A bit of a redesign, you may notice...I was getting fed up of the cheesy graphic that I thought looked cool a year ago and this is the first stage of more changes to come, when I get the time. On the news front, I just got home from playing with a new band - County Road 4, whose frontman stopped outside Beacon Street a couple of weeks ago to ask if I had wireless internet and ended up asking me to jam with them. So I get to indulge my guilty pleasure in playing along loudly to cheesy country music. I [heart] America and Toby Keith. Look, you guys who think it's just not cool, it's ironic, alright? All of Hoxton will be dancing to George Strait in just a bit - the 80s and fake bootleg mash-ups are just so passe.

Todays links:

This is pretty interesting for those of you who have missed the open-source movement. Alongside the news that nearly half of all technorati/deli.cio.us tags are in non-roman alphabets, the impact of non-Westerm countries on the development of IT and the internet seems to be about to skyrocket.

Continuing the sprawl discussion, this exemplifies to me the worst kind of 'argument' for New Urbanism, yet sadly is all too representative of the state of the debate in the US. The line praising "urban lofts, coffee shops and townhomes" says it all...as does the reference to Seaside, Florida. It wouldn't worry me so much if it wasn't that this kind of woolly and un-rigorous thinking is so prevalent here. Guys, let's not talk about how nice neighbourhoods are because you can walk around and how awful cars are. Let's talk about energy use, conservation of resources and actually being innovative rather than sentimental about what cities in the 21st century might be.

As he says, if this fantastic conspiracy theory about Intel and Apple merging comes true, you read it here first (via Slashdot.)