Not normally one to comment on politics, but the London mayoral election race just seems so much closer than it ought to. I mean. Really. Boris Johnson? As mayor? For real? Is anyone really going to vote for him? With that hair?
Big congratulations to Darren LMG and Sashinka on the announcement that they’re engaged! We do like a bit of love in the blogosphere. But in a world where our blog names are our surnames (Meg Meish (neé Notsosoft), Mike TD, Ian Blogadoon etc), obviously the biggest question of all is this: will it be Sasha LMG or Darren Sashinka?
If you’ve a spare tenner next weekend get your ass along to The Factory theatre company’s Hamlet. It takes place in a different London venue each week with cast members playing different characters. There are no props other than those provided by the audience, which on my visit yesterday included a barbie doll, sponge, mop, water cooler bottles, a glow stick, a giant leek and rubber chickens, among other things. I took along a recorder which ended up being Hamlet’s sword.
It was a really engaging couple of hours - I spent the whole time on the edge of my (constantly moving) seat.
More praise:
Here are a few things I’ve been listening to so far this year - I’m on the look out for some new aural stimulation, and trusty last.fm recommendations can only go so far before you need a bit of good old word-of-blog, so if you have a minute let me know what’s been floating your musical boat in the comments…
Sing-along pop/rock - Next To Nothing has me adding my own questionable vocal harmonies. In the shower. Whilst my housemate’s friends cower in the bedroom next door. They do fall into the indie four beats / four chords trap occasionally but hey, they’re called The Fourers, and they normally manage to save themselves from oblivion with unexpected synths and the odd melodic turn.
The whole world should go and see Thomas Truax. With some unlikely raw meterials such as motors, spoons, wheels, spokes, a comb, some strings, ducting, dogs and moons, this man creates nothing short of a genius. He’s playing around the UK in March and April. Book it, book it, book it now. Diddly-do.
What’s their new single about, exactly? The thing I liked about The Feeling last year was that they had an instant, viral appeal. I couldn’t stop listening to the ebola-esque 12 Stops And Home, but it really wiped me out after a few weeks. On this single, they’ve pulled out considerably more than 12 stops: more is more, apparently, and I personally think they could’ve done with paring things down a bit, and perhaps lending a few of the extraneous leftovers to…
…, who have really excelled themselves with the yawning void that is Ready For The Floor (listen). It sounds like exactly the sort of thing you’d be stuck in front of on the nightbus when trying to sleep. Not really a desert island disc (though it’d be fun to watch Joanna Lumley reprise her role as Girl Friday with this as a looping soundtrack).
Repeaters have more fun with Rod Thomas. First heard at Glastonbury last year, you can often hear him around various underground stations putting his Welsh-valley lungs to good use. His voice is incredibly strong, and he’s a master both of layering up great pop songs and making his audience fizz. Great stuff.
And so that was Christmas. And what have we done? Well, bugger all other than eat and drink actually. On Christmas day alone I gained an astounding 5lb. This sudden weight gain combined with the sinking feeling that many of last year’s resolutions will have to be rolled over to this year, has kick started a new sense of urgency to Get Things Done (though so far I’m resisting the advice to sort my entire life into piles).
So I’m making only one modest addition to last year’s good intentions. After a brief trip to Paris at the end of November I half-resolved that it’d be bloody marvellous to live there for a while at some point. The city feels a little headier and more compact than London, and so I’ve been listening to the not-great-but-not-terrible learn french by podcast podcast, and I’ll be picking up a 12-week course from February to brush up on my “mais oui” and “bien sur”.
Incidentally, one of the things that amuses me about podcasts is that lots of them seem to have ever-so-slightly self-conscious theme music that doesn’t really seem to know what it’s there for. And it’s apparently a small industry in its own right - the creators of the Twit (This Week In Tech) podcast theme say “A theme song will make your podcast sound professional right from the start”. Well. That’s me told.
More incidentally - if you’re a bit of a geek and haven’t yet subscribed to the Guardian’s Tech weekly podcast, do so now. First episode was a little down on 2007 but was pretty insightful and very-well put together.
To finish, here’s a reassuring list of nice things that I lack the skill to weave into a paragraph:
Hope everyone’s having a restful time of things today. I’m a bit drunk already. More soon.
Wandered up to Primrose Hill to watch some good old Guy Fawkes remberance last night - not expecting a display up there, but hoping to get a good vantage point over the rest of the London’s displays.
All in all it was grand - bottle of port, couple of mugs, some good-natured, like-minded scarved folk, and a couple of distant, muted displays from (we think) Blackheath, St Paul’s, and others. There were also a couple of teeny back-garden fireworks in the park which were greeted with amusing over-enthusiasm.
Battersea’s display looked like the most impressive though - at one point it looked like Tina Turner’s entire head of hair was in the sky, so that’s my tip for next year…
Being a mere lightweight in the world of development, I don’t read as deeply into application methodologies as some. However, I’ve been paying a lot of attention to service-oriented architecture recently: where I’ve used it in the past, where I’ll use it in the future.
It struck me that our staff restaurant at work is a prime example of when coarse-grained services can go wrong. Here’s a snippet of the menu:
Almost without fail, Monday to Thursday’s dishes contain: celery, onion, green pepper, courgette, carrot, peas, apricot(?!), and then are put together with something else, be it potato, cheese and pasta or tomato.
In not-very-l33t speak, the canteen calls on the trusty getVegetables service which returns some incongruous pile of mush, before invoking the hastily cobbled together hideItUnderAThickLayerOfMash method (which in turn uses the dreaded smash.dll)
This sort of lazy one-size-might-fit-all approach is something that creates disappointing end products that might be cheap and quick to build, but don’t really serve anyone very well. What about environments in which both creatives and developers have high standards, short deadlines and complex requirements? Sound familiar? What if, to continue this tenuous metaphor, the onion needs to be in the mash, not in the veggie goop?
It occurs to me that harnessing the power of SOA requires a lot of planning and objectivity - which is really challenging when individuals clamour loudly and endlessly (and often with good cause) for that one feature that they need yesterday.
So I have aged another year: no longer able to call myself an early twenty-something. Comfortingly, paranoid glances in the mirror reveal that crows feet are still a long way off. On the other hand, it seems neural degeneration has commenced in earnest. The most adult conversation had whilst making dinner this evening occurred after a discussion of wooden spoon rhythms culminated in the question:
“What if Simon Amstell were to present Countdown?”
Channel 4 would doubtless pay the saviour of Never Mind The Buzzcocks a vast sum of money to sit in for a week, throw withering comments at a cowering Carol Vorderman and reduce the already-timid dictionary corner to page-quivering wrecks. Surely ratings would soar as tantalised television viewers at home collectively held their breath in anticipation of the dreaded taboo: the tawdry yet inevitable puns on Richard Whiteley’s untimely death, and the resulting gasps of disapproval from a loyal studio audience of grieving would-be widows.
Yes - it’s all downhill from here. When the only constructive conversation that can be had involves cruel, questionable make-believe television programmes, you know there’s not long before all that’s left is to babble in a nondescript manner about the weather (and haven’t we had a dreadful summer!). And I’m not the only one whose marbles are rolling away: other housemate is cramming his mouth with last year’s Christmas pudding smeared with Flora and bathed in milk.
It’s all going terribly wrong. Send help.
minor9th.com is a weblog by Simon Pearson, a London-based webmonger and bathroom entertainer. More about this site »
And the rest...
Current weather (updated in last half hour):
© 2000-2008 Simon Pearson
