Editors - An End Has A Start #2

After a battle for a day iTunes finally let me download the new Editors album, and it was worth the wait. Perhaps not an instant classic, but brilliant nevertheless.

If you get the chance, have a listen. Stand-out tracks are Bones, The Racing Rats, An End Has A Start and Smokers Outside the Hospital Doors. Spiders is quite good as well.

That’s two awesome second albums this year, the other one being Maximo Park. I reckon The Killers and Bloc Party were slightly disappointing.

If you want a listen to the new Editors album, you can listen to all the tracks on their MySpace, which I failed to link to last time.

http://www.myspace.com/editorsmusic

Anyone else heard this album? Verdicts in the comments please!

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Conservative Logo

Just wondering if this is cause for concern.

Are the two in any way related? We should be told!

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Safari 3 for Windows

I’m working on a new PHP project temporarily nicknamed Cobalt, and have just been messing about with the layout in IE and Firefox. For fairness, I also downloaded and installed the new Safari 3 for Windows and tested it in that.

Suffice to say, apologies to Safari users, but Cobalt’s going to look terrible in Safari. They’ve done something really weird and despite 15 minutes of messing about with one header I still can’t get it to work properly with all three browsers.

To be fair, fonts look a lot nicer and are more readable in Safari, but it doesn’t quite seem as standards-compliant as it claims to be.

Anyone else tried this thing? Looks like the speed claims have also been exaggerated as the content for the Apple homepage loads faster in Firefox.

EDIT: It’s still not as bad as Internet Explorer

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iTunes Pre-Orders

Can someone explain to me why despite receiving an e-mail telling me my iTunes pre-order of An End Has A Start by Editors was ready to download 18 hours ago the item is still “being modified” and I can’t download it?

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(We Are) Performance

Just a quick post to recommend this weeks iTunes free single of the week, Vandals by (We Are) Performance. Very poppy and cheesy, but irritatingly catchy and worth a listen. Probably not something that would get many sales, but being a freebie its worth getting.

They’ve got some full length tracks on their last.fm page, as well as a free track (although for some reason I can’t seem to download it). These tracks aren’t quite as good as Vandals, and I’m sure there are some people who would say that means they must be absolutely terrible, but its a matter of opinion.

As for sound, sort of like the Killers but happier.

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Last.fm Playlist #1

Since I have barely anything to do, I’ve updated my Last.fm playlist, which you can listen to on the sidebar (it lets you hear full length tracks on shuffle). I thought I’d probably better write a little about the playlist and make my excuses/give my reasons. This is a long post, but if people want more changing playlists let me know in the comments. (more…)

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Forums Themed

I’ve just activated the cunningtitle theme for the forums, so everything should be looking better now. There are still some finer points of integration that I’d like to do at some stage. First off is activating the WordPress functions in bbPress so that the profile pages can also list the number of comments made on the blog, but it’s a bit tricky when the WordPress stuff is in the parent folder. I’ll have a go at it at some stage, but for the time being it’s all done.

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Remember the Milk

A while ago I blogged about a web app called “Remember the Milk“, a to-do list manager and task list which is pretty flexible. At the time I was on a Hipster PDA (fancy name for a stack of index cards) and they didn’t have a print-to-index-cards-thing so I didn’t use it much, but I’ve since moved to a Moleskine.

Having built something like TaskStep and poured however many hours into writing pages of code, it’s probably daft to recommend another web-based to-do list manager, but actually Remember the Milk is really good. Since I first used it there have been vast improvements, including Google Gears integration so you can even use it offline.

If you’re not happy with TaskStep, you could certainly do a lot worse than Remember the Milk.

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Editors - An End Has A Start

The new Editors album is out before too long, with the first single already released.

I have to admit that I was skeptical when I first heard it. Editors (never “The Editors”) sound a lot happier than they used to, and Smokers Outside the Hospital Doors doesn’t seem to have the brilliance of Munich. This was also alongside Interpol’s first single, The Heinrich Maneuver, which just sounds awesome.

Having said that, the song’s really grown on me recently. Their MySpace account now lists all the songs for their new album, and although I haven’t listened to many of them, An End Has A Start sounds like a worthy follow-up to The Back Room (in particular the title track).

Worth listening to if you get a chance, and probably worth buying as well.

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Microsoft’s Opt-Out Policy

Just received from Microsoft: an e-mail with the following opening line:

As part of a routine data inspection we have noticed you have elected to stop receiving communications from Microsoft.

As Microsoft launches exciting new solutions and initiatives, there’s no better time to register for information that will give your business a critical technological advantage. We invite you to consider receiving communications from us again.

For the love of God. No.

Sadly when I said “I don’t want you to contact me”, that translated for Microsoft to “I don’t want you to contact me for the moment, but I’m easily influenced by circular e-mails from global corporations so if you pester me enough I might sign-up again”.

The other immediate concern is privacy. Fortunately I know they’ll have just written a script to grab the data for all the people who have opted out and then sent a batch e-mail. But a “routine data inspection”? Sounds slightly paranoia-inducing.

I’m pretty sure this tactic won’t be exclusive to Microsoft, but haven’t come across anyone else using it yet. Any other companies who send daft e-mails like this one?

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