Checking out the Evening Star

Originally uploaded by nilexuk.

With a minute or two to kill, I thought I’d go and warn the Evening Star that the bloggers were coming…

They seemed fine with the idea and the lack of warning. They said they had no idea how busy they’d be on any given weeknight. I said we might be about 10. I didn’t mention the chance of Iain Dale and his camera crew coming too…

I managed to record two podcasts on the train down including an interview, but no chance to upload them yet.

Podcasting from the train

Originally uploaded by nilexuk.

Erm, I think I might be getting a little obsessed with this podcasting lark. I just snuck out to the train vestibule for a quick five minutes with my portable recorder to do a spot on what Lib Dem conference is about, how to organise your diary and interesting fringe meetings.

Unfortunately, although I can moblog photos using my mobile, I need a real internet connection to upload my mp3s.

Here’s a flyer I’ve made showing how to get to the pub we’re having the blogmeet in on Tuesday at 7pm.

Tell all your friends!  I’ll be the one with beard and sandals!

Nottingham Lib Dems have been shortlisted for an award!  See here for more…

And dear Iain Dale, who seems really to like me, has put me second in his list of “Top 100 Lib Dem Blogs”

Looks like we’ll be meeting Iain at conference.

I’m seeing if I can podcast from conference by borrowing a digital dictaphone.  As a way of testing it, I made a running commentary of my journey into work this morning.  Here you are, 40 minutes of random, M1 related musings:

Mike has tips for new bloggers from a seasoned old hack. He’s been going a looong ole time, although I note with horror from the sidebar that it’s been two years since I started.

There’s a good-looking new Lib Dem website. These forums seem to be springing up hither and yon. Does anyone have time to do all of them? And why .org and not .org.uk? Creator Rob Fenwick seems to be having trouble this avo on his blog.

Iain seems to think like a Lib Dem on prison reform. A new institute is being set up to rebut the Howard League‘s views on the penal system, called Prison Works. A wag in Iain’s comments suggests it sounds like the Michael Howard League.

Did you know I’ve been keeping a public food diary on Fitday?  Dogwood Tales says Richard Herring started the trend. I haven’t remembered to fill it in every day. I ‘fessed up on Leigh’s posting about edging towards 13st, and I’m much closer to 15, if not over. I can’t remember if Leigh is taller than me or not. The fitday website is free, but only knows about American foods and weights, which means telling it your weight in pounds not stones, and having to find alternative ways of telling it about English chocolate, cereal and the occasional thing like sultanas, which apparently they don’t have the States. Alternatively, you could import US candy… or just not eat it.

It seems people have better personalities than me. Leigh is extravert and neurotic (who knew?). Matt is extremely conscientious. Well, actually, Matt is extremely everything, which fits, except agreeable, which doesn’t really.  Dogwood’s graph looks a little different, but continues with the trend of being more conscientious.

Since I posted last, I have been listening to Jolene a lot. And playing Jolene on my guitar. And singing Jolene.

I have strummed Am – C – G – Am – G – Em – Am, the same chord sequence for verse and chorus hundreds of times, and the blister on my strumming thumb is back. Maybe I should learn to use a plectrum (although I find that’s much louder, and I have to sing louder to compete.)

And er, recording it, and uploading it to a draft new website I have been working on that is not quite ready to go live.

At the bottom of the post, thanks to PodPressy goodness, you can hear the few bars I can manage to play without going wrong.

This is exactly my relationship with music. I can suddenly get completely obsessed with just one track and play it over and over and over for weeks at a time. Previous obsessions going back years:

Especially for you, Beautiful South
I worked for Ludlow Library while I was doing my A Levels, and this was on a CD I borrowed one week and didn’t take back for months. I had only just got my first CD player and didn’t own very many CDs. I was staff, I could renew my own borrowings as much as I wanted and didn’t pay any fees. Just last post I was talking about listening to Radio 1 on the school bus — well, “Good as gold” from the same album, Miaow, got a lot of airtime, but Especially for you was what I had on repeat. When I was first getting into MP3 technology a few years later (not all that many, probably was doing MP3s by 98) my ripped copy of the track was slightly corrupted, and jumped at certain key places. Even now when I hear the song direct from the CD or with a properly ripped version, I expect it to jump at certain stages.

Marblehead Johnson, The Bluetones

This has strong memories for me of a previous job where I’d stay late into the night and crank the MP3s up loud enough to hear them over the printing job. To-ni-iigh-ight we’re not gonna solve anything. This must also have been about the time I started going out with P.

Schubert Piano Trio, Opus 100, Eflat major (Andante con moto)

Now, this was on the soundtrack of a movie P was watching this afternoon and I heard strains of it wafting up the stairs, and it took me right back to Paris, 1999, and watching The Hunger (movie with Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve as topless lesbian vampires egged on by David Bowie. And you thought this was going to be a classy anedote?) in bed with F, my then, erm, sugardaddy. Although his huge appartment had been designed, minimalistically, by some top notch designer, and had some lovely pieces of furniture, his bed was two double mattresses alongside each other directly on the floor. The film was his choice, and he had the soundtrack amongst his collection of thousands of CDs – so many that he’d removed them all from their cases and stored them in four or five three-foot high piles of the discs themselves. I became obsessed with this one piece of music and played it over and over again on his extremely expensive stereo. I continued to play it long after he got fed up with it.

Hit me baby one more time, Fountains of Wayne

I have definitely become obsessed with this cover in the last few months, and specifically one chord/key change towards the end. I’ve been playing it in the car on the way home from Chesterfield, and can spend the entire hour-long journey playing this over and over again. The song reminds me of a troubled young man from university G&S who thought Britney was singing it to him because some of the lyrics sound like his surname.

So, obsessions with single tracks is a well-trodden path for me, and Jolene just becomes the latest in a long run of songs that little to do with each other.

He talks about you in his sleep, it’s all that I can do to keep
From crying when he says your name, Jolene.

Anyway, here’s 8 seconds of Jolene, recorded by yours truly, for your listening pleasure. What do you think – should I burn the guitar for firewood?