A while back, Danny, friend and long-time cricket partner - an unbroken run of five six years Twenty20 Cup finals - told me about his dream of creating a new type of music company.

The aim, as I understood it was simple. Forget about restrictive contracts that fleece the musicians, instead treat them with respect and utilise all the tools that the Interweb has put at their disposal. Use the new techniques provided by MySpace, Facebook, Last.fm, etc and work with the artists to make the best of them.

Despite the tough times in the traditional music biz, it looks like this approach is working out. His company 360 Degree Music is running its first showcase of new talent at In The City in Manchester on 6th October.

Sadly, I'll be stuck in London, but if you're knocking about in Manchster, why not pop along and soak up some great music? Plus, it's free...

360 degree music Showcase

featuring

• Krakatoa
• Mozzy Green
• No Picasso
• Reader's Wives
• Roses Kings Castles
• Rum Shebeen

7pm - 12.15am
FREE ENTRY

Cellar Vie (Map)
18-22 Lloyd Street
Manchester M2 5WA

As I was writing the post about phrases from baseball becoming a part of everyday office jargon, a Sunday evening TV stalwart flashed back into memory. The master of corporate gibberish was Gus Hedges from Channel 4's Drop the Dead Donkey. Played to perfection by Robert Duncan who gave life to Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin's poke at 80s yuppie corporate flannel.

Sadly the copyright void that is YouTube doesn't have any clips of Gus, so you'll have to make do with the written form. Spot any favourites?

Just so you know, I'll be stir-frying some ideas round my think-wok first thing Monday morning. Enjoy...

• All right Team are we achieving megathrust? Ace!
• Anyway, heads down, chins up, chests out, teriffic, well played team.
• Are we nuking the opposition news busters? Teriffic.
• Are we sniffing round the bottoms of the opposition?
• Aye aye coach, had a good weekend recharging the batteries for another surge of powerhouse info-dynamics?
• Coach, if I could input into your mental mainframe for a moment...
• Could we interlock brain spaces in my work area?
• From now on I'm going to employ relaxation techniques to turn off stress river and mosey gently down contentment creek.
• George, can we pool our brain spaces into a centre of excellence?
• Good morning newsbusters, are we cooking with napalm today? You bet!
• Good morning scoop busters!
• Good morning teamsters!
• Helen we need a rapid interface in the chin-wag department.
• Helen, if I could just park in your mental multi-storey a moment...
• Henry, television is no longer corner store it's a hyper-mega-market. And if we want Connie Consumer to slip her hand into the freezer cabinet and pull us out, we have to be the frozen peas with the nice picture on the front and the 10% off coupon.
• Henry, welcome to my humble living space.
• However, the fickle hand of Mr Fate has spun the coin of destiny.
• I feel a very real sense that we ought to be wary of running any unsubstansiated stories if we're to avoid a faeces and fan situation.
• I see myself as a sort of hands off overview executive who sits at the sharp end and interacts within the office matrix...
• I think we have a slight togetherness shortfall here.
• I'd just like you to stir-fry something in my think-wok.
• If Mrs Whitehouse saw this, she'd have our collective danglies in a Magi-Mix.
• I'm a committed anti-tittle-tattle person.
• I'm in major cellular rejuvination mode, fast tracking my way to eternal biological viability.
• I'm not here.
• I'm reading this great new book on the benifits of reciprocal social intergrational relationships within the work environment. ("He means 'having friends")
• I'm setting you free! Free to rome the high seas of enterprise as the buccaneers of our broadcasting future!
• It's an anti verminous defecation deterrent. ("It's to stop pigeons crapping on the building")
• I've never been at a burial scenario before.
• Jill, could you come for a brief scuba in my think tank?
• Just a thought I wanted to pop into your fishbowl to see if it blows bubbles.
• Lady Merchant's just arrived, so no drops in the clanger department.
• Let's keep kneecapping the opposition.
• Let's opperate a zipped-lip scenario on this one.
• Let's stress how Tony (Blair)'s got a superb raft of ideas, several rafts in fact, which he's lashed together into a pontoon of excellence!
• Look out Mummy, the snake wants a reproductive interface.
• Look, Henry, if it's any help, I do have a sleep area over capacity situation.
• Morning hotshots! Are we cooking with napalm? You bet!
• Morning newsdiggers! Have we struck gold this morning?
• Morning ratings busters! Are we scraping Pete Punter with sexy scoops? You bet!
• Morning talent base! Are the afterburners on full thrust? You bet!
• Morning, mountaineers. Climbing the north face of newsmaking again are we? Teriffic!
• My place is here, with my family of co-acheivers!
• Problems are just the pregnant mothers of solutions.
• Quality stress diserpation opportunities here.
• Sorry, Helen, had a bit of a composure shortfall earlier.
• The three of us can go back and get into some real pro active recreational interfacing...
• There is just something I'd like to pop into your perculator, see if it comes out brown.
• Today is tomorrow's tadpole of opportunity.
• We all need to go on a forgivness curve.
• We do rather appear to have an ongoing underwear entanglement situation...
• Well, butt-kickers, what's cooking?
• We're merely running our bulletins through the cappucino machine of innovation, see if it comes out frothy.
• We've got to downsize our sloppiness overload.
• What stories are we scorching the opposition with today?
• What's filling today's scoop sandwich chief?
• Yes, Alice is indeed now occupationally challenged.
• Yes, well, I sense we may be straying down tangent boulevard here.
• Yes, well, obviously I don't have an opinion, I'm a support module, but it would be very easy to fnd ourselves standing on buttered ball bearings over this piece.
• Yes, well, publicity-wise this is a rather regrettable gonads in the guilotine situation.
• You see, when it comes to sexual interfacing with the female gender group, I've always been caution-orientated due to ongoing problems of an adaptive nature regarding the gooiness factor on the physical front.

Thanks to Hazey, Shaolin_Monkey and h2g2 for the quotes. If anyone's got more, do let me know and I'll add them or leave a comment below. Thanks.

This video has been doing the rounds of Twitter, Digg and no doubt dozens of other social network-type tools. Having the dubious privilege of being one of the geekier people in the Chinwag office means what you see below sometimes hs a frightening similarity to my days.

Laydeez and Gentlemen. The website is down...

Strike a pose. Then click the red button. 

Now...go with the jazz hands.

[an oldie, but goodie via HolyMoly, created by Scott Carver]

It's not terribly heartening is it? After months of doom and gloom for every news outlet you care to sample about the credit crunch and impending economic doom, you spot this sign as you shamble towards work one morning...

Yes, that's right, you're eye's aren't deceiving you. That really is a 442% APR Bonus Loan from the sparkly new Oakam shop. Seems like the bonus firmly belongs to Oakam, rather than the person actually taking out the loan.

The other snap - excuse the rather iffy phone camera work - shows the more reasonably priced, Payday Loan at a mere 76.85% APR.

This particular shop opened a month ago, but it's by no means the only money shop in the neighbourhood. It joins an independent outfit as well as The Money Shop chain. These only one reason these shops are opening and it's because there's enough demand form short-term finance at enormous rates.

I'm particularly concious of the costs of this type of loan as I'm volunteering at the local credit union, Hammersmith & Fulham Credit Union, HFCU to its friends, which has just been approved by the FSA. And the timing couldn't be better.

Credit Unions are social enterprises, operated and owned by the people involved in it. To form one, the people involved must have a common-bond. In HFCU's case, it's open to anyone who lives or works in the London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham, but there's lots of them all over the UK.

The movement sprung out of the Co-operative and Friendly Society movement. The best bit about them is that they're regulated by the FSA, so you're money is protected plus by law, the maximum interest rate is 2% per month, although most charge less, typically around 1%.

If you live or work in Hammersmith & Fulham, you can find out more or get involved by filling in the form on the website. If you want to find your local credit union, there's a list on the ABCUL (credit union trade body) website.

Every so often something inspirational drops into my virtual lap, which helps lift the cynicism generated by some of the more robust egos floating round the industry. In this case it's the sad, poignant and inspirational final post from Major Andrew Olmsted, who was killed in Irag last week.

What's unusual about his final post, submitted by a friend, is that it was only to be published in the event of his death. The post itself is fairly long and well worth a read. If you don't think you have time, take some, honestly. There's no politics, no ego, just someone who was passionate about what they did, trying to make a difference and showing true humanity, humility and a fine sense of humour in the process.

Perhaps it's not what you'd expect from a US serviceman in Iraq, but it's too easy to stereotype from the soundbites we're fed on the news. The comments left on one of the other blogs he contributed to, show the depth of feeling amongst his community, colleagues and perfect strangers.

Ordinarily, this probably isn't the subject matter I'd delve into, but reading his blog on the Rocky Mountain News website about training the Iraqi army was fascinating. It lifts the lid on daily life in a world that couldn't be more different from mine. Between the hyperbole and the outright negative coverage of all things Internet, it's easy to forget the web can deliver great things without any bleeding edge technology at all.

Judging by Google News, the media will be all over this story, but it's best read first-hand on Major Olmsted's blog, in his own words, without any spin.