Vinyl: Bad Company

Artist: Bad Company
Owned on digital media: No
Want to replace: No

Bad Company were one of the favourite bands of a mate I shared a house (and a room) with as a student, and also a regular feature of the "Heavy Rock" discos we used to host on Thursday evenings during our time at UMIST.

I was never that into them, even then, and to be honest I don't remember buying this album, so I suspect it's one of those I "acquired" by virtue of being the Student Union Socials Secretary during my second year. This in itself mired me in controversy, as some of my "friends" held the opinion that albums sent to me as Socials Secretary belonged to the Union, whereas I treated them as a perk of the job (there weren't many!), especially since most of the ones I received were duplicates that had already been sent to the Union addressed simply to "the Socials Committee" or similar, and in any case I was only ever interested in a handful of the stuff that turned up.

In view of the bad feeling this caused towards the end of my student years, it's ironic that I now have absolutely no interest in replacing this album in my digital collection (although I would like to hear it again just once to make sure!).

Doodle Do

Breakfast table conversations can have the strangest consequences. A couple of weeks ago we were discussing the old DoodleArt posters of the 70s and 80s, and how I used to have one tacked up on the wall of my flat. I spent many a happy evening totally focussed on colouring in my alien landscape in those simple days.

Cue Nikki's razor-sharp Internet search skills, and the uncovering of the wonderful world of Wildergorn. I was enthused! I ordered three posters. One (Watergorn - of which this is a small detail) for myself and one each for the girls.

I couldn't find their recommended pens for colouring - Stabilo 68 fibre tips - at anything like a decent discount from any online retailer, so I bid on a full set from eBay and won, at a saving of almost fifteen quid.

Once all the breakfasting and household chores were out of the way today, I rolled the 27" x 40" poster out on the dining table and set to. Pretty soon I was just as immersed in the detailed world of harpies, water and stone as I had been all those years ago on Planet Zog. A perfect way to relax on a drab winter Saturday, when there's no colour at all in the world outside, but 40 vibrant colours to choose from in my little tin box.

Mmmmm... leather

A hectic day today with lots of comings and goings. First off, it was another morning on the picket line, so I dropped Nikki off at work early and took up my placard shortly after 7am. The morning passed pretty much the same as Wednesday, except the sky was clearer and we were treated to a beautiful sunrise over the emerging steel skeleton of the new Manchester Police Headquarters that's being built across the road from our office.

After packing up at 10, I enjoyed what is becoming the traditional post-picket Art College breakfast and drove home, arriving in plenty of time to greet Annie and Jamie. They arrived as arranged to shift our old sofas, which had found a new home in Annie's flat. A quick whiz round with the vac and all was ready to take delivery of our new sofas. Rather than give us an approximate delivery time, DFS had told me we were the 10th drop of 12, in a working window of 8am to 4pm. According to my rough calculations this translated into an arrival time of 2.30 for the delivery men. They turned up at... 2.30. Yes. 2.30 exactly. Funny how some things work out exactly as planned when others often don't.
In contrast an extremely late bus delivered Nat to the front door just as the second sofa was coming in. Well, half of it anyway. It had to be split to get through the door, so we brewed a cuppa while the men reassembled it, and then sat on our new pouffes drinking in both the tea and the wonderful smell of the leather until it was time to set off Yorkshirewards to pick up Blythe.

Ninth recording

A late start, a late finish, but my penultimate track on our long-awaited second album - Me & My Girls - is in the can, leaving me with one more to record, and Annie with two.

It's getting quite exciting for us now, knowing the release date is in sight and pretty soon you'll all be able to hear what we've been working on for the past few months (in recording terms - the past five YEARS if we take all the songwriting into account!).

It'll never get better if you picket

Another Wednesday, another few hours on the picket line. Actually that's overstating my active involvement quite significantly, as I haven't attended the picket since that very first time, what with it being minus eleven and knee-deep in snow and whatnot.

But the dispute drags on and is beginning to bite financially, as I realised when I opened my pay slip this month, and to qualify for the union's additional hardship payments members have to be "actively involved," so here I am back on the picket line, freezing my toes off and wondering how long it can possibly take for the hours to tick away until it's 10am and we can pack up and pop over to the Art College for one of their wonderful breakfasts.

As it happened today's picket felt shorter than the last one, even though I arrived at the same time. A few people I knew were taking part, so conversation flowed, and one or two of the pickets were marginally more active in their behaviour - tooting on kazoos and asking drivers to stop etc - which provided some entertainment and helped the time pass more quickly.

Not sure if it's a result of experience, but the "very British" attitudes I noticed on that first picket are gradually being replaced by a willingness to mix it with those arriving for work. Especially the ones who seem to think the best way of making it across the picket line is to put their foot down and drive at full speed on to site. A site, mind you, with a mandatory 15mph speed limit. That they are wilfully ignoring. Calm down ladies and gentlemen! The most you'll suffer is the acute embarrassment of ignoring a small group of people who, on any other day, would be your colleagues but who for these few days you seem to think it's OK to treat as targets.

Bloody Region Codes!

We've had a PS3 for a while, you might remember. Aside from the fact that the copy of PS3 Monopoly I ordered from play.com went AWOL after New Year and never actually arrived, we've had a lot of fun as a family playing Buzz and Trivial Pursuit, the girls have enjoyed playing Avatar, Oblivion, etc, we've really appreciated being able to stream the upscaled BBC iPlayer on the plasma screen, and naturally the Bluray movies are awesome and even the upscaled SD movies are pretty good. All things considered we were pretty happy with it.

Until yesterday, when we tried to watch The General's Daughter and got nothing but a terse little "beep" and the message "this disc cannot be played as it has the wrong region code."

Not this bollocks again? I went through this with our old Samsung DVD player, having to hack it to play non-region 2 disks. We never had the problem with our chipped XBox, because the people who write XBMC have sense enough to ignore the corporate control-freak mentality of the whole region code crap. Must have just been a coincidence that in the months since we bought the PS3, we've never chosen to watch any of the DVDs we bought in Canada.

I jumped online to search for "PS3 multiregion hacks" - expecting it to be a simple matter of casting some kind of arcane spell through the remote control - and was amazed to discover that after three years, no such hack exists. The region encoding of the PS3 remains intact and, worse, no-one has really bothered to try and crack it because, as most forum-dwellers complain, Sony would simply annul the hack at the next (automatically downloaded) firmware release.

So it looks like around 20% of our DVD collection is unwatchable on the new system. At least, in its disk-based form. There are plenty of instructions online on how to rip DVDs to MP4, or AVI, or VOB format, any of which will play quite happily on the PS3. Which, if anything, makes me even more angry. It confirms the pointlessness of the regional encoding, but forces me to jump through hoops in order to watch a huge chunk of our collection that we BOUGHT LEGITIMATELY.

Is it any wonder the big media companies are losing money to pirates when they put this kind of barrier in the way of legitimate users?

The silver lining to this cloud is that it simply brings forward the day when we move our movie collection onto a media centre, where it can be accessible from anywhere in the house and not subject to these pathetic restrictions.

Vinyl: Olias of Sunhillow

Artist: Jon Anderson

Owned on digital media: No

Want to replace: Yes

Anderson's first solo album and the only one I bought. According to Wikipedia he would go on to record another 12 albums over the 22 years following the release of this one in 1976, but I was never a "completist" (in relation to Anderson at least!) and settled for just this one.

To be honest, in common with much of my vinyl collection, it's so long since I heard this I can hardly remember anything about it, except that I did play it fairly regularly and would appreciate having it as part of my modern collection. It's not on the "buy this urgently!" list - if such a list exists - but if I ever happen across it then I would consider picking it up again.

Currently available on eBay for between a fiver and £17, although no-one seems to be bidding ;o)

Vinyl

I got hooked into a Facebook meme yesterday about "music that changed your life" and once I'd started thinking about my old vinyl collection, I was reminded of my long-standing intention to dig out the box of albums and make a note of the ones I want to replace.

I've already retrieved some of the more obvious ones - Genesis, King Crimson, etc - but I knew in among the relatively modest collection (I'd acquired 85 albums by the time I abandoned vinyl in favour of CDs) were some more obscure works that I would love to hear again. I also recognised the virtual certainty that there'd be some in that box I'd even forgotten I owned in the first place.

I wasn't wrong.

On the flip side, I have a distinct memory of owning some albums - at least two by Emerson, Lake & Palmer for instance - that appear to be missing from the pile. I wonder where they went? I dabbled briefly in car boot sales in the mid-80s and must assume, although I have no clear recollection, that I ditched a few from the collection that were out of favour at the time.

Still, I thought it might be interesting to start an occasional series of posts covering (what remains of) my vinyl collection, my memories of the albums and where they currently sit in my head in terms of wanting to replace them. Or not.

Flat

Set off to take Nikki to work this morning and I knew instantly something was wrong. That familiar heavy feeling of driving with a flat tyre.

Sure enough the nearside front was pancaked. Luckily the forecast rain hadn't yet set in. Changing the wheel on a road with a heavy camber, in the dark, is hard enough without having strong Manchester drizzle to cope with as well.

After twenty minutes we were back on the road, Nikki using her iPhone to consult the opening times of local tyre fitters and me hoping the spare had enough air to get me there and I wouldn't run over anything (else) sharp on the way.

Arrived back home an hour or so later, almost a hundred quid poorer after the discovery that those three measly feet of travel on the completely flat tyre had wrecked the sidewalls and a repair was out of the question. At least, that's what they tell you.

*sigh*

My email has been spammed.

Nowt so unusual in that, you might think, in a world where well over 80% of the entire email traffic is spam, but having learned my lesson with my very first (publicly accessible) email address back in 1997, I'd taken great pains to protect it and... until yesterday at least... been pretty successful.

I've owned my own domain for several years and, having never entered either of my main email addresses at that domain in any forums, online forms, or anywhere it might have been harvested, have managed to stay blissfully spam-free.

Indeed you may remember me mentioning back in September that the aforementioned original email address had bitten the electronic bullet, which reduced my spam count from the low teens per day to one or two per WEEK. It didn't half feel quiet around my Inbox I can tell you.

A few months ago I did get a hint that the honeymoon was over, as a small trickle of spam started to arrive. I was lulled into thinking it might be a passing phase, as numbers remained small and far between. I should have known better. Having made it onto one list - I have no idea how - it was only a matter of time before the list was sold on, and the heavy spammers started to hit me. That time came yesterday, with over a dozen invitations to visit an online drugstore in the space of five minutes. The pile has been increased today, to the point where I've had to create a new rule or two.

Sad, but inevitable I suppose. And yet a small part of me retains its heated indignation that, when the email servers of the world are kicking out their metric tonnes of CO2 by the second to no other purpose than sending reams and reams of shit flying around the planet so that yet more servers can apply carefully crafted algorithms to delete them again before anyone reads them, no-one has yet considered this to be a serious enough problem to actually do much about it.

Eight of the best

Apparently I've garnered a bit of a reputation for meme-stealing. To which I would simply say... there are worse reputations to have :o)

Before I get started on that though, a word about my absence. Apparently it's been quiet on other blogs too. Maybe the post-Christmas blues got to everyone, or we all thought you could only have so much writing about snow or (as in my case) there simply wasn't much I felt worth writing about. Things have happened, but for the most part only mundane things, or things that will keep for another day. In short, I couldn't be arsed. However, there's nothing like a good meme to get one back into the swing of things and, as the old joke goes, this is nothing like a good meme ;o)

8 TV shows I watch:
1. Coronation Street
2. EastEnders
3. Silent Witness
4. Heroes
5. FlashForward
6. American Idol
7. Horizon
8. Lark Rise to Candleford

There are also some shows I watch because I prefer to share space with the person who really likes them, rather than liking them for myself ;o)

8 favourite places to eat and drink:
1. Jawny Baker's, Toronto
2. Chiquito's
3. Nawaab
4. Asian Fusion
5. Ayo Gurkhali
6. Coriander
7. McDonald's (guilty secret) (oh...)
8. Wetherspoons (in general - The Sedge Lynn in particular)

8 things I look forward to
1. The weekend
2. Christmas
3. Weeks away in the Lakes
4. Spending time with my daughters
5. Quality time with Nikki
6. Going to the movies
7. Retirement!
8. Being published!

8 things that happened yesterday
1. Took delivery of a 21st birthday present for Nat
2. Delivered said present to its rightful owner
3. Said farewell to a faulty printer in the office
4. Had breakfast with a colleague I haven't seen since before Christmas
5. Heard the final version of track #8 of our new album
6. Thought about tidying my desk. Didn't.
7. Wrote (most of) this
8. Watched some TV

It's an exciting life I live and no mistake.

8 things I love about winter
1. The fresh smell of the air
2. Christmas
3. Daughters' Birthdays
4. Dark nights
5. Icicles
6. Log fires
7. Bonfires
8. Mulled wine

8 things on my wish list
1. Retirement!
2. Finishing the house refurb
3. A publishing deal for my novel
4. Selling a Beresford & Wallace song
5. Grandchildren. But not yet.
6. Visiting Toronto again
7. Replacing my favourite vinyl albums
8. Fixing my *&^%$ computer

8 words I use often
1. what?
2. sorry?
3. pardon?
4. prat
5. really
6. jesus
7. sh1t
8. floccinaucinilihilipilification

8 things I have learned from the past
1. Some things can be mended
2. Some things can't be mended
3. Not trying to mend something that can be mended will cost you, but you won't ever know how much
4. Trying to mend something that can't be mended will cost you, and you'll be able to count every minute, penny, and drop of salt
5. Sometimes it's hard to tell whether or not something can be mended
6. People who are worth it don't say "because I'm worth it"
7. People who can mend things don't always say "I can mend it"
8. Sometimes all it takes is a smile

8 books, websites, things I recommend
1. iPhones
2. IMDb - it's not just for movies
3. Joomla! For people who can't do websites and want a website
4. A Million Little Pieces. One of the best books I've read in a long time
5. Bending over slowly
6. Fantasy author: Stephen Donaldson
7. XKCD - a geeky laugh three times a week
8. The Hunger Site - a click a day to absolve your guilt for being well fed

8 people I'm tagging for this post

I'm not doing this either :o) So sue me.

The thin veneer of civilisation

Our plumber eventually called back in response to my plaintive cries for help with our failed boiler. He said he'd "put money on" it being a common problem with condensing boilers, particularly in the UK. A blocked condensate drain pipe.

Why particularly the UK? Because we're not used to such extreme weather conditions, heating engineers don't bother to lag the drain. Their customers are driven by cosmetic concerns, especially when the pipe traverses a visible section of exterior wall. The pipe is small-bore white PVC, and doesn't call much attention to itself on its own. Lagged, it doesn't look as good.

Pour some hot water over it, our friendly plumber suggested, and all will be well. So I did, and it was. Within seconds, I'd reset the boiler and the interior temperature was climbing from its nadir of 7°C. Trust me, I'll be lagging that pipe.

But those two hours while I was waiting for plumbing help, and the few hours before when we'd dressed in the cold, drunk our coffee in the cold, and where I'd sat watching daytime TV (I was on strike again yesterday) and failing to get anywhere near warm, brought it home to me how thin and fragile our veneer of civilisation really is.

It's easy to feel safe, secure and superior when you're warm and comfortable. If your attention is permanently occupied with staying warm, there's very little time for other considerations. Cold weather: a barrier to philosophy.

As a boy, and in common with most of my contemporaries, I regularly awoke on winter's mornings with frost on the inside of my bedroom window. Being a geeky child, I kept a record of the temperature, which often dropped as low as 45°F - only a little above the 7°C I was complaining about moments ago. I suspect that would be grounds for accusations of child cruelty these days. Back then it was just the way things were. When did I get so soft?

The old boiler

...is not that old actually. The first money we spent on the house when we moved in (October 2006) went on a new boiler. Three years is not old, particularly for such a high-spec and well renowned boiler.

Last night, it developed a fault.

The last hour of TV viewing had become increasingly uncomfortable even though we'd had the fire on, but I'd put it down to the extreme weather. Forecasts predicted it would be even colder in parts overnight than yesterday, with some areas dropping to -20° - same as the South Pole - and that fire always was more decorative than practical.

But when we walked into the hall and discovered the temperature had fallen two degrees below the supposed minimum, we knew something was up, and the flashing blue light on the front of the boiler (and the flashing error code beneath the cover) confirmed that this almost-brand-new boiler had chosen the coldest period in 50 years in which to turn up its toes. Great.

I'd been holding off booking a service expecting our heating engineer to be snowed under (haha!) with emergency calls, but it looks like we'll be another to add to his list now.

Minus WHAT?

So I'd seen the forecast and all, and it certainly felt cold when I stepped outside although, I have to say, not as cold as it has been on previous days. There was no wind, and the street lay under its quiet blanket of snow pretty much as it had done all week.

I'll admit to the flash of a brief thought across my mind as I turned the key in the ignition - "will it start?" - but the old war horse turned over slowly and fired up first time. And as the dashboard glowed into life I read the external temperature gauge.

-10.5°C

Huh? This may sound dumb, but I didn't know it could go that low. I've never seen double figure minus before. As we hit the motorway on the journey to Nikki's office the temperature dropped another half a degree. Minus 11. Good grief.

I learned later that it may well have been even colder. Maybe the sensor is not very accurate. A mate who lives only a few streets away drives a truck for a living, and that reported minus 15. News came in later that the coldest parts of the country were only a couple of degrees warmer than the South Pole. Lovely.

Happy New Year

I suppose I should write something on here to herald the new year, even though it looked for a while as if things were conspiring to allow the shit to ooze through into 2010 from 2009. I almost got dragged into a pointless debate about whether it's a new decade or not after some crabby old bat left a rather short-tempered reply to my New Year's facebook status, but in the end I managed not to rise to her ill-flavoured bait. Breaking with tradition by working at home for the first day back at work after a lengthy period of absence (17 wonderful days) on account of (a) the snow and (b) Nikki taking a day off sick with a nasty cold, saw me locked out of the corporate network owing to my anti-virus definitions being too far out of date.

Trouble was, several thousand other staff members were in the same boat, and had also elected to work at home. I don't know whether their wives/girlfriends/partners had nasty colds, but most of them probably had snow. So the VPN was totally swamped and my repeated attempts to update my AV definitions resulted in nothing but server timeouts throughout the whole day. By far the quietest first-day-back on record, the downside being that I had to struggle into the office through even more snow (around 7 inches fell overnight) today to get access.

Lest this first post of 2010 leave as nasty a taste in the mouth as the aforementioned crabby bait, I should say that it's not all been bad. I did get to see Avatar for a second time (on New Year's Eve actually, but who's counting?) after we cried off from the planned NYE party with various medical complaints; the Christmas deccies came down in short order (two hours) on Saturday, and now sit boxed awaiting their annual departure for the upper floor; and our aquarium completed its nitrogen cycle on Sunday, so we popped out and bought another three cherry barbs to make the shoal up to six. Apart from one very large female who arrived in the new group, the other five are now virtually indistinguishable, so we no longer know which is Bee, Bop, or Lulu. It's looking like we may need a rechristening. Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich is a possibility, although as there's six of the blighters we'll have to split Dave and Dee, and of course the enormous female just has to be Tich.