2. 2008-05-30

    Barcelona '08

    We arrived in Barcelona a few days ahead of Primavera, to give us a chance to see the sights and relax a little. It's a compact city, although larger than I thought it would be, with a wide variety of flavours to the various districts. The weather has been variable, but never unpleasant.

    It is a very clean city, they seem to constantly empty the bins on a daily cycle, and there are recycling stations everywhere. The architecture is wonderful. Not just the Gaudi, which is as astonishing as you'd expect, but there's an adventurous sense to public space everywhere, interesting modern building nestling up against 14th century alleyways, and giant lumps of sculpture sprouting everywhere, in a manner you only rarely see in conservative old Britain.

    We've mostly been rehearsing our body clocks for the ever so slightly mental 5pm-5am Primavera schedule, and so we've not done so much cultural sightseeing, or eating out. I figured it can wait until the now inevitable follow-up visit.

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  4. 2008-01-12

    It shows how infrequently I use it these days, but I yesterday found myself using a remote X client on my Macbook, and to put it bluntly, the X11.app as shipped with leopard is fucked. When I was working for IMDb, this would have scuppered my world. I can't decide if I even need it enough now to make it worth trying to fix.

    Update:


    Of course I had to try! Installing the latest community developed packages seems to fix most of the immediate problems, giving a useable X11. And the new code base, and launchd integration bring real improvements over Tiger. Now quartz-wm is open source, X11 on the Macintosh can be synchronised with X.org. It would be even better if Apple folded some of these fixes into official updates.

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  5. 2008-05-26

    Appearing as part of Dot to Dot , an excellent city-wide music hullaballoo, spanning multiple venues. As the schedule didn't really sit very comfortably with my travel plans, flying out to Barcelona the next morning, I didn't really get a chance to see many sets, just some of Fight like Apes ( excellent ), Montreal's We are Wolves ( good stage moves ), Two Gallants ( dull enough to make me wander away and play Sonic the Hedgehog tennis on a nearby X-Box demo machine. Two thumbs up for Sonic Tennis, though ).

    In fairness, the latter looked like they might be quite interesting, given enough familiarity with the material, and I'm tempted to chance an album, but I wasn't really feeling it. And the main reason I was actually in the Trinity, was to catch the headliners, Spiritualized, one of my all time favourites.
    Spiritualized at the Trinity

    I thought they played a blinder. The Trinity is fast becoming one of my favourite Bristol venues, great sound, good bar, and it's incredibly handy to reach on foot. And they keep booking my favourite artists.

    The band were really together, there's the welcome return of the gospel backing singers, excellent lightshow, and J. Spaceman is looking great and singing better than he ever has, at least to my ears. New album out now-ish.


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