Getting Jiggy

This weekend was pretty full on. I went with a couple of the other Icknield Way men to Nottinghamshire to take part in the Morris Ring's annual jigs instructional weekend. Unfortunately I forgot to take my camera, so no pictures this time.

For the uninitiated, a jig in the context of morris is a dance typically performed by one or two dancers, usually with only one of them dancing at a time (there are exceptions to all of that) where the emphasis is on individual skill, as opposed to set dances (usually 6 or more dancers) where it's all about the presentation of the group as a whole.

The weekend featured seven Cotswold morris traditions (a tradition is just a group of dances which were collected from one place, and which all have a number of stylistic features in common), with between 45 minutes and twice that dedicated to study of the jigs associated with each of them. That's quite a lot of dancing.

So the weekend went something like this...

Friday... Drove up with the lads, getting to the hall at about 8pm, being presented with dinner, and then getting stuck straight in to an hour of Ascot Under Wychwood, a tradition that was completely new to me. That done, it was off to take up residence at the pub for lots of tunes and singing.

Saturday... Somehow managed to crawl out of the sleeping bag for breakfast and then into the workshops that began at 9am. I was almost out of my depth with the morning Fieldtown and Bledington workshops (mostly struggling with the slow capers), but I think I can work on a couple of the Fieldtown dances and get them tidied up. Then we had a two hour lunch break which included a much needed relax in the pub. After lunch was one of my favourite traditions, Bampton, and I reckon I have three jigs from there which, with a little more practice I could dance out. Following that was the nightmare that was Sherborne -- a great tradition, but massively different from the others I know (it has its own stepping style), so I spent most of the time tripping over my shoelaces. All that done, we got cleaned up, into our proper dancing kit and settled in for the evening's feast -- a top notch meal which set us up nicely for another long night at the pub which this time also included a few set dances, which is always fun when in a very crowded pub where there's barely room to stand, let alone dance!

Sunday... The last lap, with workshops in Oddington (in which I have a little experience) and Headington (of which I have none). Then a quick reprise session where we had a chance to dance through one jig from each tradition. And finally lunch and home.

So, one hell of a weekend. I learnt a lot, and now know of a lot more stuff I want to learn, plus a few new friends. Hopefully I'll be able to go back again next year, but for now... Well, 48 hours after finishing dancing I am almost starting to feel human again.

Quick and Random

So, we're in the last few days of the year and I am about to leave work for the last time before Xmas, and I figured I'd stick a quick post up.

We've been up to loads over the last month or so, but for some reason I just haven't got around to posting anything. We've been to the seaside, got a new freezer, made booze, done morris dancing, learnt new songs (including my first attempt at 4-part harmony since a brief stint in a school choir 25+ years ago), and witnessed the Youngling performing in a nursery Xmas concert (overdose of cute!).

All in all, 2009 hasn't been a bad year really. Let's see what 2010 has for us...

The search for the polos

This weekend was our annual pilgrimage to Pembrokeshire for the banquet. We started driving straight after work and after several stops for food, toilet, and getting Miss B into her PJs we made it to our B&B and went straight to bed.

This gave us all Saturday to potter around and get ready, so we took Miss B to run around on a windswept beach before going back for a dose of CBeebies and sorting out our costumes. I don't have any photos of us all though.

This year the theme was the travels of Marco Polo, so dishes served were taken from China, India and Venice, with one return taken from each. As always the food was superb. From China we had mutton dumplings, crispy duck, plum balls (drool!) and "clairvoyant biscuits" as a subtlety. From India it was breads and chutneys, a fantastic "pre-Columban" (i.e. no chillis) chicken curry, a lovely coconut desert thingy, followed by an (un-) subtlety of a very daft Kama Sutra inspired cake. Finally, the Venician return was pigeon and mushrooms in cream (fantastic), salt fish and bread (wow) and a gorgeous lemon torte, with little chocolate thingies as a subtlety to finish off. Of course there was plenty of mead and ale to wash it all down.

<3 and I were doing entertainment again this year as they haven't worked out how to stop us yet, but at least some quality was introduced into the procedings with one of the other banqueters putting her lovely voice to good use. So <3 wowed everyone with a very delicate performance of Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, I got everyone standing up (mostly on chairs), and for this year's firsts: I danced a solo jig in public for the first time (Princess Royal, Bampton — inexpertly, but it went OK) and then drummed (on my djembe -- again inexpertly) for <3 to dance.

Lots of fun. The discussions have already begun on what next year's theme will be.

Frog Racing

So Miss B. has now had what is, to the best of my knowledge, her first boardgame experience. I had a few coloured plastic frogs salvaged from some random game many years ago, so I drew a simple trail of lilypads leading to a win space (I was uninspired, so it was a star). Her Monkeyship coloured this in, while I stuck coloured stickers onto a spare die.

Game rules? Well, they had to be simple enough to explain to someone less than 3 years old, so it was a case of roll the die and whatever colour comes up, that frog jumps on one lilypad and says "ribbit!" The first frog to the star wins.

It didn't take long for this to really catch Miss B.'s imagination and we ended up playing this for well over an hour. Win!

Hissssss... POP!

So Miss B and I went to the "Antiques, Collectables and Crafts" market in town on Sunday and had a lovely time thanks to the swans ride, the music played by some friends of ours, the hog roast, and the presence of the all-but-ubiquitous (in these parts) Professor Crump. The Prof. was doing his usual cycling around, doing bad jokes and making balloon animals which, of course, got Miss B's attention. So while we waited our turn, we had a chat about what to ask for.

"You'll need to ask for an animal," I say. "Ask for a dog or a rabbit."

"Rabbit," she decides.

So our time came and Miss B was asked what she wanted.

"Snake."

At least it was an easy one for the Prof. to make and soon Miss B was strutting around with her balloon snake ("Hissing Sid Rumpo," as the Prof. dubbed him). It was all we could to to prevent her from taking the snake to bed with her later.

Dancing the Icknield Way

OK, so this post is long overdue, but better late than never, eh?

So, on 5th September 2009, twenty-odd members of Icknield Way Morris Men rounded off the celebrations of their 50th anniversary year by dancing along 50 miles of the Icknield Way, starting at Ivinghoe Beacon, ending at Wantage, and with twelve intermediate stops (not all of which were at pubs!). We didn't walk the whole way (that would have killed us!) but we made it, all in one day.

The weekend actually started with a trip up to Wilstone on Friday evening (via a chippy in Tring), where we stayed in the village hall -- and had a great session in the local pub, along with men from the local Whitchurch Morris, who were great hosts (and a couple of their men turned out at a couple of our spots along the tour). The evening finished off, probably ill-advisedly, with a few of us having a dance practice (Glorishears, Bledington and Queen's Delight, Bucknell) in the village hall kitchen, fueled by a polypin of Bob which had magically appeared.

A little the worse for wear, we arrived at the car park by Ivinghoe Beacon and started dancing at 08:45 the next morning. It was nice to be met there by a fella from another side (sorry, I can't for the life of me remember which side) in full kit, who joined in with one of our dances. From then on it was a punishing schedule.

Spots were danced at Tring, Wendover (with a side from Aldbury Morris Men), Princes Risborough (including a chance encounter with a visiting morris man), Bledlow, Lewknor (for a nice ploughman's lunch and a parachute display), Watlington (where we seemed to be the only living things), Ewelme, South Stoke, Goring (for tea with the Kennett Morris Men), Blewbury, and East Hendred before finally rolling in to Wantage at about 19:45. One last spell of dancing and it was in to the King Alfred's Head for dinner with the WAGs.

After food and the obligatory speeches, everyone was absolutely shattered, so unusually for the team there were no songs and tunes. Just some quiet conversation for a while before staggering home to bed.

A great day, which I wouldn't have missed for the world, but I think few of us want to do it again in a hurry!

Another bank holiday weekend

Well, we had our annual house/garden party on Saturday and were lucky enough to have good weather and heaps of friends turning up from all sorts of parts of our lives. Quite a lot of ale (and other stuff) got drunk, a great deal of barbecued food (including the fabulous flatbreads) was eaten, and we went into the evening with a nice conservatory tunes session. Win.

Monday was fun too, with a recovery day behind us. We went off the the Uffington White Horse Show, where a strong turnout from the morris performed four spots in various parts of the showground. This was hard work given how warm the day turned out and how out of practice I, at least, had become over the last month or so.

Now, this coming weekend, we have the last really big event of the dancing season (for us, at least): the Icknield Way tour. To celebrate the side's 50th anniversary, we will be travelling along 50 miles of the Icknield Way (using motorised transport, thankfully), dancing at 14 different locations in a single day, before collapsing into a pub back in Wantage for dinner. Wish us luck.

Weekend

Some of the win from the weekend...

• We all went to a car boot sale at the donkey sanctuary, so saw the donkeys and bought some tat. We also bought a big bag of plums which got made into some very tasty jam.
• Would you believe that we had our first barbecue of the year? Well, we've been to a couple but hadn't had one in our own garden. This particular one featured our new speciality: barbecued flatbreads. We'll be doing them again.
• Another gallon of turbo cider is on its way. This time I have added a cup of tea to see how that affects things.
• Finally got around to watching In Bruges and laughed pretty much the whole way through. Great stuff. This was on <3's recommendation, and a good one. One of these days I'll persuade her to watch Fight Club.

Command History

Spotted on an old post from an abandoned blog out in the geek hinterlands, but I figured I'd have a go.

history | awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s\n",a[i],i}}' |sort -rn | head

Got that?

Well, I work on quite a few machines, but there are two major Linux accounts I use: my networked (NIS) account and the separate account on my desktop box. So, desktop first...

  110   ssh
   76   ls
   73   td
   48   cd
   47   svn
   38   vim
   16   grep
   10   ping
    9   pushd
    9   less

As you can see, I ssh out quite a lot. 'td', by the way, is a little script I use for managing a to-do list.

And the network account...

  192   sudo
  171   ls
   68   glite-wms-job-status
   48   cd
   42   cat
   41   rm
   35   for
   34   history
   19   firefox
   18   man

So I sudo a lot — I'm an admin, what can I say? The 'glite' command is a grid operation from when I send test jobs out to exercise parts of our cluster (and most of the 'for' commands are sending out test jobs). Amazing how often I trawl history too! The 'firefox' invocations are mostly from yesterday when I was trying to work out why weird things were happening. But that's another story.

Of course, the number of concurrent sessions I have open on both of these accounts does distort the history a bit, but it's still interesting for me to see what I get up to!

firefox -no-remote

While checking out a user query this morning I stumbled across something quite bizarre: I launched Firefox from an (X-forwarded) ssh session on one of our servers, only to have the browser open a window on my desktop machine instead. Yes, I wanted the browser to display on my desktop, but not to actually run there.

So, after a heap of mucking about and fruitless web searching I eventually got fruitful and found the information I needed. Apparently this is a long-standing feature: Firefox on a remote machine will hand off to a process already running on your local box if it is available. This will nicely help to prevent overloading on servers (and is probably usually an appropriate thing to do) but runs counter to my intuition and, if my searching the web is anything to go by, to that of a good many others out there.

It must be said, however, that the majority of users out there will never notice this behaviour, or even begin to give a damn about it.

The way around this, incidentally, is to launch Firefox with the '-no-remote' option. Easy, huh?

[2008-08-24 Edit: s/--no-remote/-no-remote/]