Neil Hopcroft

I found a car shop.

Shame they didn’t have a fireapple red convertible, cos thats what i’d’ve driven home… But still, somewhere with interesting cars. I tried that saab, which was nice as a general car, but that one in particular was a bit wobbly after being stored for a while. And i sat in the 300z, but was a little disappointed by the “they’re all imports, they didn’t make them in this country” answer to my question about it being non uk spec (no turbo, manual). Damn nice sound to that engine.

I need a volunteer bad idea bear to help me decide.

“It always starts the same way. I am in the garden airing my terrapin Jetta when he walks past my gate, that mysterious man in black.”

…this isn’t my normal sort of thing, but this is just so bizarre it needs to be passed on: Roy Orbison in Clingfilm.

Knitted dalek

Chocolate dalek

Bentfest tours America (worksafe…its not what you might think)

R2S2

Symphony in B and G# (though whether they were playing this or another piece is currently unclear to me)

Imaginative parking

Panorama of museum in Oxford

Crisis…stop…need cake…stop…end…

Saturday night saw a trip to Milton Keynes for Laibach, where I met up with Matti for some food before the gig, and he took me to see some indoor skydiving, which was quite fun to watch but probably not my sort of thing to actually do.

Then we sauntered off down to the Woughton Centre to find Simon and Adelle, who were waiting patiently in the bar for our arrival.

The show didn’t start until some time after we arrived, and there was no support act (or perhaps they supported themselves, I can’t work it out). The first half was made up of their interpretations of various national anthems from around the world. These were those on their latest album, but somehow made more poingiant by the twin projected backdrop showing a depth of cynicism that doesn’t come across in the recorded material.

The arrival of two teutonic drum maidens heralded the start of the second part of the set, starting with a rendition of Live is Life. Its been a long time since I’ve seen a band this tight, they clearly all know what they’re doing and have a sense of timing. And having three drummers makes for quite a significant sound. There followed a bit of detour via a number of their own tunes before finishing off with credits rolling on the projectors to a soundtrack of a medley of their songs.

A stonking gig, I wish there were more like it.

So I managed to forget to tell you about some of the excitment of the easter weekend…we got back to the car after our meal on Friday night to find that the carpark had been locked. What kind of council locks its car parks at 10:30? Especially if its still got cars in? There was no mention of a call-out number to get an unlocker out to open up the gate. So its time to scout the perimeter and find likely looking escape points. There is a narrow and uneven pedestrian exit next to a traffic light crossing (and junction, iirc) through which it might be possible to drive – so we give it a go, noone else in the car (I’ve made that mistake before, don’t ever drive through a hedge with a Mikey in the car, it still worked but there was a *horrible* scraping sound), just watching the sides so I didn’t beat it up any more than necessary on the way out. We made it with only a warning smell from a slight knock to the cat – but its probably pretty old by now and need of changing anyway.

And I took some pictures:

(which could almost be a Widdy-of-the-week, were it not for the faff)

8-bit tie – this is higher resolution than i remember from those days.

No music came on. He dug around in the pockets where he kept the iPod and pulled out the twisted hunk of metal that is in the pictures

Where bill?

Trams? We laugh at your puny trams

I’m on Rails.

Modulo a rather unexpected crashing of the OSX UI when I typed ‘sudo kill 1’ by accident – it *really* shouldn’t respect that (I was trying to kill background process 1, not process 1).

Lunch now.

How difficult can it be?

I’m now on the fourth machine….two windows boxes failed to install the Ruby mysql connector (admittedly one of those was cygwin, therefore not really expected to work), the linux box wouldn’t even get as far as Ruby (as an aside, I’ve managed to mangle my apt-get to a point where it refuses to do anything except complain about netbase being both needed and not needed…clues? Do I just need to keep beheading open source developers until one of them admits to causing this kind of madness?), and now I’m halfway through the install on the Mini, its looking alright so far which means it must be time for bed before I spend all night trying to make the damned software work.

I’ve not even started anything complicated yet.