I don’t believe a word of this:
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You scored as Musical/Rhythmic. You are sensitive to sounds in your environment, enjoy music and prefer listening to music when you study or read. You learn best through melody and music. People like you include singers, conductors, composers, and others who appreciate the various elements of music.
The Rogers Indicator of Multiple Intelligences |
It’s almost a year since I got hold of the Moro Cookbook. It’s been well used. Now I also have Casa Moro, and am expecting that to end up just as food-splattered as its big brother.
One of the problems I faced when I got the first cookbook was the availability of some of the ingredients. Fortunately, soon afterwards I paid a trip to Phil and Lola and stocked up on Spanish goodies hard to find in the UK. Since then, either I’ve got a lot better at sniffing out Spanish food, or it has become a lot more widely available in the UK. I think Brindisa are to thank for much of this (damn, they’re expensive though). Now even my local health food shop has a stock of
ñora driehd peppers. Decent ham is still pretty hard to come by though (and prohibitively expensive). I’ve only managed to find lomo in Brindisa’s own shop, where it cost me about ten times as much as in Spain (although, to be fair, it was about ten times as good). And I don’t know where I’d go for caper berries (alcaperrones). Still, I can get enough Spanish food to keep me very happy.
When I flicked through the new book, I noticed one new ingredient in particular which seemed to have crept into a great many of the recipes: pomegranate molasses. I had no idea where I’d begin looking for this, and even less desire to start de-seeding and boiling down pomegranates to make my own. So I was ecstatic when, only four days after receiving the book, I was walking through Upperthorpe, past the spot where the much-missed (by me at least) Red Sea Continental Food Market used to stand, and I noticed that it had re-opened as the Al Sultan Continental Food Market. I took a look inside and, guess what the first thing my eye landed on was? Pomegranate molasses (well, the bottle says concentrated pomegranate juice, but that’s the same thing). I bought it with a big grin on my face, and stocked up on a few other non-essential essentials as well, like rose water and pickled chillis.
I bought a new mini-disc player recently. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking, WTF? In an age where everyone and their dog is hitting the street in a pair of white iPod headphones, why is Dan investing in archaic technology? Well, I did have a good reason. Y’see, a client sent me a mini-disc of sounds to put on their website, I had to find some way of getting it into the computer, and my last mini-disc player got stolen about five years ago. So I headed down to Richer Sounds to buy a new one.
What a joke! So archaic is the mini-disc player that they only had two left in the shop. And I faced a dilemma: do I buy the "Net MD", which hooks up to my computer via USB and, using a compressed format, can store about five albums worth of songs on a single mini-disc? Or do I buy the regular version, which can only play regular 80 minute discs, but has a microphone socket so I could potentially use it to record gigs & stuff (not that I seem to go to many gigs & stuff these days). Well, my MP3 player is broken, I really fancy the idea of walking the streets with hours of music in my pocket, and some time in the next year I’ll probably be able to afford an iRiver which can do all the recording I need. So I plumped for the USB version. Fool.
As it was the last one in the shop (the display model), they didn’t have all of the accessories for it. In fact, they didn’t have any. So I bought some headphones to go with it (and subsequently bought the right kind of USB cable), and assumed that I’d be able to download the software from the manufacturer’s website. First mistake (well, second mistake: the first one was buying the damn thing). Sharp (the manufacturer) wanted £15 for a copy of the BeatJam software which should, by rights, have been mine anyway. So I hunted around for alternatives. I found a piece of software called M3U2SBurner which is a bit cranky and complicated, but claims to be able to help me get my MP3s onto mini-disc. To get it to work, I had to download all sorts of other miscellaneous software, including something from Sony (how did I know Sony were going to be involved in this?) called Net MD Simple Burner. Unfortunately, it seems that Sony don’t want any old Tom, Dick or Harry getting their hands on this software, so I had a bit of a hunt to find a copy. But even then I couldn’t get it working - seemed I needed Windows drivers for my mini-disc player, and the Sony ones I’d managed to track down didn’t work on a Sharp machine.
I relented and sent Sharp the money for the software. It might cost me extra money, but at least it ought to make life easier. Well, yes, but not much. To start off with, the BeatJam software is complete pants, the kind of crap that usually gets bundled with Sony Vaios. I tried importing about 700 songs (which is all the songs I like to listen to on a Walkman, out of my collection of 18,000-odd). No dice: the computer just sat there for over two days, using up 100% of CPU cycles but not doing anything very obvious.
So I threw something less challenging at it: just an album-or-two’s worth of music. That worked much better, they all appeared in the BeatJam library. Next I had to convert them from MP3 to OpenMG format, and then "check them out" to my mini-disc player. For the first four songs, all went swimmingly, but then I got error messages telling me that "could not check the song out". No explanation why (and the Help files weren’t very enlightening). This happened regardless of which additional songs I tried to check out. If I wiped the disc clean and then started again, I could once more check out a small handful of songs (sometimes including songs which I’d been prevented from checking out before), but never more than about 25 minutes worth. In fact, on one attempt I only managed to get one song, of 2 minutes 29 seconds duration, on to a single disc before BeatJam started complaining that I couldn’t check out any more.
(Oh yes, a word about this "checking out". It seems that each OpenMG format song I have can only be copied to minidisc three times before it becomes useless. I gather this is some pathetic attempt to prevent piracy. It sucks. The punchline is that BeatJam is made by a company called Justsystem. This is the most unjust system of music protection I’ve seen in my life).
I tried again with M3U2SBurner, and had a little more success this time, but again I could barely get enough songs onto a single minidisc to last to my front door, let alone for an entire dog walk. And that was if I was lucky: most of the time Net MD Simple Burner simply wouldn’t recognise the mini-disc, or would crash out with some unspecified error.
I am convinced that at the root of all this strange and extremely irritating behaviour is some Sony-derived system to protect me from myself, some uber-complex system to prevent me from pirating the thousands of songs which I’ve spent weeks ripping from my CD collection (which now lives in the attic, and good riddance to it). I’ve seen this far too many times on far too many Sony systems (I know this mini-disc player is a Sharp, but the technology is obviously licensed from Sony). I hesitate to say this, but I’ve been the proud (yes, proud) owner of a great deal of Sony hardware in my time: I still have two VAIO laptops (BTW, did you know that VAIO stands for Video-Audio-Input-Output. My VAIOs don’t have line-in jacks. Why aren’t they called VAOs?), a Clié PDA, a digital stills camera, a digital video camera, and in the past I have had TVs, stereos, video recorders and mini-discs from Sony. No more. Enough. They are a great company, with many innovations, branding to die for, and a wonderful product line. But increasingly that innovation seems to be wasted on treating me, the customer, like an unruly kid who has to be protected from himself, pointless and hugely time-consuming hobbles the keep me within the Sony world, doing things the Sony way. In fact, they are like Apple at their worst, only far more insidious. Don’t buy Sony. I won’t be.
Before I moved to this PC, I had some RSS feed aggregator software running. I forget the name, and it was quite nice (you could even point it at non-RSS webpages and build an RSS template). But that was quite a while ago, since Day Zero I’ve just been browsing all my friends’ blogs and other RSS sites using the very primitive method of dropping them into my favourites and browsing over there every day (or perhaps ten times per day).
So… I’m looking for recommendations for a new RSS reader. For Windows. Preferably free. What do you use, and why?
I braved our local library’s reading group last night. They were discussing Magnus Mills’s All Quiet on the Orient Express, one of my favourite books. I was one of the few people who liked it (which in itself stunned me: I’ve lent the book to several people in the past: they’ve all loved it as much as me). One woman asked how anybody could possibly empathise with the book’s hero, who is something of a spineless drifter, unable to say no to any of the increasingly demanding requests made of him. Her reasoning went along the lines of “anybody like that who can’t stand up for themselves, who just goes along with whatever they’re told… well, you could accept that in a teenager, but beyond a certain age, you’ve got to think there’s something slightly sub-normal about anybody quite so timid.”
As I was sitting next to her, she turned to me and asked whether I agreed. I sort of mumbled something which could perhaps be taken for half-hearted agreement.
Somehow I think the subtlety of my protest was lost on her. But… well, what else could I say? I mean, I didn’t want to offend her or anything.
Heh, it’s a really weird feeling, stumbling upon a picture of our house and car on somebody else’s website.
Every once in the while, pieces of music from my past spring back to me, things I haven’t even thought about in years, decades even. Yesterday, as I was out walking Gizmo, my head suddenly filled with the beautiful rhythms of the Asmoto Running Band, and I realised that I absolutely had to hear some Principal Edwards Magic Theatre again. Well, I’ve got feelers out on SoulSeek, but no luck as yet.
Principal Edwards (apparently another of the many things we have John Peel to thank for) was one of the many things I have Keith to thank for. When I was 16 and first met Keith at Richmond college, we used to go over the road to his house at lunch time, smoke the occasional spliff, and get carried away with his brother’s incredible collection of original 60s and 70s vinyl. It was through Keith that I discovered the Soft Machine, Principal Edwards, Deep Purple Mk I, Tractor, and I’m sure a whole host of others. Every week I would borrow a new carrier bag full of LPs, take them home to tape them, and bring them back to exchange for more.
But… mmm, Principal Edwards, gotta be one of the strangest and the greatest discoveries from way back then.
The week before last, I was down in London. I was supposed to be taking some photos of various private views, for FAD’s Flickr blog. Unfortunately, I had left the batteries and charger for my digital camera at a friend’s house. So, for the first time in about ten years, I dug out my trusty Pentax and bought some films.
It was quite a revelation. There is something incredibly rewarding about using a “real” camera, from the reassuring click of the shutter to the beautiful crisp image seen through the viewfinder (my digicam only has a crappy, scratched, thumbprinted LCD screen, worse than useless especially when the sun is shining). In fact, it was all the things that are “better” about a digital camera that I really found myself appreciating about the film equivalent (”Wow! You don’t get to see the picture as soon as you’ve taken it, so it’s, like, a total surprise what the developed film is going to look like. How cool is that?”)
Of course, there are also many more pitfalls with a film camera; potentially expensive ones too (although I was lucky to get my films developed for free). There was already a film in the camera when I took it out (not ten years old, thankfully: I had put it in a few months ago, then left it there when I realised that the battery needed a camera for the light meter). I assumed that, as the camera was set to 100ISO, that’s what the film would be. Oh no, I discovered when I reached the end that it was actually a 400. Got the developed film pulled a couple of stops and that didn’t seem to make too much difference, thankfully. But then the next film… well I loaded it, wound it on (I’m 90% sure that I checked it was loaded properly, as it was pulling round the reel on the other side of the camera), set it to the correct ISO. Went to the gallery and took a shitload of photos, got home and I’d used 32 of my 36 exposures, so I started taking random shots around the house to try and finish off the film. Over 20 shots later, I chickened out and rewound the film because I was sure I must be double-exposing my gallery shots; I had no idea what was happening.
Well, I still have no idea what happened because when I got the negatives back, they started off from the point where I started photographing the house. As if those 32 exposures taken in London never existed. I have no idea what happened: well, obviously the film didn’t take somehow, though I was sure I’d seen it winding on, and I didn’t do anything special in between London and Sheffield that would magically make the winding mechanism work (other than, probably, bash the camera about a bit in my bag). Ah well, some things will remain a mystery.
And then came the time to scan the negs into the computer. Well, I’d always known that dust is supposed to be the bane of this type of activity, but I’d always seemed strangely kind of immune before. But this time… well, every shot was covered with big white dots where universe-sized dust molecules had blocked out the light, and huge worming snakes of hair. I really must invest in one of those blowy squirty brush things (and, no, blowing onto the negatives really doesn’t help, especially not when you end up spitting on them by accident and the spit dries on as a ghostly crust). I also realised, once I got to look at my work full-sized, that I’m really not as good at focussing as I thought I was, nor as good at holding the camera still for 1/30th exposures. Oh well, it’s all a learning experience.
I shot another roll of film last night, and I have one more to spare in my bag, but I don’t know whether I’ll be using the camera much after that; partly because it is, let’s be honest, a bit of a hassle (and the results not as good as from digital), and also because my rough treatment seems to be taking its toll: there’s a bit of metal inside the camera which has slipped down and now half-covers the viewfinder from the inside, and on one shot the shutter got stuck open so that I had to flick the camera onto flash setting and take another shot before it would un-stick.
Here’s some results:
Wahay! The good old days are back. We (Allsum) have been shortlisted for the Revolution Awards! Our website for So Safe is one of seven finalists under the Best Public Sector Service Online. Our competition comes from the likes of the TUC, the Food Standards Agency, and some of the big boy web agencies. I don’t really expect us to win but, hey, it’s really nice to be up there again after so many years “in the wilderness” (our Kellogg’s work won a few awards in 2001, but I wasn’t really involved by that stage, the last major award I was involved with was the Cannes Lion we won in 1999 for our CampaignLive site). And it’ll be very nice going to an awards dinner again!
Wish me luck. The ceremony’s on 18th March.
Something happened to me recently. I started reading again.
Not that I’ve ever stopped, of course. It’s just that, following a real explosion about a year ago where I started devouring literature of all kinds, my stamina for reading seems to have tailed off over the course of the year, until it reached the point where I had four or five books on the go at once but very little real prospect of ever finishing any of them. (Actually, I’m sure some of the blame for this rests with the fact that I was acting - reading the same script day in day out, trying to learn lines and spot other subtleties, with very little brainspace left for other types of literature).
Anyway about two weeks ago, all of this changed. I’m not sure exactly what brought it on: partly the realisation that I have so many good books piling up that I really want to read, partly the need to push my life in some direction or other. To kick off with, I spent a Sunday afternoon and evening ploughing through Jonathan Coe’s The Rotters Club. Actually, I can see what series of events made me plunge into this: firstly, I picked the book up at a Bookcrossing meeting a few months ago, and felt some kind of duty to its previous owner to read and comment on it. Secondly, I’d heard that the TV adaptation of the book was starting shortly (actually the Wednesday after I read it) and I wanted to read the book before seeing the adaptation, otherwise I knew I wasn’t likely ever to read it. And thirdly, I’d recently read a short story by Jonathan Coe (from the Time Out Book of New York Short Stories, which was very kindly sent to me by Nicholas Royle, the book’s editor). Anyway, I loved the book (and the TV adaptation wasn’t bad either), read it on one sitting (starting mid-afternoon and finishing at about 2am) and am craving to read the follow-up.
From that, I went on to another Bookcrossing book, Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. An even better read, the first science fiction I’ve read in a long time (although Atwood would prefer that I call it “Speculative Fiction”, I’m not exactly sure why), it reminded me of some of the things I used to so love about the genre, how it can make me feel genuinely passionate and afraid for the future.
After Oryx and Crake, I moved on to Jonatham Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude. I’m finding that somewhat slower going, the prose is not very engaging (so far) and I just got a delivery from Amazon yesterday so I have temporarily put it down while I get on with Slavenka Drakulic’s (very short) They Would Never Hurt a Fly (about the Hague trials of Yugoslavian war criminals) instead. And also try to pick out some plays from Grand-Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror which we might be able to put on this Summer.
Meanwhile, I’m working my way more slowly through Robert Irwin’s The Arabian Nights - A Companion (so far, more scholarly than I had expected) and Alex de Jonge’s The Life and Times of Grigorii Rasputin (started off very promising, but seems to get duller by the chapter), plus dipping into a few short story collections: the aforementioned The Time Out book of New York Short Stories, A Book of Two Halves which is a collection of football stories (something I never expected to find myself reading), but is also edited by Nick Royle and has some great contributors, so is actually turning out to be a great read. Finally, I am still dipping into and slowly savouring M John Harrison’s Things That Never Happen, which is a bit of a masterpiece and, although I’ve read most of the stories previously, I could read and read again and never tire of.
So, that’s me. What are you reading?
Now, I must go… Casa Moro just arrived in the post!
