Weather aside though, wine tasting at Wine Buffs was as always a fantastic evening with a generous selection of quality wines, and then banter with a friend I haven’t caught up with for months., along with watching The Onion Movie (Which I’d gave 3 1/2 stars - worth a watch) made a good start to the weekend.

Saturday’s highlight was the Clone Roses gig, with support from The Forge, a band who went to school with a friend of mine, who turned out to be particularly Awesome, and made a great warm up to the Clone Roses, a Stone Roses Tribute group who if I didn’t know we’re a cover bang, I could easily have been convinced it was the real thing, and they really kicked out a good show for the crowed who loved them.

So rounding the night off till the wee hours in Friars Court, avoiding the rain and rather enjoying their selection of Cains beers, who seem to be their new supplier (Though it’s been a couple of months since I’ve been in, so I don’t know how new)

Rounding the weekend off with the now traditional Sunday Roast for the few people hanging around made the whole weekend really great fun, and got to see a lot of faces which makes it all worth while.

Nicely set up for this week, where I’m making serious efforts to get into a proper health routine. So we’ll see how that goes later in the week.

Amazingly Glastonbury even has tickets still available, and I am very tempted to go along regardless, but since I’ll be seeing Sigur Rós again in Sweden when then play at Way Out West festival in Gothenburg, I don’t think I can afford to splash out on a 3rd festival when I should be saving to travel around South East Asia at the end of the year.

I’ll be listening to the new Sigur Rós album Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust over the weekend as well, just to get me in the mood for the Summer Solstice and I’ll be making the most of all the extra hours we have this weekend with Wine Tasting, watching The Forge play at the Parr Hall in Warrington, and then cooking anyone who’s around Sunday roast. Good times all the way then!

The media seems to be jumping on to the Navy’s sonar equipment as the most likely cause, but the Register has put together a convincing argument as to why that is a very tentative link at best, pointing out it was  and perhaps more interesting is the focus they add to the fact fishing nets kill nearly 1000 marine animals a day, so if people find 30 dead on a beach shocking, then perhaps they need to start looking at the bigger picture and apply as much pressure on food suppliers as is been put on the Navy.

The gist of the Register’s argument comes from the fact that the live fire tests in question ended the Friday before the beachings, and that the sonar technology in use around that time was far from anything new, and in fact has been used since the 1930’s, and more commonly since the 1990’s.

Earlier reports put more focus on the likely causes been more natural, possible following fish which where attracted to the area by an algae bloom in the region, and the more becoming beached as they followed the pod’s calls for help.

So perhaps the Navy’s use of Sonar does have a role to play, but I can’t help but think because it creates such a powerful mental image, it’s easy to get distracted by the idea where there are a great number of natural options as well.

There is lots of buzz around on the net about Apple’s new MobileMe service, which features push email, push contacts, push calender and a raft of other sync solutions they are pimping as "Exchange for the rest of us" acknowledging that they aren’t doing anything really new themselves, in fact there are tons of services out there already, Apple is behind big time one this one.

I can see as an iPhone user this would seem amazing, what with Apples history of not allowing them to install 3rd party apps, but now Apple are are introducing that ability in version 2.0 of the iPhone software, personally I’d be looking else where for some software that is more universal rather the lock deeper into Apple’s monopoly over the hearts and minds of their follows/users.

For a 70 pound child even an ounce of water getting into the lungs is enough to cause the  larynx or windpipe to spasm and the airways to become blocked.

The incident that caught my attention first took place in Jackson, Florida, but a quick Google search for some more details on that event shows that several other children have lost their lives in the same way in recent history.

Stuff like this always makes me think, particularly when you wonder if there was anything that could have been done, or if in that same situation would you spot that there was a problem in time you would miss any potential problems completely. So I put this down as something to be aware of following some water related mishap, but otherwise won’t let it trouble me.

My Twitter username is OddEssay in keeping with my travel journal theme.

Although for some reason I can’t get the SMS updates to work, so I’ll have to plug away from that this evening and I’ll play around with some of the widgets they offer then as well to publish the feeds on my blogs.

But when my K800i was broken following an “encounter” with a wave while been held in a waterproof pouch that turned out to not be so water proof, my thoughts on what to replace it with started drifting back to JCB phone once more, this time much more seriously. Since it reviewed well, and fits nicely with my quest to make all my equipment as rugged as possible ahead of my travels at the end of the year, I decided to pick one up.

Since I’d been getting increasingly frustrated using the MDA Vario III as a phone (Great PDA/GPS - Rubbish to make calls or text on) when my new JCB Though Phone turned up in the post I was particularly happy. And pausing only to pick up my camera, I got to opening my new delivery as soon as I got home from work.

The first thing that leapt out at me was that the charger was a standard USB connection, which at once started to win my approval.  Better yet, when I dropped in my T-Mobile sim, and the battery it switched on with a full charge - picked up the sim right away (As it should since it was an unlocked mobile) and started working.

So first impressions were Ace.

Now I’ve had a couple of days to use it, I am still loving it. Most importantly it feels very sturdy, though I haven’t dropped it on purpose or anything yet, much to the dismay of my friends. I’m sure I’ll drop it on my own at some point, but don’t want to tempt fate.

I am slightly miffed about the predictive text, as it doesn’t seem to be able to add new words to the dictionary, though it’s very easy to switch between predictive and T9, it is a little frustrating at times.  But everything else is perfect in my eyes.

There isn’t much more to say, it’s a simple phone that makes calls and sends text messages, and is particularly well built to survive better then any other mobile out there I’ve seen. If you’re a heavy text user it might not be the best choice, but then this is a phone you by because you need something to stand up to your environment, not because it’s cool. So if you think you need it, I’d be very happy to get one.

There are a few photos of my JCB Though Phone over on my flickr page

The software is terrible, still, I hoped maybe it would improve, but on both my PC at work running Windows XP and my home desktop running Vista stutter and clunk along, and hanging altogether for a few seconds at a time happens near enough every time I use the application to download music and transfer it to my MP3 player.

Sure it does the job, but after nearly two years of using the service I would really like to see some improvements, and they just never seem to come. At first I just put up with it, but now I have a fairly large collection of music I find myself wanting to search and be more selective in my choices of MP3 downloads, and that means using the software more, which in turn means I encounter the issues more frequently.

More recently I’ve also found a couple of albums I listen to vanish, and so become unplayable as the DRMed files are unable to get the updated certificate data, which is really annoying when it was an album I listened to a lot - Since I have the CD I just ripped it to MP3 myself, but that’s effort.

That aside, I was debating canceling anyway to save the money towards my travels at the end of the year, but I had talked myself out of it, but now there are just to many annoyances with Napster to make it worth while, even the announcement they are allowing you download 6 million DRM free music tracks doesn’t interest me as I only use the music subscription service.

That said, it has served me well enough while I’ve been using it, and I’d suggest anyone thinking about using an MP3 subscription service give the trail a go and see if it works for them, but I just find that it has failed to keep up with me expectations, and unless they come up with a significant update to the software, I wouldn’t use them again myself.

So a bit of a step backwards in that respect, beyond that though it seems to run a little quicker - but maybe that’s conformation bias, time will tell I guess, I’m sure it’s going to be an improvement, but it will just take a little bit of time to fine tune the way I like my settings.