Photography

Over at the BBC it’s time to vote for their photographer of the year. Some of the images are quite spectacular – enjoy.

Search Terms

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, but a couple of search terms today have made me chuckle.

Apparently I’m #7 on Google for “spastic retard name calling how do people with learning disabilities feel“, which is probably one I shouldn’t publicise too much. I also come in at #11 for “Psychologist Gordon Ramsay” – no idea what that actually means, but there we go. I’m amazed I’m not higher than #17 for “Debenham is Shit” (because it IS shit, and so’s their website) and completely befuddled at being #4 for “Queen Bouddica fashion“. Woad is me.

Moving Home

A quick pointer (slightly belated) that Pixeldiva has moved home, and is now back on her original domain at www.pixeldiva.co.uk. The blogroll has been edited to reflect the changes for both her and Kitchentable.

At some point I may even get round to adding a couple of new people to the list!

Applications

Do you ever get to a point with a job application and think “Oh, fuck that for a game of soldiers”?

I did last night – I’d done most of the basic guff, and was looking through the job spec for extra details on what they did and didn’t want. It was at that point that I started getting worried. I’ll get exact quotes later once I’ve got back home, but for a job with a closing date of 19th October, the part of the specification that said “Have site content prepared and ready for testing by the end of September 2004” became a bit of a worry. Explaining that “team leaders are very busy and will avoid discussion of the extranet project” showed the entire thing to be a bit of a political problem, and “Demonstrating the extranet to people who will be extremely averse to using it” was the final straw.

At that point I realised that no matter what, some things are just too much stress and hassle, and that this job was one of them. I deleted the application form (it was a – badly formatted – Word™ document) and decided I’d got better things to do.

Retirement

Stuart at Kitchentable has decided to retire. Fair enough – and good luck for the future. Kitchentable’s provided me with many a smile over the last year or two, so I hope he does well, and gets all the happiness he deserves.

Le Weekend (mini linkfest)

So, other than Urbis, what else did we get up to over the weekend? Well, Saturday involved a trip into the city centre, avoiding the fans of the England vs. Wales match, and instead looking round at a whole range of places including Green and Benz (and no getting any ideas about why we were there!) and Pyramid Glass, and then a meal in the evening at Beluga, which is still one of my favourite places in Manchester. They’ve just launched a new menu, and it’s just as good as the old one, although a couple of my preferences have now disappeared. But £60 for two people, including wine, strikes me as pretty good all round. Utterly recommended.

Sunday involved an exceptionally lazy morning, and then a trip out to Ladybower Dam and the Derwent Valley (the link goes to last year’s photos of the same area) in the afternoon along with a late lunch at the Yorkshire Bridge before going off to the gig in the evening.

And that’s how to do a weekend…

Cowboy Junkies, Manchester Academy

In a word. “Wow”. An utterly superb gig. I haven’t seen them in about fifteen years – and scarily they celebrate their 20th anniversary next year – so it was a bit of a priority to get tickets when they went on sale. And well worth the effort, it has to be said.

Support came from Vic Chesnutt, who I hadn’t previously heard anything by. That situation will soon be rectified – I haven’t laughed so hard at lyrics in a long time, and anyone who can get away with describing a frozen lake as “so cold that even the ducks are avoiding it” is fine in my book.

The only real downside of this concert was that the lighting was exceptionally dim, and so photographs were a problem. Out of the 50-odd that I took, about 5 were actually useable, which is a bit of a disappointment, but there we go. I’ll add on a couple to this once I’ve sorted them out a bit.

The Cowboy Junkies themselves though were superb, and just about flawless. It was good to see that they didn’t just focus on the latest album but instead played stuff from just about every one they’d done (with the exception of “Black Eyed Man”, which always was a piece of shit) right back to “Whites Off Earth Now!”, the first album they recorded. Definite value for money. All told, they played for about ninety minutes – and after nineteen years of recording, obviously they weren’t going to play everyone’s favourite track, but they made a pretty good attempt at doing so. Now I just hope I get to see them again far sooner – I’m already looking forward to it!