Category Archives: Music

Album reviews and more.

Shopping For Books, Music and Movies

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I gen­er­ally tend to ask people for book or cd tokens for my birth­days and Christ­mas. It’s easier some­times than try­ing to sug­gest a spe­cific item that I would like. At time like that I seem to only be able to think of ter­ribly expens­ive or obscure things that I want. So, hav­ing got some tokens for my birth­day last week, and hav­ing some left over from Christ­mas, I finally got round to going shop­ping today. And what a lot I got! :-)

I had £95 worth of tokens to spend. Some were for Bor­ders, some were for HMV and some were for Water­stones. Hav­ing looked around for the last couple of weeks at some of the things I might buy, I finally got round all three shops this morn­ing and spent all but £2 worth of tokens. Here are the things I bought:

Three Brian Jaques Red­wall books: Triss, Loam­hedge, and Rakkety Tam. I’d got behind with the Red­wall series. These will bring me up to date. Three Terry Good­kind books from the The Sword of Truth series which I only star­ted last year: Blood of the Fold , Temple of the Winds, and Soul of the Fire. Two Neal Steph­en­son books: Quick­sil­ver and The Con­fu­sion. These are the first two of the Baroque cycle which I have been wait­ing to read. The third, The Sys­tem of the World, is still only avail­able in hard­back so I’ll wait to get that one.

The last two books I got were Black Cof­fee Blues by Henry Rollins: I love his music, but I’ve not read him before; and O’Reilly’s Extreme Pro­gram­ming Pocket Guide (I had to get one com­puter book didn’t I!)

I also bought some music CDs: Michael Nyman — The Piano, the Begin­ners Guide to Bol­ly­wood which is a 3CD set for a budget price, and Serge Gainsbourgs’s Ini­tials Sg which is a great com­pil­a­tion of his work through the dec­ades. Quite a mixed bunch that lot. I’m cur­rently listen­ing to the first of the Bol­ly­wood CD’s real vin­tage stuff from the 60’s and 70’s. I don’t under­stand a word if it, but it’s great!

Finally, I bought a couple of DVDs (I set out to get more, but I can get three books for the price of a DVD!)Akira — The Ulti­mate Col­lec­tion. Jan had already bought me the second Akira graphic novel for my birth­day. I also got Sioux­sie and the Ban­shees Best of: Deluxe Sound and Vis­ion which has a double audio CD with a DVD. I real­ised the other week that I no longer owned any Ban­shees stuff so I’m glad to get this even though it’s only a best of.

So, I’ve got a lot to enter­tain me for the next few weeks. I’ll try to review them as I get through them. I’ve missed doing reviews for the last 18 months.

Another Year

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That’s another year nearly over. One in which I’ve had some major changes in my life. One which seemed to have flown by in ret­ro­spect (don’t they all?).
Next year will be another year of changes, with any luck the big changes will be the ones anti­cip­ated and planned for, like Jamie going to high school.
Of course, if everything that happened was expec­ted and planned-for, life would be ter­ribly bor­ing. I just wouldn’t want to repeat some of the things that have happened this year.
I’m hop­ing to be a little more vis­ible on line next year. I’m hop­ing to be much more organ­ized and achieve some per­sonal goals. I’m hop­ing that David Allen’s Get­ting Things Done will help. I must lose the weight I’ve gained since stop­ping cyc­ling. I really want to swim more and get bet­ter at it. I want to do some­thing more act­ive with music. I don’t know what yet, but I have recently missed being a (very small) part of the music industry. There are a mil­lion soft­ware things I want to do! There are skills I want to gain, and exper­i­ences I want to… exper­i­ence!
I don’t really expect to achieve a tenth of what I would like, but next year I am determ­ined to do some of them.

Legendary radio DJ John Peel dies

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Yes­ter­day, John Peel — longest serving Radio 1 DJ and musical hero of mine — died sud­denly in Peru. The BBC have sev­eral stories:

He had a huge impact on my musical tastes, intro­du­cing me to a diverse range of music. A range which I still con­tinue to enjoy today.
Back when I used to listen to his show reli­giously, I was in the for­tu­nate pos­i­tion of being able to help, in my own small way, pro­mote some of the bands he cham­pioned. I worked in a record shop in the late 70’s early 80’s, and used to try to stock any­thing that Peel played that I liked.
I went on to get involved in work­ing with new and inde­pend­ent bands firstly on stage and pro­mot­ing shows, and later in stu­dios, and work­ing with video and early computers!

His loss to the world of music his huge. But my deep­est sym­pathy goes out to his wife and children.

CDDB Dump Updated

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I’ve just updated my CDDB dump page. That page is quite lit­er­ally a dump of the CDDB files cre­ated by my favour­ite CD player (Notify CD Player). This little player sits in the taskbar and plays CD’s. Quite simple like most of them. The nifty thing about this one I like so much is that it puts the details of the cur­rently play­ing song in the title bar of whichever win­dow has focus. I love that! It gets it’s details from freedb.org and stores the data loc­ally so it doesn’t need to go to the net­work again. This local data is the source of my CDDB dump page. A quick grep and a couple of regex search and replaces in epsi­lon and nearly 700 files are con­ver­ted to an unordered list.
After sort­ing and de-duplicating (again in Epsi­lon), the list is down to about 628 CDs . There are prob­ably another 10 or so duplic­ates in there and 15 or so that I don’t actu­ally own but have bor­rowed at some point. Plus I have CDs which are not in the list (I can see at sev­eral to my left now!). If you want to see what they look like here is a photo of the col­lec­tion I took a couple of months ago. It has grown since then!

DMOZ Editor

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W00t! I have been accep­ted as an editor on the Open Dir­ect­ory Pro­ject (ODP) (AKA DMOZ).
My cat­egory is Arts: Music: Styles: Dance: Radio and I have already star­ted edit­ing: Clear­ing out a couple of dead links and approv­ing some recom­men­ded ones.
I am par­tic­u­larly pleased with this news: I remem­ber DMOZ start­ing up as a pro­ject way back when Nets­cape acquired it and think­ing I really should get involved… Here I am 5 plus years later and I finally found the inspir­a­tion and motiv­a­tion to actu­ally do it!

Linkin Park

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I got back from the Linkin Park con­cert earlier and I have to say the guys were fant­astic! Truly awesome!

The sup­port bands were OK, with the Lost Proph­ets sound­ing bet­ter than local band Kin­esis. But Linkin Park blew them both away. The level of pro­fes­sion­al­ism was a world apart. From the light­ing and sound to the songs them­selves but mostly I think it was the band’s pres­ence on stage. And the songs. And Chester’s voice (which took two songs to really warm up but which was then out­stand­ing). And Mike Shinoda strut­ting round the stage fir­ing his rap lyr­ics scat­ter­gun stylee. And the songs. And the fant­astic rap­port with the audi­ence. You knew these guys were really enjoy­ing them­selves. They had tons of feed­back from the crowd. Mike joined the people on the pit at one point. Rob on drums worked hard all night and along with Brad and Pheonix provided the solid found­a­tion to most of the songs all night. Joe was great too, ignor­ing the fact that he seemed to be wear­ing what appeared to be a green hal­loween mask all night!

All in all a thor­oughly fant­astic night. I can’t wait for the Live in Texas DVD. It won’t be the same as being there but maybe the next best thing.