Dear Zune Marketing,

Thank you for attempting to brand device to device transfer of music as "squirting". It enables me to make a number of smutty jokes and encourages school boy humour.

Yours, Barry.

So anyway Dinner #9 of the London Girl Geek Dinners was on Wednesday in a very noisy Balls Bothers in London. The speakers were Mary Sharoe, talking about how to survive as a woman in the geek world (despite being an honourary girl at these events I felt that one didn't apply to me <g>), Nicholas Anpazis on Feeds 2.0 (yummy, an RSS aggregator that learns and recommends; except it's private invite only) and the jubilant and effervescing Maryam Scoble who turned up with t-shirts for the girls. Now I missed out on the Barcelona t-shirts (I wouldn't suit a baby-doll t-shirt) and now I missed out on the PodTech t-shirts; I'm sulking. Sarah, as usual, documented the event.

Being a geek the highlight of the night was my surprise when Steve Clayton whipped out a Zune. We sat at opposite ends of the room and pretty soon I got a message saying "Stevecla wants to share files with you" and quickly selected "Yes". Next thing I know I have Enimem on my Zune; the UI doesn't tell you what files they want to send, so I couldn't see Steve's dire taste in advance. I fired Mogwai back again and in some effort to recover "cool" Steve fired off the entire soundtrack to Zidane, performed by Mogwai. I was rather excited and planned to listen to it on the tube on the way home. My excitement cooled when it all went wrong. There were 10 tracks in the album and when the transfer completed it started playing track 1 immediately. So I stopped it, and that was play 1 gone. Sitting in the tube station in St Pauls. I browsed to my music in-box and started the album playing again; and "Black Spider" swelled up and played. Track 2 played as well then bang; I got messages about the next tracks having expired. I am rather confused, the DRM is supposed to be 3 plays or 3 days; it looks like the DRM was applied to an album as a whole, rather than individual tracks. Now maybe this is a mistake on my part, or poor explanation on Microsoft's part; whatever the reason I have no doubt Cory will find this amusing and lambast the poor little Zune again.