Last night was the first date in this Spring's Show of Hands tour. ( Read more... )

Having recently acquired a new car, I was reading the instruction manual the other day. I can't remember exactly what one of the lamps was suppposed to say, but it was something along the lines of "there's a problem with the engine". This initially made me think of the quote I saw somewhere in a UNIX fortune file:

'Ken Thompson has an automobile ( Read more... )

This is hilariously funny.

What is less funny is that I've been learning about Six Sigma in the last few days as part of my shiny new job, and it actually seems to be vaguely useful when applied in conjunction with common sense. Hrm. I may have to re-evaluate my innate mistrust of anything with the word "methodology" in the description...

Today's post is about a fantastic new CD. It's only new in the sense that I've just bought it, not in the sense of having been recently released, but all the same, Kate Rusby's Awkward Annie is just great. Despite being fairly well exposed to the whole folk scene thing, I'd never really listened to any of her stuff - folk singers aren't always my ( Read more... )

Having moved back to the UK (we live in Leicester now), there are several differences between here and there[1] which I notice on a regular basis. However, one difference of which I was hitherto unaware - when did coffee bars in Britain start serving coffee[2] in a vessel with the approximate dimensions of a bucket ( Read more... )

I'm writing this sitting on a seat in front of the stage in the Conservatoire de Geneve, halfway listening to a rehearsal that's going on. It's not the first time I've been sitting around listening to other people rehearse - that tends to happen quite a lot when you're a musician - but I never thought I'd be doing it with the musical commentary ( Read more... )

This weekend, for those of you who weren't aware, was the 9th Festival international des très courts. It's an international competition for short films (maximum length of three minutes): there's a judging committee who give out prizes for the overall winners, and the best 50 are shown to the public in cinemas all over Europe. There's then a " ( Read more... )

It's a musical link day, today.

Firstly, an absolutely superb story in one of the Washington DC newspapers: Joshua Bell (yes, the Joshua Bell, the virtuoso violinist) went busking and was, largely, ignored. Story here.

Also, my little sister alerted me to Monkey Swallows The Universe, A Sheffield band who do some lovely stuff. She bought me their ( Read more... )

Now that the hour has changed and we're officially in summer time, things look very different on my way to and from work. I've got used to leaving the house in the daylight, but the dawn is just too late for that at the moment and it gets lighter as I make my way to the station. It's only a temporary hiatus - in another week or two it'll be fully ( Read more... )

One of the things that we've been doing recently is playing string quartets with some friends. We're currently working on Mozart's "Hunt" quartet and an arrangement of Corelli's Christmas concerto for quartet. It may be unseasonal, but it's still lovely.

A serendipitous discovery just before we started rehearsals a few months ago was the Mutopia ( Read more... )