Having recently watched the great new film about Bob Dylan, "I'm Not There", (if "about" is the right word...), it struck me that people who go to the movie without at least a certificate in "An Introduction To Dylanology Level 1" will miss out on a lot.

So, here are the facts you should know, in roughly chronological order, before watching "I'm Not There":

1. The young, undiscovered Dylan used to visit the famous folk singer Woody Guthrie in hospital.
2. Woody Guthrie's guitar had "This Machine Kills Fascists" written on it.
3. Dylan was labelled a "protest singer" by many, something he has always denied.
4. Dylan shocked his fans by "going electric" and presenting them with loud rock music, rather than the acoustic folk they were expecting.
5. Dylan had a crazed UK tour in 1965, documented in a black and white film "Don't Look Back".
6. Dylan had a serious motorcycle crash that nearly ended his career.
7. Dylan had a long running on-off relationship with folk singer Joan Baez.
8. Dylan went through a messy divorce.
9. Dylan shocked his fans by becoming an evangelical Christian and presenting them with gospel music and fiery religious diatribes, rather than the loud rock music they were expecting.
10. If you don't understand everything in the Dylan's music, books and films, don't worry, you're not supposed to.

Kate Blanchett is fantastic in the film in my opinion and, no I don't know what Richard Gere's doing either - see fact 10.

The eagerly awaited Microsoft Action Pack Web Solutions Toolkit turned up yesterday. Included in the kit are various pamphlets and three DVDs - Visual Studio 2008 Standard, Expression Studio and a "Custom Web Development Jumpstart" DVD, which is basically full of documents and presentations about all the latest Microsoft technologies, such as ASP.NET AJAX and Silverlight. There's one licence each for VS 2008 and Expression Studio, which I'm looking forward to having a play with. There's also a big round Silverlight sticker in the pack. Hmm, where's that gonna go – on the office window, the laptop, my forehead?

If you're running a small software development business using Microsoft technologies then it makes sense to subscribe to the Microsoft Action Pack. For a flat annual fee you get access to all the latest software, such as Office 2007, Vista Business and SQL Server 2005, for internal business use, development and testing. To qualify, you just need to sign up as a partner and pass an online course in your area of expertise. If you mainly do web development then you'll also get this toolkit.

Here's a little bug I hadn't come across before. While updating and testing some TradeDoubler links on one of my sites they all suddenly stopped working and returned this error:

Bad Request
Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.
Size of a request header field exceeds server limit.

This turns out to be an Apache server error. Strangely, the links worked in Firefox but not in IE7 (my main browser). I was a bit confused and assumed that there was some kind of problem with the TradeDoubler servers. When the link stills didn't work after several hours I tried clearing out the IE7 cookies and, hey presto, that did the trick and all the links came back to life. Thinking about it, I'd clicked on a lot of TradeDoubler links with IE7 that morning while I was testing them. I'm thinking that maybe TradeDoubler just keeps on adding and adding to the same cookie until it can take no more and gives up the ghost.

My wife and I were out on a walk the other day and while walking up a particularly isolated track by a wood, I said that this would be the kind of place where you might bump into the big cat that many people have seen roaming the countryside around Stamford. I was amazed when we got back from the walk to see in the local paper that a neighbour of ours had taken a picture of a paw print that may have come from the mysterious big cat. Spooky... It also brought to my attention the British Big Cats Society, who analysed the photo and think it may a panther print.

There was a rerun of the Top Of The Pops Christmas Special 1978 on TV last night and the first band on was Darts. That brought back memories! I played keyboards in "Darts II" for a couple of years in the early nineties, which was a band that Bob Fish, from the original Darts, put together. We did all the standard Darts numbers and it was a kicking live band – Mel Collins on sax, Simon Eyre on guitar, Jeremy Meek on bass – great players. A little trawl around YouTube brought up this video of a TV show we did in Spain – goodness only knows who uploaded it.

Ah, it seems so long ago! I did like that leopard skin jacket...

Is not "'Till I Gain Control Again" by Rodney Crowell just the best song ever written and one of the most fantastic recordings? It's a number I've played innumerable times with various bands over the years, but I've never really thought that much about it before. I was playing a random playlist this morning and "'Till I Gain Control Again" jumped out like the "sun over the mountain tops". The original recording is so simple, just acoustic guitar, drums and Crowell's vocals, there's not even a touch of reverb and yet it is so powerful. It just goes to show what you can do with a fantastic song, it doesn't need any decoration, it speaks for itself. Like any great song it can also be a framework for other artists to build on. Van Morrison did a version recently, which is quite cool, especially the piano playing from the great Geraint Watkins.

There are a couple of other songs that fall in the same category as Crowell's classic I think. That is the category of "mind blowing song – 3 chords, 4 max – keep it simple". One is John Prine's "Speed Of The Sound Of Loneliness". Prine's original version is so pared down it's almost a throw away track. Yet it is surely his best known song and truly an all time classic. Nancy Griffith did a version a while back which was cool as well. In fact, it reminds me that I have a little "Speed Of The Sound Of Loneliness" story. I was playing piano and guitar on a tour with Slim Whitman, George Hamilton IV and Sandy Kelly. We were doing some dates in Ireland and had a day off in Dublin and had been put up in a nice hotel in town. Well, musicians with nothing to do for a night and a hotel bar is a dangerous combination. Sure enough we spent all night drinking. Next morning, well afternoon, we all staggered up the road on a mission to find some chips to soak up all the Guinness. We came across a back street chip shop, wandered in and started ordering food. The woman behind the counter kept looking at Luce, the drummer on the tour. She then looked him in the eye and drawled "You play drums?". Luce looked quizzically at the woman with the chip scoop and replied "Rachel?". It turned out it was Rachel Peer-Prine, John Prine's ex-wife and the inspiration for "Speed Of The Sound Of Loneliness"! Luce and her had met on a tour a few years before when Rachel was playing bass for the Everly Brothers. Anyway, Rachel came back to hotel bar that afternoon and we all had a few beers. As to what she was doing serving chips in Dublin I don't think we ever worked it out...

The other song I was thinking of in this category is Amie Rigby's "Don't Ever Change". Just beautiful. Try listening to that without a tear in your eye. I went to see her play live in Leicester a while back and she was just great. So funny as well – she could be a stand up comedian! I particularly remember her song she'd written about a break up from a man's point of view – "I Hate Every Bone In Your Body Except Mine". Classic!

I've started blogging with Word 2007 now and I must say it's a very good blogging tool. You have most of the usual Word features at your fingertips, you don't have to install any new software and publishing a post is quick and easy. The only nagging thing I have so far is that I can't find a way to add tags to posts. Word 2007 manages categories well, it even downloads them from your blog, but there doesn't seem to be a tags option.

Well, I finally got fed up trying to customise my WordPress blog. All that PHP doesn't make sense to me. So I looked around for a .NET blog and decided upon BlogEngine.NET. It's written in ASP.NET 2.0 so there are features I understand like masterpages and user controls. Also it all runs from XML files so there's no need to have a database. I've been playing around with it for a while and am going to customise the current theme quite a bit more by the end.

Beware of the security update for .NET 1.1 - KB886903 . I've just spent several hours trying to work out why my machine running VS.NET 2003 and .NET 1.1 on Windows XP Pro SP2 suddenly started to return the following error every time I tried to launch a site in debug mode from Visual Studio: Error while trying to run project: Unable to start debugging on the Web server. Could not start ASP.NET or ATL Server debugging. Verify that ASP.NET or ATL Server is correctly installed on the server. If the site is launched without debugging then ASP.NET returns a 404 error page. Very strange. After much head scratching and trying various workarounds I uninstalled and reinstalled the .NET Framework 1.1, then installed SP1 for the Framework and, hey presto, everything started working again. However, Windows Update then prompted me to install the security update, which I did, restarted the machine and, lo and behold, all the errors were back again. That kind of gave it away. I uninstalled the KB886903 update and now it's all up and running. I'm yet to find a workaround for installing the update without breaking ASP.NET.

I was amazed to find out the other day that Microsoft's new MP3 player, the Zune, will not support PlaysForSure, Microsoft's own initiative for some form of portable audio player standardisation. If a player has a PlaysForSure logo it will be compatible with online music stores that use DRM (Digital Rights Management) such as Napster. The fact that the Zune will not support PlaysForSure means that it falls off of my Christmas list with a resounding thud. It seems that Micorosoft are going the Apple/iTunes/iPod route with the Zune, i.e. you buy our player (Zune/iPod), install our software (Windows Media Player/iTunes) and buy music from our website (Zune Marketplace/iTunes). Considering the backlash that Apple have received from some quarters it  seems to be a brave (mad?) move from Microsoft. Apple still have a stranglehold on the online music business though and maybe Microsoft can see the success of their business model and have decided to copy it. The battle is on.