... is the new "and they woke up and it was all a dream". Ho-hum, still months to wait for new episodes. In a complete failure to make an obvious link I only twigged today that Edward James Olmos played Gaff in Blade Runner. Standby for some Origami spaceships.

I've had to call the RAC twice in the space of a month. It's one of the hazards of driving a sixteen year old car with one previous owner who only ever used it to drive round a village. The service has been spot on both times I've dealt with them. Given my brushes with Orange, Virgin Media and various utility companies this is an all too unfamiliar situation. They're prompt; I've received a call from an operator to tell me the patrol was half an hour away and then one from the patrol itself when they're ten minutes out on both occasions. All of the people I've spoken to have been polite, really know their stuff and expressed a genuine desire to help get the jalopy going again. If you own a car then do yourself a favour and buy great customer service from the RAC. Hell, even if you don't own a car who knows when you might be in one that breaks down. Cover yourself then you'll never be stuck. As an aside I once spent three hours late one night waiting for the AA when a friend's car broke down. When the recovery vehicle finally did arrive it was from some local garage. There was a total mismatch between the expectation set and the service delivered hence why I chose the RAC when it came to needing cover myself.

Disclaimer: if the above seems a little out of character then it's because I want to balance the fact I moan an awful lot about crap customer service on this blog. If someone does a good job I figure I should mention that too.

Interesting article over on guardian.co.uk discussing the UK's water footprint, another example of an environmental cost of our lifestyles that we're able to easily ignore. They also have a good interactive guide to put things in perspective. The piece is based around a new report from the WWF that they've released as it's World Water Week. The full report is a 7.7Mb PDF and can be found here. I'm going to give it a thorough read.

This post over on BoingBoing reminds of a conversation I had a while back about the notion of music copyright. Music in the form of, say, digital information on a disc is protected by copyright yet it only has value to me as sound coming out of my loudspeakers. Is that protected by copyright laws too? Does this mean that if I have friends round to my house I should check with each of them that they all own the music I'm about to play? I'm assuming that if they own that music in some form then they have a 'licence' to hear it round at my house. Anyone else will be issued with bright yellow ear defenders and a guide to lip-reading. Perhaps we could converse using sign-language or maybe just not listen to music at all ever for fear of breaking some aspect of laws whose meaning we are only vaguely aware of. I mean, if I play music off a CD and it turns out one of my friends has it on vinyl is that format-shifting their 'licence' and hence breaking the law? I just don't know. Perhaps the music industry could sell a licence that permits the enjoyment of their product from wherever the sound may be being emitted? Sadly we would all have to rely on people's honesty to not enjoy music they had not purchased the appropriate licence for. Obviously such a scheme is patently ridiculous because it is unenforcable but is surely the ideal the music industry would would wish for as no one would ever hear anything without the copyright owner being remunerated. It can't work because you  can't apply such rules to the environment that we live in. Being able to make digital copies of music and share them at no cost is a change to the environment music inhabits and the rules the industry would like to enforce simply can't work.

Update: U2 tracks leak after Bono plays stereo too loudly

I find delicious to be hugely useful as do the people I work with so it was good that they finally got around to updating the site last week. What is it with calling these library tools 'delicious' anyway?  Besides the URL changing most work seems to have been done on the design... which is great an' all but it would be nice to have had a bit more detail on what's gone on behind the scenes.

"You may not have noticed, but the old back-end was getting creaky under the load of five million users."

Believe me, I'd noticed.

"Using the latest in 21st century technology, we've also added the ability to sort your current view in a variety of useful ways!"

Hmm. You can sort by 'most recent' and alphabetically but not by popularity, which in this case is the number of other users who have bookmarked that page. This is one of the key features of delicious so unless I'm missing something I'm surprised this isn't included. I'd also like to see a 'frequency' option which would order my bookmarks by the number of times I've visited that bookmarked page through delicious.