Remote GUADEC

Feels a bit weird not going to GUADEC this year… I blame that guy that we’re sending from New Zealand for blowing the travel budget for the rest of us 🙂 Luckily Stuttgart is the first GUADEC host city that I’ve visited before anyway, so I don’t feel like I’m missing out too much on that side of things… and hopefully I’ll be able to watch many of the talks via the live video feeds that were so successful last year.

In case any GNOME folks are worried that our low attendance this year are a sign that Sun aren’t interested in supporting GNOME any more, though, nothing could be further from the truth… we have as many GNOME/JDS projects on the go at the moment as we’ve ever had, and with OpenSolaris just around the corner I expect we’ll be ramping up even more. So actually it’s probably just as well we’re not sending so many engineers to GUADEC this year– we’re too darn busy 🙂

Money for Nothing

As I mentioned last week, we were off to The Point again this weekend, this time to see noted guitar picker and former Dire Straits frontman Mark Knopfler.

It’s been ten years since I last saw him live, and in some respects the set wasn’t a lot different, bar a wider repertoire of solo material– fortunately he does at least now seem to be over his pedal steel guitar phase, which started with the last couple of Straits albums, and bled into his first solo outings. Otherwise the staging and arrangements haven’t changed much in a decade, which isn’t a bad thing, just a little surprising. I was a tad disappointed that Private Investigations didn’t feature this time around, but we did get a satisfyingly-rousing version of the epic Telegraph Road instead (although the pianist did sound a bit like he was playing it out the Alchemy song book– the tinkly bits on the Money for Nothing version remain the definitive ones for me…)

Modern-day critics often look back sneeringly on Dire Straits, but as somebody who was learning to play guitar finger-style at the time while most kids were happy to go the plectrum-and-power-chords route, their omnipresence (and of course, Mark Knopfler’s in particular) proved to be a big influence for me. He might never really look like he’s trying, and he still sings about as well as Bob Dylan on a bad day, but I could have listened to him all night.

Real football

Good ‘ol Motherwell… last day of the season, losing 1-0 at home to Celtic with 2 minutes to go, Celtic are on course to win the league. Two minutes and two Scott McDonald goals later, we’ve won the game and handed the title to Rangers.

It’s a pity either of those teams and their glory-hunting followers had to win again this year (particularly the one managed by Alex McLeish, whose mis-management broke up the best team Motherwell ever had in recent times, and then did much the same at Hibernian), but it doesn’t half feel good to have screwed it up for one of them 🙂 With a bit of luck, maybe some of the droves who flock from here over to Scotland every week to watch Celtic and sing their sectarianism-inducing songs will finally realise that they’d be much better off diverting all that disposable income towards their local teams in Ireland instead, and then we’d all be happy.

Pretend football

Had Julie’s parents over visiting for the weekend. For something a little different, we took them along to the first round All-Ireland football championship games at Croke Park, not least because Julie knows one of the Wicklow players (although we’ve yet so see him do anything other than sit on the subs bench, and occasionally warm up). For the record, Kildare edged out Wicklow in the more exciting game by 1-17 (20) to 2-12 (18), and Dublin strolled past Longford by 2-23 (29) to 0-10 (10). I’ve no idea if the future-in-laws had any idea what was going on, but at least they had a pleasant sit out on the warmest day of the year so far.

On Monday, I was back at work, so Julie left to them wander down to the botanic gardens to play with their recently-acquired Nikon Coolpix 3200. Apparently it was raining though, so they only took a couple of photos in the glass houses inside in case it got wet… and then they got lost on the way home taking a “shortcut” 🙂

The Queen is Dead, Long Live… Paul Rodgers?

In the penultimate stage of our current retro-bands “tour”, Julie and I went to see Queen with Paul Rodgers in Dublin on Saturday. Of course, Queen are really just Brian May and Roger Taylor these days, with Danny Miranda (of Blue Oyster Cult and Pyramid fame) taking the disassociated John Deacon’s place on bass, and Spike Edney (SAS Band, and a million-and-one big-name session, production and musical director credits) on keyboards. The unenviable task of trying not to impersonate Freddie Mercury fell to Paul Rodgers (Free, Bad Company) on this tour, one which he pulled off with varying degrees of success… he was certainly more comfortable performing the songs that originated in his own back catalogue, though.

While I’ve never been a great Brian May fan– he’s certainly not in the league of guitar gods who should be trying to pull off ten-minute guitar solos in the middle of a show, but try he did– his guitar-playing is certainly the most defining feature of the Queen sound in the absence of Freddie’s voice, and if you shut your eyes, you did occasionally get a flash of what it must have been like to see them live in their heyday. Queen it probably wasn’t, but a good old-fashioned rock gig it certainly was.

Next week: Mark Knopfler…

OCS

I wasn’t long out of university when Ocean Colour Scene made it big in the mid-90s, with grungey guitar hits like The Day We Caught the Train and The Riverboat Song. Can’t say I was really into them then, but we went to see them in Dublin at the weekend and they totally rocked… it’s rare enough for one Britpop singer to hit every note all night, let alone the whole band! (Well, okay, apart from Oscar on drums and piano, who belted one out during the encore and was pretty dire…)

May Day

Pretty quiet holiday weekend here. Had lunch out and a wander round the Botanic Gardens earlier today… bit drizzly, though, so we didn’t hang around too long.

Caught a fair bit of the world snooker final on TV, and waited with bated breath (as I do at this time every year) to see if BBC2 would stick on anything instead of the scheduled film whose cancellation the final’s over-run had caused. Only an old episode of Grumpy Old Men so far, though… Ceefax hasn’t caught up yet so I don’t know what’s on next to fill the rest of the gap before we’re back on track.

Also started to pull together a presentation I’m supposed to be giving to Netsoc at Trinity College on Thursday evening. It’s shaping up to be about the application of usability methods in commercial and open source environments, and what they might learn from each other (with a few shining examples of GUI Bloopers along the way for light relief)… but it’s all a tad, er… ‘fluid’ at the moment.