I continue to try to avoid rock reunions. Fortunately the Gang of Four have now split in two so that's a temptation removed. The main risk on the horizon is the reformed My Bloody Valentine. I think I don't want to see them again after the fabulous 1989 ULU gig (in video above). They are also playing at the dreaded concourse in San Francisco. Nowadays I go to gigs on my own. This can be boring but at least it means no-one will drag me to a reunion show.
Free Comic Book Day was a disappointment. The website said there would be manga comics among the free comics. We went to the local comic store. This was the first time G. had been there. She had money burning a hole in her pocket. Comic Outpost is an old style comic store. It was pretty friendly with a two plates of cookies and cupcakes by the free comics. But there was no manga to be seen apart from some books like Akira that were new when I was a kid. It seems like a failure of capitalism when a kid cannot spend her money on what she wants. Fortunately the library provided the goods and we returned home happy.
Sid Caesar and Nanette Fabray mime an argument to Beethoven's fifth symphony. I will never hear it the same way again.
In the tech industry we are supposed to be logical. But in fact technology is just as fashion ridden as the music industry. Ted Neward explains:
Microsoft (I think) is making a huge mistake by looking to make C# more dynamic in nature[1]. My position was (and is) that Microsoft needs to differentiate the two key languages they offer--C# and Visual Basic--and an obvious way to do so would be to designate VB as the official "dynamic language" for the CLR, and C# as the official "static language" for the CLR, and encourage developers to use C# to build infrastructure (libraries and business types and so on) and VB to build "top of the stack" kinds of code (WinForms, ASP.NET, and so on). Neal put me squarely back on my heels with this (paraphrased) comment: Microsoft will never do this, because Visual Basic will never be able to shed the image it has gained, that of being the programming language for idiots
I’ve got a friend from Chester that I see occasionally. Two years ago when I was back home I went for a drink with him and he told me this story. He works in construction for one of the McAlpine companies. He’s some sort of manager but he spends a lot of time on-site. A few years back he was working on the construction of the Emirates Stadium. This must have been weird as my friend is a fanatical Red. The story is that one day when they were pouring concrete for part of the foundations, he and two other northerners buried a Manchester United jersey underneath the pitch. It was an old Sharp era shirt. If this was supposed to curse Arsenal it didn’t work too well as last season they did the double over Manchester United. Perhaps these sort of curses take a while to work as this season Arsenal have fallen apart, despite playing beautiful football. I’d forgotten about this incident but on Sunday the New York Yankees dug through two and a half feet of concrete to remove a Red Sox jersey that had been buried there by a Boston fan. He had been intending to jinx the new Yankee Stadium that is being built. So clearly these sort of practices do have some power.
I have a relative who works hard to maintain his privacy. He asks that there should be no photographs of him or his family on the open web. I use flickr for photographs. To accommodate him I had to persuade family members to do some work so that they could be marked as my family on flickr. This was only partially successful as for some it’s too much work or too much trouble. I know that I often stop pursuing anything sent to me if it involves a registration page.
I think that having public stuff on the internet is fine. It brings much more good than harm. I found my relative’s attitude strange.
At Spring break the rest of my immediate family went up to Sacramento by train. I put their photos up on flickr. Then weirdly one of those photos started to get huge (for me) numbers of hits. Four people marked it as a favorite. What was going on? The picture shows my pre-teen daughter holding up a glove she found. The glove looms in the foreground, it blocks most of the face, It’s a cute photo taken by the expert photographer in our family. It’s a leather glove. Was this some pervy thing? Some work revealed that someone posted the link to a community for people who like to see Women in Gloves, Boots and Leather.
This exceeded my comfort level. I marked the image on flickr as being for friends and family only. I don't think anything bad happened. But it did make me feel uncomfortable.
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