Well that was a surprise. I got everything ready for a nice relaxing bath before bed and as I am a bit of a restless soul I couldn't quite make up my mind whether to listen to a podcast, read a book or watch a DVD. One thing was for sure, this bath was going to be relaxing and far too long. So I line up my Solaris lappy 486 and a copy of Backroom Boys and dig out a bottle of schnapps left over from the party. Thanks for offloading those weird bottles that other people brought to your parties guys. I think the next challenge is a bottle of cheap premixed Pina Colada, sheesh.

Bath full, check, shot glass full, check, Solaris up and running check... hang on I'll just check the wireless is connected... tap on my sun.com bookmark and I'm presented with some 2.0 related speil entitled "the big mash up". The name's got me interested because mashing things up migrated from being strictly DJ lingo into general vernacular here about a year ago, by my reckoning. My friends and I often talk long into the evening about the way media is crossing, converging, tangling, how companies are unleashing services powerful enough to destabilise the traditional media and as addictive as crack for the consumer. £kerching£. In short it's an interesting time.  That's not my point. My point is that Snapp radio actually turned out to be cool. From the point of view of someone in the bath it's been a while since we did something cool, ok ok, don't jump down my neck, we do a whole lot of cool things. However I do not really need a scalable standards based operating system in the bath I'm using it becuase I love it. For now one or two cores in my CPU is enough as well. As soon as I'm running a trading floor from my bathroom I'll let you know. No, Snapp radio is actually cool for me in the aesthetic sense, I was completely hypnotised by it. Not so long ago you would have to visit a pretentious art installation to see anything like this. The music would be garbage and the small number of images would match seamlessly!

There is a killer element to this, the fact that the images and music are thrust together. I can't really find the words to do it justice, it just has a hook because an image of you at a concert is as likely to show up as anything else. You can watch it struggle with abstract music and then suddenly you start to believe that it's really matching moonlit beaches to ambient tracks. All sorts of believable emergent behaviour. The music and pictures form the two strands of the double helix man. Whoa, that schnapps is kicking in. heh heh.

My advice.... get the beers in, full screen your browser window and let the tunes and images roll over you.

Ah Marvin Gaye is coming on...  do you plan to let me go, for that other guy you loved before.........