There’s no escape!

I’d planned on keeping a low profile this Children in Need, but no, guess who took the first call?

Well I woke up this morning..

"MAKE POVERTY HISTORY! CHEAPER DRUGS NOW!".. oh, it's not him is it?

…. with a right stinker of a hangover.  A well earned one, though!

Music overload for me, infrequent gig-goer that I am.  Fresh from an exciting road trip to see ZZ Top in London I was treated this week to untypical Londoners Alabama 3 perform in my home town at the quintessentially splendid Rock City (without the sticky floors these days, which in many ways is a bit sad).

They were awesome.  Much like with the bearded Bluesmen from earlier in the month, I was really only fleetingly familiar with their material largely thanks to Rich I think – that will change though, these guys were ace.  A shambolic collection of people, a shambolic collection of music styles – it should be rubbish, but it’s fooking awesome.  If you get a chance to see them perform, please do yourself a favour and do so.

Enigmatic and strangely charismatic frontman D. Wayne and the unfeasibly deep-voiced Larry Love orchestrate a great show.  Even if the former does have an alarming resemblence to Frank Gallagher of ‘Shameless’ fame.  It was quality, I’ll be keeping an eye out on their future tour dates.

After that we hotfooted it to Tilt, which back in the day was the original site of The Cookie Club, to see Moules and Wiggins play some Blues which was also great; despite the fug of alcohol and ears ringing – it was a great opportunity to relax and chill over a few beers!  So if you fancy a bit of Blues action, pop down to Tilt on a Thursday evening and check them out – you won’t regret it!

Autumnal update..

Hmm yeah, this blogging thing isn’t really proving to be a massively compelling pasttime is it?  So what have I been up to since the start of September when I stopped briefly by to post some badly re-written lyrics?

Well, quite a bit I guess.  Lots of watching Forest – who are doing rather well at the moment, which is always a bonus to my general sense of wellbeing!  We celebrated Rich’s 30th birthday with a couple of surprise events which was all rather successful – yet strangely hard to organise.  I’m hoping he steers clear of any plans for my 40th as I can’t be arsed with organising stuff like that again!

Rich and I also made a discovery that going to see ZZ Top was much more than the novelty we hoped it would be – they genuinely rocked.  We popped down to London via car then Tube and took in a tour of Wembley Stadium before wandering over to the Wembley Arena to see the gig.  First up were Steel Panther, below is a sample of what was on offer from the shamelessly cheesy metallers…

This is lead guitarist ‘Satchell’ executing the most spectacularly indulgent guitar solo I’ve ever seen, sadly the clip ends before he gets behind the drumkit and starts pedalling away along with the various well known riffs he was cycling through.  Strangely compelling though.

As for the main act, they were just bloody brilliant.  Starting with Bluesy numbers that made their name back in the seventies, they progressed through to the more familiar mid-eighties tracks that Rich and I were familiar with from Dad’s old LP’s.  The aged rockers certainly still know how to rock – indeed, it was ace to discover latterly than guitarist Billy Gibbons travelled to the gig on the Tube! (Sadly not the same line as Rich and I).

Here’s a sample of ZZ Top in action that night, covering a classic Hendrix track:

Perhaps does them a disservice by linking a cover version since they have such a plethora of their own material that was completely awesome too, so in that spirit I shall add a final video link to one of their own very famous songs.

So that was Wednesday last week, after hotfooting it immediately up to Nottingham after the gig the following day – as we were both off work – Cat and I headed on off to Leicestershire to the terribly-websiteded Tropical Birdland.  It’s a fun place with loads of ace parrots, many of which are free to roam at will and interact with visitors.  One particular Cockatoo took a shine to me before starting to savage my head randomly.

Thoroughly recommended though.  Indulgently we stayed in a hotel overnight before heading home the following day via Twycross Zoo.  Which is always ace, particularly when The Gibbons Are Restless.  Lots of photos of these adventures on Facebook, and this amusing video of the Gibbons making a right royal racket!

… and that’s it really!  See you in a few more months, whoever you mysterious folks are who read this blog!

If the Inspiral Carpets were Forest fans..

Leacock don’t know what he’s done
His hair looks daft stuck in that bun
He can’t say, Teale can’t see, McEveley punches just like a gay
Leacock don’t know what he’s done
His hair looks daft stuck in that bun…

So this is how it feels to be Cloughie
Managing a bunch of scumbags
This is how it feels when they all run after a flag

Team bus leaving the City Ground
Savage tears, face pricked with hate,
Half-baked threats to a local lad
Who left him feeling quite irate,

So this is how it feels to be Cloughie
This is how it feels to be small
This is how it feels when your team wins nothing at all

Tyson’s led the flag parade
Now Derby launch a false crusade
They can’t watch, they can’t see, they won’t admit the hypocrisy

So this is how it feels to be Cloughie
This is how it feels to be sad
This is how it feels to be not as good as your Dad.

Stuck/Frozen pixels on iPhones..

The main menu - deliciously self-explanatory...

I’ve never encountered a stuck pixel before.  Not talking about dead pixels here – which are, well, dead, but stuck ones.  I noticed on my iPhone’s charge screen that one pixel was lit up green when it should’ve been black, from a bit of googling, green seems to be a common ’stuck’ colour, but theoretically a pixel can be stuck in any colour.

It gets weirder.

Well, kinda.  The fix does, anyway!  My initial fear was an insurmountable hardware problem.  But not so!  If you suffer from the same problem, then point your iPhone or iPod Touch at:

http://www.ebaspace.com/iphone-app/#home

First option to select is ‘Test for Stuck Pixels‘ – probably not necessary as presumably you wouldn’t be reading this unless you had the problem.  However, you will be presented with a webpage in Safari with bands of solid colour that you can scroll up and down to make your rogue pixel (or pixels) visible against a contrasting background.

Once you’ve confirmed you have a case of stuck pixel, scroll back to the top and click the Home button.

The next option you need is ‘Repair iPhone LCD‘.  This will launch a new Safari window, and will basically unleash a dazzling array of strobing colours onto your screen.  Obviously if you are sensitive to strobing colours then you should probably get somebody who isn’t to do this for you!

On occasions I’ve left this page open (touching the screen periodically to keep it live) for five minutes and had the problem cleared, other times it has required longer – so basically leave it running as long as you can tolerate it!  You should be able to see the offending pixels during parts of the colour cycle, and thus have a good idea about when it’s done the trick and unstuck the pixel.

I was pretty dubious that simply visiting a webpage could fix the problem, but whilst I’ve had some re-occuring (interestingly this has only started happening since the 3.0.1 update for me – although others have reported stuck pixels pretty much since the birth of the iPhone).  So there you have it, bombarding your screen with gaudy colours can sort it!

Downgrading iPhone 3.0 firmware 7A341 back to 2.2.1..

If you’re like me and you fart about with things when you shouldn’t, then you may have upgraded your iPhone to the illicit Beta release of the 3.0 firmware.  The one I installed was the ‘Gold Master’ version (7A341), and it worked like a charm.  However, it occurred to me that iTunes might get the hump with me when it releases the proper version on the 17th, so I’d better downgrade.

You would think that is simple, wouldn’t you?  Well, after a bit of hair-tearing out and no small amount of using Google, I seem to have managed it, so I thought I’d make a note on here for any other folks who are struggling as I was.  Of course, after all this, iTunes might just upgrade over any Betas without any complaint, but we can’t be sure.

The process is quite simple, but quite fiddly.  These are the steps I followed to downgrade my iPhone 3G.  I don’t have a 2G or a Touch either 1 or 2G to test this on, so no promises that will work!  You will need to have the 2.2.1 Firmware (this link is the 3G version), you might also need to have a copy of  QuickPWN on standby.

Sorted? Okay, here are the relatively few steps you need to take:

1. Open up iTunes.
2. Get your phone in DFU mode – this ISN’T the same as when it displays a plug and an iTunes symbol – follow this guide if you’re not sure.
3. Hold down shift and click on the restore button, select the 2.2.1 Firmware file.  This might just work, apparently – it didn’t for me (it goes on for a while before failing, and for me giving an error 1013).  If you error, carry on.
4. Allow the phone to reboot.
5. Close iTunes.
6. Launch QuickPWN.exe, it will advise you to hold power and home for 15 seconds, then press power for 2 second – do this.
7. If you’ve done it right you’ll get the ’slide for emergency’ message as well as the USB and iTunes graphic.
8. Open iTunes and it will activate. Woohoo!

Obviously you’re then free to re-jailbreak or whatever else

Nottingham City Council: Proud to rob its workers..

Nottingham’s pretty famous for corrupt officials, admittedly on a more nationalist scale we needed the probably fictional outlaw Robin Hood to rob from the rich to give to the poor, and it was quite a long time ago.  In a more modern twist the City Council are still hell bent on robbing from their workers to pay for their tram.

I’ve moaned about it before, but I’ll moan about it again quite happily – with the aid of a bit of Photoshoppery.  The Work Parking Levy – a scheme whereby Nottingham City council rather ingeniously taxes a swathe of population whose votes they don’t depend upon – is still very much on their agenda.  They need to do it, apparently, to ease congestion on the city’s roads.  And also (not the main reason, of course) to pay for phase two of the tram system.

Rather than have a lengthy rant:

• If it worked – ie. people who working within City Council bounds stopped driving to work and opted instead for the inadequate public transport system – there’d be no income from it.
• Clearly this is a fairly transparent cash raising exercise, to pay for a tram extension that doesn’t remotely help the majority of people who will be footing the bill for it.
• If congestion easing was the aim, why target only workers? Has anybody else noticed how remarkably quiet the roads are during school holidays?
• People who live in City Council boundaries are unlikely to have to drive to work if they also work there – or they will work outside of those boundaries so will be unaffected by WPL – so ingeniously, this will have a minimal impact upon the shysters who came up with this scheme in terms of the ballot box.

Of course, that doesn’t begin to factor in the impact this could have in attracting new businesses to locate in Nottingham, why people who work hard should be forced to contribute to a scheme which by definition won’t help them (as otherwise they wouldn’t be driving in the first place!).  Do councillors get to claim outrageous expenses too? Maybe there should be an investigation in that to get rid of them since it seems to be a flavour of the month…

Who’s a pretty boy, then?

If you’re ever stuck for something to do, indeed, even if you’re not, then you should hotfoot it to deepest darkest Lincolnshire and visit The Parrot Zoo.

That’s what Cat, Rich and I did last weekend to spend a day doing a ‘parrot experience’ – basically shadowing Neil, one of the zoo keepers, and generally probably not being much use in helping feed the almost-two-thousand parrots resident at the zoo.

It was ace.  Just as a regular visitor I would’ve love it, but to get in the aviaries with the birds was great, and having Macaws, African Greys, Amazons, Cockatoos, Senegals, Caiques and the slightly-more-familiar-to-us cockatiels clambering over us was brilliant!

So if you’re stuck for something to do this coming bank holiday, then that’s what you should do – well worth it, and you could always take in the splendour of Skegness afterwards!

This is amazing.

It does exactly what it says on the tin!

Take me to the.. hospital…

There’s only a couple of bands I generally buy all the output of without question, one is – perhaps unsurprisingly to anyone who knows me – the Levellers, and the other is the Prodigy.  As such I opted to take the unusual step of plugging their very-soon-to-be-released album as upon first few listens, it’s a dramatic return to form.

The Prodigy perhaps don’t really deserve such loyalty for recent output.  I grew up very much with Jilted as a soundtrack, and despite latterly finding it the beginning of a decline – The Fat of the Land provided a soundtrack and seminal genre-defining tracks (Firestarter, Breathe) to a fairly significant period in my life, so I have retained a lot of fondness for it, although a glance at my iPhone tells the story – I’ve chopped out the chaff and retained the eight tracks I like.  Jilted I’ve dropped only the incongruous ‘One Love’.

Of course, it all started with the release of Experience – but that’s an album I picked up on latterly having been seduced by Jilted.  However, it does include such gems as Charly and Out of Space so it can’t be ignored completely – nonetheless I digress completely, we’d got as far as The Fat of the Land.

After this there was the interlude release of Liam Howlett’s ‘Dirtchamber sessions’ which had a Prodigy logo on it – I’ll be honest, I bloody love this, it’s basically Liam mashing up tracks before mashing up really was part of the general consciousness.  They then released the rather lazy and ill-fated ‘Baby’s got a temper‘ single – a time when I wondered whether they’d produce any decent output again (although it featured an interesting video).

Another gap, where presumably some more snowboarding took place, and ‘Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned’ arrived.  I like this album, but it’s a Liam Howlett project really – it has some cracking tracks on it, and some fillers – it doesn’t feature Keith or Maxim.  One of the tracks also featured on a BMW advert I think!  It’s good, and it has unmistakable Prodigy-like elements, but it wasn’t great – things were declining.

Yesterday I listened to their latest album, due for release next week, and was pretty much blown away.  It starts with some proper head-juddering tracks that frankly have to be listened to loudly.  I don’t think it’s any exaggeration to say that this is perhaps the album that The Fat of the Land could have been.  Whilst it doesn’t (and what could?) eclipse Jilted, it competes and is a great natural progression.  A build upon that style with a few flashbacks to the more overtly dance roots from which they came from.

I love it.  I most definitely recommend availing yourself of it when it is available – whilst clearly I already have the means to listen to it I shall be purchasing too next week.