The kittens are already noticeably bigger than they were last weekend. I'm not too surprised, they eat enough for a small horse. There are some pictures of them in my photo gallery.

Yesterday was a momentous day - Ableton Live 3.0 was released. I got a free upgrade (because I only just bought v2) and spent most of last night playing with the new features. It's a pretty amazing piece of software - I am coming to think of it as Photoshop for music. Put simply, anything you can imagine can be done. As quoted on the reviews page:

"You can use it for live performance, you can DJ with it or engineer some weird, trailer park crossbreed of the two."

Yup, my music can definitely be described like that!

I keep meaning to post to say that (so far) Virgin.net ADSL has been loads better than the terrible excuse for broadband that is NTL. Since I went online with Virgin.net I've had none of the problems that I took for granted on NTHell - no DNS dropouts, no transparent proxy issues, no random disconnects and what's more the Usenet server is actually functional, I get twice the upload capacity, it's cheaper and just feels a lot faster.

By checking which proxy I am using I found out that I am actually still being proxied by one of NTL's Inktomi Traffic Servers. Looking back over news items from 2000, it seems Virgin.net sold 49% of their business to NTL. Given that Telewest are set to buy up NTL any day now and BT just teamed up with Yahoo! - pretty soon the UK's broadband market will be sewn up by a handful of companies.

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I saw this great site about the World Beard Championships. Since I have started cultivating a small beardy growth of my own, I have become somewhat fascinated by beards. I've got a hell of a lot of catching up to do if I want to enter when they come to London in 2007...

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I've started noticing strange things in my referrer logs (the record of sites that visitors have supposedly come from). I am getting hit quite a lot by dodgy-sounding porn sites which I have never heard of, let alone expect links from. After a bit of research, it seems that this is just another form of spam. In some ways, I'm flattered that spammers think my site is likely to generate more traffic for them but in others I'm bloody annoyed that they see fit to waste my time and energy. I'm a pretty staunch anti-spammer and will do everything I can to stop them from messing up my stats.

It's just another example of how spam is choking the Internet.

Here are some wise words from Bill Hicks for anyone in "email marketing".

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