Imagine wanting to arrange a meeting with someone and being able to see whether they’re free or not… how great would that be? Well, most modern e-mail solutions (such as Notes / Domino and that one that Microsoft sell) offer such a thing – it’s called ‘free time search’. Unfortunately, many people are either too lazy to use free time search, or maybe just don’t know how – I say this because most of the meeting invites I get are for times that I’m already busy. Not using free time search should be added to the calendar and scheduling bad habits.

Sarcasm aside, free time search works fine within organisations, although some people do their best to scupper your best attempts to find a convenient time. I have known people to be apparently busy every day, but the reality is that their days are marked with an all-day event reading ‘working in Staines’ or even ‘pancake day’ – neither of which really prevent a meeting or conference call. But what about scheduling time with people outside of your organisation? Unless there’s an organised and maintained link it’s difficult to achieve. Tungle offers a way to solve this.

What does Tungle do? It allows you to upload and sync the contents of your calendar from a number of sources, and then present the free and busy time to contacts on the web. Your contacts can see when you’re free (not necessarily the meeting details), suggest some appointment times, and then Tungle does the job of arranging the meeting between the two of you and provides the invites.

A partnership between Tungle and IBM Lotus was announced at Lotusphere – see here for details. The Tungle plug-in for Notes, now in beta, provides the synchronisation between your Notes calendar and the Tungle service. This means that you just have to update one calendar for your internal and external colleagues to see when you’re free.

Click on the purple button for a view of the Tungle calendar with my free time.

The awards ceremony takes place this coming Tuesday – I don’t care who wins and who loses because the whole thing is a nonsense. Let’s start with best album of 2009 – Dizzee Rascal is nominated. Is that his real name? “Congratulations Mr Rascal, it’s a boy” – “great, I’ll call him Dizzee… a brother for my eldest son Dirty”. Anyway, who else? Florence & the Machine, Kasabian, Lily Allen and Paolo Nutini. Young Mr Nutini, who sings like he’s had eight cans of Special Brew and is wandering through the streets of Glasgow asking people for a quid for a cup of tea, is in second place on the list of artists who make me want to turn the radio off. Dizzee (real name Dylan Mills) is at the top.

But my real problem with this list of nominees is the glaring omission, mainly those Welsh wonders the Manic Street Preachers – a band who in 2009 released not only the best album of the year, but also one of the best of the decade (Journal For Plague Lovers). The lack of recognition for such a powerful and emotional collection of songs is a farce. Who are the people deciding on the nominations?

Best British band is a category which fares better in my estimation (Doves, Muse and Kasabian), but again, where are the Manics? Instead nods are given to JLS and Friendly Fires… what the hell is going on? Let’s be honest, I like Doves but they hardly set the world alight and their latest album wasn’t that great.

To be honest, I couldn’t give a monkey’s about best single, best female artist and some of the other categories. However, there is one more lunatic category which celebrates The Brits thirtieth anniversary… ‘Brits Album of 30 Years’. Think about some of the great British albums released in the last thirty years… OK Computer (Radiohead), the eponymous Supergrass album, The Holy Bible (more love for the Manics), Power, Corruption And Lies (New Order)… I’m sure you could come up with your own list. Even albums by The Smiths, The Stone Roses, Blur and The Clash could be described as significant even if they’re not my cup of tea. Love them or hate them (probably the latter), the Spice Girls made a huge impact in the history of British pop music.

So who, from the alumni of British bands and artists from the last thirty years gets a nod in this category?

• Coldplay – like visiting Belgium, interesting in places but an overall disappointing experience
• Dido – dreary music for dumped females
• Duffy – one-album-wonder, and sings like me mucking around with a helium balloon
• Keane – wimp rock dominated by a chap who plays the piano out of key
• Sade – 80′s somnambulism
• Travis – more dreariness – “why does it always rain on me?”… because you’re so effin’ miserable

The rest of the nominees are Oasis, Phil Collins, The Verve and Dire Straits. Fair enough. But overall that list looks like a joke. If you were responsible for drawing up that list of nominations, please leave a comment to explain yourself.

Thanks to my brother Florida Steve who noted that I made a slight error in the original version of this post, and also Mrs A pointed out my error while we were driving to Windsor. 1970 was, of course, forty years ago. I’m just in denial about the fact that I was four years old when Abbey Road was released.