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.

Being Terrorised

I've been saying this for ages: the terrorists are winning when we change our way of life out of fear. Their aim is not to kill people: that is just the means to the end of sowing chaos, disorder and fear, and they seem to be doing a very good job of that right now. Bruce Schneier puts this better than I ever could.

Paddy and Willow

I'm feeling pleased with myself and that I have stepped past another milestone in my learning about the harmonica. Last week I got hold of an electronic chromatic tuner and a toolkit designed for harmonica maintenance, and over the weekend I took my first steps in customising my own harmonicas. I took a cheap and fairly nasty harmonica that I had previously damaged, and with a couple of hours work I had an instrument that played better than several of my far more expensive harps and was retuned to the "Paddy Richter" scheme (by tuning one reed to a different note you can make it a lot easier to play certain tunes, especially traditional diddley-diddley music). By the end of the weekend I had a second Paddy Richter (in a different key) and another harp just retuned slightly to sound better — and I was getting a bit quicker at the job.

This is a true revelation. I can buy a £3 harmonica and make it sound at least as good as one costing £20 (though the resilience, etc. probably still isn't as good). Once I've messed with a few more cheapies and get the confidence up, I'll try tweaking one of my decent instruments.

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Saturday evening was fun. A friend was celebrating her birthday by hosting a ceilidh in Chippenham, so <3, the in-laws and I all turned up with our best dancing pumps on. The band (Random) were good, the caller did a great job, and we all danced our socks off. <3 was feeling a bit tired (pregnancy does that to you, apparently) but joined in on plenty of times, even managing to survive the bonkers Orkadian strip the willow towards the end. I keep forgetting how much fun ceilidhs can be.

Terror Alert

I've just stumbled across this cartoon which pretty much sums up some of my thoughts on the subject. I'm just glad I didn't have a mouthful of coffee at the time.

Turlough O'Carolan, in the Tent, with the Plastic Bag

So, there I was in one of our local charity shops. I took my purchase to the till, paid my money, and as the old lady went to get me a plastic bag, I said, "No thanks, I already have a bag," and indicated the little backpack I had brought with me.

"But I have to give you a bag," she told me.

"But we have a house full of bags and are trying to not get any more, which is why I brought my own bag with me."

"Well, I have to give you a bag. I think it's to do with advertising."

"You know I'm going to just put your bag inside the one I already have?"

She shrugged and gave me my purchase in a plastic bag, which I proceded to put into my pack. So what's all that about then? I thought we were all trying to reduce waste these days.

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Later on we were with friends playing Curse of the Pharaoh, a murder mystery game produced by Freeform Games, a firm co-run, as it turns out, by an old acquaintance of mine from a past life. This was lots of fun, more of a roleplaying game than the boxed murder mysteries that we had tried before, and I singularly failed to achieve any of my goals.

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And finally, last night I finally got to play at our local folk music session. This was terrifying for me: I only started playing harmonica early this year, which is the first musical instrument I have ever learnt to play, and the first session I went to was only a couple of months back (where I just sat and listened).

The regulars were very supportive and encouraging though, and soon it came to be my turn to start a tune. I said that I only knew two tunes and wasn't confident enough to lead either, so someone kindly started Miss McLeod's Reel for me and I tried to play along. It went more quickly than I was comfortable with, but I just about managed to keep going despite losing my way a few times. Whoa, that is a completely different experience to playing on my own — or with one other person, as I have done before.

By the time it was my turn again there were more people around, and I got nudged into starting my other tune, The Kesh Jig myself so it could go at a speed I was happy with. I pretty much fell apart during the first time through the tune, but after some encouraging noises from the others, I got going again and then suddenly just about everyone was playing along with me. This was awesome, and I felt so much more comfortable this time

Now it's time to learn a couple more tunes for next time. The other musicians were good enough to play The Butterfly, a slip jig which I'm now trying to learn, and I think The Boys of Bluehill is another good candidate for the list. We'll see how I get on...

Foiled Again

A plot to blow up planes has been foiled.

I was just wondering what the terrorists' real aims and objectives are. I had an argument along these lines with a friend after the London bombings in July last year. My thesis was that the number of deaths were incidental. Yes, more deaths makes a bigger statement, but the key is to disrupt our "way of life" to the point that we have to do whatever it is they actually want us to do in order to stop being hassled so much. They basically want to inconvenience us so much that we have to accede to their demands. Granted, being dead is pretty inconvenient, but that is not the only way they can succeed.

Today's "disrupted" terrorist operation has resulted in grounded flights, travellers being unable to fly, and those who can being prevented from taking any hand luggage, not even a mobile or a drink. Apparently even baby milk must be tested before going on board. We can be thankful that (if the intelligence was accurate) a significant loss of life has been prevented, but I reckon that this has probably actually been a successful terrorist attack. Unfortunately we haven't been able to avoid dancing to their tune.

State of the Harp

I'm slowly making progress with the harmonica, currently working from two main angles: (1) learning folk tunes, and (2) working through exercises to develop technique. Of course, I'm also noodling around with the odd blues lick for a bit of fun as well.

On the folk tunes front, I can now play a passable Irish Washerwoman, and am starting to get somewhere with Miss McLeod's Reel and The Kesh Jig. At least, I'm getting somewhere when on my own with nobody listening. Lunchtime today I got together with a colleague who goes to the local pub sessions for a bit of a practice (me with the moothie and him with a fiddle), which was the first time I have ever played with anyone else (I think the messing about with Gav on Saturday doesn't count). This was great fun, but revealed just how far I have yet to go (unsurprisingly I was slipping up all over the place). At least I have stepped over another hurdle in my musical development and am slightly more ready for the next session (as long as I keep practicing in between).

The current exercises I am doing are from Charlie McCoy's All-American Harp book, which is doing a good job of getting me over one of the major technical hurdles: bending notes. This is a technique that allows a player to play most of the notes that are "missing" from a harmonica, meaning that the little 10-hole blues harp has a full 3 octaves of range. More advanced techniques allow access to all chromatic notes, but I'm not worried about that right now — many successful harp players go through life happily not playing those extra notes. Anyway, I can now just about do semitone(ish) bends on the first four holes. Go me!

The McCoy book is really good, but I'm glad it wasn't my first bit of tuition material. It runs over the basics very quickly, and would have probably just put me off. As a bit of follow-up material, though, it is great. The book that got me started was David Barratt's Basic Blues Harmonica Method, which was a great starting point (and I still haven't got through all of it), though helped massively by getting the DVD which accompanies it. Other than that, I have Ben Hewlett and Paul Lennon's Get Chugging (the linked one is a newer edition), which is just great fun for playing with rhythms and breathing exercises, and have more recently picked up Brendan Power's Play Irish Music on the Blues Harp which does what it says on the tin and was a great opportunity to get hold of a pair of customised harmonicas at a discount. Seriously, those Suzuki harps are wonderfu