adoption curve dot net

I can’t decide if these maps of the internet look organic – like some kind of monofilament web spun in technicolour; or galactic, some kind of nebulae…

An interesting take on the economics of the music business (shorter version here). Not that the minds in the industry that considered Will and Gareth to be a good idea would be able to grasp it, of course.

I go through phases of having music in the background while I’m working, but the usual pattern is for the first CD to finish and three hours of silence to elapse before I realise. The CD player is the other side of the room, which is just far enough for it to be beyond notice when things go quiet. FM radio in this area isn’t brilliant either, despite the fact that the apartment block has an external antenna.

Then I stumbled across streaming radio, after hooking up external speakers to the laptop base station. Problem solved – hiss-free continuous background music, and a wider selection of genres and styles you couldn’t wish for. Current favourite for building websites to is www.gaydarradio.com, which is exactly the kind of bouncy cheesy borderline hi-nrg pop you’d expect…

The BBC says

“The sound of your mobile ringtone could be in for a big change if a new service proves as popular in Europe as it has been in South Korea. Korean firm WiderThan’s service lets users choose what the person they are calling hears when their mobile rings. “

Clever idea, but anyone using it to call me is likely to be disappointed – my phone goes “ring ring” in a style last seen in 1995, so any other noises just get subconciously filtered. It takes me about 6 months to get used to a change in ring tone that I’ve made, so if a caller expects me to respond because they’re alerting me with the William Tell overture, they’re probably going to be disappointed…

…is Epitonic – ‘your source for cutting edge music’, as the site banner puts it. Normally that would have me expecting the sound of piano keys being hit at random while a warbling soprano rattled her key ring (ok, there is some of that) but a lot of the content is suprisingly good – and it’s in MP3 format and it’s free. Now all I need is the iPod…

If I was there, I probably would…

But only for 50 minutes this evening. Having left the clubhouse with the group that appeared to be either a) in a real hurry to get somewhere or b) chased by something with very sharp teeth, my legs caught up with me somewhere just after Millennium Bridge and started complaining about the abuse they were getting. As I wasn’t the only one in the same condition, the group gradually fragmented, and I ended up with a minor gaggle cutting things short and heading down Ousegate rather than making the whole (and much, much longer) city centre loop.

If the initial pace had been a bit slower I’d probably have managed to push things out a bit further, but I was into my mid-run stride by the time we’d turned the corner past the northern end of the racecourse. That’s about 3 miles sooner than it would normally happen, which wasn’t a good sign. Sub 6-minute miles are all very well, but only for short distances.

This is it, for the moment at least – the current final resting place of timzilla.net courtesy of Hosting Unlimited. By an amazing (for me) freak piece of forward planning, I’d actually downloaded a complete copy of the site as it used to be before I hosed the oneandone webspace, so the templates are pretty much back to where they were. Which may or may not be a good thing, depending on your aesthetic tastes and tolerance of really nasty HTML code, but they’ll do for now.

Then I can use Zempt for posting…

One of the other joys of moving hosting providers is when things start to go wrong For some reason, the MySQL database which was the backend of this (and I installed it myself, so I was very proud) has ceased to work – which means I’ve had to reinstall this from the archives and I’ve lost all the formatting due to the default stylesheet being blown away. Damn. I was thinking of changing the style anyway, but it wasn’t high on the list of priorities…

The other problem is that the timzilla.net domain seems to be stuck halfway through a transfer from oneandone to 123-reg, which means that all the URLs are screwed up I decided to dump oneandone as a result of their truely lousy support – never replying to emails, 10-20 minutes on hold every time you call them, the occasional arbitrary reconfiguration of DNS entries, and a refusal to do anything with the DNS once they’ve got it. The final straw was when they refused to amend an MX entry for one of my domains. Bugger that, I thought, and voted with my feet – the only problem being that voting with my feet seems to have taken rather longer than I thought it would for a .net domain. Although timzilla.net is resolving OK at the moment, I’m not holding my breath…

But apart from that, the last week’s hacking around of the getcompany website has resulted in an exponential learning curve in HTML, Photoshop and Dreamweaver. Next stop is the OS Commerce back end, which I get the feeling will prove more tricky. I’ve decided that the easiest way to automate the content side of it is to use Moveable Type (assuming that the MySQL bit works of course) because I at least know where to start with that. The tricky bit as far as I can see is going to be glueing the two systems together. The near future will involve much hacking around, I can feel it…