If you subscribe to my combined RSS feed (and even if you don’t), then you may have seen this story in The Guardian about Morrissey being in talks to offer his services for this year’s Eurovision song contest in Finland.  "How good would this be?!" I excitedly emailed to my old friend Jammy.  The prospect of El Moz taking on (and, naturally, conquering) all comers on a European stage.  For too long the UK has repeatedly despatched a succession of no-hopers to represent this fine nation, whilst simultaneously producing some of the best music and musicians anywhere on earth – it just didn’t add up.

So, fast-forward a couple of weeks, and imagine my disappointment at learning of the six shortlisted acts competing for the honour of representing us in Helsinki this May:

• Scooch (self-proclaimed "this generation’s Bucks Fizz")
• Liz McClarnon (ex-Atomic Kitten, and former Celebrity Love Island castaway)
• Hawkins & Brown (ex Darkness lead singer and friend)
• Brian Harvey (ex East 17 singer who managed the astonishing feat of falling under the wheels of a Mercedes which he was driving at the time).
• Cyndi (no idea)
• Big Brovaz (I didn’t even realise they were British!)

Is this really the best that we can do?  This nation that gave the world The Beatles, The Delgados, The Libertines, and British Sea Power?  My mind, it boggles.  I emailed the disappointing news to Jammy (who writes about pop music for money, incidentally).  His reply came speeding back over the ether:

"what a bunch of once-former-also-rans!

The talentless, most oikish, one out of East 17, the sub-Steps, the Scooby Doo singers…. gosh, we sure know how to represent ourselves well.

Spect your money’s on Hawkins? The great British public (and I, just for chance to get her back on TV) could favour kitten queen! And just who, who, is Cyndi? There’s only one Cyndi I know spelt that way.

Pshaw is about the only thing I can say on the matter!!"

Pshaw indeed!  My money’s on Ireland.

When I mentioned Edward R. Tufte’s excellent The Visual Display of Quantitative Information in a recent blog post, it prompted me to search North Yorkshire’s online library catalogue to see if they had any more of the great man’s works.  I was delighted to find that both Envisioning Information and Visual Explanations were available, yet languishing in a storage room somewhere rather than being on the shelves of one of the county’s libraries!  So, I placed a request and they turned up at my local branch a few days later.

I have to say, they are both fascinating reads, though I think Visual Explanations appealed to me most.  As a so-called “knowledge worker” in the software industry it’s occasionally necessary for me to crunch some numbers and produce appropriate charts and graphs to support hypotheses or dismiss speculation.  This book explains how best to go about such tasks, and also what pitfalls to avoid – the most stark example being the poor explanations given by the solid fuel rocket manufacturer as to why the launch of the Challenger space shuttle should be delayed.

Amazon UK don’t appear to have the book in stock, and the marketplace sellers are all showing vastly inflated prices.  Much better to get a copy from Stateside, or do as I did and check it out from a library.

So, tomorrow is the day of our twenty-week scan, when we hope to find out the gender of our first progeny. I hope, for Joce’s sake, that we get an unambiguous answer or I fear she will be unbearable for the next four and half months, her heart being set on buying the appropriate colour clothing and decorating the nursery in a gender-specific fashion.  More than that, though, I mainly hope that they can reasssure us that the wee lad or lass is still doing fine and developing nicely.

At the weekend we went to an NCT “Nearly New” sale at a York school, which was a far more popular event than we had expected.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many middle-class thirty-something females in one place, all vying to get the best bargains.  We arrived too late and without sufficient game plan to happen on any big-ticket bargains but at least we know what to expect for next time, when we’ll camp out overnight and sharpen our elbows in preparation!  We did pick up a few things though, including a couple of swaddling blankets for four quid each.  The only previous time I’ve ever had cause to say the word “swaddling” was when singing Christmas carols about the baby Jesus, I didn’t even realise that swaddling was still an “in thing” twenty centuries later, but there you have it.  I’m sure that won’t be my last learning experience of 2007.

Later on Saturday we also bought (on the recommendation of a certain Jools Oliver) a Tiny Love Symphony-in-Motion Mobile One Size Farm Yard,which plays fifteen minutes apiece of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart.  I’m quite impressed, it’s a neat bit of kit, and I’d quite like a similar one for our bed that offers a choice of Guillemots, Snow Patrol and Sufjan Stevens… and maybe with rotating whisky miniatures instead of the farmyard animals…

Update – Joce points out in the comments that the mobile actually plays fifteen minutes music total, not fifteen minutes of each composer.  Bah!

It’s still February (just!), but the March CTP of Visual Studio “Orcas” has been released.

You can download the installable bits here, alternatively you can download a Virtual PC image here.  The latter is my preferred method for playing with these regular preview releases, as it provides a ready-configured Windows PC with Visual Studio, TFS and all the bits, which is surely far better than wasting time configuring a development box or VPC oneself, then having to repeat the task a month later.

Of course, the downside to this approach is the increased download size, which means my desktop currently looks like this:

Now that The Daily WTF has changed its name to Worse Than Failure (I ask you, what does that mean?), I’ve been getting my laughing-at-other-people’s-stupidity kicks over at This Is Broken instead.  The short entries and picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words posts make for a quick burst of entertainment during a prolonged working day.  Such as this great sign on the door to a first aid room – not something you want to see when bleeding profusely, I shouldn’t think…

I mentioned a while back that I had unearthed a CD-RW containing a backup of my online journal from the end of the last century.  Nelsonphiles will be delighted to learn that all the entries from 1998 have now been duly re-posted on this blog for your entertainment.  Sukhpal and Jez, enjoy reminiscing about those long days at Copley…

When I announced to the world that we shall be spawning a child process in summer, some wags wryly advised that I sleep as much as possible between now and then. Superficially this sounds like a good plan, but for one reason and another it is proving difficult to implement.

My gainful employment keeps me occupied and entertained during the day, but the life of a software developer can be a rather sedentary one, and no matter how much I wiggle that mouse, nor how vigorously I tap the keyboard, it just doesn’t lead to me returning home feeling physically drained in the way that my coal-mining forebears probably did.

Also – I’ve given up alcohol for Lent. Well, more or less. I was more than ready to go totally cold-turkey, really I was, right up until last Friday I when I read Dr Thomas Stuttaford’s health column in The Times:

"There are good reasons why some of the Lenten, hair-shirt penances may actually harm health. Alcohol is a prime example of a substance that needs to be treated with some care, including the way it is discontinued. It is a drug and, like many drugs, can’t be stopped suddenly.

Most doctors now accept that, in moderation, alcohol prolongs life. This effect is most noticeable in drinkers of red wine. This is mainly, but not entirely, because of alcohol’s effect on the arteries, the heart and the clotting mechanism. There is some small immediate effect on the arteries — a good example is the way in which a glass of whisky can sometimes relieve angina.

Alcohol’s main influence on the vascular system is long-term. Conversely, the effect on platelet stickiness, fibrinogen levels and other clotting factors is more rapid, so that a sudden change in intake alters the pattern of blood clotting and may cause disaster. Everyone fares better if they stick to the same safe amount of alcohol. To suddenly stop, when one’s daily habit has been several glasses of wine a day, could induce thrombo-embolic problems, including strokes or acute coronary arterial symptoms."

Thrombo-embolic problems? Acute coronary arterial symptoms? Strokes? All of which can be kept at bay by a regular dram of my beloved Lagavulin? Given this advice it seems that teetotalism is downright dangerous, but in the interests of a spiritual workout I suppose I’ll cut down somewhat for forty days and nights.

My general evening "pattern" in recent months has been to dine with the wife, then skulk off to my office for some web-surfing, coding, or genealogical research before feeling guilty about the lack of spousal interaction and turning in for the night whenever Jocelyn does. But in recent weeks the foetus-carrying one has been retiring increasingly early, whilst I, for reasons cited above, have found myself laying awake well into the early hours.

So, it’s time to refactor my evenings a little. My new grand plan is to spend time with the wife early in the evening – I have a large pile of books that I’ve been meaning to read, which I can attack whilst we share conversation about our respective days. Then, when Joce hits the hay, I’ll hit the PC for a few hours. In my blog post regarding my MCSD.Net, I mentioned the long hot summer of 2003 when I worked late into the night learning .NET – it was one of the most technically productive times of my life, and provided the springboard and skills for leaving a lousy a job and getting a great one. I figure that if I once again harness these extra hours when the world is otherwise quiet, I can boost my skills further.

It’s tough being a generalist these days – there are so many technologies out there and so little time during the working day to get to know them. So, I really need some undisturbed hours to get to grips with ASP.NET AJAX, LINQ, VS Orcas, IIS7, SQL Server 2005, and BizTalk 2006. There’s plenty there alone to keep me occupied until junior makes an appearance.

Also, I have some coding projects on the go right now, which will never get finished unless I devote more time to them. Plus the genealogy, of course, and always some starred messages in Gmail requiring attention. And then there’s the blogging – ah yes, the blogging. I could really use some extra time to expand my witterings hereon. What shall I write about first? John tells me that the sure-fire path to the blogging aristocracy is to write at length and with passions about one’s hair… hmmm…

So, last week I bought a battery grip on eBay from Germany for the princely sum of £65.  I paid via Paypal, for speed, convenience and security.  Now, my default funding method for my PayPal account is my (UK) American Express card.  Seems that Paypal have a stupid policy of always charging Amex cards in US Dollars – so that £65 was converted to $130.14, which Amex promptly converted back to £68.33!  So I’m out of pocket by £3.33 thanks to an utterly unneccessary back-and-forth currency conversion.  Needless to say, I’ve already changed my PayPal account to use a Visa card instead.  Grrr….

Fifty-three years since Darrell Huff published the seminal How to Lie with Statistics, and still we have newspapers as august as The Times pulling the oldest trick in the book:

At first glance it all looks very impressive, but closer inspection of the comparison with sales of the Torygraph reveal a mere 8.7% sales lead, not more than double as suggested by the graphic.  Not fooled.

Another favourite book of mine that covers the still-relevant topic of graphical integrity is Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.  It’s one of those timeless works that I look forward to sharing with the next generation.

It’s been a while since I posted one of these mixed bags of links n things which don’t merit a full post.  Reason being, I tend to share such links in Google Reader, or post them to my del.icio.us bookmarks, both of which have feeds that you can subscribe to if desired.

Still, here’s a few interesting things that caught my eye in recent days: 

Firefox 2.0 tip – Ctrl-Shift-T will reopen the last closed tab.  Nice.

Parenthacks – Leaving Your Kids With The Neighbourhood Babysitter: A Primer.  This looks like it could be a very useful website, come the second half of this year

iTunes on Vista – Apple have released an "iTunes Repair Tool for Windows Vista" to fix some compatability problems.  I haven’t tried it so don’t blame me if it swallows your MP3 collection.

If you’re reading this in Google Reader, try hitting g then u, then start typing the name of one of your subscriptions.  Cool, huh?  For more hints on Google Reader’s fantastic keyboard shortcuts, check out this LifeHacker article.

Unhandled Perception – how to put the IE7 menu bar back at the top of the window (a la IE6).

UselessAcount.com – you know you want one.

Steve Jobs – "Thoughts On Music", 06 Feb 2007.  Even the Apple boss is in favour of ditching the evil that is DRM.  Hallelujah.

Second Life Stats – some fascinating figures highlighting the growth of Second Life (in excel format).

Tim Sneath has been posting a series of blog entries highlighting Great WPF Applications.  If you have Vista or XP with .NET 3.0 installed and want to know what WPF is capable of, this is a great place to start.

Scott Guthrie has posted more information about new features in Visual Studio "Orcas", including Multi-Targeting (the ability to create projects that target a specific version of the .NET Framework).

ThisIsBroken.com – I love this site.