I’m fairly certain that me and @wiscombe are BFFs now. Pretty excited about that, as it happens.

There was a fairly weird response to dConstruct this year. Last year set the bar so high (Merlin Fucking Mann, anyone?!) that it was pretty unreasonable to expect this year to be as good. You can call me wrong if you want, Jeremy, but it wasn’t. Some talks didn’t have enough time (to the fault and credit of the speaker) and some had way too much. Some waffled on without so much as a water biscuit to feed my thoughts and some were over-self-indulgent (if entertaining) and directionless.

With the bad out of the way, Kelly Goto is amazing. She had a lovely story and was engaging and entertaining. I was lost in time whilst she was talking and upset when she skipped through some seriously interesting-looking slides.

Frank Chimero is a rockstar. He has the huge, effortless, accessible lexicon that he seemingly whimsically dips into and pulls out perfect words and a flawless delivery. He spoke as a bewildered user, suggesting that we’ve all collected enough awesome stuff online and conjectured that it’s about time we started making the stuff we already know is awesome more accessible. He made some excellent points and I felt really inspired to build something whilst he was talking and when he was done.

Matthew Sheret talks my language. He’s in love with the things he carries in his pocket and he’s a total nerd. I had some interesting ideas off the back of his talk and I’m looking forward to getting an Arduino, a bunch of RFID chips and scanners and making something cool for my key-ring (yes, Benjie. Let’s do it). He linked our personal associations with the things we register just before the front door closes to totems in Inception, Doctor Who’s sonic screwdriver and a material symbol of ourselves and what’s important to us. You’re not clearer-defined by anything more than the things you simply cannot go anywhere without, right?

And now, some photos that are chronologically and/or geographically linked to the event. They’re irrelevant in every other way.

James Moss has this amazing face that I always want to point my camera at. Just look at him. What a dish.

Pete and Craig smugged it up with these ridiculously cool MailChimp hats that I just missed out on.

Spotify the service is brilliant. There’s tonnes of music on there now, and being able to import your own library and OTA sync with mobile devices is brilliant. The purchase-able MP3 bundles are a bargain (if you’re bright enough to spend £50 at a time). They’re doing really great things for music consumers when the recording industry seems to be working on triple-jointing its elbows so it can simultaneously scratch its own back and steal your wallet (or put you in jail). Kudos to you, Spotify.

My problem with Spotify, and the reason I’ll probably cancel my subscription (again), is that the player is broken. It’s a horrific abortion of an application. A worthless, frustrating, horribly-designed, fundamentally loathsome piece of garbage.

I come from a media library school of music-listening. That is to say that I have all of my music available to me all the time in iTunes. I can browse by artist, album, genre, I can arbitrarily create playlists, all the nice things that Spotify pretends to be able to do, but doesn’t. Say you’re in the mood to listen to something you know you’ve got in your library. Here’s a worst-case, oft-realised scenario of how that situation could end up causing you to want to kerb stomp a puppy:

• I’d like to listen to this album today
• I search for the album
• I’m presented with a visually cacophonous assault of things that are likely irrelevant to what I was looking for
• I realise what I was looking for was in my library, not Spotify’s and Spotify’s search only searches their catalogue
• I drop back to “Local Files” and I have to Command[Control]-F a string precise enough to match the album I want to listen to (I suppose I could create playlists in this instance, but by now I’ve illustrated that Spotify’s search is worthless, and the app doesn’t allow you to browse by artist or album unless they have the artist/album in their library. Suck it up, pansy)

Say I find my albums, and I want to queue them in a playlist, in the order I choose. I sort by “Added”, foolishly assuming that this will be able to emulate iTunes’ behaviour, whereby adding music to a playlist results in a playlist automatically sorted in the same fashion that I added it. If I add an album in Spotify, and sort by the earliest added, it seems to flip the track listing order, so that if I choose tracks 1-12 and add them, the order that they appear in the playlist is 12-1. I can’t even trick Spotify into doing what iTunes does perfectly and intuitively.

Assuming I’ve actually managed to find something to listen to, things go well from there. The controls are way more responsive than iTunes, which is nice. I don’t have to hit pause then wait for three seconds for music to stop before I can answer a phone call. Sound quality seems good, although if you’re doing something CPU-intensive, playback gets noticeably jittery (I say “noticeably” because I do a lot of CPU-hungry stuff, and have never noticed iTunes stutter).

Spoonful of sugar notwithstanding, the final (small-to-some) gripe I have with Spotify is their library tagging and how they force it on you. My #musicmonday posts are calculated programmatically by gathering all the songs I listened to in the last week, querying a few web services to get song lengths, then calculating the amount of time I’ve spent listening to artists individually that week. Naturally, as I started using Spotify as my main music player, I decided that I would implement Spotify’s music metadata API search, as I noticed that musicbrainz wasn’t getting a lot of the tracks that I was submitting. Having done this, I noticed that when using the Spotify music metadata search, submitting strings that it had obviously sent to last.fm as scrobbles, it couldn’t find this music from its own database! How is that even right? Is it not working from the same data? To make matters slightly worse, it seems to have inferred tags from my library. I have a beautifully-tagged iTunes library, which Spotify has taken it upon itself to apply its own shitty metadata to!

So there you have it. Spotify’s player all but completely ruins the whole experience of finding music to listen to, and my own esoteric obsession with collating data on said music. I guess Spotify’s plan is to piss me off so much when I’m looking for music to listen to that there’s no data to collate. Problem solved.

Repurposed my old MacBook Pro as a web-server/load-lightening-slave over the weekend, and so far it’s paying dividends. Really nice to offload our dev server duties to something that I don’t take with me when I go out or restart to play games in Windows 7.

Any recommendations for essential Linux software (even obvious stuff – I might’ve missed it!) are gratefully received at my twitter.

I spent yesterday evening tweaking the design of this site and drinking rum. Rum is delicious, and an excellent design aid, apparently. Just getting the OK for an image I’ve used and it’ll all go live. Very excited, weirdly, it’s a huge improvement!

S’been a solid few weeks of links, but I’ve not been really using iOS devices since Charlotte yoinked my iPad. There’s always cool stuff on my delicious.

PSP Phone – need this.

No More Gurus is an issue close to my heart. Working with these fools and ending up doing their job on a regular basis, I hope this gets some traction!

Spamusement – webcomic inspired by email spam

Howard Marks; author, former teacher and drug smuggler. The usual.

Dog licking and what it might mean. If you’ve got a dog, it licks itself. When it begins to seem to enjoying it too much, read this.

Peyote is a ubiquitous American drug, but I’ve never known what it was. It’s in all American sitcoms, smoked by hippies and apparently legal. So now I know.

Furniture designer featured on those enigmatic design blogs that look awesome but I’ll never be able to afford.

French Toast is just fucking eggy bread. Mind. Blown.

Life in 16×16. Gifs are awesome, icons are awesome, pixel icons are awesome. This website? Yeah. Awesome.

Spaces of Play are one of very few game developers for iOS devices (there’s loads really!) and they look pretty cool. Spirits looks great!