Friday Five on a Saturday! How disestablishmentarian is that?!

What was the first band you saw in concert?
That’d be Garbage, either a year or two years ago at the Portsmouth Guildhall.

Who is your favourite artist/band now?
Currently Avril Lavigne.

What’s your favourite song?
Alisha Rules the World by Alisha’s Attic.

If you could play any instrument, what would it be?
I’m going to go with the dull answer and say ‘grand piano’ because I still think it’s one of the most beautiful sounds an instrument can make.

If you could meet any musical icon (past or present), who would it be and why?
I’d like to meet Elvis. Then I’d steal his wallet and run away laughing hysterically.

For my edification, some books from Amazon arrived this morning. Three blog-related books and one ‘pleasure’ book. Content Syndication with RSS by Ben Hammersley; The Weblog Handbook by Rebecca Blood; We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs (Bausch, Haughey and Hourihan) and Jennifer Government by Max Barry.

Because my posts are a bit dull lately I’ve been trying to find ways to liven them up. Good content producers include the Friday Five, and This or That Tuesday.

Anyhoo, since it’s Wednesday already, here are my responses to this week’s This or That:

1. Sexier (female)…Pamela Anderson or Jennifer Garner?
I went on Google Image Search and Jennifer Garner looks sexier.

2. Sexier (male)…Ben Affleck or Matt Damon?
Choose not to answer, since I’m sexier than the both of them put together.

3. The better piano player…Billy Joel or Elton John?
Elton John, because he has a funny wig.

4. Funnier…David Letterman or Craig Kilborn?
Who?

5. The dumber cartoon cat…Stimpy (of *Ren & Stimpy*) or Tom (of *Tom & Jerry*)?
Stimpy

6. A better news anchor…Tom Brokaw or Dan Rather?
Who?

7. A better TV chef…Emeril Lagasse or Jacques Pepin?
Who?

8. The trashier talk show host…Maury Povich or Jerry Springer?
I don’t know who Maury Povich is but Montel would whoop Jerry Springer’s ass any day.

9. The worse fast food burger joint…McDonald’s or Burger King?
McDonald’s. Clowns scare me.

10. Thought-provoking question of the week: Only a handful of U.S. Presidents have been considered to be *great* Of the following two, which one do you consider to be greater…Franklin D. Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln? Why?
errr…..

I can conclude that the This or That questions are slightly unappealing to anybody outside the States, which is a bit of a shame! Let’s see what Friday brings…

A brief history of Gosport (I live here ;-). Quite interesting actually.

Hooray. Me and John managed to clear up a backlog of almost 400 blogs in the past two days on Blogwise, thanks in part to John’s great suggestions for improving the submission checker. There’s a bot that visits the site before we do to check for dud links, etc. and caches the page so that when we review it it appears instantly.

The other bonus is that many hosting sites (blogger.com.br, blogspot.com come to mind) seem to be having poor uptimes lately, so the person might have a genuine blog at that address but because the site’s down we can’t review it. With the bot caching ahead of us, it checks the site every hour or so and only caches the page when the site’s up.

Good ol’ Perl. I may release source code (although, admittedly, it’s mostly wget with a bit of Perl tacked on the put the files in the right place and to read from the database!)

http://www.ntk.net/

This week we’re going for chefs of staff and dante diving comedy.

Last week’s Perl “or die shit” put this blog second.

I am *really* bored!

I’ll want to read this later!:

http://www.webreference.com/authoring/languages/xml/rss/1/

It’s about the various issues of RSS. I’m writing an RSS->XHTML XSLT file atm, and I can’t find a suitable XSLT file that’ll translate between the various RSS versions. Surely there must be one?

Update: Potential link (see bit about normalisation)! Hray for open source.

Sorry if this bores the non-techie readers, I promise to have filtering working soon.