Planet Courgette

Things aren't going especially well at the moment, but I'm so full of hope and plans to improve them that it'd take a concerted effort to stop those things getting better, eventually. I'm having a bit of a hard time of it at the moment though. However, I'm off up to see my family for the majority of the weekend after I leave work. I'll have two big rucksacks full of things that aren't needed in the US to lug between two train changes so won't be taking my laptop for fear of it getting forgotten or damaged. Plus I don't have three hands. A book (or books, because I like books) is a much more sensible idea in this situation (not going nuts on the train with nothing to keep my brain from freewheeling) seeing as, also, a lot of the things I'm carrying are heavy and/or hard edged. My parents will store those things for however long I'm out of the country (being nice like that). While I'm so close (relatively speaking) I'll also be going with my brother to see my grandmother for what could be the last time, depending on circumstances. Hopefully she won't see it like that and the visit won't be weird. It'll be nice to see my family though. Funny how I always seem to be scheduled to see them right about the time things get especially hard.

Just spent the afternoon after a 10K run (I needed that) demonstrating everything I know about Xen (tomorrow is KVM). Turns out (again) that I know more than I realise. Which is nice. And now I'm going home. Hopefully Kris will be available to chat before we planned, but if not I've books to read.

Not much to report today. Except that I forgot my running shoes, which was a bit annoying as the weather looked OK. Last night's gym session wasn't so hard, but did leave me feeling a little tired so maybe it's a good thing that I didn't do anything today. Anyway, other than doing some load balancer things and a tiny bit of trouble shooting here and there all I've really done is read up more on networking things, apply for another job in the USA and make sure my order for a front light fixture went through OK. It seems to have and it looks like I'll get it delivered to work tomorrow.

I'm off home shortly to catch up with Kris and then over to Cormac and Steph's to help cook haggis, neeps and tatties for Burns' Night.

Happy Chinese New Year. To celebrate I'm heading out this evening (after Skyping with Kris) with friends to eat Chinese food and drink and generally have a good time. Now I think about it it's the first time I'll have had Chinese food in a good few months. Especially non-home made.

The weekend was a bit disappointing, really. After it rained most of Friday the parkrun course was pretty wet, very slippery and sticky too. Also for the first time ever there were a load of people running at the same speed as me. Usually it's me and maybe two other people. With more people around the narrow points on the course were congested and this probably contributed somewhat to my rather poor 20:00 time. Not the only reasons of course, I was just slower than I was hoping. Frustrating. What compounded the frustration was that I found my bike had a puncture (front wheel) when I went to cycle to Tesco. I pushed it there, shopped and then pushed it the mile and a half or so home, trying not to damage the tyre or wheel rim. With no Kris to talk to and really not feeling like doing any CCNA study I ended up tidying the house a bit, doing bits and bobs and generally wasting the day away somewhat. I could have gone out in the evening to the boat house to see some live music, etc. but just didn't feel the urge. Sunday started with a 19K run (which I'm really starting) to enjoy quite a lot now. The extremely strong wind on the return leg really took it out of me somewhat, but when I was in shelter or trying to keep up with a girl who decided that I wasn't going to pass her for a mile or so I kept up a pretty good pace, I think. I did do some study in the afternoon rather than waste another whole day but it was only one chapter on VTP and it was all pretty straightforward.

This morning I had a frustrating hour or so trying to work out why a developer couldn't access a web application he'd published to a release candidates area. In the end it turned out that his own documentation was both incomplete and wrong and the eventual fix was something I only stumbled upon half by accident. Still, I was able to get out for a run at lunch time to get my head back in order. Other things I did today is try and figure out my whole NI issue once I leave the country. I think I have a handle on things now. I'm just not sure if it's sensible for me to actually do voluntary contributions given I might be back within six years or so. Something to think about, anyway.

I showed two people around my house last night. Chances are they'll end up renting it after I leave. Definitely an odd feeling, but given I've already sold the place I didn't feel the need to try and "sell" it to them. However, they were nice, so I'd be happy if they were the tenants after me. Amusingly, one of them also works with/for/under my next door neighbour, so that should prove helpful if that's who we end up leaving our keys with when we go.

Went for a short, slow run today in the driving rain. It was wonderful to get out and moving but I really had to try hard not to speed up to my usual cruising pace. We'll see if I managed to help my chances at a parkrun PB tomorrow. Speaking of helping my chances, I also didn't go to the gym last night as I think I might be getting the forearm equivalent of shin splints (I'm not, but the discomfort feels the same sometimes). Instead I went home and talked to Kris on Skype, which was an infinitely better use of my time (and hers). She's working so hard at the moment. I'm glad, though, that she can take the time to chat to me. That's awesome (literally).

And so, it's the end of the week. I've spent the day doing small work things and reading more CCNA stuff. I'm into the second book now. Obviously I don't remember everything from the first book, but I've plenty of time to finish the second one and start again from the beginning of the first again. Maybe more than once more before I go. Anyway, home now, then Kris on Skype, then a relaxing evening, Saturday's parkrun, Tesco, studying and relaxing, possibly to the boat club in the evening for a live band and company. Sunday'll be a morning run, then some study and relaxing and suddenly it'll be Monday morning again.

Quick entry as I need to get to the gym and then home in time to show prospective tenants around the house.

More CCNA reading today. And some looking at our core switches here in an effort to get the CLI commands more firmly embedded into my brain. Otherwise I've been tasked with finding out why a data import is no longer working. Not knowing much about the failing file's correct format is hampering my work as well as not understanding how the import works with regard to whether missing earlier records means that valid later ones become invalid (i.e. using 'split' to perform a binary split on the import file to find the bad lines). Anyway, I need to go so I'll take another look tomorrow.

Today I actually got my hands on a Cisco switch for the first time since about 1999. Configuring it was fun, although I need a lot more practical/hands on experience before all of the commands are at my fingertips rather than having to look them up every other line. Still, with help from the Networks guy I'm pretty sure I've got it ready for installation at the remote site. There's tons of configuration options that aren't even mentioned in the CCNA, but that doesn't matter as it's much more 'real world' than the stuff in the books.

Speaking of the books I've obviously been rereading the sections on switch configuration and troubleshooting. Tomorrow I'll be doing more about routing and stuff like that. It's really interesting stuff and I wish I'd made time to learn it when I was younger and had a brain which absorbed this stuff more easily. Still, I'm doing it now. Hopefully it'll both be useful and something I get to use in the future.

Went for a run at lunchtime today. Hazel (someone from elsewhere in the building who runs, but not as quickly as I) came along on her bike and paced me. I managed to do 6K in about 23:39, which isn't awesome, but was pretty good considering the route has some hills on it. I'm feeling pretty pooped after basically doing a full speed run at lunch so I'm going to chill out this evening and maybe even order a pizza.

I sold the remaining contents of my house yesterday. So now when I go home I live in completely rented accommodation. This means I need to be careful not to get pizza sauce on the sofa, or at least more so that I used to before. Also my bike isn't mine, neither is the bed, or the toaster or anything else other than a few bits of electrical equipment and my clothes.

Another link with the UK snipped.

I think I need to read the routing protocols chapter again. There's a few too many things I didn't quite get down when I did the mini test at the end of the chapter (beginning actually, but don't worry about that). It hasn't helped that today has been a bitty day and I haven't been able to spend a good unbroken chunk of time studying. Hopefully tomorrow morning will be better. I posted back my old driving licence (new style; two parts) cut up in an envelope to the DVLA at lunch time. It got me out of the office on a none exercise at lunchtime day, which was good. I've also asked enough people I know to help me with the tax puzzle I have to be sure that the responses I've had with regard to what I need to do make sense. I'm still waiting on my parents to weigh in, but I think it's pretty much sorted now.

Today I prepared for tomorrow morning's patching, helped track down some weird data we had for payments, read a lot about routers and routing protocols, gave up on getting £11.38 back from E.ON for my utilities, sold the last of my furniture, fixtures and fittings to my landlady and left work after finishing this journal entry to go to the gym.

Tomorrow I intend to reread the last few chapters on routers and routing protocols, go running for 6K at lunchtime with Hazel on her bike keeping me at pace and then collapse when I get home. I might even see if Kris is around on Skype.

F1 fans who follow the many pundits on Twitter may have come across Lewis Hamilton’s ‘Spring Layers’ shoot for GQ, where the Formula 1 Championship driver poses in various (some may say ill-advised) outfits.

It was only a matter of time, but the photoshoppers have started: take a look here. My favourite is the knife-throwing one…

The other night I was discussing an impending album release from a local band: as is invariably the case with skint unsigned acts the CDs would be duplicated by the band themselves and sold at gigs. I was offered a sample CD to take home but with the caveat “but it’ll still change”. A bit of discussion ensued and we came to the conclusion that left unchecked their album would keep on changing, evolving, and effectively no two batches produced would the same: comments from listeners such as ‘oh the drums are a bit loud’ might result in a balance change, or ‘that cowbell doesn’t fit there’ could mean an arrangement alteration. Put simply: there would never be a ‘final version’, even after the album launch gig, and it would be a perpetual ‘demo’.

Now, I am a firm believer of a release being ‘a point in time’ for an act, a snapshot if you will. When you bite the bullet and submit your track to get an ISRC (basically a barcode) you need to submit the exact track you are releasing, and when you have physical media duplicated then that’s where you draw the line: a hundred copies are etched and that’s it, no going back, no ‘tweaks’. Effectively you as a band or act are forced to draw that big black line on the mix, warts and all – that’s what separates the demo from the release.

Yet with home manufacturing it’s all too easy for a band to change things after-the-event, and it does a great disservice to the people who have been to (say) your launch party and bought a copy. Many new performers and young acts are too impatient to release their new tracks, so version-upon-version is published to Soundcloud (or whatever music-site-du-jour) spoiling the impact. As a band/act you’ll never be completely happy with something because after all your tastes evolve and your hearing changes, but that’s no reason to rewrite history.

There are some wonderful examples of ‘slightly broken’ performances out there – off the top of my head Minnie Riperton, David Bowie, The Beatles, Barry Manilow and even Scott Joplin have recorded imperfect versions which have a charm to them. Many of those would have been lost had it been easy to ‘evolve’ a track and I think we’d have been worse off for it.

As an extreme case I can cite an artiste whose second album consisted 40% of slightly reworked/reproduced versions of tracks from her first album. Her third album was 50% reworked/revised tracks from her first and second albums. Goodness knows what the fourth contained but I’ve stopped buying her albums now – I might as well wait for the seventh or eighth so I can hear some new work.

Mind, I’ve not been exempt from this in continued adventures with Obvious Pseudonym: 18 months ago we released The Six Noises EP, then a week after I’d the master copies had been dispatched I tweaked it into a ‘Special Edition’ version correcting lots of little mistakes I’d noticed since the band listening-party. Thankfully the original run of CD production was cancelled so we didn’t have to deal with physical copies, but still the iTunes version was different from the CD version in small, subtle ways (I believe the CD version is superior but you may have a different opinion). Nowadays I sit on a mix for at least a month and will go back and listen to it with fresh ears some weeks after it’s been mixed or frequently longer, eg. I noticed a slight mis-timing in the piano track on Baby Baby just the other week… 16 months after I recorded it.

In short? Don’t rush a release, give it time, but draw a line and wave goodbye to a recording once it’s flown the nest – don’t keep picking at it. Your fans will – eventually – thank you.

Edit: As @mattbluefoot points out: ‘This could be paraphrased as “don’t be George Lucas”‘.

Not a link to my own father’s pics (you can find those on his Flickr photostream) but instead a link to a blog called My Dad’s Photos, dedicated to photographs taken by the maintainer’s father John Hendy.

I arrived there by following a link to 1973 photos of Kings Road in London, but there are photos from the 1962 Monaco GP and some British Grands Prix from 1958 onwards the Motorsport archive.

It’s a fascinating wade through, especially if you’re an F1 fan and a photographer.

Via the medium of Twitter I discovered a letter from John Steinbeck to his son on the occasion of the latter ‘falling in love’. Quite lovely.

I always enjoy reading food blogs, especially when they’re local – but I was exceptionally chuffed to see Leeds Grub blog heading down our way to review Deli Central in Wakefield, just off the Bullring. More of that please!

Remember record players? Records? It’s trendy to call it ‘vinyl’ nowadays, isn’t it? My mate John’s got a house full of it, we often joke a river of black tar would flow through Walton if his house burned down.

Last Saturday my brother and I went digging in our loft at home to find all the records which had been stashed there over the years – boxes of them which I’d been given, or acquired through Freecycle, or inherited from various relatives. Tim used to collect them and upon my father’s emigration his collection ended up shoved at one end of our loft so there was quite a bit for us to go through.

When we retrieved the boxes the musty smell was overpowering – even though cased the slight damp had pervaded the sleeves of some Freecycle-sourced discs, giving the illusion of being older than they actually were… smelling of 1940, released in 1985. Cross-legged, we started sifting through, ditching Music-For-Pleasure compilations of Perry Como hits and laughing at the tastes of someone-random-from-Freecycle who’d bought a copy of The Reynolds Girls one and only hit.

It only took a few minutes before I hauled the Technics record deck and preamp downstairs so we might listen to some of them – a bizarre Sex Pistols disc called Some Product featuring cut-up interviews and the unmistakable mark of Malcolm McLaren’s odder side, followed by unidentifiable death-metal which when played at 45rpm rather than 33rpm sounded like Daffy Duck singing Rammstein. “Swing Along With Martin Dale”, recorded live at Wakefield Theatre Club (latterly the Pussycat Club and now a bowling alley on Doncaster Road). Fun.

We almost came to blows over a first edition vinyl of Joy Division’s “Substance” album (FACT250 [sic]) but I let it go; there will be other opportunities. We listened to the first couple of tracks of an early-80s Deanna Durbin compilation, swaying almost subconsciously; the imperfections in the pressing giving it analogue character.

And that’s the rub really – I never understood the beauty of vinyl until now. Tim suggested were we to own these on CD or MP3 we probably wouldn’t have given it a second thought but the hypnosis of the spinning turntable and positioning the needle made it an event, the cover providing further visual stimulus as the tracks went on, sitting together and listening.

Tim took his share of the booty and I sincerely hope him and his missus enjoy it. The following morning was taken up listening to a Transvision Vamp LP while Ben watched, fascinated. Maybe he’s understood it too.

Since then I’ve wandered into charity shops, looking for interesting records to take home. No dice yet, and sad that Headingley Oxfam charge so much for records in such poor condition. Still, there are plenty of other places to dig around in old boxes and maybe one day I’ll be able to rediscover that Tribe Called Quest 12″ I lost or even the copy of David Bellamy’s one and only novelty song “Brontosaurus Will You Wait For Me”… I’d love to know where that went to…

In fettling the blog and dusting it off I took another look at how people were finding it via Google.

Alongside the usual searches for Wakefield, Trinity Walk and coffee percolators there’s some really bizarre search terms in here, including:

• pinke hintergrundbilder
• vibrating tongue bars
• anime blowjob
• self fisting
• flamenco wallpaper
• sue lawley legs

…and a pile more really odd ones.

Christ knows what you lot are up to…

When I was 7 I bought myself a film camera from Wakefield fleamarket – a Halina 35mm camera purchased for £1. I took it all over the place and went through the first couple of films like mad (mostly taking photographs of the sky or the floor because I couldn’t get the hang of the viewfinder). My father was processing film at the time and started loading the occasional spool of B&W in and that’s how I started out in photography… once we’d moved to a larger house he took over the cellar and we did prints too.

Almost 30 years later I’m using digital for my semi-professional work: I carry various Canon pro digital bodies around and a complement of lenses (a partial kit-list is on my Flickr profile), and I post-process using Lightroom on the Mac. An average gig shoot for me results in about 200 photos per act and I pare those down into about 40 or 50 shots for a client, all of which is a far cry from 24 frames on film.

I recently did a contract in Halifax (good lord deliver me) as part of my dayjob. Lunchtime wanderings uncovered a camera shop near the market (Janet Green Photographic, I’d link to a website but they don’t have one) where there was a window full of second-hand photographic kit – everything from mid-1950s medium-format bodies up to low-end digital, and so a germ of an idea formed – get an old film camera and learn to develop my own photos again. I pressed my nose to the glass almost daily in the hope that a suitable camera would be on display. Christmas drew closer, the end of the contract loomed, but less than 2 weeks before I’d be out of the area one appeared in the window for just £29: a Canon EOS 500N, one of the more recent 135 Canon range. I bimbled in and after verifying it would accept my Canon EF lenses I walked out as the proud owner of a film camera body, some chemicals and a few spools of Ilford FP4+ film.

The first thing I noticed was that I was conscious how many photos I wasn’t taking using film. I assumed I’d go through film like wildfire but it took me the best part of 3 days to blow my first 24-exposure film (the second film took a little less time principally because I was out in sunny Halifax getting some gritty industrial images ). This did make me realise that although I scattergun at gigs I am more inclined to take time to set up a shot elsewhere.

Once home and in the kitchen I mixed up some developer and spent 20 minutes lightproofing the understair cupboard. Every last LED from the wireless base-station, burglar alarm, central heating system got double helpings of gaffer-tape. Hallway lights went off, the cracks around the door stuffed with scarves. Total darkness, hooray. I turned the safelight on, loaded the film into the canister and went off to develop it.

Right. Safelight. Yeah – about that: there’s no safelight for film… I’d forgotten that bit and overexposed it. I had also been using a dodgy thermometer, not that it would have made much difference. The second time I was a lot more careful and some success ensued, having processed a spool of Ilford HP4+ (ISO400) in Ilfosol-3 developer: this resulted in quite a chunky grain which you can see on the Flickr page for the photo. Still, not bad considering I’ve been trying to remember how to do it all based upon vague memories of watching Dad.

As a sidenote: I haven’t been doing any printing, instead using a slide scanner from Maplin to throw the negatives into JPEG files; it’s only a cheap thing with a lamp which shines the slide onto a small CCD and auto-compensates for exposure etc. – the results aren’t very good. This one will do for the moment as long as I put the images through Lightroom, at least until I find a USB slide scanner I’m happy with.

Subsequently I walked into Halifax and blew off a spool of Ilford FP4+ (ISO100) – you can see the results here including some self-portraits taken on long-lapse outside Dean Clough Mills at dawn and dusk; I think the contrast on them is quite nice. I haven’t tried pushing the film yet, I’m taking baby-steps and since Christmas I’ve been using it as an occasional ‘grab camera’ to play with rather than anything serious.

Most of my supplies are coming from Amazon marketplace sellers (RK Photographic are sending me most of it including a black bag, a load of FP4+ and a film spool opener). Locally Dale Photographic in Leeds sells chemicals and film which is useful in an emergency and if anyone wants to buy me a present they have a secondhand Hasselblad MF 6×6 120-roll camera with a couple of lenses for £1500… thought not!

Tonight though the 500N gets a proper run at a gig using Ilford Delta 3200 film (ISO3200) which I will probably process using Microphen developer later on in the week and post to my Flickr stream. I’m hoping to replicate some of the more iconic Kev Cummins film shots from the early 80s – somehow doing colour-to-B&W in Lightroom feels like cheating and I’m hopeful of good results. At least I don’t have to worry about red/yellow saturation

(The photo is me aged 8 with the Halina – my Dad took it when we went on a photowalk in Wakefield; the courtyard is round the back of the old Post Office, and it’s now known as ‘The Latin Quarter’.)

Update: Julian (aka @liquidsquid on Twitter) said that this was his idea. If I’m going to be perfectly honest it was discussions with quite a few folks which led to this, not least @leica0000, @john2755 and my landlady in Milton Keynes towards the end of last year who gave me a box full of old Patterson developing kit. That said, the Delta3200 was definitely Julian’s idea.