Oh dear, who employed a designer who doesn't know about left and right? Yes, it was Westin.
Back in January I wrote that:
Joost is on very shaky ground. The content is going to be the sort of second-rate, mass-market slop that's been killing the concept of the TV channel and raising the importance of the TV show for the last few years. And you won't even be able to record it like you could back in the 1980s.
although I hadn't tried the system then. I got a Joost invitation today, downloaded the application and tried to watch something.
Firstly, I should say that the application is absolutely beautiful. I think it has everything that I could want in a video watching application. It was intuitive to use, responsive and looks incredibly slick. No really. It looks absolutely fabulous.
Of course, the first thing I tried to do was watch a show. Any show. And nothing worked. I tried playing different shows from different channels and they all came up with the same error screen - sadly not so slick.
And it's entirely unclear why it's not working. I doubt it's a lack of bandwidth because I managed to download the player quite fast and I've been doing all sorts of other bandwidth intensive activities. I also doubt the Indonesian government has content filters that block Rocky & Bullwinkle. So maybe it's that Joost won't let me watch content when I'm outside of their service area? I don't know. I'll try again when I'm in KL and then back in Amsterdam. But frankly, I'm disappointed that I've only been able to see a sexy application and haven't been able to watch my 'toons.
I added the Scary Bitches' Lesbian Vampyres from Outer Space to my top rated playlist on my iPod on the flight over. It's an absolutely brilliant song and I'm glad SamSam gave me the RFA 2004 CD when I visited him in Miami a while back.
They've got a grant from the council
It's a fuckin' disgrace
Lesbian Vampyres from Outer Space
I thoroughly suggest you all go over to CD Baby and buy it now - and I'll be flying to it more often!
Updated
When I mentioned this song to Gerard, last night, he told me about the story of Brisbane's Lesbian Vampire Murderers. Scary stuff!
I've been signed up for BookMooch for about five or six months now. It's a great little web site for sharing books with people. Each member lists the books they are willing to give away to total strangers and in return is allowed to receive books from other strangers' lists. I'm not sure whether it ought to work according to economic theory - but it seems to work anyhow.
It has all the great features of the wonderful and nearly ubiquitous Web 2.0 except for social networking. What's not to like? Not much really - apart from BookMooch is only ever going to be good for those books that people don't want to hang on to - and it's never going to be as fast as Amazon or even a bricks and mortar store.
So while I'm more than happy to list the books I'm never going to read again but am not embarrassed to let people know I own, I'll never list the books I want to keep and read again and again and again. You can have all my Terry Pratchetts and Martin Amis but I won't be listing anything by Olaf Stapledon or Richard Dawkins.
Which neatly seques to The God Delusion, Dawkin's latest book, which explains why there isn't really any need for a supreme being and why it's fairly unlikely that there is one. I was in town yesterday, picking up a few bits and pieces before flying to APRICOT 2007. While I was there I popped into Waterstones to see if there was anything that would catch my fancy and I saw the book on CD, read by Dawkins and Lalla Ward. It caught my fancy.
Needless to say, the reading has a good balance between the two voices and the tone is not too preachy. The writing is very clear and so the arguments are well explained. I'm almost two thirds of the way through and hope to finish before my connection to Bali lands.
This is an excellent book and audio is an excellent medium for it. But you'll have to buy your own copy because I'm not putting it on BookMooch.
Show us your Vox tag cloud.
This is so meta, people. And blogging about blogging is so 2004.
But anyway...
Show us love.
Show us some fruits and/or veggies.
I couple of years ago I visited Jerusalem and took a bunch of photographs of some fantastic fruit and vegetables. Here are some around the house:
and here are some out and about in town:
What's the next country you want to visit?
Submitted by Schomer.
Want to or are going to?
I'm going back to Amsterdam at the weekend and then I'll need to pop over the London for a couple of days before making a series of short trips to Bali, Puerto Rico and, Estonia, Venezuela and possibly Nigeria before June. Oh, and I need to pop over to Manchester for a day in April.
The trip I'm really looking forward to is the trip to Estonia. I've never been to a Baltic country before and I've always wanted to. Also, I like colder weather and dislike humid, tropical weather. I don't expect cool breezes in Bali or Puerto Rico.
I don't have anything planned for Cenrtral Asia or Russia, this year. With a little luck I might find myself visiting St Petersburg during the summer and if I'm really lucky I might get a chance to visit Armenia - but I'm not holding my breath.
