I used to live just round the corner! Near the junction of Bay Area Blvd and Space Center Blvd. I expect there's a plaque or something.

Maybe you're doing the wrong kind of typing? http://www.flickr.com/photos/philgyford/6538354609/

I saw 'Toy Story 3' this evening and, assuming the "extended peril" sequence is the one I'm thinking of, it lasts about three seconds and is immediately followed by Buzz doing very silly and funny things. And the "zombie" doll is... well, just a doll, with one half-closed eye. I'm not dismissing Nora's upset at all -- as a kid I was terrified of the flying monkeys in 'Wizard of Oz' myself -- but I think it's a bit much to make sweeping statements about millions of American kids being inured to murdering zombie violence because of a brief image of a slightly eerie doll, especially when you haven't seen it yourself. :)

"I don't know about clueless outraged Twitterers, Phil - I'm sure there were plenty of those, as normal but I do hope that referring to industry sources and newspaper articles explaining the news doesn't fall in to that territory?!" It can do, but I'm not saying it necessarily does here :) It's the "I've read an OUTRAGEOUS article and I'm going to post an outraged tweet about it, in the hope it outrages more people" knee-jerk reaction... without the tweeter knowing any background or context for the story. Which, perhaps, may be partly the fault of whatever news article they read not providing background. But it's also the limited thought people often give to these things. Hell, maybe I'm wrong about this and it's really simple and it is an outrage and there's not much more background to the story at all. I just get the feeling it's not as simple as it first appears.

Among all the Twittering, blogging outrage over this, I'm wondering how this axing of the UKFC is related to, or compares to, the previous government's plans to merge the UKFC and the BFI, saving money and losing some jobs in the process. The press, and those involved, seemed reasonably positive about this at the time, from what I can tell, and I don't recall any huge outcry at the time...? A couple of articles from last year: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article6804614.ece http://www.film-council.co.uk/news?show=15851&page=4&step=10 I don't know enough about either body, or their relationship, or their history, but it would be good to have more context and reflection about the run-up to the current decision. (I'm not saying you need to provide it, just that I'd like to read some somewhere :) .) Would this have happened under Labour too? How does "axing" the UKFC compare to merging it with the BFI? Given the merger thoughts, was this axing actually seen as inevitable by those in the know (rather than clueless outraged Twitterers)?

Around the turn of the century most future visions seemed to focus on 2020. I wonder at exactly what point in a decade these visions jump forward another ten years.

I've been pretty well taken in by the organic food good, big corporation genetically modified food evil side of things (never mind that organic food is big business too). Probably because I tend to share other beliefs with the kinds of people who hold this view. But you're often right about stuff (not always of course, but often :) ). Can you suggest anything I should read that would make me question my beliefs on this point further?

"a beautifully produced 'coffee table' book featuring cutaways, scale plans, projections, sections, maps of the fictional architecture and locations from popular TV shows." I always wanted to see a book/site that showed what the fourth walls of popular shows looked like. What was on the wall of Friends' or Frasier's apartments that we never saw? Or the Cheers bar? etc. We have two seasons of Deadwood to watch over Christmas, which I got out from the library. A bargain at five quid, and easier than downloading over BitTorrent on this occasion. I can *highly* recommend 'The Wire' if you're stuck for something to watch now...

I've been quite obsessive about getting album art in there before now, but I still have oodles of tracks that I'll never have covers for (rips of 78 rpm records, old 7" singles, the 365 Days Project, etc). So CoverFlow's always going to be so gappy as to be not much use unfortunately. I've read that iTunes doesn't store the artwork it automatically fetches in the MP3 files themselves which is a shame, as this is what happens if you manually add artwork. (And from comments here it sounds like the automatically-fetched artwork won't show up on iPods either.) I've found Synergy, which you mention, to be a good way of getting artwork -- the latest version features a "Transfer cover to iTunes" menu option, which is the equivalent of finding the artwork at Amazon and manually dragging it to the track in iTunes.

You got my hopes up when you said "older iPods"... but my 2nd generation iPod doesn't have a Games tab or a firmware upgrade.

One difference between these sites and conventional companies is that it might not be clear how the site owner will act in the future. As an example, I don't make any money from pepysdiary.com at the moment, and people contribute their discussion and find information to help others freely. I plan to keep the site free, and live, for at least the duration of the project (9.5 years) and longer if possible. But if someone came along and offered me gazillions of dollars for the site, or I realised I could make a tidy living from advertising, there's a chance I'd succumb and I'd be making money from the freely-contributed efforts of others. Which is as if Henry Ford got his workers to work, for free, on a vast fleet of community-owned cars and, a year later, flicked a switch that meant people using them had to pay him (or something like that; I hear the sound of an analogy creaking). My point is that until a site owner decides to start making money from it, there's no way of telling whether a site will, ulimately, be Good or Bad (to simplify the spectrum).

While I agree about the wisdom of crowds often being very, er, un-wise, I loved this quote: "I don't want other people voting on what I should read first. I want to see major national news stories." As if major news stories are some objective thing delivered to us from some greater power, rather than something decided on by a small number of people at the publication concerned. Basically, all our news is chosen for us by someone, but it's the quality of the crowd that matters, not its size.