So, what conclusions can one draw from the word frequency? I’ll leave that to a brave commenter.

J

The faith of Christ is the faith of the common man. An intellectual has to overcome his own precious precociousness to understand it. Even those who mock the faith by calling it a “meme” pay homage to its enduring power and infinite appeal. It is a model that explains as much of the universe as can be explained, and which correctly identifies as mysteries those things which, by their very nature, the mind of man cannot explain: my experience has been that other models of the universe are grossly deficient in some basic way, either lacking in hope (as paganism or Buddhism, which regard the world, and fate, as something to escape) or lacking in faith (as socialism, which has no faith in human nature) or lacking in charity (as Objectivsm)

- From here.

J

Saul Bass worked wonders over the opening credits, Drew Struzan distills the heart of the story into a one-sheet poster, and John Williams draws out an emotional third dimension* to the visuals via exquisite musical orchestrations.

Trailers have got themselves in a rut. While they are more polished than as recently as two decades ago (this post was inspired by watching the extras on the DVD of “Hunt for Red October), there only seems to be two broad families of future film announcement.

The first is the “let’s start the hype before a frame has been shot type”, exemplified by abstract graphics or a slow, up-close survey of the film logo, which serves little more than cue the obsessive fan and gossip generator to begin the storm of unfounded speculation. The second type is the “let’s carelessly give away the plot of the film” synoptic trailer. This surely must be some equivalent to an actor phoning in a performance, or taking a role just to keep the taxman from snapping at their heels.

I may be being unfair here but I’m really struggling to recall either a third option or a successful trailer that has worked inside the confines of a type-1 or type-2 trailer.

There are clever marketing bods let loose on the promotion of coming attractions but they’re not paying much by way of attention to the five minutes of promos before the main feature. Take, for example the viral campaigns for The Dark Knight and the long-awaited Tron sequel: the promotional work driven through the internet (but not restricted to the same) showed panache, demanded interaction and response from the viewer and both set the scene for the films and broadened the universe ** they were set in.

So what would I propose? Trailers should focus on augmenting films, not just describe them. Trailers should be composed of entirely new footage that is not present in the final production, but have been created to be stylistically and tonally “in universe”. Video games — or at least the interesting ones — have been doing this with their demos, offering the potential customer a unique gaming level or environment almost as a stand alone experience. It’s a no brainer; not least one more item to add to the parade of extras.

It would certainly make the lengthy pre-feature parade more enjoyable.

J

* No, I don’t think 3D movies are 3D in a meaningful sense. They’re little more than crude parallax. Until I can walk freely around a film scene, selecting my own angle of view, these are as crudely “3D” as the early first person shooters (such as Doom, and Duke Nukem 3D) were.

** I probably should have said “millieu” here, but I didn’t want to come across as a film school pseud.

I’m less vexed when I find out I don’t have a talent or taste for a new experience than I would have been as recently as five years ago. Rather than inspire frustration it provides focus and narrows the attention to those competences that deserve an investment of time and effort.

I’ve been thinking a lot about breaking out from the comfort zone of music at church. I had been reflecting on how I could pretty much turn up, sling a bass or acoustic guitar around my neck and switch into autopilot. It’s a slight exaggeration, but I could almost keep my head down and fixed on the printed music the band uses for the entire duration of a service and avoid eye contact with the two-hundred or so worshippers in our main service. You can guess then that I still have performance anxieties* in front of audiences despite nearly twenty years’ (flippin’ ‘eck!) of doing so.

My audience for the past three days has been a crowd of energetic and shouty primary school children at my church’s summer club. I volunteered not only to assist with the music (a selection of rather fun tunes with vigorous actions to exhaust the little tykes**) but to do the ‘talky bit’. Said ‘talky bit’ was to draw out some key messages from a preceding video where an apostle Peter relayed the story of his dealings with the renegade Rabbi.

It took me until day two of three to get the level and the tone right. In the absence of experience I hideously over-engineered my first talk so I could change the language and content to an appropriate agegroup. In the end I favoured simple ideas, repetition simile alongside interaction to keep the audience’s attention. Of course, having got the style right, the content prove, um, ‘interesting: across the three talks totalling around 20 minutes (audience attention span largely dictating things) I managed to cover Christology, the Trinity, the ressurection, sin and redemption and a whistle stop tour of the apostle Peter’s life***. Whether the kids managed to pick up a meaningful understanding of the talks remains to be seen; while being able to answer quiz questions on the daily subject does point to fact retention, it doesn’t provide much of a hint to the comprehension or longer term retention.

So in the end, no major faux pas or heresies and feedback where offered was positive and I’ve had a few tentative approaches to support the work with kids in a similar role in addition to music. Let’s see if this one has legs.

J

* I probably should have used a different term. This choice makes me sound like I should be taking up an offer from a Viagra spammer.

** I reckon PIXAR were on to something in ‘Monsters, Inc.’ in using small kids to power their monster city.

This round of discursive nonsense revolved around a subject other than Theology: As part of the coalition government’s cost-saving response to their predecessors’ scorched-earth profligacy, the Culture Secretary announced the closure of the UK Film Council. Opponents of the move began much wailing and gnashing of teath interspersed with calling down curses on the ‘philistine’ government and making adolescent sniggering remarks based on the Culture Secretary’s surname. The latter was regrettably a high-watermark for the quality of discourse to follow.

“What a loss!”, the protests rang out. “Don’t you know the Film Council were involved in the production of films like ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ and ‘Sherlock Holmes’?”. Impressive on the face of it, but one salient statistic cast a smaller shadow than hurling blockbuster titles around would suggest. So what did the UKFC bring to the party? Big bucks you’d imagine. The reality was something much more modest: £15 million pounds per year.

As I pointed out to the handwringers, this wouldn’t cover a fraction of the cost of a modern blockbuster (Sherlock Holmes had an estimated budget of $90m) and would be wiped out supporting something more modest (Slumdog… had a budget of $19m). More to the fact, the council has to spread the £15m across dozens of film-related grants, including supporting premieres, film festivals and creating fims themselves. That budget is starting to spread quite thinly now as you can imagine.

I started looking at the UKFC website itself to get some facts and figures. I couldn’t actually find any published figures to indicate the extent of support for many of the “big ticket” film successes mentioned here and in the exchanges — this is more than likely a result of my struggling with the godawful search capability of the site — but I was able to pull some names and facts on the UKFC’s support for British film-making:

Severance
Straightheads
Lesbian Vampire Killers
The St. Trinians fims
Sex Lives of the Potato Men

…and a swathe of miserablist masterpieces from the likes of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. To wit: cinematic Mogadon.

It became increasingly obvious that the UKFC were funding more misses than hits and that there involvement was marginal in either case. In short, inefficient, wasteful and unproductive*.

So-o-o-o, did this make a difference to the debate? Not really. The exchange continued apace as characterised in my opening comments and facts were eschewed in favour of heated remarks. At that point I took my leave.

J

* I did some more research and came across some, um, interesting allegations from film-makers that I am loath to reproduce…I may attract a hit-squad made up of media studies undergraduates and defamation lawyers.

Cut to two weeks later and I wake up with a somewhat worrying chest pain, like a bar of soap under the left side of my ribcage. During the intervening weeks my dry cough hadn’t shifted entirely, albeit much attenuated. However, the symptoms did have a possible cardiac element and my GP had advised that it may be necessary to head to A&E for a proper diagnosis of symptoms. A quick call to the NHS triage nurse resulted in a visit from an emergency medical technician and an ambulance. I was Royal Infirmary bound.

(I did feel that the chauffeur service was a bit OTT, but was rightly corrected that if I did have a wobbly behind the wheel, I could have involved fellow road users. Colour me chided.)

Arriving at the RI, I was wheeled into the building and Paid Attention To. I was Paid Attention To a lot, so much so much of the morning has kind of blurred into a bit of a dianostic mush where I seem to have confirmed my details to most of the A&E department, had several pints of blood drawn and had enough wiring and cables attached to my person to make Frankenstein’s finest creation envious. My lack of focus and recall was certainly not helped by some potent painkillers administered early following admission. Trippy to say the least.

Ultimately I was discharged around noon. With a cardiac condition discounted, the registrar concluded that the fluid-filled sacs around my lungs — the plural membranes — were still recovering from the earlier infection and were still irritated and causing the breathing discomfort. This was something that my late father had suffered with on a more acute scale where fluid build-up between the lung and the membrane was causing the lung to compress.

Anyway, I’m back home now with a clutch of those epic pain killers riding out the worst effects of this silly little infection for the remainder of the weekend.

Normal service will be resumed shortly.

J

Yes, Manchester was still too bloody hot.

I was granted enough of an overnight respite from the furnace to get six-or-so hours’ sleep at the necessary cost of having the one and only articulated window in my room fully open, and thusly equally open to the sounds of city center Manchester. While I didn’t hear gunfire — I believe that the knife is the weapon du nos jours in that fair city — I did hear plenty of raucus shenanegans and a chorus of police sirens before I slipped under.

Now; at this point I need to jump forward in time to offer a response to my whining about the accommodation. Whilst checking on Sunday out I pointed out that the temperature of my room was approaching that of a Tandoor, and was countered politely with the question, “Did you ask for a fan?”. I mumbled something about assuming the aircon was on the fritz (I was fully aware the room had no such device to fritz) before decamping for my train. So the moral of the story is that if you do patronise the Brittania Hotel, Portland Street, Manchester, there is relief available if the room gets a bit tropical.

OK, back to Saturday.

I broke fast at a lovely little farmers’ market on the edges of Piccadilly Gardens thanks to an epic pork, apple and cider pie. I prefer not to wax overenthusiastic about comestibles, but ruddy heck that was one fine pie…full of stuffing, flavoursome and the pastry itself putting many a Melton Mowbray to shame. Suitably satiated, I started my amble round the city center. A preparatory surf thanks to a local unsecured WiFi connection revealed that there was a dearth of interesting cultural venues open on a Saturday that wouldn’t entail train- or bus journeys, so I defaulted to just ambling. A couple of hours of shopping found me back in the Gardens, seemingly joining half of Manchester in the sunlight.

Repairing to the Gardens afforded me a chance to peoplewatch while I took lunch and browsed my Forbidden Planet purchases: Kids and carefree teens darting in and out of the fountain, a chance to listen to a skilled slide Dobro player playin’ the Blues and laughing at the poor old sod who had to wander around in 27-degree heat inside a giant inflatable Sol bottle. I suppose it’s a job and a chance to sweat out those extra pounds.

The main event of the evening saw me at the Manchester Academy to enjoy an evening with the prog supergroup, Transatlantic. Manned by former- and current members of Spock’s Beard, Marillion, Dream Theater, The Flower Kings and ably supported by a member of Pain of Salvation, Transatlantic performed for over 3 hours and effectively played all three of their epic albums including opening with all 77 minutes of their most recent recording, The Whirlwind. Barring a few playful deviations from the recordings (quoting the McDonalds’ ‘I’m lovin it’ jingle) and surprisingly few fluffs it was an epic night of top-tier musicianship and tunes I could sort of sing along to. I don’t like to keep league tables of best and worst but this was certainly up there in the exclusive club of stunning gigs. Transatlantic, please join, Steve Vai, DJ Shadow, The Pixies and Chickenfoot.

Nothing much more to report on the Manchester trip…I caught my train back up to Edinburgh having totally forgotten about the shenanegans of the workplace and energised for the return to my desk.

Manchester, we must do this again sometime!

J

So I find myself in Manchester for a long weekend. As is my wont, I travelled down on the Friday enjoying the ordinary luxury of a first-class train seat (decent seats, a power supply for my laptop and segregation from the lumpen proletariat) and a chance to catch up on a few DVDs. The day didn’t start as planned with a modest sleep in to 1000h (I find myself waking up before 0800 these days, now that my sleep is no longer sedative-assisted), rather I logged into work across the Internet to re-schedule a change implementation and deal with a few emails from people who didn’t pick up on the fact I was on leave.

Manchester was as hot as Edinburgh, 23 degrees centigrade, even with the sun hidden behind the multi-storey skyline. Like London, Manchester was quite muggy. The hotel, thankfully was closer to the railway station than Google Maps suggested, so after checking in I peeled my clothes off and made for a cool shower as air conditioning was conspicuously absent in my room.

I make a point of wandering around a city on the first day to get my bearings and to get ideas for the first full day in the city. I don’t like to over-plan my visits beyond the necessary logistics of travel and getting tickets for the event. I’d rather just discover things that fancy my tickle rather than traipse between tourist landmarks. Having too strict a timetable can mean a lot of the break is burnt in shuttling between venues. Cities should be absorbed, rather than consumed like a buffet.

So my wanderings took me to Manchester’s IMAX cinema. I had been to the cinema earlier this week but the absence of habitable ambient temperatures impelled me to find a location with functioning cooling system. That, and the idea of seeing IMAX for the first time intreagued me. Big screens aren’t that alien to me, not least the big screens in amusement parks that wrap around your field of vision and trick the mind into thinking one is on a rollercoaster, but IMAX seemed to be less gimmicky. In the end, I saw the new Prince of Persia fim on a screen that was 8 storeys high and splendidly high definition. I enjoyed it but was underwhelmed. Maybe the hype oversold a rather more modest reality.

One epic portion of fish and chips later, I found myself back in the hotel, room a bit more tolerable, and preparing for Saturday’s shenanegans.

J

* Fat. Really really fat.

The past two weeks have been among the most personally productive of my life, especially when the necessity of catching up on lost time at work impelled me to work at a rate I’ve never sustained in years. It makes me feel all young again!

Before this threatens to sidetrack me let me veer back to what I wanted to say: I feel a project coming on.

The public part of this project will see me prepare a curriculum of lessons for guitar and bass guitar which I’ll create and publish here. The plan has a couple of contingencies that if they are of a good enough quality, I may create printed versions that can be bought through a print-on-demand service. The on-line version will be Creative Commons.

I reckon I can create 10 lessons for an absolute beginner on each instrument and that should be enough ammo to see if I can deliver these lessons at my church. I do have a few people who would be interested in learning in 1:1 or small groups. That’s detail for later.

For now, I’ll cap off the outstanding work for my employer and see what free time is released afterwards.

I may need to take this site offline for a bit as I’ll need to rework the database-driven services to include a Wiki. I’ve found using Microsoft’s Sharepoint tool, Wikis are a great place to prototype, publish and maintain content.

J

* yes there is a super secret part to this too…not directly related to the musical component thereof, but interesting for me if it goes to plan!

As it stands — and there is a possibility that it even might change at this settled stage — my vote is going to the Conservatives. Let me try and explain why.

Regrettably, this decision is not a positive vote for the Conservatives, rather it is a “tactical default”, shall we say, impelled by the prospect of a far worse prospect being returned to Westminster. My preference would have been to give my vote to a genuine Libertarian option, but such an option does not exist. The Conservatives do have a small government wing to them, but like the Anglican communion they are a broad church which dilutes their overall Libertarian credentials. Similarly, the BNP and UKIP do have Libertarian-friendly policies, but the former are unabashed racists and the latter are too indisciplined to be a grown-up party. It’s quite sad as UKIP’s euroskepticism is quite appealling; Britain’s relationship with Europe needs to operate squarely on the common market model, not a superstate with a shared currency.

As for the ScotNats, I don’t want independence, so I can reject them out of hand.

The Liberal Democrats have enjoyed a bounce in light of the first of the three televised electoral debate, but I for one am immune to such superficial exercises. The LibDems policies have shown that they are not as liberal as their name would suggest. They seem to be retreading the same old social democratic mire that is occupied by Labour and don’t address the vital issues that I see as essential. They are marked by the same streak of interference that marks the paternalistic, nannying traits of big government.

As for the mish-mash of smaller parties and independents? Not this time. The need is to unseat Labour and put in a genuinely more liberal party into power with a clear mandate and majority. Ergo the Tories.

The election is for the Tories to lose. The prospect of returning Labour is hellish, a hung parliament will be chaotic and a surprise LibDem win will be little more than a slight variation on “meet the new boss / same as the old boss”.

Let’s hope the electorate delivers clarity and stability.

J

But one idea has persisted which I’ll try to unravel here.

Yesterday at church during the evening service, the speaker chose to refer to a passage in the Book of Revelation. If you’re at all familiar with the text, we looked at the last of seven letters to the early Churches scattered around the Mediterranean basin and Asia Minor. Jesus’s to the Laodicean Christians is scathing, but tinged with hope. One criticism stands out – the Laodicean’s material wealth compared with spiritual poverty.

Now, as a political libertarian, I believe there is nothing wrong with being wealthy, but as long as it does not become an idol and that like any other gift, it is used for the benefit of others. To that end, it irks me that so many facets of Christian ministry, books, DVDs, audio presentations, are de facto revenue streams more than they are avenues of service. There is a fine line that must be walked as paying for a book etc. can be a valid way to support a ministry, but in my eyes, many ministries are on the wrong side of the line. Arguably this has been at the heart of the most modern of heresies, the ‘Prosperity Gospel’.

So what is the solution then? The church needs to look to the Creative Commons phenomenon.

Creative Commons is a way to licence works for free without going down the full route of making a work public domain. The author of a book could, for example, make electronic copies available for download while offering a printed version which can be paid for. Depending on the licence selected the CC version can be redistributed, used for derivative works or constrained from commercial exploitation. The copyright remains with the licensor.

Hopefully you can begin to see how this would address my concern; those who do not have the means can access the resource for free, media can be shared among a church without fear of breaching copyright, and those who are able can still support the creator through the commercially offered versions.

This model works. Authors such as Cory Doctorow (of Boing-Boing blog fame) and the Diesel Sweeties online comic enjoy success by licensing their works through Creative Commons. At risk of using a horrible business cliché, it’s win-win. So what’s stopping the church achieving its mission by doing the same?

J

Anyway back to the reason for my ejaculation of pleasure at the outset of this post: A splendid meal of sea Bass and brown shrimp followed by panna cotta. The portions were a bit haute cuisine – a smidgen on the small portion size – but they made up for their reduced plate coverage by being intensely flavoursome.

It struck me while enjoying the courses that there is a certain craft to creating a balanced dish…matching complementary flavours and textures…it’s not surprising that all the restaurant critics use the simile ‘flavour notes’ in their prognostications and pronouncements. That line of thought lead me to think about why I’ve been labouring to record music for my Digital Audio evening class. Ideally I should have had a tune recorded on my PC in order to learn the black art of mixing to produce a final product. I fear that until I learn the craft all my recordings will sound like a mismatched melange of ideas and textures that skirt dissonance.

The solution is obvious: where complexity clouds progress, it’s best to take a step or two back and embrace simplicity. I’ll record the instruments I know well — guitars and basses — before trying to learn about synthesis and sample-based virtual instruments. Of course, this does mean having to learn how to play keyboards, but this is on my long list of things to do.

Anyway, I’m tired and have a busy day of training and travel tomorrow. I may even make it in time for the next episode of the evening class as long as the gods of rail scheduling get me back to Edinburgh in good time. The journey will be a chance to let me structure the training that I, in turn, will need to deliver.

Avanti!

J

So here I am, three weeks in with a deadline of sorts to meet. The first half of the course relates to creating and recording music using the Logic recording studio on Apple Macs*, the looming second half relates to skills required to mix and master a song ready for publishing or distribution. Therein, as the Bard probably never said, lies the rub. I need to get a song created/looped/recorded so that I have something to mix. This is where you come in.

I’ve short-listed three musical “concepts” that I’d like to compose and record, but I can’t quite pick one. So, over to you dear reader:

1) “Long Shadow/Sundial” : This one will be made up of loops and grooves…heavily sample based. I may record some short parts with my guitars, but this will be a cut-and-paste effort. I’m pitching for something like Endtroducing… and Private Press -era DJ Shadow with jazzy beats, film dialogue samples and anonymised segments from other songs. On the face of it, an easy thing to try, but it will take a lot of time (or a lot of luck) to find the right samples to get the effect I want. This could end up as a mess.

2) “Wire Choir” : Number two will be largely guitar based…an ambient, almost orchestral piece recorded by creating multiple layered single guitar lines that will accumulate and build into a series of lush, multi-voice chords, far beyond the voicings that one person could play on one guitar. Think of a clash between Gorecki’s 3rd, Brian Eno’s ambient works and Brian May’s harmony guitar. The main downside will be that it will take a heck of a lot of time to lay down the individual tracks…realistically I’d be recording 8- or more guitar tracks to get the chord sounds I want…and that’s before any other elements like rhythm, basslines or keyboard parts

3) “Faceless Monkey” : Number three will be a bit more traditional: I want to try a funk-rock idea that hybridises the Bass wierdness of Les Claypool (from Primus) and the angular, spiky guitar of Buckethead. It’s a much more simple proposition as I could quite happily jam away over a drum or bass-n-drum track ’till the cows start complaining. The biggest challenge of this choice will be programming the drum tracks; I can’t rely on stock MIDI grooves to suffice…I’ll have to tweak the patterns to respond to and interact with the bass and guitar like a good drummer does.

So there you have it. Which tickles your fancy? Deadline is 11th February 2010 to give me a couple of weeks to get composing. Leave your comments here, on my Facebook page (this post will be automatically imported) or throw a tweet in my direction.

J

* Spit, spit. Oh all right, barring some bizarre mouse and keyboard design quirks my first real recent exposure to Apple product has been largely positive.

If it is possible to sum up the year based on one’s mindset at its close it is wholly positive. This is an incredibly unusual position to be given the ups and downs (well, probably downs, more downs and the occasional plateau) of the latter half of the decade, I am more than a little surprise to find myself typing that word. Positive. It feels a little strange, but wonderful, to steal a Kings X lyric.

It could be the fact that I’ve kicked the depression into touch** with the help of a most excellent and understanding GP, it could be another step in my personal maturity that comes in tandem with aging, or it could be that I’ve had a heady draught of perspective that has encouraged me to see myself placed in the biggest of pictures. I dunno. Trying to divine the reason is a lesser concern than enjoying its fruits.

So, to you and yours, may 2010 be the year of  blessing, wonder, discovery, joy, growth and hope.

One last thing: if I may be so bold as to offer a reader a word of wisdom for the year ahead, please heed this: never lick a plasma ball.

Oh, and support your local erotic milliner.

J

* I’m quite sure that there is such a vocation. Probably somewhere on the continent.

** I’ll be weaning myself off the happy pills in the new year. No more drug-induced hangovers in the morning!

While Iron Man’s success was grounded in the ever-watchable Robert Downey Jr’s note-perfect take on the flawed billionaire industrialist Tony Stark, it was the film’s overall fidelity to the source material that made it a pleasure. Take the Iron Man suit for example: The character has been through dozens of iterations of the armour, but the producers of the film chose wisely to model (thanks to the late lamented Stan Winston) the final red and gold suit after the design by artist Adi Granov from his Iron Man : Extremis run with writer Warren Ellis. Even the origin story was brought up to date from it’s original Vietnam setting was largely a lift and shift of the underlying template. The whole thing worked because of fidelity to the source material.

The underlying idea for this post was prompted by my watching the maligned Sylvester Stallone Judge Dredd movie from ’95. It was a case of oh so nearly, but like another first-time director’s outing – I’m thinking of David Fincher’s Alien 3 – it suffered from too much interference in its realisation. The Dredd movie, like Iron Man, got so much of it right: The epic Mega Cityscape that is right up there with Blade Runner in terms of futuristic urban vistas, the realisation of the Judges’ garb of office (tangent: they hired Gianni Versace to realise the Judge’s look; I can’t for the life of me see where any value was added. The look is completely the same as the comic!), the Angel Gang in the Cursed earth were note perfect, The ABC Warrior realised the Simon Bisley Hammerstein robot from my teens…I could go on. Unfortunately there’s no credit for getting things right when some things are wrong.

The interference alluded to earlier realised itself in the character of Stallone’s Dredd: Dredd never takes his helmet off. The filmmakers – Stallone in particular reportedly – hadn’t grasped the iconic nature of the lawman, and that his anonymity (sans epic jawline) was deliberate and necessary. Dredd is the personification of justice for the third millennium, replacing the blindfolded figure bearing a sword in one hand and scales in the other, with a Lawgiver pistol and a genetic incorruptability. Dredd is a cypher, something that every writer has maintained in the thirty odd years he’s been in print…a force of nature, not a hero in the conventional sense. Judges are part of the city, like an immune system. Certainly not a character to be used as a star vehicle.

Still, there’s hope for the 60-year-old yet. Rebellion, the owner of the parent 2000AD comic are lining up a cinematic reboot which should address the faults of its predecessor. If they don’t get it no-one will.

J

Veering back on track from the brink of a tangent, I have succumbed to the siren call of the smartphone. It’s been on the books for a while when I realised that my PDA was getting long in the tooth and the romance of my recently-acquired netbook faded away. With the plan to relegate my netbook to the role of bedside Internet radio, a space opened up for a mobile Internet device. Now, being immune to the glamour of Apple, an iPhone was not on the cards. Something with the Google Android platform, or the latest iteration of Windows Mobile where shortlisted before the whole onerous trudge through the various vendors, options and tariffs put me off. Enter the Palm Pre.

I have a soft spot for Palm; I had a Palm V in all it’s glorious slimline metalness…a perfect little PDA that, well, just worked! That positive experience (and a quick round of due diligence by polling some published reviews, I took the jump.

I’ve only had the device a couple of days but it has done nothing but impress me so far. The hardware is compact yet powerful, the screen is crisp and clear and its touchscreen accurate and responsive. The built in sliding keyboard is surprisingly usable despite its very small keys – the individual convex keys stand proud of the base and have a solid response evoking the membrane touch of the ZX-81*. At the software level, the OS offers true multi-tasking with gesture-based switching and applications that respond to the touch screen and the built in accelerometer making the switch to and from landscape and portrait. If you’re a Facebook and Google apps user, the handset integrates seamlessly with these sources populating contacts and calendar.

There are a few niggles; there’s no built in way of syncing with your desktop directly – you need a third party tool*, the otherwise excellent web browser doesn’t have Flash support, accessing some of the extended characters on the keyboard can be a pain and there’s no native way to browse the 8GB of built-in storage other than connect it to a PC via USB. The biggest area of concern is the relative poverty of applications. At the time of writing, the app store is less than 1% of the size of Apple’s equivalent. It is early days for the store and it can only go up. Of course, some of these are just niggles and shouldn’t put you off considering the Pre. It hasn’t for me.

Comparing iPhone and Pre is definitely a case of apples and oranges; it seems the Pre is looking to take on the Blackberry-dominated corporate/business smartphone user-base, but it has enough nous to serve the consumer user as well.

I’ll post more in a month or so of sustained use, but colour me impressed so far.

J

* VERY early Sinclair home computer. For the mature reader.

* Not a problem for me – I can keep things in sync indirectly through the Google apps

Of course, crawling across the finish line or impaling one’s foot with a Junior Javelin ™ would still earn me a ribbon. A participants ribbon. The most unwittingly sarcastic piece of fraying fabric I have come across in my life. I’m pretty sure Mum still has those blasted tokens still squirrelled away in some ceramic dish or vase back home.

I don’t mind when people earn prizes — I should, because I’m a meritocrat — but the converse applies too. That’s why I’ve been angered by the supposedly esteemed Nobel committee awarding President Obama the Peace Prize. For what? He’s done nothing to merit it. Set aside the reported anomaly that the nominations for the prize closed two weeks after he took office (I’ve not been able to verify this), Obama has done nothing of substance, being mired down by opposition in Congress and Senate, and still presides over two wars and a war prison of dubious legality.

Unfortunately unless this knotty problem can be unpicked, the Nobel committee will have devalued their coin further, for looking at the historic recipients of the prize, this award is part of a continuing trend of bad choices like climate scaremonger Al Gore, former head of the effectively impotent UN, Kofi Annan,  as well as terrorists Yasser Arafat and Nelson Mandela. But then again, one man’s terrorist is another’s Nobel Laureate.

I fear this is just another marker on the road towards mediocrity…where instead of allowing individuals to grow and find their own level and celebrating true diversity, the implementation of equality constrains upward development as much as it brings the level of the floor up to a minimum standard.

Rant over.

J

Hideously over-engineered metaphors aside, I was pleased to find out, courtesy of the BBC, that Prog Rock was making itself noticed in the charts. To that end, being a shameless aficionado of the genre, I’d offer a few recommendations for those with a high tolerance for epic keyboard solos.

Porcupine Tree/Fear of a Blank Planet

I remember listening to this for the first time en route to a weekend retreat in Alnwick a friend invited me to. Despite being in the deepest phase of my depression (no I’m not going to blog about that again…well for the moment) the astonishing quality of this album punched through my fog-bound brain leaving me in no doubt I had found something, some band who were very special. Plundering their back (and subsequent release, The Incident) has shown that PT are something else. Take care to really follow the lyrics. Ivor Novello quality IMO.

Spock’s Beard/Snow

A very recent acquisition that has demanded a lot of my listening time of late, Snow is an unashamedly bombastic concept album centered around the tale of a messianic albino psychic(!) and his tale of redemption.  This description may make it sound like pretentious tosh, but to ignore it would be to deprive you of 2 CDs of some of the coolest melodic rock songs delivered with brio by a talented band who were obviously enjoying themselves. The album marked the final recording headed up by multi-instrumentalist /songwriter Neal Morse, of whom more down this list!

Dream Theater/Scenes from a Memory

Yup, another concept album, but this time with more of a metal edge. Ostensibly a recollection of a murder told through hypnotic regression (please don’t roll your eyes) musically you’ll witness one of the tightest bands with more prodigious talent per kilogram of any band this side of eternity. If you have any doubts about the ability of odd time signatures to rock, please start here.

Neal Morse/?

From the former Spock’s Beard frontman ? is a theological treatise on the Jerusalem temple from a messainic/Christological perspective. Yes, I’m serious…but even if you don’t have the first grounding in the subject area, you’ll have to be pretty heard-hearted (and inattentive!) to miss the central theme of promise and redemption, and if you are of a Christian persuasion it’s a joy.

King Crimson/Larks Tongues in Aspic

I’m not 100% sure why I’ve included KC in this list as I have a slightly ambivalent feeling towards the band…yes they are good, yes they are influential but sometimes they are a bit too cerebral for my tastes. Of course, when I am in an equally cerebral mood something clicks. File under “prog history”

Easy Star All Stars/Dub Side of the Moon

Offered slightly tongue-in-cheek as this disc is a reggae cover of Pink Floyd’s seminal album. But this is no sub Dread Zeppelin pastiche, this is serious, top ranking reggae offered by musicians who have a genuine fondness for the source material. Apparently this synchs up with Wizard of Oz as well*.

If you’re signed up to Spotify you should be able to get access to these albums if not other slices of the artists catalogue.

Go on. Fill your head with prog.

J

* You don’t know about that one? Oh you must google it…!

‘Only in the Gospel is the full truth of our humanity told; only in the Gospel, which is Christ, does our humanity come to its true source and fulfillment, the mystery of God and God’s unequivocal love.’

- Archbishop Vincent Nichols

(h/t to Ruth Gledhill’s blog)

I have a remedial plan, as always, to boost the frequency of posts. I was struck by the somewhat bleak content I have been posting of late. Somewhat harshly I described it as “a bit Daily Mail” – worthy in principle but tainted by Chicken Licken negativity. So here’s the plan: I’m going to start blogging about things I like. Seriously. I want to share some good things that enjoy doing, eating, listening to or watching that might be worth checking out, dear reader.

I’ve got some bare bones ideas captured in one of the (far too) many vessels I squirt ideas into, so I can’t fall back on the “running out of ideas” canard.

Over to me I guess

I did keep to my plan for the day by heading off towards Tate Modern in Southwark. I made a quick stop off at Westminster to grab some shots of the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey. For some reason an anti-war protester (cutely describing his protest as a “strike”) was trying to underline some part of his argument with a blown-up picture of a baby with Harlequin Ichthyosis. It did seem somewhat surreal but I wasn’t piqued enough to ask the protester why¹.

There was more surrealism at Tate Modern (see what I did there!). Getting there was a breeze thanks to a novel navigation aid in the form of bright orange lamp-posts providing a breadcrumb trail from the tube station to the gallery. It is an immense building spanning six floors with numerous sub-galleries hosting themed displays of sculpture, painting and printed works. Inevitably there were some pieces that were little more than piss-takes…literally money for old rope…but there were pieces from Monet, Henry Moore, Picasso as well as some contemporary pieces that were actually great pieces of design making the best use of the space they occupied. As always I gravitated to the items that piqued my interest most; poster and print work (including a room full of Socialist Realism/Heroic Realism Soviet-era posters and a themed gallery based upon a generic Manga character called Ann Lee and her “identity”).

I managed a quick jaunt into the city for a visit to the Forbidden Planet superstore to try and fill a few gaps in my comic/graphic novel collection before scooting back to the hotel to get ready for the main event – the Chickenfoot gig.

I had a small panic on the way out of the hotel having read the ticket face to see the gig was scheduled to start in 5 minutes. One taxi ride lated and a quick glance at the queues snaking around the Shepherd’s Bush Empire put me at my ease. I reckon I could have made some money from the scalpers looking to buy spare tickets – the show had sold out relatively quickly – but that would have defeated the purpose of the London visit. In the end the gig was immensely good, with the ‘foot giving an energetic performance that belied the band’s age. With the exception of a Deep Purple cover and a nod to singer Sammy Hagar’s former band, Montrose, the band played through most if not all of their debut album. Drummer Chad Smith was a complete nutter whose horseplay drew blood on two occasions, Sammy whipped up the crowd as well as giving a sterling rock vocal performance. Chad and bassist Michael Anthony’s musicianship stood out particularly with Anthony’s basswork eclipsing his recorded work with Van Halen. And Joe Satriani? I already mentioned in my Amazon review of the album, Joe’s work was fresh and interesting showing a depth to his rhythm playing that has been absent from his solo work. All in all it was really obvious that the guys were enjoying themselves and that made the gig all the more pleasant for the sell-out crowd. The band did hint at coming back for a bigger tour later in the year; it seemed they weren’t sure of filling the modest Empire venue. I shall keep an eye on announcements. Hopefully they’ll come to Scotland.

Leaving the gig I ended up walking with some of the occupants of the “VIP” area. I had looked over to the reserved seating to try and see if there were any famous faces but in the end I didn’t recognise anyone, just a mix of suited men, teens and kids. I guessed that the reserved seating was for the premium ticket holders or competition winners.  I couldn’t have been more wrong. Two of the older men ended up being the actors behind Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel and David St. Hubbins. Of course in an attempt to look cool, I didn’t rubberneck or annoy them on their way to the gig afterparty. Apparently John MacEnroe was there as well! Not quite anecdote fodder but a nice little bonus.

Nothing much more to report after the gig as Friday was taken up with travelling back home.

All in all, it was a good break. Not relaxing in the true sense of the word, but it was good to get away, spoil myself in a novel way and recharge the mental batteries. That’s the main benefit – I feel re-energised and ready to revisit goals and plans that have stalled or been relegated to the pages of my Moleskine. Heck, I’m even looking forward to going back to work!

J

1. You can Google it if you wish. Not for those with squeam.

• London is still horribly hot. Had to peel my jacket off my shirt which had aquired a pint of sweat between Heathrow and Hammersmith.
• A little nugget of goodness from the journey – a new teabag to try: Twinings African Rooibos, Strawberry and Vanilla. Exquisite.
• Hotel is pleasant, but I’ll have to see how well I sleep tonight to appraise its merits. One definite plus side, my advance booking has saved me about 60% of the cost of the stay; rooms start at £175 according to the price list behind reception.
• Has London got nicer since last visit? No doubt looking every inch the gormless tourist I’ve had several offers of help from locals. Underground wasn’t a sauna-cum-concentration camp, even at peak evening time. Have they been refurbing the infrastructure?
• Picked up some books from the Piccadilly Waterstones: Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” (Thomas-aka-Headphonaught has been plugging this chap); “Practicing the presence of God”, mentioned in a recent John Ortberg audiobook (should compliment the Spiritual Disciplines series running at church); A Midnighter/Grifter Graphic Novel (I didn’t get all of the singles when the series ran) and a clutch of Moleskine notebooks – blame Thomas for this growing infatuation!
• Chickened out of going to see “Wicked” in the West End, opting instead for “We Will Rock You”. Gloriously silly stuff, differing only from a Queen covers band by a paper-thin post-Apocolyptic plot. Still, the singers let rip, the dancers jiggled and wiggled pleasantly and the house band were ace, with the guitarists doing a fair impression of Dr. Brian May replete with a white- and black finished BM signature guitar.
• Apres-theatre grub courtesy of Tesco Metro, so no extortionate in-hotel meals for me for this stay.

I think that’s it. Oh, not quite: I remembered why I hate full length mirrors. I shall be slumming it in the gym until 2010 based on the lump that greets me after a shower.

Tomorrow? Tate Modern, some window shopping, break in my DSLR and off to see the ‘Foot.

Rock on.

J

Twitter has been buzzing with the reports of the court decision, bringing out some gems of idiocy from the proposition’s opponents:

Firstly the inevitable drama:

sarahmcgarr: RT @queerunity: Civil rights are officially over, whats next ban redheads from voting because its a minority? #rejectprop8 #savekitt

Way to completely understand the aims of Prop 8. Still why not default to hyperbole instead of a reasonable response based on facts?

Now the over simplification:

Gemified: “All men are created equal. No matter how hard you try, you can never erase those words.” Harvey Milk #rejectprop8

Tell that to the occupants of your local penitentiary. I can’t imagine this cliche being brought out when the next hate crime conviction is handed down.

sinfony: Dear Mormons from Utah and similar brainwashed morons, please leave our state now. #rejectprop8

Translation: America is a land of the free as long as you agree with me. Maybe sinfony should have read Gemified’s quotation before lashing out like a drunken boxer.

And from a F-grade student of history:

twit_atgunpoint: Next up for ConservoFascists: reintroducing slavery, because they don’t want to pay Hispanics to pick the grapes anymore #rejectprop8

Hey, at least the Hispanics wouldn’t be expelled under the sinfony plan.

And from a student of inclusion:

#rejectprop8 uncool california, homphobia and religious beliefs don’t have a place in the modern legal system

I’m starting to understand the term “Liberal Fascism” more and more.

From the “fail” file:

BunnyRamey: RT @EricDSnider That California Supreme Court decision is so gay, it wouldn’t be allowed to get married in California. #Prop8 #RejectProp8

Yeah. Nothing says tolerance like using the word “gay” as a homophobic slur.

And to cap it all:

rob_5000x1: #rejectprop8 all the fascist [expletive deleted] in california should be hung and shot for there crimes against humanity, another step back into dark ages

So is that hung and shot or hung then shot, or does it depend on how much ammo’s left? No matter. Nothing says “civil rights” like hanging people. Ask an African-American.

J

Apparently the Edinburgh Film Festival were compelled to return a donation of £300 from the Israeli embassy that would cover the cost of ferrying an Israeli film-maker to the festival to show a film. Unfortunately that was enough to raise the ire of some pro-Palestinian activists including film-maker Ken Loach, director of the Irish Republican Army-friendly film “The Wind that Shakes the Barley”. Of course, the Pro-Palestinian supporters, having a rose-tinted perception of the occupants of that disputed territory must have a bogeyman to rail against. Enter Israel, stage right. I don’t share a similar rose-tinted view on Israel’s behaviour, but this doesn’t stop me recognising that Loach et al live in some leftist la-la land when it comes to Palestinian Solidarity.

Could this action on the part of the pro-Palestinian agitators be motivated by an insidious racism? I don’t know, but it’s damn’d close.

J

The route to that fine emporium of comic paraphenalia takes me past the Edinburgh branch of L. Ron Hubbard’s fruity little club. Normally there would be a clutch of masked protesters garnering the approval of passing drivers by the sounding of their horns, whilst they waved placards secure (presumably) from behind their Guy Fawkes masks, but today they were absent. I’d caught a glimpse of what I’d thought was a busker, sitting cross legged on one of the corners of Hunter Square. Nothing unusual about him registered other than his preference for a steel bodied guitar — a Dobro? After 30 minutes browsing and shopping for funny books, I noted that the street musician was still thumping away at what seemed to be the same tune.  Rather than singing some kind of nutty scat lyric he seemed to be lauding sections of he Hindu pantheon. Satisfied he wasn’t singing “My Sweet Lord”, I clicked he was a Hare Krishna devotee. I could well believe at that point he had been playing the same “tune” for the entirety of my shopping spree.

It was an unusual location for busking, so I wondered whether he was offering ISKCON’s own little protest against the Scientologists. If that was the case, the irony of one cult facing off against another wasn’t lost on me, but it wasn’t important. The more pressing matter of moving my car before the parking ticket ran out was more important

J

“if [Darwinists] have had 150 years to make their point and haven’t persuaded most people, maybe there is something wrong with the point they are trying to make.”

- Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor

(H/t to  Post Darwinist blog)

Believe it or not, I have a degree of sympathy for one of the putative architects of the banking disaster, Sir Fred Goodwin. Today’s news carries reports of calls to strip Sir Fred of his title. Now, in time there may be merit to applying sanctions to Sir Fred, stripping him of his title and clawing back some of his vast pension, but for now there is a very real sense that a kangaroo court has been convened.

Some of the more credible news agencies have sought the opinion of experts to see if it were possible to take punitive action against Sir Fred. It would appear that it’s not possible under the rule of law. This hasn’t stopped the waves of bombast from current and past Labour government ministers in a fashion that grabs headlines but does not make matters clearer. This sabre-rattling is, I believe, an attempt to deflect a share of responsibility that the government bears. I’m more inclined to believe that the government signed-off on Sir Fred’s £650,000 annual pension. Another reason, if reason was needed, to expel those incompetent fools from parliament when the next election rolls around.

J

 Japanese scientists have made a dramatic break with the UN and Western-backed hypothesis of climate change in a new report from its Energy Commission.

Three of the five researchers disagree with the UN’s IPCC view that recent warming is primarily the consequence of man-made industrial emissions of greenhouse gases. Remarkably, the subtle and nuanced language typical in such reports has been set aside.

One of the five contributors compares computer climate modelling to ancient astrology. Others castigate the paucity of the US ground temperature data set used to support the hypothesis, and declare that the unambiguous warming trend from the mid-part of the 20th Century has ceased.

Hopefully this will further weaken the Carbon cultists.

(Hat tip to Vox Day)

J

Bah.

J

Y’see, while the Black Dog was being its most belligerent, I couldn’t read. Literally couldn’t read. I seemed to vacillate between some kind of dyslexia where my ability to scan and parse text required me to re-read paragraphs three or four times to take in the information and regressing to my hoard of graphic novels with their stunning art and strict word counts constrained by the dimensions of the drawn panel or the speech-bubble. Now, I’m taking in information and on the occasions I move into the realm of non-fiction, I find I’m able to critically and analytically process the information and impose it into the web of interconnections that my mind, as a symbolic thinker, creates as a thought-scaffold.

While a most welcome development, having always had a love of the written word, it makes the specific task of personal and professional development a much less daunting prospect; in 2009 I’ve set myself a bold challenge of getting a new clutch of letters after my name and this has resulted in accruing a stack of thick, hardback textbooks approximately three feet high. I may be exaggerating as to the size of the textbook tower, but there must be three- or four thousand pages worth of information, much of it utterly new, that I’m committing to take in, memorise and ultimately apply to my day-to-day work.

Bring it on!

J

I’m starting to warm to the idea of being more self sustaining. The temptation of staying within a lazy drive and a modest walk away from a 24-hour grocery gigastore is to turn up, credit card in hand, and exercise my rights as a consumer. I think the economic downturn and the threat of redundancy has made me think more about value for money. Oddly enough, despite the prospects of moving house in the immediate future are nil, frankly, my preference for apartment living has been overtaken by the appeal of a suburban semi with a garden in which (you can probably guess) I can turn over to cultivating veg.

That’s something for the "Maybe/Some Day" file that my personal organisation guru recommends making. For now, I’ll have to settle for a breadmaker and my patchy lawn.

J

While I’ve got an embryonic plan in place to address my personal technical development (my key marketable skill), I’m taking a along serious look at how I manage the totality of my tasks and responsibilities. To that end I’ve got my hands on a book called "Getting Things Done" by David Allen.

To be fair, I’m only two chapters into the book, but in those two chapters the author has outlined the kernel of the GTD philosophy – and I like it. I’ve been on expensive time management courses with equally expensive bespoke paper based organisers (that went up the Swannee even before I needed to order refills), bought and read books on how to make the most of Microsoft’s Outlook E-Mail/Calendar/Task management tool (I couldn’t get past the overly-florid and self-congratulatory introductory chapter) and ultimately fell back to scribbling undecipherable notes on stickies, print-outs and pads of paper that I would lose, mislay or ultimately be unable to read thanks to my illegible scratchings.

For now I use Outlook at home and at work to manage and track activities…well Outlook and gray matter as I still like to gestate ideas in my head contra best GTD practice. The benefits of Outlook boil down to the inescapable legibility of the Verdana font and Outlook’s tendency to go "ping" when I’m supposed to do something.

Of course, I may develop a bullet-proof process for getting things done, but I may have to address my general reluctance to actually knuckle down and fulfil the planned activities!*

J

* quoth the man who has planned but failed to attend the gym all week. I must be stupid…I need to lose more than a kilo a week to make my weight goal!!!

I’ve been working to a nine-day fortnight since the latter half of 2008, an agreed change to the normal nine to five in an attempt to mitigate against future absences caused by the Black Dog. It works well. Thinking about it, I guess the normal rush-rush of a Church Sunday didn’t serve much as a day of rest.

Oddly enough, I often find myself wondering what to do with free time, especially if I’ve completed the usual domestic fallback activities. A singular lack of imagination on my part usually results in a day being sacrificed to the boob tube, x-box, or surfing for novelties. It’s not a pattern I can afford to maintain as the year promises to make many demands on my time and I need to be efficient with it, least of all developing my professional skills.

So back to work tomorrow. The snow had turned to slush by the time I picked up my ‘phone and made a pilgrimage to Tesco to post some second hand DVDs to their new owners and to buy the raw ingredients for my new bread maker. I’m kind of hoping that the unanswered messages don’t promise a busy day with colleagues stranded at home because of the snow. One of the downsides of being within walking distance of work is being within walking distance of work – the expectation is always that I’ll soldier through the drifts to service the business.

J

When news that Pastor Rick Warren had been approached to offer one of the inaugural prayers, the howls from the left and militant LGBT started in earnest. With the eyes of the world on him, Warren could have played nice-nice and offered a prayer to an indulgent Grandparent figure. Instead, Warren offered this prayer:

Almighty God, our Father:

Everything we see, and everything we can’t see, exists because of you alone.

It all comes from you, it all belongs to you, it all exists for your glory.

History is your story.

The Scripture tells us, “Hear, O Israel, the LORD is our God, the LORD is one.” And you are the compassionate and merciful one. And you are loving to everyone you have made.

Now today, we rejoice not only in America’s peaceful transfer of power for the 44th time, we celebrate a hinge point of history with the inauguration of our first African-American president of the United States.

We are so grateful to live in this land, a land of unequaled possibility, where a son of an African immigrant can rise to the highest level of our leadership. And we know today that Dr. King and a great cloud of witnesses are shouting in heaven.

Give to our new president, Barack Obama, the wisdom to lead us with humility, the courage to lead us with integrity, the compassion to lead us with generosity.

Bless and protect him, his family, Vice President Biden, the Cabinet, and every one of our freely elected leaders.

Help us, O God, to remember that we are Americans—united not by race or religion or blood, but to our commitment to freedom and justice for all.

When we focus on ourselves, when we fight each other, when we forget you—forgive us.

When we presume that our greatness and our prosperity is ours alone—forgive us.

When we fail to treat our fellow human beings and all the earth with the respect that they deserve—forgive us.

And as we face these difficult days ahead, may we have a new birth of clarity in our aims, responsibility in our actions, humility in our approaches, and civility in our attitudes—even when we differ.

Help us to share, to serve, and to seek the common good of all.

May all people of good will today join together to work for a more just, a more healthy, and a more prosperous nation and a peaceful planet.

And may we never forget that one day, all nations–and all people–will stand accountable before you.

We now commit our new president and his wife, Michelle, and his daughters, Malia and Sasha, into your loving care.

I humbly ask this in the name of the one who changed my life—Yeshua, ‘Isa, Jesus [Spanish pronunciation], Jesus—who taught us to pray:

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name.

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.

Amen.

A prayer of integrity, bravery and compassion.

J

* Well, apart from pointing out the prescient nature of the song, "Cult of Personality" by Living Colour

Nonetheless, this aspiration is nothing but a pipe dream if I don’t start developing my craft, so I’ve set myself a slightly ambitious goal of posting a blog entry every day of February. Hopefully that will (a) rekindle my interest in blogging and (b) give me a push in the right direction. The idea of blogging for 28 days gave rise to a few off colour names for the project, but I’ll try and keep a more professional focus on this exercise.

Day 1 tomorrow.

J

*I’m watching ‘Transformers’ as I write this. Michael Bay movies are the epitome of ‘high concept’

"Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete." – Matthew Parris, Atheist, TimesOnline 27/12/08

I have a strange relationship with DRM – or in Facebook speak, “It’s Complicated”. It’s fine when its unobtrusive, for example its use on the Steam games download platform or the Audible audiobooks service. In both those cases there is a degree of portability or transferability (is that a proper word?) that makes the DRM components managable and transparent.

But thinking about it, my true concerns with music download is really to do with quality. I can accommodate the lack of a tangible product (though there is much to be said about combing the minutae of liner notes as seasoning for the listening experience) but the absence of uncompressed, un-lossless master source to fall back on makes the music download experience unsatisfying. It’s something to do with the cost-value gap from a potential iTunes download for 7.99 when I could get a CD for the same price (or less) from Tesco or other mass marketer.

Amazon seem to have a more flexible pricing policy. I don’t object to paying £3 for an album offered in 256KBit MP3 format is an acceptable exchange. In fact, if they keep it up, I could find myself being a smidge more adventurous with my music choices.

J

I apologise for introducing set theory in the same sentence as Christmas. Thankfully, Christmas out-Cool’s the intrinsic dullness of maths.

Unfortunately, I don’t think that future blog posts will rise above this level of stupidity.

J

I didn’t like the idea of killing this blog off entirely, so I’ve settled on a new plan. I’m going to get back to the spirit of the blog title and start blogging about guitar, music and my ongoing musical technique development.

More soon. Time to warm up the plectrum!

J

I’ve been toying with the idea of Ebay, and latterly using Amazon Marketplace, preferring to donate to charity those odds and sods that were filling space rather than provide a useful function…though in fits of laziness I would even bin perfectly servicable items rather than cart them to one of the myriad charity shops that occupy unlet premeses in my locale.

I guess avarice finally spurred me into motion and I began listing some of the items I have in my “get rid of these” crate. To my surprise, after three days trading I’ve grossed about £100 quid of sales (net value is less, of course, once Amazon take their slice and postage costs are accounted for) and I’m looking at a potential bidding war on the two items I have listed.

While it’s still very early days and I still may have to deal with the spectre of returned goods, I’m hopeful that this marks a good trend. I reckon I could recoup hundreds of more pounds from the DVDs I’ve grown tired of. The bottom line figure could grow further once I exhaust my DVDs and box sets in favour of my crates (literally!) of graphic novels. This relatively low impact act of rationalisation could help make a healthy dent in my mortgage…a good idea if the housing market does contract to the extent predicted.

J

Until then, I’ll ignore the threat of haemorrhoids from the cold metallic bench that my arse is currently gracing and take advantage of the excellent high speed internet signal that my dongle is reporting.

I’ve been up and awake for little over twelve hours so far, and I’ll clock up another four before I can collapse into bed again. This trip is unusual given my employer’s aversion to travel ever since Captain Credit Crunch started threatening executive bonuses er, threatened the value given to shareholders and the hatches were bolted down, but the unusual condition did not stretch to authorising business class air flight and a comfortable overnight stay in the local Hilton. Still, I shouldn’t complain as I’ve banked enough time in lieu to have a long weekend.

I still don’t know if I’m going to be retained by my employer. They’ve pushed the announcement of the new structure out a total of two weeks later than announced prolonging the anxiety, or annoyance depending on your point of view. If that wasn’t reason enough to lose respect for my employer, the spectre of the-management-policy-that-dare-not-speak-its-name rose again as the prospect of having to be less than honest with our teams  arose in conversation. It’s almost getting to the point where I’m going to have to make a decision to toe the party line or blow the whistle.

Rank has it’s privileges.

J

Even though I’m going to be waiting a little under a month to find out whether I’ve been fished out of a selection pool, the worst case scenario is a lot clearer. I may have a year before I need to rejoin the ranks of the employed, so that opens up a world of possibility which I’m finding quite exciting. If, on the other hand it’s all business as usual, I can reboot my planned house move.

“Business as usual” would seem the best attitude for me to take. It could make for some boring blog entries.

J

Next up is the all-singing and dancing content management system that’s going to require that little more work to make presentable…

J

My eight years of service with my current employer may be at an end soon as a premature re-organisation (premature in the sense that it isn’t taking place as a result of a new department head moving in) has resulted in a reduction in roles…a pretty euphamism for the need for redundancies.

The whole process will be brisk as the new structure will spin up in mid-September and I have to submit a personal profile form – a CV in all but name – in less than a week then sit on my thumbs while the selection process grinds away.

The outcome isn’t predictable…I could stay where I am, be redeployed elsewhere within the organisation or be made redundant. Redundancy isn’t an entirely unpleasant prospect given the potential for a good-sized pay off, but it’s more than likely that other colleagues have their eye on leaving the company sooner than their planned retirement and they’ll make up the numbers required.

Meh. I’m not worried. If the worst happens, my severance finances will give me five months to find a new job.

__________

This process has been oddly inspirational. It’s spurred me on to examine the status quo in all areas of my life and already I’ve been making changes and planning plans. For the first time in a long while my planning window can be measured in years whereas I used to operate from meal to meal! One change will be how I blog. I’m in the process of configuring a content management system on my website which in time will host my blog as well as a range of features and content.

I think it’s fair to say changes are afoot! *bdum-TISH*!

J

‘Nuff said.

J

“More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.

Since then I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.

What is more, the events of the Russian Revolution can only be understood now, at the end of the century, against the background of what has since occurred in the rest of the world. What emerges here is a process of universal significance. And if I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century, here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: Men have forgotten God….

It was Dostoevsky, once again, who drew from the French Revolution and its seeming hatred of the Church the lesson that ‘revolution must necessarily begin with atheism.’ That is absolutely true. But the world had never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized, and tenaciously malevolent as that practiced by Marxism. Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot…”

- Delivered in an address in 1983

J

I can handle the sluggish start to the new day, if only because of the promise that the new meds will offer in terms of my day-to-day functionality and general relief from my depression. What I doubt I can handle is the endless cavalcade of dreams that comes with drug-assisted sleep.

I had planned to make this a post about said weirdness, but I can’t recall anything but the most scant detail from today’s sleep theater. Detail is starting to fade in the glare of he harsh light of day (OK, the harsh glare of a bedside lamp), but I recall an experience that seemed to marry bizzare Dario Argento imagary, Lovecraftian horror and gravity defiance straight from a video game all set in a gaudy palatial edifice in the center of a city.

Decoding the dream is a relatively simple matter – it would seem my brain has been synthesising the fruits of my free time – my London trip to Harrods providing the decor, “Unreal Tournament 3″ providing the video game elements, and the DVD “Deep Blue Sea” providing the Shark-Human character.

This is kind of disappointing. It relegates dreams to a role of manic improvisation savant instead of augur or problem solver.

Anyway, I’ve got another week-and-a-bit of drug-fuelled dreaming ahead of me. Lets see if I can top today’s epic.

J

I really hoped that my return to work in February and subsequent return to full responsibilities marked an end to my tussle with clinical depression, but no, I’m back window shopping for an alternative medication that will encourage a natural sleep pattern and a restoration of my attention span. Getting my Kung-Fu back is an essential if I hope to take another pass at a couple of areas of personal development – restarting a part-time Theology course in the Autumn and securing a Microsoft professional qualification. Unless I get this ability to focus and drill down into a subject I will remain a dilettante with a depth of knowledge that wouldn’t qualify me as a pub expert, let alone a business professional.

So here I am, going cold turkey in preparation for a change in medication. This will be fun given my previous experience of accidental withdrawal, but I have sleeping pills to help me make the transition easier…in theory.

J

The reason for being in Heathrow is not business. The current business climate has meant that travelling by any other means than on foot is scrutinised by senior managers who should really be doing more important things, but hey, panic and irrationality is not really surprising when share prices drop to the level of glossy magazines from loftier levels. I’m waiting for the polite-but-bored call to let me fly back to Edinburgh after a weekend in London. London is one of those locations I’ve experienced en passant - meeting with suppliers or attending the overpriced accommodation used by my employer’s executives. I thought that it was time to experience London as a gormless tourist.

With my friend “L” in tow we managed to secure a cost effective stay by balancing a late-booked room in a four-star hotel in the West End with cheap flights. Flying down to Gatwick on Saturday, we managed to check in (single bed plus en suite for me, L managing to get a good-sized double despite a more modest booking) then make our way to the theater to catch the Monty Python musical, “Spamalot”. Being a tight-arse, I opted for cheap seats that placed us in the balcony in a seated area raked so steeply it gave me flashes of vertigo.  Actually, the seating area was so steep I could see down the ample bosom of the Lady of The Lake. Which was nice.

Sunday was our first full day in the city and it was spent eyeballing the usual suspects from the gallery of attractions before we went to the Science Museum. I’m not usually a museum person…in fact the last museum I remmember going to was the Sci-Fi museum in Seattle, WA some three years ago…but this experience was fascinating and we ended up spending three hours wandering through five floors of exhibits.  With a trip to the cinema planned in the evening, we made our way to Harrods. What a gaudy place. The faux Egyptian decor was only trumped by a statue of Dodi Al-fyad and Diana Princess of Windy Candles in a memorial setting that would have left artist Jeff Koons complaining that it was too camp. After an enjoyable couple of hours in the company of a CGI panda, we grabbed a pub meal and a bottle of Rose. This probably wasn’t too wise as a subsequent visit to Facebook resulted in L misrepresenting the degree of intoxication of yours truly to our on-line circle of friends. Sod’s law dictates that this will make its way back to my church Elders and evoke a “pastoral chat”…

…Which brings us back to today. A plan to visit Tate Modern was abandoned in favour of a whistle-stop tour of Tube stations with funny or interesting provenances (“Mornington Crescent!”) before exercising our capitalist mandate on Oxford Street.

All in all, a pleasant few days. Back to work tomorrow.

J