A very good reason for splashing out for SanDisk Extreme III memory cards for your camera is the RescuePRO software that you get free with it. It does (very efficiently) exactly what it says on the tin, and professionally rescues all those files that you have accidentally deleted... Great stuff!
Goldfrapp were excellent last night: her voice amazing; the songs as fine as always;the sound quality was fantastic...
Birmingham Symphony Hall is a great venue acoustically, it is just a shame that everyone is sat down. I think the bands themselves need a response from the crowd which comes easier when everyone is on there feet.
Still, sonically and especially at volume, it was hard to fault...
Despite what some lazy journalists think, I really like the new Coldplay album, and am looking forward to seeing them live. It is funny how people get riled about music: it is only music, and generally everyone does have very different tastes. I like Coldplay, I don't like Oasis, and am not hugely keen on Blur (although I do like their later stuff). I don't like critics' favourites The White Stripes: popular but not populist maybe? And some of my favourite bands are nowhere near as successful as they should be (ref The Bible, Elbow etc). Still, in common with everyone else I can sit back and say with confidence than when it comes to music, I am right and everyone else is so very wrong...!
An excellent video for the new Coldplay single Violet Hill can be found here; an interesting montage of dancing politicians and soldiers, with the odd disconcerting image of violence thrown in.
One of the harshest songs I've come across recently is from perennial favourites Elbow and the song Snowball from the 'Help- A Day in the Life' album:
...When the pills you take
No longer help you
You're fading in your chair
And would've met him
We see the lightning
You hear the birdsong
You hear the voices you've been holding off for so long
Words around you
And then a hurricane
A hundred thousand souls
And everyone in pain
We'll come and visit you
We'll come and visit you
This is on the day that David Davis the Shadow Home Secretary resigned his seat in protest to the 42 days detention law passed by the House of Commons. It looks to be a very honourable thing to do: a show of conviction so often lacking in modern politicians, and it should be applauded. But I do have the nagging feeling it is going to perhaps backfire a little...
Just spent an excellent warm summers day paddling on the River Tryweryn; a fantastic river of quality grade III/IV water that thanks to the Environment agency gets turned on at 8.00am and off at 6.30pm during the summer (though releases vary of course).
One of its advantages is the ease of multiple runs: the first to sort out any confidence issues (I always seem to go after not paddling for six months or more), and from then on, as many runs as you can until the energy runs out, hitting (or missing) as many eddies, stoppers and waves as possible.
And travelling down the night before, we camped next to a river at Ty Islaf campsite, a cheap, very basic campsite, but one that allows you to while the night away in front of a good old-fashioned campfire.
Camping and paddling: two of my favourite things...
I used to enjoy reading the Comments section of newspapers. Now with the Internet, I much prefer reading the comments written by people commenting on the commentators: they generally make a lot more sense.
One such article is this by Simon Jenkins (in the Guardian), who argues that mathematics is a waste of time, whereas we need more economists and designers (who no doubt don't know any maths). He is quite rightly ridiculed, and you have to wonder why and how columnists get paid to write such rubbish.
In contrast, the always excellent Ben Goldacre in his Bad Science column (also in the Guardian) writes here amusingly about the dodgy mathematics used in a report publicising the decline in the quality of maths in Britain.
Jenkins states that Latin and Greek were more useful than his studies in Maths, and as a journalist perhaps they were, though it surely means he should never report on a story with technical, statistical or economic content. Whereas Goldacre, as a practicing doctor and a scientist, applies scientific rigour to debunk some of the reporting of science and maths by people like Jenkins, which can only be a good think in the search for more reasoned and balanced reporting...
For posterity, this is the note that was on the doctor's prescription for malaria tablets from when we went to Vietnam. I just love the punctuation that says so much...
I do miss the place and it is great to go back there. The location is great; the scenery beautiful; and most importantly, the people are absolutely fantastic.
No regrets really about leaving: things change and sometimes it is time to move on. And I am happier with what is going on in my life these days (for obvious reasons). But mostly I miss the people. They are a fantastic bunch and I should make the effort to traverse the 160 miles more often...
