andcurve.weblog - The weblog of Kevin Teljeur. Somewhere within all the noise, there is a note you need to hear.

This business of just linking to stuff is going to get old very soon, but stick with me and enjoy the wild ride into… The World of Interweb Kevin and his 802.11g connection to the world!

Me, striding manfully up the beach at Wexford a week ago. I should have been on Baywatch, or Celebrity Love Handles. Click image to view larger version…

The last chunk of new music I got my hands on was an album by ‘Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’ by none other than ‘Clap Your Hands Say Yeah‘, a band who made their name by self-publishing and getting rather famous by being good and getting talked about on the Interweb (as opposed to shagging a music executive and having huge amounts of money poured into advertising their album). Kenny had been going on about them for a while, and then my brother Conor got me the cd, which was good. Very good.

Now, I was biased because I hadn’t listened to anything new in a while, and I tend to get blown away by any music that I haven’t listen to over and over and over on my iPod, several times a day for the last four years. This is actually slightly peculiar since I have something like three thousand tracks available to me, at least a thousand of which are not stupid sound tracks or incredibly crap, so I should be able to go and explore some of these. More over, a lot of those are actually sets from full albums (Don’t worry IRMA, I own them and paid far too much for them, as you well know, you cunts.) and I haven’t even ‘ripped’ a lot of my other albums onto my iPod either. Sometimes I even take out my portable record player to listen to my cds; it’s great, having these big plastic disks which you have to swap when you want to hear a song by a different artist. Anyway, I don’t do these things, for whatever reason, and my mind is starved of new music, which is why I get very excited by hearing something new and good, and then I get obsessed with it for about two to three weeks before I go back to listening to the hundred or so songs that I feel comfortable with (You can take that as being too lazy to set up a new playlist. Yes, apathy, my friends!).

A good manifestation of this effect was after I went to the Castle Palooza festical and came across ‘8 Ball‘, an up and coming band with a good sound; I located the website, downloaded the samples, and then listen to the samples over and over and over like some sort of crazed, obsessive loon. I am, possibly, a crazed obsessive loon; that’s not the point. It’s just not healthy and it was clear that new music was required. Also, their album is apparently not available, or out of print, or banned or whatever, one of these things you have to do leg-work for and then be bitterly disappointed.

Before I get to the explanation of where all this is going and the subsequent linkage, there’s something I need to point out (and I do so love a good pointing) which is that I have a habit of endorsing enthusiastically whatever I’m into, or doing at the moment. Five a Side Football, learning Romanian, contracting, premature baldness, masturbation, whatever it is, if I’m doing it then I’m convinced that everyone else should be doing it too because you’ll all enjoy it at least as much as I have. But you knew that, because if you’re reading this then you know me, right? Yeah, I have a post for you on that subject shortly. The net effect is that if I find something I like then I have to tell everyone to get onto that too. If this blog ever started getting read by more than five or so people (make that a tentative six, since we may now reliably have Aideen onboard; time will tell.) then I could make a living out of doing things and then endorsing them. Somehow.

So I needed some new music, and at the same time I have difficulty with going out to a music store, because of all the hassle involved in trying to find a cd, comparing prices, all that. The iTunes online music store is not bad, but it’s a swindle because they’re charging the same as I’d pay for a cd in a shop, but without all the bells and whistles. Some cds, notably a few from Sony, have copy protection, whereby if you put the cd into your Windows PC it installs some software which opens your PC to virus attacks (I’m simplifying here) and then prevents you from copying the music onto your PC, and then onto your mp3 player. So you still need your portable record player, thanks to those stupid cunts. Buy a Mac instead, which allows you to carry on as usual and looks nicer. I want my bells and whistles if I’m paying for them. Or I can go to Amazon or somewhere like that and again, try and get it cheaper by searching around a bit, and then wait a few weeks while they figure out how to get it to me and An Post (our beautifully hopeless local postal service) loses the delivery.

Or I can go here:

AllOfmp3.com
Cheap music to download from Russia!
http://www.allofmp3.com/
Yes, I finally decided to take the plunge and try this site. It sells music (Not quite everything, but a damn good selection.) in almost any format you can think of, and it’s legal. In Russia. So, I went to Russia on the Internet, bought credit, selected the music I wanted, it sent me an email when the site had processed my request and put the files up for me, and I downloaded them! I organised them and put them on my iPod! It was cheap and easy! Ok, almost too cheap, Russia isn’t known for being the most secure place to do business with a credit card (Possibly less safe than Finglas West.) and I was a little disconcerted when the credit card company rang up a few hours later to check if I really intended buying the fissile uranium from Uzbekistan, to which of I course I said maybe, depending on the quality. The site is easy to use, well-designed and clearly secure (You only get one shot at every download, but it hangs on to them until it knows you were successful and only charges when you complete the download) and I’m totally comfortable with using it. This is the way this should work.

I’ll say it again, because I love repetition and over-emphasis: This is the way this should work.

It was cheap, the cost is basically calculated by file-size which is dictated by the quality and format of the files, so an album might work out to between two to five euro, and the processing (they generate the files on demand, depending on if you request a popular format) is fast. The site is something that so many other similar businesses could learn from; it looks great and still delivers the goods. It even has decent preview samples!

I would actually pay even more per album, and with that I’d like a PDF file of the cover and sleeve notes, but the basic principle is great, and this is the way it should work. Everyone could make money off the deal, especially the recording artist, and the losers would be the people who are currently making money by having a big office and a sharp suit; yes, these are also the people who are opposed to a better way of doing business and who will sooner or later find themselves having to adapt to having to work for a living. I mean, it’s a model that works for the guys at the top of the pile, but there will over time be more bands who will move into the new model which makes use of the Interweb and new technologies.

The next discussion would be, how about myspace.com getting into selling music for unsigned bands? That is the begginging of the new model, and they have the money to push it. Bring it on.

Oh, and the music itself.

• New Order
  Yes, the obsession continues, and my therapist says that listening to some actual albums light help. They don’t need any further introduction.
  • Waiting For The Siren’s Call
    Bloody excellent. Krafty is particulary good, and is why I wanted this album. It’s very good indeed.
  • Power, Corruption & Lies
    Not bad, although a lot of it sounds like variations on ‘Blue Monday’, so I guess that was the sound of the day, or maybe the sample was broken or there was a sort of concept there or something.
  • Substance
    Great stuff in there. Yes please. All the collected singles up to 1987.
• Goldfrapp
  Didn’t hear too much of their stuff, but apparently they are where it’s at and I decided to taste a bit. They generally seemed to get good reviews, and they have a very reclusive, shy lead singer after whom the band is named.
  • Black Cherry
    Great stuff. Touch of the Gary Numans about it, but he was always top notch, if a bit of a whinger. She really has an excellent voice and it’s great stuff. Harsh electronic sounds with a good beat. It’s definitely ‘different’.
  • Supernature
    The opening track, ‘Ooh la la’ is what sold me on this, and the rest of the album is as good. Fantastic stuff. The sound can be a bit repetitive at times, and it seems intentionally a bit retro. Some great dance tracks, which I like.
• Snow Patrol
  Oh dear! Material for another post! This is because I went to see Snow Patrol a couple of weeks ago with the Jennifer (I got her tickets some time ago, to cheer her up; she’s a big fan. A very big fan.) and heard the music for the first time. Not bad, and a great live act, which always does it for me.
  • Final Straw
    Good music, but miserable stuff. It’s an album of misery, although the music itself is chirpy enough; I decided to actually listen to the lyrics because Jen talks about it a lot and it seems to have made a big impression on her. Man, I’m going to think long and hard before I buy her an album again, it gets me into all sorts of trouble.
• Blondie
  Again, if Blondie needs an introduction then you need to get out from under your rock more. Seriously now.
  • The Platinum Collection
    A collection of all the singles, the hits… Forty-seven tracks. It’s probably every piece of music, every squeak, every burp and every fart they ever made. Dear God, what was I thinking. Some great stuff in there though.

Now I’ll have to listen to it all, compile some new playlists, and worst of all clean out the crap. There is a lot of it in there, believe you me.

Somewhere on the thefreedictionary.com entry for this word ‘normative’, under piles of advertising for buying normative stuff and italian things for some reason, is the explanation for what this word means. Check it out. Alternatively, you could look it up on Wikipedia. I really should do a post about what I think of wikipedia, but in a nutshell, it’s a sort of mix between encyclopedia and general knowledge free-for-all where anybody can be an expert on anything at all. Unless someone even more determined decides that they know more about it than the previous person, rewrites the previous entry and dedicates their lives to ‘correcting’ any changes; and yes, there are people who do this and get fulfillment from it, and while I believe in personal freedoms I do think there are people who need to get a good hiding every once in a while in order to give them a bit of perspective on the world.

Anyway, I got ‘normative’ from reading the draft of a paper from Connor Upton, who is exceedingly clever but needed some perspective (without the hiding) from me on how much sense his paper is making (which is in fact a lot of sense, but don’t tell him that). It’s now my word of the moment, which I’m going to find new, creative uses for which are to a greater or lesser degree completely inappropriate: “Oh honey, you are have with me the great sexes, I have so much the enjoy from it. Are you also like with it?”

“Yes, yes I think it was quite a normative experience”

Me in a somewhat normative state. I’m also in the kitchen, which I’m going to rename ‘Office 2.0′ which is cool-sounding and helps me forget about food which can’t be a bad thing. This photo is about a month old now.
As you can see, I haven’t been getting about too much recently, and the incredible, voluptuous Eastern women in my head are becoming increasingly easier to please (while I’m getting more and more bored of them, in turn). I probably shouldn’t have shared that, but then again I made that up, I lied to you, my faithful reader. Yes, it’s becoming an abusive relationship already, and we should seek help.

A big, very happy twenty-fourth birthday shout out to Aideen (did I spell that right?) who turned twenty-four on Saturday. Aideen is very clever, articulate, can do hand-writing analysis, and can figure out her position in the Zaytoon kebab queue like few other people I’ve randomly come across on a night out. Sadly, although she does read books and has a remarkable grasp of the mechanics of rain creation (What’s that ‘p’ word again?), she doesn’t know much about cloud structures.

I actually can’t remember from where I learnt about cloud types; I know we still have the book, and I would have been about ten or so, but… Ah well. Also, it’s amazing how much you can deduce from people through a few brief moments of contact. I really do need to get out more.

Altostratus. They just don’t make them like they used to.

As Bernard Sumner of New Order might say; “Ooooooh ooooh, I like you, you run away, there’s a wall between us, the sun comes up, people everywhere, Oh, you’ve got hairy legs, you’ve got hairy legs, you’ve got hairyyyyy legs, and I’m too short, oooooh, oooooh, oh! Oh!”, and I think we all know what he meant by that. I’ve been listening far too much to the same 5 songs by New Order recently, but you’d probably guessed that already. It’s been a while since I’ve written anything here and in fact the biggest contributors have been you, the people reading this site. Happily commenting away. You could sign up, and even write posts yourself! Why didn’t you do that? You could have added something meaningful, post some photos, maybe start a small community, or some pod-growing scheme to revitalise the economy of Longford, perhaps. But you didn’t. You waited.

You could have read back over some of the old posts, because I suspect you missed some of the more controversial statements altogether, buried within layers of articulate but verbose ruminations on this idea, that activity, the other place. And you can still go back and check, if you like. Why didn’t you do that? There were some great photos. Comment below, if you can find the controversial statements.

I have a set of notes on what I was going to write about, but… I don’t know where they are. I’ll have to find them. In the meantime, you might enjoy these:
Michael, Liam, Caroline and John just after we arrived at the church for Michelle and George’s wedding. Hellraising joyride against the clock to get there. But we survived. Click image to view larger version
Michelle and George exchange vows and agree to dedicate themselves to each other. This was after a fantastic stand-up routine by the priest, where he told the most inappropriate jokes possible. Comic genius. Click image to view larger version
Michelle and George signing the register, for what must have been the fifth time, for the cameras. That chap does a great wedding, I’ll have to remember him for mine. The priest was good too. Click image to view larger version
John, Caroline, Liam and Michael just after the main show, waiting for something to happen. There were in fact no major dramatics, which was good and yet slightly disappointing. Nicole! Click image to view larger version
Michelle and George, the happy couple, outside and telling everyone how happy they are. They even got the sun, which was an unexpected bonus. Click image to view larger version
The Conway entourage (Michelle’s family) after the main group photo. I have no idea where they were headed to. Click image to view larger version
Michelle and George cutting cake. It took them long enough, with all the theatrics and photography. Click image to view larger version
Michelle and Caroline, with Geesa in the background. Wedding dress aside, it’s just like good old days. Click image to view larger version
James, George and Michelle, wittily entertaining each other after dinner. Click image to view larger version
Me giving the camera-man the finger. I don’t know who the camera-man was, but shortly afterwards the tiredness got me and I went home, via some interesting shenanigans involving taxis. Click image to view larger version

Yes, my friend Michelle finally married George (it was his idea apparently, but I’m not so sure) and it was a great day, not least for them and we were all very, very happy for both of them. No-one hit anyone else, no-one tried to ‘nicole’ the proceedings, and even the weather which was predicted to be brutal, behaved itself when it was required to do so. A good day had by all, and we wish them all the best for the future.

Now, I had a look for my notes while you were marvelling at the wonderfully turgid wedding photos (I’m a turgid photographer, by and large), but I’ve lost them along with my driving licence so not only do you not get to read the great things which I had sketched out laboriously one morning while feeling particularly bitter about the way my life is going at the moment (in a nutshell, professionally things are great; I’m at the top of my game there. But personally it’s starting to become a bit of a shambles, and I’m considering pharmacutical assistance to get that extra eighth day out of the week), I also can’t drive in the car I don’t own. The purchase of a car is planned, because now I have enough money to buy anything I damn well want, but if the licence really is gone then I’m sort of fucked on that front too. Since I’m working up to ten or twelve hours a day I’m not really thinking about anything else these days.

It’s not looking good. Other people keep it together under far tougher circumstances, and I’m really just being weak and self-indulgent here; take a look at what’s happening in Lebanon for example. One day you’re minding your own business, the next day the shitheads next door come over and try to wipe you off the face of the Earth. If you’re passing an Isreali embassy any time soon, throw stones at it. You’d have been right to do it to German embassies in the 1940′s and Isreal is cut from the same cloth (it’s not even ironic). One of these days that state will get what’s coming to it, and I will shed no tears for it’s supporters.

So I’ll keep looking for those notes, and then I’ll get the 60 or so turgid photos I have here on my hard drive up as a post. If I have time. I don’t have much of that any more. I’m going to get back on the cross now, and get back down later when there’s more to say.

(Edit 3rd August ’06: You’re in trouble now, whoever you are. I have the bitter notes. And the turgid photos. The all-whinging, all-moaning spectacular is in production right now. Corrected some bad grammar too.)

I am tired. I need sleep. In a few minutes, after entertaining some pretty dubious ideas and getting stressed about any number of things, I’m going to do just that thing.

Yes, I’ve been busy, and that’s why I haven’t put anything up here recently, although as always I’ve been eagerly taking notes about all sorts of interesting events and ideas from my life recently, where I’m at, where I’m going, and how exactly it feels to waste three weeks wrestling with something called a ‘mysql.sock’ file while finding new ways to explain to people why this prevents me from making their website as quickly as I had originally planned. Yes, the life of the freelance web developer isn’t quite the rose-tinted week-long party I’d conned myself into believing it was, but the contract work is going well, even if everything else feels like it’s coming apart at the seams…

Since you’ve all been asking, the new trading name is ‘andAgile’, and one of these days I’ll have a full site up, and I’ll discuss the products and services of this entity in more detail. The reason for calling it andAgile? It follows the ‘andSomething’ theme, and in many ways agility is going to be the name of the game. I hadn’t really made that clear, about the general idea; I’ve gone freelance, and now I’m contracting, I’m free to be a success or a disaster or anywhere inbetween all by myself. It’s what I’ve always wanted to do and now I have it.

The abusive and esoteric comments are great, guys; I’m going to put up profiles of the regulars very soon, so we all know who we’re dealing with Look forward to more soon about mysql.sock, Robin Askwith and how to not buy coke from your local Tesco. It’s all good!