I play a real guitar right-handed, but an air guitar left-handed. The air guitar is actually a right-handed air guitar played upside-down. I string it normally though, of course.

It will be interesting to see some figures for iPhone sales in the first few months of their release in the UK. I spend two and a half hours a day commuting, and I haven’t seen one iPhone in use. iPod Touch sales will be strong in the run up to Yule, but the startling gap between the quality of the iPhone UI that of its competitors doesn’t seem enough to lure us Brits away from our free phones and and choice of reasonable contracts.

Page, Plant, Jones and Bonham may have plundered the back catalog of various folk and blues artists of the past without due credit, but boy did they do it well.

You could argue that this is an activity very much in the folk tradition; the music has freedom, songs get passed from generation to generation, and are interpreted differently. Page is criticised for stealing Bert Jansch’s Black Water Side, but really Page and Jansch were both inspired by Anne Brigg’s interpretation of a folk song which is much older than any of their versions.

From what I can gather from the reviews and bootleg footage of the gig (I wish I had been there), the band returned to their roots; just the four of them, some instruments and some Marshall stacks, like they were back doing a TV studio recording in the late sixties.

After a number of poor reunion gigs over the last twenty-seven years – especially the Live Aid reunion – they proved that they could still perform at a level similar to the their early gigs, and being a life-long Led Zeppelin fan, I’m glad about that.

Microsoft trials XP on XO laptop

From the OLPC community Wiki that’s used for documentation and sharing learning materials, to the software on the XO, everything is open, and that is the project’s strength. Microsoft are just eyeing a new market for their old proprietory software and in so doing are not helping the OLPC project one bit.

Perl on Rails – Why the BBC Fails at the Internet

… talented, underpaid, and frustrated software engineers at the BBC are forced to make a decision. Either they can produce websites using static HTML, and make a few remote calls to limited Perl functions, decorating their page with SSIs, or they can fight against a reticent and incompetent technology supplier to make use of a crippled and outdated language on servers that more than likely are unable to meet the capacity requirements of a dynamic application being used by the BBC’s audience.

Hooray for outsourcing!

Batophobia isn’t, as one might imagine, an irrational fear of bats. Rather, it’s the fear of being near tall buildings; like inverted acrophobia. I’ve long been looking for a name for this particular phobia as I’m a mild sufferer. I’d struggle with the Burj Dubai.

Only 18 days to go before I do my Christmas shopping.

Anton Corbijn’s film Control – about Ian Curtis and Joy Division – is worth seeing.