Stephen Fry on Apple and digital devices. I couldn’t agree more, even though I’m a XP user (for now) - but that’s just because I can’t afford 10 PC’s with XP, Vista, Linux and God knows what, like Stephen can:

“Apple gets plenty of small things wrong, but one big thing it gets right: when you use a device every day, you cannot help, as a human being, but have an emotional relationship with it. Its true of cars and cookers, and its true of computers. Its true of office blocks and houses, and its true of mobiles and satnavs. A grey box is not good enough, clunky and ugly is not good enough. Sick building syndrome exists, and so does sick hand-held device syndrome. Fiddly buttons, blocky icons, sickeningly stupid nested menus - these are the enemy. They waste time, militate against function and lower the spirits. They make the user feel frustrated and (quite wrongly) dense. Mechanisms so devilishly, stunningly, jaw-dropping clever as the kind our world can now furnish us with are No Good Whatsoever if they dont also bring a smile to our face, if they dont make us want to stroke, touch, fondle, fiddle, gurgle, purr and coo. Interacting with a digital device should be like interacting with a baby.”

Welcome to Dork Talk (Stephen Fry)

Damn Near Righteous - Bill Medley (2007)
In Tune Productions / TuneCore

I must admit that I know very little about Bill Medley’s career. I know that he and Bobby Hatfield were the Righteous Brothers, and that he had a huge hit duet with Jennifer Warnes in 1987. Everyone knows that.

I didn’t expect much when I sat down to listen to samples from his new release “Damn Near Righteous”. Produced by Steve Dorff, I guess I expected a Christopher Cross record with a gruffier voice.

It’s smooth alright, with ace session players like Dean Parks, Vinnie Colaiuta, John Robinson and Joe Chemay, but it’s a big, fat, wonderful production with Wurlitzers, Hammonds, grand piano, real strings (if not, they certainly fooled me), real horns, guitars, drums and backing vocals. Not a cheap synthpad like, say, recent Leon Russell records, in sight. It sounds really expensive, actually, and when I think back, it’s been a while since the last time I heard a record sounding quite as good.

His voice is rustier than it used to be, but I think that’s an asset here. He has great tone. They’ve probably fine-tuned him a bit (he’s 67) but his voice sounds natural throughout the record - as opposed to something like…oh, yeah… ”Chicago XXX” (2006) - Jason Scheff and Bill Champlin sound like computers on that album. It’s a real treat to listen to Medley on most of these tracks.

It’s a bit too ballad-heavy, though. I like the bluesy and soulful numbers better, like “Sit Down & Hurt” , “Trick Bag”, “Hurt City”… there are lots of great tracks to choose from. His re-recording of Beach Boys’ “In My Room” doesn’t do much for me, even though Phil Everly and Brian Wilson participates. Too smooth. His cover of “Just Like A Woman” also leaves a lot to be desired. ”Beautiful” and “Two Lives” are boring in my ears. “California Goodbye” is definitely the best ballad as far as I’m concerned - it gives me goosebumps every time I hear it.

All in all, highly recommended. But do listen before you download - I have this hunch that a lot of you might disagree with me here.

I nicked this link from Boing Boing. The singers and dancers are obviously doing a parody (er, hopefully), but what I really, really love about this video are the subtle gestures of the keyboard player during the first 10 seconds of the song - he’s so freaking hilarious. I’m definitely stealing his routine.

Just wanted to put in a good word for Particls, a brilliant free, open standards based app I discovered recently that instantly tracks your favorite sites and topics. It’s kind of like a filtered feed reader.

It’s very easy to set up. Install it, enter a few keywords to indicate your fields of interest and you’re ready to start.

I fed it with some music related words - favorite artists, music industry references such as ASCAP, BMI, DRM, record companies etc., eMusic, iTunes and so on - and I’ve been spending the entire evening reading interesting, highly relevant articles from a seemingly endless array of sources.

In addition you can add your regular rss feeds, and perform a number of tweaks to improve your news stream. But I’m thoroughly impressed with its performance even though I haven’t tweaked it at all.

You can sort your news stream by date or by relevancy. I immediately fell in love with the relevancy sorting option. In the future, I’ll probably use Particls for keyword searches, sorted by relevancy - and continue using Google Reader for my regular feeds, sorted by date.

Highly recommended!

System update: My RSS feed has been a little unpredictable since I redirected my blog - some of my old posts suddenly pop up in front of the more recent ones. And I’m hardly getting any hits on the site today, so I’m still experimenting with the settings here to get it right.

It’s not like I had a million readers before, but I do hope to keep the ones I had - so I’ll probably stay up half the night and try to solve these problems.

It’s always like that, isn’t it? Whenever something’s bugging you about your computer? It’s impossible to let it go. Like when you’re fiddling with the system settings and the screen goes all black at 11 p.m. You don’t just turn in for the night, do you? You just have to try this one last thing before you give it up and go to bed? Didn’t work? How about this, then?  Or this….? … 1 a.m. . . 3 a.m. . . .5 a.m.

Suddenly you look at your watch and realize that you’re supposed to be at work…

That’s what happens to me, anyway. It’s always the same - and I’m getting older, so whenever I do something like this these days, I’ll need a week to recover.

Oh my, the trouble I go through for you, my dear five readers…

No, really - I do love solving computer problems - my wife won’t be too happy when I come to bed in the morning, though…

I’m moving my blog from Blogger to a self-hosted Wordpress account. Hopefully I’ve covered all bases, so most of you will be redirected from your old bookmarks.

My new home is http://schiing.terjefjelde.com/, be sure to update your bookmarks. I tried to redirect the RSS feeds, but I didn’t succeed - it actually seems impossible to do that from a Blogger account.

I’m posting this entry on my new site, as well as on the old RSS feed.

So if you’re reading this in a RSS reader, you’ll need to update the feed links.

Here they are:

• Posts: http://schiing.terjefjelde.com/feed
• Comments: http://schiing.terjefjelde.com/comments/feed

My apologies for any inconvenience.

I hate writing SMS messages on those tiny mobile displays. But now I think I’ve found the perfect solution. I just got a brand new mobile phone, and for the first time in my life when it comes to telephones, I actually read the manual.

You see, I had a secret wish that the software would enable me to send SMS directly from my laptop using my pc keyboard but alas, I was in no such luck. I didn’t give it up, though, and after a couple of intense hours on Google, I finally came across an open source program that communicates perfectly with my mobile phone.

It’s called floAt’s Mobile Agent (FMA). Currently FMA supports officially Sony Ericsson phones only, but they promise that other manufacturers and brands will be addressed in next major version. I can manage all data on my phone with this piece of software, including the address book, managing incoming and outgoing calls, sending and receiving SMS messages, and so far it’s been seamless. It connects either via Bluetooth, serial or irDA ports (not sure what that implies, really, but my Sony Ericsson 750i connects perfectly through a standard USB cable.)

You can do pretty much everything from your computer, and for me it’s ideal. Due to my SMS allergy, people rarely expect me to return their messages instantly, and now I can just gather up all my messages and reply whenever my laptop’s within range (which is pretty much all the time.) A great find.

PermaTabs is a brilliant little add-on for Firefox that I found a little while ago. It allows you to define permanent tabs, which means you’ll never need to reload your Gmail or your online RSS reader.

All you have to do is install it from the Firefox Add-on-site, open the page you want to permatab, right-click on the relevant tab and select “permanent tab”. That’s it, you’re done.

It’s a worn-out subject, but this stuff will probably never cease to amuse me. I know guys like this, and I wouldn’t change them for the world. To me, their style is pure art.

Take a look at that watch. Would you have the heart to tell the owner that he had to replace it with the Skagen 519XLSL1? I know I wouldn’t. Then again, I’m a guy…

Firefox extensions I could never do without:

Adblock
Get rid of annoying ads. It’s essential. You can block out any keyword or url-link that you don’t want a website to load. Very easy to use, and you can enable it / disable it in one click.

DownThemAll!
The best download manager I’ve encountered, and it speeds up my downloads amazingly. I have a high-speed connection, and yet I’ve saved hours of waiting using this extension. It really, really works. Warmly recommended.

From the developer: “DownThemAll lets you download all the links or images contained in a webpage and much more: you can refine your downloads by fully customizable criteria to get only what you really want … it features an advanced accelerator that increases speed up to 400%, it allows you to pause and resume downloads at any time and, last but not least, it’s fully integrated into your favorite browser!”

Gbutts
Displays all your Google services as buttons in your toolbar. Quick access for Gmail, Blogger, Calendar, Picasa… if it’s Google, it’s there.

Gmarks
Displays your Google bookmarks in the sidebar area. Drag and drop bookmarks much like the Firefox bookmarks toolbar. Thanks to this, I never use Firefox Bookmarks. The search option even lets you search through text located on the site where the bookmark refers to.

Hyperwords
A matter of taste, certainly much to my liking. From their website: “With Hyperwords™ installed in your web browser, select any text and a menu appears: searches, references, emailing, copying, blogging, translation, & more.”

Greasemonkey
Easily allows you to add functionality / design tweaks to websites from a wide and ever-increasing selection of scripts.

TinyMenu
Minimizes the toolbar menu. Saves you some space.

And I simply must recommend this Firefox-theme, it’s beautiful. Try it out:

MidnightFox by TwisterMC

As it says in the comments: No flaws.