Sarda – Page 3 – stevelawson.net

September 20, 2005

More fun with last.fm

the more time I spend on the last.fm site, the more I like it. I’ve started posting a series of thoughts on albums I love in the journal section over there. Not strictly reviews (so far I haven’t given a track by track breakdown or anything) – more some stuff about how I discovered it and what it has meant to me.

The first two are Hejira by Joni Mitchell, and Plumb by Jonatha Brooke – both remarkable albums that I came across in interesting circumstances that have stayed part of my aural landscape for a decade or so. I’m listening to Plumb at the moment, and it’s no less wonderful than the day I first bought it.

in other news, last night was a curry night with Sarda, Kari, Matt and Claire – Sarda and Kari being over from the US is always cause for curry, even if Sarda does seem to be in London more now than when he living in Reading… hmmm. Much fun was had by all (and much lovely spicey food), though my opinion of all of them was diminished by them being part of that damaged social grouping comprised of peopl who thought Lost In Translation was any good. Let me clarify, Lost In Translation was shit. Implausible, plotless nonsense. Yes, it was ‘beautifully shot’ but if you want beautiful camera work watch ‘The Blue Planet’ or ‘Secret Life Of Plants’ – thingie Coppola can’t get close to David Attenborough and his team for lovely camera-work, and you don’t have to put up with a load of unbelieveable nonsense about two people with nothing in common meeting in a hotel and suddenly feeling ‘a connection’. No, it’s bollocks, and anyone who tells you otherwise is just wrong.

Now, Matt and Claire, go and get Whale Rider and Team America, and watch some proper films.

Soundtrack – Jonatha Brooke, ‘Plumb’.

July 15, 2005

The G8 deal falls apart before it begins…

The oh-so-clued-up Sarda just emailed me a link to a BBC news story saying that The G8 deal on debt relief is already under threat.

Here’s a chunk of the article –

“The Belgians have apparently proposed changing the terms of the deal to give lenders more leverage over poor countries than they would have if they simply wrote off 100% of their debt.

In a document that has been leaked to the activist group Jubilee Debt Campaign, Belgian official Willy Kierkens is quoted as telling the IMF executive board that “rather than giving full, irrevocable and unconditional debt relief… countries would receive grants”.

The IMF would then be able to withdraw the grants if countries failed to meet IMF conditions such as implementing the Poverty Growth Reduction Strategy which is a pre-requisite for receiving debt relief.”

Now, Belgium has a particularly hideous record in Africa, given the actions of King Leopold in The Congo.

Let’s also remember how far short of what was being asked for the debt relief on the table at the G8 fell. It already left the countries concerned mired in a web of trade reform obligations put in place by the IMF. But apparently, even those crippling undemocratic ruinous measures weren’t enough. No, they have to not only put the measures in place, but threaten to cut the debt cancellation if those measures in any way fall behind the IMF timetable.

Is is possible to be born without a heart and live? Is there some sort of selection process for heartless, emotionless amoral bastards who see it as their droid like duty to ruin the lives of the world’s poorest people? I was already depressed about the post-G8 findings. These are acts of great evil people, no ‘great justice’ has been done, it’s no victory for Africa, it’s just a smokescreen to hide the ongoing rape of an entire continent from the eyes of a worldwide audience made aware of the cause then lead to believe the G8 are the good guys by two well-meaning but misguided Irish rock stars.

June 6, 2005

What? New Labour? Introducing a Sensible Policy? surely not!!

Thanks to this post on Sarda’s Blog, I’ve just been reading about Community Interest Companies – the gist of it seems to be that a company that is set up for the the good of their community, with the intention of making money to be used for social benefit, can now have that written into the nature of the company, register it as a CIC, and have those aims protected by law even if there are corporate takeovers, shares are bought and sold, changes in management etc.

This – if it works and is what it says it is – is a FANTASTIC step forward in our share-holder obsessed financial-gain-is-everything society. I’ve long held that the conflict of share-holder vs stake-holder is at the very heart of what’s wrong with modern economics, and this new initiative seems to be set up to protect those companies whose activities are for the benefit of it’s stakeholders, even if that is to the detriment (or decreased benefit) of the share holders.

It remains to be seen whether or not this means that ‘ordinary’ companies can write into their code of practice a desire to deal ethically and in an environmentally sound way – I doubt it, as it seems like the legislation is about the primary aims of the company rather than ‘secondary’ ideologies about the nature of running a business, but it’s still one in the eye for those who think that everything exists just to make them money.

I’ll be watching closely to see what happens.

all the legalese and fine print can be found on the dti’s pages about CICs.

Soundtrack – Wayne Shorter, ‘High Life’.

May 29, 2005

Two days with Sarda and Kari

Not having seen Sarda and Kari since the day after their wedding last October, in Grand Rapids, it was a real treat to get to see them two days running this weekend. Friday night we met up at the commuter jazz at the RFH, and from there walked to Brick Lane to meet The Cheat and The Producer Formerly Known As Showbiz Jude for a curry. Much fun was had, especially with The Cheat surruptitiously turning off the TVs in the restaurant with his new toy – a remote control that will turn off just about any brand of TV in the world!

Saturday was S and K’s official big party, at Sarda’s parents’ place in Tunbridge Wells. Again, much fun, especially discovering that James is in fact the son Ned Flanders, or at least was til his dad went grey and shaved off his moustache! A startling likeness.

The most obvious thing from the visit is just how uninterrupted my friendship with Sarda has been by him moving overseas – we chat just as often now as we did before on MSN or AIM, so it’s not like some big emotional reunion, just a chance to talk face to face instead of typing or the occasional video conference.

May 18, 2005

Blogless and desperate!

Ah, blog’s back online – was blogless for a long time, thanks to a crash on Sarda’s new server, but it’s all back now. Phew!

Right, onto blog-things –

Went to a gig last night – M83 (be warned, the website plays loud unwanted music at you) were the headline attraction, who I’d heard of via The Cheat’s scrobbler list, and actually heard thanks to the lovely Lizzy at their record label, who sent me CDs to hear. Their sound is kind of big ambient meets punked-up rock beats. Quite an overwhelming sound, on the new album especially, relentless huge synths and wall of noise guitars, but in an anthemic soundscape kind of way. Most enjoyable, if a little oppressive. The live experience was pretty much what you’d expect – the same thing only louder and noisier. They played lots of stuff from both albums (I prefer the first one – ‘Dead Cities, Read Seas and Lost Ghosts’).

The support act was Pure Reason Revolution – whose bassist Chloe is an occasional student of mine, and who I have a few mutual friends with, so it was great to get to see them play at last. Their sound is VERY mid-70s psychedelic prog-rock – think Hawkwind, early Floyd, Blue Oyster Cult, with a touch of Rhiannon-era Fleetwood Mac. They even look like the product of a fight between The Bay City Rollers and Flock Of Seagulls – rarely have more mullets been seen on stage since the mid-80s. Still, their set was great, and if they’d been around when I was 16, they’d have been my favourite band in the world ever. I’ll hopefully catch a headline set of theirs soon.

So inevitably, after a gig like that last night, I’ve been recording big proggy soundscapes today – I’ve done two, following a similar theme on each, we’ll see whether either ends up being releaseable… Might have to do a download-only soundscapes album soon.

Soundtrack – M83, ‘Dead Cities, Red Seas and Lost Ghosts’; Kings X, ‘Live All Over The Place.

April 21, 2005

Another website tweak.

As you can see, I’ve tweaked the site again – added a little header image. It’s actually taken from the back of the Edinburgh Festival flyer that I was working on yesterday – I liked it so much I thought I’d add it to the site.

I also briefly added another picture of me to the whitespace down the right hand side of the screen, but it was a bit much.

The tough bit was formatting the design on the forum page to work with it – took me ages, but I did it. I didn’t even need to get Sarda or The Captain to help me this time! (this makes a change, I’m usually pretty reliant on the two of them for web advice… both are PHP gurus.)

So there you go.

Soundtrack – Keith Jarrett/Gary Peacock/Jack Dejohnette, ‘Always Let Me Go’; Charlie Haden, ‘American Dreams’; Fiona Apple, ‘Extraordinary Machine’.

February 21, 2005

Aha, I think it's fixed…

Well, after much marvellous help from Sarda, It looks like the new paypal thingie in the shop is now working! The PHP troubles are dealt with, my paypal account is upgraded to a ‘business account’ and I can now take any old Credit/Debit card orders via paypal without the need for people to sign up to paypal in order to use it! This is marvellous news, believe me! If anyone feels like trying it out please, be my guest. It’s even set up to copy your address details across into the paypal pages, so that you’ve got less typing to do, at least, that’s the idea… Hopefully all of this will mean lots more lovely CD sales for me!

Soundtrack – Finley Quaye, ‘Maverick A Strike’; Matthew Garrison, ‘Shapeshifter’; John Lester, ‘Big Dreams And The Bottom Line’.

February 20, 2005

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. 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, OS Commerce, 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 – Cathy Burton, ‘Speed Your Love’; Free, ‘The Free Story’; Bill Frisell, ‘Live at Pizza Express’.

January 5, 2005

RE-Brand your blog!

you’ll hopefully have noticed that on this site (and on my homepage and the forum on my site) there’s now a ‘make poverty history’ white band link in the top right hand corner – you can add one to your blog too, by adding the little bit of code you can get from the make poverty history website. Thanks to Sarda for alerting me to this one.

Soundtrack – Stephen Dawson, ‘Demos For Dolly’ – Stephen’s in a rather wonderful band called Dolly Varden, and these are his original demos for a lot of their songs. Great stuff.

January 1, 2005

2004 – a year in statistics

Well, here’s the year-end stats for the website (not including this blog – which is hosted on a different server, thanks to Sarda)

so that’s over 40,000 individual visitors, making a total of more than 80,000 visits to the site, viewing over 400,000 pages, and racking up over 1.3 MILLION hits! I’d say that’s pretty good show! For a musician doing what I’m doing, the web is the hub of it all, so having a busy site is pretty much vital to keeping things moving. I’ve had more CD sales via the website this year than ever before as well, and the forum has been a great place to hang out and chat about all manner of weirdness. A big thankyou to all those of you who contribute over there (it’s about time for a live chat again, but since I updated the phpBB software, I haven’t had a chance to reinstall the chat program…)

Soundtrack – Sarah McLachlan, ‘Afterglow’ (if you haven’t seen it yet, you HAVE to check out the video to World On Fire from this album – best video of 2004, by miles!)