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We, erm, lost our server just before Easter. Hence the downtime.
As in, we actually physically lost the server. Find it we could not. The ugly old beast was gone. Not all that surprising really, since we'd not been invoiced for hosting since about 2003.
As ever, backups were only so fresh. Gah.
Never mind, it gave me an excuse to upgrade Movable Type, and we're now on Bytemark, who seem pretty good so far.
"It is a lovely feeling when you get the balance of listening to yourself... and concentrating... and playing it... You get to this nowhere land where your brain is utterly disconnected, and I think...I think that [is at] the root of all this piano obsession. It's trying to get into that little slot of your brain where things don't exist and yet they're working perfectly. It's a sort of heaven. A nirvana." - Alexander Waugh
To understand my obsession, replace 'piano' with 'sailing my dinghy'.
It's a feeling. A place. A state of blissful nothingness and ease. I've previously struggled to define, let alone explain it to anyone.
This clip is taken from the excellent BBC FOUR documentary The Piano: A Love Affair, presented by Waugh.
As luck would have it Jo watched the programme with me, and so I now have some hope that she understands why I dash off to Suffolk at every opportunity to potter about in 14 feet of glass fibre.
As a sidenote, this programme is the perfect example of niche public service output which makes the BBC's archive so culturally valuable, if only we could unlock it. Well, today was the day that Ashley announced the BBC Archive Trial.
Sign up asap, since only the first 20k get to play.
Yahoo! has kindly agreed to share their Hackday Europe with BBC Backstage. Super well done to Tom and Ian Matt for making this thing fly. Much respect.
It's over the weekend of June 16th/17th at Alexandra Palace in North London. Which is good, since Ally Pally is my back garden. My shower will be available for rental on Sunday morning.
Sign up quick, since I'll bet the 500 free places go in a jiffy,
If I'm honest, I'm not particularly fussed about Russell Brand, though he's clearly a natural at the short form web video oeuvre.
What interests me more about the video above, taken from the BBC's YouTube channel, is that I'm able to embed it into this blog at all.
At launch back in March, all the video clips in the BBC's public service YouTube channel (UK users only - sorry) had embedding disabled at the BBC's request.
Why? In short, a deep-rooted fear of handing over control of context to punters, and a more reasonable concern that the whopping YouTube logo burnt in the bottom right hand corner of every embedded clip would play havoc with people's brand attribution.
For example, here's that clip embedded in Brand's MySpace site. Lots of YouTube branding. No BBC logo in sight.
Yet disabling embedding on the vast majority of BBC clips is a flagrant transgression of BBC Web Principle No. 10 - Maximise routes to content.
The Russell Brand Video Diary is the only BBC public service clip with embedding enabled. It performs well compared to equivalent BBC clips on YouTube.
These two facts are probably related.
Control of context comes at the cost of attention.
This page contains all entries posted to Tomski.com - Tom Loosemore's Blog in April 2007. They are listed from oldest to newest.
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