Life is grand

Banks. Banks are king at getting new customers and forgetting about their current customers. Every fantastic offer you see your bank advertising has “Not for current customers” tacked on the end. “0% APR with 6 months to pay and a free rabbit hutch!” they shout and then whisper “For new customers only.” They spend millions of our money on getting new customers and forget to spend anything on us.

I want a freaking rabbit hutch.

TextDrive is giving me a rabbit hutch plus some rabbits and the whole damned animal farm. What is the catch? I just have to carry on being their customer which I was planning on doing anyway. No extra money, I don’t have to sign onto other plans or upgrade or take out a second mortgage or even sell one of my future children.

They give me more for nothing extra.

Thank you TextDrive, thank you Joyent. You guys rock.

The best bit of Inside Man by Spike Lee is the fantastic opening and closing track; Chaiya Chaiya Bollywood Joint. It is apparently from a Bollywood movie called Di Sel and features Punjabi MC amongst others. Bollywood hip-hop, I never thought I’d hear it but hear it I did and love it I am. Good enough that I paid €9.99 on iTunes for the entire movie soundtrack just to get that one track (the rest of the tracks are OK, movie background music really.)

You can watch a music video of Chaiya Chaiya here. It doesn’t have the rapping in the Inside Man version but gives you a reasonable idea of the track (minus the standard over-the-top Bollywood sequences.)

The movie itself is quite good. The usual Spike Lee touches, good cinematography and a resoanably smart plot (though you’ll figure it out a quarter of the way into the movie.) Worth watching.

I am not a great fan of wikis but Jot Spot with it’s semi-structured style works well. It has the usual free-style wiki pages that let you enter text, links, formatting and so on but throws in the ability to create structured pages such as calendars, photo galleries, file “cabinets” and spreadsheets.

The spreadsheets are especially interesting. Create a spreadsheet with address details and you can view a map that plots the address and related data on a Google Maps like world map. Put dates into your spreadsheet and you can view a calendar which automatically displays events in the calendar pulled from the spreadsheet. This is something that other spreadsheet developers could emulate.

Jot Spot wikis also have a dash of style to them, something most wiki systems lack. Jot Spot has a clean look without the usual wiki clutter and lends itself towards non-techies.

Pricing is a bit much in my opinion but all in all, a really good, hosted wiki solution.