Shopping For Books, Music and Movies

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I generally tend to ask people for book or cd tokens for my birthdays and Christmas. It’s easier sometimes than trying to suggest a specific item that I would like. At time like that I seem to only be able to think of terribly expensive or obscure things that I want. So, having got some tokens for my birthday last week, and having some left over from Christmas, I finally got round to going shopping today. And what a lot I got! 🙂

I had £95 worth of tokens to spend. Some were for Borders, some were for HMV and some were for Waterstones. Having looked around for the last couple of weeks at some of the things I might buy, I finally got round all three shops this morning and spent all but £2 worth of tokens. Here are the things I bought:

Three Brian Jaques Redwall books: Triss, Loamhedge, and Rakkety Tam. I’d got behind with the Redwall series. These will bring me up to date. Three Terry Goodkind books from the The Sword of Truth series which I only started last year: Blood of the Fold , Temple of the Winds, and Soul of the Fire. Two Neal Stephenson books: Quicksilver and The Confusion. These are the first two of the Baroque cycle which I have been waiting to read. The third, The System of the World, is still only available in hardback so I’ll wait to get that one.

The last two books I got were Black Coffee Blues by Henry Rollins: I love his music, but I’ve not read him before; and O’Reilly’s Extreme Programming Pocket Guide (I had to get one computer book didn’t I!)

I also bought some music CDs: Michael Nyman – The Piano, the Beginners Guide to Bollywood which is a 3CD set for a budget price, and Serge Gainsbourgs’s Initials Sg which is a great compilation of his work through the decades. Quite a mixed bunch that lot. I’m currently listening to the first of the Bollywood CD’s real vintage stuff from the 60’s and 70’s. I don’t understand a word if it, but it’s great!

Finally, I bought a couple of DVDs (I set out to get more, but I can get three books for the price of a DVD!)Akira – The Ultimate Collection. Jan had already bought me the second Akira graphic novel for my birthday. I also got Siouxsie and the Banshees Best of: Deluxe Sound and Vision which has a double audio CD with a DVD. I realised the other week that I no longer owned any Banshees stuff so I’m glad to get this even though it’s only a best of.

So, I’ve got a lot to entertain me for the next few weeks. I’ll try to review them as I get through them. I’ve missed doing reviews for the last 18 months.

The Beeb Shall Inherit the Earth

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Cory Doctorow claims The Beeb Shall Inherit the Earth over at Wired News. It’s a pretty good article talking about some of the things the BBC has been doing to open up its content to its audience.

America’s entertainment industry is committing slow, spectacular suicide, while one of Europe’s biggest broadcasters — the BBC — is rushing headlong to the future, embracing innovation rather than fighting it.

Unlike Hollywood, the BBC is eager and willing to work with a burgeoning group of content providers whose interests are aligned with its own: its audience.

I am full of admiration for the pioneers working there. Whilst I know they haven’t yet gone all the way with regards to Creative Commons licensing. They have been in close consultation with the UK and Scotland launches of the Creative Commons licensing process, and they have been working on some CC-like licensing, as well as getting clauses in the CC licences specifically addressing the BBC.

WordPress 1.5.1

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Hey! It looks like the new version of WordPress is out. There a summary of changes over at the WordPress Codex. In brief,

  • Login and feed fixes for IIS
  • Faster gettext i18n and Improved i18n string coverage
  • Extended ping support
  • Paging on the Manage->Posts page
  • URI-safe accent stripping for all UTF-8 characters in the Latin Extended-A Unicode block
  • Query string style argument list support for wp_get_links() and wp_get_linksbyname()
  • Improved hierarchy listing in wp_list_pages()
  • Support for a Status: theme header field
  • Improved caching and database query reduction
  • Plugins can now have multiple option pages
  • Many, many bug fixes

There’s a full list of bugs fixed over at the bug tracking server.