Standing in the kitchen washing up some plates today I suddenly started thinking about the pricing of DVDs and music. Perhaps the thought came since I watched a film with some friends last night, a film I had bought at discount price. I started wondering why people are prepared to pay more for a movie than an album, since an album in most cases has more replay value. This lead me to some other thoughts regarding why we buy music and movies in the first place, because it's not always and only about listening or watching them.

I was stumbling around with StumbleUpon, a Firefox extension that helps you discover some of the best websites and came upon this incredible long exposure of a shuttle launch.

Usability is interesting, not just because you learn a lot about how people think and feel but because you don't let bad application designers get away with it. People who work with usability are probably the hardest to satisfy, they will not accept a solution that is hard to use. Regular users on the other hand, often let their applications bully them into submission. In fact it's a sound conclusion to say that if more users had less respect for their applications people would generally feel less stressed at work.

A complete surprise, Finland won the Eurovision Song Contest this year and I can't imagine a better or more deserving winner. Finland's never done better than ending up sixth place and that was back in 1973. Best of all, they didn't just win with any song, they won with Finnish trademark music: heavy rock, so this is great news indeed!

I'm constantly trying to improve this site, adding new quality content but in order to make my site even better I need your help. I have created a feedback form with a few questions about what you think about this site. By submitting the form you're eligible to win an Amazon gift certificate as a way of me saying thank you for your time. The answers will go a long way toward helping me improve this site and provide even better content.

Go to the feedback form now and get a chance to win the gift certificate!

I just finished watching the semifinal of the Eurovision Song Contest, a relatively popular event here in Europe. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, it's an annual contest where several European, as well as non-European, countries compete in music. Each country chooses an artist to represent it. The winnining country gets to host the contest the next year. As usual the quality was uneven, there were some potentially great ones and a lot that were mediocre and some that were outright bad. Also as usual, the results of the vote made absolutely no sense.

When the idea of the World Wide Web was first conceived by Tim Berners-Lee it was the idea of the hypertext web. A network of documents with contextual links forming a mesh of information which supported retrieval and authoring of documents. Today with the popularity of blogs, wikis and the advent of AJAX and realtime interfaces we're seeing the way people use the WWW taking a new direction, a hybrid system that merges the document browser with the application viewer, a hybrid I'd like to call the "hyper-application system".