Back to the Bottle

New toys! A couple of days ago I received my first ever harmonica microphone and amplifier, the much vaunted (and alarmingly cheap for what it is) Bottle O Blues mic along with a dinky little Smokey Amp. The amp is so called because they originally came built into cigarette packs — you can still get them like that, but the one I have is plastic cased, although about the same size, which should give an idea of scale in the picture.

Now, I've never played amplified harp before, and I'm very much a novice harp player anyway, but plugging it all together and blowing a few simple blues licks was fantastic. It may not sound exactly like Little Walter, but there's this really thick, grungy blues sound in there, which made me (to my ears, though <3 may argue) sound better than I could possibly expect. I guess it's like playing electric guitar and getting your first effects pedal — it doesn't make you a better player, but it's great fun mucking about with those new noises you can suddenly make.

Now, of course, I need to practice, practice, practice. Lately I've been concentrating on playing folk music (that's what I get to play with other people) but the new toys may well bet me back onto working on the blues. (Though it's great fun playing a reel or jig through the mic!)

Jigs, Bugs, Ackee, Gonking and Babies

<3 and I have now been to our first Friday session at the Abingdon Arms. Great fun. The first half of the evening there wasn't much music that I knew, although I was encouraged to start The Butterfly, which didn't go as well as it did when I played it the previous Sunday, but was OK, and <3 even got to join in with her new low D whistle, which has a lovely sound to it.

Later on though, as people drifted off and the (tiny) pub started feeling less crowded, we had more familiar (to me) tunes, and I ended up managing to play almost my whole repetoir. This isn't particularly impressive at the moment, as I can count the number of tunes I know on my fingers, with some left over, but that is slowly improving.

The next day we headed off to the Valleys to meet up with friends who introduced us to the delights of crunchy cheesy mealworms and cream cheese and onion flavoured crickets. Yup, real bug snacks. I feel I have stepped over another hurdle as regards experiencing stuff. So what were they like? After getting over the fact that the crickets seemed to be looking at me, they were pleasantly crispy, but otherwise disappointingly boring. I don't really know what I was expecting, but these weren't nasty and weren't a fab taste sensation. They were just... something I ate, really. However, having got over the initial aversion to eating invertebrates (somewhat irrational as I have always been happy eating prawns and shellfish), I'd be happy to try something similar in the future.

Next up was going into Cardiff for a slap up meal at the Caribbean restaurant in the bay, followed by a trip to the rock club, Bogiez, in honour of the recent birthdays of three friends. The meal was awesome, having not eaten Caribbean food before, so I am now happy to say that I enjoyed a bowl of ackee and saltfish plus accompanying goodies. The club was weird, having hardly been to any clubs over the last ten years. Happily though, the air guitar skills have not all gone (though they are a bit rusty), and I also got to see some old buddies from past lives.

On Sunday we visited some other Valleys-resident friends and their six-month-old daughter, who was being a complete charmer. There is something immensely rewarding about finding how to keep a baby laughing and burbling away happily. I can't wait to be able to do that with my own kid. It won't be long. Eventually we went back home with a car load of stuff for a young baby that our friends no longer needed. Our pile of baby stuff is steadily growing now.

Hung Short

Ok, so this is yesterday's news, but much as I broadly agree with Ms Short on this, I still can't work out exactly how one campaigns for a hung parliament. It's not as if there is a box for it on the ballot.

Ultramonkeys Are Go!!!

At long last, after a lot of dithering, confusion and tinkering, I have built my first ever highly available, load balanced web server cluster using the intriguingly named Ultra Monkey software. What does this mean? Well, basically I have two old PCs on (or under) my desk, which act together as a web server. If you request a web page, one or the other will respond (you can't tell as a user which it will be), and if you turn off either of them, the web site is still available.

What's the point? Well, at work we supply quite a lot of data over web and FTP services, and need to make the system more resilient so that (a) if one computer breaks, the service is not interrupted, and (b) if someone is accessing an enormous amount of data, this shouldn't affect other people's access to their own data. My toy system is a test to try out the technology, see if it will do what we need, and an opportunity for me to learn on the job. It's not really that complicated as these things go, but I've learnt a lot from the process, having started off knowing very little about what was involved. A small personal triumph!

Sorry, no you can't access my system from the internet. As a test system it is only visible from within our site firewall. Besides, it's not really very exciting (except to me and my boss) and I'm going to turn it off in half an hour or so.