Tag: Geek

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Reasons to be blogging, Part Three

…as Ian Dury would no doubt have sung if he’d written the song today.

The world of blogs, or ‘blogosphere’ as geeks call it, is now HUGE. As in very big indeed. And there are as many reasons for doing it as there are bloggers, I guess.

My reasons are manifold – partly cos I enjoy writing, partly to sort out the thoughts in my head, to make me clarify what I’m thinking on any given subject into a form that I’m willing to submit to public scrutiny, which is the next reason – public scrutiny. I realised in the mid-90s during my Front-Row-Hands-Up (that’s FRHU for short) pentecostal church time that I knew very few people who didn’t all believe the same thing. And a lot of those people only had friends who didn’t believe the same thing as them in order to try and convince those friends to agree with them. This was clearly a rubbish way to go through life, and a supremely arrogant one. So I now actively look for places to find out what other people think and try and make sense of it. If that means that on occasion I drift into intentionally mindless relativism, that’s a small price to pay for actually being open to the possibility that I might be wrong! So I like the email that I get in response to blog posts, and I love the discussions that ensue over in the forum. I guess I should enable comments, but it would just encourage The Cheat to post rubbish, so I’ll not to that just yet.

Which reason are we up to? er, four I think… another reason is that as a music fan I’ve often wondered what’s going on in the heads of the people whose music I listen to. So this is here to hopefully provide the overly wordy and sometimes dull-as-shit open-ended sleeve-notes to where the music comes from. The music is the soundtrack to the inside of my head, and this is the literal interpretation of that. So you really ought to be listening to me whenever you’re reading this, to get the full effect.

Other reasons? To keep friends around the world up to date with what’s going on in my life, and then just cos I get a kick of of the idea of a couple of hundred people a day reading what I’ve been up to. It’s an odd experience that was only open to newspaper columnists in the pre-blog world. I like that, being the Benign Narcissist that I am.

Anyway, the best blog-reasoning I’ve read of late is the one on Richard Herring’s marvellous blog – his blog is a great daily read, sporadically very funny, and worth adding to your list of feeds, if you have one. And if you don’t, you’re wasting lots of time by having to look up all the blogs you read every day.

Soundtrack – right now, it’s a me-loop – I’m doing some practice for tonight’s gig with Theo and Orphy. Before that it was a recording of Tim Berne’s gig at the QEH in 2003, with David Torn on guitar, which is fantastic.

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my subbuteo-geek childhood…

So last time I visited my mum, she handed me two boxes of my crap that had been cluttering her house up for the last 14 years. The first one of which is full of Subbuteo stuff. For the unitiated, Subbuteo was a table football game, where you flicked little blokes at a ball, and tried to score before your younger brother sat on the fragile little blokes and broke them all –

Here’s a Subbuteo man –

and here’s what geeks like teenage-stevie looked like playing it –

So what to do with all this stuff? I clearly don’t want it. A few of the teams seem to be fetching a couple of quid on Ebay, but I’m not even sure I can be bothered to list them. I might just take them over to my local charity shop. The boxes for each team aren’t in good enough nick for collectors, and the occasional team appears to be meeting government requirements regarding equal opportunities, by having at least one player who’s been broken off at the legs and stuck back on with whatever sticky stuff came to hand (a plaster is the most fitting I’ve found so far!)

Back in the day, I was a full on Subbuteo nut – my brother and I had grandstands, floodlights, and other weirdness, and the range of teams I’ve got here goes from obvious ones like Wimbledon and Man U through to Vancouver Whitecaps and a team of subbuteo blokes in yellow tracksuits, presumably for warming up!! Did my geekery know no bounds??

Aha! And I’ve just found my pride and joy – a ‘wide arms’ goalie – normal goalies were long and thin, and you could get squat looking goalies in the interchangable goalie sets. But wide arms goalie was like the Subbuteo version of Pat Jennings – an inch-high force to be reckoned with, who somehow avoided being sat on, so remains intact to this day.

If any of you know any subbuteo geeks who’d like all this stuff, do let me know. I’m not planning on keeping it for long (unless anyone fancies coming round for a game… doh! I’ve not got the pitch anymore, unless it’s the other box of clutter from mum…!)

Soundtrack – Tommy Sims, ‘Peace And Love’.

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…and in today's geek news…

Looks like Google are going to take on Paypal in the online payment game.

This has to be good news for online traders (such as me) – Paypal have a near-monopoly on the online money transfer market (at least on sites that don’t have their own credit card processing stuff). Paypal is safe and secure, and fairly easy to use, but monopolies are rarely a good idea.

There are others at around – on my online cd shop, people can pay by Paypal or NoChex – a UK only credit/debit card processing engine, that works well and is used by a few people – I still get about 25 Paypal sales to ever NoChex one.

So if Google come up with an alternative, hopefully it’ll make Paypal streamline and broaden their service in an attempt to stay ahead, and it means the google service will have to be really good to move people away from paypal.

If you haven’t used paypal before, feel free to try it out in my online store…

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Is anyone listening to the bassists?

So, I was just fiddling around on audioscrobbler.com, wondering who people were listening to, and ended up searching on a whole load of bassist’s names, to see who people were actually listening to.

As I’ve mentioned before, The Scrob is a really interesting chart in that it’s not what people are buying, or what they own but what they are actually listening to – what it is that people are taking down from the CD shelf, or dialing up on their ipod and choosing to listen to. The membership is, I think, a couple of hundred thousand, and largely, I guess, a young, tech-savvy slightly geeky bunch, on the whole…

So here are the bassists I searched on, in order.

Jaco Pastorius – 4306
Victor Wooten – 2608
Marcus Miller – 2466
Stanley Clarke – 1002
Jonas Hellborg – 499
Tony Levin – 399
John Patitucci – 388
Stuart Hamm – 342
Michael Manring – 318
Dave Holland – 275
Billy Sheehan – 274
Brian Bromberg – 244
Eberhard Weber – 233
Wayman Tisdale – 168
Avishai Cohen – 141
Renaud Garcia Fons – 126
Jimmy Haslip – 100
Adam Nitti – 100
Mark King – 94
Bass Extremes (Wooten/Bailey) – 88
Reid Anderson – 74
Alain Caron – 64
Doug Wimbish – 59
Jeff Berlin – 54
Trip Wamsley – 51
Steve Lawson – 49
Seth Horan – 47
Randy Coven – 42
Abraham Laboriel – 37
Bill Dickens – 28
Gerald Veasley – 27
Mo Foster – 26
Mark Egan – 22
Percy Jones – 18
Michael Dimin – 10
Matthew Garrison – 7
John Lester – 7
Glen Moore – 7
Laurence Cottle – 5
Fieldy – 5
Janek Gwizdala – 3

Now, bear in mind that this relies on them being entered into the iTunes/CDDB data base under their own name – some of these players maybe be listed as ‘the such and such band’ or something else. Feel free to have a browse at audioscrobbler.com and see who else you can find. Lemme know, and I’ll add them to the list…

Soundtrack – John Goldie, ‘Turn And Twist’ (jazz trio, with the marvellous Ewen Vernal on bass).

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geek alert – found a fun bit of code!

Was browsing sites of people who use Audioscrobbler, and found this fun bit of code on someone’s website –

http://lumi.valkoinen.org/music/as_np.php?nick=solobasssteve

…well, obviously it didn’t say ‘solobasssteve’ on their site, it had their user-name, but what it does is display the last track you listened to, like this –

cool, eh? Will have to add it to the right hand side of the screen here…

Soundtrack – Andrew Booker, ‘Ahead’ (Andrew’s a marvellous drummer, in a band called Pulse Engine, who are fab, and his solo album’s pretty fine too – he came round last night and we recorded a load of bass and drum looped duets – look out for an MP3 or two here soon!); Mo Foster, ‘Time To Think’ (this album is a ‘must have’ for any fretless bassist – a true master at work)

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The end of civilization as we know it?

So I’m sat here, having a conversation with myself about why Kris Delmhorst isn’t a superstar – I’m listening to her album, ‘Songs For A Hurricane’, loving it, and trying to imagine why she isn’t the biggest thing in the singer/songwriter world. So, this is going on in my head, and I flick over to the BBC entertainment newsfeed in Thunderbird, and see that the new UK #1 single is the Crazy Frog ringtone. What the hell is going on with the world? A ringtone at the top of the singles chart??? The singles chart has been largely irrelavent for many a year, but this is pretty much the nadir of its descent into a Dante-esque new level of hell.

For starters, who the hell is buying it? OK, I know, it’s lil’ kids, downloading it, not thinking about the cost etc. etc. It’s still a nightmare. The charts have always been subject to the occasional hijack by things that have nothing to do with its normal constiuency – like every time Cliff has a hit, or when Robson and Jerome suddenly became one of the biggest selling acts of the decade with a couple of shitty karaoke versions of great songs just cos old ladies in their millions dashed out to buy their lame band-in-a-box-plus-drunk-pub-singer drivel.

But, ringtones?????????.

I now know why Kris isn’t a huge star, and I’m far less bothered by it than I was 10 minutes ago. I’ve not paid any attention to the singles chart for a decade, and I guess no-one else is really.

Chart-wise, the audioscrobbler charts are a much more interesting indication of what people are actually listening to, given that they log actual plays of actual songs on real people’s computers. So it’s a geek-chart, but a real chart nonetheless.

But the lesson is surely to give up listening to charts and mainstream radio for music suggestions, and go on recommendations and networks, and random links and of course, solo bassists.

Soundtrack – Kris Delmhorst, ‘Songs For A Hurricane’.

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Andrea Dworkin has died

Apparently she died on Friday, but it only reached the press yesterday.

Dworkin was one of the most controversial writers of the 20th century, but also one of the most influential. Rabidly loved, hated and misquoted in almost equal measure, her opposition to pornography as a violation of all women’s rights made her the target of much vitriol from liberals in the US, but her books were read in their thousands, and and she even managed to temporarily get the US law changed (it was overturned at appeal.)

The net is filling up with comments – how sad that it takes the woman’s death for us (including me) to reappraise her contribution. Makes me want to go and read some of her books, having only read articles by and about her before now.

here are a few links to obits and comments –

Guardian Obit.
Hugo’s blog post
Jyoti’s blog
some crappy myths clarified.

There don’t seem to be that many revolutionary thinkers around these days – maybe I’ve stopped looking for them, but it just feels like the substance has dropped out the arse-end of cultural critique. Please, if you can suggest any books I should read, post them in the forum.

Soundtrack – Cathy Burton, ‘Burn Out’; Jaco Pastorius, ‘Jaco Pastorius’; Eric Roche, ‘With These Hands’; John Lester, ‘Big Dreams And The Bottom Line; John Scofield, ‘Up All Night’.

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maybe it's time to learn php…

So, I’ve spent most of the afternoon and evening battling with the software on my webshop, trying to impliment a new payment processing thingie via . Paypal have finally made it possible to pay for things through their site without having to sign up for a paypal account, which means that my shop can now handle payments from loads more people – all those people who previously didn’t want to get a paypal account in order to pay!

So, , the lovely open source programming community that came up with the shop interface I use, have implemented a new payment module that allows this new ebay functionality to dovetail nicely with the shop, and with a secure transfer of info, using security certificates, and all that jazz… the problem is, the information on how to actually get all that jazz to work is written in geek-speak, and while I’m reasonably computer-savvy, I’m largely self-taught, so don’t know all the terminology.

Which means I’ll just have to wait to The Captain or Sarda have a spare 20 minutes to help me sort it out. ‘Til then I’ll just keep wasting the hours trying to find new tweaks that will fool php into working.

So maybe it’s time I got a book on php (the language that all these pages and scripts are written in) and found out how to do all this stuff…

Soundtrack – , ‘Speed Your Love’; Free, ‘The Free Story’; Bill Frisell, ‘Live at Pizza Express’.

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