1. 2009-04-21

    Baby pictures
    Strickland 2.0 announced. Late October launch.

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  4. 2009-03-03

    Macropinna microstoma , the barreleye fish has unusual tubular eyes which are extraordinarily good at harvesting light. Furthermore, it can rotate its eyeballs in order to see upwards through its transparent head shield.

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  6. 2009-02-07

    This year's Bristol Comics Expo is going to be held on the weekend of May 9th-10th. Aggravatingly this is the same weekend that I'm going to be away at ATP vs the fans .

    Even more annoyingly, this makes it the second year in a row that I'll miss it. Last year I gave up, after a few attempts to survive the stupidly arranged ticket purchasing queues. Prior to that, I'd managed to go to every single one since Bristol began hosting them , back in 1999 or so.

    Intriguingly, this year, the small press (usually the most interesting aspect of the festival, for me) is broken out into a separate event for some reason.

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  7. 2009-02-06


    • Porter airlines : the only way to fly.


    • A song about the Spadina bus


    • As I suspected, Toronto isn't even cold in the wintertime. Barely dipped below zero, the entire time I was there.


    • Apricot Weißbier, nicer than it ought to be.


    • Prevailing man-hipster fashion trend: Button cardigan, bushy beard, and oversized pseudo-religious pendantry


    • Guitar hero is more fun than I'd have thought.


    • The prehistoric Trypilian culture from the Ukraine, was one of the earliest neolithic civilizations


    • If you own a Birks watch, as I do, you can get it serviced and the battery changed for free at any Birks branch.



    • Do not place your nose into any unusual looking fixtures attached to bathroom walls.


    • Iroquois false face societies , and why you cannot see their masks in museums.


    • My karaoke version of ' In The Air Tonight ' was a surprise success, but perhaps even more suprisingly, my version of ' My Heart Will Go On ', placed me in the final three.

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  8. 2009-02-05

    While I was in Manhattan, I happened to wander past the window of Minamoto Kitchoan , a fancy boutique translation of a traditional japanese confectioners. I'm endlessly fascinated by japanese culture, especially the old-world; I have a pet theory that Japan and the UK are peculiar reflections of each other, there's a lot of cultural resonance, but it's all distorted into wonderfully strange shapes. Nevertheless, I was initially a little too intimidated to enter, as the store was devoid of customers, and the interior looked rather cold and formal. Luckily for me, Mrs S. egged me on enough to overcome my trepidation, and in I went.

    I'm not really experienced enough to count myself as even an amateur aficionado of japanese food, but I've eaten a fair bit, and their sweets are a rum affair; they're intended to please more than just a sweet tooth, designed as much to appeal to the eye, and offer textures to the palate. They tend not to be very sweet, and a large proportion of their construction would seem to be kidney beans. This does mean that they're better for you than many western sweets, I'd have thought. Far less fat and sugar.

    I wandered about the shop a little, it didn't seem like the staff spoke any useful English (this could have been my British accent, of course), but I managed to communicate a request through the universal language of pointing and nodding. Every addition to my shopping list was met by the kimono clad shop-girl with a charming sequence bowing and nodding - and then the whole order was packaged up beautifully in a box to take away.

    Here's what I bought.


    • Kohakukakanme (pickled plum in agar jelly, covered with flakes of real gold)

    • Kabochamanjyu (bean cakes, both shaped and flavoured like pumpkin)

    • Fukuwatashisenbei (a topographically curious biscuit)

    • Hanatsubomi (bean jelly in preserved lemon)





    I then ate them in installments, back at the hotel. They were all pretty good eating, probably the pickled plum made the most sense to my palate - not really too far away from a fruit cocktail. The Fukuwatashisenbei biscuit tasted almost exactly like a custard cream, but was rather awkward eating because of it's shape. The bean pastes are a little bit of an acquired taste, but faintly addictive.

    Japanese sweetshop


    The store is part of a chain, apparently there is a London branch, somewhere in Piccadilly.

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  9. 2009-02-02

    So much for my new year resolution to write more often.

    Just before I went away for Christmas, my trusty white MacBook had developed a bit of a problem with it's keyboard. Initially this manifested as the function keys intermittently losing the ability to switch between special Mac control keys, such as brightness, eject media and what-not and normal user-programmable f -keys. Initially I thought this may be a problem with the fn key that is the toggle, but eventually the keys f1 - f9 stopped working entirely. This was irritating, but didn't really render the machine unuseable. Most of the time I use it with an external keyboard, and luckily all the defunct keys functions were duplicated in software.

    The next key to go was the right Shift key. Although, of course there's a left Shift key, for a touch-typist, this was a little harder to ignore. Although I find much to admire about Apple's current laptop keyboard design, unfortunately user-repairability isn't one of its many blessings. There's no simple way to get into the top casing on a polycarbonate MacBook, it's an expensive specialist job for a service centre.

    Sensibly I'd followed my own advice when I purchased this laptop, and bought it from the always-wonderful John Lewis with their standard two-year full warranty on electrical goods. I was coming up very close to the two-year anniversary, which fell within the first week of January, itself another lucky stroke, as it meant that I'd be able to take it with me on my trip to North America , where hopefully it would hold up well enough to let me edit photos, communicate, and act as an additional entertainment for any idle moments. It managed the job fine, and as soon as I was back in the U.K. I packed it off to John Lewis for maintenance, which is something that they arranged with their usual attention to customer service. More thumbs up for John Lewis.

    Which left me Mac-less, save for my rather under-spec G4 mini, which can barely read mail and a web-page at the same time, under Leopard. And so no blogging.

    The two year mark was also my planned point for a new machine upgrade. Buying a machine for work, I was able to take advantage of the Apple Developer Program hardware discount. Sadly this means abandoning John Lewis to purchase direct, but now we've got a real Apple Store in Bristol , I think AppleCare is probably a good deal.

    I figured I'd be needing a machine with better graphics hardware, to better make advantage of the already signposted future directions in OS X technology. The new 'unibody' Macbooks didn't really suit, as I've probably got as many firewire devices as USB. Also, my recent work had been feeling the strains of my Macbook's 13" screen and modest integrated graphics chipset. And so I'm typing this update from my new 2.8GHz, 15.4" MacBook Pro .

    It's mostly a great upgrade. On the positive side, it's pretty and slim, and I'm remembering just how right the 15" widescreen form is for me. The screen is brighter than anything I've ever seen, and makes other LCD displays, including my expensive monitor look washed out and dull by comparison. The new glass front is dramatically easier to clean than any laptop screen I've owned. The extra-large button-free trackpad is brilliant, and even the gimmicky sounding gestures have proven to be almost practical enough for regular use. The unibody shell seems rigid and light, and bringing across the now-standard Apple keyboard hardware makes a brilliant switch from the old silver PowerBook G4 style, which I frankly hated. It's super-fast, of course; the new CPU, memory bandwidth, and fast hard drive all combining to ensure that as yet, I've not seen any performance stalls when many simultaneous processes grow busy.

    It's not perfect of course. Some of the positives are also negatives. The glass fronted screen is considerably more reflective than the previous gloss models, and while in practice I find that I mostly mind this far less than I'd have thought, it's undeniably worse than my gloss MacBook.

    Then there are more straightforwardly negative negatives. Like many people, I've found trouble with the Apple mini DisplayPort to DVI connector - the integrated NVidea 9400 graphics adaptor can't drive my 23" TFT without sparkly artefacts, I have to run it through the additional 9600 GT GPU to get a useful picture. It's too pretty, in as much as it makes me fret about the wear and tear that will inevitably mar its looks over time; surely computers should be tools not jewellery? It's slightly heavier than a MacBook, and the battery life is probably less, it's too hard to say, the calibration as yet seems to be a bit iffy with estimates. I miss the inbuilt LED charge gauges on the battery which allowed one to check the power without having to connect the battery up, so handy when travelling with two or more. I also miss the ports on the left hand side, and find the supplied ports a bit stingy; surely they could have squeezed a couple more USB slots and a firewire 400 in somewhere? I'm not sure I need a wired ethernet anymore.

    Not only that, but shortly after I'd ordered it, Apple saw fit to announce an update to the polycarbonate MacBook line, giving it a memory bus and GPU boost to inject some of the performance I was lacking, and keeping the essential firewire port in place. And then they announced iLife '09 would ship a mere handful of days after my new machine was dispatched. I think I'll still enjoy all the other Pro upgrades though, and they did offer recent purchasers like me the chance to upgrade the iLife suite for just a nominal cost.

    Overall I'm happy, and I'm sure all the wrinkles will be ironed out, as I adjust to life with it. It ought to keep me in the manner to which I'm accustomed for the next couple of years, at least. What was that they said about never buying the first iteration of a new Apple product line? Oh.

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  10. 2009-01-04


    • Less reading blogs

    • More writing blogs

    • Release more software

    • No more sugar, sweets, confectionary (free pass for tea, if I can't manage that plain)

    • No coffee

    • More politeness

    • Less judgement



    There's some lofty goals there. Let's see how well I fare. An important thing to remember about giving things up, which I learnt when quitting my oodles-of-fags-a-day smoking habit, is that a lapse shouldn't mean that you just abandon the effort. Some of them are obviously aspirational, and need to be viewed as a progression, not a destination.

    I have a few more, given that I'm such a fan of self-improvement, but I won't share everything.

    Last year my only public resolution was to stop drinking alcohol, and that lasted three months, until I got very bored of it. I don't think I have a drinking problem yet.
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  11. 2008-12-25

    Merry Christmas one and all! We decided to get away from it all this year, and are therefore in New York city. It is tremendously Christmassy.

    Heading to Toronto tomorrow to visit with the Lyles, back to New York for New Year's Eve (where we've a choice between two pre-booked parties to make - option a: Times Square, formal-ish dinner and comedy, option b: Tribeca, trendy club with cool bands playing). Back in the U.K. the day after.

    Here are some of the photos I've taken, so far.

    NYC Christmas

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  12. 2008-12-19

    How can I tell ? I've bought him his own duvet.

    I'm heroically committed to a program for keeping the dog off the majority of the household furniture. My strategy is thus; I have one (wipe clean!) sofa I don't actively discourage him from clambering on. The majority of the time, he sleeps on this overnight, even though to my eyes his basket seems as if it would more comfortable.

    When the wintertime arrives, and the nights get colder, he's not so keen on an unadorned sofa. I can tell this because he starts to seek out nesting opportunities in more upholstered regions. The way that I combat this is to pile up a few cheap throws or blankets on the permitted sofa, which gives him something to nest in. Of course, the actual, correct, dog-basket is padded, upholstered, lined with welcoming cushions and blankets, and positioned in front of a good radiator, but somehow none of that seems to matter. It's all about perceived status with dogs, and so far as he's concerned, sofas are extremely swanky real estate.

    To try and keep the winter sofa throws looking less manky after a couple of nights, I've tended to buy woollen ones. Light coloured rough wool doesn't show up the dog hairs so badly. In my heart, I think that I'll source them from local charity shops, but in practice they never seem to have anything suitable, so usually I end up buying them from shops, as cheaply as I can manage. Every once in a while, if they're looking particularly tired, I recycle the blankets in the rag box. The rough fibres are a too successful hair-trap; I wouldn't consider letting them near my washing-machine's expensive German filters, and I'm too lazy to clean them by hand. Then I buy some fresh ones, and restart the whole cycle.

    Which leads into the current ridiculous state. IKEA is a particularly useful source of very cheap and fairly durable blankets, and it's only a few minutes walk down the road. This time I was wondering about experimenting with something a bit more sustainable, a fabric I could more easily clean, using our wonderful new VAX , with it's miracle pet-hair removal tool (which is actually the stripped floorboard tool I think, the 'pet' edition of the same cleaner was more money for the same suction).

    I strode around a spookily empty IKEA (daytime, recession, Christmas panic shoppers busy elsewhere, wonderful!) trying to decide between a handful of different less-than-a-fiver options. I was suddenly flummoxed to encounter pile of somewhat rudimentary, lightweight double duvets selling for £2.78. A preposterous new plan quickly formed.

    And so I bought a duvet for my dog. We put a cover on it from our store of past-it's-best bed-linen, and arranged it on the sofa. He seems very happy with it, but I can't help feeling some sort of key principle of domestic husbandry has been roundly subverted.


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  13. 2008-12-09

    Eddie Argos , of Art Brut fame, and Mikey Georgeson a.k.a. Mr. Solo a.k.a. Vessel from David Devant and his Spirit Wife have formed themselves a glam rock band - Glam Chops .

    Even better, their first release is a Christmas single : 'Countdown to Christmas / Baby Jesus was the first Glam Rocker' . Better still, they've made it available as a free download 'as an antidote to the credit crunch'. It sounds pretty much like you'd expect, and the first listen brought a seasonal smile to my face.

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  14. 2008-11-26

    I've only just noticed, but the Matador Records sampler disc 'Intended Play: Fall 2008', which they have made available as a free download , has a sample track from A.C. Newman's forthcoming 'Get Guilty'. Unsurprisingly, I like it. There's some good stuff on the rest of the album too, well worth the download cost.

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  16. 2008-11-24

    As I mentioned earlier , just as I was preparing to head out for Release the Bats, an email came in advertising a once-in-a-lifetime, never-to-be-repeated, world-exclusive, miss-it-at-your-peril set of performances by a reformed Sleep , at one of next May's ATP weekenders.

    Now I'm old and cynical enough to realise that very few things are truly never-to-be-repeated one-off exclusive shows in the world of Rock n' Roll, but I am keen on Sleep, and ATP surely know how to run a memorable event. I've always been intrigued by the idea of one of their Minehead weekends, it seems eminently possible that it's a great deal more civilised than the more traditional tents, rain, and cider circuit. It didn't take me that long to make the plunge and book a chalet for two. Team Strickland are going to Butlins !

    Aside from Sleep on the bill, we have long-time house favourites Spiritualized , crazy art-rockers Devo , experimental hip-hoppists AntiPop consortium , post-punk legends Young Marble Giants , and several others I don't yet know adjectives for. The more interesting thing about the lineup is the fact that 50% of the lineup will be chosen by popular vote by the ticket purchasers. That means me!

    There's a cunning twist. No doubt intended to mix things up, and keep it fresh. You're not permitted to vote for acts that have played an ATP UK festival before, at least not initially. This makes life decidedly more tricky. Lots of my no-brainer instant first choices are on the exclusion list. I shall have to work a little harder.

    dEUS and A.C. Newman have to be definite votes. St. Vincent would be good. Angels of Light , Midlake , Wolf Parade, Swan Lake ? Ratatat ? Sufjan might be a populist choice. I'd love to see Morton Valence again. Black Affair or the Aliens ? Maybe I could gamble a vote on a reformed Beta Band. Decisions, decisions...

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  17. 2008-11-12

    Yet another fancy-dress party. This time to honour Claire's birthday. One thing of note about pirate dressing-up, Goths have an unfair advantage over normal people. Still, not often that happens, I suppose, so fair play to them. My outfit ended up a bit Roger the Cabin Boy. And my monkey had insufficient anchorage, and so listed about a bit, drunkenly. Not my best look, on balance.

    Pirates!

    I blame Johnny Depp. I'm sure pirates used to be far less accessorised.

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  19. 2008-11-05

    After falling head over heels for the ATP stage roster, and having my mind blown by Shellac at Primavera this year, It took me about five minutes to sign up for this Halloween show, in London with Shellac headlining. Literally five minutes, the serial numbers on my tickets were #00002 and #00003.

    Held at the Kentish Town Forum , which I think used to be the Town and Country club, a venue I was last in to watch the final incarnation of Green On Red in something like '91. Nothing much changed about the place, and I was quite happy to note that there was plenty of milling around room at an event which I think was sold out, indicating a sane crowd capacity limit, a novelty for a London venue.

    A varied lineup of bands, the evening kicked off with Lightning Bolt , an outfit I know very little about. Apparently they played from the stage floor, surrounded by the first 500 punters in the queue. Followed by Pissed Jeans a band I narrowly missed seeing at Primavera , but am moderately curious about them, chiefly due to their revolting name. Sadly I didn't show up until just after they'd finished their set this time, as well. Perhaps I am fated never to see them play.

    There was a nice atmosphere for the themed night. The crowd was mostly dressed up in halloween garb, plenty of monster makeup and fake blood and wounds. Some of them seemed scarily over-refreshed to me, at least for such an early point in the evening. There were monster mannequins propped up about the place, and model ghouls with flashing eyes suspended over the stage. Most of the bands had gone to great lengths with their fancy dress. Mrs. S. was wearing bats in her hair, but I'm afraid that I let the side down somewhat, opting merely for some magnificently spangly silver glitter shoes.

    First act up after we arrived were Wooden Shjips , who played agreeably spacy drony krautrock, which managed to keep my interest through to the end of their set, always a good sign for that style.

    They were followed by Om , who I find marvellously impressive. They didn't seem to feel the need to dress up at all, but this was perhaps mitigated by the fact that their doomy Sabbath sludge metal stylings rather suit the spooky halloween monster vibe without them having to try any harder than usual. The most fascinating thing to me about Om is just how much of a great metal-ish sound they manage to summon up as a duo - just a Rickenbacker bass, vocals, and a tricksy drummer. My attention did wander on occassion, but when I found myself locked into their ponderous form of groove, it was quite captivating. And unlike in Spain, they were all finished by 10 p.m. so I managed to enjoy the full set this time. Exciting Om-related news that reached my inbox just before I set out for the show. Sleep are to reform for a show at ATP:Fans strike back next May!

    Les Savy Fav next, a band I find okay on record, but who have a 'must see' reputation about their live show. They kicked off with a tableaux involving a plague of zombies on stage, battling the band dressed as cops. It was a tad confusing, with plenty of dry ice, but I suspect the cops were overcome, and they then kicked off straight into their set as zombie cops. I can see why they have their live reputation; Tim Harrington is a very unusual looking frontman, and his stage antics are high-energy and engaging, plenty of clambering around the rigging, clothes shredding, fake blood and protracted sojourns into the audience for mass singalongs. Overall, I found them a bit murky-sounding and unconvincing for me.

    Shellac of course played a fantastic set. The vocals were a bit muffled, mostly down to Steve's comprehensive home-made mummy outfit, his entire head was wreathed in bandaging. Backing vocals were also indistinct, yet marvellous, Bob was styled as a Frankenstein's monster-type character, and performed the entire set firmly in character, all his vocal parts were strangulated-larynx monster grunting and zombie moans. Very amusing. I think he even performed an onstage Q & A much like they did in Spain, but kept to this completely unintelligible delivery. And Todd was a superbly convincing vampire, with plenty of finely judged cape theatrics and hissing. Shellac are superb, and are still my favourite live band. Go and see them as soon as you can.

    I can't provide any photos, sadly. In the only negative note of the whole evening, my camera was pinched by some idiot. I think it most likely was pilfered while I was on the night bus back to the hotel, as I wasn't really paying close attention to my belongings by that point. In consolation though, the camera-lifting idiot didn't get the essential proprietary cabling and charging cradle necessary to make their new toy useable, and I got to pick up a new camera the next day from one of the gadget megashops on TCR. I quite fancied an upgrade anyway. Plenty of photos from the show from others , on Flickr.


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