Present Perfect

Festival

Went to one day of Werchter with the boys band. Sadly arrived late for AYWKUBTTOD. Rilo Kiley was good. Bloc Party was great, but we didn't go forward soon enough so we had to follow from the side and didn't get enough of the sound. Nine Inch Nails was ok, Interpol was great but short. We got home fairly early because Interpol was moved forward for some reason. Anyway, I realized that I miss going to festivals and having some loud live music play - if the music's good. Maybe I should catch another this year - Pukkelpop or Benecassim.

Music

... And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead still takes the prize for coolest band name ever. I didn't really "get" their latest album on the first few listens, but I've been listening to it all day today and "Will You Smile Again" is all over the place, excellent song.

Tom McRae made a new album, has some good tunes on it as usual. Every album he made has at least one song with that McRae Moment - this album has it in Vampire Heart, in the tiny pause between "so I curse you with a vampire heart" (where the backing vocal goes up and decelerates to a standstill right before a drop) and "for letting me love you". That, and the way the woman sighs "love you" after that. Go Tom.

Lift to Experience - how I miss thee. Those sonic scapes of desert rock with a biblical twist and a self-evident grace. There might not ever be another album. Some time ago I found this painful article about the lead singer and the daemons of music. Sad to read, I wish there was redemption at the end.

My brain is wired for music. I walk into an airport hall and hear some woman sing "Too many people" and in that split second the words tranvision, vamp, and perfect shoot through my brain. I guessed a song once where I had heard only the first second - where that second isn't actually part of the song, but just the musicians tuning instruments. When I am old and in a home I will be a reverse jukebox: a song will be played, I will write or type out the artist and song title, and people will take money from me.

I need more music. If anyone has suggestions, shoot.

Festival Went to one day of Werchter with the boys band. Sadly arrived late for AYWKUBTTOD. Rilo Kiley was good. Bloc Party was great, but we didn't go forward soon...

Two concerts this week. Wednesday was dedicated to the delectable
Twilight Singers. In very good form, and they seemed to be enjoying themselves immensely. The concert was in a small room somewhere round the back and upstairs. There were about 400 people there, but packed so tightly we were all dripping with sweat halfway through. Lots of AW t-shirts in the crowd as well. The set list didn't contain too many surprises, but the encore was pretty damn long and got kicked off by an incredibly sweet rendition of ABBA's "Dancing Queen". I swear, this guy just has the perfect knack for taking a song and making the cover into a work of art on its own.

After a good 90 minutes, they left the small stage completely doused in sweat.

And yesterday evening, it was Ed Harcourt's turn. I had seen him last year in Belgium at a regular concert. But for this gig, it seems it was just him and a friend playing trumpets and xylophone.
It was simply amazing. He was funny, inventive, brought a completely new approach to most of his songs with a minimum of instrumentation. He has an amazing voice to begin with, nobody whispers or sighs better than him. He got the small (150 people) audience to participate, teaching them parts of the chorus to sing along to. He brought a girl on stage because he needed backing vocals for one song, and he pulled it off too.

He went from guitar to piano during songs without dropping a single note, and he played for a good 100 minutes without breaking a sweat. About the only drawback was that he didn't play my favourite. He radiated energy all night long. It was the same sort of vibe and performance I expect Jeff Buckley was giving at Sin-é. Truly a privilege to have been a part of it. And completely different from his normal band shows, which are very good as well, but more typical in some way. This gig was quite special.

Two concerts this week. Wednesday was dedicated to the delectable Twilight Singers. In very good form, and they seemed to be enjoying themselves immensely. The concert was in a small...

Disclaimer: this is a week-old entry blocked by my use of umlauts. Flushing it again...

Weekend

Had a great saturday with people from the other company. We went into the mountains, climbed a bunch of trees, jumped off some platforms, swung from cables, and did all sorts of safe adventury stuff. Lunch was in a typical Catalan restaurant, with wine being served from the special caraffs which have a second neck to drink from. You're supposed to tilt the bottle, getting a very fine flow of wine, and direct it in your mouth, then extend the arm as far as possible without spilling any wine. When you're done, you get the bottle back to your face then stop tilting.

Needless to say, lots of variations on the theme were tried, with the climax being a couple pouring for one another without spilling a drop.

We were happy to have chosen the quad riding for the afternoon. On a quad, no one can tell when you're drunk (Well, except for the poor woman who managed to land her quad off the road TWICE). The other half was not so lucky apparently - one guy managed to fall of a platform during the drunk tree climbing, straight into a bush. And some other guy managed to run fullspeed into a rope he managed to not see, and got catapulted back some ten meters.

Anyways, it was a good preparation for the very same activity at the same place for this weekend, which for obvious reasons (to the parties involved at least) I am not at liberty to discuss any further...

New employee

Fluendo wants to welcome their newest employee. Zoë weighs a good 3.2 kilos and is in perfect health. I'm sure she'll be an excellent asset to the team. Congratulations to the happy mom and dad !

Telefonica

As other inhabitants of Spain can attest, sometimes dealing with Telefonica can be really frustrating. Both phone and ADSL went dead last wednesday. Called on Thursday. They called me back on Friday, saying it was probably a problem in the central switching station. By Saturday, the telephone was fixed, but the ADSL wasn't. Tried to get into the help line for ADSL (since of course that's a different line), keyed in my number, got disconnected with the message that there was no one available to take my call. Called again, keyed in number, got some waiting music and a message saying that everyone was busy. After eight minutes another voice said no one could take my call, and I got disconnected. Sigh.

Apparently Kristien had called as well, since when I got in the lady told me that she called. I was going to get a call back in the next 48 hours from a technician. Tuesday morning, I get a call. What kind of router I use ? A Nokia one. Yes, I'm sure it works. No, it's not one of yours. No, it isn't the fault of the router - it's the third time this year you managed to turn off my phone and ADSL at the same time, so I'm pretty sure it's not our fault. Yes, the phone works again.

Then the guy tells me that the telephone guy turned off ADSL completely in the central station. Why on earth did he want to grill me on the router then ? Anyway, he would have it fixed. During the day Kristien lets me know that it works again. And when I check, I realize that I understand WHY they messed it up in the central station - I had double the download speed as before. So it was all part of Telefonica's cunning plan to give you double the speed in one week and no speed at all the next.

Anyway, I'm happy for this week.

Music

I had been impatiently pining for the new Interpol disc, "Antics". When I finally got it the day it was released, I had two quick cursory listenings to it and was hugely disappointed. Nothing seemed to grab me.

This weekend I gave it another go, and I haven't listened to anything else ever since. There is not a single bad song on this CD. And the emotion I thought lacking at first listen is all there under the surface. I love to be suckerpunched by music that way. Highly recommended.

Food

We finally managed to cook tartiflette, a typical Savoie dish which I love eating on skiing trips. It came out great, we were very impressed with ourselves. So were our guests, Jochen en Kristien. It was better than on ski holidays, though it made me long to have my feet stuck to a snowboard on a white mountain. Jochen made the dessert, impressing me with a stunning pineapple carpaccio with mint and sugar.

On days like this life just feels right.

Disclaimer: this is a week-old entry blocked by my use of umlauts. Flushing it again... Weekend Had a great saturday with people from the other company. We went into the...

I was dead tired this weekend so I didn't feel like doing anything intellectually challenging. So I spent some time this weekend working some more on DAD. I actually quite enjoy working on PHP. The reason I do, I think, is because it's nice to take a bunch of code that actually works, even though it might not be structured correctly yet, and restructure it. PHP allows you to do stuff very quickly but also very ugly, and still have it work. Someone on IRC today said PHP is the BASIC of the web. Makes sense - lots of people learn PHP as their first language, and sometimes it shows.

Anyway, in the case of DAD, the code is quite good, but sometimes hackish in places. Sometimes Kristof just wanted to move quickly because I nagged for features. And when I tried something myself I didn't know enough about the advanced concepts to do it correctly.

So this weekend I focused on writing a class for the concept of having a popup detailing progress while some background action is taking a bit of time. I ended up learning about sessions to do it nicely (a previous hack used two temp files to track progress and errors) and it was a lot easier than I had expected. I worked on the class in a test directory using a bunch of sleep()'s, forcing myself to get it exactly right first before integrating it.

And when that was done, integration was dead easy, the code looks nice, is well-documented, and can now be used to delete a few hundred lines of code. I love it when a plan comes together.

Meanwhile, I've started to think again about my plans for a world-wide audio database. Lots of projects already exist, and all of them have fundamental flaws in either design, setup or community. Each time I think about it, I seem to solve a few more conceptual problems, and actually start believing that one day my ideas might actually make sense. There are a bunch of tricky bits to get right, and the hard problem will be finding people in the beginning that a) love music enough to see the value; b) have technical skills and c) have the tenacity to work on it for some time before it starts to be usable.

In other words, the plan will probably involve me having money to give other people work after finding a way to make this be sensible from a business point of view...

But I still have time, and I'm not quite happy yet with what I have so far.

I was dead tired this weekend so I didn't feel like doing anything intellectually challenging. So I spent some time this weekend working some more on DAD. I actually quite...

On Thursday three girls arrived. An was the girl getting married. Vanessa and Isabel where the girls joining in for her bachelorette weekend, together with Kristien. It was fun to hear some more from "the other side" again - since moving to Barcelona I haven't been around that much girl talk. And to be honest, I'm the kind of guy who likes to hear lots of girl talk - "know your enemy".

Anyways, they seemed to enjoy themselves, they took real good care of me (I had some great dinners), and I've never seen someone drink bottoms up as fast as An did. That girl doesn't swallow even once when she downs a glass of champagne or beer.

On Saturday we went to the Razzmatazz again, which made me wonder why again I don't go there every chance I get. Five rooms of music, some of it very very good... Been a while since I've been to a party and heard Sonic Youth, Pixies or even god forbid Elastica. I should have forced my friends to go there when they were here - I'm sure Peter would have enjoyed hearing at least three Cure tunes full blast at a big party, accompanied by visuals from the video clips... I need to get out here more often.

Last week I still thought I'd be solely responsible for getting the word on the new Soulwax album out here in Barcelona, but I guess I was wrong. Imagine my surprise when at 4 in the morning the main room was playing "NY Excuse", an album track, not even a week after the album's official release. I guess my work here is done.

An had fun too, getting her picture taken with just about every guy passing by. A bachelorette party is always such a good excuse to get attention ...

One of the rooms had one of the guys from the Inspiral Carpets as the DJ. He was an excellent DJ, so I forgave him when he closed off the room with one of their biggest hits, Saturn 5, and he decided to sing along.
We left at 5.15, Wim decided to stay a little longer on his own. He seems to be having a great time here. Hope I won't take as long to get back there.

On Thursday three girls arrived. An was the girl getting married. Vanessa and Isabel where the girls joining in for her bachelorette weekend, together with Kristien. It was fun to...