| Mooo! |
[Sep. 19th, 2011|07:23 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  contemplative | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Matt & Kim - Daylight | ] |
Hey look, LJ is still here... looks like hardly anyone I used to read is still here though! Even the ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif?v=92.2) mix_cd_exchange group seems to have keeled over, which is a bummer.
So since that last post about 4 festivals last May, I have notched up another 12 or so, and already have my ticket for next year's Primavera Sound (this year's one being one of the best weekends ever, even with a medical emergency at the end). |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 11th, 2010|11:14 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  melancholy | ] |
I managed 4 music festivals so far this year - both ATP weekends, Primavera Sound in Barcelona, and Glastonbury. I figured out that I'd seen about 80 acts in May, between those first 3 and a bunch of actual gigs.
Met some very nice folks between all that too, although some of them are leaving the country in various directions, which is a real shame. |
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| Oh, I can smile about it now But at the time it was terrible |
[Dec. 15th, 2009|06:40 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | DD/MM/YYYY - Lismer | ] |
Howdy. Is anyone still here? :)
Blah blah gigs. Blah blah geeky toy. Blah blah single.
Facebook has ruined my ability to compose a paragraph.
Actually, two ATP festivals back to back deserves at least three blahs. The first one was a mad weekend of partying and meeting new people, and the second one was probably the best music lineup for a festival I've been to. So in ten days I had 5 days of awesome music, partying etc and also I got the drunkest I ever have been and lost an entire day to the worst hangover I've ever had. And it was still an awesome weekend.
Go see Sian Alice Group, too. And Sunn O)). And múm. |
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| Hey MTV! Bring back 120 Minutes! |
[Apr. 17th, 2009|10:32 am] |
The only show on the MTV network that actually showed cool videos, and new music, and it got canned. Where will I get my Rex The Dog fix now? Who else will show Of Montreal on TV? Remember your roots, MTV!
And no, Kings Of Leon 20 times a day doesn't count as alternative.
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| (no subject) |
[Apr. 13th, 2009|10:37 pm] |
I've been tidying today. Thrown out a pile of stuff that I'm never going to use again. This is very unlike me - I tend to hoard.
Now I have some tidiness and order, I've been looking at bare walls, and thinking about getting something to put on them. I like movie posters, but I wanted to get something more unusual than the ones that get reprinted. That means finding someone who has kept the original printing, which of course gets harder (and therefore more expensive) for older or more obscure films. I originally wanted the chinese poster for City Hunter, but it seems that movie posters aren't as collectible in Hong Kong as here - or perhaps just not old trashy Jackie Chan movies. I found some Jacques Tati posters that were nice too, but they're antiques now, so pretty expensive.
So I'm looking at art prints now. I kind of wanted a Mondrian print, but all the ones I can find are so clean and crisp. I know that's supposed to be the point, but I found the only time I really 'got' a Mondrian was when I saw one in San Francisco. It was the typical white+grid+coloured fields thing, but what made it so cool was how grubby it was. The black tape was peeling, and there were fingerprints on the white - it was great! Apparently in his later life, Mondrian went so bonkers about clean colours, he painted his houseplants white. I hope that's true.
Anyway, back to the hunt...
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| This is not the hot party I was expecting... |
[Mar. 30th, 2009|09:13 pm] |
A while ago, I finally bought myself the Logitech Squeezebox that I've been talking about for ages, to coincide with finishing off the ripping to FLAC of all my CDs. The squeezebox is a nifty bit of kit, which is basically a network-connected MP3 streamer with nice menus and nice software. You can either talk directly to the internet (via the SqueezeNetwork portal) and use it as a fancy radio, or you can connect it to your own PC and run Logitech's SqueezeCenter software.
The SqueezeCenter software is quite nice - it indexes all your music and all that usual stuff, but it also has a nice web interface that lets you control multiple players, and even synchronise them. There's a good plugin development community offering extra goodies like clever searching, and last.fm scrobbling. It installs nice and easily on Windows, and there's a port for FreeBSD (it's open source, and written in perl).
So, with all that going, I wanted to get a smaller quieter NAS-like thing to store all my tunes on. I did look at actual NAS boxes, since a few of them have SqueezeCenter as a package. The general impression was that they were a bit gutless processor-wise though. So I landed with something based around Sun's ZFS filesystem, which promises decent performance RAID-like features. It's available on a few platforms - FreeBSD, Linux, OS X and of course, Solaris. However, it's read-only on OS X, and I couldn't find anything talking about the FreeBSD or Linux versions that didn't mention terrible performance or "random data loss". Those seemed like bad things for a filesystem. It had to be Solaris.
Having found a couple of articles about building Solaris-based NAS boxes, I settled on a dual-core Intel Atom board, a laptop drive for the system, and a 1TB WD caviar green drive for the data (to be come 4 drives at a later date), with OpenSolaris 2008.11.
OpenSolaris is reassuringly familiar to anyone who's installed CentOS or Ubuntu lately - it has just the same Gnome look&feel - but it's a rather different under the surface. It has it's own package manager, service manager, and pretty much anything else manager. It comes with DNS turned off by default. It comes without compilers by default. The hardware compatibility list is rather short.
I've actually got as far as a networked CIFS (windows sharing) server now, although I still haven't gotten to the bottom of where Sun have mangled up perl so that CPAN only sort of works. The Atom hardware is nice, small and quiet. The Sun software ranges from pretty annoying to just OK, with the one exception of ZFS. If only it worked on FreeBSD reliably, I would have been a lot happier...
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 22nd, 2009|08:44 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  tired | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Les Savy Fav - Comes & Goes | ] |
This has been a loong week... last weekend was the stag for one of my college buddies, so that was travelling, drinking, doing manly things[0], more drinking, more travelling. Work was a week compressed into 2 days followed by an all-nighter for the excellent Girl Talk at the Scala on Wednesday, along with 3 decent support acts too. Daedalus had a monome to launch all his loops - very funky toy, and a good act too.
Thursday was mostly recovering from Wednesday. Saturday was shopping for the same wedding, plus rugby (I'm an honorary Welshman in that regard), plus another gig with my mum & dad - King Pleasure & The Biscuit Boys, in Windsor. They're a pretty amazing blues/swing band. I saw them once before at a charity ball thing, about 10 years ago, and they are a great party band. Sadly the CDs don't really capture it.
Then this morning was up at 4:45 to be in docklands for 6am for a planned outage. Ugh.
Much tiredness.
[0] quad-biking, archery, a shooting safari thing and knife throwing |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 27th, 2009|05:43 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | Hjaltalin - Goodbye July | ] |
How do. No real news. Eve Online is back in my life for a little while. Completely coincidentally, not much work has been done on other projects. I'm playing with an Arduino, with a view to making a motion-sensitive LED-matrix clock. I'm not playing with it that much though, and the more I look at what I really want it to do, the more it looks like it'll cost £150 in parts (the chips to drive the LED matrix, mainly). I want it to display an abclock, and do other things if you rotate/wiggle it.
I *have* nearly finished re-ripping all my CDs to FLAC, on the other hand, so I can get a little NAS and a Squeezebox sometime soon. It does leave me with somewhere around 1000 CDs I don't really want anymore, though. I think that technically, I should be keeping them. That's a lot of space to take up with this crap.
I used to post so much more... I don't think I really said any more though!
ObSeenBandsList: StereoLab, Animal Collective, Hjaltalin
ObSeeingBandsList: Parts & Labor, Girl Talk (squee!), Emmy The Great, Crystal Stilts, Wavves, ATP vs the Fans. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 14th, 2008|10:28 am] |
Went to Barden's Boudoir in Dalston last night to see Indian Jewelry, who were pretty cool, but the real heroes of the night were These Are Powers - those guys were amazing. Loads of energy, loads of noise, loads of crazy. I want a suitcase full of pedals and gizmos.
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 1st, 2008|02:52 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  chipper | ] |
Just got back from an excellent halloween gig... highlight of my evening was hugging a semi-naked sweaty man as he passed by. It's hard to explain, it's like some kind of cult. I also appear to have picked up a cut above my eye from the mosh, too.
So tonight was fun, and there have been a few good ones recently too, Mogwai (and Fuck Buttons supporting them), M83, Lykke Li and Blitzentrapper were all stand-outs. I got the Upset The Rhythm fler this evening, and we're off to over half the shows on it - all nice cheapy things, but some cool bands- High Places, Jay Reatard, Gentle Friendly...
Anyway, that is my update. |
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flim_flam's journal
