Life may be cheap, but it seems my corpse would be cheaper still...

Mingle² - Online Dating

Via Pharyngula

Well, that was a pleasant enough show... We got there a little after 8pm, so had missed the first support (The Twilight Sad), but caught most of Ash's set, which was pretty good.

So, Snow Patrol: big, anthemic, lighters-aloft music (well, these days it seems to be "mobile phones aloft", but you get the drift). Heavy on numbers from the current album, a bunch from the last, and only a couple from before that, which isn't exactly a suprise as the band was pretty much unknown until the last album, and you gotta give the punters what they want. And the punters certainly seemed satisfied by what they were given.

The O2 Arena: big, easy to get to and quick to enter, though we had a long walk around the arena to get to door H, but that gave us a chance to see what the dome now contains. What it contains is a Vue cinema, and a bunch of restaurants and bars (of the Nando's and Slug & Lettuce variety - pretty much the same sort of mix as Reading's Oracle, and no doubt any number of other recent developments). The arena itself is quite good - decent views from everywhere and reasonable sound quality (as good as I've heard in an arena, certainly).

I have to say that it does piss me off that you can't take your own bottles of water into the arena. The restriction is purely about money, of course. I don't know if they even tried to justify it on any other grounds.

Getting home again is more of a challenge. It takes forever to get down to the tube platform. Ok, no longer than it would from Earl's Court, say, but given it's all newly built you'd hope for quicker transport than they've managed. Huge queues for buses and taxis, as well, so we stuck with the tube and eventually got on a train about 30 minutes after leaving the arena. Paddington was busy as well - is it me, or have they reduced the number of post-midnight trains back to Reading?

To sum up: I enjoyed it well enough, but I'd rather see Cale, or Howe, or someone who's prepared to take a little more risk... (we'll ignore the fact that I'll be seeing Steely Dan in Hammersmith in a couple of weeks, 'cause that show certainly ain't gonna be taking any risks!)

Tonight we're going to see Snow Patrol at The O2 Arena (or the dome, as it used to be known, before anyone found a good use for it). The band is a bit more... mainstream, say, than most I tend to see these days, but it should still be a good show, and a kind of "thank you" to V for putting up with previous random gigs like John Cale and the Howe Gelb & Friends shows earlier this year!

According to The O2's website, the arena's an improvement on echoey barns like Wembley Arena and Earl's Court (note to self: sort out leave and who's going to the beer festival this year!), so we'll soon see if they're exaggerating when they say:

I hope they aren't - I've had to put up with lousy acoustics in the past at some gigs, though to be fair it's not just the concrete boxes that suffer (one of the worst I've heard was British Sea Power at The Forum in Kentish Town), but it does tend to be these arenas that sound the worst, which is one of the reasons I tend to prefer smaller gigs...

Photo linked from Snow Patrol's website.

Via Boing Boing, Gnarls Barkley's song Crazy, performed on the theremin by The Ether and Aether Experiment. What more could you want to cheer up a miserable June day?

Too right - we need more theremin in popular music. Who were the last band to use it? Space, or someone? Bill Bailey seems quite fond as well, but, damn it, we need more!

Today's awful pun, courtesy of xkcd:

I've just returned from a very pleasant week in Spain. We stayed at the Hotel Neptuno, in the small resort town of Tossa De Mar, on the Costa Brava. The weather was gorgeous, the food and drink great, and my regret at being back at my desk yesterday morning even greater!

We booked the holiday as a flight and hotel package from Expedia, and after looking at the transfer options I decided to hire a car for the week instead of messing around with trains and buses. I'm very glad I did so - it was a quick hop up the motorway from Barcelona airport to Tossa, only taking about an hour and a half, and the hire for the week was only £100, with an extra €54 for parking and around €50 for petrol, so still ended up cheaper between the two of us than public transport would have done, and gave us the advantage of the car when we wanted it.

We spent most of the week relaxing in Tossa, but we had an excursion down to Barcelona for a day. We drove down the coast instead of the motorways, which took a little longer but was worth it for the views, and parked for the day in the Glories carpark, where we got the Metropark ticket - a bargain at €5.50 for all-day parking plus metro and bus travelcard. Another €5 or so for an extra travelcard for V (my better half), and we were set.

I was very pleasantly suprised by how easy it was to get to and from the car park by road, given how close to the centre it is. Actually, I thought the entire transport network worked excellently around Barcelona. The metro trains were air-conditioned, on-time, clean, frequent, and took us wherever we wanted to go (and let's face it, we can't say the same things about the tube in London, can we?)

Anyway, Tossa itself was a lovely little town, with some great restaurants, a reasonable beach (though the sand wasn't exactly fine), some interesting architecture, and a fair selection of shops - everything we wanted, really! And wonderfully free of the Reading-town-centre-on-a-Saturday-night vibe that plagues many resorts...

In a couple of days I'm heading to Cheshire to take part in the 23rd Annual UK Shield Challenge, a golf tournament over 3 rounds and 2 days. The tournament is affiliated with HP, and started out (way back when!) as a north v. south competition between 2 of the offices, but by now it's got teams from all over HP UK, and plenty of people taking part who, like me, have either tangental or historic attachments to HP (I spent a little over 6 years, in two 3-year stints, working in their Bracknell office as a consultant).

Each year a different team organises the event, and this year it's Team Manchester who have the pleasure, and they're taking us to Carden Park. Last year my team (the glorious "Fast Bogeys") organised the event, which we held at Woodhall Spa. That was a great few days, and one of the finest courses I've ever played on. I hope this year is as good..!

My Dad was 60 back in January, and for his birthday my Mum bought him a gliding lesson. Since she's such a nice person, she got me one for my (not at all significant) birthday, so I could join him. After an aborted attempt a few weeks ago, when it was rather misty, we finally flew yesterday.

We flew at the Yorkshire Gliding Club, on Sutton Bank in North Yorkshire. Spectacular views, even though it was a bit hazy, and I may even forgive my Dad for finding a bunch of thermals and getting lots more air-time that I did, but since I had more time in control of the glider I suppose we came out even...

Lots of pictures up on my Flickr stream, and movies of my Dad taking off and landing at YouTube (or there will be when they've finished processing!)

I've just upgraded to DasBlog v1.9.7123.653. My apologies if things have been (and still are!) a little temperamental around here!

Now, to get the config tab working again...

Update: Edit tab wasn't working because there was an entry in site.config which was referring to the previous version of the FreeTextBoxAdapter. I removed the entry, and it all worked again:

I've also taken this opportunity to use the dasblogupgrader.exe tool to remove all the pingback spam that was cluttering up a lot of my pages...

This makes very depressing reading: A physics teacher begs for his subject back. I have a degree in physics (albeit not an impressive one, but hey, that's the effect that a very close and cheap bar had on me when I was that age...), and I thoroughly enjoyed the subject at school. It spoke a language that just made sense to me. The article says:

Given the sort of teaching that he describes, I just can't see that I would have given a damn. It would have bored me to tears. Hell, if I'd wanted that sort of a subject I'd have studied sociology or something (no insult intended to the sociologists out there!); what I loved about physics was the elegance of a mathematical proof being able to illustrate the reality of our universe.

I believe that the understanding of science is of vital importance. I'm not talking degree-level understanding, but the ability to grasp the basics. How else can you evaluate the constant barrage of competing claims, the latest health scares, the ridiculous uses of statistics, that we're all subjected to?

The author (Wellington Grey) is asking for help in making this issue better known. It certainly should be.

Update (2007-06-26): A petition has been created - please sign it.

Another wonderful cartoon from XKCD: