I’ve uploaded some new music to my “The Embryo” MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/theembryomusic

The four new tracks are called Come On You Bastard, Alarm, Waking Giant and Trump.

They’re all fairly short. I’m always impressed with myself when I manage to write a track that’s over six minutes long, but most of my newer tracks don’t even hit three minutes.

Either I’m running out of musical ideas or I’m becoming less self-indulgent.

It’s only mid-April and already the temperature is 20 degrees Celsius in London. This is quite a pleasant amount of heat for me. I can go outside without bothering to wear a coat, and I’m not likely to get sunburn or spontaneously vapourise.

But, if it’s this hot now, what the hell is it going to be like in London in July? Time to stock up on the aftersun – but it’s worse than that. Because I’m not going to be in London in July. Oh no. I’m going to be in the south of fucking Spain.

Bugger.

I’ll have to stay inside between 6am and 10pm, and even when I do venture out in the fading twilight, I’ll still have to grease myself up with factor 25 lest I singe my epidermis. I’m just too pale to live comfortably in even the British summer these days, and in a few years’ time you won’t be able to recognise me for tumours.

A few years ago, when I had a shaved head, I managed to severely sunburn my scalp. I woke up the next morning and my hotel pillow, which was pristine white when I went to bed, was bright yellow from the pus oozing out of my head.

It looked pretty strange. I wonder what they thought when they came to clean the room. Maybe that somehow, during the night, I had urinated through my eyes.

Oh dear. I did have plans for the Easter weekend. Well, not big plans, but plans nevertheless. Back at home with my parents, I was going to catch up on some reading,  watch a bit of telly, and gorge myself on good home cooking and Easter eggs.

But then I discovered Facebook.

I’ve dabbled with social networking sites before. I’ve got two MySpace accounts – one personal and one for my music. The trouble is I’ve only got about four friends on each account, and they get bombarded with spam messages and spam “add friend” requests from desparate friendless American teenagers.

I had an invite thing for Facebook a few months ago, but I’ll confess I didn’t bother with it because I thought it would be pretty much the same. But then my sister showed it to me on Thursday and I was embarrassingly excited.

Facebook is a like a combination of:

• MySpace – but with all the crap bits taken out. No “unofficial” profiles of popular sitcom characters. No pretending that you’re on first-name terms with Russell Brand. No rubbish music blaring out when you click on somebody’s profile. No brain haemmorage as you suffer what somebody else thinks is a “kewl” colour scheme.
• FriendsReunited – but with all the crap bits taken out. No paying money just to send someone a message. No removing of email and website addresses from profiles, so you don’t see silly things like “email me at .com” or “my website is http://” because the owner didn’t realise.
• Flickr. I expect there are some crap bits about Flickr. I’ve not used it much.
• Blogging, but you don’t even have to tell people about your blog because you can just import it into your Facebook notes. Genius.

And it seems pretty much everybody I’ve ever known has a profile already.What an annoyingly good idea. I wish I’d come up with it.

So, instead of the nice relaxing Easter weekend I had planned, I’ve spent much it trying to remember the names of everybody I’ve ever known. If I go away from the computer to read or watch TV for a while, it’s not long before I come running back to the computer to search for somebody else I’d forgotten about, or just to check if anybody else has added me as a friend.

Facebook is not without its faults of course. I’m a mere normal person, and not a student, and I’m self-employed (for now) and don’t have US phone number, so I can’t “verify” my account. That means every time I want to add a friend I have to enter one of those annoying image verification codes which are always an interesting challenge. Sometimes these don’t even come up, so when I click the “add” button I get told that I got it wrong.

Also for some reason all the times I see are an hour ahead of the real time.

But these are just minor flaws. The thing that really worries me is, where are the adverts? There are hardly any. Who is paying for all of this? Are they just getting us all hooked until we depend on Facebook for normal human interaction, so they can then stick the knife in and make us pay exorbitant fees just to keep in contact with our friends? Or do they really think they can sustain their business by getting us to occasionally pay for a small picture of a cake to appear on somebody else’s profile?

I think I’ll have to start limiting my Facebook usage, as I could easily spend all my time on it. There is a danger that you can almost use it as a replacement for real life – living vicariously through your News Feed showing what your friends are up to. It probably won’t be long before people find out they’re dumped because their News Feed tells them that their girlfriend or boyfriend has changed their status to Single. And I don’t think paying $1 for a small picture of some flowers is going to fix that.

Here are a couple of adverts that have been annoying me while I’ve been travelling on the London Underground:

“Confidence” says this advert in large letters. “Don’t rush the good things. Prolong the pleasure”. Unfortunately the picture tells us something different – they certainly look pleased with themselves, but why are they still fully clothed?

There are two interpretations of the picture:

- The guy fell asleep before any activity took place. His girlfriend finds this quite amusing.
- They like to practice safe sex by keeping their clothes on. Maybe they are afraid of other lovers or parents walking in, or perhaps they have particularly gruesome sexually-transmitted infections which means they prefer not to even think about each other’s genitals.

“The song that makes you call the friends your girlfriend doesn’t like”.

I really hate this advert. There’s something about the smug smile on his face that makes me want to smack him in the mouth very, very hard. What is he thinking? “This is the song that me and Pete played in the car after we picked up those prostitutes”.

This is one of a series of adverts with a theme of “Music gets you talking”. No it doesn’t. No song has ever made me want to phone anybody. Mobile phones have lots of functions these days, but that’s not a reason for advertising to claim that some of these functions are related. “Playing a game makes you start taking photos”? No. “Video calling gets you browsing the internet”? No. About the only one I could accept would be “The built-in organiser reminds you to call your mum.”

This morning, while battling one of the worst hangovers I have experienced in a long while, I received this email:

—–Original Message—–
From: CashYourSofts [mailto:igor@cashyoursofts.com]
Sent: 03 November 2006 05:00
To: alex@axeuk.com
Subject: Business Development

Dear Sirs,

We might be interested in purchasing the source code of your software. Please contact us by replying to this email to discuss this opportunity further. Thank you.

We are interested in applications targeted to a wide end-user audience such as different audio and video format converters, CD and DVD tools, general windows optimization software, games and many others, your proposals are welcome.

At the moment, we pay 150 USD per application, but this price could be negotiable for high quality applications.

Feel free to check our website for more information : www.cashyoursofts.com.

Looking forward to a successful cooperation

Best Regards,
Igor Dubovets
alex@axeuk.com CashYourSofts Management

www.cashyoursofts.com

I don’t know many people who would be willing to sell years of work for what equates to about a hundred quid. And why is my email address in Igor’s signature?