Bigbro's foray into the scary world of blogging
03 2008
Thanks to Niall O'Broin for providing me with a laugh. When it was suggested he ask his ISP for a statically assigned IP address, his response was the very telling:
"My ISP is $ISP - I might as well ask my cat. And I don't even have a cat."
Irish Rail have cancelled the train I was hoping to get to Balbriggan this evening. I imagine they will be in contact with me shortly to offer me a reduction in the ticket price, given their repeated reductions in service.
posted at: 15:52 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry
I use Ubuntu as my prefered OS on my desktop and laptop (I currently don't have any Apple kit) but since I got my Dell D430, I've been having a strange problem whereby the laptop would go to sleep (standby) as configured, but if left for some (long?) period of time, upon being woken up it would almost immediately suspend to disk. While this worked almost perfectly, it was most annoying to have to wait for the laptop to recover from standby, go into suspend to disk, and then come back out of suspend to disk (writing and reading ~2GB of RAM to disk in the process) before it was usable. I'm an impatient person and when I open my laptop to do work, I want it ready to do work as fast as possible.
While I've not isolated why the laptop started doing this yet, I've managed to work around the problem by configuring the /etc/default/acpi-support to only allow standby, and not allow suspend to disk. The big con of this solution is that I can no longer suspend to disk, though my laptop is rarely out of use for long enough for this to be a problem. The biggest problem I expect to see is that I can't change battery without having external power, or rebooting - something I could previously do by suspending to disk.
My acpi-support looks as follows, in case someone else is seeing the same problem:
ACPI_SLEEP=true # Following line commented out to disable suspend to disk... # ACPI_HIBERNATE=true ACPI_SLEEP_MODE=mem # Added usbserial to try and make the 3G modem work reliably between standby/restart cycles... MODULES="usbserial" # Added mysql to the services to stop and start between standby/restart cycles... STOP_SERVICES="mysql" # All other options are left at the default values for Ubuntu. # Example taken from Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy) and running on a Dell D430 laptop.
It being almost Paddy's Day, RTE felt they should put some traditional music on the telly, and came up with a performance by The High Kings in Dublin. Their repertoire is eclectic, mixing some of the best known pieces previously recorded by the Dubliners, the Cheiftans, Makem and Clancy, the Furey Brothers and Davey Arthur, and Riverdance - though this is no real surprise given the musicians involved. The vocalists include Martin Furey and Martin Clancy - with Darren Holden and Brian Dunphy (both having contributed to Riverdance in the past) and the backing band includes Nollaig Casey, who has long been a favourite traditional fiddle player of mine, with Martin O'Connor (accordian) and Robbie Harris, a superbly talented percussionist.
Some rich four-part harmonies are evident, with exquisite violin from Nollaig and rich modal guitar accompaniment from Dave Keery and Ewan Cowley though I can't help hearing Riverdance's formulaic modulations, chordal suspensions and rhythmic syncopations. Still, I can't really complain given the style of chord substitution and syncopated rhythmic variations I use in my own playing. I can't help thinking that the creators of Celtic Woman have done nothing more than come up with the Irish traditional equivalent of Boyzone/Take That/Insert-Boy-Band-Here. While it's great to see jobs being created for musicians, I can't help but worry that more damage than good is being done, as Irish Traditional Music gets stereotyped further into the 'everything-sounds-like-Riverdance' camp.
I must admit, I liked the marching of the playing pipers through the venue for their rendition of 'The Parting Glass' - reminds me of my time with the Irish Youth Choir performing Clare's Dragoons, when we had a playing War-Piper march up to the stage to join the choir and orchestra. I should also state that I like Riverdance and that I have the greatest of respect for Bill Whelan - but perhaps these artists could be a little more careful to distinguish themselves a little from the rich history of Traditional Irish Music, perhaps by referring to themselves as 'Neo-Traditional' musicians (as I refer to my style of playing) or something similar. Or perhaps I should be blaming the media rather than the musicians - I don't know... I'm very sure that there's a lot more to traditional Irish music than the distinctive sound of 'Riverdance' though.
posted at: 14:22 | path: /music | permanent link to this entry
Despite the dire threats of bad weather, a group of us went to Dublin Zoo in the Phoenix Park. Apart from the fatal flaw of getting ice-cream from the van on the way in, which meant we were covered in ice-cream before we even got to purchase our tickets, all went well.
There's a Zoo blog which seems to be updated periodically with useful information for potential visitors, but the very recent birth of their baby elephant doesn't seem to be there yet. I'm happy to report that both parents and calves appeared to be doing well (there's another calf in the encolsure, now about a year old.)
All in all, a most enjoyable day, with little of the really nasty weather that we feared. The zoo is small enough to get around and see everything in about 3 or 4 hours - so we saw the lot, spending rather an excessive time watching the tremendous show the penguins put on for us. Pictures coming soon.
posted at: 11:38 | path: | permanent link to this entry
