I have played Arcade Fire’s new single several times now, because I have become ensnared in the online multimedia object that accompanies it. (I am not sure what the correct term is, but I am sure that “video” is the wrong term.) If you have access to Google Chrome you can do the same thing.

I arrived in London last Monday for meetings on Tuesday and Wednesday. I realised that since I was getting a return ticket I could usefully spend the rest of the week here, and so I did. This morning, as I walked from the Lodge to Clapham South tube station (where I was to discover that all service had been suspended for the weekend for vital engineering works) an old Routemaster bus passed me by. It had been suitably refurbished and was waiting to be hired for some advertising event or the like.

At the start of the week our hamster Otto suddenly seemed to become old and slow. He stopped running around and stayed in his house almost all the time. Today Naa tried to pick him up and he jumped in the way that animals and people jump when they get a sudden pain. So, this evening we took him to the vet.

I have finally found an advertisement that is as good as the Tango advertisement that I have written about before.

Aviary is a set of online editing tools that allow you to edit images, vector graphics, and sounds. The tools include a Firefox plugin that allows you to screen-grab directly into your Aviary library. And it is now all free.

James sent me a Tweet the other day and I finally got round to checking out the link. It led to Fox @ Fury, an interesting blog (by the owner of fury.com) that I added to my Bloglines feeds. However James wasn’t just linking to the blog in general. He was linking to a post about Jesse Schell’s talk at DICE 2010 called Design Outside The Box.

This morning I found out about the new beta version of the Second Life Viewer 2. It is now available for download. I have played with it for about an hour and (so far) it seems as stable as the allegedly stable “stable version”. It also has several important new features, including Shared Media. I shall continue to use it as my viewer until I find a reason not to.

David Cameron is the Conservative Party leader in England. There will be an election in summer. The election campaign has already begun, even though the election has not been officially announced yet. He is in danger of looking ridiculous before he gets a chance to look serious, courtesy of a series of advertisments that are attracting the parodies they invited.

In 1967, after his near-fatal car crash, Jan Berry attempted to record a new Jan & Dean album using a variety of guest singers. Although he was suffering from both aphasia and dispraxia he was still able to write music. The album was finished but then rejected, and now finally it is being released. With a cover by Dean.

Last Saturday, after forty years, Tunnelin Levy closed forever.