overlap

After a December of self-indulgence it's been a January of making up for it, mostly by doing very little. There's usually not much goes on in January anyway, and it's a month I associate with various things of notgreatness, so a lot of time at home has seen me gradually making a dent in some of the jobs around the house I've been putting off. There's lesser quantities of leaves and nettles in the car park, less stuff waiting to be recycled (and thrown away) and I even have a gleamingly clean fridge with a freshly defrosted freezer compartment.

Among all these debauched excesses, I've found another set of data that I need to track. In addition to my domestic housekeeping, my current computer file housekeeping exercise is giving me plenty to do, but one of the drawbacks of being at home more than usual is a greater proximity to my kitchen than usual, as well as the wine belly that's gradually appearing courtesy of the vineyards of Australia.

The addition of the stats function to flickr has been hugely illuminating, if not especially surprising. Having gone through a significant petrol bill and quite a few hours driving on saturday to see a band I've now seen a dozen times, I took the opportunity to knock off a ton of live on stage action shots. In conditions with next to no meaningful lighting beyond a couple of UV striplights and some lights at the bar at the back of the room, it wasn't easy, and handheld shots up to 1/6th of a second produce a lot of blurry rubbish - trust me, I have the evidence - but I still ended up adding eighteen shots that I was reasonably satisfied with to the band's flickr pool. And since the band included a link to that pool in an email to the mailing list to thank people for turning up and pass on some other news, suddenly there's a lot of traffic going through those pictures that they wouldn't normally get. So far, so obvious, but what is much more interesting will be whether anyone comes back after a first look, and which other shots they have a look at while they are there. This is my favourite of them at the moment - 1/10th of a second at F4 produces the red-yellow warmth to the skin tones.

Funny, I remember when the January sales actually had something to do with January rather than being rushed through from Boxing Day onwards. Then again, I was on the website of a certain major High Street name, looking at the sale stock in the early hours of Christmas Day, so the truth of 'if you build it, they will come' seems to speak for itself. Having found a good haul of stuff in that sale, I wasn't so impressed to find they couldn't actually cope with getting the delivery bit right, and not for the first time. This evening I had an email reply to my letter of complaint, which was a pretty mealy-mouthed apology, so it remains to be seen if I buy more stuff there. Can't imagine why business are putting out profits warnings left, right and centre when they struggle to get stuff to their paying customers! On friday I made a late sale gamble purchase, and today I've done something I'm certain I haven't done in a very long time. Despite the provisions of the Sale Of Goods Act, I'm either very good at doing my research first, or notoriously poor at insisting on my 'rights'. So I'm quietly pleased that having bought a jacket that I really liked but then found that the extra large turns out to equate to a small size 14*, I took it back and got the refund that the shop's terms of sale entitle me to. Then I went and looked for something else that I'd seen, only to find that there wasn't one of those in my size left either, but I did finally find the sort of belt I've been looking for in New Look. Now, having been reading someone's complaints about shops which look and sound more like discos - in the case of New Look, which does of course exist for fashionable teenagers and twenty year olds, it's no surprise it sounds like a disco. No more shopping now for a bit. Fingers crossed! * Go on, guess where!

Labels: shopping

It's been a funny and rather continental week. I've spent a whole day watching a news story develop in French, with enough specialist knowledge to read between the lines as well as take in the face value of what was being said. And after spending much of saturday harvesting music from youtube, I've spent a couple of days listening to a German band that I haven't listened to in ages. To the point where I'm on the verge of booking flights and tickets to go and see them in Germany later this year, since I'm pretty confident I'm not going to see them turn up anywhere closer. It would be misleading to say absolutely everything has come back and I'm at the height of my linguistic powers, but it's rather reassuring just how much does come back with a little practice, and how quickly.

And on that anniversary note, another time and place I don't have to think about to remember is exactly where I was on 4th January 1986, the day Phil Lynott died. Although that's been mentioned on here before, it was in the days before youtube became such an all-encompassing thing, and I've just spent some time going through some stuff on there, a lot of which I've never seen before. Old Town - I've also crossed the Liffey on possibly that footbridge, but I like this in particular as it's off one of the solo albums and it seems a bit more honest and a bit less trying too hard to be a big tough cartoon rock star. That business with a trumpet he can't play is not someone demanding to be taken seriously! The Man's A Fool - much as I prefer the album version, this is great, especially to see Sykes and Wakeman (yes, that one!) really going for it. Please Don't Leave Me - Sykes' solo single, sung by Phil and effectively recorded by Thin Lizzy minus Scott Gorham. This is a mimed for telly version, but it's the best sounding version I can find on youtube, and it's one of my very favourite songs. It'll tell you plenty about my highly unfashionable taste in guitar solos too!

Labels: John Sykes, Phil Lynott, rock, Thin Lizzy

So this is the third anniversary of me starting this, easy enough to remember as today is also a birthday that's burned into me as if by a branding iron. I have no idea what I had in mind when I started this, but I do know it's been through different phases, and having shifted to more music content than anything else, it's interesting to see what does generate the limited amount of traffic that passes through. Thanks for visiting, and wrap up warm if you're going out!