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November 25 2018November 25 2018

Lord Of The Lost – The Garage

Smith and I traveled to the lofty intellectual heights of Islington last night to visit the Garage venue just outside Highbury station. On the bill were Lord Of The Lost, a German rock band, the venue was meant to be Electrowerkz but I think they sold more tickets than expected and they moved the gig to the Garage.

This was my third time at the Garage and again I was impressed. It’s smaller than I remembered, a nice, cosy (but not squashed) venue. I will say now that the sound in the place was pretty impressive and worked well. Probably better than Electrowerkz but I think this is largely to there being a little more space. Possible improvements would be a light beam a little further out from the stage to light up the bands a little more from the front rather than from a 3/4 position.

The second band were just finishing as we entered and they weren’t that impressive.

One of my favourites on as last support act were Unzucht. I’d seen them before at two M’era Luna festivals and I was looking forward to this.

They were good fun and played a decent set. They play a good hard riffage and then go and mess it up with an almost-ballad in the middle but I enjoy their style and it was good fun.

The headliners came on and I wasn’t really aware of the time but when I did look at my watch it was only 21:30 so for some reason there was an early curfew. It looked like they were setting up an urban-disco type thing.

Lord Of The Lost were good. It was a solid fun set and they seemed genuinely happy to be playing to a large-ish crowd.

I don’t really remember what songs they played but they started with “On This Rock” and ended with “La Bomba” which is always good for fun. Somewhere in the middle they played “Drag Me To Hell”.

It was a good evening and one that I ended too early really because I needed to be up early the next day [boo!]. Normally there would be more written here but I’m tired.

November 13 2018

The Nicest People

I recently had to spend some time in the company of the NHS. In case you aren’t sure what the NHS is, well, it’s a health service that I pay for through my National Insurance contributions. I pay these in the knowledge that the money will either help me when I need it or help other people. Maybe I’m an odd one because I am happy to pay my fair share of money to help others who are less fortunate than me. I consider this a social duty. I will quite likely rant on here one day about how we should make everybody pay their fair share, too many people in this country try to avoid paying to help others. While that might seem very black and white it’s not and the arguments are complicated.

There’s a communication that has been in draught form for about three years where I explain my politics and the reasons behind it, but it will be long and rambling and possibly unpopular. As an idea of what I think I am currently considering the idea that many wars are caused by those in power aiming to maintain their fragile grip on power and to do that they send millions of “little people” to their death. That’s not my final thought, it’s just part of the things I’m considering. This came about because the end of World War One was more caused by the German people rebelling and the Kaiser resigning than any military gains by the allies. The UK government then did its best to quash any forms of rebellion in the UK. It’s why the Eton arseholes still rule us. Anyway, you can see my thoughts degenerate into anger and swearing quite quickly. Another day for the reasoned arguments.

The point of this communication is to praise the lovely people I met at the hospital and how they couldn’t have done more to keep everything happy and safe. So many of the professionals who came and talked to us had heavy accents but I don’t care about that. In fact I’m glad about that. It highlighted how much our medical service relies on people who come here from abroad and our country is better for it. The whole system worked well and all the workers were brilliant. It’s never an easy time being in hospital and I have nothing but praise for the people who helped us.

It’s so galling then that our government continues to bolster itself into a situation that will culturally and financially ruin our country for the next thirty years at least. This along with the chronic underfunding of all public services over the last ten years truly has ruined our country. I am so fucking angry at these things. But maybe that’s for another day.

November 2 2018November 2 2018

Black Celebration 2018

I spent a lovely amount of time with Smith at the O2 Forum in Kentish Town on Sunday. The event was the Black Celebration music festival of all types of dark music. Of most interest was the band Suicide Commando. The event was promoted by the Flag Promotions company who run so very many of the gigs and concerts I go to. Obviously my music tastes are aligned with some of theirs.

Here are my reviews of each band in order of viewing. As is my usual behaviour I write notes on my phone during or after each act to help me remember what I’ve seen. That is why the comments may be pithy or short.

Machine Rox – were first up. We arrived towards the end of their set as Smith and I were having make-up issues. But they were ok. My notes indicate the following: female singer, there was a guitarist but I couldn’t hear him.

I liked the dancers who came on for the last song wearing outfits similar to the lead singer. It was a nice touch.

Next up were DKAG who are quickly becoming my most-seen band. They are supporting many bands over the next year. While the music is good there are no vocals and so unless I am wasted on alcohol I’m not that interested. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before but I like crowd interaction from the band, I want to know that they are enjoying it. Two guys with their keyboards doesn’t quite hit the mark.

There was now a short dinner break for me. The local cafe was very welcoming and the food was nice. Recommended. It was Mem’s Cafe on Kentish Town Road.

The return to the Forum meant the last few songs from Sulpher. This band sounded good and heavy with a decent industrial feel.

My notes are: guitars and heavy stuff. A little bit of samples mixed in. We saw about 4 songs and it was alright.

Let me explain the “alright” comment. This means I enjoyed it more than a lot of others. While “alright” might not seem a glowing review it means that the music was OK, suitable etc. [I’m trying to renormalise the term AVERAGE and OK to mean what they really mean].

Empathy Test came up next. I have seen this band before although I couldn’t remember exactly where or when. Smith and I had a discussion about who the lead singer was. Once they were on stage I figured out that they had played Infest last year and I saw them there. Here’s what I noted at the time: only 20 seconds in and I was done. Remember them from Infest. Boring vocals and drone-like. Slow. Female drummer who looks like she’s concentrating too much. Well constructed songs but boring.

Suicide Commando rocked the venue. I don’t mind the graphic visuals of people with holes in their bodies where holes shouldn’t be. This band was really good. A real uplift from the previous band.

I still maintain that a live drummer rather than a machine or dead person makes such a difference to a gig. I really enjoyed Mr Commando!

My notes say only the following:

heavy, fast and dirty. Great.

And then we get to Mesh. This might be the third time I’ve seen Mesh and they seem almost bored to be on stage. There’s not a lot of interaction. My only notes were:

Kinda boring

The Young Gods came on stage next. I knew nothing about them but I could see three white lights thinly blazing over the positions of the band on stage and I liked that set up. It worked really well. The first song was very Pink Floyd with a slow build up to not-a-lot and then a slow wind down. It felt like the crowd didn’t really know when the song finished. But, this band were older and clearly excellent musicians with that easy style of people who have worked together for so long.

My scrawled notes say:

Interesting but not really my stuff. turning into experimental upbeat music. Still quite psychedelic. Good beat to some songs. Enjoyable.

Finally we had DAF. A band I had seen at M’era Luna and a band that didn’t impress hugely. I get it that without DAF and other older bands that my style of preferred music wouldn’t exist but I’m also allowed to find their stuff a little boring. I think I would be the same with Nitzer Ebb and other bands from the 80s and 90s. Smith and I stayed for a while but in reality we both had work the next day and long-ish journeys home. Maybe I’ll see a complete Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft set one day.

October 25 2018October 25 2018

Not Really

This one is easy pickings really. Almost everything written in the Daily Express is rubbish and it has been amongst the leaders of our “free press” stoking the embers of racism and nationalism over the last few years. But, let’s stick with science:

I took this clip of the Daily Express two days ago. It’s a photo that was shared widely through the press and you’ve probably seen it.

It is a good photograph and quite stunning. Although we can’t see the right hand corner of the iceberg and I couldn’t see any other views of this iceberg so I wonder how rectangular it is and how many people’s brains will fill in another right angle.

I’m more interested in the words that the Express uses.

“Nature can do straight lines” – yep, knew that already. Pretty sure light travels in straight lines (at a basic level). Also, notice that the edges of the ice berg aren’t straight. There are bumps and lumps. So, it’s not straight. It just appears that way.

“Eerily perfect 90-degree angles” – hmm, have they measured that? Perfect 90-degrees is pushing it a bit. I mean they can be close to 90 but “perfect”. Bullshit. In the very NEXT paragraph they say the angles can be “about 90-degrees”. So they dismiss their own claim in the VERY NEXT PARAGRAPH.

“Perfect ice rectangle” – but it’s not perfect. What sort of person writes that word in a news article? We can’t see the rest of it. The picture is at an oblique angle so we can’t measure the sides. I doubt the Express have done anything like that.

So, let’s see what NASA said about their photographs:

“I was actually more interested in capturing the A68 iceberg that we were about to fly over, but I thought this rectangular iceberg was visually interesting and fairly photogenic, so on a lark, I just took a couple photos,” Harbeck said.

The photographer took the photos for a lark! Brilliant.

They aren’t all that rectangular:

In fact pretty much all of them are irregular in shape and so the odd one that looks a little special to human brains isn’t that exciting:

How do you get your kit to Antarctica? In a large plane of course. How do you land large plane? Make an ice runway:

October 12 2018October 12 2018

Radio

Over the last two years the news has become increasingly depressing. I think that is because everything I hear goes against my views of what our society should be. All the politics since the EU referendum and election of May and Trump has been frustrating. I have often switched off from one of my twitter accounts because I find it depresses me, makes me worried for the future and makes me feel helpless.

I have tried to cut down the amount of news I consider. Recently I have found that listening to BBC Radio 4 a lot hasn’t helped my mood. The presenters don’t seem to approach the discussions in the way I think they should and they seem to miss all the important issues facing this country at the moment.

I went through a phase of listening to music in the mornings and evenings while in the kitchen and I am now at the point where I miss the voices. I like the music but I miss the discussion of talk radio.

So, I spent a little time last night trying to get a radio station from New Orleans play over my Sonos system. I am pretty sure that this station, WWL, broadcasts only to the USA and the website I get directed to doesn’t work properly in my browser. I don’t do any VPN type thing yet, although that might happen at some point.

So, I spent a little while trying to find the URL I could use to add WWL to my Sonos system. Sonos uses TuneIn Radio to connect to streaming services and WWL doesn’t broadcast over that network. However, you can add stations manually if you can get a streaming URL.

It took a little clever Googling around to find a source that would work but eventually I did it. I have now added WWL to my sound system. I am looking forward to, once again, learning about the weather in Louisiana and how the traffic is near the big lake.

A previous communication in 2016 covered this media switch also.

Why New Orleans? Because I follow their American football team, that’s why.

October 8 2018

Migration

Well, that was a weekend! For some reason I decided to have a go at running my website [this one] from my own NAS drive. I figured this will save me money in the long run? won’t have to rely on GoDaddy who have hosted my website since its inception. I’ve not had any problems with GoDaddy but it’s a bit like car tax. When it comes around to paying for the hosting I just find I’d rather not.

So, I spent many hours staring at my computer screen. The first thing was getting the NAS to run as a web server and get the data out to the world. This took a little while to configure, especially the port forwarding and stuff, but I had done this for my Raspberry Pi and it’s web server so I did have some experience. I installed Webstation on the black box and got it working.

The next thing to do was trying to migrate my website from the GoDaddy servers to the NAS. However, this means running WordPress and that means the following have to be installed on the NAS drive:

Maria Db for the SQL database
Text Editor for getting into those pesky php files
phpMyAdmin to read and mess around with the SQL databases
WordPress

WordPress configured everything to run well and then I followed a web guide which had explained it should be easy to transfer the data with a little knowledge. I have a little knowledge and I think that makes me more dangerous than most! I FTP’d my site to my PC ready for uploading to the NAS drive.

I then tried importing the SQL database and setting up WordPress to read that database and work properly.

I failed at this about three times.

I failed terribly. To the point of uninstalling WordPress and deleting all the data and trying again. Each attempt took about an hour. It was quite frustrating because I do think I was close and only needed to change a “space” or “comma” in one of the php files and it would have worked wonders. But I started to despair.

So, I paid for some migration software. I already use UpdraftPlus and this automatically backs up my site to the cloud and they offered a migration package for about £20. Considering how much time I had spent doing all this it would have made more sense to spend that in the first place. But, you know, I wanted the experience. I do know a lot more about SQL and stuff now so it wasn’t a complete waste.

UpdraftPlus migration was easy to use and it even sent the files straight to my webserver. I thought that was quite impressive. It did take a long time though and I left it running overnight. I checked on it this morning.

The local version of WordPress was asking me to locate the backup files and then import them. As I was running a very basic and unmodified version of WordPress I hoped the import file would write all data to the SQL database and also import all the settings.

It did and quite quickly.

However, it did come up with an error reading one of the “upload” zip files. I think there must’ve been an error. Most of the website was working well and the WordPress dashboard was looking good. I think the database thought all these media files existed but Updraft couldn’t remove them from the zip file and so stopped working.

I FTP’d into the existing site and downloaded all the media files, about 5GB and FTP’d them to the NAS and hey presto. It all seems to work quite well. I am quite pleased.

I now have to go through and change the odd link here and there which won’t work because of the directory structure, but generally I am very happy with everything. I have a plugin which will crawl through and check links for me. I could also get Google to do a crawl for me, it worked really well last time to indicate some issues on the site.

This is the very first Fooyah communication on this new hosting. I am happy. If blurry eyed.

October 2 2018

Paying For It

It has struck me recently that while I stream quite a bit of music the money I pay for this doesn’t seem to get back to the artists. I know that each Spotify steam is bugger all. Each stream of a song is about 0.4 cents or pence it doesn’t really matter. For an artist to make a living from Spotify they have to be best sellers really. Now, I will listen to an album a large number of times when I like the music. But I might steam an album once or twice. It seems to me that if I know I like the songs then paying for the album means I will listen to it more, enjoy it more and contribute to the artist more.

Just paid for an actual album (download). More of the money will go to artist than streaming.

— Ian Parish (@iparish) October 2, 2018

So, my first album purchase in probably over a year goes to: Leaether Strip.

I decided to buy two albums. A “best of” and a later album. Ironically I’m going to share them here via Spotify you can always search for these on your preferred content provider.

I think it should be an aim to buy an album each month. Preferably using Bandcamp or something similar where more of my payment goes to the artist.

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Bank warns no-deal could see UK sink into recession – BBC News