Joel's Mundane Life

GAAAAAAAH! I hate not getting any feedback! I'm increasingly finding myself in situations where I'm working my arse off day in day out, sometimes struggling valiantly to meet deadlines imposed on me, and then the meeting doesn't happen or there's a deafening silence.

This is irritating for a number of reasons:

• It may mean I can't continue to the next stage of a project without risking wasting time.
• A lack of affirmation of 'what the client wants' invariably leads to greater misunderstanding later on.
• It causes diary issues when the client eventually does come out of the woodwork demanding action right now (and of course something else is blocked in so I either have to play Tetris with timesheets or disappoint the client).
• There will be less testing time resulting in the real risk of major issues being discovered post-deployment.
• The project slips and slips and slips...

...And of course if I'm not doing work, I can hardly do a billing run so my own income suffers.

I realise clients pay the bills and call the shots, but if you employ contractors to carry out work at least spare them the time they need to do their job and give you value-for-money. If you don't, you'll lose cash, your contractor will go elsewhere come renewal time, and your project will die on its arse.

(Note: This is not aimed at any individual or organisation in particular, it's industry-wide. Of course this is a hazard of the job, but it seems to be getting worse. Gah.)

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In brief:

• The Obvious Pseudonym Escobar gig on 6th February went OK - I tried to record it but forgot to flip the switch to 'Line In' on the recorder so it's a bit of a crap recording complete with another band ('Marmalade Sun') heckling us. Too bad, I've sampled their jibes and they'll be on the album. If you're really wanting to listen (and I don't recommend it) you can pick up an MP3 from my MP3 dump. Still, lovely to see friends we've not seen in years and if you didn't make it across then shame on you.
• I've started the process of cutting down my work at Pace, and will be taking more work on in London because it's more exciting and pays more. Yay capitalism. Also means I'm back to working at home a couple of days a week.
• Ellie had a lovely birthday last weekend and now has a bike without stabilisers, although Nicky had the patience of an angel trying to get her to ride it... will take some getting used to I guess, and plenty of scuffed knees.
• With my ill-gotten gains from the Calumet Canon roadshow I bought a 15mm f/2.8 fish-eye lens. It's quite good fun - I did my first gig shoot using it last Friday at Escobar, but not something I should use all the time as the effect can be quite overpowering.
• Very pleased to see The Buggles have finally got round to releasing a remastered version of Adventures In Modern Recording. W00t.

C'est ca.

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What the hell happened to January? It seems to have flown by!

We started out with Ben's birthday - his main present was a 3/4 size Stratocaster and an amplifier, and I've told him that if he can play three chords I'll let him plug it into my Line6 Spyder amp for a bit of a thrash. His party was at Soccer City in Leeds, involving a couple of games of football and some soft play. The date clashed with the only footie game not cancelled by snow and (being by Elland Road) the place was chock full of Leeds fans! I found myself thanking goodness that Ben hadn't insisted on wearing his Sheffield Wednesday top as we cut a phalanx through the hundreds of fans at the venue.

Then it was Nicky's birthday the other week (I bought her a pushbike); we had a house-ful of friends and the night involved much dancing, Singstar, and general fun. I did manage to do something bad to my chest: it started off feeling like a cracked rib but I think I've probably just pulled a muscle, leaving me low on sleep and scrabbling for the coproxamol a couple of times a day. Going slow has been the order of the past week amidst the 'reminders' from my mother to take it easy.

More recently, last weekend was lovely. It started on Friday with drinks in Leeds to see our friend Colin off before he emigrates to Canada at the end of this week! More than a few pints of Peroni in Leeds' Sandinista bar, meeting up with friends we've not seen in a while.

Saturday brought a reunion of staff who worked at Painthorpe Country Club in the 90s. The club itself was razed to the ground for new a housing estate (the company went bust, building work stalled and consequently the area is now full of derelict partially-constructed housing). However, about 7 of us showed up at The Hop travelling from the sunny climes of Bristol, Chesterfield, Leeds and Wrenthorpe to chew the fat over the years since the club was around. It was really quite lovely to see coworkers I had a lot of respect for, and find out what they'd done with their lives - needless to say we all ended up the worse for wear and I fell into bed at around 2:30am. Consequently most of Sunday morning and afternoon was written off to a hangover.

The band is getting its groove on - just in case you've managed to avoid my incessant marketing and PR I'll mention (again) that we've got a gig coming up at Escobar on 6th February. This is a Saturday night one where we're supporting two other bands who are much more 'our' sort of thing - it'll be fabulous and I can't stress how much I'm looking forward to it. We'll go through most of the card including Westgate Run, Disco Sauce and probably Keith Chegwin For A Day in a chock-full venue. Eeeeeeeeeeeeee I'm so bloody excited!

I recently acquired some new kit at home to augment the sound - among them Korg Electribe ER-1 and EA-1 units, and a Korg Prophecy (one of the few synths I regretted selling years ago). Those are starting to make their way into the recordings as well as inspiring Simon and I to do a little electro side-project without any songs per-se but more along an 'evolutionary soundscape' type thing.

That said, I spent last night in the studio remixing Disco Sauce for the Saturday gig and started working on a new song which has a working title of Bond. We have two band rehearsals this week which will be tiring, but ultimately incredibly satisfying I'm sure!

My PSO work in London is starting to take more of a front seat again - all this e-learning stuff and statistical analysis. It's quite good fun but very hard work (and led to me doing some multi-agency observation towards the end of last year), and although technically it doesn't involve as much learning experience as my work in Saltaire it's fascinating to see how it all works. Everyone seems happy with progress and with the mornings getting lighter again I'm feeling quite optimistic (it's all been a bit too much like this recently).

So, February, you ain't allowed to go as fast...!

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I took most of yesterday off to pay a visit to Calumet in Manchester for a Canon Professional Services roadshow where they were showing off some of the new stuff.

I like CPS (formerly CPN) - it's open to everyone who has spent a ridiculous amount of money and provides on-site support from engineers at the larger events, 'masterclass' type newsletters, plus loan kit if yours packs up. More importantly (to me) their repair service guarantees you'll have an item back within 5 days or send you loan equipment to use.

However, I can quite honestly say I was drawn to this particular event by the promise of free CCD cleaning and service! Normally I fork out at least £40 a shot for this (plus travel) so killing two birds with one (free) stone seemed like a good idea and I wouldn't have to hang around in a cafe while the cameras were 'seen to'. Besides, the 30D sorely needed a clean anyway.

The 'roadshow' itself was quite small and hidden in a meeting room in the depths of Calumet's offices. One side of the room was given over to printing technology (the Pixma range) and the other featured a table full of lenses, flashguns and camera bodies to try out - lots of toys. One end of the room was given over to a small theatre-style arrangement of chairs, but no screen to see example images (which seemed a little odd).

So what did I have a play with? I'd heard the hype around the 70-200 f/2.8 IS L II lens (I have the first version) and had a quick go - the optics have apparently been redesigned but it was difficult to be able to compare in an office room (more about that later). Additionally the Canon rep wouldn't let me store any images on a CF because "it's a pre-release lens, this is the only one in Europe, and it's not the final one". Disappointing!

That particular restriction only applied to a couple of items though. I also fiddled with:

• 17-40mm f/4 L ultrawide (as a complement to my 24-105mm f/4 lens).
• MP-65 Macro which gave some insane results - this photo was taken from a distance of 15mm. Great for getting pics of bugs I guess!
• 15mm f/2.8 fisheye, a lens I've had my eye on for a while which could give some fun gig shots. I'll probably nab one of these from lensesforhire.co.uk for a week so I can make sure it's good enough.

Then there were the camera bodies, and I had a play with an EOS 7D, an EOS 1D Mark IV and an EOS 1Ds Mark III. I really missed the full-frame, and the 1Ds Mark III didn't really 'wow' me either, so it served a purpose in that it made me realise how happy I am with my EOS 5D Mark II and stopped me lusting after toys for a while. Additionally, the absence of edge-AF (the diamond is concentrated in the centre on all models) means I'll wait a bit longer, thanks.

(Sidenote: I asked about the possibility of a '1Ds Mark IV' and was told nothing was in development or in the roadmap.)

It was great getting hands-on experience of the kit and talking to people who obviously knew what they were on about, but it would have been so much better if we had something to take photos of when trying equipment out - even a couple of bowls of fruit with a softbox would have been something. As it was, I used the Canon guys themselves as models and did the best I could with the flourescent lighting itself.

I pottered back to Wakefield once the cameras had been cleaned and I'd played with enough toys. Nice to see the human face of Canon, and worth the jaunt.

Photos (and examples while playing with kit) are here.

Edit: I just got a call - I won the £500 voucher to spend at Calumet as well - what a lovely surprise!

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Alright, so I'm not so annoyed any more after I've just found out from the BBC Eurovision twitter feed that Pete Waterman will be producing the UK's entry this year.

I guess we can look forward to something dance-y then, I really hope it's not a ballad!

(Personally, I'd have quite liked to work with him, but t'was not to be...)

Edit: BBC's got a proper announcement here.

Edit2: There's been some confusion as to whether he's producing or writing the entry - even @bbceurovision don't seem to know, stating 'The press release says "Pete Waterman to write the UK entry" and Pete "...will produce" as well. So it seems he'll do both!'. Not so sure about that...!

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The Eurovision Song Contest 2010 is around the corner: between the heats on 25th-27th May and the subsequent final on 29th May, 39 different countries will be participating in Oslo.

Song selection processes are very much in swing across the European Broadcasting Union, with the major exception being the entry from our own fair isle. We usually arrive at the party late and badly prepared, which in my opinion is why we don't have the support we normally do.

Are we complacent because (as funding members of the EBU) we automatically get a 'bye' to the final? Is it just bad management at the BBC? Last November Jayne Collins Casting announced they were looking for acts to potentially represent the UK (*cough*) and more recently the BBC Eurovision team twittered that "the date and format is yet to be announced" in the selection process (adding there would be "an announcement soon", echoed by their micro-site). I've had word from 'the underground' that the BBC team have u-turned on several ideas and the ESC fansites are rife with whinges about it.

But this is not what should be happening! Straight after Christmas the selection process should be started and hyped! By mid to late February we should have an act attempting to hit the charts with a pre-Eurovision song, and then the contest itself! There is plenty of time under the contest rules to have all this sorted, especially as the time limit for the entrant song is that it must not have been written or released prior to 1st October of the previous year. Gah. As one fan put it on the ESCtoday.com site, "seeing as the BBC are a little bit late this year to do a multi-week contest, signs are pointing to a more traditional selection for us this year".

In any case, Nicky and myself won't be in Oslo - we'll be in Wakefield, doing our usual Eurovision party. Best get thinking about costumes!

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Given my recent post on IPv4 exhaustion, I read with interest that 1.0.0.0/8 has been reallocated (to APNIC) as part of the efforts to debogon and reuse address space.

Previously there's been discussion on which /8 should be allocated. A good read, and covers issues I'd expect to become more important as the IPv4 space is depleted. IANA keep a document on /8 RIR assignments here.

I don't do much networks stuff nowadays, but what's important from my programmatic point-of-view is IP address validation within user interfaces - I know at least two systems I've been involved in developing have IP address input validation; consequently I think you can probably expect to see older (poorly programmed) routers thinking erroneously 'oh, that IP address is invalid!'.

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Now a few of my friends and acquaintances have dSLR cameras and enjoy music photography I thought I'd mention one of the better venues for gigs in Wakefield but which also has the most undesirable light; certainly it's the most hostile I've come across for a photographer.

I'm talking about Escobar in Wakefield, a music venue which features quite a lot of upcoming bands alongside mainstream returners (such as The Cribs, Reverend & The Makers, The Kooks, etc.). As such, amateur photographers can find themselves shooting away at their mates' 'Unsigned Bands' gig on a Monday alongside professional music-press photographers - the walls of the venue are decorated with images of past gigs and magazine articles sporting photos of previous successes. Myself, I've photographed there frequently including Leeds band Vessels, Rosie Doonan, Jonny The Firth, Chat Noir and a few of the Louder Than Bombs showcase nights.

The lighting can be described as 'atmospheric' - it's quite dark with a predominance on red and orange lighting fading in and out (it doesn't seem predictable and there's no obvious lighting desk); as a result it's very easy to unexpectedly blow out the red channel on your photos. There is no side-access to the stage so you're left crouching near the barrier on either side with the crowd at your back.

From that particular venue I've learned quite a few lessons, most of which apply to 'hostile stage environments' in general:

• It is a trial simply to focus on your subject let alone grab a steady shot so you do have to get quite arty.
• I break my own rule in this particular venue and use a flashgun (checking - if I can - that it's OK before using it, some bands find it distracting).
• The flashgun is on-body and bounced off the ceiling - the main stage area has a brown ceiling which provides a nice warm glow.
• I put a 1/4 CTO gel over the flashgun head -pick yours up from flashgels.co.uk and use a rubber band to keep it on (Royal Mail red rubber bands are ideal). This colour-corrects the artificial light, otherwise you will get an undesirable contrast in the blue-tinged subject near the flash and the warmer background.
• The flashgun's own focus-assist is pretty useful too, even if you stop the flashgun from firing it can help a lot.
• As we're using flash, we might as well do some 2nd-curtain work - that's where the flash fires as the shutter closes. You can get some nice effects with long shutter speeds and 2nd-curtain such as motion blur in this photo.
• Shooting in RAW is absolutely essential as you will need to colour-correct afterwards in Lightroom or Aperture.
• Forget Tv and Av modes - utterly useless in this scenario. You will need to go fully manual and ride your settings. Expect a lot of duff photos as a result.
• You may get away without a flashgun if you are using a very high ISO (start at ISO1600 in Escobar), have a fast (f/1.8 or higher) lens, and your subject doesn't move around much - this particular venue has a lot of folk bands and Indie bands with slow songs which suit that setup.
• If all else fails you can shove stuff into monochrome and slap on the effects, but I feel it's always nice to get 'real' photos first.
• Oh and whatever you do, don't get in the way of the punters - they paid to be there.

Hopefully this will help a few photographers in Escobar itself, but in general those are the rules I apply in the 'dark'. You can see my pics from this particular venue here.

For preference I use both Canon EOS 40D and Canon EOS 5D Mk 2 - although the former is fairly useless unless I'm using the f/1.4 50mm or the f/1.2 85mm - and the lenses I use for preference in the venue are f/2.8 IS L 70-200, f/4 IS L 24-105 and f/1.4 50mm.

(NB. if you want to practice a little, we're playing in February...!)

Edit: I changed the title of this entry to something a little more representative of the content.

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According to iNetCore (via Trefor Davies' blog) the IPv4 address space will finally be exhausted on 5th September 2011.

Available IPv4 address space dropped below 10% yesterday 19th January 2010 as announced by the Number Resource Organization. So, everyone ready to take IPv6 seriously now? :P

(To be honest it sounds like a good excuse for an 'end of the world' type of party - anyone in Hollywood fancy making a disaster movie out of it?!)

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I'm giving my 'Teaching Old Micros New Tricks' talk tonight (Wednesday 20th January) at the RISC OS North West User Group (RONWUG), covering some of the new projects to expand and enhance your BBC Micro. I'm hoping to have a few toys to demo with and have a look at as well as the talk itself.

This is effectively the same talk I gave in Wakefield last year - the presentation is already online in a PDF format here (although there are a few bits altered such as mentioning the Classic Gaming Events Union). Links to most of the products I'll be discussing are here.

I understand these meetings are open for anyone to attend - it takes place in Sale in Cheshire, postcode M33 6LR. Starts at 7:30pm-ish tonight, depending on when I get there (yay rush hour M62) :)

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Bet this one's pissing a few people off this morning - just got an email from Amazon regarding their affiliate scheme:

After careful review of our Associates programme, we have made the decision that as of February 1, 2010, we will no longer pay referral fees to Associates who send users to www.amazon.co.uk, http://astore.amazon.co.uk or www.javari.co.uk through keyword bidding or other paid search on Google, Bing, Yahoo!, or any other search engine, or their extended search networks. In connection with this change, as of February 1, 2010, we will no longer provide Associates who engage in such paid search activities with access to our Product Advertising API or datafeeds.

Or to put it in laymans' terms, those Google adwords which direct you to Amazon aren't usually paid for by Amazon, it's someone doing a man-in-the-middle type thing. One can only really presume that it was causing untold levels of fraudulent activity if they're going to stop paying out on it.

More obviously as I read it ('extended search networks') this is probably going to slap cybersquatters (sorry, 'domainers') from putting links to Amazon on unused domains. I could be wrong on that though.

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Just before Christmas, one of the better corners of the UK Internet underwent a transformation which saw it go from minimalist mine of useful information to web-2.0 bevel-edged gradient ad-infested bollocks overnight.

I'm referring to the National Rail Enquiries website. 'Designed' by the agency Fortune Cookie and launched by ATOC slap-bang in the middle of the worst weather we've seen in years (pretty much guaranteeing that it'd go on its arse within a few days), it's a mess.

Granted they've fixed some of the more irritating problems within the first month: incompatibilities between browsers, adverts slapped ad-hoc over useful pieces of information - y'know, all the things five minutes of QA would have sorted (which was an essential requirement in the tender document). However under the hood it's got an epic usability failure: it's difficult to find out what is going on, and the quality of information has been reduced to the extent that it is almost useful, but not information you can make travel decisions with.

The previous versions may not have looked so 'pretty' - certainly it wouldn't win any design awards - but it was useful. For instance, you could pretty much guarantee that stuff would appear on the service disruption page quite quickly, sometimes within minutes. A case in point was a large-scale failure on the Airedale Line this morning leaving trains around Shipley in a state of cancellation and mess - was it detailed on the NR site? Was it bollocks.

It's also failed for mobile access (although you can go direct to the live departure boards if you know the magic invocations or have it bookmarked). Those with iPhones may be able to buy an iPhone app for rail querying - nice revenue stream there of course.

I'm not the only one pissed off with the changes: a cursory dig reveals quite a few whinges.

Of course it all fell on its arse when the snow started in the UK recently, killing off the argument that 'the new site can cope better with the spikes in traffic'. As one friend put it, "FFS, even we have a cdn service that could cope with this and we're....8 people." Quite.

Ultimately it actually seems to be about increasing the advertising revenue on the National Rail Enquiries site itself. The company who designed it will surely be preening themselves at the lovely curves and web2.0 gradients, but sadly that's at the expense of its usefulness when you need to find specific information quickly - the biggest epic fail of all.

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So I'm sitting in my office, sipping a fairly reasonable 2005 Bordeaux and listening to Air on the stereo. It's a new year - a new decade even - and the thought's been tumbling around regarding resolutions and aims for the new year.

A simple one to start with - I need to learn to play the guitar. I'm finding it increasingly hard to explain to other musicians how I envisage a particular part in the songs I write (both personally and for Obvious Pseudonym) and the best way of fixing that is to understand their own terms of reference or even better, play some of the parts myself. So I'm in the process of acquiring another electric guitar (given a former friend ruined my cheap Squier Telecaster by leaving it in his damp garage for months) and will teach myself. There.

The second one relates to my (mostly) successful aims from last year involving the band, and the resolution is this: During 2010, Obvious Pseudonym must chart in a top 100 somewhere in the world. That one's a bit harder but I'm sure we can do it, especially considering some of the (cough) 'hustling' I'm doing. Oh yeah baby.

Any questions? No? Then let's get on with it.

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Almost three weeks since I last blogged any sort of 'what's going on' thing, I'd intended to catch up sometime over the Christmas period so you'll just have to deal with a bit of a redux. Anyway, that was Christmas and New Year, a very homely affair where we didn't go out with anyone really apart from our friends Lee and Jem, and everyone came round to our house instead. That's the short version. The longer version comprises a few significant events...

Given I'd been promising Ellie that I'd take her to France and Belgium, we managed to book a 'mini-cruise' in Christmas week to do a bit of shopping. Even discounting my idiocy in filling the diesel Picasso with unleaded petrol it was touch-and-go if we'd get there owing to a rather arduous and dangerous drive through the back streets of Hull to get to the ferry port (thanks to major issues caused by the weather). In case you didn't know, both myself and Nicky went to university in Hull and consequently I knew enough of the back-roads to get us to the port without too much hassle although the ferry was delayed anyway. Ellie and I spent a lovely morning in Lille followed by an afternoon in Bruges where we noshed moules-frites and did some Christmas prezzie shopping.

I wandered round Leeds on Christmas Eve - because of the snow it was quite deserted and I had no problem getting the best out of the markets. I accidentally (!) treated myself to a Ted Baker flowery shirt (and will have to watch the Ted Baker shop in Victoria Quarter doesn't become something of an addiction); never mind, my reward for managing to get everything sorted. Mind, this year was a bit different with Christmas - Nicky had taken the reins and wrapped everything so as a consequence we actually got to bed before midnight on Christmas Eve. The following day saw the usual Nigella turkey, an attempt at Christmas cake ice-cream (which didn't quite work so got replaced by lemon sorbet) all preceded by a Thai prawn salad. Mum and Lawrence and Tim over for Christmas dinner, with Nicky's sister Sarah in residence. Good fun. Much brandy. Ow my head.

Santa brought me some cool stuff - a few DVDs, a pair of glitter silver Converse boots (proper glittery disco boots woohoo!), and things like that.

Boxing Day heralded the Sheffield Wednesday/Newcastle game which Tim and Ben disappeared to spectate upon, leaving myself and Nicky to cater for the Rowbottoms. I managed to escape in the evening to see Bez's band Chat Noir (I took a few photos).

Following all that I ended up working in Saltaire in the few working days - well, to be fair I only showed up in the office for one day but did bits from home in the interim. A band practice featured as well, although that was more just getting drunk and waving our hands vaguely at instruments. I also blew a substantial amount of savings on synthesisers and other bits and bobs such as flightcases... and a pre-amp for my turntable so I can listen to my vinyl in the office (well, since I'm working from home a lot more in January).

Where was I? Ah yeah, then came New Year's Eve where we did our usual "if you have nothing better to do..." party. In previous years it's varied from one person showing up to an entire rabble, but this year we had many new friends join us - from my primary school pal Lisa and her son through to friends who'd joined us more recently it was quite a bash. I lasted until 5am, something I'm not really used to doing nowadays... it's taken a day or so to recover from that one.

In the interim my Gaggia sprung a leak (in the solenoid) and owing to the whole Gaggia-going-titsup thing last year it's going to cost a small fortune to fix. Oh well, time to look for a bean-to-cup system maybe.

And so to now, where I'm contemplating work tomorrow, looking at my #LDNnudetech calendar and wittering at you lot. Tons to do and I've no idea where to start, I'm sure it'll all make sense eventually. Happy 2010 anyway.

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Dan and I pootled over to Leeds on Wednesday 16th December to see John Lydon's band Public Image Ltd, recently reunited for a short tour. After a little confusion as to where the O2 Academy actually was (and eventually realising it's what used to be Leeds Town & Country Club) we managed to get there and got a decent spot on the floor.

For a bunch of old gits, they were pretty good although Jah Wobble on bass was definitely missed. Lydon started off by launching into the title song from 1979 then played for a solid 2.5 hours soothing his throat by alternately swigging from a large bottle of brandy, cough medicine, orange juice and water - I say swigging, I actually mean gobbing it back out on the floor.

Most of Metal Box was performed, and the only omission I could think of was Seattle (arguably one of their best songs). Still, after Rise and with the comment 'well if that lot hasn't fucked me, this will positively kill me' he launched into an absolutely blistering rendition of Open Up (not a PiL song, but they gave it a hell of a stab). Two days later my hearing came back in my right ear.

At £35 a ticket I was a bit concerned it would be overpriced for what it was (filthy lucre indeed, John) but it was worth it.

(Oh and as a bonus, Dan and I got recognised in the pub next door as members of Obvious Pseudonym - notoriety breeds notoriety!).

Photos here.

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