Had a bit of a mad weekend - a good party in a crap club in Mayfair on Friday night, and a great house party on Saturday night. Plus some infuriating computer issues.
Anyway, I’m in a mad rush to get ready for Glastonbury, but before setting off I thought I’d add some details and pics from last year’s festival. I actually wrote this a few days after returning from Glastonbury last June - primarily to serve as a kind of aide-mémoire for me, so probably only of interest to a very small number of people - but for some reason never got round to posting it. If you’re interested, here’s Glastonbury 2007 - the gory details.
Okay, I’m officially excited about Glastonbury now. This time next week I’ll bouncing around to some great music in a muddy field in Somerset. It may not have as many good ‘big names’ as Bestival this year, but I think the 2008 Glastonbury lineup is actually really strong; if anything, I think I’m going to have more difficult choices to make than last year.
Details of Shangri La are out now too, and it’s looking much more fun than Lost Vagueness last year, and if Trash City is half as good as it was last year, it’ll be fantastic.
So, who to see? I’ve formulated a bit of a list, but haven’t checked times and days for clashes yet. Plus of course it never goes according to plan, so I’ll probably end up catching one or two of these acts, find someone brilliant that I’ve never heard of, and spend the rest of the time primal dancing around a fire in the Green Fields. Right, in no particular order… (more…)
Oh dear, almost a week without posting, what a poor show. Before I ramble on, I must thank Miss Schlegel for the plug in her piece on three humungous artworks last week (love the video in that post).
I have to admit this weekend didn’t quite go according to plan. I was meant to be having a few drinks on Friday night to celebrate a friend’s birthday, then travelling down to Devon for a big party in the countryside on Saturday. Unfortunately Friday night turned out to be more of a heavy-duty session than intended - think sambuca shots by 9pm - and by lunchtime on Saturday I was still far too ‘unwell’ to face a 4 hour journey to Devon. So, no big party for me, just a rancid hangover and guilt. (I’ve since heard that it turned out to be “the best party since 1991″ - how gutted am I?!)
With no Plan B in place for the weekend, I found myself at a bit of a loose end today, and decided to stroll over to Belair Park in West Dulwich to see Carters Steam Fair. (more…)
Updated with full write up 11th June. I’ve finally got round to writing the promised review of my new Slimdevices Squeezebox and Acoustic Energy Aego M speakers; I’ve had them for two weeks now, and I’m still thoroughly impressed by both products.
I took this photo them the day they arrived - I included my G2 iPod Nano for scale (excuse the poor quality of the pic, but I couldn’t be bothered with setting up the tripod or stobe). It’s quite a long review, purely because the Squeezebox does so much - I hope it helps if you’re considering getting one.
So what is a Squeezebox?
The Squeezebox Classic is a digital audio receiver made by a company called Slim Devices (although it’s now been re-badged as Logitech, who recently bought Slim Devices); in other words it’s a standalone device that allows you to stream music stored on your computer to a hi-fi located in a different part of the house.
The Squeezebox connects to your stereo using a choice of standard analogue red/white RCA connections, headphone minijack, or digital optical or coaxial connections. It then uses your existing wired (Ethernet) or wireless (802.11g) network to stream your music on demand from the network-connected computer holding your music. The computer holding your audio files can be a Mac, Linux or Windows PC, or even certain NAS drives (swanky hard drives that can be accessed on a network without needing a computer).
The Squeezebox itself is a very sleek looking thing, about 20cm wide and 10cm tall, so you shouldn’t have any trouble finding a spot for it next to your hi-fi or under the TV. It sits upright, and half of its front is taken up with the 320×32 pixel, vacuum-fluorescent, cyan-on-black display, which is large enough to read from across the room (unless, say, you live in Buckingham Palace).
It comes with a nice-quality remote control (seems different to some older pictures I’ve seen, which showed a rather cheap looking remote), which allows you to browse and play your music, change settings and adjust the volume and so on.
Setting up the Squeezebox
Setting up the Squeezebox was an absolute doddle. First you install the SqueezeCenter software on the computer hosting your music. You point the SqueezeCenter to the directory holding your music, and it scans the audio files for tags (apparently it also plays nicely with iTunes).
When you plug the Squeezebox into the mains for the first time, it steps you through the setup process. You enter your network information using the remote’s left, right, up, and down buttons, and the alphanumeric keypad (much like on a mobile phone).
First you choose whether it’s a wired or wireless network; if it’s wireless, you scroll through the list of the wireless networks it’s detected (it spotted mine straight away), or enter the name of the network if your SSID is hidden. You then choose your country and enter your network password - WEP, WPA and WPA2 are supported - before deciding whether to assign the Squeezebox a static IP address or use DHCP. I chose DHCP and it had no problems connecting to my Netgear router via my Netgear wireless access point. Finally, you choose the computer where the SqueezeCenter is installed from the list of computers on your network. And that’s it, you’re good to go.
Playing music
The SqueezeCenter software supports a wide range of audio formats, including MP3, WAV, Ogg Vorbis, AAC, FLAC and WMA, but it doesn’t handle DRM files, if that’s important to you (not an issue for me - I refuse to purchase DRM protected tracks).
You can browse your music collection through the SqueezeCenter via your browser (so you could also use a PDA, web-enabled mobile or another laptop as a remote control), or more likely using the supplied remote control. All the standard player options are present - browse by artist, album, genre, date or directory structure, search, shuffle, add and edit playlists etc. Playback and browsing is very responsive, and I’ve not experienced any stutters or delays.
More than just your MP3 collection
Of course you can only listen to your music collection if the computer they’re on is running; however, even when your computer’s off, the Squeezebox still has plenty to offer. The Squeezebox can connect to Slim Devices’ servers so you can access the services offered by their SqueezeNetwork, which include:
Internet Radio - you can choose from hundreds of Interent radio stations that are listed, and stream them direct to your Squeezebox. If you don’t like the stations on offer, you can add your own favourites.
RSS News Ticker - by default the list of feeds to choose from includes BBC World News and CNN, but again you can add your favourite feeds. The feeds can be used as a screensaver, and slowly scroll across the Squeezebox’s display.
Last.fm, Pandora and Rhapsody - if you’ve got an account with one of these third-party services, you can have the music they pick for you streamed to the Squeezebox. I’m not sure about Rhapsody, but Pandora is no longer available to those of us outside the US. (I haven’t hooked up to my Last.fm account yet, but you can tell the SqueezeCenter to tell AudioScrobbler what you’re playing).
Sound Effects - fancy listening to heavy rain and thunder, or perhaps chirruping crickets? No problem, the Squeezebox has quite a number of sound effects to choose from. I did try out the heartbeat effect to see if my friends’ babies would be taken to a state of womb-like tranquillity, but they didn’t seem that impressed. I love the thunderstorm though.
Attention to detail
There are loads of other things that the Squeezebox and Slim Devices deserve credit for, including:
As previously mentioned, the SqueezeCenter music server software is cross-platform, and is open source (it uses Perl and MySQL), which means users have developed plenty of plugins for it - plus I think it suggests a good ethos on the part of Slim Devices.
One of these plugins allows you to listen to BBC radio - live or using their Listen Again service (don’t know if this is available to those outside the UK though).
There’s an active community for support, with both forums and a comprehensive wiki.
The packaging, Squeezebox and remote all ooze quality - there’s no cheap plastic here.
The instructions - in the manual and during operation - are well written; they certainly don’t read like they’ve been translated through 4 different languages.
There are loads of nice touches, such as a sleep facility and alarm clock. Just about every aspect of the Squeezebox can be adjusted, including what information is displayed during playback, the brightness of the display in its various states, and the size of the font.
The Squeezebox can be set up to act as a wireless bridge.
Slim Devices recently released the Squeezebox Duet which performs a similar role as the Classic, except that the box (the Squeezebox Receiver) that plugs in to your hi-fi doesn’t have a display; it does however have a very swanky remote control (the Squeezebox Controller) with an iPod-like colour display with which to browse and control your music. I preferred the Classic to be honest. The Controller is compatible with the Classic though and can be bought separately, so I may add one at some point.
Squeezebox sound quality
The one thing I’ve not really mentioned is the sound quality. The Squeezebox uses a Burr-Brown DAC, which is meant to be very good, and I certainly can’t fault the sound quality. With decent speakers, I think the quality of your audio files is going to be your only concern.
For example, I ripped quite a few CDs to MP3 at 160kbps to cram them on my Nano, and I can easily hear the difference between them and ones ripped at 320kbps. In fact, I’m now considering the daunting task of ripping everything to lossless FLAC. Slowly.
What’s not to like?
Criticisms? I’m struggling to think of any…. Obviously the fact it won’t play DRM-hobbled files could be a deal-breaker for some. And sure, in some ways it would be great if it could handle video, but to be honest I’d rather have a device that does one thing and does it extremely well, than a ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ box.
Otherwise, the only cons are the fact that you really need your music properly tagged, and that you will almost certainly start thinking about converting your music collection to a lossless format and moving it to a NAS drive.
To conclude, the Slim Devices Squeezebox Classic sounds great, looks great, is easy to set up, and totally intuitive to use. At around £180 it’s not particularly cheap, but I’d go as far as to say it’s possibly the most impressive gadget I’ve ever bought.
Acoustic Energy Aego M Speakers
I bought a set of AE Aego M 2.1 speakers to go with the Squeezebox, as I’d heard them in action and knew they produced a fantastic sound.
Despite the two satellite speakers being pretty tiny (68 x 103 x 90mm, supplied with 5m of cable each), they have no problem filling a decent size room without straining - they’re certainly more than just crappy computer speakers. What HiFi Sound and Vision had this to say about them:
Looks great, works superbly; real power and good integration make the Aego M one of the best-sounding speaker systems in its class
…sound big, and goes (very) loud. It’s not all about brash, in your face, tunes, though - the M-System delivers delicate music with detail and finesse.
As you’d expect from a company that makes serious hi-fi gear, the speaker system is fairly minimalist - just an on/off/volume control and three setting for bass level on the subwoofer unit.
The speakers are magnetically shielded, and the built-in amplification in the subwoofer made them the ideal partner for the Squeezebox, as I can just plug it straight into the RCA connection on the Aego Ms. For £130 they’re an absolute bargain.
The undoubted highlight of my social calendar last year was the raucous week spent on Rhodes for Jonathan & Suzanne’s wedding. Although it fell during my somewhat extended blogging hiatus, I can tell you Lindos was lovely, we met lots of good people and had fun in rather epic proportions. Once back in Blightly I put together a little site for the photos, should you wish to view strangers getting married/drunk in Lindos: Escape to Athena (named after the classic Roger Moore/Telly Savalas war film which used several locations around Lindos).
Of course it’s never easy maintaining one’s sartorial elegance in warmer climes; the slightest fashion faux pas could even lead to one being mistaken for Johnny Foreigner. With that in mind I took it upon myself to put together a little fashion guide for the Groom and Best Man, well in advance of the wedding. I’ve kept the page in case it comes in useful for anyone else getting married abroad: looking cool at a hot wedding. Sadly Jonathan and Simon chose to disregard my advice.
Si and I had planned to set off first thing Wednesday morning, but as a friend was having a farewell party on Tuesday night before moving back to Norway, we were up parting until 3am. As a result we didn’t arrive at the festival until after lunch.
Simon had the idea of transporting our heavy gear from the car in a wheelie bin. I was a little sceptical, but it turned out to be a stroke of genius (coping admirably with the mud on Monday), not to mention making for a good talking point as we passed people on the way to Park Home Ground.
Unfortunately our old festival tent was nibbled by rats, so this year we splashed out on a swanky four-man job. It proved to be a little tricky to put up, due to both the high winds and the fact that it had an unusual way of securing the poles and illustration-free instructions. Just as were were about to try a spot of involuntary paragliding, our neighbours came and helped us out, basically putting the tent together as we held on to it. Kudos to Gary and Emma from Manchester.
Once unpacked, Simon and I settled down to enjoy somme G&Ts in the late afternoon sun, before heading off for a look around (and to get some essentials - how could be both forget to pack towels?). After exploring some of this year’s new areas, and some old haunts, we staggered back to Campo Relaxo at midnight, and stayed up drinking wine with Gary and Emma until about one.
Thursday
I awoke at 6am on Thursday morning with a feeling that something wasn’t quite right. Sure enough, after a spot of still-drunk flapping around, I realised that some thieving scumbag had come into the tent whilst we were asleep, unzipped my ‘bedroom’, leant over me and rummaged through my stuff. Normally I tend to keep my valuables in the bottom of the sleeping bag, but that night I’d left my stuff under a pile of clothes by my head. Schoolboy error. On the bright side, for some reason Scumbag didn’t take my camera, and thankfully didn’t take Si’s money. Let’s hope Scumbag spent my £280 wisely, although I suspect it just went towards some Burberry clothes.
So, not quite the perfect start to my first full day at Glastonbury - phoning a call centre in India at 6.30am to cancel my card, then the long trek across the site to report the theft to lost property and the (friendly) cops, and a soaking from the first downpour of the festival on the way back.
When I got back to Campo Relaxo I had a chat with some of our other neighbours who were emerging from their tents; amusingly, they asked if I’d heard ‘that guy snoring last night’. I felt obliged to let them know that I had, and that the culprit was my mate Simon. Later Si told me that I’d also been snoring like a bastard, so we concluded the reason our tent was targetted by Scumbag was that he must have heard us both snoring away and figured we were out for the count. Which is quite funny really.
Anyway, I’d been looking forward to Glasto for two years, and there was no way I was going to let Thieving Scumbag spoil it; I felt much better after brunch in the Green fields.
The rest of the afternoon was spent mooching around, meeting a few people, watching a band (no idea who) in the Leftfield stage as we sheltered from a downpour, and searching for insoles for Troy’s army boots (without any luck, but in the true Rat Mears spirit, he fashioned some insoles out of a cheap foam mat). I also had a bit of a chat with the guys at the Sea Cow stall - the fish’n'chip shop about a hundred metres from where I live - who were at Glasto for the first time.
Tracker managed to blag his way in to the festival, and rocked up to our tent that evening, along with the roughest cider known to man. The rest of the evening’s a bit of a blur… We went to Lost Vagueness… then ended up cutting some rug till the early hours in Slippery Dick’s Love Shack. Vaguely remember striking up a conversation with a couple after getting split up from everyone, and watching dawn rise at the stone circle in the pouring rain.
Friday
I didn’t make it down in time for Reverend & The Makers, but listened to them from Campo Relaxo and they sounded good.
Tracker, Troy and I only mananged to get down to the Other Stage on Friday lunchtime in time to watch Modest Mouse. Now I really like Modest Mouse, and they were good, but I’m not sure how engaging they’d be live without Johnny Marr.
After Modest Mouse we took shelter from the next downpour in the Saloon, then met up with Adam and Frances. Caught a little bit of Amy Winehouse on the Pyramid; pretty impressive, but can’t help but think that he performance might be better if she’d had an earlier slot, if you know what I mean.
Tracker, Troy and and I - fairly pissed by now - wandered up to The Park for Chas ‘n’ Dave. We got there early and watched Tigerstyle, a Sikh/Bhangra act on the BBC Introducing… stage. Very enjoyable, and got us ’screwing in a lighbulb’ on and off all weekend.
The sun came out just as Chas ‘n’ Dave appeared on the Park stage, for one of the highlights of the festival. There was a big crowd, and a great atmosphere, with everyone singing along, waving their arms like mentalists and doing the rabbit thing (at one point a guy in a rabbit costume ran across the stage). Si’s got a great video on Facebook of Tracker and me during Ain’t No Pleasing You. Utterly fantastic. Afterwards we all agreed that nothing was going to top Chas ‘n’ Dave, and I think we were right.
Next we went over to watch the Fratellis - not a band I’d any interest in seeing, but capturing ‘track four’ on video was of profound importance to Tracker. The consensus of opinion seems to be that the Fratellis were pretty crap, but we were down the front, completely out of it, and had a great time (yes, another one captured on video).
Clash No. 2: Arcade Fire vs The Cat Empire - Winner: Arcade Fire
Would have liked to have seen the Cat Empire (Tracker did, and said they were really good), but in the end I’m really glad I watched Arcade Fire, as they were fantastic. Wish I could say the same thing about the hog roast we had afterwards.
Clash No. 3: Bjork vs Arctic Monkeys - Winner: The Waterboys
I fancied watching Bjork, but as no one else was bothered, I thought go with the flow; however, rather than see the Arctic Monkeys (apparently they were a bit dull), we all agreed on the unexpected compromise of the Waterboys on the Avalon stage. Troy and I managed to catch a bit of Bjork, and from what we saw it looked like a brilliant performance.
Now I haven’t seen the Waterboys for years, and I knew they’d be good, but I really didn’t expect them to be quite so amazing. I can honestly say it was one of the best sets I’ve heard from any band; superbly talented musicians putting on an incredibly tight performance. Thoroughly enjoyable. We glooped back to Campo Relaxo rather gob-smacked by it.
Saturday
We didn’t exactly hit the ground running on Saturday, thanks to the dodgy hog roast, but took some time to struggle through the mud around the Tipi, Avalon and Cabaret fields. We met up with a few people for a spot of binge cider drinking, before heading off to the Other stage for CSS.
CSS were as good as I’d hoped, colourful, full of energy and great fun. Definitely want to see them in a smaller venue though. As luck would have it, we bumped into Carla and Ollie during the CSS set, which was cool.
I was quite looking forward to seeing Klaxons, as they’re meant to put on a good show, so we waited around for them after CSS. Perhaps we’d have been better off seeing them in the more intimate Dance tent rather than the Other Stage, but for me they put on the most disappointing performance of the festival. They sounded really unfocussed and pretty shambolic.
Then, after watching some cabaret in the Pussy Parlure, we managed to grab a seat on some freshly delivered bales of hay, where we sat drinking wine and people-watching for a bit (and got talking to some stereotypical Dutch people).
After a little R&R back at Campo Relaxo (completely forgetting about Africa Express) we wandered up to the Stone Circle, then back down to the Small World Stage, where we chilled out watching a band called Laxxula from Cyprus.
Clash No. 4: Editors vs Pie Minister - Winner: John Fogerty
I quite fancied seeing Editors, but we needed food, and Pie Minister sounded just the ticket. However, as we arrived at the Jazzworld stage, what should we hear but ‘Dude, dude, dude, looking out my backdoor’… we’d stumbled across John Fogerty. All thoughts of food vanished and we ended up knocking back Brother’s pear cider as we watched Fogerty play a blinding set of Creedence songs.
Clash No. 5: Iggy & The Stooges vs Getting into LV early for Madness- Winner: Madness
I’m pretty gutted about missing Iggy & The Stooges, as by all accounts they were awesome. Still, knowing how rammed Lost Vagueness was going to get for Madness’s ’secret’ gig after the main stages finished, we felt we had to get in early, even though it meant missing Mr Pop.
We’d been hoping to meet up with Matt Pritchard (of Dirty Sanchez fame) and bumped into him in Lost Vaguess where he was, er, having fun with a couple of mates, and he introduced us to some actor from Shameless (name-dropping only really works if you remember the person’s name).
Fortunately, Madness were absolutely fantastic, and we had a great dance-and-sing-along to them. At one point I started a chant, which the crowd joined in with; I was so chuffed - I’d never started a chant before. And to top it off, my chant was mentioned in Q magazine’s review of the festival the following week! It’s the little things, it really is….
We stayed in Lost Vagueness after Madness had finished, and got chatting to a friendly guy called Dave. The three of us watched The Beat on the Strummerville Stage at about 1.30am, before the guy’s fincee turned up. The four of us had some tea and several shorts, at which point my memory gets a little hazy. I think we spent the rest of the night dancing to 80s music in Lost Vagueness with Dave, Katie and their mates.
Thanks to the EXIF data on a photo I know Si and I headed back to camp at about 5 in the morning. I do remember we were given free pizza for breakfast at a cafe in the Green Fields en route, which was nice.
Sunday
We didn’t exactly hit the ground running on Sunday morning, funnily enough. After a bit of a saunter around the Circus Field, Tracker, Si and I then met up with Adam and a few of the others, before watching Billy Bragg in on the Avalon Stage.
We missed Dame Shirley, but struggled through the gloopy mud to see the Manic Street Preachers on the Pyramid Stage a little later. I find the Manics a little too AOR for my taste, but one has to be sociable, and at least they had Nina Whatshername from the Cardigans performing too.
We were really flagging by now, but thankfully we caught The Go! Team on the Other Stage, and their energetic performance was a real tonic. After the Go! Team and a quick pit stop at Campo Relaxo, Si and I returned to the Jazzworld Stage, determined to make it to Pie Minister before the end of the festival. In his excitement at finally getting one of their pies, Simon told the person serving at Pie Minister to keep the change. Unfortunately, what he thought was a fiver was in fact a £10 note, so they ended up receiving a £6 tip. And even more unfortunately it was my money. “I thought they looked a bit surprised!” he said. Still, they are the best pies in the world.
Expensive pies out of the way, we went to take in a bit of comedy before watching our mate’s old band Railroad Bill. They’re a skiffle band, and always great fun live; this was their 12th time playing over the weekend, and there was much spraying of throats during their performance. Most of the small but appreciative audience was dancing, and our noisy support earned us a name-check.
After Railroad Bill, we braved the torrential rain for our first night time visit to Trash City, and soon realised that leaving it till Sunday night had been a mistake. Trash City was fantastic, and in my humble opinion far superior to Lost Vagueness.
By pure chance we arrived just in time to see Ebony Bones perform an absolutely blinding set - a riot of colour, sound and energy.
We then struggled through the mud to what turned out to be the 1970s New York gay disco - moustaches supplied on the way in - which was a lot of fun.
Things went a bit pear shaped at some point in the early hours of Monday, as we got split up. I found myself back in Lost Vagueness and vaguely remember watching an Indian brass band, before throwing shapes in the Chapel. It’s pretty much just a blur to be honest.
And that was it - the three of us packed up at lunchtime on Monday and, thanks to finding a short cut across a field, managed get out of the car park and onto the road in less than an hour. The “I don’t think I can do that again” sentiments lasted about a day, but the thought of missing out on a sunny Glastonbury is just too horrible. There can’t be a mud bath again next year, can there?
I think this is the first time I’ve actually typed an entry from the comfort of my bed; I’m not doing so because it’s late (although it is), but because it’s bloody freezing here. The builders arrived here on Monday to begin some rather major work on the place, and as a result there’s currently no heating or hot water. There’s no kitchen either, and what’s left of the bathroom is lying in a skip. But most importantly, I still have broadband!
It’s actually quite cosy - one of my cats likes to sleep on my bed, which is as good as having a hot water bottle, even if she invariably somehow manages to take up most of the room, leaving me to fit in around her. Oh dear, I’m suddenly reminded of the TV commercial that’s on at the moment in which a woman says (using what must be some terribly filthy euphamism), “I can’t get up without my furry alarm clock”; perhaps I just can’t go to bed without my furry hot water bottle. Besides the cat, the iBook on my lap generates a reasonable amount of heat too (I know, we’re not meant to, but having watched An Inconvenient Truth a few days ago, I’m starting to wonder if I’ll ever want kids anyway).
By the way, today marks the the fifth anniversary of the arrival of the first detainees at Guantánamo Bay. There are still 385 prisoners there (including ten British residents), not to mention the other 13,600 ghost prisoners being held/tortured in secret US detention centres around the world. As Clive Stafford Smith says, today represents the anniversary of too many shameful acts..
Thought I’d better post something here in case Microsoft has any laptops left to give away as bribes review machines.
I had such good intentions for the Christmas holiday, including finishing the new design for this site. In the end I had a thoroughly lazy, unproductive time, and only managed to catch up on a few of the things on my to-do list. Definitely felt like a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ week - to be honest I think I really needed a break from worky stuff. Still, now I see that Celebrity Big Brother has started on Channel 4, I’d say there’s a good chance I’ll get that new design in place shortly.
I suppose I should write a belated-but-still obligatory World of Badger review of 2006. <scratches head /> I guess the highlight of my year would have to be the Sultan’s Elephant in London back in May. What else? Album of the year? Um, I have to admit that, as a result of converting a lot of my CD collection to MP3s, I spent a large part of 2006 getting back into a lot of albums from the late 80s to mid-90s. That said, there were some really good albums released in the last 12 months, and my favourites would include:
(I would have linked to Spillers Records in Cardiff, the oldest record shop in the world, which is threated with closure by developer scumbags, but I can’t link directly to the albums on their site, so I’ve used Boomkat - another independent music shop - rather than Amazon. Spillers is a great little shop, and I used to get all my albums and gig tickets there when I lived in Wales; please sign the petition to save it.)
OK, admittedly not the most comprehensive review of 2006, but it’s the best I could come up with at this late hour.
Work’s been pretty hectic these last few months (actually the whole year’s been really busy), so it’s a relief to say “That’s it, no more work until 2007!”. As of 5.30pm today we’re officially on holiday, and will only be responding to client emergencies (our definition of emergencies, not theirs - crashed servers or compromised security qualify, but cosmetic changes to e-commerce sites or the inability to use a simple CMS do not).
I’m having a fairly low-key Christmas in London this year, so despite my good intentions, I’ll be surprised if boredom hasn’t driven me back to the computer by Boxing Day. Top of my list is getting the new design for World of Badger finished and live. I’ll probably try to catch up on a few other bits and pieces of work without the pressure of deadlines and client reviews too.
But for now my Chrimbo R&R kicks off properly tomorrow, when I’m meeting friends for an afternoon and evening of eating, drinking and being merry in central London.
I managed to get away from London last weekend to do a bit of long-overdue catching up with friends. I took my iBook with me so I could get a couple of hours work done on the train, in between enjoying the complimentary drinks and muffins in first class (not because I’m too stuck up to travel with the riff-raff in standard class, but because this country’s stupid transport policies mean that it’s cheaper to buy two first class singles than a standard class return).
Unfortunately, within a couple of hours of arriving, my friend Chris managed to spill a very large glass of wine over my iBook as we browsed the web. It got well and truly drenched and immediately cut out. Chris quickly turned it upside down and I whipped the battery out, and we then dried off as best we could before leaving it to one side. Chris was pretty mortified, but with a few glasses of wine in me I had to laugh.
The next day I popped in to a shop and had a play with the latest Apple laptops, and started to think that perhaps it wasn’t such a disaster after all… claim on my insurance and get my 18 month old iBook replaced with a new Core 2 Duo MacBook. Sweet.
After three days drying out time I decided to try turning the iBook on, still convinced that all that wine would have shorted out the logic board and turned it into an attractive paperweight. Much to my amazement it booted up with the familiar Apple bong, and I was able to log in as usual. Screen, sound and hard drive all fine. By now I was looking forward to getting a new MacBook, so I wasn’t sure whether to be happy or not (I decided I was happy, as a new MacBook would mean shelling out on a larger Crumpler bag too). Quite how the iBook survived I don’t know, but it’s definitely earned the tag “Old Faithful”.
If only the same could be said about the Antec PSU in my Windows box. When I got back to London I fired up the PC and within seconds the PSU died. I was not a happy bunny, especially as this is the second Antec PSU I’ve had to replace within the last year. Although it’s still under warranty I decided to buy a different one rather than wait for Antec’s painfully slow RMA process.
My shiny new 600w PSU arrived yesterday and what did I discover? Not only did the Antec PSU die, but it seems to have fried my rather expensive motherboard in the process too (and I had to try every component in Rob’s PC to be sure). So now I’m waiting for a new motherboard to delivered.
The moral of this story? Don’t buy Antec PSUs. In fact, don’t buy/build a PC, just get a Mac. And be careful with your wine.
After the ‘all work and no play’ nature of the last month, I decided to treat myself to an 8 gig iPod nano. Bloomin’ lovely it is too. I actually bought it from John Lewis rather than Apple, having stumbled across Hot UK Deals’s voucher and discount codes page (yes, I know it sounds like the sort of site which is one notch up from Viagra on the spam-o-meter, but it is worth bookmarking), which got me £15 off my purchase over £75 thanks to a Telegraph promotion.
Naturally half of my weekend was taken up with deciding what to put on the nano; initially I planned only to put on things I’d listened to in the last year, but I kept uncovering CDs I’d completely forgotten about or just not bothered listening to for a few years (e.g. Lou Reed - Transformer, My Bloody Valentine - Isn’t Anything). Now a stroll to the shops is an exciting voyage of rediscovery and reunions.
I am already starting to wonder whether putting My Way - The Best of Frank Sinatra on there was a mistake though, as I keep finding myself singing along without realising. OK at home, but walking down Regent’s Street yesterday I must have sounded like some sort of deranged care in the community karaoke crooner.
