This was the first time I have been to the Cluny. It's a good venue, being a converted warehouse. The main pub section is open, but warm in feel, although having so much brick around is a bit noisy. The food was good, although as I'd already eaten well at lunch it was overly large.

As I've said previously, I first heard of Jess Klein on pandora, and was lucky enough to see her tonight just a few weeks later. Dressed in black, set against the light, she seems small and vulnerable on stage; the effect accenutated by her guitar, a Gibson J200 I think, which is huge; the soundbox dwarfing it's owner. Her music, however, belies this image. Although, some of her songs are quiet and gentle, quite a most of them are belted out, her vocals strong and clear, the guitar strummed with fervour of a busker. Put on top of some melodic, and well-paced songs, it makes for a compelling performance. She's not the best lyricist in the world and, perhaps, overuses the power of her voice but, in general, she's well worth seeing.

Chris Knight, I have never heard of before. The introduction told us that he was from Slaughter, Kentucky. He gobsmacking accent confirmed this — I have a bizarre image of him swapping stories with a bunch of geordies afterward. Chris likes to sing about bad things. He got married at 16, and 18 and 21, his various wives gave birth in many bad situations, and he's killed a lot of men. Still, you could feel the anticipation in the audience; we waited patiently all night for it and eventually, we heard what we had all been waiting for and Chris called the audience "y'all".

Well, this might all come across a bit negative, but I enjoyed a lot of his performance, it just went on a bit longer and got a bit familiar.

I've been totally obsessed recently with Pandora; basically, they have defined a feature set for music, attributed this set to a library of music and there you have it: theme-based, personalised internet radio.

I've discovered some many new musicians this way. Ani DiFranco is playing at the moment (who I knew before). But Melisa Ferrick and Erin McKeown I'd never heard of before. Jess Klein, I am probably going to see at the Cluny this week.

At times, you think that talent is a rare thing, but, then, there are so many people in the world, there is a continual stream of excellent, surprising and exciting music and art being produced. The traditional media has limited us massively; we get to hear so little of what is available. It's not really a surprise that the various social networking sites have been such a success.

When I moved up to Newcastle and had Outlook inflicted on me for a while, I moved to using a trackball. I've found that they are much, much easier on the wrist for mouse-heavy applications. The experience has generally been good. However, logitech insist of supplying mouse drivers which attempt to be clever, and do the right thing all the time. One of these things, was to screw up cutting and pasting into a cygwin window. Finally, I have found the solution:

bind '"\C-y":paste-from-clipboard'

Emacs keybindings in cygwin: what more could you want?

Tried a new technique last night; basically, I just slow, shallow fried large lumbs of tofu. After a while, once they had sealed, I threw in some cayenne, garlic and, then, some Udon noodles with a bit of stock to let them cook.

Worked pretty well, as it happens. Took ages, as you'd expect from a bit lump of tofu, but required little effort.

This morning I got up early and came in for a session on module design, as part of the PCAP course. I was irritated to find out that it actually wasn't on at all, and that I had completely wasted my time in coming in early (which, if I was being uncharitable, I might think would have been what happened anyway).

But all is not lost. I found the solution to a problem that has been bugging me for ages. Once upon a time, I managed to type my email address as phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.ukl, by mistake, into firefox. It's been offering me this as a completion for the last year. I have finally found the solution on a blog — select the option, press shift and delete, and it magically disappears.

Have spent the last three days doing a teaching and learning course. I wouldn't mind doing this course but, like most academics, I'm fairly overloaded and would be more interested in doing my own research, rather than listening to others talk about research that I am not that interested in. Still, there have been sections of the course that was quite interesting. I'm a bit distressed to find that I found the section of resource allocation — that is, how the finance system of the university system works, and where the cash goes — has been by far the most interesting section. What am I turning into?

One of the things that annoys my about politics is the tendancy to massively over-interpret information. The recent spat over the education of Ruth Kelly's son is an example. She's decided to send him to a private school, as it would appear to be more appropriate for him.

As far as I can see, the conclusions that you can draw from this, is that for one child, with one set of learning difficulties, in one area, one private school appears to be better than state provided options. Interpretation made in the press is that this means that any child, in any area, with any learning difficulty would be better off in private education.

It would be a shock, indeed, if you could find no child, anywhere, who was not going to better off in a private school.

Today, I am at a research away-day at Slaley Hall. This is a De Vere hotel, which I am sure is the name of Peter Bowles' character. The whole place has a wildly expensive feel to it. Internet access is 15 quid for a 24 hour period, which is probably about a markup up of about four orders of magnitude.

When I was younger, I thought that the difference between an expensive hotel and a cheap one would be the basic quality of the experience; better beds, nicer food and so on. It's not really true though. Expensive hotels have exactly the same problems as cheap ones: soft beds, bad food, light pollution from the corridor, noisy mini-bar and air con and, worst, people having sex upstairs. The difference is that the add-ons, that you don't use anyway, are better. The free biscuits are nicer, the grounds are better (Slaley Halls are very nice, but water-logged at the moment) and the naff art-work on the wall is a cut above.

Okay, so I'm grumpy, but the air-con kept me awake all night. Air-con. In Northumbria. In winter.

Perhaps it's a bit daft of me, expecting too much, but I'd hoped for some quality entertainment over the Christmas break. I have to say, I was most disappointed by the general quality of the TV.

I was looking forward to the Ruby in the Smoke, which the BBC dramatised; I'm a great fan of the books. Somewhat inevitably, Sally Lockhart was played by Billy Piper, who appears to have become the BBC standard feisty hero. She was okay although, perhaps, a bit old (Sally is 14 in the book). Julie Walters was excellent as always. In general, the film I think lacked over the book. They cut out too many of the incidental details which provides the books it's richness. The sense of the Sally fighting against society was lost. One thing they left in, was the death of Mrs Holland. I always thought this was weak in the book — the lead baddie , randomly decides to kill herself, in an act of desperation. Why didn't she kill Sally?

Speaking of Billy Piper, the Christmas special of Dr Who was excellent. Sharp action, witty dialogue and an entertaining baddie.

As for films, there was nothing new. The best were Unforgiven, and Pirates of the Carribean (terrible ending, pointless special effects but entirely sold by Johny Depp). Ah, well, maybe the new year will bring something better.

Been trying out Zudeo. Basically, it's Azuerus with a nice front end. It doesn't take too much to get behind the front though: strange messages about NATs, UPnP devices and port numbers pop up with regularity. They need to think more if they really want to sell this to the mass market. The basic idea of a high quality version of YouTube is fine, but it takes too long at the moment for the download.