After a loooong absence…

Silence, esOterica

Try to overlook the fact that the lead singer looks like Igor. (MORE BASS GIRL! LESS SHOUTY FREAK! UG!) This is a cover of a Delerium/Sarah McLachlan trance track which is much less interesting.

Money, It’s Pure Evil, Bigelf

Mascara and lots of hair? Yeah, that’s my new look! Can I grow this beard out while it’s still the fashion? (I like the way that they chose the most 70s proggy name they could think of: “Elf! No wait…BIGelf! Yeah? Yeah??!”)

An oldie: Everything Good Is Bad, Westworld

I am so fucking glad to have found this again after so long. Great song, great fuzz guitar - for 70p from Amazon!

…is (still) blocked by caravans and lorries. Back to Aber for the weekend. Some grey clouds, but patches of blue sky, the day slowly warming up and turning pleasant before squally showers blew in later that evening. By then, we were sat in the bay window of our room at the Marine Hotel, drinking and occasionally telling the most junior Research Assistant to go to sleep.

Handy items for every Real Man(tm)’s toolbox:

• Kamasa chubby ratchet screwdriver; six double-ended bits built into the handle, and small enough to go into your pocket. And it doesn’t break after the first turn. This partly assuages the grief over my late, much lamented £2.50 Woolies ratchet set. (More pr0n in Kama’s online catalogue.)
• Telescopic magnetic pick-up tool; curently 99p from your nearest cheapie hardware store (e.g. Wilkos).

Enhancing scanned images with ImageMagick

Having nailed down a faster b/w workflow for digital images, using Bibble, I’ve been considering something similar for scanned negatives. Obviously, the bulk of time is unavoidably expended on developing and scanning those negatives (which is why I now have four unprocessed rolls of film sitting in a drawer), but that time can be amortized over all the frames on a roll, whereas taking those scans through to a finished print absorbs more time per image. What I want is a quick, automated way to perform the minimum remaining steps necessary to produce an acceptable result.

With a little help from Classic Rock Announces Prog magazine (OK, that’s not precisely the title but we like the acronym better), and carefully avoiding ITV in the evenings, we finally found some decent music.

ELC Baby Rattle

Shake and throw audible rattle for babies aged 3-12 months.

How this toy aids your baby’s development:

• Develops hand and eye co-ordination
• Stimulates senses, including hearing, sight and touch.
• Strengthens muscles.
• Introduces principles of rhythm.
• Builds tolerance in adults.
• Develops an appreciation of nuclear physics, the environment and the more obscure Shakespeare texts.

Warning: Failure to purchase this toy will result in your child growing up thick and working in Macdonalds for the rest of their life. Is that what you want? IS IT?? No it isn’t, so hand over £5.99 and try to smile while you do it. You’d only spend it on beer anyway.

Some time ago, I used a handy Perl script called fp2flickr to import some Fotopic collections into Flickr. It was crude but it did the job usefully. After a moderate amount of hacking and bodging, I’ve now modified it to import PhotoPost albums into Flickr: pp2flickr.

Prog spin-off mag, Classic Rock Presents Prog issue no. 1, is in the shops now (well, if the shops are WH Smiths). It comes with a free “Prognosis” (groan) sampler CD, although at £7.99, you might be better-advised to view it as a mid-priced compilation album with a free magazine attached. That’s twelve helpings of bangin’ widdly-widdly hardcore goodness…uh no, wait, these are all modern ‘prog’ bands so not very prog(ressive) at all.

(Blows dust off category in blog.)

I am slowly coming to the conclusion that if you built up a billion dollar company over ten years but never did any backups, and then a massive data loss wiped out the organisation, you still wouldn’t have lost as much money as you would had you tried to develop and manage a working backup solution in that period. Nevertheless, here are some interesting links on the topic that I’ve found recently.

Dan Smith, 1968-2009

Scarlet Martyrs guitarist Alan Brown called me today to convey the sad news that our bassist Dan Smith (aka the Cult of Dan) passed away suddenly on 25th February. This has come as a great shock to his family and to those of us who knew him. Although Dan had suffered some serious health complications in the past few years, he appeared to have put them behind him and had gradually rebuilt a normal life. I spoke to him on the phone for the first time in several years only a couple of weeks ago; he was as voluble as ever and already planning future musical projects. Ironically, another band he once played with and taught, Nightvision, recently signed a record deal. He was proud of that.