From the ever-marvelous XKCD:

I've found a torrent of the show I was at on Dime (now I've managed to get my login back!) here.

On Wednesday V and I went to see The Feeling at Shepherds Bush Empire - one of my favourite venues in London.  Let's be honest: given my music preferences (Neil, Tom, and so on), this was more for V than for me (q.v. Bon Jovi @ Twickenham later this year!).  However, I must admit to a guilty-pleasure-like enjoyment of the band.  Sod it, it's not a guilty pleasure, they play unashamedly derivative pop, and why the hell not?  Ok, they always make me think of 70s west coast rock, Queen, early 80s rock, and so on, but then Oasis did the same thing with the 60s (and especially the Beatles, of course) and for some reason they were more acceptable to like.

Anyway, I'm rambling.

The support was a band called Palladium.  They were ok - I'll probably have a listen when they get their album out (May, they said) - and were frighteningly young and skinny, but that's probably just my age and weight being envious...  The keyboard player suffered the age-old curse of keyboard players, of how do you play a static instrument and still jump around in a cool manner?  (The answer being that you don't, of course).  Their set had the same sort of influences as The Feeling - Huey Lewis came to mind a couple of times - and played perfectly adequate pop...  They were also very keen on getting us to sign up for their mailing list when we were leaving.  I get quite enough spam already, thanks!

The Feeling played pretty much all of the tracks from both albums, and threw in a cover of Electric Dreams during the main set (we left before the encore to beat the crowd).  To be honest, they were better than I expected them to be - the band are very tight, I like their songs, basically it was just a thoroughly enjoyable set.  In many ways they're a band who are far easier to like than to admire, which makes for easier listening than a lot of the other bands I like!

It's a real pity I let my login for Dime lapse, as there are a bunch of boots of Neil's shows available at the moment.  There's a list at Rust Radio.  I've found a download link for the 2008-03-05 show in MegaUpload here, but I really want to get the show I was at!  If anyone knows of a download link for the 2008-03-06 show, I'd be grateful..!

Well, that was good.  Interesting set - shame he didn't play Cinnamon Girl, Cortez, or Rocking In The Free World - but wow, what a show.  I'd like to give a good kicking to whoever it was thought that clapping along (out of time) to Old King was a good idea..!

It felt like 2 gigs - 1 hour of acoustic material, then 1:20 of electric.  Bargain!

I've seen his extended guitar work-outs described as being thought of as transcendental by some and interminable by others - count me in the former category. No Hidden Path isn't my favourite of these, but there's something mesmerising and elemental in his playing that keeps me from ever getting bored, even if I find myself drifting a bit - and wondering if the big yellow light on the right of the stage was meant to symbolise the sun?

Set list from Sugar Mountain:

1. From Hank To Hendrix
2. Ambulance Blues
3. Kansas
4. A Man Needs A Maid
5. Try
6. Harvest
7. After The Gold Rush
8. Old King
9. Love Art Blues
10. Heart Of Gold
11. Out On The Weekend
12. Old Man
    ---
13. The Loner
14. Dirty Old Man
15. Spirit Road
16. Down By The River
17. Hey Hey, My My
18. Roll Another Number
19. Oh, Lonesome Me
20. The Believer
21. Powderfinger
22. No Hidden Path
    ---
23. Fuckin' Up

Wise words indeed.

Neil Young, tonight, at the Hammersmith Apollo.

I can't wait.

Since I now have a shiny new iPod Classic 160GB*, and since iTunes is now offering DRM-free music at decent bit-rates, and since I didn't want to wait for delivery from the OW OM Store in the US, I've just purchased Rainer's Westwood Sessions Volume I.

I've got everything else of Rainer's that I can find (all his CDs, mainly bought from Glitterhouse), and the two live recordings at Archive.org, so it's no real suprise that I think it's great! 

Rainer was a Tucson-based guitarist, master of dobro and slide guitar, who played with among others Giant Sand, Robert Plant, Billy Gibbons (of ZZ Top - see Rainer's The Texas Tapes), and released a handful of recordings before his tragic death in 1997.  The website at www.raineroftucson.com seems to have gone, but a biog can be found at Wikipedia.

The Westwood Sessions were recently found and dusted off by Jim Blackwood, and release on Howe Gelb's OW OM label.  They're unreleased tapes from sessions Rainer did between Barefoot Rock and Worried Spirits, and contain some real gems.  It's a very bluesy record, including songs such as J B Lenoir's Voodoo Music, but for me the highlights are Rainer's own songs, especially Zealots Serve Dogmas and I Am A Sinner.

The last word goes to Howe:

* I've been waiting for an MP3 player that has sufficient capacity for ages... I used to have an Empeg Car with 70GB of discs in it, and had filled that by the time I changed my car 2 years ago (though I never got around to putting it in this car), so I've been wanting something big enough to take everything I've got...  Now, as a car player the iPod is just rubbish compared to the Empeg.  I'm using it with a tape adapter so the sound is... well, ok at best, and I really do miss the flexible playlist structure of the Empeg.  And the ease of use in the car.  And the extra features like filters.  And being able to see what's playing all the time.  The radio never worked properly, mind you!  But, overall, I'm very happy with the iPod.

Here's a quick techy post to start the New Year...

In SQL Management Studio you can save your results pane as a CSV file. All you need to do is select the grid, right-click, and select "Save Results as...". Nice and simple (and a quick way of getting your data out of the DB).

However (and there just had to be a "however", didn't there?), the CSV file that's saved can't be read by the .Net StreamReader object, as the Encoding can't be detected (it's Encoding.Unicode) automatically. Initially, I did try to detect it using the BOM (Byte Order Mark) of the file, but there isn't one. In the end, I checked that the 1st and 3rd characters were value zero, which for the files I'm interested in is perfectly valid, and if so explicitly set the Encoding to Unicode. If you do this, make sure you set detectEncodingFromByteOrderMarks to False.

Updated 2008-01-18: And now, just to annoy me (it's a conspiracy, I tell you!), the file has miraculously acquired a BOM: FF FE, which according to Wikipedia means it's UTF-16 little-endian. Not sure if the endian-ness (or whatever the term is) makes a difference, as Encoding.Unicode still works.

I've no idea where this BOM has come from - does anyone know if SQL Management Studio was updated through Windows Update recently?

Somehow I had managed to let my hosting account expire.  However, after paying the invoice and asking nicely, those kind people at WebHost4Life restored everything...

Well, what's new?

I've got tickets for the following gigs:

2008-03-06 - Neil Young (Hammersmith Apollo)
2008-03-19 - The Feeling (Shepherds Bush Empire)
2008-05-30 - Bruce Springsteen (Emirates Stadium)
2008-06-27 - Bon Jovi (Twickenham)

...which should all be fun!  I may have a spare ticket for Neil Young - depending if PH still wants it.

I was given The Traveling Wilburys Collection for xmas - great couple of albums, especially Volume One.

V and I are off up to the parent's place this weekend - it's my Dad's birthday the week after, so we're going out for dinner.  Just for a change we're taking V's car rather than mine - it will be the longest journey the car has ever made, so should blow away a few cobwebs.

Right, that's it.  Update done.  Back to work...

A couple of weeks ago I had the honour and great pleasure of playing one of the finest golf courses in the world: Royal Troon. We've been talking about it for years, as Alan's father, Jim, is a member there, so we were able to get signed in by a member (which makes life a *lot* cheaper and easier!).

We played the Old Course on the Sunday, and the Portland Course on the Monday. Fortunately the rain held off when we played the Old Course, and while I had a terrible round (I don't even want to think about my score!), it was glorious. The Monday was a different story - horizontal rain! Still enjoyable, in its way, but if I'd been anywhere else I'd have called it a day at the turn.

We stayed at the Piersland Hotel, which I can thoroughly recommend, even if they didn't let us have the sound up on the telly for the England-France rugby match...

More photos are available on my Flickr photostream.