Da Vinci Crock

Just spotted a site about a legal battle over claims of plagiarism in the Da Vinci Code. I can never tell with US litigation (one obvious example in progress at the moment) whether people only sue rich successful people, or whether everyone is suing everyone else and the media only reports the big cases.

I recall that there were allegations that Life of Pi was plagiarised from a Brazilian author, though that apparently went nowhere; it may simply have been a bit of easy publicity for the Brazilian. I wonder if it’s a similar marketing ploy in the above case?

Bass amp shopping

This is a nearly-content free post from my avaricious side, feel free to ignore.
There’s some danger of me actually having to get a real bass amp. For starters, last night’s rehearsal with the Alex Harris band was loud enough that my little Kustom bass amp wasn’t audible. Secondly, there’s a couple of potential gigs in the offing: one’s just a flat-warming party for a friend of Alex’s so won’t require much amplification, but the second is at Royston Town football club (May 29th, details TBC), and I’d feel a bit of a gimp (the soundguy’s gimp, to be exact) if I turned up with my little practice amp as a monitor and just DI’ed straight into the PA. So I’ve been idly polling usenet and the interweb for ideas; I’m tempted by a head and cab, for the portability reasons mainly, and the opportunity to try out different speaker configurations easily. eBay is turning up a few Trace Elliot heads, but though I like the Trace sound (and already own a Trace guitar amp, so it’ll be a matching set), I hear that they suffer from reliability issues; certainly Steve’s Trace blew up at least once. On a more logistical note, bass amps are heavier than mountain of depleted uranium, so unless the eBayer happens to be local to me it’s not worth my bidding.
So, I’ll probably get one from a shop. The next thing I discover about bass amps is that they’re as expensive as they are heavy. With one exception: Behringer, the Aldi of music gear, have started making cheap bass amp heads. (So I won’t go for a Trace due to reputed unreliability, but I would consider a Behringer, whose gear is as reliable as politician’s pre-election promise? However, 170 nicker for 300W is a lot of bang, or rather, throb, per buck.) Then to decide between a 4×10″ or 1×15″ cab, with either paper or aluminium cones! The one disadvantage of the Behringer cabs is that the speakers are made by a company called Bugera. Because they’lla buggera youra earsa? Hmm. I also have the temptation to score one of the fancy new neodymium bass speakers and either make or buy a cabinet to put it in. These things really are the shiznit, mental efficiency with minimal weight.
At least I’ve got about a month to get to the shops and try these things out!

Spam blocking

Blimey, just as Adrian blocks comments on his site due to comment spam, I spot the Bad Behaviour plugin. It’s described as analysing incoming requests for spambot-type behaviour, and throwing an error message at offenders. Interesting, I do see the activity of the spam bots in my webstats, I wonder if this will reduce that. I guess not as the hit will still register… Just googling for the Spaminator, my old anti-spam plugin, I now find that apparently it doesn’t work with the final WordPress 1.5 release, so apologies to those who have desperately been trying to post comments and have been prevented (though I’d be surprised if anyone had, as a) I check the logs for just such events and b) this shit’s so dull people rarely comment.) I’ve disabled the Spaminator, let’s see how Bad Behaviour copes.

Another sidebar addition

Added a thingy to the sidebar to show what I’ve been listening to, using the WP-Scrobbler plugin. Just seemed like I wasn’t really using Audioscrobbler to its full potential; since it supplies an RSS feed of my recent listening, why not doing something with it, I thought.

Doorstep me

I’m dying to get doorstepped by one of the political parties. Well OK, one of the three serious ones. I’d ask questions about top up fees, Iraq, ID cards, council tax vs local income tax, Europe… though aren’t we really supposed to be voting for our local representative, so I guess I should be asking Cambridge-specific questions as well. Heck I’m sure I could think of something on the spur of the moment, just DOORSTEP ME! Knowing my luck I’ll get a visit from the Jehova’s Witnesses instead. Maybe I don’t need it though, even the rather random questions in the Observer vote-o-matic put me as Lib Dem.

WinNMD and an old Casa tune

I bought a minidisc player at the start of last year. Yeah yeah, why didn’t I get an mp3 player instead; the reason was that there weren’t any reasonably priced mp3 players that contained a mic preamp, and I wanted to use the device to record rehearsals and gigs. The model I purchased is one of the Sony NetMD ones, which can transfer tunes quickly from the computer via USB; however you can’t transfer from the player back to the computer, natch. Thus the latter process involves manually controlling the recording process. Recently I found a program that at least makes the process hands-free, even if the transfer still occurs in real time: Win NMD. This little beastie controls the MD player via the USB connection, and will create a wav file (named using the track info on the MD) of each song you select for transfer, all while you put your feet up in front of Hollyoaks: top banana. I used it to transfer a Casa del Funk gig from the end of ‘03, which I’ve been meaning to do for a long time as it was quite an old-school Casa line up, featuring Derek Scurll on drums and James “Reg” Regan on keys. Here’s the closing song of the first set, Jazz Carnival. I note at the end of that tune there’s a particularly fiddly bit of guitar sound, but I can’t work out if it’s Reg’s keys sound or me playing it! It sounds a bit too even to be me, normally I fluff more notes . It’s particularly exciting as, all going to plan, I might be playing with Derek again on a more regular basis, once Tom O’Grady (he of playing Rhodes with Kirk Degeorgio fame) gets his much anticipated funk band up and running. Of course, that would put me in three bands: the jazz soul band, Alex Harris, and Tom’s funk garden (not the official band name). I think I’ll have to axe the jazz in order to actually spend some time at home. A shame, as I was just getting into fingerstyle.

Thoughts on skiing

Now my legs have stopped aching and my scalp has stopped peeling (yuk), I think I’m in a position to give my thoughts on skiing as a holiday. And because I’m a scientist I shall present it as a list rather than prose.

• Everyone in ski boots walks like daddy cool. Your ankles are locked at a 90 degrees, necessitating the use of an exaggerated heel-to-toe gait normally employed by only the funkiest of cats. Of course I walk like this on a normal basis so had no trouble.
• Ski boots aren’t as bad as you’d expect, but if you tighten the clips enough you can end up feeling like you’ve been taken hostage by a crack team of Chinese foot-binders. Do wear ski socks, which are little different from hiking socks but come up to mid-calf, thus covering the pressure point where your shins rest on the front of the boot. There were differing opinions on whether wearing an extra pair of socks inside your ski socks would cause or prevent blisters; we didn’t, and didn’t get blisters.
• Intensive learning courses mess with your mind. Kyla and I had lessons every morning for a couple of hours; after a couple we both noted that as we were falling asleep and idly thought about the day’s skiing, our leg muscles would tense in the way they needed to as if we were actually on the slope. Sounds like a rather extreme version of visualisation aiding muscle memory! There is a body of thought that says visualisation is a positive thing in sport psychology, and I’ve even seen it discussed as part of practicing guitar. Maybe I’ll have a play with visualising my scales more often.
• It’s true, snowboarders do look cooler than skiiers. But then more boarders should wear wrist protectors, I now know two people who’ve broken their wrists on the first day of their boarding holiday.
• It’s not just a sport for posh folks. Chatting with some of the other guys in the chalet, their professions were builder, plumber, electrician… I wonder if there are people in the Royal Family who actually hate skiing, but becuase they’re posh they end up forced into it. I wonder whether Prince Harry would rather be a boarder; after all he’s already smoked dope.
• Drinking in the Alps isn’t cheap, but the toffee vodka in Jack’s Bar, Meribel, is f’kin gorgeous. Apparently it can be made by soaking six bags of Werther’s Originals in a bottle of vodka for a fortnight, though in the Alps it’s made with a locally-produced caramel sauce. Think I’ll be giving this a go as soon as.
• Having more experienced people around is a bonus, as they’ll drag you down slopes you can cope with but might otherwise not attempt. Kyla and I had never been skiing before this holiday, but went down a few red runs on the last day (not very well, admittedly, but we made it eventually).

Skiing in Meribel

No posts for a week as I’ve been NAK. There was a surprising amount of snow around for mid-April in the Alps; there’d been a large fall the day before we arrived, which was followed by a series of blazingly hot sunny days. It was during one of the latter that I came across another of those turning points in the aging process: when you realise that your hair alone is insufficient to stop your scalp getting sunburnt. We went with Alpine Elements, who were thoroughly fantastic and organised all the lessons, ski hire and bar crawls we could manage. The snow was getting very thin towards the end of the week, but beginning on Friday night another enormous dump of snow commenced, making for some pleasingly soft landings on the last day (a good job too, as we ended up going down some red runs that should have been well out of a beginner’s league.)

Hot comment action

I’ve been meaning to add a “Recent Comments” thingy to the side bar, and now I have, with the help of MtDewVirus’s recent-comments plugin. Lovely job.

Waiting for the Pope

I was looking at the BBC’s website when I spotted an article discussing whether photographing the dead pope is in some way disrespectful. I can see both sides; is it simply turning a man’s death into a tourist attraction? But then the pope is an iconic figure whose image represents the Catholic church, so sharing the image merely propagates awareness of Catholicism. I thought that if people were taking digital photos, there’s a chance some have made it to flickr, which is where I spotted this incredible aerial shot of the people queuing to pay their respects to the pope. (Though the actual source photo is here.) I wonder if there was a similar photo taken of the million-person anti-war demo in London back in ‘03?