little bits of everything

I don't often go to see gigs, but in 2017 I somehow went to several. I've put photos in to break up the text, but my phone's camera doesn't exactly excel in concert conditions. They started in... February - Under Construction, the Bailey Sisters Under Construction  is a covers band based in High Wycombe. One of my friends is the bassist and for his 50th birthday he got them to play for the party (and joined in on bass). They have two lead singers - one male and one female - and some very competent musicians. There's nothing quite like hearing some great songs from the 80s and 90s played live. His wife is in the folk band,  The Bailey Sisters  and they did a few songs too. Traditional folk isn't my cup of tea, but I enjoyed what they did. March - elbow elbow is my favourite modern band. (Seeing as you didn't ask, my favourite non-modern band is Genesis and I was very glad to see them in 2007.) I bought their Mercury prize winning album "Seld...

As I've created accounts on various websites and social media I've avoided using nicknames. (The one exception is eBay, where I feared that a bad sale would mean that someone would track me down, so I hid behind a username based on a work nickname.) However when I was in my early teenage years we were given a CB radio and when I (briefly) took to the airwaves I chose Sparrowhawk as my handle. I'd forgotten why I chose that, but this piece by David Mitchell (the author) on A Wizard of Earthsea reminded me why. At the time I loved that book, and David's article could explain my love of the book: Any reader with experience of adolescence will recognise herself, or himself, in Ged’s portrait, and because we identify with Ged’s failings, we worry for him, can hardly bear to look when disaster hits, and afterwards care deeply about his fate. It may reread it now.

This is part of an IBM mainframe that I saw at the Science Museum in London. It's hard to imagine that anyone ever understood what they all meant. I think the reason there are so many lights is because there is so much to go wrong. The lights show when something's working, so no light means failure, or when something fails. These days the FLP BFR (flip buffer?) always does what it's supposed to, so we don't need to have a light for it. I remember when modems had a full set of lights: TX, RX, DCD, DTR and so on. I also remember using them to try and work out why connections weren't being made. As they became smaller and sleeker they had just a couple of lights to show activity. Then they disappeared altogether. We need lights for things we can't rely on. Once it's reliable the lights go away. Today I was re-reading the essay from Douglas Adams, " How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet ", written in 1999 (I wonder if that distingu...

A phrase from the latest blog entry by The Reinvigorated Programmer,  What I've been reading, lately part 23 , has prompted me to get this post out of the mental draft folder. Speaking of The Complete Harlem Heroes, a reprint of the strips from 2000AD he says They are full of panels that, forty years on from my first reading, still reach right back into my hindbrain and yank on my neurons. I have the same thing as I re-read a couple of comic books I have from my childhood, a 2000AD annual from 1980 and a Superman Giant Bumper Book: I must have re-read that book many times, because when I look at it now can remember imagining a cavern with a laugh echoing round it almost as if I was there. With this picture: I can imagine the slimy and firm-to-yielding texture of that thing, as well as the force it takes to push it down into that container. When I occasionally read comic strips/graphic novels it's not quite the same. Is it because my imagination has atrophied wit...

This isn't half bad This is actually pretty good This is actually very good They know much more about this than I do This is too short Why isn't there much longer stuff? How would I know if it's any good though before I commit to reading it?

Someone asked on Facebook what our 8 desert island disks would be. I said these, in no particular order: 1. ELO - Wild West Hero 2. Mike Oldfield - Tubular Bells side 1 3. elbow - Mirrorball 4. Travis - Sing 5. David Bowie - Heroes 6. Kate Bush - Cloudbusting 7. Genesis - Carpet Crawlers 8. Glen Campbell - Wichita Lineman Pink Floyd is a favourite band, but tracks are better listened to as part of an album

I've recently finished the autobiographical Bedsit Disco Queen by Tracey Thorn, the female singer from Everything But The Girl. I find it hard to review an autobiography without reviewing someone's life. I'd recommend it as a good telling though of someone who you could have been at school with, who went to University with a record contract, became famous a couple of times, and then wrote it all down. Here are some of my favourite bits: Talking about what it was like around 1984: I'd grown up in an era of collective thinking, of 'movements'. I was full of political and moral certainties, and the wave of feminism that had taught me so much was a very uncompromising one. ...it was a mindset that had seemed the norm if you were part of the 'alternative' culture. But that was all starting to change. For now, there was simply a sense that we were on our own, as were our contemporaries - individual bands in an age that revered the individual above all th...