Same s(h)ite, different wrapper

Posted on 23 May, 2006 by adrian

Right, here we go…

I’ve installed WordPress and done a few simple tweaks to ensure basic functionality. Apart from that, it’s all pretty raw at the moment; I really just wanted to get something up and running.

The next thing to do is decide on a redesign… I’ve got a few ideas floating around at the moment, but nothing certain. In fact, I did come up with a design a few weeks ago that I really liked, but looking at it this morning, I like it less. I’m keen to avoid all of those multiple shades of grey, fine dividing lines and sweeping landscape photos that scream “web geek with no sense of humour”. So I’m not rushing anything. All I know is that it’ll be a contrast to the previous monochrome design.

After that, I’ll reincorporate all of the old content, along with a few new ideas. It looks like it’s pretty tricky to import old Greymatter files into the latest WordPress, so I may just have to create the archives manually. It’ll be a long job, but at least I can add categories as I go along.

Posted in Admin | 5 Comments

The layman’s life in the bush of ghosts

Posted on 10 May, 2006 by adrian

It’s 25 years since Brian Eno and David Byrne released “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” and you can learn all about this groundbreaking album on a shiny new website.

Of particular interest to musical types, though, is the related “remix” site where you can download the multitrack master recordings for two of the tracks. Within the bounds of the Creative Commons license, you can then use those recordings as you wish, remixing the tracks or using elements in your own music. It’s no cheap gimmick… as well as mp3s for quick access, the tracks are available in wav format!

Bush of Ghosts Remix Site

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Here we go again again again

Posted on 6 May, 2006 by adrian

Well, it was a typically unemphatic last day performance, with a 1-1 home draw against nothing-to-play-for Rochdale, but that was enough: Lincoln City are in the 3rd Division (or League 2, if you prefer) play-offs for the fourth season running. The climax was less fraught than in previous seasons, with fewer variables affecting the play-off positions, but you just never know… Lincoln have shown a remarkable ability to self-destruct at crucial moments all season.

But anyway, Lincoln City’s season is elongated once again by three extra matches, starting this time with a visit to local rivals Grimsby Town. For about 16 minutes today, it looked like Grimsby would snatch the third automatic promotion position, leaving Lincoln to face Leyton Orient (with their impressive away form) in the play-offs, but late goals changed that. In the run of normal matches this season, Lincoln lost 3-0 at Grimsby (admittedly during a particularly inconsistent period at the end of 2005) but won 5-0 at home in March. I suspect there may be a few goals in the next two matches…

And dare I think about potential opponents for the final? Lincoln lost both home and away to Cheltenham, but again, this was in the dodgy pre-2006 period. The home defeat to Wycombe came around the same time whereas last month’s virtuoso 3-0 away win was far more typical of the Imps’ post-Christmas form. It’s all idle speculation, though. As I’ve seen in the play-offs over the last three seasons, it’s all about “peaking” at the right time. This time round, I’m tempted to bury my head, ostrich style, until it’s all over.

Oh, and here’s to Swindon Town fans everywhere (such as Neil McIntosh and my own Ms Spaghetti) who can at least wind down for the summer in the knowledge that every cloud of relegation disappointment has a chink of silver lining ;-)

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Alf Clausen and the Simpsons

Posted on 4 May, 2006 by adrian

Working through the vast backlog of “ooh, that looks interesting” podcasts I’ve downloaded recently, I found a great little feature on Alf Clausen, composer of all the background and incidental music on “The Simpsons”… basically, everything except for Danny Elfman’s title music. I’ve always been intrigued by the process of creating music around the structure of film, and quite fancy having a go at some point. As a fast-paced cartoon show with multiple layers of cultural references, “The Simpsons” must be pretty challenging to compose for, especially as the music ranges from short bursts of “aural scenery” right up to full-length parody songs.

With the hope that my bandwidth doesn’t get completely SLAMMED, I’ve uploaded the 21-minute chunk here…

Mitt i Musiken: Alf Clausen feature (14.75MB)

It’s from the Swedish radio programme “Mitt i Musiken” (*mumble*… sorry, Sveriges Radio…) but the chunks in Swedish are mostly translating and summarising what Alf says in the interview portions. It’s worth ploughing through for the rehearsal excerpts (now that’s what first-call session players sound like!) and there’s a few interesting nuggets of information. For instance, Matt Groening likes having real orchestral music on the soundtrack, in order to provide smooth continuity and sheen when the animation is a little rough and ready. Also, it turns out that Alf Clausen is hugely influenced by Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, which, on reflection, doesn’t surprise me. I’ll be talking about that piece right here, once the Proms season starts…

Posted in Art/Culture, Language, Music | Leave a comment

Big Phil

Posted on 27 April, 2006 by adrian

Well, they’ve asked him, so it’s now a matter of waiting to see what the answer is.

I still feel they’ve missed a great opportunity in not pursuing Fabio Capello* assiduously enough, but to my mind Scolari is the best of the current short list. Steve McLaren has earned himself several brownie points with Middlesboro’s UEFA Cup run (showing a dogged determination that England have often lacked under Eriksson) but I’m not sure he’s quite ready for the step up to international coaching. As with Sam Allardyce, I’m sure he will be in a few years’ time. One of the great advantages with Luiz Felipe Scolari is that he’s used to working with work-shy prima donnas.

We’ll just have to wait and see…

[*Who allegedly contacted the FA, offering his services, in the weeks before they engaged Sven, and has recently mentioned his dream of coaching England one day.]

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Running as an alternative to powered transport

Posted on 24 April, 2006 by adrian

Network Rail have an unenviable task in repairing and maintaining our rail infrastructure after years of neglect, while trying to create the minimum of disruption to the regular service. In the long run, most rail users would probably accept a few weekends of inconvenience in return for a better service in the future.

Yesterday morning, though, I wondered if they have access to PR advisers or, better still, a calendar. To shut down a large chunk of the south London suburban network (basically, a triangle between Sutton, Croydon and Streatham) for 24 hours is never going to be a popular move, but to do so on the day of the London Marathon, when hundreds of thousands of people congregate in central London from all over the country… well, what can you say?

Anyway, enough complaining. Despite the reduced transport options and the rain, the Marathon was a great spectator event, with plenty of plucky determination, joviality and general backslapping. Congratulations to everyone who took part, for whatever reason.

London Marathon 2006 photos on Flickr

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Delayed Sheep Effect

Posted on 21 April, 2006 by adrian

One of the recent memes doing the rounds of LiveJournal and other blog networks involved listing the births, deaths and events which share your birthday. I forget the exact rules, but never mind. Here (sourced from Wikipedia) is a selection of famous people who share my birthdate, although none were born in the same year…

Pietro Mascagni (composer – 1863)
Eli Wallach (actor – 1915)
Noam Chomsky (political commentator, linguistics pioneer – 1928)
Ellen Burstyn (actor – 1932)
Tom Waits (singer, songwriter, actor – 1949)
Jamie Clapham (footballer – 1975)
John Terry (footballer – 1980)

Now Jamie Clapham might not be as celebrated in his specialist field than the others in the list, but I’ve included him for the simple fact that, like me, he was born on 7 December in Lincoln.

Historical events? Well, the bombing of Pearl Harbour in 1941 is pretty notable, but laughably insignificant in comparison to the 1971 blaze at the Montreux Casino. Caused by a flare fired by an audience member at a Frank Zappa concert, the event inspired the song “Smoke on the Water”. However, all of this triviality is eclipsed by the events of 7 December 2003, when the Conservative Party of Canada was officially recognized after the merger of the Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservative Party of Canada (okay, which jumped up little political brown-noser thought it was worth adding *that* to Wikipedia?)

Deaths? Well, nothing particularly exciting… the biggest name is William Bligh (1817), inventor of the two-section chocolate-coated coconut confectionary (and hapless sea captain). You probably haven’t heard of composer Adrian Willaert (1562) but he was pretty important in the development of the Italian Renaissance madrigal. Lovely hands, too.

You know what? I’m going to do something to change history on my birthday and then kill myself exactly a year later. The 7 December page on Wikipedia is going to look pretty damned impressive, I can tell you…

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One of my (rare) Keith Flett moments

Posted on 17 April, 2006 by adrian

A letter to the Guardian…

As Patrick Collinson says, the legality of Russian download provider allofmp3.com is questionable, but his dogmatic insistence that “real music fans should choose legal services” is simplistic and reminiscent of music industry propaganda. While the allofmp3.com model is certainly not the way to develop a healthy online music industry (I speak both as a professional musician and a user of allofmp3.com) it’s not enough simply to condemn users without examining why they shun the alternatives.

The biggest supplier, Apple’s iTunes Music Store, is typical of legal download services in that its prices barely compete with the major online CD retailers. Plenty of top name CDs can be bought for £8 or £9, often less, from Amazon or Play.com, but what do you get for your £7.99 at the iTunes store? Low bandwidth digital files, crippled with copy protection. Meanwhile the Russians are offering mp3 files up to 384k bandwidth, with an option of lossless (CD quality) downloads on selected albums. Many consumers are clearly happy with the bog standard listening experience, but others demand quality, and if the official marketplace can’t satisfy their (technologically undemanding) needs, they’ll go “underground”.

As Bobbie Johnson reported in the Guardian (4 March) the fault for this situation lies not with Apple and other legal download services, but with the major record labels, who charge exorbitant wholesale rates for their digital product. The fact that so many people are paying to use allofmp3.com (rather than simply using free, illegal P2P networks) shows that there’s an increasing willingness to behave ethically online. However, unless the music industry is prepared to charge reasonable wholesale prices reflecting the vastly reduced overheads of digital distribution, disillusioned music fans will continue to seek other options.

Posted in Music, Technology | Leave a comment

Like we didn’t see this one coming…

Posted on 6 April, 2006 by adrian

Having spent $580m on the networking site (and ego boost for bored teenagers) MySpace last year, Rupert Murdoch is starting to make his presence felt. According to the Guardian, he’s removed 200,000 “objectionable” user profiles from the site. This is nothing new for the Dirty Digger; despite using topless teenage girls to sell newspapers, he’s not above a bit of censorship from time to time.

What exactly constitutes “objectionable” in this case? If the culprits were guilty of using MySpace as a platform for race hatred or other illegal activities, their removal would be perfectly justified, but I doubt this is the case. Murdoch wants to make easy money out of his millions of unwitting new customers, but can’t risk a backlash from those parents who won’t make the effort to supervise their kids properly (and fail to realise that the little darlings have heard/seen/said/done it all before).

It’s unlikely, given his track record, that Murdoch will want to leave MySpace open to the sort of creativity and free-thinking that certain liberals seem to think is appropriate to the Internet, so make the most of the networking opportunities while you can.

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Niall Quinn on G-14

Posted on 31 March, 2006 by adrian

I’ve already burbled at length about the malevolent potential of the G-14 group, so I’ll say no more. However, it’s good to see that both the media and members of the football community are speaking out against the organisation. Earlier this week, Everton’s chief executive Keith Wyness criticised the greed and self-interest of G-14, while Niall Quinn used his Guardian column today to make some excellent points.

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