An Exercise in Irrelevance

This was the first time I have been to the Cluny. It’s a good venue, being a converted warehouse. The main pub section is open, but warm in feel, although having so much brick around is a bit noisy. The food was good, although as I’d already eaten well at lunch it was overly large.

As I’ve said previously, I first heard of Jess Klein on pandora, and was lucky enough to see her tonight just a few weeks later. Dressed in black, set against the light, she seems small and vulnerable on stage; the effect accenutated by her guitar, a Gibson J200 I think, which is huge; the soundbox dwarfing it’s owner. Her music, however, belies this image. Although, some of her songs are quiet and gentle, quite a most of them are belted out, her vocals strong and clear, the guitar strummed with fervour of a busker. Put on top of some melodic, and well-paced songs, it makes for a compelling performance. She’s not the best lyricist in the world and, perhaps, overuses the power of her voice but, in general, she’s well worth seeing.

Chris Knight, I have never heard of before. The introduction told us that he was from Slaughter, Kentucky. He gobsmacking accent confirmed this — I have a bizarre image of him swapping stories with a bunch of geordies afterward. Chris likes to sing about bad things. He got married at 16, and 18 and 21, his various wives gave birth in many bad situations, and he’s killed a lot of men. Still, you could feel the anticipation in the audience; we waited patiently all night for it and eventually, we heard what we had all been waiting for and Chris called the audience "y’all".

Well, this might all come across a bit negative, but I enjoyed a lot of his performance, it just went on a bit longer and got a bit familiar.

Originally published on my old blog site.

When I moved up to Newcastle and had Outlook inflicted on me for a while, I moved to using a trackball. I’ve found that they are much, much easier on the wrist for mouse-heavy applications. The experience has generally been good. However, logitech insist of supplying mouse drivers which attempt to be clever, and do the right thing all the time. One of these things, was to screw up cutting and pasting into a cygwin window. Finally, I have found the solution:

bind '"\C-y":paste-from-clipboard'

Emacs keybindings in cygwin: what more could you want?

Originally published on my old blog site.

Tried a new technique last night; basically, I just slow, shallow fried large lumbs of tofu. After a while, once they had sealed, I threw in some cayenne, garlic and, then, some Udon noodles with a bit of stock to let them cook.

Worked pretty well, as it happens. Took ages, as you’d expect from a bit lump of tofu, but required little effort.

Originally published on my old blog site.

I’ve been totally obsessed recently with Pandora; basically, they have defined a feature set for music, attributed this set to a library of music and there you have it: theme-based, personalised internet radio.

I’ve discovered some many new musicians this way. Ani DiFranco is playing at the moment (who I knew before). But Melisa Ferrick and Erin McKeown I’d never heard of before. Jess Klein, I am probably going to see at the Cluny this week.

At times, you think that talent is a rare thing, but, then, there are so many people in the world, there is a continual stream of excellent, surprising and exciting music and art being produced. The traditional media has limited us massively; we get to hear so little of what is available. It’s not really a surprise that the various social networking sites have been such a success.

Originally published on my old blog site.

This morning I got up early and came in for a session on module design, as part of the PCAP course. I was irritated to find out that it actually wasn’t on at all, and that I had completely wasted my time in coming in early (which, if I was being uncharitable, I might think would have been what happened anyway).

But all is not lost. I found the solution to a problem that has been bugging me for ages. Once upon a time, I managed to type my email address as phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.ukl, by mistake, into firefox. It’s been offering me this as a completion for the last year. I have finally found the solution on a blog — select the option, press shift and delete, and it magically disappears.

Originally published on my old blog site.

Have spent the last three days doing a teaching and learning course. I wouldn’t mind doing this course but, like most academics, I’m fairly overloaded and would be more interested in doing my own research, rather than listening to others talk about research that I am not that interested in. Still, there have been sections of the course that was quite interesting. I’m a bit distressed to find that I found the section of resource allocation — that is, how the finance system of the university system works, and where the cash goes — has been by far the most interesting section. What am I turning into?

Originally published on my old blog site.