bookmark_borderLight Drizzzzle

Ick. What a horrible day. Solid grey sky, walls of drizzle, faded light. Mind you, it might just be that the office windows need cleaned.

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Is it acknowledgement or acknowledgment?

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My nephew has gotten himself a tattoo. A large tattoo which reaches down his upper arm to below short sleeve level (just). It would be awfully hypocritical for us to suggest he doesn’t get any more but I am slightly concerned about how future employers will view them.

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Crapola. Bloglines is down. Now I don’t even have a diversion, I’ve got to work!! Nooooooo…..

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Popped in to see my parents last night, they’d been down to York and stopped in at Alnwick on the way back. My Dad was showing me some photos he took and I suddenly realised that Louise and I had been in the same place at the same time of year? Why this sudden realisation? Because my Dad and I took almost identical photos of Alnwick castle – here’s mine. Like father like son, eh!

Ohh and they got themselves a rather lovely new Laguna. I’m not jealous at all, honest (but BOY was I thinking about it this morning as I whipped our little Peugeot 206 along the motorway).

bookmark_borderEmployment

Kaiser Chiefs – Employment @ Amazon.co.uk

I’m at a loss. If this is one of the ‘bands of the year’ then 2005 is going to be pretty lean and full of bands that sound like they’ve been around for ages. Super Furry Animals is the easy comparison, and whilst the leap to the Kinks isn’t too far in terms of style, it’s an unreachable level in terms of substance. This isn’t a bad album at all, far from it, but it does sound like I’ve heard a lot of it before. Thoughts of Interpol, Radio 4, British Sea Power, and back to bands like Space and the “Furries”, all flood my head

As I said it’s not a bad album, stand out tracks include the single “I predict a riot”, “Saturday Night” and “Oh My God” the latter adding a sprinkling of Supergrass…. and that’s where I have to concede that I’m maybe not giving this album a fair chance. A couple of re-listens later and it starts to worm it’s way under the skin, not too deep mind you but deep enough that the track order is memorised and you know when to skip a track, something I find myself doing less and less.

And then I re-read what I’ve written above, consider the album from a new perspective and realise I was right all along. It’s NOT a bad album, it has some nice songs on it with severa,l if not all, being perfectably listenable. But it lacks one thing, emotion. I just never get the feeling that they are fully committing to their songs and if that sounds like some arty-farty way of saying they sound “lazy” then… well.. yeah I guess they do. The problem this brings is that it makes the songs forgettable. Too many other songs exist that sound like, and better, than those the Kaiser Chiefs have offered.

bookmark_borderSparky

I swear I can hear it laughing. Honestly, if you keep really still and hold your breath you’ll be able to hear it as well. Just a slight tinkling, not so loud as to draw attention but enough that I know it’s doing it.

“Ha ha ha” it says. “All those Saturday mornings, cycling with that leather case dangling dangerously from the handlebars, in rain, occasionally in hail, rarely in sun. Slow on the way there, fast on the way home as the weekend was now yours. Dreading the practise, the exams and the weekly showdowns. What was it all for?”

“Ha ha ha” it says. “All that time and effort and for what? I sit here, day after day, gathering dust whilst you tap away on THOSE keys, those inferior little plastic keys, what can they do for you? Can they lift the spirits? Can they move and sway the emotions?”

Chopin, Mozart, Beethoven, Gershwin all join in to mock me. “Remember us?” They say. “Once upon a time you could play us, your fingers and mind were nimble and able, but now? Ohh sure you can type at 48wpm but can you dash out a chromatic scale over three octaves? No, I didn’t think so.”

I sit and receive the taunts, deflecting them the best I can but some get through and jar a memory into life. My first hearing of Joplin, my one and only public performance in front of the entire school on a grand piano, the exam halls, the theory and the constant scales and arpeggios. From the little fat fairy plodding away at the practise tunes one finger at a time, through to the dramatic flair of the cross-hands, full fingered chording, or delicate trills.

I hold five certificates from the ABRSM, Grades 1, 2, 3 and 5 practical and Grade 5 theory (well the Scottish bit of it that is, RSAMD I think? Guess I should have dug out the damn certificates). My piano teacher (who was much more than just a piano teacher as he introduced me to Dylan, Big Band, and so much more – he is also the first adult I heard use the word “fuck”) was putting me forward for the Grade 7 exam when I quit (Grade 8 allows you to teach I think) so I must, at the very least, have been capable.

Yet I still ignore it, shying away from the keyboard, offering excuses easily; it’s an electronic keyboard you see and doesn’t have “touch” sensitive keys so every note is played at the same volume no matter how hard or soft you press, you lose so much emotion from the music that way; I don’t have the right kind of music, it never matches my mood; I can’t get comfy I need to buy a stool.

It’s probably one of the few true regrets of my life. All that time, effort and money that was ploughed into the lessons for what? Granted I can still sight-read a little, and the few times I have sat down at the keyboard to play it has been fun, trying to remember fingering combinations and the like, yet I just can’t get my head into the right mood, the right frame, the right key.

Maybe I should buy a piano?

bookmark_borderInternal Thumping

Most nights, just as I’m dropping off to sleep, I “hear” a loud thump. It happens fairly regularly and usually manages to scare the bejesus out of me. The first few times ended up with me wandering the house trying to find out what had fallen over.

It’s most odd. The closest thing I can find is the myoclonic twitch but that’s normally associated with the legs/arms/body. Is it possible I’m experiencing these in some small internal muscle near or in my ear/head???

Just wondering.

Posted in UncategorizedTagged

bookmark_borderRandom Alley

Rainlendar – Having to check your calendar to confirm the day of the week isn’t a good thing.

SuperNanny – could be addictive, and yes I AM slightly aroused by her “suit and glasses” look in a “I’ve been a bad boy miss” kinda way.

Barbelith – Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century and chock full of “interesting stuff”.

Google Video BETA launch – Helping media meltdown?

Blog abuse is spreading people – let’s be careful out there!

bookmark_borderHoisin

Hello? Is this on?

Small blip there, apologies. I presume I missed a memo somewhere as it was definitely a server issue that affected a few other sites or was this one of those things I was emailed about months ago and have since forgotten? Most probably the latter so apologies again for the lack of warning.

ANYWAY…

As a Technical Author, I write software manuals for a living. The process of creating the manuals involves a fair amount of planning, information sourcing and research. Frequently I am writing the manuals at the same time the code is being developed, and it’s only towards the end of a project that I get to see the finished applications and compare them with the documentation. When that moment comes all hell breaks loose as usually my interpretation of a function (taken from a specification document) differs slightly from the implemented design in the UI. This is the way of things and I have no complaint at all as I’ve grown to accept that at the end of a development project, the tech author will always have a heavier workload than at any other time. I’ve worked in several companies with differing approaches to product development and it’s always the same. Universally constant.

I’m at that stage of the project right now. The only slight difference from the norm is that I’m currently working on six different projects, with manuals for two of them (the largest two) still being corrected and re-written. I’ve yet to start on a 250 page configuration guide, nor a 180 page system installation guide (these are large enterprise wide applications with many parts on different servers). And yes, I am beginning to hit the “mild hysteria” stage but have yet to make it full blown panic (I don’t think I’ll actually get there with this project as, for a change, all the information I need is available, I’m just lacking time to process it all).

Hang on, I’m breaking one of my own rules: Do not blog about work!

Suffice to say that whilst it may appear normal here, I feel very much like the graceful swan (ugly duckling?) of blogging. Posting glides smoothly onwards whilst real life is thrashing away under the surface. But then that’s no different from any other blog really, what you post is never a true reflection of your life, of your person, of your thoughts and emotions. For one, capturing such things accurately in writing is a skill beyond most, and if we blogged everything we did we would be churning out the most awful, boring and repetitive navel-gazing posts day after day after day.

Hmmmm, that feels a tad to close to the mark.

Never fear, posting will continue apace as I have plenty of ill-conceived draft posts that I’ll be dusting off and “pre-date publishing”, but I may be noticeably absent from your comment boxes (it’s normally Gert that notices, mind you, as she chases me from comment box to comment box). Of course, I’ll still expect you to keep me entertained with witty and pithy comments as, if nothing else, it would make a change.