Here is our selection of photos taken by local photographer, Alex. These are going to be turned into Arran place mats and hopefully sold in their thousands!
Music by the Greencards
I watched a couple of my favourite films this week with Lorraine's mum, both starring Bill Nighy. The first was Girl in the Cafe. Bill plays a rather awkward government adviser. He meets a girl in a cafe and ends up taking her to the G8 summit in Reykjavik. His acting is superb and the film is rather moving.
The second one is a Stephen Poliakoff work called Gideon's Daughter. Nighy plays a PR guru who can do no wrong, except in his daughter's eyes. Once again the acting is superb, and the lighting too. I've only started to notice lighting since I got interested in photography and it really does stand out in this film as being very well done. Of course anything Stephen Poliakoff does is going to be moving in some way and this one is no different. His work opens me up in a big way.
Check them out.
Our bluegrass band, the Saggy Bottom Boys, had our debut gig last night as the support act for Irish supergroup, Lunasa. Check us out here!
http://web.mac.com/janattkins/iWeb/Folk%20Festival/Saturday.html
I spent the whole of last week sorting out the shop. Usually I spend my time doing Post Office stuff. I'm the Post Office guy. Lorraine did shop stuff. I didn't enjoy the shop at all and resented it when it took me away from the PO stuff. But I decided this week to try and change that. So I was in the shop the whole week preparing for the new toy order that arrived on Tuesday. I moved things around, put sale stickers on junk, and worked till about 8 every night.
Friday and Saturday saw a lot of the junk selling and it was very satisfying. Even thought it's selling at a loss, it's satisfying to see it leave the shelves and at least keep the cash flow sort of running.
Lorraine came in yesterday and we managed to get all the new toys out.
The other thing I did was to start my eBay campaign. I really need to get stuff shifting but have always disliked using eBay, mainly because of the hassle and how clunky eBay can be. But it needed to be done and I've started so I just need to keep some momentum going. If anyone's interested, the eBay handle is brodickpo
Here's hoping for a good season and the possiblity of paying my invoices!
The most important ingredient when fixing computers is patience. It's a while since I've gone through a repair cycle, but this is a biggie. A friend's Dell wasn't booting so I've brought it home. I did manage to diagnose it as a hard-drive issue, so that was good. Diagnosing can be the most difficult thing when one does not have the requisite spare parts.
Thankfully the data is still on the hard drive, so first things first, I thought I would back up the data to my own computer. Only then did I discover that the problem of low disk space that I've been shoving to the back of my mind needs to be addressed now or I won't be backing up anything! I had a new drive that I bought over a year ago for this very purpose, so I started cloning my data drive to the new, larger-capicity drive. I set it running at 10pm last night and was dismayed to find that it had reached only 75% by 10 this morning. Patience.
So I was ready to dive in to the problem drive. I had left a disk maintainance utility (SpinRite) running over night and it had found no errors. Only I didn't really want to start messing around with the failed drive until it was backed up. That meant waiting until my disk clone was done.
As I write, that is now complete and I am now creating a disk image of the failed drive on to my new larger-capacity drive. I will then clone the failed drive to another hard disk of the same capacity and see if I can get that to boot. We're talking probably about an hour for the image creation and another for the disk clone. If the replacement hard disk doesn't boot, I'll have to use the Dell recovery disk and start rebuilding the OS and then migrate the data back from the image.
I'm going to need buckets of patience!
I found it to be rather a clever book in that it seems to rise above the geekish realm of fantasy and sci-fi and enter the mainstream. Yes, it is in essence a fantasy book, but not like any other I've read. There are no elves and goblins, no magic talismans, no underdogs coming into their powers and having to save the world from evil against the odds. Rather this is a tale of 19th century England and features such historical characters as Napoleon and Wellington.
The style is a literary one, reminding one of Jane Austen and the Brontes and the characters would not seem out of place in a Dickens novel.
We begin in the north of England, where practical magicians no longer, well, practice magic and the theoretical magicians read books on magic and discuss it in their clubs and societies. That is until Mr Norrell comes along, a practical magician intent on being the only one of his kind. He agrees to prove to the theoreticians that he can do magic, but makes them agree that, if he is sucessful, the theoretical magicians should give up magic all together.
Then Jonathan Strange comes along as another real magician and we follow the relationship between him and Mr Norrell throughout the tale.
The audiobook is read by Simon Prebble and he does a good job. I enjoyed the book a lot but do feel that it could have been shortened without losing too much. The constant footnotes became a little grating but I had got used to them by the end. I don't think that I would read this again and I would be hesitant to recommend it to my fantasy-loving friends, but to those of you who do enjoy the 19th century novel, I'd have no hesitation in recomending it.
At the Tuesday Catacol session it came to light that the fiddle club are playing their competition entry for the Whiting Bay Music Festival this coming Friday. Normally Nick the gardener would accompany them, but he's off down south to see a man about a guitar amongst other things. So Carol and Sandie asked if I would accompany them. So I found out on Tuesday night and had to be at their rehearsal last night, giving me all of no time at all to figure out some chords. Thankfully I had my iPod and mic with me on Tuesday so I got a recording of the tunes and messed around with my guitar in the back room at the Post Office for half an hour when it was quiet. I figured out a few chords and then headed out last night to the rehearsal which I'm pleased to say went all right.
The gig is on Friday night. We're playing three tunes in A, Am and Bm respectively. I have some nice modal chords for the Bm tune (basically Am with a capo on 2) from the Frank Kilkelly accompaniment book and I was thinking of trying some DADGAD chords for the A and Am tune. I've got something that works in standard, but I'll try the DADGAD stuff tonight and see how it goes.
So, that means I played last Tuesday, Saturday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday and I'm playing again this Saturday. Things are definitey looking up! :)
Nick the gardener came round to ours last night for a jam and it was a great wee night. He brought his Fylde mandolin and Lowden O32 guitar. He's been playing mando for about a year and has some serious chops. He plays often with a fiddle player so usually gets to play accompaniment with little chance of knocking out some melodies, so playing with me gave him that opportunity. He also showed me some basic chords on the mandolin, something which I'd just never got around to learning. He played a 3-tune medley that I recorded so I could learn to play along, but I did attempt to accompany him while the recording was under way, so I've included that recording on this post.
We played a good few tunes and I enjoyed playing his Lowden for a while. It recently had a refret and proper set up and it plays like buttah. My only complaint about it is its lack of bottom end, but that's only really noticable from the player's perspective; it sounds great from out in front.
I hope we get to play together more often as I think we could work out a few things together and have some real fun.
It's also nice to meet a fellow sufferer of guitar acquisition syndrome! He's off down to see Roger Bucknall of Fylde to see about getting a new guitar. There is, of course, no cure for GAS!
Recent Comments
-
Lauren said:
[this is good]Absolutely beautiful! I think the last two are my favorites. <3 read more
on For Place Mats -
-
Cams said:
Thanks greywolf. Yeah, things are definitely looking up! read more
on Saggy Bottom Boys' debut gig -
greywolf said:
You guys sound great! Looks like you've found a way to stay involved with music. read more
on Saggy Bottom Boys' debut gig
Those are some great shots. read more
on For Place Mats