I’ve just pre-ordered Emm Gryner’s new The Great Lakes CD which will be released to non-Living Room goers on 27 September 2005. The CD was designed, printed, packaged, recorded, and of course written, by Emm. Each CD booklet is also handstamped, embossed and autographed. Yummy.
Throwing Music, home to all good things Throwing Muses, Kristin Hersh and 50 Foot Wave have a new website. The choice of colour scheme is unfortunately hideous: the background colour changes depending on which part of the site you are on; the links remain the same colour. So you get things like purple links on a green background. Check out the contact page for even worse.
50 Foot Wave will also release a new EP beginning in September 2005. As Kristin writes:
“Money has so polluted the music world that my overwhelming urge right now is to divorce money from recorded music. Over the last 2 years we’ve been asking people to help us educate listeners about 50 Foot Wave and we’ve met resistance every step of the way—caused by little other than money—and to an extent I’ve never seen before.
“So we’re sending free recordings off into the world to do their work.
If people enjoy these songs and are excited by them, we ask that they share them with others. The music business is about fame and huge profits: egos and greed; but if enough people care, 50 Foot Wave will earn an honest living playing live, which is what we love to do.”
Emm Gryner is now on her short Great Lakes Living Room tour, which is exactly what it says it is. In people’s living rooms.
In March this year I wrote that Fiona Apple’s new album Extraordinary Machine was shelved by Sony/Epic because sales wouldn’t justify the cost of promoting and distributing it.
Apparently this was wrong. Fiona simply hadn’t finished it. (At least that’s the spin).
Extraordinary Machine will be released October 4, with two tracks from the version doing the rounds on the internet, plus new recordings of the nine other tracks and a new track Parting Gift. This album will sound ‘radically different’ from the one we all know and love.
Way back in my distant past there were all sorts of ways of managing and tracking software bugs. The general opinion of the developers and management was that we had to:
The first point is specious. Bugs depend on all sorts of factors and ‘bugs per line of code’ is used because it’s easy to measure. Really though it’s a useless measure.
Having just released the first version of a complex web application ‘into the wild’, I’ve been pondering an alternative measure, which should work for all systems. Provided that you have an effective testing regime using real data, as time goes on the frequency of bug discovery will reduce. Furthermore the type of bugs found will become more trivial either in their consequence or in effort to fix.
If you track bug detection, normalised by severity and discovery effort this should provide a metric by which a product is then deemed ready to release. Just a thought.
Yesterday, the BBC wrote that the US shuttle Discovery is due to be flown back to it’s home base at the Kennedy Space Center, having previously landed in Florida due to bad weather.
It’s flying back on the back of a Boeing 747, as usual. The BBC reports “But it is likely to cost the agency at least $1m to fly the shuttle back.”, obviously indicating that it’s a lot of money.
In the general scheme of things it’s not. According to the costs of the whole space shuttle programme and the number of flights, each flight has cost about $1.6bn (that’s billion BTW).
Emm’s second album of cover versions Songs of Love and Death is wholly more successful and more adventurous than her first covers album, 2001’s Girl Versions. This one concentrates on Irish artists. Although as before she has a knack of re-inventing songs rather than just singing them.
Ash’s 2001 single Shining Light is one of them. Backed by just piano, and eventually cello and organ. Allmusic call the original song ‘dreampop’. But under Emm’s direction it is anything but, and at last you can hear the lyrics, turning it into a completely different song.
If you’ve been in my kitchen you’ll know I have a lot of coffee. It’s my new culinary obsession.
I was away from home all day yesterday and returned to find a card from Royal Mail informing me of a package that couldn’t be delivered because it was too big to fit through my letter box.
In the grand scheme of Getting Things Done, I have a Waiting For folder in my Mail. Nothing in there should have been posted to me, so I was wondering what had turned up yesterday.
I visited the post office today to collect a rather squidgy package, took it home and opened it. Guess what? Two freebee coffee pod packs from Kenco ‘as a valued customer’. Which was nice. Except I have no room in my kitchen for more coffee.
Kathleen Edwards:
This is not my town
And it will never be
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