A few blog posts ago I said that Slicehost's service was nothing special but what made it so good is the fact that it did as advertised which is such a rarity with hosts these days.

Well, forget what I said as I was indeed wrong. Slicehost are something special. What has impressed me recently, apart from their wiki, articles, blog and forums is an email I received informing me of server's IP having been blocked for spam by some third-party which it would seem Gmail makes use of. The problem was a simple script error but this is irrelevant, what's impressive is the fact that Slicehost actually send you this email, very helpful!

The slicehost blog button I designed was, to my surprised, featured on the Slicehost Blog. Someone at
Slicehost clearly values community input. Cheers guys

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The Jazz is a DAB Jazz radio station broadcasting in the UK. Unfortunately it's plagued by problems, firstly there are adverts on it, a pet hate of mine. Secondly it's DAB the first leap backwards in technology. Maybe monophonic audio steams of low quality MP3 are fine coming out of a 2.4" speaker but when you find yourself needing to hear music in a format that's enjoyable this will not do.

Fortunately I found a solution today. The Jazz broadcast online in a pathetic 32kbps... or do they? It would seem when using Windows Media Player this is indeed the quality you receive. However, using an alternative player in Linux or OS X and I can pick up a much higher quality stream. Unfortunately I can't tell what quality the stream is, only that I can not recognise any encoding artefacts in the stream and I can skip adverts if I let a few minutes buffer first or simply rewind to re-listen to the last song whilst waiting for the adverts to finish. Great stuff

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My car is out of action for this week and possibly Monday too, some problem most likely related too wheel bearings who knows? Anyhow I have been forced to travel on the bus like I did in the "good old days". It's always the case that you never realise how much you like something till it's gone. As humans we have a wonderful tendency to take anything and everything for granted. Well, true to this rule I now find myself realising just how terrible the buses are. Unreliable, annoying stop changes, cold, uncomfortable, no privacy and highly inconvenient. Needless to say I can't wait till my car is fixed.

Whilst travelling on the bus I listen to music for the entire journey. I do this for two reasons, because I enjoy listening to music and because I don't enjoy listening to a commentary of last nights TV programming, football results or general gossip all wrapped up in bountiful swear words and a thick black country accent to further drive one insane. However, two nights ago someone was having a rather different conversation. It must be noted that this is the first time I have ever heard such a conversation on a bus and so I consider it a great rarity.

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Quote:
What we are, that only we can see

- Raplh Waldo Emerson

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What ho? A ping!

Following hot on the heals of the toadstool post where I first talked about the new XML-RPC features and the lagging behind post where I first moaned about not having them. Logicfury the software my blog runs on now supports pingbacks.

Primarily I use the one ping to ping them all service Pingomatic to dish out my pings also coupled up with a few default ones just to be sure.

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