Richard Branson's Virgin empire has announced that it has leased a site for its first Virgin Galactic spaceport.  Not surprisingly, they haven't gone for RAF Lossiemouth as proposed by the Scottish National Party.

It's been quite some road for Richard Branson, from the early days of publishing a school newspaper, to founding Virgin Records, at that time an independent label, with this release (left).  He was a tougher cookie than Malcom McLaren when dealing with the Sex Pistols.  He founded a major chain of record stores (as a student in Edinburgh, the small Virgin Record in the New Town was the place to get indie releases), which recently got rebranded and has gone bust.  I can remember wondering what the hell he was up to getting involved in an airline, but obviously what do I know!

Back in 1982, 23 Skidoo released Seven Songs, a mini-LP on the Fetish label (there was something of a fad in those days for budget-priced mini-LPs).  I hadn't played this in some years, when I noticed that it had been reissued with some bonus tracks that I hadn't got.  Aha! I thought, let's try out this Amazon.co.uk mp3 download shop.  Off I went, credit card in hand, to make my first online digital download purchase (well, except for Nine Inch Nails' Ghosts I-IV). 

What a refreshing listen.  Particular standout tracks are Kundalini (see video below), and The Gospel Comes to New Guinea, but the whole thing is great.

I'm just playing with this last.fm thing.  Having just activated audioscrobbler on my Squeezebox, here's a little Recently Played widget from last.fm.

Here's a neat widget that should show the ten most played albums in my last.fm profile.

The omens weren't good for this event. In early December I came down with a long-lasting cold that kept me from training for much of the month.  This, coupled with festive season food consumption, resulted in my carrying several kilos over my racing weight.  So it was with some trepidation that I set off for the club room to ride the New Year's day '10'.  The event was held on the F5d/10 Stoke Hammond bypass course.

As usual, I rode down to the club room, where we were meeting and signing on.  Fortunately, the weather was warmer than of late, and was just slightly over freezing. Less fortunately, it was kind of a damp, penetrating cold, that had us all shivering on the line. To add insult to injury, there was a gentle amount of tiny, almost imperceptible, snowflakes. Just before I was due to start, I decided against removing my outer thermal layers. This was all to the good, I think. I had a quick spin up and down the opening leg of the course, which was enough to confirm that was the correct clothing choice.  In all, we had a good turnout for this event - 13 riders.

Yet another palaeontology blog post!  This story roared round the internet just before Christmas (for example the BBC News story), but I found it interesting as a non-specialist in arachnid evolution or palaeontology, partly because of the methods used for extracting fossil arthropod material from the substrate, and partly because it tells a tale of re-examination and reanalysis of specimens with a quite different interpretation. Oh, and there's a tale of the evolution of silk use by spiders!

Production and use of silk is the defining characteristic of spiders - modern advanced spiders use silk for a quite astonishing array of purposes (from taking flight to encasing eggs; from capturing prey to constructing shelters), and a single individual may produce silk of several types with distinct properties.  Spider silk is produced from specialised structures called spigots, which are in turn located on modified appendages called spinnerets (see picture on the right, from the arachnology website, where there's a description of silk production). 

Twenty randomly selected books from my library...

The much reported synchronised locking-up of first generation 30Gb Zune MP3 players appears to have an explanation from Microsoft: it's a poxy Leap Year bug!

I suppose this is only to be expected from a company that enshrined the "1900 is a leap year" flaw in its flagship Office component Excel.

Thisismoney.co.uk announce that Money Mail have awarded their 2008 Wooden Spoon award to British Telecom.  This is from an online customer survey.  One notable quote from the article is:

There were two areas you felt most aggrieved about. The first was dealing with overseas call centres. You complained that you are forced to spend a substantial amount of time pressing buttons in the automated system before you can reach a human being.