My poker buddy (for lack of a better expression of people you know a bit through playing cards) David Flusfeder has started a blog. David is off to Buenos Aires to play in the Latin America Poker Tour. The blog will hopefully be better than most poker blogs as David is an author who plays cards; not a card player who tries to write.

And David is not the only travelling thanks to PokerStars, Pete Birks is off to Monaco.

• MP3 support. Simple as that, it would allow me to take the music with me on the road (or in my case the train/tube). It would also make void any worries over the future of the company itself. Spotify could simply disappear (have a look at Music Ally’s list of 200 digital music start-ups or does anyone but me remember eBay’s short-lived music business ?) or have their licences revoked (so we could end up with something like a  YouTube versus UK songwriters clash)
• DLNA support. This would allow streaming to devices like a Squeezebox/Soundbridge, PS3s/X-boxes and modern TV-sets
• A cheaper price. £6.99 would be my sweet spot, £9.99 just feels a bit too much. I say this as someone who must have spent £10-15 000 over the years on physical product (roughly an LP or CD a week since 1978). I might have bought my last ever normal CD and it does not even make me feel sad

First LPs, then CDs. This time I took the last CD for each letter A-Z, stacked them up in front of me a checked if the albums are in Spotify (UK). The only disappointment is that there is no Stina Nordenstam at all in their library. It does not matter for me as I’ve got the full set of of her CDs and Spotify makes up for it with having one of my other favourite Swedish acts Monica Zetterlund well covered.

Even if most of this stuff is fairly mainstream (you will look in vain for any Burial or Holger Czukay albums), I would still say this is quite impressive. Now if I could take the library with me on the road and keep the MP3s (to play on the iPod) then I would not hesitate to shell out for a premium account; but as it is there is too many negatives with Spotify (I’ll come back to that) for me to splash out just yet.

• Avalanches, Since I Left You: Yes
• Buzzcocks, In a Different Kitchen: Yes
• Crowded House, Woodface: Yes
• Durutti Column, Sporadic Recordings: No, but this is to be expected as this is a limited release
• Everything But The Girl, Best of (1996 version): Yes
• Franz Ferdinand, Franz Ferdinand: Yes
• Nanci Griffith, Lone Star State of Mind: Yes
• Howlin’ Wolf, His Best (1997, Chess version): Yes
• Chris Isaak, San Francisco Days: Yes
• Junipher Greene, Friendship: No, re-release of Norway’s first double-LP
• Josie Kuhn, Parade: Yes
• Low, Trust: Yes
• Bob Mould, Modulate: No (but his superior first two solo albums are there)
• Stina Nordenstam, The World Is Saved: No, the world is doomed
• Omar, There’s Nothing Like It: Yes
• Public Enemy, It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back: Yes
• Q – none, first on R is Rain Tree Crow’s Rain Tree Crow: Yes
• Røyksopp, The Understanding: Yes
• David Sylvian, Dead Bees On A Cake: Yes
• Tricky, Maxinquaye: Yes
• Ultravox!, The Island Years: Yes
• Suzanne Vega, Suzanne Vega: Yes
• Mari Wilson, The Rhythm Romance: No (this one is quite rare)
• Dhafer Youssef, Divine Shadows: No (but ie Malak is there)
• Monica Zetterlund, Det Fins Dagar: Yes

The series have been widely praised by TV critics and on the web, but I found the first episode lacking. I liked the dreamlike quality of the filming and the good acting, but this whole local-Mr-Big plot was just over the top: a man gets away with child murders for years (even having an ongoing affair with one of the killed children’s mothers), maiming, he has the police force and the press in his pocket, there’s a slightly upsetting swan motif, there are hints of Abu Ghraib in a police interrogation scene and so on.
So good but not quite living up the hype.

I’ve spent a few hours of my weekend getting the tumblelog more to my liking. Getting there. When I am done there the intention is to suck out all the old mini-posts on this site and leave this as a site for longer post only.

I’ve spent some time over Christmas helping artist and my on-off poker-buddy Mathew Gibson to get his website up.

Mat’s site is using WordPress, the Elegant Grunge theme and a few plugins like Lightbox.

I did also help (on a very small scale), to finally (?) bring David Flusfeder’s site up.

Download Blogariddims 50, 67:58 minutes MP3@192Kbs, 107MB

The Blogariddims project has come to an end with this special 50th terminus-mix. It has seven-minute contributions from many of the 20 or so DJs, mixers and bloggers that have participated over the series (a meta-mix?).

This is the blurb for part nine of the mix. DJ Flack’s contribution to Blogariddims 50 follows my effort and you might have arrived here from Heatwave’s bit.

I’ve gone back to some of the English postpunk of my youth. Not the chopped-guitar postpunk that is so popular today (ie Bloc Party, Young Knives); but music with a softer focus (apologies for the softcore picture). Some might not even call this postpunk, but both John Foxx (Ultravox!) and Vini Reilly (Ed Banger and the Nosebleeds) came from a punk background. Virginia Astley could never be described as punk (her early outfit The Ravishing Beauties sound a lot like her solo-music) —- but she, along with John, Vini and several others (like Young Marble Giants, Marine Girls, Eyeless in Gaza, David Sylvian) arrived at a similar place at around the same time.

A place where people are sleeping in their gardens, waking up listening to church and cow bells on a Sunday morning, listening to Mozart with the windows open (well Vini Reilly anyways judging my the cover of his debut). A place where music is slower, sparser and gentler than the flag-waving stuff that came from their one-letter one-digit contemporaries at the other side of the Irish Sea.

My segment in Blogariddims 50 is a tribute to those who made this music. The true new romantics.

Thanks to Droid for setting this all up and for inviting me in the first place.

Tracklisting. A Garden Faded.

Sources are mostly digital since some of my pictured vinyl had faults.

• A summer long since gone (excerpt) - Virginia Astley
• The Garden (digital source) - John Foxx
• Sketch for summer (excerpt)- Durutti Column
• Faded with the Sun - Fieldtripq (soundbed throughout)
• Vondelpark Crossing - Peet Sneekes (field recording, soundtransit.nl)
• Windebells in Koiwa - Frederik Froument (field recording, soundtransit.nl)

My other Blogariddims mixes.

• Blogariddims 31 —- Blogariddims 31 - It’s So Different Here Volume 1
• Blogariddims 14 —- Norwegian postpunk 1979-1985
• Blogariddims 9 —- Absolute Norwegian

To kickstart my online presence after a prolonged break I have set up a tumblelog at tlog.halvorsen.org. All short posts like links, quotes, YouTube videos etc will be posted there. The main blog will continue to be here at www.halvorsen.org and I plan to restore the bulk of the longer pieces I’ve written over the next week or so as well as getting the Acecast podcasts up and running again before the autumn [Ever the optimist. Ed].

From the Evening Standard,

London cyclists are investing in helmet-mounted cameras to record their daily commute, so they have video evidence against careless drivers if they are knocked off and hurt.

The poisoning was not uncovered by the state but by Giroud, who sells his catch to African, Asian and eastern European immigrants in the local markets of Lyon’s grey suburbs and old industrial heartlands. Giroud, 35, is the only commercial fisherman on the Grand Large in Décines, bringing in 10 tonnes a year and selling it himself. …

Then in 2004 birds started dying around the Grand Large. Tests showed it was avian botulism. “Although there was no effect on my fish, customers who had seen dead birds were wary,” said Giroud. “Off my own back, just to reassure them, I sent my perfect-looking fish to the lab. I expected excellent results.”

But the tests found a different, murkier poison - the fish contained PCBs between 10 and 12 times the legal safety limit. Fish from the Grand Large was banned at the end of 2005 and similar bans have progressively spread to other areas.

Researchers have now been able to show not only that the fish sleep, but that they can suffer from sleep deprivation and insomnia.

Mechanism design theory looks at the paradoxes that result when economic actors withhold information about their preferences. When one person wishes to buy a unique item, and another is happy to sell it, they both may have an incentive to lie about the true price they would be happy to trade at. As a result, trades that ought to take place often do not do so. The Nobel winners have investigated how no auction, however designed, can truly create a perfect outcome for everyone concerned. While abstract, the theories have applications in the real world, as they suggest that markets may not be the best way to provide so-called public goods, such as roads and television programmes.