nico nuzzaci

My friend Adam Frankel and I went to see the Hotel Cafe Tour 2006 at the Carling Acadamy in Islington, London. It turned out being quite a emotional rollercoaster panning from bad, ok and excellent. Overall the evening was a disappointment.

The main reason to my disappointment is probably that I was expecting an evening with Tom McRae, and not an evening with a mixer/blender effect of 5 artist doing 2 songs at the time and taking turns on playing with each other.

Tom didn’t disappoint me, he was brilliant. On stage he was very relaxed, personal and funny. The singing and playing was spot on. I’m quite sure that if the evening had only been with Tom, I would have been more than satisfied.

But it wasn’t.

After Tom’s beautiful, charming, personal and promising start, the whole evening got an increasingly aftertaste of plastic image and bad lyrics. From time to time I was proven wrong, but those moments were among the exceptions.

At one point I turned to Adam saying:

Adam, we are standing in a venue named after a beer that has more similarities with pee and water then proper beer, listening to an American songwriter singing “I’m going to the country” in front of a big backdrop saying;
MYSPACE.COM + (RED)
The Cafe Tour 2006

Adam quickly replied:

Yeah… I know, they surely could have left out the ’2006′ bit.

The highlights of the Evening were:

1. Tom McRae’s presentation of the artist.
2. Steve Reynolds guitar playing.
3. Jim Bianco performance of his sing Painkiller.
4. Last but not least; Tom McRae preformance of the evenings, and his, final song – I’m the boy with the bubblegun.

Links:

• tommcrae.com
• jimbianco.com
• joepurdy.com
• carybrothers.com
• stevereynoldsmusic.com
• islington-academy.co.uk

I just feel I have to send out quick warning to everyone about the poor quality of the movie World Trade Center. Unless you are doing research for an article on bad movies, I success you stay away from this film.

It’s embarrassing.

I have tried a few pizza delivery places around the area I live (e.g Pizza Hut, Pizza Man, Sorrento), with average results(normal London pizza standards). This all changed last night when I found an amazing place called Firezza!

The pizzas are wood-fired oven pizzas ordered by the meter (oh yes!). The minimum order is 1/2 meter – enough to share between 2-3 people – and you can choose your own toppings every 1/4 meter. The photo above is a 1/2 meter pizza with a 1/4 Patate (Mozzarella, rosemary potato, red onions, smoked pancetta and Gorgonzola cheese) and a 1/4 Chorizo (Tomato, mozzarella, spicy Spanish chorizo sausage and wood-roasted red peppers).

If you live at any of these postcode areas in London:
N1, N4, N5, N7, N16, N19, EC1, EC2, E2, E5, E8, E9, SE5, SE11, SE14, SE15, SE17, SE19, SE21, SE22, SE23, SE24, SE26, SE27, SW1, SW2, SW3, SW4, SW5, SW6, SW7, SW8, SW9, SW10, SW11, SW12, SW13, SW14, SW15, SW17, SW18, SW19, SW20, WC1, W3, W4, W6, W12, W2, W8, W9, W10, W11, W14, NW1, NW5, NW6, NW8, NW10.

Then you can visit www.firezza.com and order your pizza online. (The online order system is ok, it’s not well designed or built, but don’t be frightened by it – I used it and 25 minutes later someone was buzzing the front door).

BON APPETITO!

As you might have noticed, similar to wikipedia, I have added a small icon next to all external links. Unlike wikipedia’s little arrow (), mine () , also indicates that these links will open in a new window.

Now, opening a link in a new window is nothing new, but since we’ve moved from ‘HTML 4.0 Strict’ to ‘XHTML 1.0 Strict’, the recommendation for the attribute that tells links to open up in new a window; target=”_blank”, has been removed. This means that by adding the attribute target=”_blank” on your links, the page will not pass W3C Markup Validation (note: The Transitional versions of the specifications still allow the target attribute).

To work yourself around this you need to parse the markup (XHTML) with Javascript and assign the attribute (target=”_blank”) to links you wish to open up in a new window. Again, this is nothing new, but most of the tutorials here on the World Wide Web that deal with the matter, approach the problem from a different angel; normally adding a ‘class’ or a ‘rel’ attribute (e.g class=”external”) to the links too open the link in a new window. Then, while parsing the markup attach the target attribute (target=”_blank”) to the link that has the matching value of the ‘class’ or ‘rel’ attribute (e.g class=”external”).

New-Window Links in a Standards-Compliant World, is a good tutorial and example of that method.

But since I want to open only external links in a new window, instead of adding this attribute to all links, I just check whether the link is external or not while parsing it.

Here’s an example on how that function could look like. In the example I have also added the functionality to exclude links from this behavior. Simply add a ‘rel’ attribute with the value ‘ignortarget’ (e.g rel=”ignortarget”) to external links you still would like to open in the current browser window.