The Art of Happiness

• A Handbook for Living
• His Holiness the Dalai Lama & Howard C. Cutler

Rammstein

Easily the best concert that I've ever attended and I saw Rammstein in this same venue when they played in 2005.

You would think that there would be more people leaving Manchester during rush hour, but for some reason the roads that are usually are quite clear were grid-locked. Luckily I was still in plenty of time to get to the M.E.N. Arena and have a wander around before heading inside.

Quite why the venue security insist on everyone sitting down I don’t know but I guess it’s a chance to rest your legs in preparation for the next 3 hours. Strange that we all stood up at the same time. There didn’t seem to be a signal we just did it. I was stood about mid-way between the stage and the mixing desk, dead centre.

The stage was already set for Combichrist so there wasn’t the usual roadies running around checking microphones with the compulsory 1-2 1-2. They have to do that as part of their union regulations. You could tell from their setup that they’re a good match as support for Rammstein. Two drummers either side of a keyboard player with a singer prowling the front of the stage. I hadn’t heard any of their stuff previously and may checkout a track or two of theirs on iTunes. As always with support bands there is always one or two people in the crowd who are total fans. Bouncing up and down and shouting along whilst the rest of us just nodded gently.

When Combichrist had said their goodbyes a woman, who was obviously the worse for drink, moved into the spot in front of me. She was already shouting ‘Rammstein’ in that delightful cracked wail that only the completely inebriated can manage. She kept swaying around and putting her hands in the air making these strange gestures like an Indian belly dancer. At least it provided a diversion during the set change.

Because I'd stopped reading Kerrang! magazine a couple of years ago I didn’t know what was in store this evening. I'd bought the new album, Liebe Ist Fur Alle Da, and to be honest I wasn’t that taken with it. I'd even bought the ticket just thinking that I wouldn’t want to miss Rammstein considering that they may only tour the U.K. once every 5 years.

I have certainly never seen a rock concert like it. It was simply amazing. I think not knowing what was going to happen made the whole experience much more enjoyable. So I won’t even try to describe the whole show. But the lights and the stage would usually be enough for most bands but the flames were simply astonishing. Fire shooting up from the stage and down from the lights. How they manage to remember where they have to be at a given moment is remarkable. One step too far and any of them could be toast, literally. Parts of it were just completely mad :– the dolls, the bath, the petrol pump, Till singing at a table next to a floor lamp, Flake ‘walking’ for most of the show, the foam ‘cannon’, the wings, which other band would have the keyboard player ‘sail’ over the crowd in a dingy.

It was just the most amazing spectacle that I've ever seen. I can’t wait to get the live DVD, or Blu-Ray, when it comes out to re-live it all over again.

Related Links
A Gallery of Photos by lodge28 (Warning – Show Spoilers)

Das Keyboard

Boy, this was a long time coming. I'm sure it seemed longer because I was still stuck with a crappy Microsoft keyboard that I'd been using for work. It didn’t help that I ordered it just before they revamped it. I'm not sure what they changed about it, maybe the blue LED’s, possibly the powered USB ports, I don’t know. Then they had a minor problem with some units after they were shipped, which delayed my delivery even further. From the end of September 2009 to the middle of January 2010, but was it worth it?

The Microsoft keyboard was one that kind of curved. It wasn’t as if it was split, like some of them are, just bent enough to make it annoying when you switch from a it to a straight keyboard. It must have only cost about £30 and that was in a set with a mouse. After a year or so of heavy use it started to develop problems with some of the keys. I unscrewed it, which was certainly not easy considering the 12 or so screws of different sizes, and looked inside. There was nothing. It was just a rubbery membrane and a sheet of contacts. Nothing broken exactly but just something that was stopping some of the keys from registering.

The Das Keyboard is just a joy to use by comparison. The keys themselves have a satisfying little click just before they are fully depressed. I haven’t managed this yet but I'm sure that you could adjust your typing so that you just hit the first click without pressing the key all the way down.

I ordered the Ultimate, because I can touch-type, but I was a little concerned about entering cryptic passwords that have upper and lowercase as well as numbers. To be honest I haven’t had to do this yet and even if I did have trouble I'd just use the laptop keyboard.

One thing that I used to do with the old keyboard was to look down at the keys when I was hitting the numbered keys above the letters. Now, not having the keys marked means that I have to move my right had up so that my index finger is on the 7 and my little finger is on the 0. After the last week or so I have started to do this simply because I have no choice. The same goes for brackets and the other shifted symbols, there is no visual guide so you have to learn where they are. The numeric keypad is never used. I'm sure it’s only there for accountants and anyone needing to total long lists of numbers. I also have a habit of using one hand to hit an uppercase letter or for control key combinations. It’s these bad habits that I'm going to try to unlearn over time.

It certainly isn’t without it’s faults, but they are only minor. The connection to my Dell laptop is via 2, yes 2, USB ports. The cable out of the keyboard splits in to 2 USB plugs. The laptop has 4 thankfully, the other 2 are for the mouse and a mini-USB cable for my phone. I can’t see why it needs 2 USB ports, possibly for the powered USB sockets that are on the right-hand side. This is another problem. Those ports are right next to my mouse and mouse mat. I wouldn’t use them because any wires would hinder my mousing hand. These ports, useful though they may be, should have been moved 90 degrees anti-clockwise so that they are on the same edge as the main cable. They could even still keep them on the same bump as the Das Keyboard lettering.

Those quirks aside the Das Keyboard is good enough to almost make my job more enjoyable.

Related Links
Das Keyboard Model S from getDigital
Das Keyboard flickr set

Thank god I set out 2 hours early. All I had to do en-route is fill up with petrol, even though the little pointer wasn’t quite into the last sector on the dial. Traffic to the M60 was fine but getting near the Trafford Centre every lane ground to a halt. 40 mile an hour speed limits and cars just crawling along. And this was just an hour before showtime. I did contemplate getting off the motorway but that wouldn’t have been the wisest of moves as I don’t really know the area all that well. There didn’t seem to be any road works, I just saw a few cars on the hard-shoulder with a police car and that was about it.

Unlike The Academy shows that I've been to at least The Lowry has reserved seating, so you don’t have to queue outside for half an hour and then sit waiting for an hour before Henry comes on. I was pleased to see that row B was the front row. The row A seats must have been removed. Even I had to check the row letter twice.

Looking around before the show I noticed two microphones, at stage left and right, on stands pointing out to the audience. This did make me think that Henry could sell the MP3’s of each show on his web-site for a few bucks a pop. Possibly, if the show was being recorded, it would be included on a future CD release. With audio recording equipment being fairly cheep, they already have the microphones/mixing desk, I can’t see why all the shows couldn’t be recorded.

At just past 7:30pm the house lights go down and the stage lights come up and Henry walks out on stage. It’s been nearly 2 years since I last saw him and he hasn’t changed a bit. The same grey trousers, black t-shirt and blue/white Vans shoes. The only difference being that his hair did look a shade lighter, but that may have been the stage lights.

Henry started saying that he'd just found out that Salford wasn’t Manchester… then his mic cut out. He complained a little that his ‘road-crew’ had 2 hours this afternoon to get it working but he just ploughed on. I could hear what he was saying, being at the front, but I guess the folks at the back of the circle had a little difficulty. The sound cut in then out then the roadie yelled to Henry to grab the spare. Once that was switched over everything was fine. Even Henry said, while this was going on, that it can’t be the mic because it a Shure. I think that bending the cable just past the plug to wrap the cable twice around his hand can’t do it much good. I can see why he started doing it. Singing with Black Flag if someone jumped on stage and pulled the cable the microphone would just fly out of his hand.

Once that technical glitch was over Henry just kept talking, barely stopping for a gulp of water :– Obama, working on Sons of Anarchy, making the commencement speech at Sonoma State University, Saudi Arabia in a car with a Prince and later at the palace, his girlfriend (who also has grey hair), the Bhopal disaster, slums in India, China and giving essential hygiene advice to the ladies of Bangkok. There were countless other topics covered during the two and three quarter hours that he was on stage.

Henry is always worth going to see, this was my 5th time, but tonight didn’t seem to be all that funny. Not that you go to a Rollins show to have your sides split, the show is still billed as a Spoken Word and not as an evening of Stand-Up Comedy. Possibly it was because his travels to Bhopal, Saudi Arabia and India were more of an education for the audience instead of entertainment.

One thing that I have noticed is that he never mentions traveling to South America. It always seems to destinations in the northern hemisphere that he visits. Maybe South America is too close to home and not enough of a culture shock.

As always a great evening out seeing Mr. Curve!

Related Links
Dispatches
Fun House by The Stooges

Pragmatic Version Control
Using Git

• Travis Swicegood
• Operating Systems

Cat Peril

Well, this could be the end of those rare visits to shoe shops.

After venturing out in the snow the other Sunday, to take photos, I noticed that my footing, which is unsure at the best of times, wasn’t as solid and stable as it should be. I have slipped on snow and ice many times and, because of my height and general build, I fall as a giraffe would fall if it encountered frozen water for the first time. Arms and legs flailing wildly and pointing in all directions of the compass.

Looking at the soles of my brown Dr. Martens boots I noted a distinct lack of tread. The heals were warn to a scoop and the main tread area was flat and smooth. Only the edges of the sole showed signs of the original grip pattern. Of course the leather uppers showed no signs of wear and the laces had only been replaced 3 or 4 times since purchase. Considering that I purchased them in late 2004 I think they have lasted quite well. These are the same boots that caused so much suffering during my trip to London a few months ago.

Since then, and certainly during this snowy and icy spell, I've been wearing black Dr. Martens. These still have a full tread because they’re only brought out for concerts because of the steel toecaps.

The first place to go to for any purchase is Amazon.co.uk. There really is no point even searching for an individual footwear manufacturer if you can’t purchase them easily online. I saw a pair that I liked the look of by Cat. They weren’t the usual Cat boots either, those bright yellow things that people wear with the laces undone and the tongue hanging out. Repulsive. These were a more rugged, authentic working boot and in my line of work exactly what I needed.

Because I'd never purchased footwear online before, and had never purchase Cat footwear before, I really wanted to try a pair on. The buying experience isn’t complete without entering a shop, trying on the one shoe and walking up and down. This just isn’t the most viable test conditions at all for footwear. Walking up and down on carpet hoping to get a feel for what could be an expensive purchase. If your town is anything like mine then to truly test footwear your path needs to be littered with broken glass, barker’s eggs and pavement pizzas. How are you going to make a purchasing decision based on 3 or 4 steps up and down a length of Axminster.

I've purchased shoes and boots in the past, tried them on in the shop first and then had months of agony and pain trying to wear the damn things in. Shoes that must have been made specifically to torture customers. Boots that you have to stamp on for half an hour to try and soften the leather.

With some Christmas money burning a hole in my wallet, and no sign of the ice disappearing, I made a purchase online.

According to Amazon they only had them for sale via a 3rd party merchant at nearly £100. Even if they last 5 years that’s still too much for a pair of boots. Amazon has adverts for Javari so I checked on there. They didn’t have the Rope colour that I wanted so I bought a pair of size 10 Croutons for £71.24. Javari seem to be part of Amazon now so the checkout was fast using my Amazon email address and password. No need to set-up a new account and enter address and credit card details. It was all really fast. LOVEFiLM take note.

They arrived this morning, a full day before they said they would, which took me by surprise.

I still have to give them a run out, that’s later, but I've tried them on, walked up and down a bit and they feel fine. No more shoe shops for me.

Pragmatic Thinking & Learning

• Refactor Your Wetware
• Andy Hunt

It was when I started using Huffduffer that I noticed that people were doing strange and unusual things with the tags. Instead of just putting a word or two they were joining words using ‘:’ and ‘=’ in a very specific way. Jeremy wrote a post at adactio.com on machine tagging Hufferduffer and on the machine tag browsing that he'd set up. I did some Googling and found that the concept had been around for a while. In fact I'm sure it was reading Jeremy’s post Ghost in the Machine Tags that I'd first heard of it.

The way it works is ridiculously simple. A machine tag consists of three parts, a namespace, a predicate and a value: ‘namespace:predicate=value’. The way that it’s used on Huffduffer is that someone can enter say, ‘book:author=jeremy keith’ as a tag and the application has been set up to recognise that it’s a book author and so use the Amazon API to retrieve books. The same goes for music, ‘music:artist=alice in chains’ will return details from Last.fm, items from Amazon or both. As far as I can tell there is no certified standard for how machine tags are defined.

After seeing it’s potential I started to added little ‘extras’ to the tags of my posts. At first it was just a case of adding a persons twitter account name, ‘twitter:username=eddieizzard’. This then uses a Ruby gem called feedzirra to take the last 5 tweets from that users RSS feed. Then I tried geo tags with latitude and longitude coordinates. This shows a Google Map of the location which, at the moment, is just a static image. Then for music artists and book authors I've used the ruby-aaws gem to take the top 8 covers with links to the Amazon.co.uk web-site. The post about Eddie Izzard’s gig at the M.E.N. shows all three in action.

The feedzirra task is set to run every 6 hours, picking tweets as well as a few personal feeds, using whenever. This job also deletes the cache and pings the main page as well as the archives and tags pages. Any other pages that get hit will be cached then expire after 6 hours. I was wondering if I could just expire the pages that had changed or switch to partial page caching but for just a personal blog it isn’t worth the hassle.

For the time being that’s it. In the future I’ll add tags for flickr and possibly Last.fm. Watch this space.

Black Gives Way To Blue

Considering the recent weather, torrential rain and strong winds, I really didn’t fancy queuing outside for long if it was going to be typical Manchester weather. Luckily the rain held off and I was outside The Academy at about 7:00pm. Finding ‘a’ queue wasn’t fun. A huge trench had been dug in the pavement and instead of the usual boards covering the gap they'd just put barricades along the full length of it. It also didn’t help that there was a vast amount of people outside the main student union building for another gig, or two. Long and short of it I'd joined the wrong queue. This was eventually pointed out to us by a man shouting for tickets who seemed either drunk, or high, or both so his first announcement fell on deaf ears. A group of us left the queue, which was the ticket collection queue, and walked past the front doors and around the side of the building to where the buses were parked, to the end of the real queue.

It is kind of saddening that you have to be searched before you enter these places. We’re all there to listen to the music and see the band surely? Possibly some aren’t. They’ll have airport style security next.

The audience certainly seemed about the same age as me, maybe older. I bought Dirt back in early 1993 after Kerrang! magazine voted it album of 1992.

The support act was a woman on guitar and vocals and a bloke on drums. Even now I don’t know who they were. You'd think they'd say “we’re The Support Band, goodnight” at the end of their set.

With only a mic stand and a small drum kit to remove from the stage the change over should have been really quick. At least that’s what I thought. I wonder if someone keeps a list of the amount of times a microphone is checked by a roadie?

Set List

It Ain't Like That

Again

Them Bones

Dam That River

Your Decision

No Excuses

Check My Brain

A Looking In View

Rain When I Die

Heaven Beside You

Got Me Wrong

Black Gives Way To Blue

What The Hell Have I

Acid Bubble

Angry Chair

Man In The Box

Encore

Would?

Rooster

After what seemed like forever the stage lights lit the audience and a cameraman pointed a video camera across the crowd. Then the lights went back to the way they were before, lighting the stage for the roadies to do their job, checking microphones and shining torches on cables. The sight of two members of the road crew with their elbows resting on speaker stacks didn’t bode well at all. The crowd, growing increasingly restless, started booing and slow clapping and for a minute I thought that the show wasn’t going to happen. Then, at about 9:30pm, because I kept checking my watch, after what felt like forever, the band walked on stage.

After Layne died this is something that I never thought I'd see, Alice In Chains playing these incredible songs live. Highlights? Again, Them Bones (during which I almost lost it completely), Check My Brain, all the heavier stuff. Whenever Jerry stood centre stage everyone shouted his name. William sang and played guitar like he was born to do it. The only slow spots were the acoustic, barstool songs. Black Gives Way To Blue was so quiet that I'm sure people talking in the crowd was louder. There was a huge cheer at the end when a really short black and white video clip of Layne was played. It was just the right length and exactly what was needed, fresh faced, long curly haired, smiling and giving the peace sign.

With the technical difficulties, and the curfew, we won’t know if they would have played more songs.

William really did a great job, fitting in like the role was always his. Certainly big boots to fill but I think the crowd, like I was, was just pleased to hear those songs again. Like the man said, “This is just the beginning!”.

Somebody check my brain.

Update
Official blog entry for the Manchester show

Eddie Izzard

Certainly the first time that I've seen a single, solitary, stand-up, performer in such a large venue. Eddie Izzard was ‘playing’ the second night at the M.E.N. on his Stripped tour and apart from seats on the upper tiers the placed seemed sold out. Comedy is the new rock ‘n’ roll and has been for a few years now. I'm amazed that he is playing such vast spaces, I honestly didn’t think that he was that well known. Remember the days when he would only do stand-up and wouldn’t be seen dead gracing our television screens?

It is, more or less, impossible to distill his act into a few ‘jokes’. There won’t be many people at work tomorrow trying to re-enact the show for their work colleagues. In fact I'm amazed that Eddie manages to remember it all, I can only recall a few segments, the rest just passed by in a blur. Maybe that’s the joy of it, laughing at the time, forgetting most of it, then remembering bits in the weeks that follow.

The interesting thing is that when he does two or three characters you can see that they’re there. You know where on stage they are, your mind just fills in the blanks, even if Eddie confuses the voices or positions, which he makes a joke about and becomes another part of his act. When he does an impersonation of a giraffe, or shark, it is just a short, stocky guy in tails, but the voice and the mannerisms are spot on.

For such a big show there were lights, screens, back-lit panels with hieroglyphs on them (I've just remembered another joke) but the major let down was the sound. I've heard people complain about the sound in these ‘sheds’ before but I thought that only applied to concerts. It seemed that the only speakers were the ones up in the lighting rig. At a gig these are usually the ones to fill in the sound for the people on the tiers, because bands will have rows of Marshall cabinets on stage. Tonight Eddies disembodied voice only came from those speakers up high near the ceiling and so was no where near loud enough for those down below. Why didn’t they have speakers on stage, behind the light panels, for the punters on the ‘floor’?

And talking about ‘the floor’, are they supposed to be the more expensive seats because you are looking directly at the stage? All I could see was the back of the bloke on fronts head. I spent at least half the show watching Eddie on the big screen in all his pixelated glory. When I did get a chance to see the real thing it was a pleasant surprise. This is all because ‘the floor’ isn’t slanted, obviously, that'd make Disney On Ice a real treat, so you can never see over the person in fronts head. The tiers, albeit at the sides, must give you a better, uninterrupted view, of the stage.

It looks as if the Eddie Izzard Live Stripped DVD is already available for pre-order, just in time for Christmas. I personally prefer the older discs, Unrepeatable and Definite Article.