funkysimon

Recently I’ve been listening to Cambridge’s community radio station, Cambridge 209, during my daily commute.  I do this not through some act of local solidarity, but mainly because the Jukebox show doesn’t have a DJ, it just plays music.  No talking, no adverts and rarely any station idents, plus the most unpredictable playlist I have ever come across.  For example, this morning’s journey was accompanied by New Frontier (Donald Fagen), Jump (Pointer Sisters) and Whatever happened to? (Buzzcocks).  Occasionally you get seriously heavy rock followed by classical music.  It’s like a party with the worst DJ in the world, and frankly I love it.

I’d like to get involved, though I haven’t really got the time.  (I had an idea about getting Tom of Acuphuncture/The Beauty Room fame to bring his extensive vinyl collection along and do a jazz funk show that took music WAY too seriously.  Nice.)  I used to do a radio show with a friend at Uni; an hour of bickering, biscuit tasting and… well, I’d say beats, but at that time my music collection was dominated by Soundgarden, Metallica and Faith No More, so things were a bit more rock than they are today.  (Sadly there was no beer; they told us that drinking alcohol whilst in charge of a radio station is illegal, which seems unlikely but we never checked.)  Doing your own radio show is similar to the implicit narcissism of writing a weblog: you talk, and assume the world hung on your every word.  Or maybe that’s just me.  In reality the CUR transmitter had a range of a stone’s throw, so  the chance of anyone actually hearing us was pretty low, but it kept us amused regardless.

Thinking about the 209 station idents (and an advert for another show I caught), there’s just a slight lack of sheen that differentiates them from what you’d hear on Radio 1.  Maybe it’s some effect on the “professional” station’s sound samples - potentially 209 could slap a bit of delay and a load of compression on the voices to make them sound a bit more in your face - but it seems that when the Radio 1 DJs joke about the jingles costing a few thousand pounds each, that expenditure does make a marked difference.

Canal boat chase ends in capture after 8 days.

Inspector Harry Graham, head of the thirty-strong pursuit team, blamed an initial delay on the need to get permission from British Waterways to exceed the 4mph speed limit. ‘When we got the necessary clearance, we found our boat would only do 4mph anyway. So we decided on a softly-softly approach and dug in for the long haul.’

I’ve been on a barge holiday, and this is exactly what it’s like.

Well well, google released a new browser.  I just downloaded and installed it and was blown away by the speed of the thing.  My Yahoo mail loaded so much faster than in my usual browser (Firefox 3.0.1), and general performance seems to be better than FF.  All good, until I was looking around online and spotted in the comments section of the Guardian article about Chrome that the Chrome EULA (of which I of course read point 1.1 then skipped the rest) includes this section:

By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any content which you submit, post or display on or through, the services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the services and may be revoked for certain services as defined in the additional terms of those services.

Nice: anything I look at or post in Chrome belongs to google.  Looking around on the net I found another post about the Chrome EULA, which has several useful links, and is written by a lawyer who claims that this effectively rules out the browser’s use by a whole slew of people.  And even if Google says “Oh don’t worry about that,” should we worry about it?  If it’s not needed, don’t put it in the EULA.

I’d request your presents as well, but perhaps that’s asking a bit much.  Anyway, we’re playing a gig at B Bar this Thursday, the 21st day of August 2008.  Come down.  Buy beer.  Dance.  Or just sit stoney faced and stare at us, it’s what the crowd did last time.  We’re on from 9 and it costs nothing to see us, so it’s credit-crunch friendly too.  And as long as you avoid the Erdinger I’m sure it won’t even affect your productivity on Friday.

Derek’s doing the whole Tache Back thing, his target style being “Frank Zappa Jr“.  That’s a classic ‘tache and monster soul chip thing Frank’s got going on.  Question is, is Derek’s chin a match for the poly-rhythmic prog rock prickliness that’ll be unleashed?  He needs your cash to help him (and cancer research) find out.

Check this out:

1 gigabyte in two days!  And all from China.  I only found out about this because we got a warning from our hosts about going over our bandwidth limit; I think I’ll add some “Free Tibet” banners so we get banned by the Chinese government, these idiots are costing us money.

Whilst in the gents today a guy with the nigh-on ubiquitous white ear phones of an iPod in his lugholes walked past me and headed into a cubicle. Now I’m all for personal soundscapes to enliven hum-drum daily activities, but a soundtrack for your dump? What’s on that playlist?

1. Eruption, by Van Halen.  (Double marks for “Brown sound” reference; maybe he’d had a vindaloo the previous night?)
2. Release the Pressure, by Leftfield
3. Push It, by Salt ‘n’ Pepper.  (Not enough fibre in his diet?)
4. Anything by Scouting for Girls (no scatological references, they just irritate the shit out of me)
5. …  ?

There must be others, but it’s time for me to log off.  Arf.

I’m trying to work out if I like “reliced” guitars.  (For those that don’t know, that’s a guitar that has been artificially aged to look like it’s got 60s mojo.)  This ranges from slightly discoloured pickguards and hardware with a patina of rust, through to looking like a previous owner had acid sweat and sandpaper skin.

Why?  Oh, no reason.

Adrian recently linked to Swing to Bop, a weblog about developing jazz guitar technique.  I’ll be following this with some interest, because I still just do not sound jazzy enough for my tastes.  I think what Derek once described as “wallpaper be-bop” is something that I’d like to be able to do, then hopefully move past it into something more interesting.  Anyway, I quite liked this video dealing with improvising over major chords; flat 9s and sharp 5s are two notes that I rarely throw in (unless I switch with H-bomb subtlety to a half-whole diminished scale or the harmonic minor; my knowledge of scales is well beyond what I can do tastefully with them), so it has been fun trying to use them a bit more.  I also like the little legato 4th-minor 3rd-major 3rd move, and it’s yet another example of someone avoiding the fourth.  I think I’ve been using the minor pentatonic for so long now that fourths just don’t sound off to me; my new playing mantra is “stay the fuck off the fourth”.  It’s so tempting a note, though… right there, nestled between the third and the fifth… what harm can it do?

My home machine runs Windows Vista.  I know, I must have been bad in a previous life or something.  I actually  have no real problem with MS’s fancy new OS; the user account control is very much like the same thing you get in Linux so that doesn’t really bother me, and since service pack 1 the speed of certain directory listing and file copying operations have improved significantly.  Perhaps the people that complain about Vista are doing a lot of real work on their machine, whereas the most complex thing my Vista box gets to do is run Team Fortress 2.

And therein lies the problem.

I’d noticed that Vista wouldn’t go into sleep mode via the time limit set in the screen saver page.  Vista’s problems with sleep are well documented on the web (just google for Vista insomnia and you’ll see), though the symptoms of this problem were subtly different, in that I could manually send the computer to sleep and it would happily stay there, and recover without a hitch.  After fruitlessly fiddling about with the various power settings suggested on pages I found via google, I started to wonder if it was any of the background applications that prevented the machine from entering the idle state, and hit the answer first time: if you exit Steam, sleep mode works fine.

So there you go: gamers, if your computer is having problems sleeping, try turning off Steam.

I read the post over on Guitritus about getting a whole bag of new plectrums (plectra? Is it Greek?) with envy.  I’ve got a problem with guitar picks: I only like one.  There it is in the photo.  It’s pink and it’s a  millimetre thick and because I’ve had it for about ten years it’s got a weird wear pattern on the end and the logo’s nearly gone so I can barely read who made it but its mine and it’s the only plectrum for me.

Every time I drop it off the back of a badly lit stage I have to spend a horrified few minutes scrabbling in the mess of dust and cabling until I’m joyfully reunited with it.  If I was to have a signature piece of guitar equipment, it would be a plectrum: I’d have my original mapped to micron precision with lasers and recreated exactly, but even then I’d not be happy with the copies and would keep using mine until its worn away to a nub.

Believe me, I’ve tried others, but they’re just not as good.  Not quite the right flexibility, or too thick, or they’ve got funny dimples to aid grip, or (and here’s the catch) they’re just not worn in enough.  I think I need to buy some more, but file the ends down slightly to match what’s happened to my pick.

Seriously, Eric Johnson might complain about the brand of his batteries, but he’s got nothing on me and plectrums.

Acuphuncture played the opening set at Clare Ball on Monday night, at the work-friendly time of 9 til 10.30PM.  This of course meant that we played to an empty tent, because most punters arrive at a ball and immediately head for the food and booze; the biggest crowd we had was mainly thanks to the band who were on after us, The Anomalies.  Incredibly we even managed a soundcheck, thanks to the Anomalies finishing their check on time, however due to the usual fucked communications at a May Ball, the tech sheet we had submitted hadn’t been passed on to the sound guy.  This meant that Myke (our intrepid multi-instrumentalist and backing vocals chap) had to channel all of his musical output through the single remaining SM58 that the soundman had brought.  Irritating.  Our set up on stage was made even more complicated by the headline act, The Delays, refusing to allow any of their kit to be moved after it had been set up, resulting in us being perched in a long line across the front of an already less than generously sized stage.  The Delays are obviously cunts.  Still, the gig went ok, though our linear set-up meant that we had a few communication issues.