Oooh! Guitar progress!

I actually started making headway on playing a song I know (and so can tell if I'm getting it roughly right). "Shining Road" by Cranes.

It's taken a weird tuning and the use of a capo for me to find a song I know that's not too evil to play, and I suspect I'm going to have a problem with a bit of it (damned F chords), but I played it enough that I could actually recognise bits of what I played! Well, I've got the intro almost spot on, but that's only two chords alternating in straight eights...

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Of interest to some...

If any folks out there are a fan of strange ambient music (I know of a few) then you could do worse than to download "The Apparat Programme #2" from Warren Ellis's website. It's the second podcast he's done of music supplied by the musicians, and this one is both very ambient and rather good. Strongly recommended.

(for convenience, here's a link to just the posts about the podcasts)

The Snoring Undead!

So, today I most definately do not live. At all. Not even close.

I've mostly recovered from the plague, but just because my body couldn't let me actually feel halfway decent (it's the rules, apparently) it decided that I wasn't going to be sleeping last night. I got to sleep okay, but then I woke up again... and again... and again, and so on until the morning. So I got some sleep, but never in lumps of greater than about half an hour.

The result is a somewhat less than conscious and fully functional eggwhite. In spite of this, I have already managed to have a productive and useful meeting, which will most probably result in my finishing all the work I need to do on a particular project sometime this afternoon...

As for the weekend... Well, I had an enforced long weekend starting with Thursday, when the doctor told me to go home. The advice was good, as I was feeling almost human by Saturday, when I travelled in to spend a day with izzy_stradlin. Took her to see Serenity, which seemed to go down rather well. Not hugely surprising as it is a mighty film.

Alas, there was a slight case of lost scarf in the cinema, which was looking like it could put a dampener on the day. After a bit of wandering about whilst the next showing finished, though, the manager blokey let us back into the screen and the scarf was rescued.

I had planned to go and see Night Watch on the same day, but after one film I was already coughing and spluttering enough, so I decided not to and spent the rest of the day with izzy_stradlin instead. It was a good choice, and I will go see the film another time...

On sunday I walked to Homebase to buy a bunch of storage boxes, which I then used to sort some of the stuff in my cupboards. A worthwhile activity, but tiring and dusty, so I started coughing and sneezing again. Bah! I then played around with izzy_stradlin's old accoustic guitar again, trying a strange tuning so that I can attempt some cranes songs... Tuned it down a semitone on each string. Even managed to coax some halfway decent sounds out of it, although it'll be a while before I actually render those sounds recognizable.

In the evening nuuki let me usurp his PC so I could continue with Half-Life 2. Damned ant-lions. Get back in the Starship Troopers film where you belong... and stop eating me!

Paging themadone:

Where and when is gamesoc tonight? Provided I don't just collapse in a heap beforehand I may actually be able to make it along to talk darkages for at least some of the evening...