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A great Muppet classic:

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A few hours before Jonathan Coulton performed his very first gig in the UK ever (And the first outside the states, I believe), he bought a Tenori-on which is apparently only available over there.

This means we ended up being the first people to ever see him perform playing with a new geeky toy. It looked very much like this:

I also, briefly, met Aquarion.

We also ended up with covers of The Saturday Boy and “Do They Know It’s Christmas Time?” The latter of which doesn’t appear to have made it to YouTube yet. Most of the rest of the concert did, though

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For those who don't know, iScrobbler is a plugin for iTunes for sending information about your listening habits to Last.fm. It runs in the background and sends a notification to Last.fm every time you play a track. By doing this for long enough, the service builds a very good picture of your music preferences which it uses to link you with other people with similar tastes, to recommend new music to you that's similar to what you like, and to inform you of upcoming events you might be interested in.

I use the Last.fm/iScrobbler service to supply the infobox on Soylent Red telling you what I recently listened to. But I like to listen to podcasts in iTunes and I'd prefer if these didn't show up on Soylent Red (not because I have anything to hide—I don't care if you guys know when I'm listening to Macbreak Weekly—but because that's not what that part of the site is for). After a bit of poking around I discovered a set of hidden preferences for iScrobbler, including the ability to filter tracks by artist, genre or file path.

Read the whole linked page for the details, but if you only want to filter out podcasts, here's how:

1. Quit iScrobbler
2. Open a terminal and type the command:
   defaults write org.flexistentialist.iscrobbler "Track Filters" '("Podcast")'
3. Start iScrobbler

Simple as that! Now your podcasts will stop showing up on Last.fm.

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Bang! The Complete History of the Universe is a new popular science book about the origins and development of the universe for a lay audience. So far, so, "I've read it all before." What's interesting is the list of authors, which includes legendary glam rock guitar god Brian May—sorry, Dr Brian May—of Queen.

Alternative headlines for this post were: "Prince of the Universe"; "A Kind of Science"; "Radio Telescope Ga-Ga"; and "Brian May Has a Sodding Doctorate in Astrophysics"

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Today would have been Freddie Mercury's 60^th birthday.

Mercury, with Queen, can pretty much be credited for any interest I might have in music. For a long time they were the only band I listened to. I spent part of the summer of 1997 in Slovenia with my parents. We would drive our rental car from our hotel to the interesting parts of the country, me in the back listening to Queen Rocks on my then-new Sony discman. Even then I attached particular significance to "No One But You", the surviving band-members' tribute to Mercury.

To this day there is more Queen in my CD collection than any other artist. If anything can be considered to be my all-time favourite song, "Bohemian Rhapsody must surely be it. My pubescent unrequited crushes were made bearable by endless listening to "You're My Best Friend" and "Somebody to Love". "Fat Bottomed Girls" gave me my... um... healthy body image. Yes, that will do.

Needless to say Queen will be on heavy rotation in iTunes today.

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I went to see Pearl Jam in The Point on Wednesday, and then to Radiohead in Marley Park yesterday. Both were good, but Pearl Jam were better.

It was the first time Pearl Jam had played in Ireland in six years. Since I only listened to them for the first time about four years ago this was obviously my first time seeing them live. I'm sorry to say that my knowledge of their music is pretty much limited to Ten and their new, self-titled album, so there was quite a lot of unfamiliar material for me. Still, they played everything I wanted to hear and I got to sing along to the one song that I actually know the words to, "Alive". We were treated to their interpretation of "The Boys Are Back in Town" during the second encore.

Radiohead were good, but there was more filler than I would have liked. There was one sequence of two or three songs during which I pretty much switched off and stopped listening. Partly because there were a couple of songs I didn't know and partly because some of their songs are just difficult. They still covered all of my favourites. Easy enough, given that I tend to like their most popular songs. I'm told that they don't tend to play "Creep", but they've played it both times I've seen them.

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I want a music player that doesn't require me to explicitly rate songs by assigning them a number of stars or some such nonsense. I want it to keep an internal representation of ratings and to gather data implicitly to alter those ratings. A song's rating should go up when the song is played. It should go down when the song is skipped over. It should go up when I raise the volume just after it starts playing. It should relate the rating for one song to the ratings of other songs by the same artist, or in the same genre.

If iTunes had been paying attention to all of my actions so far it would know that when I add a new Foo Fighters song to my music library there's a fairly freaking good chance that I'm going to like it more than average. If I started skipping over it a lot (possibly because it's one of the crappy acoustic songs from the second CD of In Your Honour) it should have adjusted the rating to reflect that.

Software throws out too much useful information about user behaviour.

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Somewhere in the discussion of the demise of Top of the Pops I came across a link to Nirvana's performance of Smells Like Teen Spirit on the show.

Top of the Pops didn't allow bands to perform their music live, instead forcing them to sing and mime to pre-recorded music. So Kurt Cobain completely took the piss with his singing, while the whole band mimed their instrument-playing as badly as they could. Cobain doesn't even pretend to play a whole chunk of the song. Krist Novoselic spends most of the performance swinging his bass around his head. It's hard to tell from the YouTube video but apparently the bass didn't even have any strings on it. Stick it to the man!

By the way, this is my 500^th post to Soylent Red.

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