I was kindly invited to Rob and Kate's Eurovision night.

Previously I've avoided Eurovision like the plague... Most of the music on there is stuff I wouldn't really want to listen to.

Once I got into it it was fun though. We joined Terry in mocking most of the acts and the presenters.

Notable acts included Germany with a surprising country number. Electronic cacti and a banjo gave them a fair few marks under "Gimmick"

Also notable were Lithuania, with their cunning combination of arrogance (The chorus is "We are the winners of Eurovision") and insane flailing dancing.

But the best entry by far was from "The country where I quite want to be". Their song, "Hard rock hallelujah" was more the sort of thing I listen to. On our ratings table, they came out a clear first with maximum points.

At the end, there was the voting. There was much cheering on of Finland, who ended up (if I remember rightly) with 293 points... winning by a large margin.

We can only hope that this victory causes some other, similar entries in the coming years....

All in all, it was a fun night. Thanks to Rob and Kate for hosting, and see you next year!

On the telecoms thing I had that with a mobile company the other night. They wanted me to take a contract with someone or other and when I said I was already under contract they wanted me to take this other one as well

Lackey "but its cheaper"

Me "Not If I have to pay twice"

Lackey "You could give it to a friend or family member"

Me "That still has me paying for two contracts, I cant see that that's going to be a big money saver"

Lackey "ok bye" [dial tone]

I really should register for the telephone preference service

I've just had an amusing conversation with a random telecom provider's lacky trying to get me to switch to yet another random company.

There seems very little point trying to get my custom, as all I use the landline for is ADSL... I pay my line rental and maybe one or two calls a month.

The end of the call went something like this:

[Me] I'm not interested.
[Lackey] But you can make cheap calls (with more details of course)
[Me] I don't make many calls at all. I'm not interested.
[Lackey] But why sir, you really could be saving a lot of money!
[Me] No. How can I save a lot of money if I'm not spending a lot of money?
[Lackey] Oh. OK (dial tone)

Sony have announced the price of the ps3 the 60 gig version is £425 ....... just let that sink in .... at current exchange rate that about US$800 the us price is $599 course that doesn't include tax which the uk price does but still its a big chunk of money more.

Sony have described the price as "cheap" and "a bargin", hmmm yeah 425 quid is just pocket change.

They did similar thing with the psp pricing but at least this time we may get the ps3 at the same time as the rest of the world rather than having to wait a year, course theres still time for sony to slip the nov 17th european release date.

Theres more on this over at Eurogamer

Had some trouble with the site this morning which caused it to go down.

Thankfully after some careful adjustments with the coding mallet Matt has got it all up and running again.

I don't think its a coincidence that today is friday the 0x13th.... A bad day for code...