With our collection, just putting it on shuffle-all is not an option. There is just no mood which in which it’s appropriate to sequence Bill Evans and Jack White and Ute Lemper and Gustav Mahler and PJ Harvey. Not gonna happen.

Tim Bray

Our collection isn’t quite as extensive as Mr. Bray’s (around 8000 songs, although I’m still not sure that I’ve ripped all our CDs), but it is quite possibly just as eclectic. However, I do use shuffle on my iPod, usually when I’m in the car and can’t think of which album I want to listen to. If it comes up with something horrible, I just hit the “forward” button to skip to the next track. Sometimes I end up skipping several tracks. It can be annoying, but sometimes it turns up trumps.

On Friday night the iPod seemed to have decided the right music for driving was trance: it played nothing else for at least 30 minutes. Then, it played one track of odd, haunting, traditional Maronite chant. And then it switched back to trance for another 30 minutes. Strangely, it worked!

Oh cool, the clock on the microwave is working again. Darn thing has been an hour off for six months.

DeWitt Clinton (@dewitt on Twitter), the day after the clocks went forward in Canada and the USA.

I am glad I’m not the only one whose microwave clock is wrong by an hour for half of the year. It’s not just my microwave; there are a variety of digital clocks around my house (and one on the car radio) that never manage to follow the vagaries of the biannual clock changes. Luckily the digital clock that controls the household heating system has nice clear instructions printed on the control unit, and the dashboard clock in my car is really easy to change. The rest of them require various combinations of pressing down and holding buttons that normally do something else in order to enter “clock setting mode”, then fiddling with other buttons that normally do something else to change the time, followed by some other arcane button press combinations to get you back out of “clock setting mode”. What makes matters worse is that every single one of these devices has a different method for changing the time.

I have often wondered why on earth manufacturers don’t just agree on a simple, standard method for setting digital clocks, and then use it on every device made. I wonder if it is because organisations have got patents on the method for setting the clock? Since these devices are all implemented using software, and some nitwits decided to allow patenting on software, it seems possible that each company might have its own patented method for this, in order not to infringe the patents of everybody else. If that seems ludicrous, it’s because it is, but the chances of it changing are not looking good at the moment.

I also have three analogue clocks. They almost always tell the correct time, because setting the time on them is easy. There is a rotary dial on the back, that moves the hands back and forwards. Rotate to the time you want. Imagine if someone had patented that?

O come, O come, Emmanuel
Ransom captive Israel
That mourns in lonely exile here
Til the Son of God appear

Oh little town of Bethlehem
How still we see thee lie
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
The silent stars go by

Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting Light
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight

While shepherds watched their flocks by night
All seated on the ground
The angel of the Lord came down
And glory shone around

The first Noel that angel did say
Was to certain poor shepherds
In fields as they lay, keeping their sheep
On a cold winter’s night so deep

It came upon the midnight clear
That glorious song of old
From angels bending near the earth
To touch their harps of gold

Peace on the earth, good will to men
From heaven’s all gracious King
The world in solemn stillness lay
To hear the angels sing

We three kings of Orient are
Bearing gifts we traverse afar
Field and fountain, moor and mountain
Following yonder star

God rest ye merry, gentlemen
Let nothing you dismay
Remember, Christ, our Saviour
Was born on Christmas day

Now to the Lord sing praises,
All you within this place,
And with true love and brotherhood
Each other now embrace

Just be thankful I left out “Good King Wenceslas” and “I Saw Three Ships”.

• Detroit’s 6 Mistakes and How Not to Make Them
• How To Be a 21st Century Capitalist
• A User’s Guide to 21st Century Economics

Whilst I’m not sure Haque has the right answers all of the time, I do think he’s asking the right questions, and it’s great to see someone challenging current business ideology so thoroughly. What worries me is that if he is right, then the aftermath of the current economic crisis will probably be longer, harder and more turbulent than we might have believed. If Haque is correct, then most of the worlds biggest corporations are all very vulnerable, because the policies and tactics that have sustained them during the 20th century won’t protect them now, and their executives are too ideologically tied in to those ideas to let them change. So we might be at the start of a decade which sees huge numbers of these corporations fail. To be sure, I’ll probably be happier with the new breed of corporations that replace them, but it’ll be a bumpy ride while it’s happening.

Still, it could be worse: at least I didn’t pick a career in Brand Management…

I found this gem at Florencom’s YouTube channel, which is devoted entirely to different versions of this song. What really surprised me was finding the history of the song. I guess I first heard it performed by Tight Fit, and for years I have assumed it was a fake, the result of someone wanting to write a pop hit with an african feel. The truth, as ever, is much more complex. The song that we know as The Lion Sleeps Tonight was written for The Tokens, became a big hit for them in 1961, and has been covered by many other artists since then. But it was really just an adaptation of Wimoweh by Pete Seeger and The Weavers, which was released by them ten years earlier in 1951. But Pete Seeger had in turn adapted the song Mbube by South African artist Solomon Linda, which was originally released in 1939.

Here is the original version, by Linda’s group The Evening Birds:

Wikipedia has the full story of the song, a partial list of cover versions, and the shameful details of how Soloman Linda never got the royalties due to him.

• Microblogging Defined (via @rjeffries on identi.ca)
• Identi.Ca (from @oddbloke on identi.ca)

I succumbed to Facebook a while ago, and the thing I like best about it is keeping up with peoples status messages. So I decided to try out Twitter on the basis that it was just the status message bit of Facebook, but open to anyone to read. I was also drawn to Twitter because a couple of my favourite blogs (ongoing and Music Thing) started posting links and one-liners to Twitter instead of to their main blog.

Then, thanks to Robert Rees, I found identi.ca, which is an open-source take on the same idea. A lot of people who use multiple microblogging services post the same thing to each one (there are easy ways to do this, such as ping.fm). I have stolen Robert’s idea of posting different things to each service: techy and geeky stuff gets posted to identi.ca, more general stuff gets posted to Twitter. However, I am currently piping both of them into Facebook to update my status there, and also showing both of them here in my blog sidebar.

If you are a techy sort of person, I’d say it was worthwhile having a play with microblogging. I have found interesting people to follow on both Twitter and identi.ca, and learned a bunch of useful stuff by doing so. However, neither of them are as good as Facebook for simply keeping up with friends.

Moving the data over proved rather easier than I expected. I set up my categories on WordPress, created some dummy entries, then exported the blog to see what the WordPress eXtended RSS (WXR) export format looked like. I then found a handy Ruby script which claimed to generate a WXR file from a Typo blog. I had to hack it a little to make it work: my version of Typo was so old it didn’t have the published_at property, so I had to change it to use the created_at property instead. Then when it had generated the WXR file, I did some edits on it to make sure the categories and author matched what was in WordPress. But once that was done, WordPress imported the WXR file without complaint, and everything seems to be here, even the comments. The only problem I’ve found so far was with HTML in the title of one post, which was easy to fix manually. Please let me know if you spot any other oddities.

So, what should I do? My first option is to stop blogging and simply close down the site. I haven’t written much this year anyway; I haven’t had a lot of time for writing, and the things on my mind that I might have written about haven’t been the sort of stuff I want to publish here. I’m not expecting those factors to change much over the next year, so maybe the time has come to bow out from blogging.

My second option is to look for another Ruby on Rails hosting provider, and migrate everything across. This would keep everything intact, but would require me to really get to grips with Rails deployment, Typo installation and backup/restore of MySQL databases. Right now that feels like too much work to contemplate, but maybe I’m being too pessimistic.

My third option is to start using a public blogging service such as Blogger or WordPress.com. I should be able to get the existing articles moved over to one of those, but I’ll probably not be able to transfer the comments. On the other hand this will save me money on hosting fees and probably be the most hassle-free solution to maintain.

Your ideas and comments would be most welcome.