Call me suspicious, but if work gives everyone free ice cream what bad news is coming to balance it out?

You know this Dan Le Sac album really ain't bad, Thou Shalt Always Kill is probably the best thing on it, but it's definitely not the only track, and I do find myself getting caught up trying to work out where some of the guitar samples have been lifted from.

Now, should I be sensible on Thursday, or go and see Ladytron down in London and be completely knackered on Friday?

So this year the folk festival has a queuing system for the ticket booking system. Having slightly miss timed getting my coffee I didn't get in the queue till just after nine and was told there were two and a half thousand or so people in front of me and I should expect a wait of thirty to sixty minutes. Once the queue had got down to about two thousand or so the estimate was ten to thirty minutes, five to ten minutes came shortly afterwards and it's been imminent for the last five minutes with a thousand people still in the queue.

I can only the assume the time estimate is there to scare off people early, and then keep anybody who isn't scared off really quickly hanging on desperately.

Edit: On the bright side the whole thing seemed to work nice and smoothly this year, which has to be an improvement over previous years.

and you think, "I should point that out to somebody," and you discover that del.icio.us actually works from work these days so it's finally worth creating an account.

Then you see that the top link on the appropriate person's links is exactly what you were going to point them at.

Anyway, Processing implemented in Javascript, a heady mixture of daft and win.

After a few listens the new album is definitely growing on me, and my limited edition copy of Ghost I-IV turned up today and is lovely. Nicely reproduced art book, nice design to for the vinyl sleeves, very nice package overall.

Oh, and a nice low number, 230 of 2500.

I doubt we'll see quite this sort of thing for the physical release of The Slip, but you never know.

I was going to just do this as a comment, but the first few tracks were so amusing in their own way I thought I'd do it as an actual post.

1. Open your library (iTunes, Winamp, Media Player, iPod, etc)
2. Put it on shuffle
3. Press play
4. For every question, type the song that's playing
5. When you go to a new question, press the next button
6. Don't lie and try to pretend you're cool...

1. Opening Credits: How We Know, The Thermals
"You spill water water like love and i will take it if you can't take it." I'm not sure if this is my life or not, but I sense a theme.

2. Waking Up: Knockin' On Heaven's Door, Eric Clapton
This is why I don't like waking up.

3. First Day At School: Ecstasy, Lou Reed
Considering the title of the song it really is rather downbeat.

4. Falling In Love: Picky Bugger, Elbow
"Drinking / in order to feel / Thinking / Reinventing the wheel" Ouch.

5. Fight Song: China (Clouds Not Mountains), Banco de Gaia
A song about insurmountable tasks that you may start but will not personally see the end of. I don't think this is a fight in the action movie sense.

6. Breaking Up: Everybody's Got Something to Hide…, The Beatles
Breaking up is never this fun.

7. Prom: Leif Erikson, Interpol
"It's like learning a new language / Helps me catch up on my mime / If you don't bring up those lonely parts / This could be a good time" That's somehow oddly appropriate for school dances.

8. Life: Family Business, Fish
I'm glad that isn't my life.

9. Mental Breakdown: Don'ts, David Shrigley
"There is no such thing as a metal Frisbee."

10. Driving: Feel Good Lost Reprise, Broken Social Scene
This sort of music is only ever used for the timeless moment before crashing, which is probably what my driving would be like.

11. Flashback: Hell In A Bucket, The Grateful Dead

12. Getting back together: Postscript, Robert Fripp
"So the whole story is completely untrue, big hoax." Sound of footsteps retreating and door closing. Sound of door opening again and footsteps returning. Don't you just love connecting tracks?

13. Losing your Virginity: Blue Room (Ambient Mix), The Orb
I think you could probably meet a girl, get to know her, go on a few dates, lose your virginity, and have the rest of a relationship before this track finished.

14. Wedding: Walking Into Clarksdale, Jimmy Page & Robert Plant

15. Birth of Child: Climbing to the Moon, Eels
I suppose if you picked out the chorus then maybe it could work, maybe.

16. Final Battle: Space Truckin', Deep Purple
That could work, well the opening chords certainly could.

17. Funeral Song: Slow Burn, David Bowie
Kind of works, but feels more like an end credits song really.

18. End Credits: Dammers or Czukay, Future Pilot AKA
Somehow cheerful and sinister at the same time. I think I'll be back for a sequel.

Which is a good thing because the next track on the playlist is Revolution 909 by Daft Punk which would clearly be good opening scene music to a film.

Iron Man was excellent, less rescuing cats from trees than is normal in super hero films but I'm not sure how Tony Stark would rescue a cat from a tree except by carefully blowing the tree up and catching the cat in mid air.

The Easter egg at the end of the credits was excellent, Robert Downey Jr. portrayed the alcoholic misogynist Stark perfectly (you'd almost think he had practice :-) ), and the action sequences were brilliantly choreographed. The scenes of him testing the Mk. II were especially amusing in that respect.

Given the egg at the end I was surprised that there is no Avengers or Iron Man 2 listed on imdb, and the only other reference to RDJr as Stark I can find is in the upcoming Hulk film. I do hope they correct this obvious omission soon.

It's on at 7, 8, 9:10, and 11.

For some reason I want to hear a mash up of this and this.

So then, Iron Man. I've heard surprisingly good things about it. Anybody fancy going and seeing it on Friday?

Dinner plans in London having fallen through I'm now installed in the Blue with Matthew Reid.

I was going to do a grumpy post about the thermostat on my oven having broken and burnt my dinner, but I think it was just in mourning for Humph.

So yesterday nin's site had a, "two weeks," message, and today there was a new single with the comment tag saying to look on nin.com on May the 5th.

Good grief man, the non-standard copies of Ghosts aren't even out the door and you've got another thing coming?

Those of you who said yes, is meeting at the station at about 11 okay?

techiebabe, do you still fancy meeting up for food and/or drinks? I rather fancy a trip to Rough Trade's giant shop after the exhibition, but other than that have no firm plans.

I remember a news story from back in the nineties that CERN had some problems with the Large Electron-Positron collider because of a couple of bottle left in the beam tunnel.

Well, apparently they think there may be some loose plastic parts in the LHC beam tunnel but aren't even going to both searching for them because the beam will just vaporise them anyway. They are clearly getting closer to proper Evil Genius™ status.

I wish ewx hadn't mentioned simont's suggestion of using counted trees as an editor data structure at the pub last Thursday, because it's now two-thirty in the morning and I've got a bit of lisp (oh come on, what would you use for tree wrangling?) that implements such a structure for text (so holds the data as lines with counts for both lines and characters) and maintains arbitrary spanning objects within the tree structure by painting nodes as end points (with an offset into the node's data) or edges. It's quick to find out if any point is within a span by working your way up the tree, and the span grows in a nice way with the tree as things are inserted in he middle.

Clearly this would be an excellent basis for an editor that can efficiently handle large files and the associated for formatting, folding, change highlighting etc. and I encourage somebody else to go away and write it. I'm going to bed.

I like strange maps, but Where News Breaks is one of the best on there in quite a while. i wonder how different the map would look if it were based on more recent wire service articles, I've got a feeling the California might be bigger.

Interesting stuff on the unreleased sequel to the Hitchhikers adventure game, you can even play two pretty sparse prototypes of the game.

Melt Banana (who sound like this) are playing at the Barfly in Cambridge on the 24th of June. Anybody want to join covertmusic and(oops, he has a prior commitment to see Radiohead that night) myself in listening to ear splitting guitars and a shouty Japanese vocalist?