I drove behind a car with a Darwin fish sticker this morning. Never seen one of those before - great idea! 

Every now and again you stumble upon something that becomes more than a little addictive. This time it's a really cool piece of software called Family.Show. It was basically written to show off the power of the new Windows Presentation Foundation technology and the skills of the developers, but it turns out to be much more than that. I've been looking around for genealogy software for a while, but it all seemed a little grey – glorified spreadsheets really. Family.Show uses the power of the new Windows technologies to provide a funky program that's fun to use. I've already spent several hours adding long lost uncles and aunts to my family tree. It's quick and easy to add family members, photos and biographies and I particularly like the way it zooms in and reconfigures itself around a person when you click on them, so you can see the relationships from their point of view. I've been meaning to investigate my family tree for ages. My brother has done some groundwork and there's a mystery about my paternal grandfather, who apparently won the Military Medal in the First World War, but no-one in the family knows what for. There's just an old photo of him with a scar across his cheek, which, so the family story goes, may have come from a German bayonet. Looks like me, my laptop and Family.Show will be doing some investigating...

Oh, by the way, I'm not related to Prince Charles! The screen shot above, which gives an idea of the slick interface, is of a demo family tree, The Windsors, bundled with the software.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Spare a thought for the album cover artist.  Years ago, in the glory days of the gatefold double album, they could make bold, striking statements. Think of the prism on the front of Pink Floyd's "Dark Side Of The Moon", the airbrushed spaceships on ELO albums, The Beatles staring out from the gatefold of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in all their stoned technicolour glory,  the list goes on and on. Albums covers that you could hang on your wall.

Then came the advent of the CD. A far smaller canvas, but still a high quality print medium not without possibilities. CD artwork could encompass the front and back cover of the CD case, the surface of the CD itself, an accompanying booklet, a presentation box to put the whole thing in and more.

Now however, the album artist's canvas has shrunken to a few backlit millimeters on the screen of an iPod. For the digital album cover artist this presents a new challenge. The skills of the miniaturist will have to be rediscovered. Bold designs that have an impact on a tiny scale will need to be developed. Artwork will need to be designed for individual tracks, a whole album, an artist and maybe even personalised for the end user. Maybe a whole new art form has been born from the ashes of the gatefold album cover.

After upgrading from XP Pro to Vista Business any attempt to play a track downloaded from Napster brought up a pop-up window full of random text with "Media Rights Usage Acquisition" in the title bar. It seems that the licence files get screwed up somehow during the Vista upgrade.

I found this tool - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/916249 - which resets the DRM system. I downloaded and ran it and everything is back to normal now - Vista & Napster is possible!

Napster To Go is a great idea - you pay your money each month and you can download and transfer to your MP3 player as many tracks as you want. Online music subscription services are the way to go I think. It's a great way to find new music. The problem with the online music business at the moment is the compatibility issue. How many iPods have been sold and then returned or sit collecting dust because they don't work with Napster / Tesco / etc... and how many £30 MP3 players have been sold to people who only face disappointment when they get home and try to get it to talk to iTunes? It's VHS vs Betamax all over again. I know techie people who are online all the time (the kind of people who would read a blog!) will think that it's obvious and if you get the wrong player it's because you don't know what you're doing. Just imagine if it was the same for every electrical device you bought though - "Hmm.. shall I buy a Dyson vacuum cleaner, is it compatible with my electricity supplier, do I need a firmware upgrade..?!" People just want to walk into a shop and buy an MP3 player and know that it will just work.