Last weekend I was mainly drinking. Unusual in that it involved watching great bands like The Bees, Sting and The Police, The Zutons, One Night Only (new but good), and the mighty Wombats. I’ll run through a summary of IOW Festival 2008 rather than an in-depth review, keeps it simple.
Good Things
- Most of the bands; Newton Faulkner and One Night Only, much better than expected
- Most of the food places, got a curry from one place that was on a par with most of the stuff from Albert Rd and cheaper too!? Eh?
- Feeder. Not on the mainstage. Makes no sense at all, but still brilliant in the Big Top.
- Bumper Cars. Brilliant.
- Sitting around BBQ’ing lots of bacon in the morning and talking rubbish with mates.
- Mates
Rubbish Things
- Sex Pistols, Kaiser Chiefs and The Kooks - Disappointing
- Toilets, won’t go into it too much; although the ones left of the stage on Saturday morning were something to write home about, lovely.
- People throwing bottles and cups. I know it’s exciting with all the people and the music, but get a grip.
- 50,000 people in a small space, a lot more crowded than last year
- Chavs - Should be some sort of barrier to keep these people out
So, that’s what I think. Maybe a different festival next year….
Always good to have a plan…
For ages I’ve been trying to sort out a decent way of being able to access stuff on my media-server from other Macs/PCs in a way that keeps it organised, and doesn’t matter too much about which client I use to access it. Didn’t work that out, but instead found this app which lets you access your itunes/winamp library from anywhere else on the internet. Probably a bit grey legally, you can have it running on a media server at home, then access your music while you’re either at a mates house or at work. Setup is minimal, and you can add friends libraries too - Up to 30 other people, which is brilliant. Works on both Mac and PCs, to stop your anti-mac mates grumbling about anything. Get it 
Zattoo is an IPTV client which runs on Windows, Mac and would you believe it Linux. It streams content from a bunch of channels direct to the client without having to faff about with firewall ports and because it comes straight from their servers it runs alot better than any others I’ve tried that rely on P2P connections from the back end of Afghanistan. Being a Swiss company seems to allow them to do anything they like, since the channels available are the main UK TV channels (even BBC!?) and most importantly of course, The Poker Channel. Again, this is a freeware app so there’s nothing at all to complain about. The streams are live content only which I think stops them getting sued, so next time there’s an international sporting event which inconveniently clashes with work*, this might well come in handy! Get it 
