Theme change: Retromania

Don’t adjust your eyeballs, it’s just a theme change.  This time I’ve gone for Retromania, made by Jay Hafling.

Excess baggage

It’s often been said by those of us in Casa that this band needs lights.  This ranges from a need for small clip-on lights so that people can read their pad of music (the horn section complains that their parts are more complicated than the rhythm section’s, because they’ve got, like, notes and stuff?  So they can’t memorise them), up to a full set of stage lights, lasers, dry ice, mirror balls, and fireworks.  The reason we haven’t bought lights yet is that they’re just one more piece of kit to lug around, and given that Dave, our drummer, already looks after our PA, and he knows full-well we’d get him to carry the lights too, he’s vetoed it.  However, for the gig we did on Saturday we were presented with a large, souless hall with two possible lighting settings: inquisition glare or moonless midnight.  Fortunately we had Derek on drums, and he has a friend who was willing to lend us 3kW of lighting rig at short notice.  For once we looked totally professional!  Err… ok, we were a bit easier to see on stage.  But, given that I carted the lights home and returned them on Sunday, I think Dave has a point: more kit is A Bad Thing.  I think that in the next life I’ll be a singer and just roll up to gigs with a microphone.

(Oh, one more thing: if you click on the photo to view the original on flickr, look closely and you’ll be able to see Derek’s ‘tache in the wild.)

Cambridge 209

Recently I’ve been listening to Cambridge’s community radio station, Cambridge 209, during my daily commute.  I do this not through some act of local solidarity, but mainly because the Jukebox show doesn’t have a DJ, it just plays music.  No talking, no adverts and rarely any station idents, plus the most unpredictable playlist I have ever come across.  For example, this morning’s journey was accompanied by New Frontier (Donald Fagen), Jump (Pointer Sisters) and Whatever happened to? (Buzzcocks).  Occasionally you get seriously heavy rock followed by classical music.  It’s like a party with the worst DJ in the world, and frankly I love it.

I’d like to get involved, though I haven’t really got the time.  (I had an idea about getting Tom of Acuphuncture/The Beauty Room fame to bring his extensive vinyl collection along and do a jazz funk show that took music WAY too seriously.  Nice.)  I used to do a radio show with a friend at Uni; an hour of bickering, biscuit tasting and… well, I’d say beats, but at that time my music collection was dominated by Soundgarden, Metallica and Faith No More, so things were a bit more rock than they are today.  (Sadly there was no beer; they told us that drinking alcohol whilst in charge of a radio station is illegal, which seems unlikely but we never checked.)  Doing your own radio show is similar to the implicit narcissism of writing a weblog: you talk, and assume the world hung on your every word.  Or maybe that’s just me.  In reality the CUR transmitter had a range of a stone’s throw, so  the chance of anyone actually hearing us was pretty low, but it kept us amused regardless.

Thinking about the 209 station idents (and an advert for another show I caught), there’s just a slight lack of sheen that differentiates them from what you’d hear on Radio 1.  Maybe it’s some effect on the “professional” station’s sound samples – potentially 209 could slap a bit of delay and a load of compression on the voices to make them sound a bit more in your face – but it seems that when the Radio 1 DJs joke about the jingles costing a few thousand pounds each, that expenditure does make a marked difference.

Barge chase

Canal boat chase ends in capture after 8 days.

Inspector Harry Graham, head of the thirty-strong pursuit team, blamed an initial delay on the need to get permission from British Waterways to exceed the 4mph speed limit. ‘When we got the necessary clearance, we found our boat would only do 4mph anyway. So we decided on a softly-softly approach and dug in for the long haul.’

I’ve been on a barge holiday, and this is exactly what it’s like.

Chrome EULA

Well well, google released a new browser.  I just downloaded and installed it and was blown away by the speed of the thing.  My Yahoo mail loaded so much faster than in my usual browser (Firefox 3.0.1), and general performance seems to be better than FF.  All good, until I was looking around online and spotted in the comments section of the Guardian article about Chrome that the Chrome EULA (of which I of course read point 1.1 then skipped the rest) includes this section:

By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any content which you submit, post or display on or through, the services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the services and may be revoked for certain services as defined in the additional terms of those services.

Nice: anything I look at or post in Chrome belongs to google.  Looking around on the net I found another post about the Chrome EULA, which has several useful links, and is written by a lawyer who claims that this effectively rules out the browser’s use by a whole slew of people.  And even if Google says “Oh don’t worry about that,” should we worry about it?  If it’s not needed, don’t put it in the EULA.