Landfill Indie

Tuesday, July 22, 2008 ~ 8 comments so far

Great article about the current state of the UK music scene.

Now, whilst I disagree that the Fratellis fall into this camp and feel it is a tad harsh to blame all of this on the Arctic Monkeys, the article mirrors my current thoughts, largely fuelled by listening to X-FM in the morning commute to work (Not a fan of Radio 2 in the mornings, nor the inane chat on Radio Scotland and Radio Clyde). There seems to be a lack of anything new and original, with band after bland band churning out the same punk-lite, faux gritty, rat-a-tat-tat style tunes.

It’s no wonder I’m reaching for some old favourites every time I fire up iTunes.

You don’t need to read the article to get a basic understanding of what is being said, and I’m sure most people who are aware of the current music scene have already moved on from all those definite article bands (The … ) and are currently enjoying bands such as Fleet Foxes and Vampire Weekend, but there is one quote that sticks out and I think is worth repeating:

“Scouting for Girls are like the sound of Satan’s scrotum emptying. They’re abysmal.”

Which captures what I’m trying to say perfectly.

More nothing

Monday, July 21, 2008 ~ Comments Off

I’m not sure if it’s the lull after the last few frantic weeks but I find myself ebbing between tasks, bumping around on the current, rudderless for the moment, with nary a breeze to prod me gently onwards.

In saying that I did re-organise the bedroom yesterday, whilst Louise shampooed the living room carpet. We were going to shuffle the living room about but, due to the space and dimensions we are kinda limited. As we had talked about doing the same with the bedroom I tackled that, moving a chest of drawers into the next room (now known as the “walk in wardrobe”), and moving the bed under the window. It gives us a lot more floor space although I’m not entirely sure what to do with it all!

We paused in the afternoon and nipped out to see Wall-E. It’s a great movie, quite dark in parts, but well-paced, funny, moving and thought provoking. Quite a feat. The story telling is first-rate, and whilst I was expecting more time to be spent setting up the premise and allowing the audience to buy-in to Wall-E’s plight, I now realise that as that wee robot is soooo darn cute they didn’t need to.

An aside, the scene where Wall-E is chasing the red laser dot across the terrain, I’m pretty sure they stole that from the way Oll-E (as he will now be known) does exactly the same thing.

And so to today.

Today I’m on holiday. I’m waiting in for the nice Sky installation engineer man to arrive (before 1pm, he promised) and install our Sky HD box. I’m both excited and sad about this.

Excited because I’m really looking forward to watching HD movies!

Sad because my gadget splurging is at an end. Guess I’ll just go and check my email on my iPhone, play a little Burnout on the PS3 and then settle down to watch a movie in high definition. It’s a hard life…

Normality resumed

Friday, July 18, 2008 ~ 1 comment so far

… whatever that is…

As the week draws to a close my mood is liftening (err… that’d be “lightening” and “lifting”) considerably. I’ve spent the last week facilitating meetings which have the teams looking at how they work and coming up with improvements. To get to the improvements they are asked to consider what went well (with the aim of taking those things forward) and what didn’t go so well (aka “badly”) with the aim of putting actions in place to stop them happening again.

Needless to say, fixing things is a lot harder than dealing with things that already work, so the process can be kinda draining. Looking back on this week (this is the second time I’ve filled this role) is always good, it is productive and useful but it is really tough going. Hence why it’s been so quiet here.

So what else is new?

Well iPhone aside not much just yet, in a finally flurry of gadget related activity we are shelling out for Sky+HD (or whatever it’s called these days). I managed to snag free installation and a half price box through a friends and family thing, and given that our current Sky+ box is on it’s last legs (hard drive is failing, missing recordings and so on) we’d have to pay out anyway.

And aside from that the only other thing I’ve got to say is that if you have a PS3 and are thinking about buying Metal Gear Solid 4… don’t. Unless you don’t mind a “gametime” of 2hrs which includes all of… 20 mins ACTUALLY PLAYING THE FECKING GAME!!!! I had heard there were a few cut scenes but it’s ridiculous. It may suit others, but I just don’t have the patience.

I’m slowly getting through the backlog in Google Reader, but we’ll see how hungover I am tomorrow after our Dev team night out tonight.

Quick iPhone Thoughts

Tuesday, July 15, 2008 ~ 8 comments so far

Whilst it isn’t as full featured as, say, the HTC Touch Diamond, I can’t think of anything that I’m really missing.

Text messages appearing as a conversation thread is so much better than the traditional display method (one text per screen).

Intuitive? Very. Although there are a few funny things, for example, you CAN set the keyboard shift button to turn into a CAPS LOCK style key, but it’s disable in the Settings by default.

Tip: To switch between keyboard modes (to add a ? for example), press and hold your finger on the 123 mode toggle button, keep your finger on the screen and slide to the ? and then let go. The keyboard inserts the ? and automatically flips you back to the ABC mode. Smart!

The screens is stunning, I’ve encoded Blade Runner to MP4 and… WOW.

Surfing the web and want to dial a number on a webpage? Click it. Simple.

Apps – 10 million were downloaded over the weekend. Impressive numbers. Some aren’t so good, but some, like Vicinity are awesome. It uses the built-in GPS to figure out your current location, then polls Yahoo Local directories to get you lists of taxis, restaurants and so on.

In short, I’m glad I waited a year to get my hands on this phone. The list of niggles is small and, quite honestly (and yeah yeah, call me a fanboy) it’s the best phone I’ve ever used.

Caveat: my last phone, a Samsung D800, was a crock of shit, but still. The iPhone is a helluva piece of kit. It, honestly, just works.

My Firefox 3

Sunday, July 13, 2008 ~ 8 comments so far

So I’ve been living with Firefox 3 for a week or so now and I’ve pretty much got it under control. Here’s what my current browser window looks like.

As you can see it’s fairly customised, mainly to cut down on space and makes use of some rather nifty extensions.
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End on a good note

Saturday, July 12, 2008 ~ 1 comment so far

So, the past week has been a little hectic.

At work it was the end of a product release cycle which is usually a little busy, I’m preparing to start handling the translation requirements for the product, and I was also (still am!) trying to get a new website up and running (it’s a whole Developer Community thing… well it will be..). On top of that my boss resigned and so we’ve been rejigging things for the new man.

Next week I’ll be facilitating our release retrospective meetings, 10 meetings in 5 days, with most averaging a couple of hours. It’s another thing which is quite draining but fascinating all at once.

Ohh and I’m arranging the next development team night out.

It’s all going well but has taken a fair amount of effort. But in a good way. You know, a sense of satisfaction. Anyway, that’s why it’s been so quiet here this week.

Needless to say I’m a bit wiped out so I’ve got tomorrow pegged to do… well not a whole lot. I’ll be catching up on the blogs, playing a little Metal Gear Solid, I may even read a book.

But enough of that mundane drudgery, there are far far more important things a foot for, this every night I’ve just had a wonderful WONDERFUL piece of news.

My wee sister, she who shares the same cheeky smile that adorns my face, got engaged!!

I’m so chuffed that, even as I type this, I have a big grin on my face and a few tears of happiness welling up. Congratulations Jen and Chris, so happy for you both.

Redirecting Question

Friday, July 11, 2008 ~ 5 comments so far

Note: This is a techie question, all those not interested, look away now.

(and no, I’m not doing very well at the whole ‘staying away from the blog to be productive thing…)

[update]SORTED!!!
That nice man wot writes Hydragenic came through for me (apparently he would ‘not be defeated’, he cracked it second time round).

I’ve added the following line to my .htaccess file on the gordonmclean.co.uk domain:
RedirectMatch 301 /index\.php/(.*) http://www.onemanblogs.co.uk/index.php/$1

And now when you click this link (which points at the gordonmclean.co.uk domain) you’ll be properly redirected back to this domain (onemanblogs.co.uk).
[/update]

I received an email the other day. It was a nice email, the very kind I’d hoped my 404 page would generate.

The problem is a simple one. I moved domains a while ago, so some of the links that still exist point to my old blog URL (which is still live but is no longer a blog).

Following one of those links (from Lifehacker.com I think) will take you to this URL. Which is currently displaying a 404 error message.

To get to the correct page, all you need to do is edit the URL, replacing “gordonmclean” with “onemanblogs”. Simple.

So why the hell can’t I figure out how to write the appropriate .htaccess commands to get it to do that automatically.

I don’t want to redirect everything, only anything that has “/index.php…..” in the URL. Shouldn’t be THAT hard, right?

Well I’m stuck. So, dearest technical interweb friends, help!!