Weekly Rewind #72

Howdy, and welcome to another slightly overdue Weekly Rewind. Things have gotten so hectic lately I may have to consider changing the name to Fortnightly Rewind, or even Monthly (shudder). But I shall persevere and hopefully get back to weekly updates more often than not. The last couple of weeks have been eventful and fun, so let’s talk about them…

I’ll skip over the mundane stuff as there’s a lot to fit in, let’s begin on Tuesday 26th of October. We recorded and broadcast a postponed edition of Linux Outlaws. Only postponed from the night before, but postponed nevertheless. It was great fun as always and we talked about all the news and events in the Open Source world. The IRC channel was jumping off as always, “off the hook” as I believe the young’uns say, get off my lawn! That show was later released as episode 172 – “Port 25”. More Outlaws business in a minute.

The following afternoon I packed up a small portion of my studio kit and headed over to the Biennial Vistor’s Centre in Liverpool to set up for Social Media Cafe Liverpool. Along with the usual suspects, Neil, Andy, Ella and Adrian we got set up and I hooked up all the sound equipment. As it turned out the room was so small I wasn’t entirely convinced we needed speakers, speakers of the audio tech kind, not people clutching Powerpoint presentations on USB sticks, we still needed those. We had 3 talks and they were all really interesting actually. I think we finally got a decent audio level to the people watching the live stream but that’s still a work in progress. I’ll have to get my compressor into the chain somewhere to iron out the levels, I’m a perfectionist when it comes to audio, and most other things. Afterwards we spent a few hours in the pub over the road slapping ourselves on the back for a job well done. We had a great turnout in the end, there wasn’t a spare seat in the house, even if there were only 60 of them. Better to have a small venue packed with people than a large one with tumble-weed blowing through, I’ve learnt that over the years with bands. Around this time I was also working quite heavily on the as yet to be unveiled 20lb Sounds website. More on that in a minute.

20lb Sounds logo, a white weight on red background
New 20lb logo courtesy of Ana Bee

On Thursday 28th I headed out to Chester LUG for the first time in a while. They’ve moved to a new pub called the Bear & Billet (strange name) and I had to go and check it out obviously. I give it my seal of approval, it’s very nice. We had some good discussion and Les talked about ZFS, demonstrating some of the cool things you can do with it. Following that Stuart spoke about LVM and gave us the low down on that. So it really was a night of file storage discussions, which doesn’t sound that riveting but if you weren’t there you missed out believe me. We had a good laugh too 😉

Fast forwarding to the weekend it was Halloween, not a holiday that’s ever been a big deal to me if I’m honest. I think it’s a bigger thing for my American friends, they get really into all that pumpkin and “trick or treat” stuff. That’s cool, just doesn’t seem to be as big on this side of the pond historically. November 5th is much bigger because of Guy Fawkes and all the history we have I suppose. I did some practice with the band on Saturday and spent most of Sunday paring Rathole Radio for the evening. I also got the new 20lb Sounds website ready for launch and actually did so during the live show. The reaction has been very nice and there’s already quite a few comments. You can download some of our music from there right now if you like. I hope to develop it more in the coming weeks. I played one of our new tracks on the live show and also did an acoustic version of my Nano song, celebrating NaNoWriMo. You can download that on my main site.

Linux mascot Tux with a Liver bird on his chest
LivLug And Prosper 🙂

The following Monday (Nov 1st) we broadcast another Linux Outlaws which later became episode 173 “GPL Black Ops”. I also released Rathole Radio 38 on Tuesday and recorded a couple of special “freedom hating” episodes of Linux Outlaws which haven’t actually been released at the time of writing. One was about Fab’s new Amazon Kindle and the other about a PS3 game, Fallout New Vegas. In the evening I went over to Liverpool with the band to check out our potential new rehearsal space. We later decided to take the room and we’re back in Elevator Studios in Liverpool. I say “back” because I used to have a room there many years ago with a previous band, about 3 rooms to be more precise, over a couple of years. We tried out rehearsing there for the first time on Sunday and it’s going well. I think it’ll be good training for more gigs and the live sound. I joked to the lads it was our “altitude training”.

On Wednesday I went over to Liverpool LUG in the evening and caught up with all the gang. We had a great talk about a Linux-based CCTV system Sebastian is designing and all the problems he encountered with webcams and software. That was followed by a trip to the pub for more chat. On Thursday I headed over to Studio 2 Parr St for the Jelly Liverpool event. It’s a monthly co-working day and it’s cool to have other people around while you’re working, you can learn a lot of stuff. The weekend mainly involved sitting around not doing much, interspersed with band activity. My kind of weekend, and that’s it, we’re up to date.

Upcoming:

The week ahead (and partly behind us now) looks fairly quiet by my standards… apart from Public Enemy in London on Sunday, yeah boyzzz!!!! I didn’t think I’d ever get a chance to see them live but I have tickets for their gig at the O2 Arena and I can’t wait. I’m driving down with the band, we’re all going and it’s gonna be a road trip to remember. There’ll be some other stuff to report on for sure and I’m still pushing the new band website hard, I want to get the forum up and running so people can get involved in discussions. Rathole Radio should be on live this Sunday but I’ll be in London obviously. I have a poll running right now to decide whether I should postpone or pre-record the show. It closes soon so apologies if you miss it. I’ll report back as soon as I can about Public Enemy and all the other things going on. Take of yourselves and wrap up warm, the weather is getting bad now.

Speak to you soon,

Dan

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.