List of Things Which Have Happened
Archive
30 March 2008
Got out for a gig this week, despite various annoyances. And the miserable weather. 'Inclement', they always call it. This has to be one of the most stupid words in English. It's only ever used in formal announcements about the weather. It covers any kind of bad weather, though it would sound misleadingly mild if used about storms etc. And no one ever says 'clement', unless they're trying to be droll. Whenever I hear the word, I can't help thinking, 'Just talk normally, will you!' Which makes me a bit of a hypocrite.
And the gig was great. As I expected, once I was there, I enjoyed it and all the bad stuff of the week got lifted away for a while. That figure in silhouette is Liela Moss out of The Duke Spirit. My camera's fairly rubbish but I thought the pic had a certain atmosphere. You can see some slightly better ones in my 'review'.
I have two or three more gigs lined up in the next couple of months, all quite different... well, as different as Icelandic and Finnish get :)
27 February 2008
An actual earthquake! No, I've never experienced one before. I was duly amazed today when the epicentre turned out to be Market Rasen - a long way from here.
I was up when it happened, at one o'clock, watching the television. Thinking nothing for the first fraction of a second, just feeling the shock. Then struggling to understand it, with several possibilities racing through my head: maybe a lorry passing, which can be a bit like that, but never so big, and without that unnerving shudder from below. Which said what it was straight away; but even so, what with some winds earlier in the day, I wondered about a severe gust, since the windows had rattled. I sat there in the dark, waiting for a crash from above, a chimney maybe. And then had an even more irrational thought, well it hardly qualifies as a thought, but something more primal, to do with some sort of violent break in...
I had a look around in the light today. No damage visible anywhere, so I guess these houses are reasonably solid. Rather like we always do with our weather, we seemed to have made a nice old fuss about nothing very much. It enabled the insurance industry to do its usual boring bit of Jeremiah-style trumpet blowing. But the national casualty list seems to have been one broken pelvis.
Oh, and I had cause to write an email to Ukraine today, so I looked it up: I can tell you that the Ukrainian for earthquake is something like 'zemletrus'. But apparently it's sunny in Kyiv at the moment.
9 February 2008
I had a computer nightmare this week. Immediately after an Adobe Flash Player update, I suddenly found that I couldn't log on - supposedly, a failure of the 'User Profile Service'. Now, since this was my one and only User Profile with admin rights, I was snookered as regards being able to do much about it. At least I had made a Guest user profile, so I was able to get in and do a search on the error message. The alarming thing for me is that this is a Vista bug which has hit quite a lot of people, and yet, unless I simply didn't find the relevant document, Microsoft don't seem to have properly addressed it.
Since this was the first bad problem I've experienced with the OS, I spent a stressful two or three days trying to find as much relevant information as I could. Ideally, I'd have tackled the problem at its core, in the registry, but of course without admin rights I couldn't do that. The answer will be familiar to a lot of people; to press F8 on bootup and go into safe mode (with command line), and restore the system to just before everything went wrong.
I guess I can look on it positively because it has indeed been a learning experience. And in some ways, it reflects quite well on Vista. But it was sheer luck that I'd created that guest account and could therefore go online to investigate. Apart from the safe mode tactic, which was new to me, the other big lesson for a Vista user is to make sure that you create a spare User Profile with admin privileges, for emergencies like this. Which is why I've written what is otherwise a dull story, to pass on that piece of advice.
And it amuses me to imagine someone else getting hold of this computer, and wondering who the hell Lydia is.
28 January 2008
Do you ever have the experience of several things breaking at once? Completely unconnected things? Worse - because I do try to be rational and scientific - that things happen in threes just like people say? A logical person might say, ah, but it's never a complete coincidence, there's usually an underlying pattern or connection involved.
Well, I can't see it. On Saturday, I woke up, went downstairs and flicked the light switch. There was a loud fizz. All the lights had gone. I duly went down to the cellar to find the fuse had blown. This I could have done without, because I had friends coming round for lunch, and it meant an excursion to a local hardware store for some fuse wire. Anyway, that seemed straightforward enough. I got on with lunch and we had a good time. Not that you're asking, but I cooked kaalikääryle, which sounds exotic, but it's simply cabbage roll. Not bad in fact, I'll do it again some time.
In due course, later that evening, and while considering scheduling the washing up, I discovered I had broken a tooth. This happens every now and again. Sadly, it's my lot, as a result of eating too much sugar when I was a child, and the legacy of a mouth full of fillings. Today I rang up my dentist and was given an appointment for next week. Ugh. A whole week with the gaping hole and sharp edges. But I had to be honest, it's not actually hurting.
The third thing? This didn't become apparent until the next day ie. Sunday, but it must have happened on Saturday like the other two. One of my nice neighbours came to the door and asked if I knew I had a flat tyre. I'm glad she did because I would probably have driven off without noticing. Today I changed the tyre for the emergency one, and took it down to a local garage to have a new front pair put on. What caused it? Not difficult to diagnose, there was a nail in full view. It could have been anywhere that I drove over it, it's the sort of thing that can take some while to deflate.
So there you are. I refuse to believe in fate or anything like that. You tell me if there was any connection between those three things! I don't see any at all. A friend said to me, ah bad things always happen in threes! Well, they don't do they, but I can't deny that Saturday had its annoyances in triplicate. But I had a good social too, so who cares about them :)
21 January 2008
I'm furious. I'll quickly get over it because there's nothing useful I can do about it. My old web site has just been deleted.
I gave notice to my former ISP a week or so ago, but the finish is supposed to be in another month. And I can still access email. So why delete the site now? Are they entitled? The brutal fact is that it's academic. Even if I took it up with them, there's little to be achieved with only a few weeks to go. I have a copy of the site on disk. And I'd probably done as much linking on as I was going to do. So this new site is well and truly on its own now.
It is definitely another good example of the consumer unfriendly behaviour they seem to indulge in these days. You know, I had been with Demon for a long while, since the early 90s. Once upon a time they were pioneering, the first ISP for ordinary consumers. And one of the things which I really appreciated was how well they communicated with their customers, whether with a magazine, software, or features on their website... best of all, there were individuals working there who would put themselves out to explain things, technical or otherwise. But since being bought by 'Thus', any sense of what one laughingly calls 'community' has gone out of the window. All sorts of margins have been cut. Changes would be made without notice. Service outtages and network problems would only be notified late or not at all. It became difficult to get through to support staff who knew anything useful. Who weren't in South India. It's the kind of experience which gives substance and bite to the stereotype of the big bad corporate.
And the early site deletion ...petty. I might say I'd learned a lesson from this, in that I should have got out long ago, but it's an old lesson, isn't it? It's human nature to stick where you are, until you can't pretend it's going to get any better.
1 January 2008
2007 Music List - Records of the Year
Indica - Kadonnut puutarha
PMMP - Kovemmat kädet
PMMP - Kuulkaas enot!
Värttinä - Oi dai
Indica - Ikuinen virta
For once, no thought went into my personal 'records of the year' list. I didn't have to think, because I already had the evidence of what I'd been playing during 2007. A cousin gave me a diary for Christmas a year ago; I didn't need it but decided to make use of it by making a note each day if I played an album. True, it doesn't allow for sometimes playing an album twice in a given day, but the results are clear, and I don't have to rely on vague impressions.
The list above is of my top five most played records, and Kadonnut puutarha got played nearly twice as much as the second in the list, at least sixty-three times since getting it, back in March, and probably a lot more. Yes, I still think it's a wonderful, rich work. I've managed to persuade one or two friends of its quality but I must admit that some others just stopped listening properly when they found it was unfamiliar and not in English. A great, great pity, but that's the way the world is.
All of these records are in Finnish so I suppose it's been a bizarre year of obscure obsession. Maybe things will be back to normal in 2008, but I wouldn't bet on it, not while I'm learning the language as well. In fact, it turns out that of 57 different albums I apparently played during the year, a full 28 of them were by Finnish bands. 29 if you count Hedningarna. Which some would, though they're technically Swedish. I know it's nerdy verging on anal to have kept such a diary, and I won't repeat the exercise. But there it is, I did it, and it provides some facts to correct the usual vague ideas of what one's interest in music amounted to.
What else? Only three live concerts, by The Sounds, The Hold Steady, and The Raveonettes, all in Manchester. I suspect the count will be higher in 2008.
Other verdicts: best pop band, PMMP; band most likely to leave me with a smile on my face, Värttinä; best British band, Art Brut; favourite British album, an old one, but I cannot deny the stats, Ladytron's Witching Hour; most interesting and unusual newly discovered act, Vuk (watch out for The Plains if it ever gets released). And in case it isn't obvious, most wonderful band, Indica.