Blackwood River Chamber Festival

Last year I visited the Blackwood River Chamber Festival, in the beautiful town of Bridgetown, south of Perth, Western Australia. The festival was held for the most part in a small church and the atmosphere was very intimate. The festival is held in autumn, and 2010 will mark the festival's twelfth year.

The music was superb, and I wept on a number of occasions at the purity of conviction of the artists.

Blackwood River Chamber Festival: www.chambermusic.com.au

YouTube improvement

Have you ever been viewing someone's blog, and seen an embedded video and thought it looked interesting. So you started watching it, and noticed:

1. it isn't worth watching
2. it's really long

You pause the video so you don't have to hear it's sound, and then you keep reading, what you really wanted to do was cancel the video's downloading because you don't like it, but there's no button to do that. So the video sits there downloading tens of megabytes of unwanted data. Yes, you could refresh the page, but AJAX is here to stop that being a necessity, further what if the video is set to start playing (and therefore downloading) automatically.

YouTube should have a button to stop a video downloading, especially when it's embedded on blogs etc. In these days when our networks will be struggling to keep up with bandwidth requirements, this will provide some respite, it is also in YouTube's interest as it will relieve unwanted server load. I feel this extra complexity in the user interface is warranted.

Naturally this also applies to any streaming content site that continues to buffer content when it is paused.