I see that Al Gore has decided he wants to be the next Bob “Give me us your fockin moneys” Geldof. Mr Gore wants to stage the biggest concert of all time ever. Rumours that the stage will be Gore’s forehead are yet to be confirmed.

Gore has given the series of concerts the oh-so-imaginative name Live Earth. Wait a minute that sounds like a Microsoft product. Wait a minute — it is! Shit me!

Hopefully this will knock Geldof off his perch a bit. Back when there was all that Live 8 nonsense I wrote plenty of stuff about the offensiveness of Geldof, a man who unashamedly makes a living out of starving Africans.

He is not content with giving an undue platform to bland rockstars who don’t have the faintest clue about politics or economics and bollocksing up his purported goals in the process. Geldof has also allowed his offensive sperm to turn into Peaches Geldof. I had my suspicions before, but now I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that Bob Geldof is the most evil man on the planet.

As such, I hope Gore’s big concert puts a massive dent in Geldof’s ego. The problem is that Geldof will only be replaced by Gore on the “Massive Arsehole” league table. Soon, Geldof will strike back with his own massive concert, then Gore will hold another huge concert. Then Bono will come along and throw his weight behind the creation of a carbon neutral™ Benevolence Android™, thereby gazumping them both.

Despite the fact that Bono is firmly in third place on the Massive Arsehole league table, he might have the right idea with this carbon neutral™ Benevolence Android™. After all, it is surely true that a great deal of climate change is caused by the hot air emitted from the Geldof / Gore axis of ego. And that is without taking account of the guitar-wielding windbags that they place on their foreheads that are cleverly disguised as stages.

Of course, the biggest problem with holding massive concerts is that they actually use up shedloads of energy. After all, they involve the use of massive fucking speakers and sophisticated lighting systems — real energy guzzlers. And then there is the small matter of the transport involved to get everyone there.

Gore claims that the concerts will be carbon neutral, but this is a bit hollow. After all, they could plant the trees anyway, without holding a concert. That would probably do much more good. But then we wouldn’t be able to have a giant party then, would we? Diddums.

My biggest problem with this concert proposal though is the fact that it is designed to “raise awareness” of the climate change issue. But has Gore not seen the news recently? Every fucker on the planet already knows about climate change. You could not possibly raise awareness of climate change! It is already the most talked-about issue on the planet!

In other words, this concert will achieve absolutely zip. If anything, it will have a generally negative effect — just like Live 8. Well done Mr Gore! Do the world a favour and stick to what you’re good at — losing presidential elections.

Gary Andrews is similarly unimpressed.

I’ve been fiddling around with Gadgets again, and I have to say I stand corrected about the weather gadget! I hadn’t realised that dragging them away from the sidebar actually makes gadgets more functional. I now know that Sunday will be cloudy and Monday and Tuesday will be rainy.

There are some other cool gadgets that I’ve installed. Multimeter is a gadget that is just like the Microsoft gadget that tells you CPU and RAM usage, but it uses bar charts rather than antiquated dials.

iTunes Accessory is a very nifty gadget that displays what is currently playing in iTunes. It allows you to skip tracks, pause, mute and suchlike. So now I don’t need to keep fidgeting with windows just to pause a track. Nice.

I’ve not kept it on my sidebar because I don’t post packages very often. But if you do, I think Postage Calculator (UK) is very impressive. If you haven’t got your head around the Royal Mail’s new pricing system, just plug in the weight and size of your package and this will tell you how much it will cost to send. Simple but brilliant.

But this is the one that has really bowled me over. BBC Radio Player allows you to listen to any of the national BBC Radio stations (including digital stations, naturally) without the hassle of firing up your browser and trudging through the BBC website. Such a simple interface as well, and it works perfectly.

What I’d quite like to see is a Meebo gadget. I love the idea of Meebo, but I don’t like it taking up a tab in Firefox.

Hello there! Sorry I haven’t posted for a few days. I’ve been too busy getting over this new PC thing what I got with Vista on it. On the one hand it’s a bit silly to get Vista so early as it’s going to have so many little problems to begin with. On the other hand, I’ve been waiting to get a PC of my own for ages and it always seemed a bit pointless to get a new PC when the new version of Windows was just around the corner (ha ha ha).

The upshot of it is that I’ve got a computer that’s slightly ridiculous. Here’s how it happened. It was the cheapest one on Dell’s website. The choice of speakers was either two really crummy looking ones that looked like they would disintegrate if you touched them; or a ridiculous 5.1 system. 5.1 system it is then. Bwoom.

I also misjudged the size of the monitor. I guessed that 19″ would have been just about the same as the old monitor I used, just a bit wider. Maybe it is, but it’s too bright or something. I’ve even turned the brightness down, and I’ve moved the whole lot to a desk that lets me sit further away from the monitor, and I’m still squinting a bit and getting a bit of a headache.

Also, all of these lines of text are now ridiculously wide. This is making it difficult for me to judge how big these paragraphs are, which is probably why they are all bigger than normal. I guess I should just resize my browser window, but I’ve always liked to have everything maximised.

Anyway, that’s all boring. The purpose of this post is to talk about the gadgets (widgets to you and me) that come with Vista by default. I mean, they are all potentially useful, but some of them seem to fall short of their potential. Take the calendar gadget for instance. As far as I’ve been able to work out all it does is show you today’s date and then it shows you a little calendar of all the dates in the known universe.

Flick over to the start menu and you find an application called Windows Calendar. Nice! Does it sync with the calendar gadget? Not as far as I can tell. So right now I’ve got a calendar in my sidebar, but I can’t put any events on it. In other words, it’s a bit useless.

Then there is the weather gadget. Yes, it knows that Kirkcaldy exists! Result. Er, but hang on. Can I not get this to give me a weather forecast? Apparently not. It can only tell me what the weather is right now. I could really just look out the window to get the same information this has given me. More than anything else, it serves as a permanent reminder that I probably should really be outside and not sitting indoors getting pale in front of a computer. But I bought Vista as soon as it released ferchrissakes. This is like McDonald’s asking me to go swimming before I eat a Big Mac.

I know that you can download other gadgets and that better ones are bound to come out soon enough. But I really wonder why they bothered. Both of these are potentially very useful gadgets, but they lack any functionality whatsoever.

Normal blogging will resume soon! Possibly.

Update: I forgot about the RSS gadget, which would be really good — if you could choose an RSS feed that wasn’t from MSN!

At last, BBC News have removed that effusive story about the highly dodgy Browzar software. I almost complained to the BBC about it yesterday, but luckily I didn’t need to. Today they’ve replaced it with a new, much more probing story.

It’s clear that Browzar is on the back foot now. I particularly like this bit:

Mr Ahmed said at the time of its release: “Although it’s possible to delete history folders and empty cache with existing internet browsers, the majority of internet users worldwide don’t have the time or expertise to do this.

It could hardly be simpler to delete history folders and empty your cache. In Firefox it a simple matter of going to Tools → Clear Private Data. And that’s it! As I recall, it is similarly easy to delete your history and cache even in Internet Explorer.

Yet Ajaz Ahmed thinks that people will find it easier to go out, download and install his scam IE shell? In a world where so many people still think that the only way to browse the web is through Internet Explorer? A friend recently said to me that he didn’t understand why he could need Firefox because “with Internet Explorer you just type in the address and that’s it.”

Every opportunity should be taken to warn people away from Internet Explorer, so I’ll do it right now.

Or at least Browse Happy.

So I can now use MSN sorry, Windows Live Messenger to have a chitty-chat with Yahoo! Messenger users. But I have to add them all first. Why can’t I just associate my MSN account with a Yahoo! ID? Can somebody tell me, is there a reason for this, or are they — MSN, Yahoo!, the lot — all just being arses again?