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The Cardigans: Godspell

Amazon would have you believe that it’s a bible-bashing song. It’s not. In either meaning of the words. It is instead a concise criticism of those who misuse religion to get their own way. But enough about the lyrics.

Godspell is the second track that appears on The Cardigans’ new album Super Extra Gravity and without doubt one of the most catchy. One might think that when you’ve created a masterpiece such as Long Gone Before Daylight (which is slowly becoming my favourite album of all time), the next step forward would be backwards. I am pleased to report that this isn’t the case. Where Long Gone.. was a countrified rock-opera, Super Extra Gravity is pure rock, using the best bits from Gran Turismo, but arranged with the poise and precision of its successor. There are plenty of twists and turns on the way, lyrically as well as musically. But it confirms The Cardigans as the best band on the planet today.

Just don’t buy it on iTunes, ‘cos you’ll miss out on the two fine bonus tracks, unless you buy the right version, which has the bonus tracks, for the same price as the one that doesn’t. Ain’t it wonderful?

1 Comment | Permalink | Tracks of the Day | Mini Music Reviews | Music of 2005
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Rip, Rip & Burn

In December 2004 I wrote about Rip & Burn, ‘the music mag for the download generation’. My final comment on this title was ‘What useless bunch invented this magazine?’.

Seems I wasn’t alone in my views. The final issue was in April 2005.

No Comments | Permalink | General Musings
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Software Management

Joel Spolsky’s company Fog Creek has just launched the Fog Creek Software Management Training Program.

In his introductory article, he states the following:

“Now, there’s nothing wrong with promoting a programmer to management, but management is a different job and a requires different skills from programming. Many people who are excellent developers are lousy managers, and promoting someone out of a job that they love doing and are good at doing into a job that they hate and are not good at doesn’t make sense.”

and..

“We don’t really want to hire MBAs, because there’s too much evidence that MBAs substitute book-learnin’ for common sense or experience.”

I’ve already written about my own experience of the first quote (somewhere in this blog!) and I once knew a senior systems engineer who had views similar to the second quote, although his view was more along the lines that one’s usefulness in a business was inversely correlated with one’s qualifications. Anyhow, bravo to Joel.

No Comments | Permalink | General Musings
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Macs and Dummies

Yesterday I needed to upgrade my Mac Mini, which I use as core component of my hi-fi, to MacOSX 10.4 (Tiger).

Sure enough the upgrade process was simple. Everything installed fine, with the installer detecting my bluetooth mouse and keyboard. I had no need to move the Mac Mini, no need to replace any connections to my plasma display, no need for other keyboards and mice.

However, that was the second take.

The first take went badly. When I first attempted to upgrade, I stuck the operating system DVD into the Mac Mini and rebooted. Got the grey screen, then some weird video error, and the system crashed. My mate Mark says I should be fair and balanced about this. (Or words to that effect, but not in the Fox News meaning of the phrase.) After about 20 minutes of plugging of different monitors, mice and keyboards, the penny dropped.

I force-ejected the DVD by keeping the mouse button pressed down when booting the Mac. And looked: MacOSX Panther. Ah.

So, some lessons:

  • never upgrade your operating system (OS) when you’re in a rush
  • never pick up the OS box in a darkened office, ‘cos they’ll all look the same
  • bin unwanted old versions of OS

And, one lesson for Apple: please don’t cause a system crash if the OS is incompatible. Why was it incompatible? Well, the Mac Mini was launched after Panther was released – this is why when you come to reinstalling an OS that came with your Mac you should always use the installation disks that came with your Mac. During the installation of an OS, the DVD is the OS and so it cannot always be compatible with versions of hardware that came after it.

No Comments | Permalink | All things Apple
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Egg Heads

And another thing.. how come supermarkets store their eggs in non-chilled areas, yet there’s usually advice on the cartons to refridgerate after purchase?

No Comments | Permalink | General Musings
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Creamy Interfaces

Why does cream come in plastic pots with tear-off foil lids? Is it a tradition? Most cream that you buy in the UK still comes in these pots, although the majority also come with extra scarily insecure plastic lids.

Today I bought some cream from our local convenience store. There was a choice of various types of cream, with the foil lids, including a frightening long-life cream. (Is long-life cream really necessary?) But I also found a little bottle of cream, gosh, in a plastic bottle with a screw-top plastic cap. Brilliant. Guess which one I bought?

No Comments | Permalink | General Musings
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Balligomingo: Beneath the Surface

Number 6 of 2004 — Balligomingo: Beneath the Surface

Imagine for one minute that you’re a business consultant for IBM. But you harbour a secret desire – to make music. So you ditch your job and start a journey into the unknown. That’s what Garrett Schwarz did, and a discussion with Delirium’s Kristy Thirsk led him to Vic Levak and the birth of Balligomingo.

Balligomingo reflects and documents a personal journey of self-discovery, with the songs functioning as metaphors. It’s an album you feel rather than listen to. And despite the lyrics being optimistic and inspirational, they are not essential to the appreciation of the album. In this case, the vocal delivery is essential. Each of the seven vocalists on the album were matched with the most appropriate songs.

Beneath the Surface was released in 2002 and launches with Purify, sung by Jody Quine: “I kiss my window facing south / where endless rains are splashing blue / My mouth spills an ocean of words / crashing waves of intention”. One part William Orbit, another part Enigma. We’re into the best and least clichéd of worldbeat music, setting the tone for much of the album. Jody and Vic now have a new project called Viia. Escape follows – more low-key Strange Cargo, or perhaps Torch Song, even down to the way the piano works.

It’s not until Falling, however, that Balligomingo brings something new to these familiar aural experiences. Because with Falling, we get strings – real strings – provided by the Mark Ferris Orchestra. The layered orchestral accompaniment yields an organic grounding withdrawing the track from what would otherwise be blandly synthetic. Falling is sung beautifully by Beverley Staunton, who contributes to four songs on the album. Here we get the nearest to a definitive Balligomingo ‘sound’. Lyrically it appears to be a precursor to Heat which follows later.

Sweet Allure brings acoustic guitars in with the strings and on the breathy Wild Butterfly a laid back housey piano leaps up during the chorus. These little bits of detail make a crucial difference to one’s appreciation of the album.

Beyond is more ambient and lyrically full of messages that are more at home on self-help tapes: “Go beyond the limit you place on yourself / You’ll find the power’s all yours”. Fortunately these lyrics sound better than they read. Privilege takes another, final step towards Heat, “I am the freedom that you’re fighting / I am the sweetness that you’re hiding”. Then we’re into the centrepiece of the album, namely Heat. Where before everything was restrained, Heat bursts into passion: “Now you’re moving in / Like acid on my skin / I like being burned / Your heat is what I yearn”. Kristy Thirsk’s lone appearance dominating the song, a caress of a million butterflies.

After Heat, nothing else comes close. There are some deliberately ethnic tracks during which you can turn off to. Not until the last track Lust do things get back on track as Beverley Staunton’s wavering ambient gothic vocals entice the listener back to the feelings conveyed in Heat. Ultimately a picturesque, touchy-feely album, proving that concept albums sometimes do work.

Read more about the women of Balligomingo.

No Comments | Permalink | Music | Music of 2004
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Junctionbox Six

A quiet day at the office. One of those Friday’s when I didn’t feel like doing much client work. Instead I’ve been dabbling with the architecture for our new website.

The current website is based around a heavy maintenance custom-engineered CMS system, written in PHP. All we want to keep from that are the news articles and portfolio, both of which are driven from database tables.

Now that we know and love Rails, the easiest thing is to have a website that is essentially static, with exceptions being the bits that render the news and portfolio. Easy peasy. A couple of controllers and some scaffold is all that’s required.

What about the static content? One way is to have another table for pages, but then you cannot easily create content in something like Dreamweaver – you end up cutting and pasting all the time. Another alternative that lots of people use is to hook the Rails 404 error handler to bypass Rails and render the static page directly. Trouble with this is that you end up with duplicating template layouts (i.e. once for Rails, and again for outside of Rails) and you can’t integrate nice Rails or Ruby stuff inside such pages.

Instead I’ve a simple Page controller that looks up static content by filename, i.e. it isn’t derived from ActiveRecord. This controller reads the content from that file, then renders it using the application layout. As a result, you not only re-use the templates from Rails, but you get all the Rails goodies too available inside the page, which includes passing data from the page to the layout. Couple this with some dead simple routes mappings and everything is nice and readable.

No Comments | Permalink | It's Our Business
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