Halloween In Aber

I’m a big bad wolf, it seems. And last night I, along with Little Red Riding Hood (Claire), Death (Bryn), Paul (Andy!), Judge Doom [barely] (JTA), Pinocchio (Matt), and Matt (not in costume… grr), went out to the Coopers Arms to see Pagan Wanderer Lu. And he was good – some songs I knew, some songs I didn’t: tried to buy a CD at the end but it was £3 and Claire and I only had a £20 note between us and he evidently hadn’t sold £17 worth (i.e. 6) CDs yet because he couldn’t give us change so he’s holding one for us. Nothing rhymes with ‘Aberystwyth’, by the way.

We didn’t stay for much longer, because by this point the room was very full and very hot (particularly with us all in costumes)… so we bailed and went for a sly drink in Scholars, before retiring to the flat to watch My Neighbours, The Yamadas. Which was good.

Hmm… what’s everybody else saying:

Surprisingly Good Unsigned Artist

I’m actually impressed. My friend Andy’s finally put some songs online, and he’s really good (for one reason or another, I’d never heard anything of his before, and I’m much impressed – for some reason I’d come to the assumption that he’d be shit). Anyway – so long as you’re willing to put up with the (pretty crappy) recordings he’s put online, go listen to B.O.A.T.S. and Straight To Video (and Kofi Annan TV, if you can put up with bad MP3 quality). Then leave him some feedback.

In other news, have made a few minor improvements to Abnib: mostly to better highlight upcoming Troma Night events. On which note – this Saturday is Troma Night 50 – “Return To Firetop Mountain” (well done to Matt for understanding the reference), which I’m much looking forward to.

Hot Puppies, Troma Night, And A Fantastic Transcript Of A Speech On DRM

[this post has been partially damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has been possible to recover only a part of it]

Went to the castle to see The Hot Puppies yesterday evening. Everything I’d heard was true – they really are very good. They play well, they sing well, they look good… and they exude confidence. A wonderful show.

Troma Night was somewhat shorter than usual, owing to the aforementioned puppi…

Live Music, Anyone?

[the image in this post was lost during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004]

[the image in this post was recovered on Thursday 30th December 2004]

Castell Rock gig poster

Sounds like an excuse to lounge on soggy grass and drink real ale if ever I heard one. Yay….

×

Random Drunken Piano Appreciation Society Of Aberystwyth

So Paul, Claire and I are in The Flat. Paul’s reading, I’m coding, and Claire is playing the piano. It’s half past eleven. The doorbell rings.

Who could that be? None of us are expecting anybody, and most of the folks we know have already left town to be with their families, etc. I go downstairs and open the door. A confused-looking young man smelling of beer looks in at me, confused.

“What’s the piano?” he asks.

“It’s a long instrument with lots of keys, but that’s not important right now,” I reply. Somehow this humour is lost on him. “It’s my girlfriend,” I continue, “She’s playing the piano upstairs.”

“Oh,” he says, “Tell her she’s very good.”

So I did.

Random.

Alone, And With…

People who are in on the Secret Of The Jukebox will be delighted to hear that I’ve had a good long hack at it tonight (hence it being 4:30am) and I’ve managed to get heaps done and ready for Paul to break test, including but not limited to the new “Alone, And With…” engine, which doesn’t seem to suffer any longer from the age-old bug that gives it it’s name.

I’ve just finished listening to some old hard-to-get Goo Goo Dolls albums that I acquired a little while ago. One is silly over-punky shouty hard rock stuff; very coarse and unrefined, much unlike their later stuff. The other, ‘Hold Me Up’, is much recommendable: some tracks I’d heard before, some stuff I hadn’t heard, all very very good. In particular, enjoyed ‘Laughing’, ‘Kevin’s Song’, and the older version of ‘Two Days In February’. Toy.

Bugger

I’ve just discovered that I have an assignment deadline tomorrow for an assessment I didn’t realise I had, in my weakest module. Joy!

On the upside, I’ve just looked at the assessment and it’s got very little to do with the module; in fact, it oughta be comparatively easy: still – 4-8 hours work I didn’t anticipate.

In other news; a stunning article (plain English, both an introduction to the subject and an ongoing summary) about the state of play with digital music, DRM, and all that on Bill Blog today. If you listen to music on CD or watch DVD movies, you oughta read this one.

I Wanna Wake Up Where You Are

Watching a Goo Goo Dolls concert on VideoCD.
They’re really quite remarkably good. I suppose you can’t help but respect the artistry that goes into making a song for which you need to re-tune your guitar such that five strings are tuned to the same note. I mean, can you see the conversation now? “Hey, Robby: tell you what, why don’t we see what this sounds like…” And Gutterflower is a simply stunning album.

Reading MMURTL v1.0 (Building Your Own 32 Bit Operating System)
It’s really quite remarkably geeky. I spent Christmas reading quotes from it to my family, Claire, and her dad. Claire understood bits of what I said. Sometimes. It’s great – a 600-page A4 book which contains at least 200 pages of solid assembly language (the most hardcore programming anybody could ever really justify doing) and another hundred of low-level C. It’s on a short print run – the attached CD-ROM is on CD-R media.

Missing Claire.

Gatecrashing

Claire, Peter and I gatecrashed a friend-of-a-friend’s house party last night, and ate all of their Pringles. One of the housemates’ music collections was fab: all the best of the Goo Goo Dolls, 3 Doors Down, Nirvana… and some weird (but actually quite good) Welsh rock band.

(Is Welsh Rock a genre? Or just something you buy on the prom at Aberystwyth?)

Must start my Christmas shopping.

[Edit: Came home from the party with an irresistible urge to listen to Pink Floyd’s ‘Comfortably Numb’. Weird.] 

It’s Over

It’s over to you:
I can’t find the answers when you’re gone.
And it’s over to you;
You can’t find the answers where you are.
I won’t tear you down!
I won’t tear you down,
To get into the world you wanted.
I’m kicking through the walls…
No-one can believe in the things that never change.

– “It’s Over”, The Goo Goo Dolls

I can’t sleep. Tomorrow’s a big day and I really oughta get some, and I’m knackered, but hey.

Tomorrow’s the first day of the Fresher’s Fayre. I’ll be selling hot dogs, alongside Kit and Paul, all day, in order to raise money for Nightline. Perhaps I just don’t feel like everything’s sorted yet. This last week I’ve spent most of my working hours at the office, and as a result the amount of planning and preparation that has gone into this three-day event has been a blur to me… perhaps that’s why it doesn’t feel ‘finished’ – because as far as I’m concerned, it never really ‘started’. This project… I’ve not really been a part of.

The plan is to meet up early in the morning and collect the remainder of our supplies – fresh bread, bacon, and other perishables – then go and set up in the Sports Cage on Penglais Campus. Then, having set up all of our stuff, we’ll go and check that the Nightline stand itself has been set up and see if the Nightliners who’ll be running it want a breakfast bacon sandwich.

My Local Education Authority contacted me to tell me that while they’ll offer me my usual student loan for this, my final year in education, they won’t pay my tuition fees. This puts me in a moderately complicated situation, as I’m not able to pay them myself out of my current income. Instead, my current plan – should my appeal to them fail – is to find an unsecured loan I can take out to pay for my studies, and pay it off after my graduation. Hopefully, however, they can be persuaded to pay, and that won’t be necessary.

This town’s fascinating this time of year. So many students reappearing… look down any street and you’ll see two young people struggling to carry a TV into a house. A stark contrast to the two weeks previous, in which it’s been a ghost town, or the weeks before that, when we were infested with tourists.

Claire’s come down with the Freshers’ Flu early – characteristic illness of University towns at that time of year when people from all over the country bring their local illnesses to one place all at once. There should probably be some kind of quarantine process or something. Like out here during the Foot & Mouth outbreak.

I’m going to go fridgesurfing then write some more code to the sound of Goo.

Sleep well, sweet Aberystwyth;

Progress!

Working late. I’ve got Club 977 (best 80’s cheese on the ‘net!) playing as loud as this computer goes, slamming out code at a rate more productive than I’ve been all week. Finally got past a bug that’d been troubling me for days. Phew! Just in time for a meeting tomorrow!

I’ve been getting a lot of concerned attention after my post, “Stress!”, earlier (I didn’t think I had so many avid readers). Thanks, all of you; you concern means a lot, but really – I’ll be okay: I land on my feet, remember! Just need to get my head down and get on with some stuff, that’s all, and a little bit of de-stressing onto the web was good, too.

A few more lines of code, methinks, before Claire arrives (she’s kindly giving me lifts to and from work while I’m being a lazy bugger and not sorting out my bike, the star).

Take care, y’all;

What Meatloaf Song Are You?

I’m I’ll Kill You If You Don’t Come Back. Excellent.

“When you fall, you fall hard. Maybe you get a bit obsessive. Maybe you get a bit homicidal, even. But you’ve got a rockin’ melody and a beat you can dance to.”

What Meatloaf Song Are You?

Dark Side Of The Moon

Spent last night in a dark room with Paul, Kit and Claire, listening to a DTS-encoded 5.1 surround sound version of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side Of The Moon”. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve heard in a long while. The sound quality was unbelievable – the patterns moved and shifted around and through us. Quite stunning. I felt my heart rate change several times to match the beat

Nobody’s updated their web journal in several days except Kit. That makes my work morning a little boring.

We have a new guy working for us – Daniel – a school leaver who’ll be helping us for the summer. Alex and I are trying to get him talking, without any luck yet.

Suppose I’d better get on with some work, now.

Update (20th March 2012) – crosslinks:

  • Paul’s post about getting to use his DTS system
  • Kit’s post about the experience of listening to Dark Side of the Moon with us