Protected: And
Aug/090
5 days
Jul/090
So, there are just five days of work left in this placement. I’m looking forward to the end, I guess. There’s a lot I’ll miss about the place, but most of it was not the work. The people are really nice. The ferry trip in the morning is fantastic. I love the crossword lunches, which also feature the ritual reading of the quiz (when those level nine bastards haven’t pinched it) and lately, foosball.
At the end of the day, what have I left? A monitoring tool which is apparently useful, a configuration database, some magic deployment tools and some silly applications I made to amuse my friends (a countdown timer, an XKCD mass downloader, a crossword tray application).
They’re all pretty cool things which do make people’s jobs easier (or make their procrastination more subtle…), but there’s not really five months’ worth of effort.
Because I didn’t put in five months’ worth of effort. They didn’t demand it, and I never pushed for it.
I don’t particularly want to be content with apathy, but I am good at it.
Five days to go, featuring a hopefully awesome presentation, some sort of party at the end, and maybe a few hours of work in the middle.
From five days in the future to a 5 day retrospective. Segue!
Pretty quiet week, actually, right up until the point at which it got very loud. Turns out, one of my friends does a real university course, and only just finished exams this week. Celebration was required; giant schnitzels were vanquished. The Bavarian is always fun, as is the Redoak.
At work, we finally got our (REDACTED), which is part of our big project to make (REDACTED). It didn’t work at (REDACTED) but I think it got fixed because it’s been fine since. It’s pretty cool that I’m one of the first people to have a (REDACTED).
It’s still secret, obviously.
To celebrate, they handed out some tshirts and caps. The tshirt says “I helped build (thing)” but is missing the footnote “And all I got was this crappy tshirt”. The cap is white and boring, but I wore it backwards to be ironic. I can do that, you know.
Last night was fun too. I went to the Pumphouse with Steve (not that Steve, the other Steve) and met his girlfriend (it now feels like the previous qualifier was unnecessary). Note to self : Redback Cristal is meh.
We’d planned to meet up with Ciaran and Mickey at Scubar, but decided that didn’t actually sound like something we were in a hurry to do, and had a curry instead. We met up with them at Bar Broadway instead, had a couple of drinks and then went to Purple Sneakers.
That was fun.
At midnight I went to find a friend on the dancefloor, and then didn’t see my other friends for the rest of the night. Whoops?
Sneakers is not what I would normally call my sort of place, neither was save FBi. I had a surprising amount of fun at both.
It’s nearly 1pm and my ears are still slightly ringing, 10 hours after I left. Loud music that almost completely prevents conversation isn’t actually the worst thing for someone who doesn’t talk all that much anyway.
Sleep is quite difficult to achieve after what must’ve been at least six jaeger bombs. It’s one of the few things that can get me dancing, though. (Actually, several things need to coincide for me to dance, possibly including a full moon. Seeing me dance is like seeing a yeti: rare. Also ungainly and with quite a lot of hair).
The taxi ride home cleaned me out. I literally poured everything out to pay the driver, but he was good enough to return my key. I needed that, and presumably it’s not a very good tip anyway.
The fare was reasonable, it’s just that I’d spent the rest on alcohol.
On the plus side, I’d withdrawn the exact right amount from the ATM earlier in the night.
On the negative side, I thought I’d withdrawn enough to cover several days.
I’ll admit to feeling a little bit hungover. I need food, and/or a stomach pump. Worth it, even though Red Bull tastes like oblivion.
I need to try and stand up now. I have a beer tasting to attend!
FBi needs my saving expertise
Jun/090
So I said I was bored, right? I decided I would try Music.
I listen to music already, just not the stuff that other people generally do. I’m ok with that, as I’m sure I’ve posted before. Soundtracks? Life needs a soundtrack, and it’s fun to make pretend that my life warrants the sort of sweeping, epic sounds that accompany the hero’s journey. It also just sits nicely in the background, so I can inflict it on others when we work Comedy? Life is hiliarious. Get used to it.
Still, I was vaguely aware that I was missing out on stuff. And damned if I wasn’t right. Going to the gym means exposure to MTV, and I discovered to my amazement that I only hate about half of what they play. I thought it was more like 90%. I decided this meant that I should probably try something new.
So when James mentioned that there was a concert for a radio station I’ve never listened to at a venue I’d never been to where bands I’d never heard of would be playing, I thought why the hell not?
I’m glad I did.
You’ve taken your first step into a larger world
Obi-Wan
I’ve been to concerts before. I’m told they don’t count. In the last year or two, I’ve gone along to a few concerts where they’ve played Beatles songs. I think one was just The White Album. I’ll admit these weren’t my idea, but I was pretty happy to go along with family and see them. Adam Hills and Bill Bailey sing a little bit, but I guess they’re not really concerts as such. About six years ago I went to see “Weird Al” Yankovic, but that was very much a sit down affair.
So that made last night my first time.
I loved it.
We got there right at the start in order to see The Jezabels, a band that James and Lexie like quite a lot. It wasn’t very busy at this stage, so we were right up the front. The sound! The bass drum vibrates through your soul, from head to toe. It may have been relatively unspectacular, as these things go, but it was a brand new experience for me. I even wanted to be in a band at one point. But this is me, and so one of my thoughts was a quote from Gladiator
The silence before you strike, and the noise afterwards, it rises, rises up like…like…like a storm, as if you were the Thunder God himself.
Proximo
That’s kinda what I was imaging it was like. I was barely aware of what they were singing, for a good part of it. I just knew I liked it.
We went out after the Jezabels for some food: tapas. This was also a new and fun experience, as was a Spanish beer called 1906 Especial Reserva… but this night was about the music. Over dinner we missed Palace of Fire and Muscles; I am told this wasn’t a big deal.
Returning to the metro, the security person decided that I looked a lot more suspicious than I did two hours before, and decided to fondle me a bit, ostensibly looking for drugs. All part of the fun?
It was a lot busier at this point, we ended up three rows from the back. I was pretty happy with this; I’m not quite ready for extended moshpit/dancefloor head banging. It was mainly the underage types anyway.
Midnight Juggernauts were really good. Bluejuice were not. I tried really hard to like Decoder Ring, because it was practically soundtrack music, albeit ’soundtracks on acid’. I didn’t, though. It didn’t really grip me; it was a little too ambient. That’s ok, we were just hanging out for Dappled Cities. (The others were, anyway. I decided to trust their judgement).
They were brilliant. I loved them.
Not so surprising: if I have any mainstream musical appreciation, it’s in what I would broadly term ‘rock’. Mind you, my genre classification system means that anything labeled as rock is essentially
- not comedy
- has words
- has one or more guitars
So I like rock a bit, and now according to wikipedia I like Dappled Cities’ indie rock.
Just before they came on, James offered to educate me a bit by picking me some CDs that they were giving away for a gold coin donation. I’ve been listening to them while writing this.
I like The Walkmen, I’m not so sure about My Latest Novel (too mellow, although I love the first four or so minutes of Ghost in the Gutter), and I have Fionn Regan up next.
I obtained Midnight Juggernauts’ Dystopia, but couldn’t immediately find anything by the Jezabels or Dappled Cities.
So I guess that’s the end of my first concert story. I’m cool now! Not very cool though, since I still quoted Star Wars.
There may be a few more posts about musicky things in the future… ‘cos a blog about music is totally original and stuff.