the most embarrassing night of my life
Working title: the dangers of Facebook, online dating, stranger danger and gross stupidity
The (now defunct) Chameleons remain one of my favourite bands but were responsible for the most embarrassing night of my life.
After the band reformed, I went to their London gigs and occasionally frequented the (now defunct) Wishville forums for discussion about the band, concert reviews, banter about football, discovering new bands - all the usual stuff we did before Twitter and Last.fm came along.
In November 2002. The Chameleons played a single date in London before a German tour. As I had struck up a friendship with a like minded individual on Wishville (liked footy, liked The Chameleons, liked a laugh) and exchanged messages with him, we arranged to meet up for a drink in Camden before going on to the gig.
Mark Burgess is a City fan, so he'd arranged the gig deliberately to clash with United playing Bayer Leverkeusen in the Champions League so I'd hoped to see most of the game before going to the venue.
Anyway, we exchanged mobile phone numbers, exchanged descriptions and arranged to meet in an Irish pub (public bar) that was showing the football. I didn't tell my Mummy in case she was worried about me meeting a strange man I'd recently met on the Interweb.
Inevitably, something screwed up on the night mainly because we are blokes. I can't recall precisely what happened but someone had a flat battery, lost their phone or told their Mummy so I arrived at this hostelry and furtively tried to identify this gentleman from a (Wedding) photo he'd shown me.
To cut a long story short, I couldn't find him and he couldn't find me. Worse, the footy wasn't been shown in the Irish pub or rather, I think Arsenal was being shown instead of United, so I went elsewhere to watch the game.
After a few beers and United taking a 2-0 lead, I made my way to Dingwalls. Now, there was no way I was going to make contact with my 'Internet acquaintance' in a packed venue so I was quite prepared to enjoy the support (Brian Glancy), soak up the pre-match atmosphere, drinking overpriced lager while watching the technicians twiddle buttons on amps, place guitars on stands and say 'One Two - One Two' into microphones while waiting for The Chamleons to take the stage.
Unfortunately, as always, alcohol intervened and as I watched Glancy performing, I happened to see a young lady who was also a regular on Wishville. This young lady spent every spare minute and every spare quid on watching bands and had traipsed around Germany and the States following The Chameleons on tour.
Unfortunately, I only knew 'Cath' by reputation and only recognised her by virtue of her distinctive dyed red hair. While I enjoyed her superb gig reviews, we'd never communicated directly so I didn't know her and she certainly didn't know me.
I should have just left it well alone but for some reason I didn't and I approached a complete stranger (a female one at that) and memorably opened with: 'Hi Cath. Do you know where Joe is ?'
Cath Aubergine (for that was her rather unusual name) broke off her conversation with her mate, turned to me and replied: 'Sorry - what ? Joe who ? Who are you ?'. There may have been the odd expletive thrown in for good measure.
'Joe - I arranged to meet him here but....'
Blank stare. Her mate is also now looking at me with a similar blank stare. 27.4 seconds left before the 6'2" boyfriend returns from the bar with their drinks.
'Look - you know. Joe - Mr. Moto. Have you seen him ?'
'Oh Mister Moto - why didn't you say ? But what's your name ?'
'Andy.'
'Sorry - did you say 'Andy' ?' Another piercing, blank, suspicious stare. Times two.
'Look. I'm RomanTotaleXVII on the forums but my real name's Andy, alright'. Christ - the embarrassment levels were now excruciating as we were having to shout this conversation above the noise of Bryan Glancy's set.
'Oh so you're RomanTotaleXVII but hang on - you're not RomanTotaleXVII any more. You are now...'
'Yeah, yeah I know. I'm now FieryJack.'
'Yeah - you're the guy who names himself after The Fall characters. Well why didn't you just say so ?'
And so it came to pass - Cath Aubergine led me to the bar area and introduced me to Mr. Moto (aka Joe Donellan)
'Hey Joe - I've got someone who wants to meet you. Here he is - RomanTotaleXVII'.
press the eject and give me the tape
Those 2010 Brit Awards in full:
- British male solo artist - Dizzee Rascal
- British female solo artist - Lilly Allen
- British breakthrough act - JLS
- British group - Kasabian
- British Album - Florence & the Machine - Lungs
- British Single - Beat Again (JLS)
- International male solo artist - Jay-Z
- International female solo artist - Lady GaGa
- International album - Lady GaGa - The Fame
- Outstanding contribution to music - Robbie Williams
...and Liam Gallaher swearing and throwing a microphone into the audience. Who said rock'n'roll is dead ?
I bet Joe Strummer is turning in his grave.
float in isolation
Many years ago, in a parallel universe not far from here, I worked for a small dot com Internet company.
One day, the boss walked in and proudly announced: 'Right - I've bought everyone three sessions at the London Float Centre'. I thanked him but told him I wasn't interested and he could give my three sessions away to a more needy case but he was insistent and he was the boss.
So, on a Thursday lunchtime, I found myself nervously walking down to the mysteriously named 'London Float Centre' located not in sunny San Francisco but in grey, cold, dreary Clapham Common. As I nervously walked into reception, my preconceptions and prejudices were instantly reinforced when a young lady wearing a colourful, long dress with braids in her hair greeted me.
I looked around at the arty artwork on the walls and nervously mumbled: 'Err, this is, err, my first time. How does this all work ?' She replied: 'You just go to your cubicle, get undressed and enter the flotation chamber for 40 minutes. A quiet bell sounds to indicate the end of your session.'
'Undressed' - did she just say 'undressed' ? My reluctance and lack of commitment to this ludicrous idea was being severely tested already. I had packed my Hawaiian swimming trunks specially for the occasion. No-one back at the office ever mentioned getting 'undressed'. The young lady must have sensed my unease or maybe she saw my brightly coloured swim wear in my carrier bag I was holding (like Mark. E. Smith but without the broken hip). 'Of course, you don't have to get undressed. You can wear swimming trunks. It's entirely up to you.'
I was about to depart for cubicle 3, wondering what the hell I was doing here and cursing my boss when the young girl bamboozled me with a surprise, trick question: 'Do you want the music on or off ?' If I hadn't been so nervous, I would have answered 'Yes please. I'll have 'Bend Sinister' followed by 'The Sky's Gone Out' but instead I hesitated, looked blankly and replied: 'Music - how do you mean - exactly ?'
'Well - some people find the sensory experience is heightened by music playing during the session. If you don't like it, just press the button to your left to turn it off.'
'Ah OK then - yeah I'll have music. That will be nice. Thanks.' while thinking inwardly to myself '...nice to ease the boredom of being immersed in a salt water solution in a darkened room for 40 minutes.'
I made my way to cubicle 3 and assured myself that the dimensions of the flotation tanks meant they were single user only and the cubicle could be locked to ensure stray people could not wander in and mistakenly stake a claim for immersion chamber No. 3. Finally, reluctantly, I decided to embrace the full hippie, flower power, free love experience by casting aside my shorts. Plus the wife would be pleased - they wouldn't need washing.
Feeling like an idiot, I laid down in a small-ish, rectangular tank of warm water. Gradually, the concentrated salt solution managed to float my enormous bulk and I just laid there floating - in silence - with the light on - staring at the cream roof. Now what ?
I remembered the girl had told me to press another button to turn the lights off which I did.
Now I was lying bollock naked, floating around in a tank of luke warm water, staring up at nothing - in pitch black. It was dark, completely dark. I waited 40 seconds for my eyes to adjust so I could make out the reassuring lines of the walls and the ceiling but my eyes didn't readjust. It was still pitch black.
I was floating around aimlessly. I nearly had a heart attack when my shoulder bumped the side wall. I thought someone, possibly the not unattractive hippie girl with dreadlocks, had somehow unlocked the door to cubicle 3 and silently crept in unnoticed to lie alongside me.
I tried to calm myself down, to be open minded and lighten up - for 30 seconds at least - and to actually try enjoy the whole experience. I managed to master floating while remaining perfectly still. I gradually felt calmer and actually started to enjoy the silence. No longer was I looking for the solace of the walls or the ceiling or worrying whether my wallet was safe.
Then, like a bolt from the blue, like a shot to the heart, from nowhere , soft music started playing. Very quietly, very gently - whale like music. This was just like having a water birth at home - except I was a middle aged man in a flotation chamber in Clapham Common. Obviously, they didn't have anything by The Fall or Bauhaus - I must put that on the feedback form.
I laid back again and listened - nothing - apart from the strangely reassuring and apt sound of dolphins talking to each other. I strained my eyes - nothing. Again, I relaxed and forgot all about my stupid, small, minuscule, trivial worries at work. I forgot about everything. I even forgot about the prospect of falling asleep, drowning in 8 inches of water and winning third place in the 2001 Darwin Awards.
I laid back, floating. My mind became strangely blank. Completely blank. It was glorious. A glorious nothing-ness. A glorious emptiness. A glorious void. I just laid there; doing nothing, thinking of nothing.
This state of mind continued for another 25 minutes. Not once did I think of the time. Not once did I think of work. Not once did I think of United's chances of lifting the title. Not once did I think of online media recovery of an Oracle database when some of the archived redo logs were in deep in secure storage offsite and we only had a daily collection from Iron Mountain. Not once did I think of the appraisals of the four people reporting to me.
After a beautiful period of more nothing-ness, a gentle noise told me the session was now over. I lay there for a little longer and finally pressed the light switch.
The lights came on. I was back in the real world. I could see the walls. I could see the ceiling. I could see how small the flotation tank was. I could see a third button next to 'Music' and 'Lights' called 'Emergency Assistance'. Good job I hadn't noticed that earlier. The whale music CD abruptly ended as if killed by a blood soaked harpoon.
I got dressed, checked the contents of my wallet and packed away my dry swimming trunks for my summer holidays in Crete.
I walked back into reception: 'Now - how was it ?' 'Yeah - it was great. Thanks.' 'Oh good - we've had a lot of people from your company. They all seem to enjoy their sessions here.'
'Would you like a cup of tea ?' I was about to reply 'No - really I've got to be getting ba-' but I caught myself just in time. 'Yeah - that would be great. Thanks.'
So I sat down with some blackcurrant, herbal tea chatting with the receptionist about the science behind flotation chambers or isolation tanks.
Then I returned to the office. Now this is where is gets really weird.
I couldn't concentrate. I felt like I was still floating up high, looking down on everyone. I felt like I'd done some drugs. I couldn't type or read my email - well that's not true - I could type letters and read words but they didn't seem to make sense. Nothing seemed important. Nothing seemed to matter. As The Chameleons sang in 'Second Skin', I felt like 'I was floating on air'.
At 4 o'clock, I capitulated, politely made my excuses and decided to go home early.
Years later, whenever I recount this story, my wife says: 'Yeah - it was weird. When he walked in, he looked like a complete zombie. I thought he'd been made redundant or someone had died at work. Either that or someone in the office had given him space cake for a laugh.'
in praise of Killing Joke
After buying most of my Christmas presents from them, Amazon kindly gave me a £2 voucher to spend in the MP3 download store.
As the festive season of hosting friends and family approaches, I decided on a 'easy listening', 'middle of the road' purchase suitable for all the family to act as a quiet backdrop while we gather to play charades around the fire.
'Killing Joke' by 'Killing Joke' was one of the first vinyl records I ever bought and, as always, I was introduced to the band by the wonderful John Peel. I was intrigued by the cover art which I still think is brilliant.
Killing Joke also used another very striking and evocative image. When I visited a mate in London, I was surprised to see he had a massive Killing Joke poster adorning his lounge of Nazis saluting the Pope. Initially, I thought it was a mock-up but he told me it was a genuine photograph from the 1930's and while he wasn't a right-wing fascist (quite the contrary in fact), he also thought it was a very striking and thought provoking image.
I'm pleased to report the LP sounds as fresh as it did 30 years ago. Deserves to be played loud.
how I ditched iTunes and started living with Foobar 2000
[Obligatory hat tip to 'How to stop defragmenting and start living'. As an aside, if you're an Oracle DBA and haven't read this whitepaper, please do so. Now.]
I have used various devices and software over my 76 years on this planet to listen to music:
- Record player
- Cassette player
- Transistor radio
- Ears
- WinAmp
- SonicStage
- Windows Media Player
18 months ago, I finally caved in and bought an iTouch which I use a lot; mainly for listening to music and podcasts at airports.
I duly downloaded iTunes in order to get my music library onto the iTouch. I seem to remember that iTunes couldn't play Windows Media Player files which was slightly irritating. In any case, with a sense of a new beginning and a fresh, clean start, I re-ripped all my music CD's into Apple's AAC format, added the missing album artwork and synchronised my music, photos and applications to the iTouch.
Over the last 18 months, Apple proceeded to add more and more 'features' to iTunes which I don't want or need:
- Tighter integration with the iTunes store
- Genius - some sort of recommendation engine closely linked to the above
- Jukebox
- A default assumption that I also wanted to install additional software packages: QuickTime, Safari and Mobile Me.
When Apple recently released iTunes 9, I suddenly realised I was downloading 98.4MB - just to play music.
It slowly dawned on me that, whenever I started iTunes, my (admittedly aging PC) was unusable for 40 seconds while iTunes initialised and CPU usage hit the roof.
I also realised that iTunes consumed a staggering 82MB of physical memory while playing a tune and this excessive memory consumption could increase to 134MB after connecting to the iTunes store.
I realised this was madness. Complete madness. Finally, I came to my senses and sought out alternative programs to replace the oversized, obese, bloated, multi-function and very slow iTunes.
I soon discovered Foobar 2000 which is a small, compact, lighweight audio player for Windows. I downloaded the program and was immediately struck by the size of the Foobar2000 distribution - 2,985KB, 2.81MB or 3,056,036 bytes to be precise.
This was already promising so I installed the program. I was pleasantly surprised that Foobar quickly imported my existing iTunes music library in its entirety and I was immediately able to play AAC encoded music. No need for additional plugins or codecs.
I was also pleasantly surprised to see Foobar 2000 start up instantaneously (no delay or hourglass here) and consume a slightly more reeasonable 25,888KB of memory.
However, all of this was redundant unless I could actually synchronise music to the iTouch as using two completely separate programs to mange my music was self-defeating. So I downloaded a Foobar extension promisingly named 'Ipod Manager' and configured it.
For a complete fresh start, I took the rather brave (or stupid) move of completely resetting the iTouch to the factory settings which deleted all data and promptly hit 'Sync' in Foobar.
Although it took a while, synchronisation was 100% successful and I even got a 'Preview' of what songs were going to added/removed from the iTouch. This feature was incredibly useful as it gives you a chance to abort if your entire music library is going to be (unexpectedly) deleted.
There were some minor issues - not all album covers were displayed on the iTouch. I discovered that iTunes embeds album artwork in the AAC file. I preferred Foobar's method of adding the album art to the folder as 'Cover.jpg' so you have complete control over the images used. Later on, I actually removed the embedded artwork completely.
What else was missing ? I previously used iTunes to manage podcasts although this was never really satisfactory as iTunes had a weird concept of when the status of a podcast should be modified to 'Listened'. I rather thought listening from start to finish would qualify but Apple obviously disagreed and repeatedly kept sync'ing old content onto the iTouch.
Foobar had another useful extension called 'PodCatcher' which worked brilliantly. It would automatically download new podcasts (in the background) and I was able to easily sync to the iTouch simply by including the new 'Podcasts' category to the synchronisation list.
I wasn't completely happy with the default UI of Foobar so I used the Columns UI extension to make it look slightly more usable with the album artwork displayed.
Foobar 2000 really is the complete music player - once you add the appropriate encoders, it can play virtually music in any format (FLAC, WMA, AAC, WavPack, Ogg Vorbis et al).
One great feature is that Foobar can perform conversion between the various formats. If I can summon up the energy to re-rip all my CD's yet again, I plan to rip all my music to a lossless format (FLAC) and Foobar would dynamically convert to the required lossy, compressed format during the sync to the iTouch.
Another couple of useful extensions for Foobar:
- Audioscrobbler - to upload my played songs (including those on iTouch) to last.fm
- Playback statistics - generates 'Recently Played' playlist.
Although I am now blissfully almost iTunes free, I still need to use iTunes to update the software on the iTouch but I am delighted to say that is the sole extent of my iTunes usage. If I need to install any applications on the iTouch, I can do that directly from the iTouch.
It was particularly satisfying to copy my Foobar configuration and music library to my work laptop and completely remove iTunes from that computer.