Benj’s blog!

I went over to Sheffield last night, to see a guy called Buddy Miller. Dave has a knack of finding out good gigs, wherever they may be in the country! We set off about 1800hrs to be there in-time for the start at 2000hrs — rush-hour traffic in Nottingham is quite bad and it’s about a 40 mile drive.

After a slight detour via Sutton-in-Ashfield we were on the Motorway, listening to Alison Krauss and Union Station (great CD, more on that another time … ). Sheffield is a very well laid out city, you can drive straight off the Motorway at junction 33, right into the heart of town. Found a car-park opposite the “theatre square” and crossed over to the Library Theatre. In the same square is the Crucible, where the world championships are being held!

The venue was small and about half-full for the opening act,
Bill Mallonee who I remember seeing before in Nottingham with Vigilantes of Love. Bill did a great opening act (1h) and Buddy and the band joined him for a few numbers towards the end. After a short interval — to allow the very drunk local guy to stock up on even more Carling(?) — Buddy and band came to the stage. He looked a lot like he does here, Dave commented he had looked like that for as long as he could remember.

I always enjoy live music, the thrill of seeing talented musicians enjoying themselves and the inspiration I get, especially if they are naturally gifted guitarists, is something you don’t get with a CD! Anyway, Buddy did a great set, managing to shake off the comments from the by now very drunk local guy and I’m looking forward to listening to some more Miller soon!

This is a more rational attempt on my thoughts about iTunes. I wrote it for the TopTechTips site that a friend is trying to get up and running.
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Today I’ve been playing around with CFSocket! Interesting eh? I recall years ago reading an MFC book and thinking what the hell is a “callback”. Funny how age (and a CS degree?) makes these things become oh-so-clear!
Why CFSocket? Well … since there are no decent NNTP readers and I could use a project to get focused and learn some more Cocoa/OS X coding, I’ve decided to set about writing one. Expect it to be completed around June … 2008!

This evening I had the pleasure of playing a Ramirez “1A” guitar made in 1962. The guitar is up for sale and I am tempted; the only thing that I am unsure about is the repair work that has been done on the fretboard.

I’ve checked in my “Things about the guitar” book by José Ramirez III and the maker was one of his original pupils. The guitar sounds great but it is a classical rather than a flamenco guitar, which affects the sound. It has a 660mm scale length (which makes a little harder to play).

Anyway, I dunno, the price is right, JC has checked it out if I want it, it’s mine. I’ll sleep on it and play the guitar again tomorrow evening!

A great interview with Al Di Meola (and many others) @ Innerviews.

Hard-drives are fucking unreliable pieces of crap. Never trust them.

The Anatomy of a Search Engine is a good read. Had a few spare minutes and decided to read the paper, interesting ;).

So, there I am playing Age of Mythology with Jonno (kicking his ass as usual) when the game locks up. “Hmm, Odd” I though and rebooted. Jonno had saved the game so we resumed and a few minutes later the same thing happened. So I rebooted again:

“SMART warning: the HDD is about to fail”. Yeah, yeah, whatever; I had disconnected the hard-drive over the weekend I thought that maybe I hadn’t connected the power cable correctly.

Power down, jiggle the wires, reboot. XP fails to boot. Disconnect the drive, XP boots. Reconnect, XP fails to boot. At that point I remembered earlier in the day I had heard a strange noise coming from my PC, but I put it down to one of the many wires catching against the CPU fan.

Several hours later, after seriously abusing the drive with bits of metal, hammers and dropping it from various heights on to the floor I accepted the fact that I had lost the data.

Who cares, it was only 7 years worth of email, photos, code, applications (’95 - ‘02). Why didn’t I have a backup? Good question, I thought I did. A near total loss happened in ‘99 and since then I had always ran 2 HDDs in my PC with a manual copy of the data every few months.

Somewhere along the line I got confused and must have been making the copy to an alternate partition on the same physical drive. Another thing I vowed in ‘99 was to replace the drives every 18 months. This Fujitsu drive was made in ‘01, since buying the Mac I’ve neglected the PC some-what.

ZARNTFS has made a reasonable attempt at recovering some of the data on the disk, unfortunately it’s all the crap that I don’t care about, like fonts.

Oh well. Here’s to another 7 years.

This evening I made a purchase via the DABS (to replace the HDDs) website and was surprised to see a window popup (and refuse to go away) requiring me to register for yet another pointless customer information gathering system.

I have several issues with the Halifax secure system:
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Whilst waiting for my new HDD to arrive today, I thought i’d play around with iPhoto export templates. I found a nice plugin called BetterHTMLExport and the results can be found here. They are just some more pictures I took around Nottingham with the Ixus400.