As promised in my piece the other day. I went searching around the ‘net for that info on the 12,000 fewer new CD titles released by the recording industry. I found this article over at MacWizards Music. It’s not the one I read before, but does have some interesting figures pulled from the RIAA own reports and other sources.

“So the record industry cut their inventory (and artist investment) by 25 percent and sales only dropped 4.1 percent, even though the economy is at rock bottom. There were almost 12,000 fewer new releases for the consumer to choose from in 2001 than 1999. The record companies are making more money per release than ever.”

An odd day today, I’ve not really been able to concentrate on anything for any length of time, as my cold is in full throttle. It kept me awake (actually, stopped me going to bed) until past 3 am this morning.
I went to see my Mum this morning and to fix up some hanging baskets for her. Jamie came with me which was a nice change.
Steve and Megan came round in the afternoon. Megan brought her new game “Disney’s Sorry”, which she and Jamie seemed to enjoy.
Michelle, Chris, and Chloe came round later too. It’s been a while since they’ve been round so it was nice to see them.

Another interesting day at work today. I spent another day with Dave N, just looking at the code really. Driven by error messages and exceptions in the log files, tracking them down, fixing them where we can (exceptions on the mainframe are soooo expensive). We found one error caused by a robot, TurnItIn, hitting the site, failing to correctly interpret or ignore some links written to the page with javascript (don’t ask 😉 ), and then making invalid requests as it tried to follow those ‘links’. Hopefully the robots.txt fix for that one will work. Quite why turnitin is trying to crawl a clothing catalogue site I have no idea. No academic papers here!

Apparently it’s already May! What happened? Where have the first four months of the year gone? I mean, I don’t really keep track of the passage of time much, but I kinda divide the year into before my birthday and after my birthday. Well it’s my birthday this month which means that the first ‘half’ has already gone.
What have I done? What have I achieved? Which of my plans have come to fruition? Did I make any plans?
Treading water is a phrase that comes to mind.
Actually I didn’t make any plans, I never do. I never have done. I often feel that I am supposed to, or even pretend that I have, but a plan you have no belief in or no intention of carrying through doesn’t count, does it?
Actually I make it up as I go along. All of it. Everything. Work, family, everything. Hmmm… That should be work, family, full stop. There is nothing else. And when I say work, I mean computery stuff, which I ‘do’ most of the time, some of which I get paid for, which is good, but not enough, which is another story. And when I say family, I mean Jan and Jamie, and occasionally some of the others, but that’s a lot less than it was, which is yet another story.
I’m rambling now, as I sometimes do, but not usually here. And I’ve got a dozen things to do, and a 90-page document to read for a meeting first thing tomorrow. So I’d better go and read it…
Right… I’m going… Now.

Sorted! Joel is happy, I’m done with the hassle, and I actually got round to releasing those bug fixes!

I got a reply from Joel. It looks like he will be spending more money on his attorney. Ah well.
I really haven’t got anything invested in the name of the thing. In fact it never was intended to be a name, it’s more of a description! So what the heck, it’s now called B2Links!

Edit: I’ve now sent my reply to Joel.

It was good while it lasted, Wired has this story Gibson Kicks the Blogging Habit

“DUBLIN, Ireland — Writer William Gibson will wind up his hugely popular weblog within a few weeks, out of fears that it might stifle his creative thinking about his next novel.
“I think it’s in its last couple of weeks,” he said. “I do know from doing it that it’s not something I can do when I’m actually working. Somehow the ecology of writing novels wouldn’t be able to exist if I’m in daily contact. The watched pot never boils,” he added with a laugh. “

I must admit I didn’t read it as regularly as I would have liked, but it was always interesting.