So. You know how much I love jazz. I mean, I present radio programmes of jazz music on public radio, for free, because I love jazz, and I love public radio.

One thing you might not know about me, is that my family originates from Liverpool, in the north-west of England. I only escaped growing up with a Liverpudlian accent by my father moving south, to the West Country, where the regional accent was different, but equally strong. We can only assume that any potential Scouse accent I might have otherwise had, was neutralised by all the Bristolian accents around me. This may be why my accent is along the lines of "low budget BBC newsreader".

The Beatles were from Liverpool. Liverpudlians are understandably proud of this fact. I love good music, and that includes the Beatles.

OK, so now to bring these seemingly random points together.

Much as I am passionate about jazz in its many forms, and much as I love the music of the Beatles, I wish that modern-day jazz artists (particularly vocalists) would stop recording their "special jazz interpretations" of Beatles music.

Stop it! Now. Seriously. You sound like a twat, and you're just fulfilling all the negative stereotypes people hold about jazz.

That's all I had to say.

Things not to do at the supermarket checkout, when there's a line of people waiting behind you:

1. Sending The Clerk To Get Items You've Forgotten Here's the deal. You make a list (on paper, your PDA, your forearm, whatever), of the things you need. You then proceed around the store, getting the items listed. Then you go to the check-out.

If you are so stupid, that with a list in front of you, you fail to get all the items, only realising this at the check-out, you keep that fact to yourself, ditch your groceries in your car, and return to the store to get the items you forgot.

You do not waste both the staff and other customers' time, sending the poor minimum-wage earners to the four corners of the store, to find things for you. It's you that screwed up, not them, and not the people with the rising blood pressure, waiting in line behind you.

2. Pay By Cheque
Hello? It's 2003. Modern technology anyone? In the UK, almost no-one pays by cheque at the supermarket (or anywhere else for that matter). Why? Because using your direct debit card is the same as paying by cheque only, (brace yourself for this shock news), your fellow shoppers don't have to wait the several hours it takes you to write the damn thing out!

Even when the occasional Briton does pay by cheque, all they have to do is hand the cashier a blank cheque, and the till printer, prints it for them in about three seconds.

But here in the US it seems, vast swathes of people, of all generations, still insist on keeping us all waiting, whilst they do their impression of a medieval monk, hand inscribing each cheque, like it's some illuminated page of the word of God. I guess the pictures of bunnies and flowers these people have printed on their cheques, confuse them.

3. Order Cigarettes
Apart from the fact that it's a vile and disgusting habit, getting the poor, underpaid checkout clerk to traipse the entire length of the store, to the cigarette booth and back, during the 5pm rush, frankly shows a level of self-importance normally associated with Saddam Hussein.

I'm sorry lady, but you're no more special than the other weak-willed lung-cancer wannabes. At least they actually make the effort to queue up for their fixes. The cigarette booth is right next to the door by which you leave the store, so just how lazy are you, that you make some poor wretch do the leg-work to support your foul addiction?

4. Ignore Your Crying Child
This applies to anywhere in the known universe, not just supermarkets, but given how tiresome supermarket shopping can be, you should be especially vigilant at making your crying/screaming/screeching child STFU.

I think it's British supermarket chain ASDA who, in some of their larger stores, offer a free crêche, so that parents can shop unencumbered, and the kids can have fun whilst their folks line the pockets of the supermarket. I'm amazed we don't see that over here (at least not in CO).

Bizarrely, loud mobile phone conversations, are actually less annoying than they would normally be, when you're in a supermarket check-out line. Why? Probably because they help distract you from the God-awful tabloids and magazines there, and more importantly they help while away the hours whilst some nicotine-ridden tart has the entire staff search the store for things she's forgotten. Sadly, they are unable to find either her brain, or her manners.

Having not written any code for over 18 months, today I was back in the saddle, and loving it.

Previously, I've worked in C++ and Visual Basic. Today it was Javascript. Every day I learn something new in this web design job. Today it was Javascript. For an ex-software developer, it was as laughably easy as I'd been told it would be (by fellow developers). Of course if you're new to writing code, I daresay it's not such a breeze. Still, there has to be some pay-off for the years I spent wrestling with the Windows API and MFC!

It's a little ironic that having loathed writing software (at least towards the end of my time in my previous job), I'm now eagerly looking forward to doing more and more, increasingly complex coding for the web pages I work on.

Next Week: Max learns that ColdFusion development doesn't involve a fridge.

A tale of everyday obsessional "pop-star" stalking from the BBC.

Looking at the pictures of the two individuals involved, I'm not sure who looks more creepy and/or who looks more like a character in a horror/slasher movie.

What's the betting the gentleman concerned, still lives with his parents?

Now if we could just persuade him to rid us of members of various other manufactured, talentless mime artists, claiming to be musicians...

P.S. Is it just me, or does the lass in this story look like she's made of plastic? It reminds me of the Autons in Spearhead From Space.

Want to know what sort of a day I've had so far?

Well, it's 4.30pm, I had a doughnut for breakfast, and I've not stopped for lunch yet. I'm sat at my desk, dealing with a potentially major crisis, and I'm drinking a beer.

In fact, neither of us left in the office, have had lunch, and we're both dealing with this crisis and drinking beer. You see, the fridge was out of Mountain Dew, so it was either mineral water, or beer. I don't think I need to explain the rationale behind our choice.

I won't go into the crisis, because you never know who reads this nonsense I publish. Suffice it to say that it has nothing to do with the massive power outages across eastern America honest guv. I was nowhere near Niagra Falls at the time, and in any case, I have several witnesses that can testify to the fact that if you let me play with a power station, the only thing that would black out, would be me.

As I write, we've just resolved the technical crisis, that might just have annoyed the client - a financial institution we won't name.

Mind you, after the day we've had, I came up with a new company tagline. Out goes the dynamic and edgy-sounding, "creative. technical. strategic." slogan, and in with mine, "no crisis too small".

And so as the last of the beer drains from the bottle, I'm off to KUVO to do a three-hour radio show.

Alright, so since the last paragraph, I've done the show. It was hard work. As much as I'm used to doing three hours of live radio at a time, when you've already put in a full day at the day job, it can be tough getting through the third hour.

At one point, I announced on-air, "The theme for tonight's show is 'CDs That Skip'". This was what could technically be called a lie, as in fact none of the CDs had actually skipped, so much as been sabotaged by operator clumsiness. Clearly, fatigue was setting in.

I played a new CD by saxophonist Charles Davis, and dedicated it to, "All you Windows users out there, hit by the latest worm virus." - the track was called Blues For Yahoo. I resisted the temptation to follow it with jazz organist Jimmy McGriff's The Worm

I think DMfM readers are well overdue for a new picture of my number one go-to guy, Miles.

Every day, we get up and go for a walk around our cool neighbourhood, often off-leash, despite Denver's oppressive leash-laws. Miles is well-behaved enough that he knows never to wander off the sidewalk, and he waits for me at every junction, before we cross.

He comes to work with me, and puts in a full day as the company mascot, meeting and greeting visitors.

Either at lunchtime, or straight after work, we find a park, and get in some quality frisbee time.

After dinner, we kick back and relax, either on the porch, or on the sofa. Tonight, Miles watched TV with me, as shown:

click to enlarge

In case you're wondering, he was watching Fawlty Towers.

One thing I haven't mentioned lately is my radio broadcasting exploits. Oh don't look at me like that, I'm not going to go on at length about it.

I did what i thought was my "farewell" show on 8th July, and informed the listeners that I was returning to Europe. However, the very next day, as we now know, I landed my website design job in Denver, a mere five days before I was due to move back to Europe, and am thus staying a while longer.

Since then, I've done three shows, one evening, one daytime (thanks to my understanding day job employer), and one last night.

Last night, however, things got a little crazy.

Normally the show, "Into The Night", runs from 9pm until midnight, however, for the month of August, the first hour is replaced by "live recordings" from the Vail Jazz Festival.

Consequently, I was due on-air at, "sometime before 10pm." according to the boss. This is about as precise as things ever get in public radio, it would seem.

The theory, was that the presenter of the 7-9pm show, would kick-off the recorded program, and wait for me to arrive. It was a lovely idea, until you factor in that he had somewhere else he needed to be, and assumed that the next person on-air would have a key.

So a moderately farcical scene ensued when he bumped into me, in the lobby of the building, and I asked, "If you're out here, who's going to let me into the s?". It's been a while since I've seen such a look of horror on someone else's face, as he realised that he'd left us unable to get into the s, with barely 40 minutes of programming left to run, until we hit dead air.

A tense half hour then followed, wherein frantic phone calls to the Director of Programming, resulted in the CEO being dragged out and across town, to let me into the s. Imagine her further delight when I suggested that spending a couple of dimes on some spare keys would have avoided all this hassle. Yes, I'm helpful like that.

The show itself was my usual blend of well-chosen jazz, wit and sarcasm. I had a small in- posse, consisting of a couple of the folks with whom I'd been out to dinner, and let one of them read the weather forecast on-air. Beyond that, nothing too exciting happened except for discovering an interesting (and avant garde) group of jazz musicians calling themselves The Prophets of Time and Space. I know what you're thinking, and it does sound like a Doctor Who story, but they were interesting, and a little 'out there' - in a good way.

OK, that's your lot. I've been so busy at work (I was there all day today - a Sunday - racing to meet a deadline tomorrow) that it's been harder to sit down and write lately. However, starting this week, I should have more time.

When you call a company that's too big to bother employing an actual human to answer its phone, you get put through to an automated system that guides you, via button pressing, to the part of their organisation that you require. That, at least, is the theory.

It's a lovely idea. They (the company) get to lay-off their telephone operators, and you (the poor bastard who just wants to ask a simple question, or pay a bill) get to type in enough digits to represent the bonuses that the company's executives are going to get paid, for laying off the staff who used to answer the phones. See, everything is cyclical.

Of course, one digit out of place, and you have to start the call all over again. There's never an option along the lines of, "Press 8 if you don't have thin, child-sized fingers, and have therefore misdialed".

One of the things that really annoys me is when, having typed in 200+ digits, including your phone number, social security number, inside leg measurement, and hat size, you're then asked for the same information, all over again, when you finally get through to a human being. I mean, what's the point of typing it in the first place? Can't these companies' systems pass on a simple numeric string? They don't seem to have a problem passing around the numeric strings that they use to send me a bill.

But my real beef is with the grammar of their voicemail/customer-avoidance systems. In the US, the phrase, used all too often, is, "Your call will be answered in the order in which it was received."

Well, let's see... I'm making ONE call, so the order in which it's being received is:

begin sequence my call end sequence

My call is not being received backwards, or upside-down, so short of some disturbance in the space-time continuum, that causes my call to be split, in the forth dimension, and arrive at their phone system as a series of calls, it's always going to be a sequence of one call.

What they mean is, "We answer incoming calls in the order in which they arrive".

Of course the torture doesn't stop there either. Dear me no. Whereas previously when put on hold, you were merely driven insane by bad "hold music", now, it's a barrage of advertisments for the institution with which you're trying to speak.

Other stock phone announcements when on hold, include the classic, "Your call is very important to us..." one. The full text of which, is actually, "Your call is very important to us, if you owe us money, but not important enough for us to spend our money on employing enough staff to handle the number of calls we get at any time of the day or night."

Of course, given the general standard of heartless cretins that companies usually employ for customer service, avoiding a corporation's carbon-based life-forms could be seen as a good thing.

But by far the biggest pain the arse with regard to automated phone systems has to be those systems that call your house, then ask you to hold for the next available operator. Yes, THEY call YOU, and then put YOU on hold!

I have a strict policy with those systems. Namely, if they can't be bothered to have a human being call me, then their call is not important to me, and will be hung up upon, in the order in which it was received.

I had a strange dream last night. I'm not prone to sharing all my dreams with you, but this is very short.

I dreamt about a project to burrow to the centre of the Earth. You know, the whole Jules Verne sorta thing, complete with a vehicle in which our intrepid adventurers were going to travel.

The odd thing though, was that the whole venture was being sponsored and project-managed by our local phone company, Qwest.

Given that I've never worked for them, and have been nothing more than a customer of theirs, you have to wonder what it all means.

Boy did I have a good evening last Saturday. I wrote about it at the time, then, with onset of thirtysomething senility, promptly never posted it, and forgot all about it.

The subsequent week has proved to be busier than an entire hive of bees on speed, with a deadline to meet. Consequently, I've not posted anything for a few days. If it's any consolation, I have a few articles in the pipeline.

So, anyway, last Saturday, I went to Dazzle Jazz, to see Charles Gatschet play. His special guest was alto saxophonist, Bobby Watson.

I went alone, but bumped into a number of fellow broadcasters over the course of the evening.

As I got in for free (being a KUVO on-air host), I was seated in what I suspect is known as The Freeloader Booth. It's position, at the side of the stage, affords its occupants a first-class view of the left-hand sides of those performing. Still, when one gets in for free, one can't complain.

I was sharing the booth with Bobby Watson's girlfriend, and after a while, by some friends from the station.

Before the show started, I chatted with Charles, as we'd met previously in 's live performance . We caught up, and as a result, he might become a new website client of mine. Here's hoping.

The band were amazing. I say that, having seen a lot of live jazz in the past few years, yet still they were amongst the best. Local lads Eric Gunnison (piano), Mark Simon (bass) and Paul Romaine (drums) ably assisted.

Originally, I was going to just watch the 7.30pm show, and then leave. In the end, between the great jazz, and great Guinness (is there any other sort), I stayed for the second show, and didn't leave until nearly 1am. For the second show, I was sat front and centre, about three feet from the stage and consumed my own body-weight in strong coffee.

There were moments, mainly when Bobby was really, "going for it", that I actually found myself thinking, "Damn, I wish I could do that!". That's something that doesn't happen often.

When I say, "Going for it", what I mean is, blowing that Alto-sax like his life depended upon it, and gyrating whilst he blew, in a fashion I can only describe as Crazy Person Gettin' His Groove On.

Afterwards, I met a few KUVO listeners, and actually got recognised (as soon they heard my voice). It was nice, and they were all very sweet. Plenty of handshaking and grinning practice, for when I run for Congress.