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Since I started blogging, three intelligent friends have complimented me on my musical taste and 123 people have accused me of being stuck in an ‘manic depressive, 80’s time warp’. Obviously, this is preferable to being told you have abysmal taste in music and started me thinking. So here is another in the very occasional and popular ‘30 second’ series:

• ‘Superlative’ - You love everything I love. You despise everything I despise and I have actually discovered new bands from your recommendation engine.
• ‘Unexpectedly good’ - You love ‘The Chameleons’ who broke up before you were even born.
• ‘Excellent’ - You like everything I like and you hate everything I hate.
• ‘Mixed’ - You like Devo.
• ‘Eclectic’ - as above but also includes Test Department.
• ‘80’s time warp’ - Admirable but no overlap with my own particular 80’s time warp.
• ‘Dinner party music’ - You tend to overindulge when hosting a dinner party and reach for Dire Straits ‘Brothers in Arms’.
• ‘Esoteric’ - You like a Devo song and it isn’t even ‘Are we not men ?’
• ‘70’s time warp’ - You have a penchant for vinyl, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. Seek medical help immediately.
• ‘Unbelievably varied’ - Your name (pseudonym alert) is Ontario Emperor.

Thursday 15 May - Manchester, near England

107,239 hungover Rangers supporters (and an exiled Scotsman who drove up from Coventry) firmly blamed Great Manchester Police for last nights scenes of fighting, violent disorder and urinating in the street.

One fan, Jimmy 'Och Aye Jimmy' McTavish from Glasgow, claimed:

'Everyone was having a great time in Piccadilly Gardens, sunbathing, drinking and joking around with the police.

At 19:35, everyone went to the toilet, big Gordon put the kettle on, Doug popped out for popcorn and we all sat down to enjoy Rangers' biggest game in 36 years on the big screen.

Then, without any warning, the police switched channels to 'Coronation Street'. That's when it all kicked off.'

Define your favourite Web 2.0 service in two words (or less)

• Blogging: Dear diary
• Flickr: Cat photos
• FriendFeed: 'Friend's Feeds'
• Tumblr: 'Disposable blogging'
• Wikipedia: 'Online encyclopedia'
• Twitter: 'Inane drivel'
• del.icio.us: 'Period overload'
• Disqus: 'Modern flamewars'
• Digg: 'Technical narcissism'
• Last.fm: 'Dire Straits'
• YouTube: 'Cat videos'
• LinkedIn: 'Gizza job'

There is a new, improved Monthly Archives plugin available for Habari which is now installed on this blog.

I realise that I'm probably the only person to ever scan the historical archives but I really like it so, once again, many thanks to Chris Meller and the Habari community.

I have to say I am a little surprised at this breaking news. Still, I guess Eriksson will draw another excessive compensation package while he seeks alternative employment.

In my view, buying all those expensive foreigners, beating United twice and finishing mid-table was a creditable first season.

Mind you, I always had niggling reservations about Mr. Shinawatra.

So, who's next for the job at Manchester City - Jose Mourinho ?

Mark Krynsky posted a interesting post on Twitter (sorry, I simply cant bring myself to call them Tweets) inviting readers to share their first ever Twitter post.

Trawling through my own Twitter archives, I noted my first ever post was: 'just signed up. never thought I would' on 9 November 2007 although I had earlier aired my disdain on this blog way back on 12 March 2007.

Perusing the archives of my own continuous stream of inane drivel did unearth the odd gem - well OK then - the occasional notable one-liner in a continuous stream of inane drivel.

• 'giving twitter yet another chance. After all, 3 Oracle bloggers can't be wrong !' - 23 January 2008
• 'The 140 limit is already imposing limits. When I hit it, the text box behaves strangely. You can cut text but DEL and BS don't work. Weird' - 23 January 2008
• 'I see txt spk is an obvious way to save characters but I despise it as I tend to write in English with proper sentence construction and gram' - 23 January 2008
• 'I once saw The Smiths on 3 successive nights in Warwick, Leicester and Coventry. It was the happiest time of my life - marriage, kids excepted. - 23 January 2008
• 'twhirl has search and shortening of URL's - nice' - 24 January 2008
• 'Want twitter id of 'stalker' so emails read 'Stalker is now following you'' - 24 January 2008
• PHP upgraded on Bluehost to 5.2.5 (from 5.1.6) so can use latest Habari. Only PDO mySQL driver no longer installed. Opened ticket with BH - 26 January 2008
• 'Just gave @michaeltwofish several sensible reasons why I won't be going to Habari (yet). Now importing WP blog to perform 'gap analysis' - 11 February 2008
• 'Finished tweaks to Habari Whitespace theme for XHTML compliance. Now fighting obsessive theme porting disorder' - 21 February 2008
• 'I am seriously wondering whether I will ever blog again. I am stuck in this 140 character mode of thinking' - 22 February 2008
• 'Email to colleague: 'Keegan worries me. He seems to have completely lost the passion. He seems a broken man' - 26 February 2008
• 'Is it just me or does everyone think 'Prophylactic' (medicine, condom) whenever they hear about Profilactic (FriendFeed competitor) ?' - 19 March 2008
• 'Disqus is an outsourced commenting system for blogs.Good: one-stop shop for all commenting. Bad: Every single blog needs to adopt:-)' - 25 March 2008
• 'Whoopee Doo ! Today is 'Dress down Friday'. So I am dressed and I am down.' - 28 March 2008
• 'Utd-Villa. Gatecrashing a bikers bday in a dodgy pub in Hull.' - 29 March 2008
• 'Wishing I had continued to use the alias 'RomanTotaleXVII' for longer because it simply was brilliant.' - 31 March 2008
• 'Bemused tourists at T5 gawping at 12 Englishmen dressed from head to toe in yellow lycra - http://tinyurl.com/ypkdgk ' - 31 March 2008
• 'I have uncovered the true meaning of blogging - an innate desire 'to be loved' - 1 April 2008
• 'This writing desk smells of beer. This writing desk smells of beer. You come to me with excuses. You wear me out. R.E.M Country Feedback' - 2 April 2008
• ''I'm not sure all these people understand' Once again, Michael Stipe nails the world's probems in just 8 words. Don't you just feel humble ?' - 2 April 2008
• 'This is why FriendFeed is truly 'disruptive'. It just keeps on probing, nagging away, posing difficult thought-provoking, questions' - 2 April 2008
• '@mathewbutler Accelerate, well it's R.E.M - the upbeat version. Obvious singles 'S-natural S-serious', 'Living Well', usual brilliant lyrics' - 6 April 2008
• '@michaeltwofish Hacienda now has mythical status. When you grew up in Manchester, it was just another music venue (and not even the best)' - 10 April 2008
• 'Just had a fantastic blowjob in men's toilets at LHR T5 - gate A2. The hand dryers in there are absolutely fantastic !' - 14 April 2008
• 'Wondering, if I should pre-decease Michael Stipe, whether my estate could afford R.E.M to attend my funeral and perform 'Country Feedback' - 20 April 2008
• 'Idea dump - Habari branded lingerie. Guaranteed to make $$$, capture large user base and catapult us over WP and Drupal' - 22 April 2008
• 'The prospect of ironing five shirts (in this state of mind) for my jaunt to Berne is not a pleasant one.' - 26 April 2008

Ashamed of MUFCs last two games (Barcelona, Chelski) - no goals, no threat, no attack, no desire, no ambition, frightened, defensive, arrogant, complacent, stuttering.

Complete shite.

London, near England - 23 April 2008. For immediate release.

Brightside Software Enterprises are pleased to announce the immediate availability of FriendOrFoe.

Tired of being followed by those mindless idiots on Twitter, not to mention those horrid spammers ?

Tired of having to search out new friends with similar interests, sense of humour and outlook ?

Tired of being a 'soul in isolation' with 0 (zero) friends in the whole wide world ?

'FriendOrFoe' is a simple Twitter utility that will subject all Twitter 'Follow' requests to lengthy and vigorous inspection using sophisticated algorithms, advanced AI techniques together with analysis of 'social graphs' to categorise the prospective follower as:

• Spammer (Citeh or Liverpool fan filters available soon) - user will be automatically blocked and receive a DM stating 'Don't follow me, follow Jesus'.
• Friend - automatically follow back, sending a DM to the recipient's mobile, changing the ring-tone to U2's 'I will follow'.
• Stalker - automatically followed on Twitter, FriendFeed, Ponce, Jaiku, NetVibes and footage of user streamed on live Webcam, right into your bedsit.
• Anyone, anytime, anywhere (aka 'Promiscuous mode') - all Follow requests are blindly followed with a DM of 'Hey I'm pretty desperate. Fancy a drink ?'

'FriendOrFoe' is freely available now as a set of Greasy scripts written by 1,000 monkeys, bashing away continuously for 8 days, on a Dvorak keyboard.

Many disgruntled readers have contacted me via email, IM, facsimile, phone and anonymous poison pen letters to ask Hey Norman - whatever happened to the unified blogging day scheduled for Friday 18 April ?

Apologies for the delay but before we get started, some random, meaningless statistics:

• Feedburner: 66 subscribers.
• Google Reader : 'From your 189 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 6,807 items, starred 1 items, shared 325 items'.
• Twitter: Following 19. Followers 55. Updates 1,292 in 87 days.
• FriendFeed: Subscribed to 35. Subscribed to me: 30. Comments: 180 this week, 504 all time. Likes: 77 this week, 188 all time.
• Disqus: Comments left: 59 in 21 days. Comments on my blog: 31 in 14 days. Precious clout points - 12.

Originally, on Unified Blogging Day, I was going to religiously transcribe every single 'output' over a 24 hour period into a separate blog entry (annotated with timestamp and channel).

This was primarily a final effort to alienate loyal (but shell-shocked) readers who had survived the WordPress to Habari migration.

However, thankfully, FriendFeed already aggregates that inane stream of consciousness beautifully formatted here.

A secondary aim of Unified Blogging Day was to conduct a detailed poll to see how people subscribe to each 'output' but Habari doesn't have a 'Poll' plugin so just leave a comment below indicating which channel(s) you are a) aware of, b) subscribe to c) devour feverishly and d) blissfully unaware of.

• Blog - a man barely alive but we have the technology to rebuild him.
• Tumblr - stuff I'm too embarassed to put on the blog.
• Technical blog - low traffic.
• Twitter - endless stream of drivel (soon to be upgraded to include 'Hello', Goodnight' and the state of my runny nose).
• Disqus - every single comment I have left on the blogoshpere (on Disqus enabled blogs).
• FriendFeed - unified feed of all of the above. Filters available to reduce the signal/noise ratio.

Anyone owning up to subscribing to duplicate channels will have stay behind after school for 1 hours detention (unless they have a note from Mummy).

Thoroughly enjoyed 2 hours of The Story of The Who last night on BBC4. What a story it was.

The ultimate rock'n'roll band. A Rolls Royce driven into a swimming pool, copious amounts of drugs, lots of girls and the premature death of two band members. During one gig, Moon was carried off stage - completely comatose.

30 years on, Pete Townshend looked visibly choked when talking about the (not wholly unexpected) death of Keith Moon and Roger Daltrey remarked 'Keith seemed to think he was invincible. He thought I am "Keith Moon of The Who".'

Townshend's and Daltrey's immediate reaction to Moon's death was ironic; they tried to assuage feelings of guilt by going out, doing 'crazy things' and experimented with 'even more substances'.

I never appreciated what a great bass player John Entwhistle was and he seemed the quiet, sensible one although he later died on tour in Las Vegas, in bed with a woman, after snorting cocaine (from a heart attack). Well it sure beats dying in your sleep.

There was some great footage and interviews but this clip epitomised The Who at their supreme best.

The American host has a chat with the band and introduces 'My Generation' with the immortal words: 'You're going to be surprised at what happens. This is excitement.'

The band ended a brilliant performance by trashing their instruments with the normal dry ice and smoke bombs.

However, no-one (not even the other band members) knew that Moon had bribed a stage-hand to pack his drum kit with explosives. The effect reminds me of the line from the classic film 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid' - 'Do you think we used enough dynamite there, Butch ?'