If you don’t try and keep up with boifromtroy you end up with so much to read you keep putting it off. It’s an amazing amount of material. Anyway in case you – like me – have missed out on this season’s fashion tip (hot from New York City) you should click across right now and learn that polo shirts are back. Honest. When I was at University in the early nineties there was a hall warden in the residences who must have worn a polo shirt every day of the four years I was there (I do not believe it was the same one). His collars were always up and, unlike most people’s collars, they never went limp. I don’t know who did his laundry (maybe he did) but it was incredible. Now the fact I can’t remember his name is starting to trouble me.

On this day…

2004: Troy
2003: Open Secret
2003: Crossroads ‘was all a dream’
2003: Pop Life
2003: Unfortunately There Are Effectively No Funds Available To Pay The Salaries
2003: No Consensus In Support Of Same-Sex Unions
2003: Dr Kildare is a Sissy

A number of site’s are pointing to Tim Berners-Lee’s discussion on new top level domains. I found it a fascinating insight to some of the concepts which were put in place in the early day’s of the internet. What I also see as interesting is that the tree-like structure of the domain system evolved from good technical reasons and was – back then – less about maintaining the concept of a trademark or brand. It’s a shame that it’s moved away from that really.

On this day…

2004: Memories Of A May Afternoon
2003: Helsinki Jazz

There are a lot of reports around at the moment about the levels of spam. BBC News is saying that junk mail now accounts for nearly 70% of e-mails worldwide. If this is true then I am doing rather better than most people. You may recall that my ISP is Demon who introduced spam filtering earlier this year. This has had a fantastic impact on the levels of spam I receive. Musak is hosted with DreamHost who use razor spam filtering server-side and then I use Mozilla’s junk mail filter at my end of the chain. If one message a day gets through then I am surprised indeed. I’m so used to this level of filtering that I hardly ever look at the spam folder. I just looked at it and while there are lots of pre-filtered messages there none of them were mails I should have had. All-in-all this is working very well indeed.

On this day…

2004: New Entries Or Broken Images?

I have always been pretty loyal when it comes to web-browsers. I own, somewhere, a fully licensed version of Netscape 0.9 (or was it 1.0) on floppy disc. Since that day I have been a Netscape user and turned to Mozilla when that became the non-AOL enabled version. Netscape/Mozilla has also been my mail program of choice for most of the time – although I did use Eudora for quite a while until multiple accounts became available in a Mozilla release.

Over the years I have had to use Internet Explorer. Primarily I use it for work where the software we develop has an interface optimised for IE.

I had a brief spell as an Opera user (and licenced a copy) but I never grew accustomed to the interface. Yesterday I received an email from Opera announcing the beta release of Opera 7.5. So, I downloaded it and two things struck me about it. Firstly, it’s fast. Despite the claims on Mozilla’s site about 1.7 Opera won (I haven’t run Firefox yet to compare that code). Secondly, Opera’s full-screen mode really is full-screen. No address bars. No scroll bars. Just full-screen browsing. I really must remember that because at times it’ll be very, very useful. And, what’s more, I still like Opera’s small-screen rendering option!

On this day…

No other posts on this day.

In other news, Take That are to get back together for the first time since their split in 1996. The article also notes that Mark Owen has been dropped by his record label.

UPDATE 25 April: Apparently Not.

UPDATE 30 April: It may be on again now but former member Robbie Williams will not be joining the band.

On this day…

2004: Porche Gadget

Perhaps it’s a little sad that the first thing that jumped out at me from this item at Engadget was the ‘phone not the car.

“but we think there’s a reason they decided to roll with the Treo 600 for the promotional photos” – indeed.

On this day…

2004: Boyband Back (But Not For Good)

On Wednesday I read about the launch of Amazon’s new A9 search service so, of course, I had to go geekwise and try searching on my the word ‘musak‘ to find this site nicely up the rankings. Why did I waste a few minutes doing that?

In addition I searched on some other terms which would link to some of my sites and found a pointer to an entry I made at The Mirror Project. It seems the picture was chosen by a guest curator to be included in the Real Smooth Shave collection. In turn, that reminds me I have a new image to post there.

On this day…

2005: Where Was I?
2004: Bloglines Top Links

I have mentioned Bloglines before (here and here for example). Since I acquired a broadband connection this kind of web service is all the more useful and I have discovered many interesting personal sites because of it.

Earlier in the week I received the news that they have now introduced a daypop-like service which lists the most popular links in the sites Bloglines sees daily. Nothing too new (although I suspect there’s a ton of clever code beneath it) . What is nice is that you can reduce the listing based only on the sites you track. You can, therefore, see the most popular links by people who you actively read. This is brilliant because it should really highlight connections between the vast mix of sites I dip into over time.

Looking at today’s mix, however, doesn’t highlight any overlaps! Perhaps the collection of sites that I read are very different from each other. I don’t know if that is good or bad.

On this day…

2005: Where Was I?
2004: I Had Visions Of A Robotic Dog

I suspect everybody will link to this over the next few days but it does make me smile. At the beginning of April Google announced an email service. This morning, BBC News reports that a US Senator is drawing up legislation to stop it on the basis of the reports which claim it will scan emails to allow targeting text advertising to be placed (similar to the other Google ad products).

I don’t know if it’s the Senator’s actual words or a BBC journalist writing but the legislation is reported to be bring put in place because the problem

“is Google’s plan to make revenue from users agreeing to their incoming e-mail being scanned for targeted advertising” / source

The keyword for me there is “agreeing”. If you agree to the scanning (which I suspect is being hyped out of all proportion) then why not get the benefits of all the extras Google are offering? There are many other email services on the market so there is no reason to sign with Google unless you want to.

I am not sure if somebody is just jumping on the bandwagon but Google’s getting a nice lot of coverage from this offering and with an IPO looming it can’t be such a bad thing. I do suspect that over the next few days you will also see a whole stack of marketing gurus commenting on the effect any controversy is having on the Google brand. You heard it here first!

On this day…

2005: Vacillation’s What We Need
2004: It’s A Takeover

Catching up with the excellent writings of Chris at prosaic (who’s new design is simple and elegant) I was directed to an article at sfgate.com (The Obesity Crisis) which is fascinating and rings true. I am sure that, over the last ten years, the amount of food I have consumed has increased massively as a result of the size of the portions that I eat (rather than eating more meals). Anyway, methinks I should head off the the gym now and resist the urge to simplify the look of this site …

On this day…

2004: Add Listen To Musak’s Content to My Yahoo!
2004: Gay Weddings
2003: Deborah Orr on the Oscars