Well I'm not. You'll have to pardon me if I take the opportunity to monkey around with some tags...

I had, many years ago, an iPod. And wonderful though it was, one day it stopped working. You could turn it on but beyond that it steadfastly refused to even impersonate working. So, harbouring an irrational fear of getting things serviced when they're broken, I dodged another malfunction and bought a new one.

Today, I have been stuck in the house all day waiting for an electrician to come and fix the shower (ironic maybe, but only in the Alanis Morrissette sense of the word, which is to say not at all) and decided to pass the time by making his old, broken iPod work. Unfortunately, I got it working.

Bear in mind that this is a marvellous achievement because, frankly, my ability at breaking things far outweighs my ability at fixing them. This newly-functioning 2nd generation iPod is one of the few things I've actually fixed, possibly the first. In fact, I may have passed some kind of repair tipping point, because the long-malfunctioning screen on my eMac appears to be working which makes a change. This is in one regard a Good Thing: I may have gained the ability to unbreak things. In another, it's less than perfect: why would anyone need two iPods?

There is, I imagine, a difference between owning an iPod and, say, an iPod Shuffle given the differences in capacity and features. There's probably a case for having an iPod and an iPod mini, even if it is entirely spurious. All of this means that there cannot really be a case for owning two 'standard' iPods. What's the point? I can store all of my CDs on one and almost all of them on the other one, which would give me at least three copies of most of the music I own. I could gaffa-tape them together and pretend to have a 60Gb monstrosity, though that might limit the portability of the thing.

Or, I could get one of these...


[picture from/link to Engadget]

Music Hurts is a new online music magazine that, remarkably, reads a lot like a glossy printed offering. In fact, in some ways, better than paperware.

I just watched an actual space shuttle launch live on the internet.

Wow.

Link.

Yesterday, Scotland beat Brazil 5-3. At football. Unfortunately, it's unlikely that you'll find this fact trumpeted on the back page of whichever newspaper you read every day. This is because neither team was made up of millionaire professionals drawn from the best leagues in the world nor, in Scotland's case, Scottish footballers.

Both teams are competing in the Homeless World Cup which is taking place in Edinburgh until Sunday. The game differs slightly from 'normal' football in that there are four players from each side on pitch. Substitutions are rolling, in a similar fashion to basketball or ice hockey and the pitch, much smaller than a regular football pitch, is enclosed on four sides much like an ice hockey rink. Each half lasts 7 minutes, but besides that, it's more or less football as anyone on the planet would recognise it.

Except, possibly, that everyone seems to be enjoying themselves. Even when they're losing.

I spent this weekend as I have spent so many others - chasing a frisbee around a field somewhere in Britain. This time, it was a hat tournament in Edinburgh (photos here) which, at least, meant there was no 12hr minibus ride to get there.

At hat tournaments, everyone registers individually and puts their name into a hat that corresponds to their professed level of ability - beginner, intermediate or advanced. I've always thought that these classifications never quite cover the full range of players who show up. There is, for example, no hat marked "thinks he's better than he is", nor is there ever one marked "been playing long enough to be good, but isn't". There's also a period of hanging around, chatting to the people you know about the people you don't, and thinking, "Y'know, I'm gonna be one of the better players here." That is, until some genuinely talented players - in this case, some members of the Fusion team that came 10th at Europeans the week before - turn up.

Then, there's the vagaries of team selection. As it's random, there's always a possibility that there will be a team that ends up without a single thrower on it. It's usually mine. After meeting up with your new teammates for the weekend, you're off and you don't have time to worry about much except how badly you're doing on the pitch.

Which, in our case, was particularly badly. Due to numbers, there were only five teams with the bottom-placed team after the group stage disbanded and distributed amongst the four remaining teams. All of this means that I managed to finish last. Twice.

But no-one goes to hat tournaments to bring home silverware. I went to have fun (check) and to see how much pain I would be in on Monday morning (big ol' check).

Next week: practice in St. Andrews, followed by Tour 3 in Birmingham in two weeks.

Edit: practice in St. Andrews? Five people turned, including only one person who actually lives in St. Andrews.