Simplifying digital life

I got an iPad recently. The purpose was largely a business thing, so I can help out my wife with Black Swan Analysis work - I look after website analytics, etc.

I was well aware of what the apple mobile platform will and won't do, so I considered it a challenge of sorts. Would it do the job? I was pleased not to be an early adopter (it's been out since early 2010 really) as this gave the platform time to get some applications for serious use under it's belt.

I can report that it's coming along very nicely as a serious productivity tool. But the purpose of this little missive is a more general point about increasing complexity, size, and the human frailty of thinking that progress is about making things bigger.

One of the things I don't have on iPad is Microsoft office. Thankfully recent movements mean that the "doc" format is phasing out, and more third party apps exist which will use it; so I spent a whopping £5.99 on "pages" for the iPad to try it out.

Easy to use, word loads the files fine, but the biggest revelation was how little of the bloated, enormous, buggy MSWord I actually use. Pages is tiny. It costs next to nothing. And yet I reckon it handles 95% of day to day word duties I would need it for with effortless ease. Note, I'm no secretary or report writer. I do have a Bluetooth keyboard for the iPad as well, but that's portable and not essential (for instance I've been editing my homepage at www.funkybass.co.uk using "Gusto" this morning using iPad onscreen keyboard work).

We have allowed ourselves to put up with bloated crapware which we pay a fortune for, for backward compatibilty, and made Bill Gates and his ilk very rich. Why on earth did we do this? It's viral junk!

Go openoffice (note, now libreoffice thanks to Oracle being arseholes)! Use that for your PC office needs instead.

Let's simplify our lives and keep using older machines to do the same work, instead of this relentless and destructive upgrade madness.


- Posted on the move

Wow am I out of live practice!

It's been a few months so doubtless it'll take a little time to get back into the live thing again. Bringing the 5 string fretless was a baptism of fire, the guitarist played dropped D and nobody told me so I found out the hard way ;-)

Luckily it's a fretless so you can get away with a few Les Claypool moments heh heh

Tonight at Tilehurst...

... I'll be playing my first live stuff in about 9 months :-)

The function band thing will ramp up soon, I'm told - I've been using Spotify with the free 2 hours service as a way to compile and practise along with set lists. Extremely useful, and helps a lot as I don't have to but a track here and a track there. I'm not a fan of downloading tune by tune from iTunes, I think it's going to kill creativity in any music for commercial release as anyone who has half a hit will have demands placed upon them for "the difficult second single".

How many artists from the golden ages of the last 50 years have had free licence to experiement a little on their albums? This will end completely if the current trend of all music becoming the equivalent of the 99p woolworth's bargain bin continues.

I digress. This subject does press my buttons.

If you want to come and see me sweat with a Warwick Fretless 5 string, come to the Plough in Tilehurst and see some great musicians. Weird pub, this - seems to have a concentration of excellent musos within spitting distance, resulting in a decent jam night nearly every time.

The Plough Inn
78 School Rd
READING
Berkshire
RG31 5AW
United Kingdom

See you there, maybe...

Why people are buying android phones

It's because they're better then symbian. But as this fellow found out, android is still too geeky and windows-like in some aspects:

http://m.zdnet.com/blog/bott/why-i-dumped-my-droid/2487?tag=nl.e550

Plus, the device sounds like a pisspoor hardware platform.



- Posted on the move

Apple GameCentre

Wow. This got pushed onto my iPhone with iOS4.1 - but I hadn't looked at it yet.

What a piece of crap - this software is definitely not up to apple's usual standards. I would wager it didn't come through the same teams as work on iOS proper, and I'm surprised it was approved in the first place, for several reasons:

1. the font is ugly as hell
2. All the text is black on DARK GREEN which renders it hard to read
3. The slider switch controls only seem to respond to tapping (!!)
4. When I registered my usual apple ID email address, I then had to re-authorise it(?)
5. The graphics (stupid bloody banner things on every button) make it hard to work out what is and isn't a control

There are other points, but the overall point is this application is a miserable addition to the iPhone. I've hidden it away in a distant folder in a distant corner so it doesn't offend my eye (even the app icon sucks).

Has anyone used the feature?

A cautionary tale for iPad users!

A friend of mine at work is in the Apple Developer Programme, and also has an iPad. At the moment, the iPad is a little behind the rest of the iOS devices, in that it's still running a v3.x.x version of the operating system. Lots of people would argue that that's fine - and my experience so far has been that it's a wonderful device - but anyone with an iPhone with iOS4 on it knows that there are some very useful features which definitely enhance the user experience.

As part of the developer programme, he gets early releases of upcoming iOS versions and he got v4.2 for the iPad and tried it out. It seems apple quality control is not that applicable to their beta releases - his 3G connection was well and truly borked and the mail application crashed a lot.

"Fair enough" thought he "I'll downgrade back to V3"

unfortunately this proved to be a vain hope - it appears he can't get the baseband to downgrade as well, so he's stuck with the dodgy beta or an iPad which won't power up.

So if you're an iPad user and you're on the dev programme - it would appear you need to consider taking the beta release very carefully. Apparently forum postings indicate that the non-3G iPads may have an easier time of it - which might well indicate a problem with the baseband software as, of course, a non-3G equipped iPad probably doesn't have baseband software at all.

Spofity - late to the party but impressed.

I've recently started using spotify; I had thought you had to be invited but was pleasantly surprised to see I could start an account myself.

I looked again as I've got a function band project starting up, and the playlist, while containing a lot of standards I know well, does contain the odd one I don't have a CD for and haven't played live.

I really enjoy immersing myself in bass lines, working out the style, phrasing, touch, so I really fancied finding the original tracks.

I'm allergic to iTunes' quality and as a musician I hate the buy-one-song philosophy as I believe it stifles artist's potential to experiment in an album format and grow.

So when I realised what you could do with Spotify I was really impressed with it as a resource. Got the whole setlist with original recordings in 10 minutes. And now it's a playlist I can use it on the studio machine, plug the laptop into the headphone amp... Nifty.

I'd recommend it to any muso learning tracks.


- Posted on the move

Corporate stooge? Maybe for a minute.

I've got a couple of things coming through - one is a rather interesting and brand new project with a folk pop feel (not done that before!) and the other is a function band job.

I swore I'd tell everybody the setlist so I could get fingers pointed at me and lots of hoots of "sell out!" so here it is;

Set 2

1) Smooth
2) Moondance
3) There’s Nothing Like This
4) Summer Breeze
5) Ain’t No Sunshine
6) Fly Me To The Moon
7) Delilah
8) Can’t Take My Off Of You
9) Can’t Smile Without You
10) September
11) Celebration
12) Never Too Much
13) Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now
14) High n Dry
15) Creep
16) Sweet Home Alabama
17) Won’t Get Fooled Again


-----------------------------------------------------------

18) Superstition

Luckily lots of these have seen lots of service in my repertoire over the years.

Wish me luck ;-)


- Posted on the move

The insurance saga... I've emailed swiftcover.

I decided I'd do what I did with Direct Line when they did EXACTLY this same stunt: give them a chance to explain and redeem themselves.

While I appreciate than customers are now just dumb cash cows, and that customer relations are more a question of FAQs and automated helpdesks rather than talking to actual people, I want to believe that there is someone at swiftcover who still gives a shit.

Here's the email:

---

"Regarding my upcoming renewal quote: price has ballooned by approx 22% from 377.27 to 461.74 in one year. This does not compare favourably to previous years increase.

Admiral are quoting me 411.80 for identical cover. This represents an increase of just over 9%, which would contribute to a reasonable profit margin for your company and dividends for your shareholders.

If you can match this quote, I'll stay with you. If not, I'll walk.

I'm offering you a chance to impress me. A chance to do better than Direct Line did when they pulled a similar stunt a few years back.

Seriously, explain your quote. Match my figure. Or I walk."

Now it appears the comparison sites are bent as well!

OK, I've done a search on Go Compare. Admiral quote: £445.40

Now I do a search on Confused.com with EXACTLY the same details (and I have checked): £398.15 from ADMIRAL. Same conditions.

Someone want to explain this? Where did that £50 come from?

Not happy. I'll go back to getting individual quotes from individual companies now. I can see that the arc of the comparison websites is on the way down - no doubt either their scraping algorithms are getting too complex, or they don't fill in all the fields correctly, or (frankly) they're on the take from the insurance companies involved. I would wager comparison sites, with their huge advertising campaigns (funny how often we see go compare ads, eh?) are getting large kickbacks from the insurance companies.

I wonder what Direct Line will quote me...

I know insurance companies are bent, but...

This is beyond a joke.

I gotg a renewal notice from Swiftcover, who were pretty reasonable last year. This year... a rise of over 25%.

With this in mind, I logged on to gocompare, and discovered that they archive previous searches from years gone by. All are at the same address here in south buckinghamshire I've got 2007 (£320.22), 2009 (£342.60 - not too bad for a year's increase) and now... 2010... £437.83!!!!

What the hell happened in the last 12 months? Are these bastards trying to claw back losses, or prepping for a crime spree in the next few years? An increase of over 25% in 12 months?

If I change the postcode (speculatively, of course, to check out how much I'm being ripped off for) to Nic's parents place up in Rutland, it drops to £293.95. No kidding. The bastards are charging me an extra THIRD for living around here.

take note people. The south east really REALLY sucks.

Pot repair?

How satisfying! I think the pickup selector stacked rotary pot on the 6 string doesn't need replacing after all!

Thank you, servisol, once again. :-)

Time to get cracking.

Geekery, Democracy, Jiggery-Pokery

This is quite a serious posting for me.

http://bit.ly/dDhevd

this link is to a story about subversion of Digg, a site I hadn't really taken any notice of until now. If the stats in the story are to be believed, there is a growing cabal of right-wing tech-savvy individuals who are manipulating the stories which "bubble up" in Digg's rating mechnism such that right-wing conservative stories make it up, and anything regarded by their close little group as "liberal" is voted down (and indeed out).

What this represents is nothing more than an organised attempt to recreate the conditions which got Hitler into the position of power. And we all know where that ended up.

What's fascinating is that this is happening through a technological medium: these people have organised themselves through a yahoo group, have shadow accounts they keep as backups - the whole thing is very cloak and dagger - but you can see why: they are attempting to influence the thinking of the body public, you and I, through the exposure we have day to day to news stories - you know, the sort that say "crime rife! Crap liberal government to blame" and "castrate paedos now!".

If you've got any enlightment in you, read the article. It's scary reading. I don't know what anyone can actually do about it though: boycott Digg?

iPhone 4 mixed signals

You can't have escaped the hooha about the iPhone 4 and the antenna design / now apparent oversight of apple on every iPhone ever regarding the algorithm used to calculate RSSI (received signal strength indication). I worked in mobile phone comms until 3 years ago when I moved into doing work with tetra radios.

The way the story has been covered has been your typical bad science reporting, with this morning's BBC slot by some fellow from "click" explaining the problem.

Much as I love apple's products, the last 10 years of consumer electronics have persuaded me of one thing; resist the urge and don't be an early adopter. The iPhone 3GS I've got was around for quite a while before I got hold of it, and even then I only went for it because it finally offered the features I'd been enjoying in phones for many years. Kudos to apple for not rushing features out btw, which is one reason why this 3GS is a joy to use.

I've done a lot of apple defending in the past, but the iPhone 4 appears to have been something of a cockup. The antenna design is, I think, a good basic idea - internal antennas are a compromise and will never get as good a signal as a proper or stub antenna. Apple locating the surface of the signal receiver around the edge is a good idea, but the co-locating of the wifi antenna and the close proximity (allowing the 3G/2G antenna to ground through it) were poor design choices.

I had thought, in my admitted admiration for the polished feel of apple products, that this must have been some small software issue but now I think I know how this poor design got through. Secrecy. Pete Stewardson from work takes credit here, it didn't occur to me at all.

See, apple have to field trial phones like the rest of us. They love the slavering anticipation their product cycle produces, and hence they keep a tight lid on things; iPhone 4 was no different. So, to keep the physical design a secret, they had testers using the devices inside a case which gave the phones a 3GS "look".

This, of course, insulated the antenna from the testers' hands. And totally masked the antenna grounding issue. Woops.

What is happening now with apple suggesting that the rssi meter algorithm has "always been wrong" and that they were "astonished" to discover this, this I think is a total damage limitation exercise. If the meter had been wrong all along I simply cannot believe that 3 iterations of the iPhone would not have seen it fixed. Simple field trials would have shown it up.

Sean Cody, where are you matey and can you give me the lowdown!

I'm writing again...

Collaborations are gearing up for the summer.

I've got 4 ideas I'm working on.

Should get a mix from Aussie Rob with my rubber stringed Ashbory bassline soon.

Studio is humming nicely, automated desk is a dream.

Woohoo!

And great jazz band last night at the Wenlock Arms. Regret not seeing Blackmaninoff but there y'go...

Oh and the iPhone FB app sucks.

Good old fashioned acoustic fun.

Over the weekend, we were lucky enough to be invited to one of those impromptu BBQs that spring up amongst friends when the weather improves. Ours will be shortly I suspect.

Anyway, the occasion was firing up the Ozpig (www.ozpig.co.uk) amongst other things - this fantastic little piece of steel ingenuity is the result of Aussie outbackers converting gas bottles into portable wood burning stove/heaters. There is even. Community of OzModders, I understand, who weld further brackets and acoutrements on to utilise more of the heat.

This is by the by though. I brought the trusty Acoustic Bass with me, and had a grand old plonk well into the evening while being warmed by the pig. Some étude style pieces, a little bach, a lot of funk and some two-handed buffoonery. I must perfect the Inspector theme tune, although the full brass section middle 8 is probably a pipe dream without the MIDI driver.

A great night. My first public performance in a few months, so to speak; best compliment was the agreement that people only realised how much they enjoyed what I was playing when they detected the silence as I took a swig of beer or zhivago (Nic, of course, had a full portable kit with her - we have converted further masses to the zhivago cause).

Otherwise the warm weather is, as usual, and in an entirely predictable way, playing merry hell with any practice schedule I try to keep. But it's the best reason to spend more time on he acoustic. I just need some good backing tracks. Hmm...

Ash cloud remnants...

All that recent ash cloud goings-on and the way in which the airlines got back in the air troubled me; it seemed to me that a financial imperative put the planes back in the sky; now it seems the CAA have pointed a finger at aircraft engine manufacturers-this is from the BBC;

CAA chief executive Andrew Haines told Radio 4's The Report: "The critical path for this decision was the time it took for the manufacturers to satisfy themselves on the safe level of contamination. How long does it take for a manufacturer who has declined to determine something for many years to actually say, 'Given the evidence we've now got, we're happy to nail our colours to the mast and say that these are safe levels of contamination that don't present a hazard.' I suspect that manufacturers knew much of this, that they knew there was an acceptable level of safety but what hadn't happened is that they were prepared to underwrite that and validate it. I suspect that a lot of these things come down to a combination of commercial and safety pressures and actually there are levels of contamination which might impact on the life of the engine without impacting on its safety. But that's only a speculation on my part.... I'm just grateful that they came to the table and worked very hard to get it resolved. If we'd had the assurances from manufacturers that we have now at the start of this crisis, the response would have been different."

I see. Buried in there is a tiny little phrase

I suspect that a lot of these things come down to a combination of commercial and safety pressures and actually there are levels of contamination which might impact on the life of the engine without impacting on its safety

I stand by what I said before. I expect at least one plane to suffer from unexpected engine failure in the future due to pisspoor maintenance scheduling which didn't take this into account. The airlines were in trouble before this happened; I simply don't trust a financially driven organisation to be 100% vigilant.

Honest mistakes

I made a cracking mistake this morning; there's a hatch at the back of the boat you grab weeds from where they wrap around the propeller shaft (as part of essential maintenance). During our show-around, we were shown how to remove the retaining bar (which has two screw threaded handles which push down and keep the hatch in place) and a tip for remembering to put the bar back in-if you forget, the boat sinks.

Don't panic, this story isn't calamitous.

The tip was to place the bar across to top of the deck hatch, along the edge of the hatch's hinge edge. This means you can't try to shut the hatch without noticing the bar, at which point you slap your forehead, issue the time-honoured Homer Salute to Mistakes, and put the bar in.

Now, I had followed this to the letter, and the weed hatch cover (which comes out completely) was to the right, on deck, while I froze my hand removing weeds and checking the cotter pin.

As I moved the hatch cover to replace it, I knocked the end of the bar, which promptly fell down the weed hatch, briefly waving at the prop shaft as it headed for the bottom of the canal. Oops.

After a couple of minutes of reflection, I rang the guys hiring out the boats, and a fella with a hve magnet got the bar in less than a minute. He said he'd never had to fish out one of the retainer bars before, which surprised me !

I reflected on my mistake, and realised it was entirely honest; I was half awake but followed he instructions faithfully. The fella with the magnet said he'll make sure it gets fed back into the show-around, so I now feel quite pleased with my novel mistake as it should ensure nobody else panics (we didn't panic btw, it was all very logical).

Have you made any honest mistakes like this recently?

Success: what does it mean to you?

I had a conversation with Nic today which got me thinking, on several levels. It was about "success", and before I move on to my own musings I should give the whole thing a little context.

Nic's brother, it's fair to say, is what you might call a generation X casualty (my words!). He's pretty much opted out of interfacing with modern life, and on several counts I agree with him.

Nic worries about him a lot, which is admirable. I understand why he feels the way he does (and I am assuming I do understand, for the purposes of this piece, as we've talked at length about things in that way people do when they want to work out how to fix the world). There are personal compromises about the way society has decided to work itself out which mean if you didn't keep an eye on your path when you were younger, you find yourself in a situation you know you wouldn't have wanted if you'd thought about it back then.

I understand because I now hate desk jobs where you work in a large organisation. They're now the epitome to me of collective human worthlessness, where those who come up with great ideas and want to implement them have them squashed by accountants, middle managers and bureacracy. The tyranny of the project plan, the awful inevitability of the wash-up meeting, the liturgy of the lessons learned. All of it created by a group think so stifling no new ideas can be quickly brought to being.

This is my opinion: nic's brother has gone straight to opting out, before he ended up behind a desk. Nic believes that you just have to suck it up and put up with spending 1/3 of your time doug stuff you don't want to do so that you can do stuff you wantto do for the other 2/3, but when you pull 41 hour weeks, and add another 1.5 hours 5 days a week in the car, where is the 2/3 coming from?

Nic is right, of course. She's got the brass neck to start her own business, and opt out another, more constructive way. Those of us too timid or too entrenched (an excuse?) to do that can only look on and wonder. Or take to our beds and stop.

What do you do to stay alive? Or am I howling into the void again?

Mobile geek alert... Android's popularity amongst manufacturers could be its' undoing?

First up, in case you didn’t know, I have an iPhone. I’ve been using “smartphones” for many years, the first having been a P910i, then a P990i, both of which I kept using for more than 2 years. They weren’t bad, but the iPhone in my pocket makes them seem pretty slow and primitive, especially with regard to user interface elegance. I spent 7 years in mobile phone software testing (mainly in depth protocol stuff but I did a lot of UI testing as well).

I’ve had a fiddle with an android device and I thought it was pretty good: it was a G1, pre-recent Android 2.1 update (I think that’s what is gradually being rolled out). Smooth, slick, nice interface.

I’ve read a few things recently though, which make me think Android could have a problem…

I think there are several things about android which may result in a gradual slide away from it, and they stem from thinking about Android as a platform for “app” developers rather than as a nice open-sourced attractive operating system with good user interface characteristics.

1. Different hardware vendors produce different devices with different hardware platforms. Primarily, the issue here is screen size. If, as an app developer, you have to code for several devices with different screen sizes, it’s analogous to the awful situation web developers find themselves in trying to cope with rendering and processing differences between IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera… etc. Over time, app developers will grow tired of either having to compensate for small screens and rejigging their application interface to take advantage of larger ones, or only having their app run on one screen size and limiting their audience (and therefore their revenue – nobody’s going to keep doing this for free and produce good content).
2. Different Android handsets are on different software versions with different capabilities. Although there are a variety of methods of updating android firmware (including rather nifty over-the-air) the updates are by no means guaranteed to go out to EVERY android device – some will be on the end of a cable; some will be over the air; this proliferation of different Android versions across the handset population is corrosive to coordinated application development.
3. There’s the issue of no “central point” of Android OS software development as well: Google ain’t providing the firmware for HTC devices, Google are only looking after the overall state of Android, in the same way as Mandrake aren’t going to fix Linux issues in Ubuntu – but if core problems occur, they will find their way back into core Android eventually, but will they percolate out quickly? Another reason why an app might need to be tied to older versions of the OS to keep itself available to as many punters as possible.

There’s a spat going on between Orange customers who have their android app store view knackered by the latest updates, and apparently HTC aren’t interested, saying it’s an orange issue…

Some of this can be overcome using clever coding, and I’ve little doubt a second-tier industry will spring up to create tools to try to design UIs for a range of androids, with a range of OS versions, but it’ll still be compromising at every turn and that means the apps will miss compelling features.

Some of this is actually diplomatic – issues between companies who produce android hardware and networks. This is the really nasty one as large organisations are appalling at coordinating this kind of stuff.

But the overall picture, if it’s not reigned in damn quick, will see android descend into a pile of mush for developers – a great platform ruined by a lack of central control.

Most of the people who complain about the iPhone rant about the restrictive APIs, the lack of multi tasking, and the general feeling that it’s not “your” handset, that Apple retain control all the damn time. That’s why the iPhone keeps getting jailbroken, and there’s a community who have their own jailbroken apps store.

Good for them. But 99% of the population don’t give a shit if the iPhone is locked down, they just enjoy running apps on it, interacting with it and using it: it really isn’t an issue for them. The righteous indignation and anger of the Geek brigade is futile, even if it is justified. And in the current malware-obsessed criminal internet environment, we’re looking at moving towards always-connected mobile devices. Ask yourself, would you prefer a device with some locked-down aspects or an open-source OS with freedom for programmers? (well, Android is sort-of open source)

I decided I wanted a smartphone which wasn’t so “smart”. I’m a programmer during the day, I geek out building stuff from scratch… but I’m seeing that Apple’s approach has many benefits on many levels. Tied down APIs and a single point of delivery for OS updates and applications which is distinct and separate from the network I’m on are definite advantages if you want a popular, populist platform you can really code for and get to the widest possible audience.

Good luck Android, I think you’ll need it.

Total facebook FAIL

Wow. Not impressed this is the only way I can post anything to FB at the moment.

It seems facebook's glorious transition from interpreted PHP to cross-compiled C++ has not gone smoothly. In addition to totally screwing with the look and feel of FB again, they appear to have completely FUBARd the actual guts of the site.

Apparently the idea was to save cash and trouble reatnig ever larger server farms, by making the existing machinery work more efficiently - by running compiled code rather than PHP. They got quite a lot of kudos for this but my guess is that, as usual, not enough testing was done, and it's blown up. Very messily indeed.

Currently my iPhone will get some status updates (not all of them) - I can't log in to FB at all, or reset my password (everything is closed for "maintenance", that lowest of innuendos for "We're screwed right now, try again later")... oh dear.

As Dylan put it the other day - what's this Google Buzz business? Sounds interesting, even if it will always be in Beta, at least the bloody thing might work?

Or does all of this just feed my emerging belief that modern software systems are so huge and complex that we will either have to be connected and spend a lot of time with low-level angst and annoyance (with our Windows installation, our 27 inch iMac screen, our OS in general, OR our social networking sites) - OR - disconnect and go back to the way stuff was a few years back.

I'm getting v. close to closing the FB account for good, I suspect it wasn't doing me any good even when it was working...

Bloody snowy hell! It's like childhood out there!

I've been working from home for 2.5 days now, it's been rather productive. The valley we're in still hasn't had its' road treated, so I'm stuck. In fact, I pushed a Peugeot and a Porsche up both sides last night to rescue the poor idiots.

Today according to the met office things are supposed to get better; the sky looks bloody grey to me, with gathering darker clouds on the horizon. And it's getting colder again.

The view from the kitchen as I type:




I think we'll be walking to the supermarket and laying in a whole shitload of grub very soon. :-)

Merry Xmas to all. Especially the poor humps who abandoned their BMWs in Whitley wood and went to retrieve them only to find them minus alloys an radio. Jeez, that’s low.

Have to post a wintry pic.

I was forced to walk a mile or so today to get some milk, as our road didn't get gritted or cleared (still lethal!). On the way there I got some really picture postcard shots.




Who'd have thought anywhere near Slough could look nice?

New equipment.

Under-keyboard CAT add-in. Complete Audio Triumph.

Killing in the name of... Reality TV

There's a lot of talk about the race for Xmas no 1. I've bought my first online music by purchasing a copy of Killing in the Name Of by Rage against the Machine, as prompted by a facebook group, starte by a couple who got tired of preprocessed pap from Simon Belt-navel Cowell.

I thoroughly endorse their approach, but all the news reports I've seen on this seem to be missing the salient point with the UKs population now so tired of reality TV that they are willing, whenever possible, to subvert them through voting strategies, and now by deliberately pushing a reality TV "winner" (let's face it , long term his outlook isn't great) off the top slot.

Mr cowell's public annoyance will turn into something else a la the Jedward 180, I bet.

So buy a copy of the RATM track and be a rebel; be different; and actually recapture part of the spirit of Christmas by telling the prepackaged hypnosis-fest which is the unholy alliance of TV and music industry to "F@&£ you, I won't do what you tell me"

Breeze at the Flowing Well, Friday night

Good to see them again. Sounding awesome with new keyboard player who can get in there on bass and guitar as well. They do Queen now! And it's getting like the osmonds up there with Steve's nearest and dearest doing drums and vocal guest slots!


- Posted on the move

Last toms of the season

Yay! Before the frost sets in, look what was on the plants... And now rescued! I see lots of salsa. Mmmm!

Now, where's me fretless and the ashbory. Have a rap track to work on.


- Posted on the move

Alan Carr - chatty tw@t

I've never really seen this latest of our great British tradition of camp humourists before, but I just caught a few minutes of his show on BBC1. Bit tragic. I thought mercilessly taking the pee out of that slightly mentally fragile bint off x-factor last year who has "White horses" out on single was last years' tired character assassination based humour?

Seriously though, is this guy actually gay? Gay people are often naturally funny I reckon. The audience sound like they've been beaten around the head with applause cards. It's like listening to a giggling bath tap.

Not funny.

November. And it's tomato harvesting time, still.

Madness. But they are perhaps the hardiest tomatoes we've ever grown. They are just leaning against the house, user the deep eaves we have, and they get a fair amount of sun.

Weather looks okish this week. I reckon well still be cropping next week.



Got to love growing your own. Next year hopefully we'll get our patch up the hill working. Currenty it's all brambles!

Incidentally, anyone want to buy a green Xantia? I just got another one and I think I should at least pare it down to one.

;-)

The tyranny of push

I just turned off nearly all the email stuff facebook sends you, and turned on the SMS notify stuff, but only for messages, not wall posts, etc.

Apart from the annoyance having to look through about a million emails with one damn comment each, it was filling one of my inboxes with utter junk, making it hard to find actual messages.

Why can't facebook do a daily digest with it all in?

It's a bit academic anyway. Since I got this phone I tend to check facebook when I've got a free minute, and the support on it is great, so you soon catch up.

Anyone out here use Twitter? It sounds like a great place to meet up and discuss topics with other near-psychotic disillusioned thirtysomethings.


- Posted on the move

Output to rise

Nothing political. I have decided to take time out from playing live. All the recent stuff with stress has forced me to confront some ideas I have cast into stone, and question them properly to find out if they are as important as I think they are.

Recent advances on t'web mean I can collaborate far more easily with people, and the studio has had its' recent makeover. My inability to find time to practise and write properly within a band setting became another source of stress rather than the glorious experience it should be, so I'll be working solo and collab for now.

Hopefully this will mean more output. I hope so, this is an experiment.


- Posted on the move

The power of the web

Wow. Just got an email from the guitarist, he's already mixed down a live recording of our new track (and his studio has a bloody excellent live sound) and he's sent us out download links already.

How different is that to when I started, swapping tapes of rehersals. He's done a pro sounding recording already!

I love tech when it's useful, truly useful. That's why I'm not using windows any more. It's useful alright, but it's gone too far and has become a bewildering array of features accessible from a thousand areas (usually unintuitive ones). Top that off with vulnerability and instability and I'm finally off to unix land (prob osx).

Weird. No more windows, apart from supporting the ones left in the house.

His studio is osx now as well!


- Posted on the move

Ableton live

Wow, this feels odd compared to cubase. Very strange.

Some similarities but mostly damn odd.




Looks the part though.

Rehearsal notes

Note 1; Get here on time. My bad, but Burnham and it's fantastic random a4 backup mechanism at j7 did
NOT help.

Note 2; soundproof my own studio. Since tony did his the recordings in they are just spectacular. He can seriously just stick a couple of mics in for ambience and get something which sounds fantastic!

- Posted on the move

Time trouble

I've been trying to get some arranging done on some tracks for jacquoda but there doesn't seem to be enough time. It's probably half "blank page disorder" an half masses of other stuff to do. But it got to get done; I need to get some kind of creative output going or I'm going to go insane (there's a grain of truth there, I'm actually having stress counselling at the moment!).

It's a rehearsal this afternoon as prep for a gig. Long one I reckon.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Iphonery

I capitulated in Italy and bought an iPhone 3gs. It's excellent. I wish I'd been part of a company which had wanted to produce a device like this when I was working at Panasonic. They would have dismissed the ideas present on this device so quickly, the Japanese simply didn't want to listen to gaijin ideas.

Well now the gaijin have beaten them on the usability front!


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Perception: reality: new media: mini-breakdowns?

High minded title, eh? I’ve been on a short break recently, and anyone who reads my facebook drivel will tell you I needed one.

I came to realise something while I was out there though. I’ve been far too stressed about both things I can’t control, and the lack of control I exert over the things I should. It’s affected my sleep, my work, my music and the way I view people. So, I’ve been conducting experiments on myself for the last couple of days to see if I can recognise and nuke the stress responses (usually by avoiding the stimulus).

In recent times, I seem to have become increasingly obsessed with researching, defining and quantifying how and why western society will ultimately tear itself to pieces, in a far messier and nastier way than communism did. While this was entertaining initially (it’s fun to trawl using google news) ultimately it’s self-fuelling and doesn’t achieve anything, except adding a little more to the stress fuel tank. Avoiding news media entirely is now my immediate goal – I’m not keeping track of MPs expenses (but mark me, if a sitting MP turns up on my doorstep I may spit in their face), I’m not following Obama-wan, I’m not concerned with Gordon Brown. Or I’m not trying to be.

Just the act of writing that first sentence in the last paragraph kicked in my new experimental “stress watchdog” reflex, which I’m trying to cultivate. Doubtless there are plenty of exercises in the Cognitive Behavioural Therapy arsenal which describe this in better terms, but I’m attempting to better realise the things which place me under stress, and actively take steps to stop my mind spinning off into the strange rants that have characterised my recent behaviour. Please bear with me during this transitional period, but do feel free to try out my new reflex with the odd good natured prod!

Those of you who are already naturally possessed of this talent will probably roll your eyes and think “get a life!” – that’s definitely the kind of mindset I’m after.

See, I’ve seen some old friends on facebook who are definitely going down a bad path to a place where I’m afraid only chemical solutions will bring them back up to “normality” (that’s a whole other debate – are we declared insane when we fall outside societal norms of defined sanity, and is this necessarily bad? Ah, Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance). I’m not into posting a continuous stream negative stuff about how I feel for the public to consume: some things should be kept private – but definitely shared with actual people, face to face, so the human touch can actually take hold, instead of the horrible spectacle of watching someone trying to gain sympathy and self-confidence through the pity of others: that path can never work. I should say right now that I believe firmly that people have to reach a nadir, a low point, before rebuilding and recovery can take place. I sincerely hope that everybody I see feeling down or bad can reach this point and build the ramp back out of the hole.

I think I hit my stress limit in the last couple of weeks, and I’m actually feeling pretty good that I now recognise this and I can move on to take the steps to increase the proportion of my life which I feel in control of and enjoy, and strip out the meaningless stressful “prophet of doom” crap. I’m just not built for it, and it’ll kill me if I keep trying to persuade people we’re all shafted. I’ll have to keep a close eye on myself though: I recognise it’s because I care about things being “right” (morally, scientifically, personally, emotionally, etc) that I get so stressed, but I don’t think I’ve ever thought about what happens when your stress water-butt gets full J

I’d encourage anyone who is torturing themselves as I did (I don’t even know how many people are?) to do your best to let it slide, to forget about it… to get a life.

Hope that wasn’t too self-improvement-manual. Normal service will resume, promise.

Duxford on the buses

Fantastic place, duxford. Not been here since I was a child; it's grown a fair bit and no mistake! There's a hanger containing nothing but american aircraft, including the truly gigantic stratofortress, which is awe inspiring.

But I have always had a thing about the SR71 blackbird, it's a bonkers testament to cold war paranoia when it met scientific insanity. A mach 3 monster, this thing was a spy plane that flew at 80,000 feet with surfaces that could get to 500 degrees and more, they had to wait half an hour before servicing it on the ground to let it cool down!

Awesome ;-)

Face bar: First band on, and the insanity of thursday nights..

Not bad: their vocalist has some presence, a curiously country and western feel. The bassist is a hired hand, he tells me, and he ought to ensure he knows the songs back to front! I hear the odd missed entry note...

Wierd gig, this one-not played this venue before, 5 bands in one night: tony is providing PA and his guitar amp, I'm providing the CCL plus 4x10 cab as bass amp. Apparently tony volunteered his system after having heard the system oin face bar-it is a little older, I guess-and the sound in there is pretty good as a result of Tony's system.

However, the guys here wanted us here at 3pm! Now, I am still a wage slave at the moment, so to speak. So this was def not possible! ;-)

Anyway, it'll be 930pm before we're on. junkyard scientists are on after us: I hear they're great, and I do like their sound. Coolio!

Another gig, but LOUDER

Tonight, it was Milestone Centre, Northbrook rd, Caversham Park. And it was a wicked gig. Tonight was definitely a lesson on two fronts:

Z) spend more time through the full stack and work on the sound through the multitude of signal processing stuff to try to make sure levels are the way you want and the Q-tron is actually going "whah" in the way you intended

€) don't have more than one drink. ;-)

Schloop) while playing, ensure you are shorter than your drummer

12.5) start your gig with the theme from FilmXXXX (tonewheel jackson rules!)

Great gig. Loads of fun.

Jagz: not been to this venue before...

I'm in ascot, at Jagz, a bar and restaurant complex type thing opposite the station. Upstairs they have a long, barrel-ceiling room with a huge stage at the end.

We're on after a couple of acoustic acts: the pic here is of a fella who has really nice songs and a cracking fingerpicking style on guitar: a little like newton falkner, and he's got a great sense of humour. "if i am a biscuit tin, you are a bourbon" :-)

He's even sharing about the perils of carbonated drinks and burping mid-lyric. Love it!

Today I got really hacked off at a lack of summer, lack of 2 week break and, indeed, total lack of a complete break at all: so I booked NEXT year's summer hols, at Metochi Cottage in Crete. This place is magical.

And now I'm suddenly happier: visualising the future pleasure of a familiar 19th century stone built cottage with a nice small pool of your own, tree coverage that seems to be perfect all day long and a local lidl with wicked cool beer.

Good times to come. And italy in a month where I buy my iPhone!

And a good gig tonight. I'm on the stack, and the sound is wicked out front.

Sunday social at the Bang Bar

What an odd wee venue! It's right in the middle of Basingstoke's own "central LA" skyscraper zone, but all the offices look like they're empty and a good portion of them look broken into! A long, deep bar, it's got odd colour schemes and reasonable acoustics.

Not come along to a "sunday social" before, I found out about it through Loz Lozza, champion of inependent music.

Trouble is, they had a big gig around here last night, and apparently the afterparty is still going. Elsewhere. So there aren't many musos here at all, which is a little sad. Not having a solo repertoire, I suspect I might manage a pint and then head back, but we'll see.

With a few people in it could def be interesting though. Bang Bar, it's at. Google for address.

A reply to an email from a recruitment agent...

I don't usually like posting non-music stuff (although it happens a lot) but I got an email from a recruitment agent whose subject quoted a BBC news story: "recession is "coming to and end".

I don't believe this one bit, so I had to pen him a reply. After my thoughts gelled, I was quite happy with their summation of my thoughts so I thought I'd post them here so I don't lose them. I hope you'll indulge me.

---

Many thanks for your email XXXXX.

However, my opinion is that the BBC is reporting on another “mass self-hypnosis” (with the last being, in all quarters, both public and financial sector, that the financial boom was sustainable).

Our last 10 years of growth were generated by financial magic, which turned out to be borrowing from the future in an exponential fashion.

Right now, people are buying cars, houses and plasma TVs by borrowing money which has been borrowed from the Treasury in the form of gilts. This has now caused those who have access to the media to start reporting that people, and now businesses, are feeling better about themselves. However, until we all wake up and realise that the money has to come from somewhere, and that organic financial growth cannot be in double digits (which is what the stock market and fickle day-traders have come to expect), we are heading for another cliff after what might feel like a small plateau, when governments and central banks finally realise they simply cannot hold up the edifice which we have all contributed to in the last decade.

I had to respond to your email – I do apologise if this is an odd reply to get!

I too saw the BBC report but it simply doesn’t ring true with me at all. I’m not paranoid enough to believe that central government is seeding stories like this – I don’t actually believe in sinister top-down management, frankly the management I see tells me that most people who rise to the top of the tree are struggling to control their own small empires – instead, I believe humanity builds complex systems which it cannot hope to control (or even understand – economists being a case in point, they really ought to be called Economic Historians), and which often blow up in our faces due to forces within them which align (usually on the basis of simple human instincts). In the case of the last decade, we’re looking at a financial system out of control on its’ own drunken binging on wholesale capital markets, with individual human greed in investment banking arms (bonuses et al) and a lack of oversight on the part of governments who just loved all the tax that came in. Collective hypnosis and an unwillingness to listen to those who tried to warn the system of its’ own lack of foundations led to where we are now. The people at the bottom just loved being able to buy all those new cars and plasma TVs.

I see no underlying changes either in the mindsets of the participants or the system itself which can make me believe that the recession is coming to an end.

Fwd: The butler - tiny venue, loads of character!

Well, here I am at the butler in Reading - a pub saved by the locals, I'm told - where they've decided to take a backroom which still has BSH calendars on the walls, about the size of a normal living room, and put live music on, including us. Mad! I just moved about 10 chairs off what looks like an old railway cart to put my bass amp somewhere!

It's 4 acoustic acts and then us and the venue feels really nice, actually - small enough to feel like a gig in your living room. This could be a great "underground" venue.

The pic is of the first acoustic act: they're pretty good, like the waterboys actually, nice sounds with guitar, bass and mandolin/banjo. case Hardened, they're called.

On my front - I bought a powerball for exercising and warming up and it ROCKS! i can seriously recommend these if you're a musician: I did about 5 minutes 20 mins before our soundcheck, and when I started playing it was like I'd been playing for hours-totally warmed up!

If you're a muso, get one now. Low impact, high strength, and no loss of dexterity. Sweet!

The butler - tiny venue, loads of character!

Well, here I am at the butler in Reading - a pub saved by the locals, I'm told - where they've decided to take a backroom which still has BSH calendars on the walls, about the size of a normal living room, and put live music on, including us. Mad! I just moved about 10 chairs off what looks like an old railway cart to put my bass amp somewhere!

It's 4 acoustic acts and then us and the venue feels really nice, actually - small enough to feel like a gig in your living room. This could be a great "underground" venue.

The pic is of the first acoustic act: they're pretty good, like the waterboys actually, nice sounds with guitar, bass and mandolin/banjo. case Hardened, they're called.

On my front - I bought a powerball for exercising and warming up and it ROCKS! i can seriously recommend these if you're a musician: I did about 5 minutes 20 mins before our soundcheck, and when I started playing it was like I'd been playing for hours-totally warmed up!

If you're a muso, get one now. Low impact, high strength, and no loss of dexterity. Sweet!

(Titter) (snort) ooer!

Sometimes The Register posts non-geek stuff I read.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/24/swedish_shortage/

arf arf!

Apple admits iPhone supply issues

Apple admits iPhone supply issues

Well, that vindicates my final capitulation to Cupertino... truth is, all the other manufacturers, who've had years to create something as compelling as the iPhone, have frankly pissed away the time creating overly complex bits of kit. It's the classic PC vs Mac scenario, only in your pocket this time. I've had enough of pisspoor UIs and knowing the internals - time to get stupid! :)

118 800 – the exploitative company that leaves really nice comments on your blog posts

Anyone who reads my rants will remember my posting a few days back where I was pointing out that their company are a bunch of shysters making money out of your private number. OK, they don’t give your number to people, no, they SMS you the contact details of the person who made the enquiry!!! Apart from being an utterly pathetic sop to privacy, this business idea has several flaws:

• While most people hate cold calling, they also don’t like receiving spam texts either, and will make themselves X-directory as soon as they receive anything from 118800 (don’t forget, kids, 118800’s website is permanently down right now and their x-directory service is offline so keep trying until they’re back up – don’t lose interest, that’s what they want you to do)
• You know what your friends’ mobile numbers are, or you ask them for their number to put on your phone – the whole concept of a mobile phone directory enquiries is utterly last millennium, and only really applied to landlines anyway. Who is going to ring 118 800 to catch up with someone they haven’t seen for years???
• They don’t have up to date lists. All the major UK mobile operators told them to p!ss off in no uncertain terms. 118800s response? They threatened to enact some legislation which apparently gives directory enquiries companies legal rights to lists of subscribers. Well done to the UK mobile companies for standing up to them and telling them that they didn’t think their subscribers would want their numbers given to 118800. They are right. In the end, 118800 was forced to buy lists from market research companies. So they’re starting with bad data, which will dwindle as millions ask to be made x-directory.
• As millions apply to be made x-directory, the service will become less and less useful and not worth the money. So nobody will be calling them anyway.

These are further points garnered from some excellent thoughts from friends and colleagues.

However - my original post seems to have been picked up by an employee of 118800! How nice! You’d think they’d be more concerned with trying to get their pathetic website up and running so we can all apply to be made x-directory, wouldn’t you? But no! This comment appeared on my last 118800 rant…

Hello, Joe from 118800.co.uk here.
Our service on 118 800 and 118800.co.uk was being tested in June. There are now developments we want to make to improve the service for our customers. But due to the high levels of enquiries we are getting, we are simply not able to complete the technical work required whilst the service is live. We are sorry for inconvenience and will be up and running again as soon as possible.
Just to reassure you that we’ll never actually give out anyone’s personal details. When you search on 118800.co.uk, we’ll send an SMS message to the person you’re looking for, giving them your contacts details and it is then up to you if you wish to call them back or not.
If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us on contact@118800.co.uk

I do love the stipulation that high levels of enquiries are keeping them offline. “We are sorry for the inconvenience!” – if you’d read my post, Joe-Bot, you’d have noticed I think you should be offline permanently.

And my only concern at this time is with the poor bastards who have backed this company with capital. You won’t be seeing any return dudes, this one was a turkey from the start. Who thought this could work???

118 800 - the company making money out of your mobile number

No doubt you've heard of this company - they pitch themselves as directory enquiries for mobile phones. Although they don't give people's mobile numbers out, what they represent is an agglomeration of available information (trawled and bought) on people's mobile numbers, which they are then leveraging for profit.

What I didn't realise is that this miserable commercial proposition is based here in Reading. I'm not that surprised though, this is, after all, the home of a bridge design company who bribed governments and violated the oil-for-food scheme in Iraq when Saddam was still in power.

118 800 has to be eradicated. I suspect the public in the UK are doing a good job already: the company is very keen to be seen to be compliant with data protection so they have handily provided ways to declare yourself x-directory (like you should have to!!!) - either through their website or by texting a capital "E" to 118800 (you should receive a reply).

The problem is, their website has now been down for the best part of a week as thousands (hopefully millions) of angry mobile users deregister themselves.

I'd like to form a campaign to make this information as available as possible, and for every last active mobile number they have to declare itself x-directory: hopefully we can put these bastards out of business. How dare they buy our mobile numbers and then give them out to people we don't want bothering us - no matter what they claim, this "service" is not required. Your mobile is a very personal form of communication - you know who your friends are, their numbers are IN YOUR PHONE ALREADY - so why would anyone need this pile of crap from a bunch of sharks based in Reading, craphole of the universe?

Get yourself deregistered as soon as you can: keep an eye on the site. If it comes back up, I'll post a message.

Another post? Man eating robots!!!

Lots of non-musical posts. Sorry about that. I'm getting distracted by funny stuff at the moment.

Speaking of which, the Register is a geek site I visit a lot.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/09/eatr_beta/

the way this is written cracked me up!

The M25: I don't use it. Thank god.

Roadworks threaten M25 traffic jams for three years

I have a trafficmaster oracle system in my car, which talks to you, telling you the major issues ahead and on adjoining motorways. Sometimes it's a judgement call ( 5 mins, 10 mins, could be nothing... ) but since the M25 started to get widened (and the cones went out months ago now, they have only just started work on the road itself) as I approach J7 every evening (6-7pm) it barks in a female Stephen Hawking style that clockwise from J15 (the M4 interchange) the M25 has "stationary traffic for 17 miles. Severe delay. AVOID."

Wow. That, for three years? Who the hell would continue to live in this insanity? When they widened the stretch between the M40 and M3 I noted that what this did was create a pressure vessel between 2 pinch points. Hey presto, it has now got so awful trying to get north and south from the M4/M25 junction they're going to try to take 3 years to improve just the northbound side to the A1!!!

Time to get that horse I think.

Sorry about the rash of headlines.

There's just too much comedy about.

Governments 'must prevent suicides during recession'

I think one of those strong catch-nets under the No 10 staircase would be a start. Oh no, hang on, just leave that one off.

Governments must try HARDER not to COMPLETELY BALLS-UP EVERYTHING THEY TOUCH would be a slightly better rebuke, I suspect. Their lack of long-term planning and foresight, combined with a suicidal fawning worship of city suits, got us here.

My only hope is that those who decide to take their own lives do so in front of a cabinet member, preferably Mr tripartite regulation himself, Gordon Brown.

Sigh.

I believe I can fly!

... straight to B&Q to get some anaglypta to go over this lot - talk about giving everybody nightmares...

Get your Michael Jackson tribute wallpaper says the tearaway Sun. Solvit with Solvite? Eek.

Talk about non-geek. They mean COMPUTER DESKTOP wallpaper.

Today's best King of Pop (tm) headline

This in from the Times Online - Michael Jackson's family may await return of brain before burial.

So they have one between them? What are they, mormons?

Reshaping society - "commuting" is pointless

I just got a small online survey to complete regarding commuting. Here in the Glorious (i.e. shitty) Thames Valley, everybody uses cars, and hates each other. I got a bit philosophical (surprise surprise) at the last page of the survey - you know, the "any more points to add" bit where you can type some free text in - here's what I wrote.

It's not about how you get here (meaning work), it's where you live and how that relates to your mode of transport. The last 20 years have lauded mobility (e.g. politicians references to our wonderfully mobile workforce) and the ability to live somewhere other than where you work. Net result, clusters of glass and steel boxes where people work, away from their homes. Clusters of steel boxes out of town where they shop.
The only solution is to either make workplaces smaller and locate them in pleasing buildings near where people live, or to tell people to move close to where they work.
Undoing 20 years of social trending regarding car-centric behaviour patterns will take more than "why don't you use the train" type surveys.
It will require the demolishion of our current workplaces and shopping centres and a return to smaller ways of life.

I really do believe this stuff. I think anyone who wants to drop out of the rat race but keep some technological job, would do well to move to Devon or the West Country, where there seems to be a high-tech cottage industry if what I hear is right. Live near where you work: in a beautiful location: work in a nice building (you hope) near where you live.

And drop out of this tragic excuse for an existence in the Thames Valley.

Short breaks, long days, and giving in to the Jesus Phone

It's been a few days since I last posted - I'm making this one from my desk job in a 5-minute "eye break" as I've been flat out today with several different things as usual. I've realised my work-life balance may not be as good as it could be, but mainly because I'm pushing myself a bit too hard during the day. I'm not really doing enough musically in the evenings and I've had a lot of cold type stuff recently (I suspect allergies too, I'm a scottish coastal boy, not this inland english NO2 laden humid hell!) so I've been remiss on the practise side, which I have just started really ramping up again.

The "Jesus Phone"? It's a term often applied to the iPhone, an item recently upgraded to the "3Gs" model which finally sees the iPhone having capabilities which catch up to the 3-year-old P990i I'm still using. In version 3.1 of the iPhone operating system they finally get voice dialling, something I suspect Apple have put in pronto because the new Android handsets don't have it.

This raises an interesting observation for me. I was in mobile phones for many years, and I used a long succession of SonyEricssons, from an old brick 768 (my first phone!) all the way through
to my current P990i. I liked the SEs because their feature set was larger than Nokias, and the user interface seemed slightly more intuitive to me (probably because it built on earlier SEs) and more comprehensive.

I've kept a weather eye on mobiles recently looking for smartphones which I thought I'd be interested in buying: the P990 firmware does crash quite regularly, and it's a little slow. Plus, the browser really doesn't handle sites very well.

Everything I saw left me feeling a bit "meh". A bit "so what?". A bit "Well, that doesn't do much beyond my P990", and the iPhone was a total turn off because 1) it's locked to O2 here in the UK, and you can't buy it anywhere else, and O2s network sucks, and 2) it was a "dumb" smartphone - no cut and paste, feeble camera, etc etc.

In addition, Nokia's utterly dismal smartphones (bad physical design, a version of Symbian which is falling apart at the seams and has an AWFUL UI) - their recent N97 is a case in point, it's already being criticised as a missed opportunity - just turned me right off. SE have pretty much stopped making UIQ smartphones (the P1i being the last), although some WXXX badged walkman phones are still running Symbian / UIQ.

Anyway, SE are about to release some new sparkly things, but the OS is... symbian, which is now entirely owned by Nokia (albeit under some form of "open" guise) - so I'm right off Symbian.

Android ain't looking bad, but no voice control for dialling! I've had that on phones now for 4 years! So no dice there.

Net result? I've been looking again at the iPhone, which I've had a certain amount of respect for, with Apple pulling their usual act of releasing something unique, well-formed and compelling into a market full of the above-mentioned miserable hacked, patched, ancient or not-quite-complete mobile OSs. Until very recently OSX on the iPhone fell into this category (no cut and paste? Dinosaur!!!) but with v3.1 they finally surpass my P990i. Bravo!

Now, I'm thinking I want an iPhone. But I'm on vodafone and I want to stay that way (they have a good network - it's all Ericsson - whereas O2 have got mixed-manufacturer infastructure and a rather poor comparative coverage. But I don't want to jailbreak an iPhone, I can't be bothered knowing internals anymore: I want something that "just works" (to borrow from Jobs).

Up pops Pete Stewardson at work and reminds me that in Italy phones HAVE to be sold UNLOCKED. I'm popping over there later this year - so I'll buy a PAYG from TIM and have a totally unlocked, feature enabled iPhone! Woohoo!

Addendum: I'll also not have the first hardware iteration - I hope - the iPhone 3Gs has been getting some rather dodgy press for overheating (although this could be gimps who left it in the sun while using it as a GPS device) and poor battery life. Here's hoping it's all good by the time I buy one!

Damn! It’s hot!

Metaphorically AND literally – last night’s gig was seriously hot. The gig last night at the South Street Arts Centre in Reading (nice venue, by the way – slightly out of the way but it’s a good space and they arrange tables at the front!) was a reminder of how hot things get on stage when they’ve got decent lighting going (and the lighting guy does good work – a mixture of blue and purple front and back gave some really nice contrasts on Armen’s kit, and the stage looked nicely “set” before the audience came in – I was impressed by that detail – check the pic!)

I arrived pretty much on time – 5:30pm, yet! – and Fatima Spar and the Freedom Fries were just finishing their soundcheck. Lovely guys, great double bass player who reminded me of Cooter from Dukes of Hazzard – lovely sound from his bass, despite having to use an old TNT 150 (I had one of those about 15 years ago!). They’ve got a great sound, it’s a real summery infectious experience.

Once the main act were happy with their sound, I did my usual routine of waiting for Armen to work out where his kit would go – he takes up the biggest amount of room onstage so it makes sense to see how the stage looks when he’s set up. To my delight, the Freedom Fries had no problems with moving pieces of kit away a little so we had good space to set up – far more space than any of the other places we’ve played in Reading – and I found a useful spot to place the Monster Stack, on top of the subwoofer for the PA.

My amp does hiss on the tube channel a bit (it’s the tubes, it’s what they do!), and the sound engineer noticed it – he dived in with a DI box (I didn’t mind!) but it was switching to channel 2 which really cured the problem I reckon. I also got a good reading from the engineer on balancing the synth sound for The Vibe with my live bass sound, which sounded great on the night.

A wide-angle view of the stage shows how much kit there was up there! Apologies for the focus, when I upgrade my phone (finally – the ones on offer are all shite at the moment)

I was really pleased with the setup (you can see my W as a blue smudge on the far right!) – you can see Tom’s stuff on the left and Jacquoda got centre stage which is ideal – as it meant I could dismantle my stuff and get it offstage ASAP.

The gig went pretty well – I had spent all day doing mouse work at work, and my right hand was oddly stiff – took ages to loosen up – and that’s my excuse for the cack bass work on Turn me On. And I’m sticking with it :).

One thing though: as we’ve played a lot of small venues so far, we’re really not used to be spaced out across a stage: we needed better monitoring, but this isn’t easy in a short timespace (we only found out we were supporting 10 days ago!) – we’ve agreed that we need to rehearse in some bigger rooms, and some in-ear monitors for Jacquoda would definitely really help I suspect, she’ll be able to hear the whole band and we can tailor levels of different instruments so she gets the best mix.

Me? I don’t need no stinking monitors! I’ve got 900 watts of Warwick Neo POWER! And a very loud drummer.

Before the last track (turn me on), Jacquoda seized the initiative and did the band introduction bit, which was great – we launched into one of our patented jams, which funked up quite nicely, and when jacquoda ran through the names we got great rounds of applause and some cheers from the audience. Very gratifying. I was actually pretty pleased with the audience reaction, we reworked the set with a lot of the quieter numbers early on to “bring them up to Funkerton” – they had, after all, come to see Fatima Spar and her Freedom Fries, who aren’t quite as LOUD as we are when we get going…

All in all, a good evening with plenty of learning curves all round :)

Ill wind?

Well, I’ve felt pretty crud today but at least something good came out of it – I revamped loads of stuff on my own website and got a facebook ad out for our gig on friday, supporting Fatima Spar and the Freedom Fries (wacked out stuff, find them on MySpace and listen to the maddest Vienna people I’ve heard in a while) – the ad’s turned out like this -

this time around I paid per 1000 presentations, so we’ll see how it pans out.

The Jacquoda Site got some attention as well – now it sports the right logo and some blurb I concocted telling the start of one deflated music fan’s ride back to the high ground of the funky mind :)

Shout to Tom

Big shout to Tom Johnson (that’s his facebook account there) the skin-slappin funktor who hits things to give us some seriously infectious grooving capabilities. He’s the man for your conga needs. And car parts.

Rehearsals, colds and headaches…

You know, sometimes you just stretch it too far. You know? Like when you work hard all week to try to fix stuff, don’t get the time at home with mental energy to do the stuff you really want to NAIL in the evenings, and then find yourself wiped out at the weekends… such it was this weekend!

We had a great time on Sunday, it was something of a writing session – at least two great new grooves, with some structure emerging already, and quite nicely too. I love it when a band gets the sort of interpersonal feel where one person can suggest some kind of lick, groove or motif, get someone to play it, then sort of “fashion” the idea as it’s played by everybody, as they start throwing ideas into it. It’s like listening to plasticine being aurally moulded, as it were.

Armen had a nice simple idea, a pretty laid-back groove, a rare gem which has great potential for a whole chilled-out track with some scratchy samples from old black and white movies in it. Very smoky, end of the night, almost ambient. He just sort of “dah dah dah dah daaaaah dah – no, like chocolatey bass, andy – yeah, that’s it” and before we knew where we were we had a smooth feel rolling along.

In order to ensure our set has shade and light as well, we got a fastish thing going which I called the Duck (for some reason) – much Q-Tron in evidence, in my fave squishy driven mode. The bass in “another story” on “return of the space cowboy” in the fast parts – I love that sound – and the 6-string running through that GR-20 just gets so much boost to volume it can really drive pedals nice and hard.

Funny thing was, I was feeling more and more tired as things went on – dog-tired, like I was going to have to lie down before driving home or something. I loaded the car up, got back, and then promptly fell asleep for about 12 hours(!!!) – I did move from sofa to bed after Nic suggested it might be a good idea – but I woke up this morning with a headache like you wouldn’t believe. 400mg of ibuprofen isn’t touching it, and I’ve been like a zombie all day, with a dribbling nose and sinuses like rocks! urgh! I haven’t ruled out tree pollen yet. Could be the old allergies I used to get really bad in the summer coming back? Seems like they vanished a few years back.

The Riviera comes to Slough

Holy cow, it’s actually hot enough to sunbathe!

So I’ll be the one setting up outside to record some new ideas :)

In the meantime, and it’s at least musically related – check this youtube vid out. It’s the best parody of Kiss I’ve ever seen.

I almost fell off my chair, it’s that funny!

The Night after the Night After

Good gig, that. Bracknell has a very well hidden basement venue in an arts centre we played in last night, alongside the first gig by some rather talented guys called The Stellar Thieves – great energy live and – thankfully – their music sounds great in a night where we’re playing as well. We found someone to gig with! So nice to have a friend…

Tuesday night gig!

We’ve got another gig at the Cellar place in Bracknell – weird venue, and last time we had a very odd band playing after (the guy before was wicked, solo acoustic) – thrash punk. Good drummer though.

If you come along, bring earplugs just in case!!! I’ll be bringing the stack so the bass will def be up there :)

Big shout to Paul Harckham, hope your Gorillapod arrives shortly mate – one tip, use one of the newer SD card or hard drive camcorders, I was using a MiniDV cam and the tape mechanism got well upset by the vibrations at points :)

Hope to see you in Bracknell on Tuesday night.

When Digiboxes tell the truth

You have to laugh. Nic and I often have a giggle at what the program guides throw up on the Sky box – and we’ve got a Bush terrestrial digital box which gives some great comedy:

Poor old Britney. Even the digibox is out to smear her personality.

Heroes’ Bar, Maidenhead – stylish and full of FUNK

Last night, great gig. We definitely still need more material but last night was the first live outing of the new track we worked on based on the heavy vibe from a synth line I pulled on the 6-string: the track flowed pretty well last night, but it needs some sax and vox in the bridge before the chorus I reckon. Otherwise it sounds great!

I did get a bum steer from a clamper last night though – you can park round the back of this particular venue, and we did get a message from the bar owners saying that if we had a sign in the window saying we were playing in Heroes we’d be OK, but I saw the clampers freeing a poor git when I arrived, so I asked one of them what the deal was: “you can’t park here mate” got I. So I used the multi storey opposite and got all my gear down 2 sets of stairs (lifts out of order, of course) – 6-string, gear bag, pod and CCL combo – and trundled it (thankfully I didn’t bring the Monster Stack with me, god, I’d have killed meself) through maidenhead to the venue.

Good stage area – backlit with odd LED panels, cycling through colours – and some decent overhead lights. Definitely not your average pub gig. Mind you, it’s more of a trendy bar in the bit of Maidenhead with block paving and the cinema. It’s a little like Dundee – except Dundee has gentrified more of itself in the city centre.

Good gig though.

Seriously. He’s gotta go.

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/please-go/

I’d encourage anyone who reads this to visit this site and stick your name on there. As I’ve mentioned once or twice (thoroughly abusing this information vector which is supposed to be about music) I think Gordon Brown is a naive gimp who, while chancellor, was stupid enough to think that the Banks would reign in their own excesses.

This petition is gathering pace pretty quickly, but you’ve got until October 22nd (I think) to sign it – while I’ve had my laptop on another 80 have signed up, and in the last 4 hours it’s gathered another 400 signatures.

Ideally I’d like to see it reach millions – we should be using this pathetic politicians’ attempt to use electronic media to shout “YOU STUPID GOBSHITE” in his ear!

Summer Nights… Tony feels shite!

But uh-oh the summer allergies (a wella wella wella OOH)

Bummer – we were going to be playing the Arches in Reading tonight, but Tony’s had a massive allergy attack (I’m not surprised, I saw the oilseed rape on the outskirts of town and it’s in full yellow smelly bloom) so it’s all off! Bummer.

I guess I’ll have to use the time to work on chops. Ah well, all in the name of live work eh?

Oxford Gold and Random Rhythms

Wicked. I've been jamming to random rhythms from a steinberg loops CD and having a blast with some patches on the GR20: now a well-deserved rest. Made a latte for the first time in ages after the kitchen yielded gadgets we forgot we had (the gadgets that time forgot) and now it's Oxford Gold time.

Looks nice. :)

String Cleaning Advice

Up until a short while ago, I’d save a few quid (well, 30 odd per set!) by cleaning Bass strings in a saucepan, boiling them with some washing up liquid, rinsing and drying. While it worked quite well, the strings predictably objected to being boiled in water, and eventually the core would give up on the thinner strings.

Well, recently I came across a new way to clean bass strings online – I suspect it was via the BassChat bass forum site somewhere – using methylated spirits, available from B&Q and other outlets.

In a nutshell, just take the strings and immerse them in meths, at room temp! I leave them for as long as possible (they get a lot of oil and skin in them over time, especially the way I play) in a large plastic pot which I vapour-sealed, and it works really well. The strings come out bright, but not too bright (sort of “ready played in”) and they’ll last 3 gigs or so before they need doing again.

By far the biggest advantage is that the metal isn’t corroded by this: the only thing I think might limit the life of the strings would be the wear of the frets (so I guess the fretless will do well!) and a gradual weakening of the core through age and stress.

I’d recommend it to anyone. With the price of a set of Warwick black labels at nearly 40 quid for the 6 string, it saves me a fortune – and I now have loads of spare sets as the lifespan of the strings has been increased.

Incidentally, we’ve got a few gigs coming up:

• Sunday 19th April – “the Arches” (or the jazz club underneath the railway line near the fire station on the IDR) in Reading
• Friday 1st May - “Heroes” club in Maidenhead
• Weds 13th May – Fiddlers Elbow in Camden, London
• Tuesday 19th May – Cellar Bar in Bracknell

Good job we’re writing more material, eh? :)