chrisgreen.co.uk

Apple is notorious for its secrecy, which as a journalist is rather frustrating. As such, much of what the company releases comes to the market as somewhat of a surprise.

Well for once the company has let the cat out of the bag early. While at the Wall street Journal “D” conference in California, Steve Jobs decided to go public on some of the new features that will be bolted into the next release of iTunes.

iTunes 4.9 will retain all the usual features of the iTunes app, but will also have the facility to read and download from RSS feeds, meaning that iTunes will now be able to directly download podcasts, without the need for external applications such as iPodder.

Depending on the implementation, I think this could be a very good thing in principle - iTunes has mass-market recognition and penetration, and thus should open up the world of podcasting to a much wider audience that would otherwise never know of its existence.

OK - a little behind schedule - I blame the amount of booze I drunk on the evening - but I haven’t had a chance to finish touching up the pics from my friends Simon & Sarah’s wedding yet. With a bit of luck I’ll get something posted this evening.

Mr & Mrs Brett
Here’s a pic of my friends Simon and Sarah at their wedding reception cutting the cake - and it was a nice cake, one tier was fruit cake, another was jam sponge - an excellent choice.

They are now off to the US for their honeymoon. I’ve taken the liberty of giving them some advice on where to visit when they stop off in Vegas.

…..not mine though, but rather one of my best friends is finally getting hitched to his long time girlfriend.

The wedding is set for 3pm today, and with a bit of luck I might even remember to pick up my camera on the way out of the door today. Assuming I do take the camera, I’ll post a couple of pics here later.

Oh - and there is a little matter of the FA Cup Final today at 3pm (the same time as the wedding). Arsenal v Man Utd - a prospect that holds no interest for me whatsoever, except maybe if the Man Utd fans have a riot in protest at the recent takeover of their club by a guy who resembles a cross between John McCririck and that Crazy Frog mobile phone ring tone character.

And finally, this evening sees the annual Eurovision Song Contest - by far one of the most crooked competitions ever run by a group of public broadcasters. Still - it’s usually a laugh, especially with Terry Wogan taking the piss out of every act that participates.

I’ve found my first OS X Tiger bug (though to be fair a few people found it before I did.

If you are trying to burn a data CD or DVD in Tiger, and you get an error 0×80020025 when you insert the blank disc, the solution is as follows: click on the Apple menu (upper left corner), and select “Force Quit…” From the list of application, choose “Finder” and click “Relaunch” and follow the prompts. Reinsert the blank CD or DVD and it should work fine.

According to the a couple of web sites, apparently there is some caching bug in Tiger which makes the Finder sometimes forget that you have a Superdrive or in my case a Combo drive attached. Restarting the Finder clears up the problem.

And of course, Apple’s online support site offered up no reference to this problem.

Enjoy!

Blimey - Ipswitch were a different team in the second half, and fought back for the draw. All to play for in the second leg.

Come on Ipswitch!

A lucky own goal has got Ipswitch back into the game - here’s hoping they can do something with it come the second half!

An interesting few days have just passed.

Wednesday evening was spent at the very strange ‘Wenmley Arena Pavilion’ in West London where Queen (with Paul Rodgers helping out in place of the late Freddie Mercury) were playing a rather good one-night gig.

Great show, great music (I would not call myself a Queen fan, but I really liked what I heard) and some surprise and dismay with the venue.

Wembley Arena proper is undergoing a much needed and long-overdue refit as part of the overall redevelopment of the Wembley site (for those reading who are not familiar with the Wembley site, it includes Wembley Stadium which is being rebuilt and is due for completion in May 2006 in time for the FA Cup Final, Wembley Arena and Wembley Conference and Exhibition Centre), and in order to keep some revenue coming into the site while both the Arena and the Stadium are out of action, they have erected a 12,000 seat tent in what was the Arena car park.

Being a tent, the acoustics are terrible, and the seats are not the most comfortable (and I felt so sorry for anyone sat on the floor level seats who I’m sure saw bugger-all all evening. We had seats right at the back, so we were miles from the stage, but at least we had proper tiered seats so could see over the row in front of us. However there is more legroom that there was in the Arena proper, and all the other facilities (bars, food outlets, toilets, merchandising outlets etc) are far better that we previously enjoyed in the Arena proper. Have a look over at http://www.brianmay.com for the views of Queen ’s Brian May, who was absolutely disgusted by the venue - so much so that his first words after saying hello to the crowd was to apologise for the ‘god-forsaken shithole of a building’ they were playing in. Respect is due to Brian for actually caring about the fans.

And finally, as I write this, the first leg of the West Ham/Ipswitch play-off semi final is taking place. As a QPR fan, I am of course backing Ipswitch. However, they are getting their arses kicked in this leg, so it will take a miracle if they are to prevent West Hame from making it to the final. Here’s hoping for that miracle!

I thought that with the rise of eBay, the days of gentlemanly auctioneering was long dead - but no!

Auction house Christie’s has won the right to sell £10million of artwork by beating rivals from Sotheby’s at the playground game Rock, Paper, Scissors.

Staff from the two firms were told to play the game by Japanese art dealer Takasho Hashiyama, who could not decide which of the two auction houses he wanted to place the bundle of paintings with.

Sotheby’s picked paper, but Christie’s chose scissors, which of course cuts paper and therefore wins.

Mr Hashiyama often resorts to the game to resolve business decisions.

Expect to see footage on Sky Sports soon

Cardiff 1-0 QPR

I can’t begin to explain how pleased I am with QPR this season. Not only did we avoid being relegated straight back to League 1, but we aquitted ourselves perfectly well in the Coca Cola Championship, making a serious play for a play-off place for much of the season before a dip in form and injuries to a small squad finally got the better of us.

it was a shame we could not end the season with a win, though we did at least win our last home game of the season, when we sealed Nottingham Forest’s relegation. We will just have to make do with a comfortable and respectable 11th place finish - above Leeds and Cardiff - and hope that Ipswitch can do the business and prevent West Ham from being promoted to the Premiership.