Birthdays, Two: Yesterday
It seems as though the majority of my friends (not to mention my wife) have birthdays in March, making it an expensive and boozy time of the year. Maybe it's the June heat that causes mass rutting and a corresponding swarm of babies nine months later. I dunno. Yesterday it was the turn of both mar-c and John to get older. We met up with the former in Mono for drinks and cake, which was duly photographed for Cake Tourism purposes, then went round to the latter's flat for continued festivities. We were horribly aware of time marching on and work looming in the morning, but all life's pleasures must be paid for and we were having fun, so we stayed up past our bedtimes. Yes, we were paying for it this morning, but without regret. It was a good night and worth a fuzzy head.
The last few days have been noticeably warmer, and it feels as though spring has finally begun in earnest. The platform was swarming with midges this morning, but they were almost welcome since they came with warming sunshine.
Labels: diary
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Saturday, March 17, 2007
Saw-watch. The thrilling conclusion!
Click the pictures for larger versions with comments.
I had a very brief shot when it arrived, and can make some lovely noises come from it, though having enough control over the tone to make a recognizable tune seems some time off. It's R's present, though, so I've put it away for when she gets home. link | 0 comment(s) | links to this post
Friday, March 16, 2007
Saw-watch. Day Four
Still no saw.
Though there was a letter confirming my place on a writing course at Glasgow Uni starting in April. That's Glasgow Uni who told me to bugger off when I applied there in 1994. WHO'S LAUGHING NOW?
Oh... it's you, isn't it? Laughing while you count the money I just gave you for the privilege of being lectured at your institution for a couple of hours a week? Thought so.
This weekend I shall be attending a German-themed birthday party where, I am assured, there will be much bratwurst for the eating.
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Bleezer
No sooner have I had a moan about the lack of a decent desktop-blogging tool, than the excellent CoolOSXApps has a post about Bleezer, which is free, cross-platform, and has a bunch of nice features including Flickr and del.icio.us support. Writing this post on it (on Windows), and it seems nice enough, though the user interface is a little untidy and its built-in spell-checker just pulled me up for the word "a". I'll bung it on the Mac later and see how it does.
Eew - just switched from its raw HTML view, to WYSIWIG and back again, and it's made a bit of a mess, whacking in line-breaks where previously there were none. Nothing that actually affects the rendered output of the post, annoying all the same. Won't be doing that again.
Edit (Via the web interface.): Seems like it can't get old posts from my account either. And the gui locks up for a worrying length of time while posting. Still, it's a one-man work in progress, and worth keeping an eye on, but it hasn't completely put me off the idea of writing my own.
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Missing Choir
R had a gig with the choir at the GOMA as part of an opening last night. I went along with her after work, but because of the nature of the place it didn't feel right to hang around during sound-check, since I'm not a member and it was a formal event in an art gallery rather than a gig in a pub, so I scurried off to try and waste some time before the doors opened officially. I didn't much fancy sitting in a noisy, crowded pub, so loitered in Borders for a while, heroically spending nothing, before wandering down to Mono. Thankfully there wasn't a band on and it wasn't busy, so I spent a fairly relaxed half hour or so reading on a sofa before getting a text from R saying "That's us, come on down." Unfortunately I thought that meant "that's us finished sound check, and the doors are now open", rather than "that's us about to do our thing", so stayed to finish my drink and ended up missing them. Ah well. Remember kids: to ASSUME makes an ASS out of U and ME.
Saw-watch. Day Three: When we got home there was a card in the mailbox telling me that I owed Parcelforce twenty quid for VAT on an imported item. They didn't say what is was, but I sense the saw's presence drawing near. Paid on the website and await delivery of mystery item with bated breath.
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Japanese Lynch Saw
I really must make a start on that desktop Blogging tool, since, although the "new" Blogger's interface is much improved, it's still a pain in the arse to fire up a browser and navigate to the page when you just want to knock up a quick post. At least, more of a pain in the arse than starting w.bloggar used to be. If they'd just get round to supporting nu-Blogger they could save me the effort.
Last night we were supposed to go and see David Lynch's new film Inland Empire, which is generating both excellent reviews and awful interviews in the press lately. Though he's too mild-mannered to be bolshy, you can sense the exasperation whenever some lazy hack asks "So, David, what's your new film actually about?" However, after some dodgy Japanese fast food in Oko-Express on Queen Street, R started to feel a little green, so we went home instead. We got her an acoustic guitar for her birthday, so we started working through her "Learn guitar in eight weeks book". I'm doing it with her since, although I know a few chords, my guitar playing is embaressingly bad, and forcing me to practice the basics can't hurt. Later chapters go into scales and things that I've never learned also, so it's all good.
Saw-watch. Day Two: Thought for a moment that the saw had come when we found a "You were out, so we've taken your parcel away to an impossible-to-reach location, and no, we won't redeliver it anywhere that's in any way convenient to you" card in the mailbox last night. It was addressed to Rebecca, however, and I had the saw sent to me in the hope that would arrive pre-birthday. Drat.
Labels: diary, movies, music, software
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8 Things You Probably Don't Know About Me
I was "tagged" by mar-c ages ago, but after thinking about it for all of about five minutes I came to the conclusion that I'm not interesting enough to warrant such a list, and promptly forgot all about it. At R's birthday dinner last night, however, she pulled me up for it, and I promised to give it a bash, so here goes. I'm imagining the "you" of the title to be a person who reads this blog, but doesn't really know me personally. Any "you" who has met me in the flesh doubtless knows at least a few of these.
1. I used to run a music reviews website called Curious Goods. It was intended to be primarily about the Glasgow music scene, but was around the time that about five people in Glasgow internet access, and so only got a trickle of hits. We did get sent a fair amount of review material, however. If I'd kept it up, it might be like Diskant is today. But laziness prevailed. We must still be on some mailing list or other, since my mum keeps receiving press releases. Highlights included receiving death threats from bands we'd slandered. Lowlights included manually typing out gig listings from the Evening Times without even any kind of content management system to help out.
2. I have shaken the hands of both Kim Deal and Warren Ellis, and remain both disproportionately proud and disease-free.
3. Before meeting (and subsequently marrying) the lovely Rebecca, I used to go out with another girl from Texas. Given that I have lived in Glasgow my whole life, did not go looking for Texan girls (Honest guv'nor!), and there is nothing connecting the two in any way, this is a massively unlikely coincidence.
4. The only thing I have ever won in a contest is an Edam cheese.
5. I was reading the newspaper at a precociously young age. I've been in steady intellectual decline ever since.
6. Come this summer, I will have been in my current job for ten years. TEN YEARS!
7. I have never (yet, touch wood, yadda yadda...) had invasive surgery. I have had my face zapped by lasers several times for birthmark-removal purposes, but stopped going back due to an unsatisfactory pain/benefit ratio.
8. There are 401 items, amounting to a total of 1 day, 13 hours, 27 minutes and 2 seconds in my "Unplayed" playlist on iTunes. My OCD insists that I listen to them all and clear that list, but new tunes keep coming my way. To make matters worse, I've subscribed to the In Our Time podcast, which, while fascinating, is dominating my iPod during commuting time.
There, now wasn't that interesting? I tag Jackie Bignose, Terry "The Flan" Conners, and Ethel Merman. Oh, and Kenny and Dave if they're still reading/blogging.
Saw-watch. Day One: Still no saw.
Monday, March 12, 2007
Ice Cream and Jelly
A big run of posts and then two weeks of nothing. Blogging and exercising have more in common than you might think. Both are largely dependant on maintaining momentum and fall by the wayside as soon as I'm remotely busy.
In the last couple of weeks I've been involved in moving offices at work (to a smaller, but far prettier and even more central location), signed up for a creative writing class at Glasgow uni (starting next month), saw LCD Soundsystem at the Barras (excellent as ever, despite Moog malfunctions), bought Excite Truck for the Wii (looks like an early PS2 game but plays like Stunt Car Racer, so I'm enjoying it.) and, last night, attended an "old-school" 80's-style birthday party, winning pass-the-parcel, musical statues and the weird Mars-bar eating game, the rules of which are too long winded to go into here. I am the kids party-game king!
Right, maybe with the backlog of events cleared with extreme brevity I can get back into the habit of writing a little every day. Wish me luck.
Today is R's birthday. She is somethingty-something years old. She has to work today, which is sucky, but we're going out for a meal tonight with some friends. Unfortunately, the musical saw I ordered for her has been delayed. No, seriously.