Bobbie, Jake and I took Juliet and Louise to go and see New Zealand funk/reggae/rock band Kora last night, so named because that’s the surname of the four brothers in the band (and there’s also one “token white dude from Wainuiomata” who played bass and keyboards).

They were stormingly good. Everyone played pretty much every instrument. Almost everyone was a lead vocalist. The technical skill and polish was astonishing, and when they brought the funk, it was Parliament heavy.

Small crowd of really enthusiastic punters, and the guys put on an amazing show. I’d heard they were good live, but they were even better than I was expecting. All of the highlights from the album with a few really extended grooves and a drum and bass workout for good measure.

They finished the set with ‘Flow’ - which I managed to capture on video (and it turned out better than I’d hoped):

An encore was obligatory, and they didn’t disappoint.

Two support acts. Beatboxer and ‘live-looper’ Red was pretty astonishingly good. The Tivoli were sort of generic. It’s fine to sound like another band, of course. They sounded like an entire category of music. No distinguishing features.

But all in all, an awesome night. Shame there were only about 30 people there to see it. Next time - go.

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Professor Tim Wall and I quite often write together. Usually, I’ll go to his house - a good hour’s journey on two buses, plus waiting and walking. All up, 3 hours commuting, interspersed with cups of coffee, long and interesting chats about lofty-minded things, and short bursts of typing.

Working that way, we tend to get at best about 4 hours of actual writing done in a day, what with a break for lunch and everything.

We’re working on something together at the moment, so this time I suggested that rather than sit in the same room together, we use Skype video, document sharing and various other bits of online trickery, and see if we can’t get some work done that way.

Apart from some wireless router glitching I’m experiencing, it worked absolutely brilliantly. We were able to work together just as well, I got to have a bit of a lie-in, we could see each other while we worked (normally, facing our respective computers means we are in the same room together, but not face to face) and in some respects, it was a better experience all round.

My plan is to roll this out more generally so that I never have to go to work.

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These are not the blogs that I host myself, just those scrap-booky ones where I throw stuff for temporary projects or things that just have no budget attached to them whatsoever.

But I wasn’t delighted at having the overly long domain http://nowwearedifferent.wordpress.com - which is what you end up with when you have a free account.

But there’s a new thing: domain mapping.

For the about £5 (the cost of the domain again) you can set up domain mapping on a Wordpress.com blog (once you have that name registered of course). So now, without the usual expense of getting hosting sorted out, I can have http://nowwearedifferent.com. And I do.

Quite pleased with that. Now I just need a decent banner - and some content.

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Not that I think it’s particularly important in the grand scheme of things, nor am I twiddling my thumbs waiting for it to come back on so that I have something to do… but there are people who read it, and some of them are starting to notice its continued absence.

Took me ages to build up to 700 visitors a day and over 2,500 RSS subscribers. Hoping I haven’t lost too much of that in the meantime - but there’s pretty much nothing I can do except wait for support people to get back to me with more information.

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Almost 20 years ago, he was Doogie Howser, MD. Now he’s a criminal mastermind with his own web-only (for now) musical, written and directed by Buffy creator (and genius) Joss Whedon with a bunch of his friends and family.

Serialised online (Act 1 up now), Dr Horrible features a really great cast, enjoyable musical numbers (and I HATE musicals), and it’s very funny.

Go watch it.

A bit more background here.

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Interesting stuff - and there’s even a pop video to go with it:

There is a point to all this. However… I’m not going to talk about it much here, because it seems such a separate thing at the moment from what I’ve been talking about on this, my personal blog… and I kind of think it’s a big enough project to warrant its own blog.

So I gave it a working title: Now We Are Different… and if you click on that title, it’ll take you to the blog of the book.

Very early days now, and it will probably end up getting its own hosting and everything, but for the moment, that’s where my thinking about that stuff will go. So if you’re not interested in the evolution of the human species under the effects of digitalisation, then you’re probably pretty safe here. At least - as safe as you ever were before I had this book notion.

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Stef and I made another website today. I had the idea for it on the bus on the way to a coffee meeting with Stef this morning, and he’d got it up and running by the time I was having dinner this evening.

It’s called 5ALIST - and on it, you fivalise - that is, you make top 5 lists and share them with your friends so they can comment and respond. You can edit your lists if you change your mind, but on the whole, that’s pretty much all there is to it at the moment.

But actually - that’s fine, because that’s pretty cool as is. You can comment on lists and you can follow the list making activities of friends and people you find interesting. And there are already some amazingly interesting lists up there with just a few people and a few hours online.

Go have a play: 5ALIST

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Stef, Jason and I had a very productive day. We came up with our next big venture, they discussed (and fiddled with) their new iPhones - and we finished off by launching an I So Wish Facebook App.

It’s fairly simple for now (just how we like it) - but it does the job.

Just wait till you see what we’re launching next…

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He twittered that he was working on some scripts, and so I thought I’d issue a challenge: Can Keri get the word ‘hackable’ into a broadcast episode of the show?

Hint for non-Twitterers - read upwards. Most recent messages at the top:

If there’s an episode with that word in it, then I have done a very geeky thing with perhaps the least geeky thing in British popular culture: I’ll have hacked the Archers.

W00t!

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