I plan to age gracefully, takeing my life one bit at a time, stageing my progression without raceing against time, which I expect will be ravageing me in due course. I hope to find the older me paceing myself and tolerateing the declineing returns of advanceing years. By gaugeing how I am perceived by others and changeing how I am behaveing, I am hopeing that I will be ameliorateing the effects of the evolveing demands of life.
Last night was another Descarga! Night at 1331. A bit of a funny one - at the start of the night there was only half a band and no audience… But the rest of the band shew in the end (though with a couple of personnel changes) and we got treated to some of the standards. Then after a break, I had a go on timbales. A combination of nerves, getting used to the height of the drums, the fact that the band wasn’t 100% on the groove, and the fact that I hadn’t played for two weeks, and the fact that I got first solo only moments into the first song meant that I was less than spectacular on that tune, which is a shame because it was Ray Baretto’s Acid, an absolutely TOP tune that deserved better. However I soon found my feet and redeemed myself on the next song with an explosive (though still rather more fragmented than i’d like) solo. Part of the credit must go to Steve G for the supportive glances during the first couple of songs :-).
Rob got up on bongos next and pulled off some convincingly ape-shit soloing … I could tell he was in his Zen place by the end of the tune, so a swift kick to the calf stopped him overrunning the end of the song :-)
After that we stepped down and it was a case of cha-cha-chaing solo in with the audience while other folk had a go on the percussion, and trying not to step on too many people’s toes :-)
I think smoking should be allowed in pubs and bars, but that every time you light up you should pay everybody in the room 50p towards their laundry.
I already discarded everything I wore last night, but I can smell fags on my bag under my desk…
A pantoum by me, chivvied on by Rachael. [edit: I have taken out a couple of commas which may count as cheating, but they grated too much]
The hillside rolls quickly away
Where it meets the burbling brook
Where a water-rat closes the day
In a dry-rotted, knotted root-crookWhere it meets the burbling brook,
The sunlight, refracted, alights
In a dry-rotted, knotted root-crook
Near a packet of ten Camel LightsThe Sunlight, refracted, alights
On the hand of a boy; see him draw
Near a packet of ten Camel Lights
As a water rat closes its jawOn the hand of a boy; see him draw
Back in horror, away from the place
As a water rat closes its jaw
He turns his bike, wheels to faceBack in horror, away from the place
Where a water rat closes the day
He turns his bike wheels to face
The hillside, rolls quickly away
I spent all night last night trying to do this in C#. After a 380Mb download, careful adding of references to COM objects, and a self-guided crash course in C#, I found myself having spend the last 2 of the 3.5 hours’ development time trying to find out how to make a C# console application start in a single-thread apartment using Visual Studio Express.
This evo, I rustled it up in C and cygwin in about an hour, and it’s a 4k executable.
clip-0.1.tgz
Pipe data to clip -c and it will appear on the clipboard. type clip -p and it will paste from the clipboard to stdout. Handy huh?
Why do they keep children out of Italian bakers’ shops?
Cos they’re always saying Focaccia.
Sorry.
On the way up through New York State we stopped at Saratoga Springs because Rachael half-remembered there was a huge waterfall there. We saw geysers, which unfortunately all had brass fittings … uh … fitted. I guess they at least guaranteed a nice strong fountain of water. There was also a gorgeous stream which I seem to recall we were forbidden from entering. We weren’t however forbidden from entering the outdoor pool. It was a little on the cool side for outdoor swimming but we didn’t let that put us off and had an enjoyable splash about in the kiddie-sized pools surrounded on three sides by manicured lawns and less-manicured woods.
The lifeguard struck up conversation when he figured out we weren’t from around those parts.
When we said we were headed up to Montreal he said how he loved it up in Canada, the whole place seems cleaner. We didn’t really know what he was on about - the Springs area of Saratoga was pretty swank - but it put us in a good mood regarding our destination for that day, and his words would come back to us with force when we crossed back into the USA at Niagara Falls.
On the penultimate leg of our round-trip, we passed through the finger lakes, having nominated Ithaca as a cool place to check out. With the delicate balance between making progress on our 1400 mile tour and actually fitting in a holiday slightly in our favour at that point, we stopped at a local winery and had a taste. There we found a leaflet about falls around Ithaca, and discovered that Seneca Falls existed. Spurred on by this, we further found out that the falls Rachael had half-remembered were in fact Taughannock Falls, the “Tallest In North Eastern USA”. Not only that, but they were only just down the road.
Yay!
Maybe it’s time Tescos stopped selling food, if they’re so sick of it.
It’s good to see that York has spent umpty-billion pounds on some super new networked electronical signs which can be updated in real time to reflect the prevailing conditions. Last night as I left the ringroad in the freezing fog, visibility ranging from a hundred metres to only a few metres, and the road surface treacherously slick with icy condensation, I had missed one key detail.
