Tales from the Bitface

You know I said a while back that, though I hadn’t yet done a lyrics quiz, I would? Well, the more observant among you may have noticed it appearing right under your noses, gradually, in the very titles of these posts.

Yes, eight of the posts since I started this have titles that are quotes from popular (or not so popular) songs. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to identify the posts and the source of the quotes. It should mostly be pretty easy (I think).

As an extra clue, the song in question (if not the quote itself) always has some relevance to the content of the post (now there’s a way to get people to (re-)read my posts).

Go on, give it a try. I bet Swisstone has got the first one already.

This will probably be ongoing, with periodic roundups. And anyone who says, “Martin can’t think up decent titles of his own,” will probably be agreed with.

I noticed this morning that, judging by her titles, Purplerabbits seems to be doing the same sort of thing.

Duct tape. I ask you, when, in this country, did we start calling gaffer (or gaffa, I’m never quite sure) tape, ‘duct tape’?

The answer seems to be about two or three days ago. Certainly The Guardian is blithely referring to it as if we talked about it every day.

And anyway, what ducts exactly is said famous tape intended for? It holds cables to floors, patches up guitar cases and even amps; but what ducts?

Thing is, I realised in these troubled times that all my ‘duct tape’ is at Karmicnull’s, since our recording sessions.

The Nulls, of course, live out in the countryside, many miles from civilisation; so perhaps their need for taped-plastic-sheeting protection is greater than we inner-Londoners. But I doubt it.

Anyway, it gave me the idea for another of my obscure post-titles, which, if you haven’t worked out the purpose of yet, I’ll explain in my next post.

There’s a new magazine out (here in the UK). It’s called Word and it’s about books and music and videos and popular culture in general. It may be of particular interest to certain LJ users (hi Zoo_music_girl, hi Zotz) because it has interviews with Nick Cave (he’s on the cover) and John Peel. I haven’t read much of it yet, but it looks pretty good, despite the unfortunate Microsoft-application-name-overlap

Its kind of exciting to get issue one of something; it’s a long time since I did anything like that.

In a bit of a newsagent spree, I also bought the NME, which I used to get religiously, but haven’t done so for a few years now. This week’s comes with a free CD of NME Awards nominees, which is pretty good. Slightly strangely, it closes with The Clash’s ‘Complete Control’. So I now have that on CD, as well as 7″ black vinyl picture sleeve. Ha!

The other day a flat cardboard box arrived in the post for me when Frances was getting ready to take the kids out. Fiona (aged two on Friday, pop-pickers) was convinced that it was a pizza, so it had to be opened. It was, in fact, my Utilikilt, arrived all the way from Seattle, less than a week after I ordered it (they quote six to eight weeks for delivery.

I found their site when I was searching for sites where I could buy a proper, actual, Scottish kilt. I’ve had my Dad’s one since he died, but it sadly got attacked by moths. So I should be getting that from the shop where he got his, back home near Balloch. Eventually. They take things a bit slower in Luss than Seattle.

I spent all of Friday afternoon trying to track down (what should be) the last bug in the project I’m currently working on. Only to discover that it wasn’t really there. Grrr. I must have looked at the wrong output when I ran the relevant test just before lunch, so I thought I wasn’t getting the data that I should be. Then after I got back from Pizza Express (it was Friday after all) I started debugging.

I spent the rest of the afternoon deep in the bowels of JBuilder, stepping through the code in debug. Then just as it was getting close to being time to go home, and when I thought I was going to have to come back to it on Monday, I discovered that there wasn’t any bug at all: I was getting the data that I expected. Grrrr. And Grrr! again.

Still, at least I did get it sorted out before the weekend.

For some of the time I was listening to a band called Rusted Root, who are a kind of folky, percussive lot. One of my co-workers had them on his hard drive, and he had thought that we might sound a bit like them, purely going on the “cowpunk” description (and knowing next to nothing about punk, clearly).

So I pointed him at the mp3s of our old demo. It stems from before and I joined the band, but we still do the first two songs (and might conceivably reinstate two of the others into our repertoire). He’s an open-minded sort of guy, and is keen to hear the results of our recent sessions.

Ethernet guitars. I ask you. Still, at least they’re not proposing a new type of connector.

From Allan Carl’s Blog via Doc Searls.

How crap is that? I was cycling to Waterloo this morning, on my brand-new, four-month old Ridgeback bike, when all of a sudden something began to drag badly on the back wheel. I got off, had a good look, up-ended it, and saw that the tyre was rubbing against the mudguard bracket, once per turn.

I tried slackening the wheel and re-seating it, but that didn’t help. The mudguard bracket wasn’t bent or anything. I gradually realised that the wheel was out of true.

But it had happened in an instant; I had heard the change, just as I went over a speed bump. Surely wheels only get warped over a long period of time?

A few more minutes of examination revealed the culprit: a spoke had broken. The careful balance of tension that makes a bike wheel the perfect, dynamically stable circle that it is, had gone, throwing all out of alignment. I feel there should be some sort of metaphor here, perhaps for world affairs; but this isn’t Thought for the Day.

So I was left to take it easy the rest of the way to Waterloo, and I’ll have to struggle home somehow.

Fortunately (I suppose) the bike is overdue for its first free service, so I’ll take it into the shop and I’m sure they’ll sort it out. But after only four months? It’s very disappointing. It’s not like it’s seen very heavy use: twelve miles a day on only two or three days a week on average, and I didn’t use it at all in December.

And it would have to happen this week, when the Central and Waterloo & City Lines are fracked because of the crash.

I got a terrifyingly cool response to giving honest answers to this survey (seen on ‘s journal).

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Which OS are You?

Further to yesterday’s post, I have to express extreme, pleased surprise and respect at how well the tax return site worked. After my post yesterday I tried again, but went back a few extra steps. I think the fact that I couldn’t get back directly to the page I’d been on was due to some wrinkle with the HTML form that the page was using. I went back to the start and went forward again; all the data I had entered was still there (apart from on the page I was on when there was a server problem, but that was easy to re-key).

I finished entering the rest of my data (after spending more time than I should have had to tracking down some of the documents I needed) and got to the end, and pressed the button saying, “Calculate my tax”.

That’s when I got the biggest (and pleasantest) surprise of all: it seems they owe me two hundred and twenty quid!

As a socialist, of course, I approve of paying your taxes; though like anyone, I wasn’t looking forward to the possibility of having to pay some extra. But I never imagined for a a second that I’d get a refund.

Thing is, I don’t even understand why.

Who’d have thought that doing your taxes could be both so easy and so lucrative?