at that sort of bitrate, so I may have to grudgingly accept it for the convenience of not having to go out and buy CDs and meticulously rip them any more.
• Who forgot to invite the indies? Independent labels have been selling DRM-free music for years, so it’s a shame that they were left out today. I guess they’ll be added soon, but probably not in time for the new Arctic Monkeys album release, which is a shame because that would have been a fine test-case that might have helped persuade the other majors to get on board.
• The best part of the above interview is when Steve is asked about whether the same thing will happen with video. It’s funny because he knows he’s talking absolute shit, and I think it pains him slightly to have to say it. Don’t worry though Steve, I’ve got you covered. Here’s what he actually wanted to say: “Well, as you know, I’m on the board of directors at Disney, and we own the rights to a huge amount of video (and not much audio, funnily enough). Unfortunately, I haven’t yet been able to convince a majority of my buddies over there that we should sell it sans-DRM (and believe me, I’ve tried), so thank God for this guy sitting next me. I’d also love to add a feature to iTunes which would rip your DVDs and put them on your iPod, but because of the DMCA I can’t do that either. But don’t worry, today is clearly the beginning of the end of DRM so it’s only a matter of time.”

Even with those little niggles, today is still a great day for consumers and — I suspect history will show — for the music industry, as well. So props to EMI, props to Apple, and props to the ability of common sense to eventually overcome even the most hardened control-freakery.

Okay… technically, yes, that is a “Face Print”, but it just so happens that the face in question is the fricking Unabomber. Now, I suppose there might be one or two people out there who want to wear a t-shirt featuring a forensic sketch of a loony revolutionary terrorist, but perhaps the shop could lend a helping hand to the uninitiated who don’t recognise the picture. Instead the advice given is “Wear this printed tee with combat trousers and a leather jacket for bang-on-trend style this season”… Great.

Anyone with working eyes, ears, hormones or a nose should be able to tell that today is the first day of spring (here in South-East England). Well done Northern Hemisphere; we made it through another winter! Couldn’t have done it without you. Now we get to spend the next six months waking up happy instead of glum.

…Yay!

The story behind the story is that they found some salmonella in M&S’s houmous and apparently every supermarket in the country gets theirs from the same place, so this island is now virtually dry (in regards to chickpea-based middle-eastern dips).

As I said, this is one of the best parts of my week (yes, I know, I need a hobby/girlfriend), so I’d be damned if some foodborne bacteria was gunna take it away from me. I’ve read the ingredients list enough times to know what houmous is made of, and hey, who cares if I haven’t got the second-most important ingredient (sesame seeds): it’ll probably taste fine. So, when I got up on Saturday afternoon I spent about 2 hours (yes, really) making my own:

It actually kinda looked like the real thing (wrong colour, but you can’t have everything). So guess how it tasted? Yup, absolutely vile. For some reason I decided to ignore all the quantities on all the recipes I read online and just winged it on instinct (alright, the reason is that I couldn’t be bothered to look up what a “cup” means — with hindsight, a false economy of time). I added waaay too much garlic, and it turns out that the sesame seeds are actually pretty important. Oh well, live and learn.

To top it off, I managed to destroy the blender in the process, which from the look of the thing had been a part of this family longer than I have.

I had it down on my calendar as being on BBC2, but actually it’s getting its first run on the Sci-Fi Channel. No problem: I’ve got that channel, and I’ll just start watching it late so that I can fast-forward through the ads. So 22:16 rolls around and I flick the TV on and find that the fine, upstanding folks at the Sci-Fi Channel have decided to broadcast the show in not-so-glorious 4:3 (“fullscreen”) instead of its native widescreen. So, I sat down and watched it, in all it’s missing-one-quarter-of-the-picture crappiness…

…No, of course I didn’t. I went off to see what’s cooking on the Internets and it took 5 minutes to find a download of the first episode in high-definition (widescreen, of course) with 5.1 surround sound. Oh, and naturally the next 15 episodes are there too. Gee, that’s a real hard decision you’re giving me Mr. Sci-Fi Channel!

I do have a little bit of sympathy for content owners in this day and age: after all, it is difficult to compete with ‘free’. But they could at least give themselves a fighting chance by offering a product that is as good as the free version.

(Yes, the more observant of you will have noticed that this post is just saying the same thing as that post I made the other day, and even uses the same annoying sarcastic style. Hey, as a wise man once said: if it’s worth saying once, it’s worth saying repeatedly until your friends get really bored of your blog and don’t want to be your friends anymore.)

(I was thinking about mottos because I drove past my old school earlier today and I stopped to have a look and noticed their motto on the sign outside. It’s Labor Omnia Vincit ‘Work Conquers All’, which is a little too close to Arbeit macht Frei for my liking.)