The Inklein Quartet

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The Inklein Quartet. Inclined to make good music (see what I did there). Pic from Myspace.

Sometimes there are lucky coincidences. Even in recession battered England. Because by pure chance I stumbled over the name of the composer, conductor and all around good guy Steve Bentley-Klein and soon found out that he had made an album. With a string quartet. And drums! The Inklein Quartet (It’s a pun on words, you know) was (according to the blurb on the net) founded in 2000 and has been working with all sorts of fancy names: The Royal National Theatre, Morcheeba, the British Council (unfortunately not the Style Council) and was even on some pretty cool movies. They released one album, which I am currently listening to, and it’s bloody beautiful (available via Amazon Download). It’s a lovely mix between late  – romantic string quartet, trip hop, gypsy jazz and features some of the nicest music I have heard for a while.

Their website is now defunct, but have a listen to their stuff on their myspace page.

 

Geekiness aplenty.

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A cooler monster

This picture was taken by the best girlfriend ever after wandering randomly into my study and seeing this enormous red, glowing thing on my (messy) desk. She obviously asked herself what in the world that thing would be: a Dr Whoish weapon? An alien artifact? Nope. It’s actually a fancy CPU cooler called the ‘Silent Knight’ and now sits on my new processor.

I had recently acquired ‘Ghostbusters – The Game’ and was quite confident that my moderate gaming rig would be happy to cope with it, but was let down badly. 4 gb, a HD5670 and a Phenom X III obviously don’t get you very far anymore, so I had to upgrade. As I have lost the will to scour hardware sites and compare prices, I went for a moderately priced MoBo/Processor/Ram/Cooler bundle from a very friendly chap at Maplins in Colchester and a HD 6850 that I sourced from the brillant Nexus Computer in the same Essex metropolis (a true geek haven, with knowledgeable, friendly staff). Together with 8 gigs of ram and a fresh Windows 7 installation, this is now an impressively quick rig for under 400 quid (and still implanted in my ancient beige metal case from the late 20th century), and the Ghostbusters are having a very impressive blast.

And yes, the silent knight fitted into the old metal case with ease and now keeps the little monster at a breezy 40 celsius, even when Ray,Peter and Egon are at it against dozens of ghosts.

 

Avoiding the Itunes shuffle bias

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At this present time I have 4276 tracks in my Itunes collection. I carry these around on various portable item (ipad/ipod/Archos) but for some reason the shuffle function on my ipad/ipod/macbook only seem to serve the same 10 percent songs, so I have started to listen to my collection from A to Z. This is incredibly liberating and I have rediscovered the majority of the tracks that I had completely forgotten about (I completely forgot about my Miles Davis collection). It also tends to serve a very varied program, and keeps my afternoons at work much more interesting.

The only thing I want to know whether Apple benefits from pushing only a handful of songs. Do I smell a conspiracy?

 

 

 

 

Oh Americans, how lucky you are.

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And so it has started again. The best show on earth has started to rumble into gear again, swallowing thousands of journalists, creating millions of pages of print, thousands of hours of TV and keeping the nuttiest bloggers on earth in business (and, of course, giving Rupert Murdoch the chance to poison another 59 million minds by ramping up Fox News coverage and spreading his “neutral and unbiased” opininions over 5 continents). Yes, it’s the American Presidential elections, and this year could be an especially brillant one. If we’re really, really lucky, some of the nuttiest right-wingers ever could turf it out among themselves, turning the whole process of the Republican primaries into one giant freak show that is likely to be more entertaining than anything that Aaron Sorkin has ever dreamed of writing.

The prospect of Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann slugging it out on a stage while Mitt Romney looks on grinning is just too exciting to contemplate, and I envy the nation that has the pleasure of witnessing this thoroughly entertaining process every 4 years. Here in the UK the best we can hope for is one aspiring Labour/Conservative/Liberal candidate calling the other one ‘spent’.

So I raise my glass to you, the happy citizens of the U.S. and especially to Sarah, Michelle and Newt and with baited breath shout

“Bring it on!”

Ask the manager…

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And so it came to pass that the managers from that top, world class, out of this world network operator National Express East Anglia had a ‘meet the manager’ event on platform 10a in London Stratford. Looks like nobody really had the time to meet them, as everybody was busy phoning their family that their train was cancelled/late/delayed.

I still wonder why the brought the poor policeman.