Zanak

A Hopeful Sign in Oakland CA

2009-07-11T20:33:00.000-07:00

Imagine it raining in July, that has never happened for as long as I have lived here. At least we saw a nice rainbow.

Reflections on a setting Sun

2009-07-03T18:54:00.000-07:00

It became a custom for a while for people, when they got let go by Sun, to send an e-mail to "All Sun", to say goodbye, prefaced by the words "please delete if you don't know me". Happily, the "all Sun" alias is a lot more controlled now, as with the amount of people leaving now, we would not be doing anything else than reading peoples last thoughts about Sun.

There are still a few alias that can reach a lot of people though and the mail below was sent by a finance guy in Asia. Normally these last mails are not worth reading, but this one is really beautiful. It sums up a lot of what was great about Sun and why the IT industry, and maybe the world, will be a poorer place without us.

I wouldn't normally "reprint" stuff like this, but this got a very wide distribution in Sun anyway, and it is so well written, it could maybe be Sun's epitaph:

I joined Sun in its infancy some 20 years ago. I stood at times wide
eyed during my first decade at Sun, and at other times, mesmerized as
Sun took off like a blazing comet to Jupiter and Mars, taking the world
to the era of "The Network is the
Computer" and Java.

Alas, the dot com fizzle and thefinancial services industry meltdown in
the second decade vaporized the soft landing of our descent back to
planet earth.

I wish I could say that the "sun will rise again tomorrow" but the sky
has darkened without this one brief shining moment that was Sun.

Yet, I know with certainty that those brilliant contrarian minds
with their creative spirit and effervescent energy, that created Java
and the disruptive technologies, will go onto other companies and infuse
them with their dynamism and innovation and fashion the next wave of
computing.

Their mark will be left indeliby on not just billions but trillions of
devices in the years to come and the spirit of Sun will light up the world again.

If our paths should cross again, we wont have to say a word..... for
that special twinkle in our eyes would
have said it all.

Brought back from the living dead by Oracle

2009-06-27T09:38:00.001-07:00

I've been in these beautiful buildings all week, working with Oracle on the Sun transition. Having your company bought and then sitting around waiting and not knowing what was going on was a bit like being a member of the living dead, so it's nice to be actually working again.

I just ordered a new TV as the iMac we have been using as a TV for the past four years has now finally died. Happily, not having any way to watch TV at the moment has meant we have avoided all the TV shows about Michael Jackson's death. Was odd to have the radio shows play "Thriller" as a tribute to him, that odd voiceover in the middle about "rotting corpses" just as Michael Jackson had become one, not sure if that was lapse in taste by anyone.

Still, nice to feel I'm not one of the professional living dead for a while.

Becoming dangerously obsessed with Open Source whilst the Sun sets (my first blog post written entirely in Opensource)

2009-06-05T18:18:00.001-07:00

Well an awful lot has happened since I last posted here. Having worked full time since the age of 19, some 23 years ago, I'm currently in a period of my working life that I think I'll look back on as one of the strangest.

Whilst I was away in Scotland in April, the company I have worked for since 2001, Sun Microsystems, was bought by Oracle. Being one of a team of people who handled procurement work on behalf of Sun, and procurement by it's very nature, being an activity that requires a certain amount of forward planning by the business you are buying on behalf of, the lengthy period of nothingness that is the result of needing to get SEC approvals for the merger, have the shareholders vote, blah, bah, blah, means that there are quite a few people at Sun with very little to do.
So, it's with some degree of irony that, whilst the foremost corporate exponent of open source software makes it's way into IT heaven (if there is an IT heaven then I'm sure Sun will enjoy meeting Silicon Graphics, Apollo Computer and DEC there, "what took you so long to get here?" I'm sure they will say. It was probably all that money we made in the tech bubble that delayed us, but I digress) I am spending my downtime learning as much about open source software as I can.

It all started with me coming across an article online whilst I was searching around for news about Sun's acquisition. I wish I'd kept a copy of the article as it could rightly said to be one of the few articles I read on line that genuinely changed my life, in one way or another. The author was an IT buyer for schools in the US and he was a long time Mac advocate. But he was bemoaning the fact that there was such a large price premium to be paid for Apple laptops. The example he used was that the cheapest he could by Apple were $800 second hand Macbooks and he said he could get little Acer notebooks for around $320 and load Ubuntu Linux on them and they did the same job.

Certainly it made a ton of sense for the IT buyer for a school to go for the Acers instead of the Macbooks, but it did get me thinking. My main machine is a Macbook Pro, it cost $3300, OK these little Acer notebooks are not as highly specified as the Macbook Pro, but can Apple really justify charging 10X the cost of Acer?

Intrigued and with a lot of time on my hands, and with a few Amazon vouchers we got as wedding presents, I bought the little Acer the author of the article had mentioned.

One thing that seemed immediately strange, was that Amazon do ship Acers like the one above, running only Linux - but those machines are slightly under specified, they ship with only 8 gig of flash memory. The machine I bought was their regular X86 Windows machine with a 120 gig hard drive. Of course, the first thing I did when I got it was figure out how to partition the hard drive and load Linux. It seems very difficult to buy X86 PCs without an Windows pre-installed.

I must confess I had been put off Linux for a long time and had not used it in years. Sun, in one of it's many bursts of enthusiasm to change the world without much thought of how it would make money (which admittedly was why so many of us employees loved Sun, but also is why it is where it is today), brought out a complete Linux based desktop package. In one of our many strokes of marketing genius, we called this the "Java Desktop System". It would have been much more appropriate to call it the "Sun Linux Desktop System", but we were in love with over using the word "Java". There was actually pretty much no Java in this, it was all Linux.

In fact the overuse of the term "Java" is sighted in a really interesting piece as one of the "Top 10 reasons why Sun failed". The article was, and again this is another reason why Sun was such a great and different place to work, posted in an "official" employee blog, but was taken down by Sun in the new atmosphere of pre-Oracle caution. Some of it has survived though and it has been reprinted in a number of blogs, like Food-ological's here.

Anyway, JDS was a cool idea, very Scott McNealy, take Microsoft on, head on with a complete functioning, opensource operating system with all the basic apps you would need, and not a trace of Microsoft product used in it. Unfortunately, like a lot of ideas at Sun, it was, way ahead of it's time and didn't really work. In fact it was released far to early in the evolution of Linux. Some apps were very flaky and there were so few drivers for it, using it was a very limiting experience.

I got a Sun provided laptop around 2004 and it was a dual boot JDS / Windows machine. Having been driven crazy by Windows 98, by 2003 I was a confirmed Microsoft hater, and my main machine at home was a Powermac. I was using a very old Fujitsu Pentuim 2 Win 98 machine for Sun work, so the thought of ditching Microsoft for work too appealed to me.

However even the sight of the above screen shot makes me shiver to see JDS again. I remember the frustration of trying an average of eight times a morning to get the inbuilt Linux VPN client to connect. Worse, when traveling on business I realized that JDS was only really capable of boring old work. There was no way you could stream a movie, use iTunes, etc, etc. So most of us Sun people sheepishly started to boot to Windows again and JDS died a slow and sad death. I can't remember when we stopped providing dual boot JDS / Windows machines internally, but it was a long time ago. I managed to break the original hard drive of my JDS laptop and it came back from the Toshiba repair people in San Jose with only Windows on it. I felt rather guilty for a while, thought - oh well.

I think I had first come across Ubuntu when I was reading a Wikipedia article about the "one laptop per child" project. It seemed like Linux had done a lot of growing up since 2004, but I didn't really have time to check it out then.

Having spent the last two or so weeks using it I must say now that I am a convert. I quickly got frustrated by the size of the Acer. It is a nice little machine for traveling (the review on Amazon that really sold the machine to me was the guy who said you could use it in economy class on a plane, even when the person in front had reclined their seat, having been left with a useless Macbook Pro on a flight numerous times, this really appealed to me), but was no use for all day use. So having tried Ubuntu out on two other old X86 laptops I had lying around and got them (mostly to work), I took the plunge and, with some trepidation, installed it to dual boot on my Macbook Pro.

There always seems to be just one thing in an installation of Ubuntu which does not quite work, and of course it is the old Achilles heel of Linux - drivers. The wireless card is not working on the Macbook, but I'm working on it....

I spent a few days googling "Ubuntu eqivalent of Dreamweaver..." etc. and quickly found out, with a bit of work, I could do practically everything I already did on the Mac, on Linux instead.

The best thing about Linux I think, apart from the fact most of the software is free, is that there is this wonderful sense of community around the software. If you have you have any problem, you just need to google it, or post it to one of the 1000's of forums that exist.

My favorite discovery so far is the fact that there seems to be loads of music creation and recording packages, and even a podcast to tell you how to use it! It's like having two mates with you helping you use the software.

Anyway, I'm sure there is much to learn and discover, but I think this is time well spent, as there now seems to be a viable alternative to Windows that is now Mac (not that I'm anti Apple now, I'm just getting anti the prices they charge, it seemed to be a good time to break my Mac habit).

I even managed to put up the statement: "Kirkcaldybands.com is now maintained and hosted entirely on free open source software" at www.kirkcaldybands.com. Now that's progress!

ps I am also learning about "creative commons", so I should really acknowledge some of the sources of the images above. The "apple dollar" was made by Flickr User "Scott_Free and the pic of the digital editing software is, of course, a screen shot of "Ardour".

Sad Halloween

2008-10-30T21:25:00.000-07:00

I can't really understand quite why Halloween is such a big deal here in the US. When we were in a Diner in San Francisco on September 30 they were already putting up the Halloween decorations. Wells Fargo (local bank) was full of fake plastic spiders and scary signs, "Fear here", etc. Actually I think that Banks are scary enough just now without the fake spiders.

The above display has been outside the house next door for about a month, but we just found out that someone has stolen all the figures, which I think is sad. I was just saying that it was nice that this area is so safe that the people that lived in the house felt able to leave the figures outside their house - sad.

I'd think the ghost made out of a sheet is still there down the road.

A short love note to the Claremont Diner

2008-10-25T08:25:00.000-07:00

This place is great and, even better, you can walk to it from our house. The people there are always super friendly, it is cheap and the food is very nice. It has all the good things that a traditional American diner should have, without all the artificial 50's pretensions that most 'Frisco diners have.

The people who run the place must be old radio fans, and the shelves of the Diner are full of vintage radios, makes me miss my four or five old radios that are back in my storage locker in Edinburgh.

Even better, they have a model train that runs around your head when you are eating - great!

And it's next door to this areas only decent pub, the Graduate. Free popcorn, a decent jukebox and Blue Moon on draft- does it get any better than this?

Bang

2008-10-23T07:25:00.000-07:00

I had to get into Sun's office in Menlo Park on Tuesday, I'm glad it was not Wednesday instead. This area of Interstate 880 is just down the road from where we live, a car swerved into a tanker and the tanker fell over and blew up. Amazingly, the tanker driver was able to walk away and no one was hurt.

Unfortunately the road was closed most of the day, causing traffic chaos in the area.

Of course, the press was there delivering the news.

Thankfully, due to Sun's work form home programme, I was able to sit in my little home office and let the rest of the Bay Area's workforce sit in the traffic.

Farewell old friend, but I remember our good times together

2008-10-17T15:21:00.000-07:00

When I first arrived in the USA in May 2005, the only computing device I had at the time was a Sun owned Toshiba Win XP laptop. Having been heartbroken at needing to sell my 18 month old Powermac when I left the UK, I quickly bought two new Macs, an iMac for putting in my new living room to watch movies and listen to music (also later functioned as a recording studio) and an eMac for work.

I'd always thought of laptops previously as being machines that you used when you traveled, so I didn't think much of needing my own laptop at first. But I soon discovered that the combination of a laptop plus wireless internet (which I had for the first time when I moved to the USA) was a pretty useful combination and made the myriad of things you could do with computers all the more interesting, if you were not chained to one part of the house on a desktop. So this Sun Toshiba began to get used more and more in my new house.

Sadly though, after suffering a series of bumps and bashes, it's hard drive failed in the Summer of 2005.

Having already bought two Macs, it seemed profligate to go and buy another, but the laptop was simply now too useful to live without, so I went off to the Apple Store to buy another - this time an iBook.

This became my most used computer for around two and half years, before it got replaced with an Intel Macbook Pro in November 2007. I think, although this is a difficult statement, that this machine may have been my favorite technology purchase ever. It was super reliable, rugged and was lugged around so many places that I have lost track, but the places include - at least five trips over the Atlantic to the UK, Atlanta GA twice, India twice and so many times up and down the SF Peninsula, that I have lost count. I even forgave it's keyboard for partially failing, it was worth it for the comic value of me not realising for weeks that it's "3" key was broken, so I was busy typing out erroneous numbers as anything with a "3" in it got missed out.

However, having sat about since the Macbook Pro's purchase, and as I'm undergoing a programme just now of turning excess possessions into money, I reluctantly decided last weekend it was time for the iBook to go. It managed to sell around 12 hours after being posted to Craigslist, which I thought was pretty good, particularly as for most of those 12 hours it was the night!

But of course, being a boy, I always feel a tinge of sadness when a piece of technology I bonded with so much goes, so I began to think about how many pictures the iBook ended up in (accidentally or deliberately), and I ended up with quite a gallery of good times with the iBook!

Molly the Dog watches David Jackson with Van Der Graaf Generator in Friokheim Scotland, October 2005.

Downloading pictures whilst camping near Aviemore Scotland, July 2006. I had invested in a gadget that allowed me to re-charge the batteries whilst driving and with my spare battery and the large battery life of the iBook, I was able to enjoy my sister's DVDs of most of Series 2 of the new Doctor Who whilst under canvas. A truly bizarre experience and watching those episodes again takes me right back to Aviemore in '06.

Writing my very first blog entry in my home office in San Jose, March 1997.

Hotel room in Chennai India in July 2007.

Hotel room in Bangalore India in August 2007.

Working away on my website, www.kirkcaldybands.com in Fair Oaks Street San Francisco on Labor Day 1997.

Working from home (kind of) using the garage's WIFI whilst waiting for my car to be serviced in Sunnyvale in October 2007.

The iBook's last long trip, over to Scotland then a stop off where it was pictured here, in my hotel room in Atlanta Ga in October 2007.

So although my old friend was getting a little slow with all the software I was running on it, it never did this! Having bought a new Macbook Pro, I then persuaded my employers to buy me an identical machine for traveling purposes, but it did this and needed to go to Mac hospital. It's taking me rather longer to bond with my Macbook pro.

The DMV and the myth of American Efficiency

2008-10-15T21:00:00.000-07:00

DMV stands for Department of Motor Vehicles. It is the place where you have to go to do your driving test, and renew your license. For some reason, your license does not last very long here and time has flown since October 2005 when I passed my driving test here, so I had to go to renew my license as it ran out on October 1st 2008. Getting my license in the first place was very difficult and frustrating as the State of California seems to be trying to set some kind of record by running the most badly run and inefficient organisation you could imagine.

I spent way more time in Oakland DMV than I'd have liked today. The only good thing is that it is walkable from my house, and is actually quite a nice building - shame I didn't get a photo of it and no one else on Flickr seems to have one.

What is on Flickr is quite funny - a tribute to the way the internet manages to publicise problems and issues with society. My own experience was frustrating again. Admittedly I realised too late that my license had already expired. I managed to make 4 different appointments on line, seems there is a way to make appointments on their website but not way to cancel them.

Having not got the paperwork for my renewal, I called to get it, but after struggling for ages with the voice activated phone system they have, I found out that it would take around two weeks for them to send the paperwork to me. Having not got the paperwork, I had to fill it in there and then and didn't know I needed to provide my social security number to renew the license. You would think that they would still have it from last time, but I had to provide it again. Having not memorised my US Social Security number (I can reel off my UK one from the top of my head as I have had it since 1984) I had to go back home and get it. Unbelievably, the DMV person I was dealing with said that she could put in my application for a new licence, but "it would just be rejected" - eh? Maybe the better advice would be to tell me how to do it properly? Or send the renewal notice to me so I wouldn't get there and have to find out what infofrmation I needed to provide there and then.

So having no more appointments left that day, I had to go back and get the Social number and then wait around for around an hour. The second DMV lady I spoke to was even worse, now telling me I needed to provide her with "birth documentation" (whatever that means) as my renewal notice went to my old address. How this happened when I changed my address on their website when I first moved here I have no idea. I had not clue what birth documentation meant, I thought she meant birth certificate - one of the hallmarks of dealing with the State of California is that none of their people seem trained or skilled in communication. It actually seemed to mean also my passport and as I had my green card with me I was out of jail this time.

I then had to join yet another queue and have my photo taken again, seems they can't just re-use the photo from 2005. Having been initially told to join the wrong queue (there are many queues in the DMV) I wasted more time trying to get this done, only to find that I had to sit a 10 question driving theory test to renew the license - this I didn't expect!

I managed to pass this with only 2 questions wrong, which is pretty good for someone who has only used a tank and a half of fuel since July, and one of the ones I got wrong I had managed to change from the right to the wrong answer as I had second thoughts about it.

So, whilst all striving to keep hold of our jobs in a terrible economy, the State of California managed to burn up my entire afternoon by, not sending the renewal notice to the right address, even though I gave them the right address 5 months ago, not being able to send out the renewal paperwork in less than ten working days, not explaining what personal information was needed up front to renew a license, not the explaining that yet more personal information may later be required and having a generally slow, inefficient and badly run system.

In Europe most people think the USA is a model of efficiency. The problem here seems to be that there is so much resistance to public spending in the US (listen to the presidential debates and it seems that no one will ever be able to make a positive case for taxation), that all public services seem to be run as cheap as possible. However, having hired the people that work there at the lowest pay they can get away with, the net result is a system that wastes everyones time. Wouldn't it be a bit of an investment in US efficiency to make this place better run, so ordinary workers like me wouldn't waste an entire afternoon trying to renew a license? Wouldn't a bit more money spent here benefit the whole economy as the DMV could stop wasting so much of everyone's time? Seems logical to me, it must be easier to renew a driving license in Romania.

So having got my new license now, and the picture on it is a classic as I was so pissed off when it was taken, I have found out this new one does not last three years like the old, it only lasts until my 43rd birthday in December of next year. Do I really have to go through all this again in 2009? Come on California, get your act together.

BART Woes

2008-10-10T16:21:00.000-07:00

I love getting public transport places almost as much as I hate driving in the US. I have managed to cope with only using a tank and a third of fuel since July, and my car does not even have a big fuel tank.

So on the odd occasions I have to go into Sun's San Francisco Office, I quite enjoy getting the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) into work. However, today it was not so good, as all the unhappy people above could testify. A fire just before the tunnel under the Bay meant that all the trains going into San Francisco were slow, a journey that normally takes half an hour took more than an hour. All my fellow travelers seemed to take it in good spirit though and the ubiquity of mobile phones these days meant no one had to be unexpectedly late. Someone behind me remarked that it was good that we were stuck in the station and not in the tunnel under the Bay - amen to that.

I learned today though that a BART station (I wish I knew which one) is built right on top of the Hayward Fault, so I hope I am not on BART if that fault creates an earthquake, I'm sure that would make our little delay today seem like nothing.

Back in Broomfield

2008-10-09T16:39:00.000-07:00

I'm back in Broomfield Colorado just now, sitting in the very nice Denver International Airport enjoying the free wifi, which is nice but limited bandwidth as I just found out having tried to use the magic skype.

We couldn't get into our normal hotel, but we stayed 4 miles down the road at the Westminster Westin, and it was pretty much the same as our normal hotel. They seem to hav discovered Blue Moon here, which is my new favorite Belguim beer, the Stella having got too much for me over time.

I like it here in Colorado, it's calmer than the Bay Area, although I have a feeling there are rather more guns around than I normally like. Sun's presence here started, like a lot of tech companies, as an overspill from the San Francisco Bay area. Tech companies who got fed up with the high real estate prices out in the Bay area moved started operations here instead of expanding further in the Bay area and employees who were fed up with high Bay area prices moved out here as well. Unfortunately, our rather nice campus here is beginning to look like a ghost town, as I think a lot of employees are working from home now, so it's days are probably numbered.

I love the climate here and the big mountains, reminds me of Scotland.

The portion sizes here though can be bloody huge as can some of the people, the two facts are probably related. Below is the chocolate cake we ordered on Monday, ate about 10% of it, took it back to the hotel in a "to go" box, where I hope now the cleaners enjoy it as it never got eaten, as it was too much of a challenge.

Bin your Bank

2008-10-09T16:27:00.001-07:00

Spotted today in Denver International Airport. Funny how some advertising that seemed appropriate when it was written takes on a whole new meaning now.

We went to see Peter Hammill in a (not very) glorified Restaurant

2008-09-30T23:00:00.000-07:00

My great musical hero Peter Hammill does not play in the USA very often. I used to have a bootleg tape of him playing LA in 1978 and it was obvious from the crowd reaction that this was a rare and precious event. He was the second of my musical heros playing in 'Frisco in September. So I was particularly excited to find out he was playing over the water from me in San Francisco at the end of September. So, of course, we booked the tickets and went.

The venue seemed promising from the website, but I had reckoned without how different things can be in America....

This venue is called the Great American Music Hall, sounds good. However I'd say the people who run this place have absolutely no idea how to run a music hall, great or otherwise. I should have known what was going on when I was asked by their booking office if I wanted to buy a "Dinner Ticket or a Regular Ticket". Seems in America, you just can't escape food (in the same way you can't escape drink in Edinburgh). So you go into the venue and then realise that the people who buy the "dinner tickets" get the best seats, closets to the stage.

Worse are the army of people who work there, who seem to stand around and watch the audience just waiting to bark an order at them, or mutter a complaint. Seems like the "have a nice day culture" never reached the Tenderloin, where the Great American Music hall is. Sit in not quite the right place, or move a chair without their permission and the Great America Music Hall police are onto you. Welcome, we didn't feel - it was more like being back at school.

Even worse still, having given away the best seats to the people who buy their food too, the waitresses run around and constantly encourage you to buy drink from them as you are sitting waiting for the band to come on, with that old American euphemism - "you doing OK there"? For those of you outside of America, this means, buy my drinks and give me a tip!

Even more worse still, when the support band was on (who admittedly were terrible), the aggressive waitressing and even more aggressive great America music hall policing continued unabated, with the one of the waitresses shouting out a huge long list of drinks choices to a group of people and then wandering around shouting about who had ordered a plate of chips, effectively drowning out the support act from where we were sitting.

Incredibly enough, even more worse still, although the waitressing finally stopped during Peter Hammill's set, the bar and the Great American Music Hall police conspired to spoil the show as much as they could for us. The bar clinked glasses together, slammed the fridge door shut, and slammed the till door shut all the time and the Great American Music Hall Police (obviously being more Bon Jovi fans than the more cerebral Peter Hammill fans) got bored with the show and began to goof around with the waitresses and talk in loud voices to each other - effectively completely spoiling the more quiet parts of Peter's set - unbelievable.

As for Peter Hammill, he was great as ever. I first saw Peter Hammill live in London on the 14th of February 1988, over 20 years ago. Peter was 41 then and I was 21! Now I'm 41 and Peter is 61! It's always a spellbinding experience to see Peter live. I also was the ONLY PERSON THERE wearing a Van Der Graaf Generator t shirt - imagine that. One guy was asked me when I was in the queue for the toilet where I got it, jealousy is a terrible thing amongst Peter Hammil fans. At the beginning of the only encore Peter said "alas the night is young, but the singer is not" and someone in the audience shouted back - "neither is the audience". Quite.

Sadly though, due to the numerous shortcomings of the venue, this was one Peter Hammill gig I didn't really enjoy. Come on America, you can have a bar, or a restaurant, or a music venue, but if you try to combine all three, you end up with a mess like the Great America Music Hall. A visiting icon like Peter Hammill deserved better and I sure won't be back to your venue.

Singapore

2008-09-27T22:15:00.000-07:00

Here I am in Singapore and I'm staying in the hugely large Stanford Hotel. Someone said it is the tallest hotel in the world. I'm not sure that is true, but I'm on the 18th floor and that seems pretty tall to me. I'm on a recruitment trip for Sun, trying to hire the first of our new Asia Pacific operation.

Despite what Amnesty International and Wikipedia say about Singapore's rather harsh penal code, I really like it here. It is small, but I expected it to seem crowded, but it seems just fine. Its very clean and I always feel safe, in a way I don't always in America with all it's poverty and guns.

Of course beer is bloody expensive, at it's worst it's SIN $ 14 ($ USD 9.45 / GBP 5.56) a pint, bloody hell! It's also bloody hot and humid, 31 C tends to be the temperature it sticks at all the time.

It actually looks foggy here, but it isn't. I came out of the air conditioning in my room, stood on the balcony and the camera lens steamed up.

It also rains quite a bit here.

There are also loads of British influences here. The plugs are square pin, you drive on the left and even the car license plates are like the old UK ones with the letter denoting the age of the car.

They even have M&S here!

This bar was by far the strangest UK influence though. Believe it or not, it is staffed by a crowd of young Singaporean people wearing kilts. The guy at the bar, when asked what beers he had, told me "Scottish Ale". When I asked him to be more specific, expecting an answer like "McEwans" or "Tennants", he told me, "ale, you make it with hops", quite. Seems they are a micro brewary and make it themselves and I'm happy to report it tasted like any other lager, Scottish or otherwise, although it was sold at the decidedly un-Scottish price of 5 and a half quid a pint!

Other highlights included a visit to Raffles hotel where you are supposed to be able to see the very chair that Noel Coward used to sit in (we couldn't find it), although for some reason the custom here is to eat monkey nuts and throw the shells on the floor, which seems to conflict with Singapore's clear image as you crunch around on all the bits as it makes quite a mess. Also I think we had a beer in the bar that the original Rogue Trader (although everyone seems to be a rouge trader now), Nick Leeson used to drink in.

Here is my video diary of the trip - edited mainly whilst sitting on a Singapore Airlines flight from Singapore to Hong Kong. Sadly though the Credit Crunch may be biting the best airline in the skys, as apart from one sector, I was able to get three seats all to myself all the way, which was great and even better than first class, but sad that it may be a sign of a bad economy. Singapore Airlines even have in seat power in economy in their newer airplanes, so I got most of the work done on my India movie on the plane.

Eric! Wreckless in San Francisco

2008-09-05T23:00:00.000-07:00

We went to see the first of two of my musical heros today. I think secretly, Eric does not really want to be known as Wreckless any more, but I think he has tried changing his stage persona a few times, but when you had your biggest hit under the name of Wreckless Eric, I suppose it's better not to confuse the public and stick to your original persona. Even in his mid 50's, Eric is still Wreckless.

Eric was one of the original artists on the iconic Stiff label, was a close friend of Ian Dury and he is one of the best and most idiosyncratic songwriters I've ever had the pleasure to hear. He's also one of the genuinely funniest people I've ever met, although I think the audience in "Frisco struggled a but with the more biting aspects of Eric's humour. The dialogue on Eric's "25 years at the BBC" CD between Eric and Mark Radcliffe (who is also one of the funniest people ever in my opinion, although I don't think he has aged as well as Eric recently), when Eric did a session for Radcliffe is priceless and it always makes me smile. The dialogue between Eric and Jonathan Ross on the same CD is worth a listen too, although I don't find Jonathan Ross very funny, Eric rose to the occasion. Asked if he liked tribute bands, Eric responded that he was thinking of forming his own tribute band as a tribute to himself - brilliant.

I last saw Eric in a year like 2004 in a tiny pub in Haymarket in Edinburgh and he played to around a crowd of 20. My mate Ian and I had numerous beers whilst watching him and ended up meeting him after and found him a great guy in person, very generous of his time with his legion of fans that were there that night. We even sang the opening lines to "Whole Wide World" together, as I always had a hard time working out the second line of the chorus. I found out later that Eric did what I often do when writing songs and got the music and lyric out of synch and had to kind of squeeze his words into not quite enough music, so I think he must get fed up explaining what that second line is. He even signed a copy of his 1991 classic "Donovan of Trash" which was on sale at the venue on glorious vinyl. Although Ian wanted him to sign it "to the Pooheads" and Eric misheard him and put "to the Pinheads" and Ian made him change it. I wasn't so sure that you should correct a punk icon.

his time around Eric played another pub, this time in Protero Hill in San Francisco. I never thought I'd see Eric in the US, but he has now married an American songwriter called Amy Rigby, so hopefully he will be here more often now. As one of those amazing pieces of fate or coincidence he met his wife to be in the same pub in Hull (he went to art school in Hull) where he first played "Whole Wide World" to the general public. Amy played "Whole Wide World" as part of her set and Eric approached her afterwards and told her his one hit only had two chords and she had them both wrong. Very Eric!

Eric is now doing shows with Amy, so it's really the Eric and Amy show now, or maybe the Wreckless and Rigby show. Generous as ever with his time, Eric and Amy were happy to meet the fans after the show and I was touched that Eric even seemed to pretend to remember me from our encounter in a Haymarket pub in '04 (he can't really, can he?). Eric maintains a very caustic and funny blog in his diary section of www.wrecklesseric.com and we had time to have a chat about his latest entries where he was having a go at fat badly dressed Americans - imagine that. Amy also has a good blog, actually on blogger, that is worth a read.

Eric and Amy also seemed cool with the audience videoing parts of their show. Although due to the fact that Eric and Amy didn't come on till around 11pm and me (punctual as ever) insisted on us being there at 9 which is what the ticket said, I had a right few beers before Eric came on (which actually never seem quite as enjoyable or acceptable in America as it does in Scotland, shame about that) and started singing along, especially when he played old favorites like Reconez Cherie or Kilburn Lane and therefore spoiled another tape by singing along. Some things never change.

Eric's diary is at www.wrecklesseric.com, Amy's diary is at http://amyrigby.blogspot.com/

Drowning in Treacle

2008-08-24T09:31:00.000-07:00

I'm surprised by the largely positive reviews of this film. Maybe it's a cultural thing, I'm a European living in California. We went to see this movie on the back of some positive press reviews. It starts well, but I was misled by it's start. I thought this was going to be more of a skeptical movie about the way religious people fool themselves into believing what they want to believe (a little like the sentiments behind "Life of Brian"). But no, the start is deceptive, as the film progresses, it actually wants to start to make you believe that a stain on the wall of a (supposedly) terminally ill mans house is the face of god, sheds blood and has magical powers. Sorry, I couldn't suspend my disbelief and the whole film then fell apart for me.

The lead character is supposed to be terminally ill, but his disease is unnamed, which I suppose is a good thing as it's difficult to believe what it could be as his only symptoms seem to be stubble and a craving for vodka and pizza. There is of course a beautiful woman who just happens to live next door who just happens to have a cute troubled 6 year old daughter, who of course the lead character falls in love with.

The whole thing descends into nauseating, saccharine, formulaic cinema. Towards the end I was beginning to laugh out loud in the cinema at the predictable happy every after ending, it seemed almost like some kind of spoof or wind up it was so corny.

But I suppose, if other people liked this then maybe it's a cultural thing. The US is a much more religious country than mine. I suppose that explains how George Bush got in - right?

How Environmental are Body Shop?

2008-05-15T18:35:00.001-07:00

Sitting here in temperatures of a max of 37 Celsius today, you can't help but think about all those huge tanks called "SUV's" in this country, and what they could be doing to make matters worse. As everyone moans about the surprising early heatwave, I'm thinking about all the environmental damage that may be causing some of these temperatures.

So co-incedentally today, the above Body Shop product arrived at our house. I have no idea what it is or what it does but I do know that the little product (the little silver thing) arrived in a huge package that was pretty much 8 to tens times it's size. Aren't Body Shop supposed to care about the environment?

Back in Banglore

2008-03-13T07:31:00.000-07:00

I'm back in Bangalore this week, we came here on Singapore Air, who tend to be a class above the normal economy class airlines. We stopped off via Hong Kong, where the first thing I saw when I left the plane was an advert for the Royal Bank of Scotland.

We are staying at the wonderful e-Inn in Electronics City. The e-Inn is a totally vegetarian, non smoking and (of all things) non alcoholic hotel. It's also got a jolly good free wireless network, which has got heavily used this week to play the BBC and do cheap and free calls on Skype.

We went for a walk on our first day round the local area. It was the first time I'd walked round a genuine Indian urban street, we are usually driven around and just see the chaos that India can be from the car window. I love some of the funny signs you get here, I'm not sure you could be openly advertising for ladies in the west.

Happily, although we were the only western looking people in the area, no one seemed to pay any particular attention to us.

I'm not sure who this person on the building is meant to be.

Yes, this is really February

2008-02-17T07:18:00.000-08:00

We had one of those wonderful weekends last week in Santa Barbara. As you can see, the weather was wonderful. A real Californian experience, on the beach, and only early February!

Having been distracted by my new Nikon SLR, I'm now back to using my Leica more again and I think this photo set is pretty superb.

So, having had a particularly Californian weekend last weekend, I'm having a particularly Scottish morning. After literally years of trying, I've managed to persuade the BBC streaming audio server that I'm in the UK and am enjoying Aberdeen v Hibs. Aberdeen just scored!

I've also had a ton of new material for www.kirkcaldybands.com including the deeply wonderful picture above of Nationwide and the equally wonderful pic below of the Gimix. Nationwide look like something out of the 60's here! Scotty even has hair.

Don't worry about where I've gone - I'm writing the story of Plastic Shark!

2008-02-03T22:51:00.001-08:00

Having genuinely had all sorts of good intentions to write more material for my blog, I have ended up burning most of my recent free time trying to learn how the editing software "Final Cut Express" works. It is rather cool, full featured - but complex to use.

Lara and I spent an exciting evening last Sunday recording footage of me talking about my musical past. This was really just to have some test footage to edit, so I could learn the software.

Having heard it all again, I do believe most of it is a bit of a ramble. The interview itself lasts for 50 minutes and that's before I do any clever Final Cut stuff, like adding music and pictures.

So rather than try and edit together the whole lot in one go, I decided this afternoon to just do one section and see how that works out. The section I chose, is my first ever attempt to be in a band twenty five years ago, the late lamented Plastic Shark! Interested? Well, you will just have to watch the movie when I finish it. As for me, I now have to go to bed with our incompetent music of twenty-five years ago ringing in my head, the side effect of having to listen to so much of our music to edit out the approximately 4 minutes of music I'll use in the piece!

Numberplate of the day

2008-01-21T19:50:00.000-08:00

Spotted in Safeways car park today.

Martin and College Radio

2008-01-21T08:52:00.000-08:00

We get a public holiday here today in the US. It seems a funny time to have a public holiday, soon after Christmas. But I'm glad we have it if it's for Martin Luther King.

The older get the more shocked I am about how young some people were when they died, did he really achieve so much in 39 years. Wow, I'm 41 and what have I done?

The photos immediately above was taken on Martin Luther King day 2 years ago, in San Francisco. There are some really nice tributes to him in Yerba Buena Park.

Silvana also encountered Martin in Newark New Jersey in 1990.

It's only 9.25 AM but I've spent a nice morning so far, listening to my favorite college radio station - Berkeley's KALX. I was so impressed with their programming yesterday that I sent them a donation. Due to the multiple computers we have at home, not being in Berkeley is not a huge issue, as all the big college radio stations now stream live on the internet. This is only a problem in the car, but if you are heading north here, KALX slowly appears out of the static and is only interrupted briefly when a local Christian radio station interferes with it around Daly City - I find this quite disturbing.

I always wonder if KALX is made for current students, or ex-students, as most of the music seems to be programmed to please my generation - Bob Dylan and the Only Ones were played in the same 4 song set yesterday.

To commorate Martin Luther King day today they have been playing songs about him and interspersing this with recordings of his speeches. This seems an unlikely mix, but it worked this morning.

We've just began to tentatively look, but funnily enough, the home of the best radio station in the area may be our home next, as a move to Berkeley is possible. So I can get the live version without internet streaming and cad drive around Berkeley listening to it.

Although, you'd need to have a pretty big aerial in Berkeley, the classic KCRW show, Morning Becomes Eclectic is on just now. They are playing St. Etienne, cool.

It's great to be off work to catch shows I don't hear normally.

Some weblinks, these stations broadcast EVERYWHERE on the internet:

KALX

KCRW

The Wharf with half the Crucified Brains

2008-01-21T08:41:00.000-08:00

I met Ian Cargill in the Autumn of 1984, when the original line up of the Crucified Brains was still together, and we have been making music together ever since. Cameron, Ian and I formed a band called the Cassette Tape Trees in early 1985. We were really terrible and I'm grateful we didn't even try to gig, I think we knew at the time we were very dodgy. What did strike me about this band though, was that Cameron and Ian were such a great complement to each other in a band. Cameron was the most solid rhythm guitarist I ever played with and, freed of any obligation to play rhythm guitar, Ian's lead guitar was often amazing.

After the demise of the Cassette Tape Trees, Cameron and Ian never played in the same band again. Having known each other at school, they had been rehearsing, playing in a succession of "bedroom bands"in The St Clair Hall, Balwearie and various bedrooms for many years, so it always seemed a shame to me that they never played live together until........

Fast forward 14 years to 1999, and Ian was in a band called the Cylinders. Cameron had lived through the experience that was Darlingheart in the early '90's and hadn't played with any band since 1992. The Cylinders played the annual Dalmally music festival every year, Cameron came up that year to help out and played with the Cylinders at the end of their set.

So I think this clip is interesting for a number of reasons. Having rehearsed together and played in so many bedroom bands together, this is the only time that the original two guitarists of the Crucified Brains ever played live together. They are actually playing a song called "The Wharf" that was written for one of the bedroom bands they were in and this was the only time it was ever played live. After almost finding fame and fortune with Darlingheart, this was Cameron's last appearance on stage.

So maybe not the Crucified Brains, but interesting all the same. Now, if only we had video cameras back in the '80's......

Sorry for the very poor picture quality, this is not Youtube's fault, the original tape is very bad too.

For anyone interested, here is a link to the Cylinders My Space

And of course, anyone who knows this blog will know that much, much more information is available on the Crucified Brains and other seminal 1980's Kirkcaldy Bands here.

Side Effects

2008-01-19T12:28:00.000-08:00

Ian has been transferring his Kirkcaldy 7 inch singles to MP3. Some are very interesting. I know nothing about this band, but they seem to be very good.

I wonder if I can find out any more about them?

Here is Ian's single, you can click on the links and hear the songs from them -

Side Effects - Little Men

Side Effects - Just like Me

Side Effects - Imagination

Could this be the worst job in the world?

2008-01-19T12:16:00.000-08:00

I suppose it's a job, but I do feel sorry for these guys.

Somebody, somewhere must have thought that your rental apartments go if you are attracted by a wiggly sign, and the apartment complexes around here employ people to stand here all day and wiggle a sign around.

I have to admit though, that I first saw the apartments where I am currently living (and where this poor guy is pictured) when I drove past it. I don't recall if the wiggly sign was what attracted me though.

Buckfast

2008-01-15T18:56:00.001-08:00

Actually, Buckfast has a jolly good Wikipedia entry that explains all - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckfast_Tonic_Wine

Although I do find the claim that "In recent times, Buckfast has achieved a surprising level of popularity within working class and bohemian communities in certain parts of Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland." somewhat difficult to believe.

Christmas Movie

2008-01-15T18:48:00.000-08:00

OK, so we have just got over the strange annual ritual in the west that is Christmas.

It was even stranger for me this year, as my family decided not to do Christmas any more, so we had a kind of un-Christmas. It did feel good though, not having to push through crowds to buy things that people probably don't want anyway.

I usually enjoy doing these "travelogue blog" entries - but, having done the Scotland - San Francisco trip so often, I didn't feel I had too much of interest to report this time round.

My Christmas movie, which is below, seems to capture quite nicely all the highlights. Having messed about with iMovie for, what is almost certainly too long, I feel that this is quite representative of the trip.

There are probably too many airplanes and Edinburgh bars in this, but my trip was kinda like that. There are some very nice shots of central Edinburgh though, I always feel my former adopted home town looks at it's best in Winter. I also enjoyed finding a bottle of Buckfast in the Pizza Hut toilet. I must google "Buckfast", so see if my non Scottish readers will get the significance of that.

Oh well, looks I'm back to India in mid Feb, that may make for more interesting travel blogging.

The movie had to be split into three parts due to youtube's limitations (I'm not really moaning, I know it's free). A tiny part at the beginning was shot on a Sony Ericsson cameraphone, all the rest was shot on my Leica d-lux 3 compact camera. It's amazing the quality of the video that the camera produces, shame the compression of youtube has reduced the quality a bit - it actually looks great on the big screen.

This is great - there are people out there!

2008-01-12T07:28:00.000-08:00

Having not managed to publish a single post in about three weeks, I have been feeling a little sheepish.

Particularly as my sister recommended this Statcounter service (http://my9.statcounter.com/).

This is great little service and, what it tells me is that there are people that actually read this blog! Wow - I had figured that, if I wasn't getting any comments, I was basically on my own here.

OK admittedly, it's obvious from reading the stats that a lot of people have surfed into it by mistake and have surfed out again, but I do seem to have some returning visitors - pretty good for a blog that hasn't been updated for 3 weeks.

It takes Google a little while to settle down and begin to have our content appear under relevant searches, but now this blog is appearing all over Google. I must remember to tell Daphne that at least two of the Google searches that led to this blog were her name.......

Even better, I've installed this service on www.kirkcaldybands.com

and it's giving me loads of interesting info - makes it all seem worthwhile that people actually view this content. If you google for "bands 80's", Kirkcaldybands is on around the third page of google results, which is a kinda scary thought, hopefully I'm not disappointing too many people who are looking for Kajagoogoo.

So, as both of these websites have attracted more that 100 visits in the last 3 weeks, one of my many new years resolutions is to try to create more content to keep my public interested.

My Weekend Movie

2007-12-17T20:08:00.000-08:00

OK so I have not managed many posts about my life in the USA for a while, but I have made a movie.

This was my weekend - Friday 14th December to Sunday 16th December.

Made on a JVC Eviro video camera, a Sony Ericsson camera phone and (mainly) a Leica d Lux 3 compact camera.

Edited on a Macbook Pro using iMovie 08.

I am suffering from being another year older

2007-12-08T13:32:00.001-08:00

But we had a good party.

Almost Invsible

2007-11-20T21:17:00.000-08:00

These are Alan and Ian's new songs. They used to form part of the Cylinders (pictured above in 2003), Ian on guitar and Alan on vocals. Ian, way back in the 1980's, played with me in our teenage garage band and has been working with me on various half baked musical ideas ever since.

I'm not on these tracks, which is probably a good thing, as they are jolly good. Alan's sister is on the first track and is duetting on the second.

Ian said they took years to get these songs together, so nice to hear these finished.

You can click on the links below to play the tracks. I believe a right click, or control click on a decent computer, will show a menu item "save link as" and you can save the file locally.

Almost Invisible - Profit

Almost Invisible - Invisible

Almost Invisible - Echo

Join our Club

2007-11-19T21:24:00.000-08:00

Its funny the things you suddenly miss from the UK. Having had my evening meal, I was suddenly craving a Jacobs Club.

Having consulted this deeply wonderful website http://www.nicecupofteaandasitdown.com, I have remembered that my love of the Jacobs Club is mainly nostalgia, they did indeed get a bit crap in more recent days.

This looks great too. http://www.wisechoiceuk.com - selling all things British to the American market, even Dolly Mixtures!

Bubbles the Launderette

2007-11-14T17:02:00.000-08:00

Just a funny little film taken to:

a. Pass the time at the local Launderette.

b. Test out my little Leica camera's video capabilities.

c. Learn how the new iMovie works.

d. Test out my capabilities as a film editor.

This was taken in our local launderette in San Francisco's Mission district.

My Latest Film

2007-11-12T20:42:00.000-08:00

I've been having more fun with Youtube, but this time I've also been combining uploading the videos with editing them together with the latest iMovie on the Mac.

My little Sony Ericsson Cybershot mobile phone also takes video, as well as being a phone, 3 MP camera, radio and MP3 player. Previously these videos were normally pretty useless, as there was no easy way to edit them. So the new iMovie allows you you to import these little clips and edit them together.

The possibilities of this technology is pretty amazing. I always have a phone in my pocket, therefore I always have a video camera in my pocket too. Lots of potential to make little movies.

So the little film below was cut together from around 12 individual files, taken on Saturday night. This was Moe's 30th birthday party, he wanted people to come with wigs. I managed not to bother bringing a wig, but much to my regret, some people had spare ones and I ended up looking like a Scottish Jimi Hendrix! Some people went a lot further and came dressed up to match the wigs.

I decided not to spend a huge amount of time editing this movie together, as the resolution on the camera phone video is pretty low, so this will always be a bit of a throw away. But it's a funny little reminder of last Saturday night. My little Leica takes much better video, but Moe lives in a particularly rough part of Oakland, so I didn't fancy having $700 worth of camera in my pocket walking through that area.

You can see Craig taking the above pic of me in my film, as I had my camera phone phone pointed at him when he was taking it.

Who can spot Lara in her different wigs? They were borrowed too.

Coming next, Bay Area Friends of Europe - The Movie. Taken on the little Leica.

Technical note (for anyone who may be interested): the ".3gp) video format that the camera phone uses needs converted to something more regular, like a ".mp4" file format before you can import that to iMovie, but there are loads of good converters around that'll do that.

Where were you on the day of Live Aid, 1985?

2007-11-04T22:49:00.000-08:00

Well, the answer in our case was here! Steve Ellis's party July 13 1985 Ramsay Road Kirkcaldy.

This was my friend Steve Ellis's parents party. Of course, the true significance of Live Aid can only be judged with over 20 years hindsight - it was a big thing on the day, but I'm sure it's significance got bigger over the years.

I remember watching the afternoon stuff live, I loved Queen so much, I even made a donation! I remember catching live Bob Geldoff's classic - "fuck the address, there are people dying now, so get on the bloody phone" - funny how that didn't make the DVD! Some people I know taped the whole thing, it'd be fun to get a copy to see all the continuity etc. The DVDs miss a whole lot of the fun.

So whilst Madonna was gyrating around, we were at this party. Most of my friends from my year at school were there - Ian Grayson, Steve Ellis, Steve McIntosh and Steve Bruce.

I was fascinated with video cameras at the time, but owning one was a distant, far off dream. Steve Ellis's Dad always has so much cool stuff though, and he is behind the camera here.

A funny little snapshot of 22 years ago.

Later at the party, I remember having a few beers and trying to play the Genesis rarity (from around the time of their first album) "One Eyed Hound", and no one really understanding what it was meant to be. Glad that never made it onto video.

I've got one of my trademark black shirts on here and a "I've got it made in Hong Kong" T shirt, I think they were British Airways promotional T Shirts my Mum won.

Steel Magnolias in Santa Clara

2007-11-04T18:49:00.000-08:00

We went to see the wonderful Santa Clara Players last night doing Steel Magnolias.

Our friend Daphne Nayar was outstanding as M'lynn, the Mother character. It was amazing to see someone I know well acting like they were someone else.

In the theatrical tradition, we bought Daphne some flowers. The lady on the far left was in the play too. she played Ouiser.

Daphne has has some wonderful reviews, here is one -

****1/2 "Poignant..."
Review posted by: Marj Moehrke from San Jose CA, Oct 28, 2007
I attended the 2pm show on Saturday. The theatre was almost full. I was
impressed by how the play was able to tell the story from one set. I
had seen the movie and knew what to expect next. I couldn't imagine how
they would tell the story from one set only but they did it to
perfection. The timing between the actresses was flawless. I especially thought
that the character who portrayed the mother was fantastic. The
character who portayed Clairee had such an authentic southern accent, I almost
thought she had been raised in the south! My 15 year old was laughing
out loud so many times. And he also admitted to crying too. Thanks for
putting on such a poignant show. We were still wiping away tears as we
left the theatre.

"Excellent performances"
Comment posted by: Wal Oliver from Watsonville, Oct 29, 2007
I enjoyed the play as much as I enjoyed the movie.

The players website is here - http://www.scplayers.org

Well Scary

2007-10-30T22:34:00.001-07:00

We had a 5.2 magnitude earthquake nearby this evening. It was pretty scary, the whole building shook and wobbled a lot. Some of my CDs and DVDs fell over. This was the largest tremor I've experienced in two and a half years of living in an earthquake zone.

Hapilly it seems that not much damage or disruption has been caused. One of the local TV channels is asking people to e-mail photos of damage to them. Although I think captioning this one "Bathroom Mayhem" may imply they are struggling for dramatic pictures. Hope we will always be this lucky.

Retirement at 16, why were we so earnest?

2007-10-30T18:55:00.001-07:00

For my further education after school, I did a course called "HND Communication Studies" at Kirkcaldy College of Technology. I didn't really have the faintest idea what I wanted to do with my life at the age of 17 when I had to make some key decisions about my future. But this course appealed to me, as it was about a subject I was interested in; the media, journalism, television and marketing. Going for an HND course instead of going to University also meant an easier life in my 6th year at high school as I got most of the grades required to make this course in my 5th year at school.

One of the more exciting things we got to do at college was to practice a potential career in television, both behind and in front of the cameras. I can recall this practice was in two parts. The first was just reading a piece to camera to see how you came over. I think I read a piece about Star Trek - arrgh, I was only 17 I suppose! I remember the lecturer said I may have a problem getting a career as a TV presenter as I had the kind of face that was "naturally vague". This comment caused enduring hilarity among my fellow potential TV stars.

The second exercise was much more ambitions, we were supposed to make our own TV programme. This course requirement caused us much angst in advance as I remember. The class split up into about 4 different teams and the team of people I did this with were just the people I chose to sit around on day one of the course.

Our team was - Lorraine Rennie (main presenter), me and Mark Deas (first interview), Ewan Croal and Susan Neilson (second interview), Barbara Penman and Dave Radford (third interview).

I remember doing endless preparation for this exercise. We split our little team into sub groups who would interview each other for the programme. Mark would become a good mate in the coming months, but I don't remember him being at college much around this time and he dropped out in year 2. I think this video was made towards the latter half of year one and Mark's enthusiasm for the course was really fading.

Our group had a few sessions to get the programme ready, but I don't remember Mark being there much. So our section is pretty scripted, you can see the piece of paper pretty obviously on my lap. It was so scripted, that I think I wrote the questions and the answers for our piece. Mark's one great contribution was the title - "Retirement at 16", we all loved that.

Mark was a big socialist at the time, I first met him at a meeting of the Militant Tendency (of all places), so the parts of the piece where he is talking about the final end of capitalism is the only bit I didn't script. I think he is improvising here.

Owing to Mark and I being a little under prepared, our piece ran short by mistake, so we asked Ewan and Susie to pad their piece out a bit. This didn't seem an issue for them. Ewan was the guy I sat next to in the whole of my second year of college and he was a real nice guy, never short of a word or two.

There are some great little period touches in this piece. Ewan's references to "Bentleys" and a "Nick Kershaw haircut" are priceless. I remember Susie came from a particularly rough part of Fife that I didn't know well and some of her experiences may have helped her talk so knowledgeably about heroin abuse and alcoholism. Most of us, except Mark and I, tried to make an effort to look smart for this show. Susie used to call this her "social worker look". I think Mark and I's look make us look more like genuine socialists though.

Ewan looks a bit uncomfortable in his tie too. With 22 years hindsight, one of the things that shocks me about this video are the number of technical mistakes. The programme was made by a guy called Don who was the college's resident technician, but I don't think he could have been taking this too seriously. There's obviously a problem with Susie's mic that didn't get corrected and the crackles are left in. You can actually hear Don coughing behind the camera. I remember all the equipment looked ancient to me, even in 1985. The video system was a huge clunky Umatic system. I remember the Umatic tapes seemed enormous.

Barbara the body builder is wonderful here. She was always so softly spoken that I struggled with the thought of her being a body builder. Dave was the oldest of our little group, he was an ancient 23 or 24 at the time and that seemed a large age gap. As he was the oldest, he tended to take control of our little group. He looks nervous as hell in this piece too.

All of Dave's "taking charge" meant that we got voted the best programme by our classmates in other groups. We sat through all the programmes in class one day, and I got the impression that other groups didn't manage to take the exercise as seriously as we did. The only major errors on ours were technical, other teams seemed to be taking the piss a bit. The lecturer felt I transcended my "vague look" from the earlier video and Lorraine got special praise as our anchor woman.

What really amazes me now is the sheer earnestness of the programme. I suppose these were grim time in Fife, the miners strike was still on and unemployment was around 3 million. But I have such wonderful memories of my life around this time, the earnestness of the programme seems to conflict with this memory. I think the truth is we were all a bit nervous and Dave was being pretty bossy throughout the preparation and making of this.

The letteraset titles took bloody ages to do and it still looks crap. We got this final one the wrong shape too and Don the technician / cameraman had to pan around it to make it work. Our backdrops don't really work either, they are too small in relation to the rest of the "set". Mark and I's is particularly poor.

The beginning music was my idea, it's a Song called "Leisure" from XTC's "English Settlement" album. It seemed to fit Mark's "Retirement at 16" title perfectly. "My Generation" at the end was Dave's idea. I played the music from my sister's portable cassette player into the studio mic while Don filmed the leteraset.

I happened to know a guy who had just started at the college as a junior technician, working for Don. He was in the year below me at High School and was a really nice guy called John Wishart. I persuaded him to strike a copy of our programme. I think he took this straight from Umatic to Betamax, which was the format of the video recorder we had at home. Betamax was a much better format than VHS at the time, shame it didn't catch on, the picture quality was a lot better.

I rented a VHS machine when I moved just behind the college tho 2 Sang Place Kirkcaldy a few months later. I remember this cost 11 pounds a month and this seemed an incredible expense as my whole income was only 70 pounds a month. I quickly transfered some of my favorite Beta tapes to VHS in the Summer of 1985 and this was one of them.

This survived on the same VHS tape from 1985 to 2005, when it was transfered to DVD. The faint white lines that scroll up and down the screen are a result of decay on the original VHS tape, it seems I was able to digitise this at just the right time before the VHS became unplayable. The Beta tape still exists, but I'm not sure if I will ever get my hands on a beta machine to play it.

As far as I know, this is the only one of the programmes from our year of HND Communication Studies that got copied. Certainly, I'd be very surprised if any other programmes survived this long, copied or not. It's really funny think that, thanks to 21st century technology, this little student programme may now be seen by more people than anyone ever intended.

Due to the 10 minute per video restriction on Youtube, this is split into two parts.

We did go on to make some more impressive videos in our second year.

This time we had a more professional set up in the college assembly rooms. The college had asked for volunteers from our course to make some educational videos for the council. Our part was the technical side - production, direction, sound, camera, floor manager, etc. I was the sound engineer, you can see me poised over the 4 track porta studio that doubled as a mixer. The Drama Studies course provided the people in front of camera this time.

Next to me is Kim Marr who was the vision mixer and nearest the camera is Madeline Fyfe who was the producer (she was always a bossy sort!). Don didn't get too involved this time, although I'm pretty sure I remember him taking this picture.

Looking back on it, this was just a way for the council to get educational videos for free, although we had good fun doing this and the college was very grateful. Left to right above is Donna Hodgkinson and Lynn Williamson on camera, Andy Gyle the floor manager and Neil Renton also on camera. There are two drama students who's names I have long forgotten in front of camera. I love the way the cameras have "KCT TV Colour" written on them.

I didn't get a copy of these videos, I think my enthusiasm was less this time as we were not in front of camera. Also our final exams were looming, so I guess I had other things on my mind.

Shame, as the drama students had someone that year who went on to become a genuine star. Sharon Small, who is now one of the two stars of The "Inspector Linley Mysteries" (a favorite here on US Public TV) was the anchor woman for all the videos. I remember her being professional, but of course no one realised she'd go on to have a genuine career in film and TV. One of the highlights of my whole college experience was getting to pin a contact mic on her blouse. Well I was the sound engineer after all.

Having watched "Retirement at 16", if there are any NBC, CBS, BBC executives out there watching Blogger or Youtube for potential television stars, just let me know. You'd only be 22 years late.

Bay Area Friends of Europe - The Movie

2007-10-28T17:41:00.000-07:00

This is Geoff Lewis's, who is the man behind the Bay Area Friends of Europe, little video about the group. I think it is rather cool, although there is no interview with me as I wans't there that day. My friend Daphne is, from memory, the second interview - she is the one taking about what she misses most about the UK is British sarcasm.

The Andrew Crescent Recording Sessions Summer 2006

2007-10-28T11:55:00.000-07:00

In the summer of 2006 I had one of those magical holidays back in Scotland that I'll remember forever.

I managed to do so many things. Camping in the Highlands (the first time I'd camped since 1978!).

The world cup was on, so I was able to watch some of that in the pub and Travel Inn.

I was down my favourite pub, Robertsons in Rose Street in Edinburgh.

And I got to record some music with my old friends.

This was in Ian's house in Leith. He's sold his one now and is moving to a new flat next month.

I always thought I was so lucky to have friends who are such great musicians. For many years they have been able to amplify whatever microscopic musical talent I have and have been able to make sense of whatever odd, half-formed musical idea I happen to have in my head.

We managed two different sessions this holiday. Apart from the picture at the very top of this post, all these still pictures were taken at a session where we recorded a song I'm going to call "That's Why I Hate the Blues". I had the idea for the lyric around 20 years ago, in 1986.

At that time my Friend Ritchie put me up temporarily in his flat in York Place in Edinburgh, where he was staying at that time. It was my first real experience of staying in that exciting city across the water from Fife. The city I used to see every night from my bedroom in Fife. It's twinkly lights always seemed to alluring when I closed by bedroom curtains at night.

Ritchie was a huge blues fan, he later played harmonica with a number of them. The bar over the road at the top of Broughton Street, that later became "The Basement" at that time had just opened as "The Blues Basement" and live blues bands used to play there. We also used to go and see blues bands at those other long defunct Edinburgh venues, the Preservation Hall and the Jailhouse.

Never having been a huge blues fan (it all seemed to formulaic to me), but finding Ritchie's enthusiasm difficult to fight against, I began to imagine a song about a guy getting the blues about the blues. You know, having been forced to listen to so much blues music, he got the blues about the blues, real bad.

So the first session was an attempt to record the music for this song I had formulated in my head 20 years previously.

The other song that we did at the second session was called " I wish I could", which was a shorter punkier song. Darren couldn't make it to the second session, which is a shame as I love his bas playing. He always manages to play just the right thing, not too much, not to little, he has a great bass sound too.

However, Andy was on hand to do the bass too - he had a nice punky style on this song.

These video clips are great fun, they are all from the second session. We recorded "I Wish I Could" at this second session as well as changing some of "That's Why I Hate the Blues".

I wish we had the technology years ago. It would have been nice to have video of us recording our early material. I think it's really interesting to see us playing some of the material that ended up in the songs. Some of these clips are us just trying out bits and pieces for sound levels or just messing about. Other clips are first takes of pieces that didn't end up in the songs. Other clips are the actual takes that we used in the songs. The above clip is Ian trying out an idea that didn't get used for "That's Why I Hate The Blues".

This is Andy trying out a solo for "That's Why I Hate The Blues". Ian is doing his recording engineer bit here as usual. Andy is playing his beloved Gibson SG here, I think he was had it for about 25 years. You can see too in the "Tom's New Shoes" video that's in an earlier blog post here and also on my YouTube page.

This is Andy's main guitar solo for "I Wish I Could". Funny, it shows the benefit of little video clips of the recording, I had forgotten he was playing Ian's Telecaster here. This take is in the finished song.

This is Andy, on his SG again, doing a nice light little solo over my acoustic guitar at the end of "I Wish I Could". This take is in the finished song too.

This is my first attempt at the acoustic guitar for the end of "I Wish I Could". Bloody hopeless actually, the timing is very wayward and I forgot what I was doing half way through. Ian's comment that "I think the other one was a lot better" is curious, as I don't remember doing one before that.

This take is the one that we used in the final song. Only slightly better really, my timing is still pretty out. Ian cheered me up about it at the time though, by calling it "Syd Barrettesque"! It does sound a lot better on the mixed version with Andy's guitar on the top.

I just need to add vocals to these songs now and they will be finished. Hope I can get round it it one day soon. It's a good thing that there are no video clips of my plastic bucket percussion on "That's Why I Hate the Blues"!

The Best Pastries in San Francisco

2007-10-28T11:10:00.000-07:00

After lazing around until about about 12 yesterday, we got up early today and headed to this place I had only heard about before. It's at 18th and Guerrero and their pastries are meant to be very special. But, especially on a weekend, the queuing is supposed to be very bad.

We tried to get in early, at 8.30 - but didn't realise that it didn't open until 9!

This was the queue and it was only 8.40, 20 minutes before it even was supposed to open.

This was the queue at 8.55, five minutes before it was supposed to open, we were at the front - hooray.

And there are even some left over to enjoy later. I'm glad we got their early after all.

The Link Ups with the Beatles Kareoke

2007-10-25T23:02:00.000-07:00

I just came over these little video files taken with my Leica camera when I just bought it, so I thought I'd share them with You Tube and the world, as they bring back happy memories.

This was a really fun party. For a while Bay Area Link Up (www.bayarealinkup.com) had a number of musical events and people were asked to bring instruments along. This morphed into a band called the "Link Ups".

This was a party we had in San Francisco on the 16th of December 2006 at Fort Mason. I was there with my little Turkish friend, you can see her dancing around near the backing vocals mike in the videos. I had a beer or two and decided that I would sing backing vocals all night.

I remember a particularly dodgy solo version of "House of the Rising Sun", well the beginning of it, before I forgot the words. Hapilly, I can't easily sing and take video at the same time, so my performances are in the dustbin of history where they belong.

In case you are wondering what these songs are meant to be, they are "Happy Christmas, War is Over", well it was Christmas after all, and "Rocky Racoon".

I love Open Work!

2007-10-25T22:49:00.000-07:00

Despite some of the frustrations, one of the reasons I stay with Sun Microsystems is the wonderful Openwork policy. As one of my old boss's explained to me once, if you have an internet connection and phone, you can work anywhere.

I like to collect bizarre places I have worked for Sun, this must top them all. I took my laptop along to the garage as they can often do oil changes while you wait. I took the laptop as something to keep me amused and, not unreasonably, to do some work as I think I was still there in what was technically a "work hour". I couldn't figure out where the waiting room was, so ended up sitting in the showroom. I clicked on the iBook's wireless settings, more in hope than expectation that a network would appear, and it did - and also in the name of Falore Nissan, the name of the garage dealership.

So - hooray for Falore Nissan who are actually a nice Nissan dealership (miles better than the shite service I got at San Jose's Capitol Nissan where I bought the car) and hooray for Sun's Openwork policy. My only minor disappointment is that no one approached me and asked me to sell them a car! I have also worked from an Edinburgh Laundrette and a Dutch motorway in the past, but I'm not sure if they count as neither had wireless internet.

Old Father Time is the most unforgiving parent, but he can't take away the golden years

2007-10-25T21:29:00.000-07:00

I really love this photo, I've been looking at it a lot in the past day or so. My fondest memories of this amazing family were the time we spent together from my birth, to the mid 1980's. This is my Gran on my mother's side and all her brothers and sisters. I can't remember how I came to have this scan, but this photo is also up on the wall of my cousin's house.

I think this photo must have been taken around 1930. My Gran is on the far left, she would have been 19 then. Their lives were so different from ours. I remember my Gran being shocked at how many presents us children got in the 1970's and I remember being shocked to find out that they only got an apple and an orange at Christmas, if they were lucky! This was a very close family by modern standards, I think now maybe the hardships of their lives made them close. The family, in the old cliche, survived two world wars, and the poverty of their own childhoods. We were especially close to, in a word that used to amuse me when I was little because of it's potential double meaning, the "Aunts".

My sister and I came into the world when they were around their mid to late 50's. There weren't many other children our age around then and the Aunts really enjoyed our company, there are a huge number of cinie films of us with the aunts back in the 60's and 70's.

As I think about that period if my life again, I think the Aunts must have thought of the mid 60's to the mid 80's as being a golden period. They all retired around the early 70's, there was never much money around, but they had enough to have a comfortable life and they all had their health. Happily, this period of their lives coincided with my childhood. There seemed to be endless family get togethers, and the summer holidays did seem long, before I turned into that strange creature called a "teenager" and they, as it seemed to me at the time, turned into old people.

They all lived into their mid 80's or early '90's. I sometimes wonder if the difficult environment they grew up in helped give them a long life. I hope I got their genes though, and live as long as they did, despite living a very different Californian, air conditioned life.

But indeed, old father time is the most unforgiving parent of all, and Aunt Susan, the last of the Aunts, died yesterday at the age of 93 and a half. She is second from the left in the 1930 picture above and on the right beside my Gran in the photo below.

I remember a poignant moment around January of 2004. She was in hospital and was beginning to fade, mentally. She had just turned 90, but didn't realize it. My cousin told her she had just turned 90 and she seemed really startled by the news. She said "Oh Ron, what happened to all those years", Ron said "Well Susan, you lived them". Lets hope many of them were happy.

The more contemporary images were taken in the Summer of 1983 with a disc camera (remember them?), can you spot the grainy quality?

Once Again

2007-10-19T21:16:00.000-07:00

The wonderful Irish film, Once has now come out in the UK and it's been getting some great reviews. Some bits and pieces have shown up on youtube which I'm sure is not strictly legal, but it if encourages more people to go and see the whole film, then I suppose it's a good thing.

I saw this film and felt good all day after, what better recommendation?

LTL3 and other cameras

2007-10-17T21:20:00.000-07:00

Having uploaded all my images, many scanned very laboriously from badly cataloged prints, I've been a little nostalgic for the camera that took many of them.

This was it. A Praktica LTL3, bought second hand in Dixons Kirkcaldy in 1982. I was initially very hesitant about it's completely manual exposure and focus, but soon got used to it. I took soooo many pictures in the mid 80's, just at the time when I was getting a decent amount of pocket money and before I had discovered alcohol in any volume. As I think about it, particularly in 1984 when the photo taking seemed to reach its maximum, this rather bulky camera must have been with me all the time.

I was briefly seduced by the technological marvell that was the disc camera - remember them? My Aunt Nan could never take decent photos and these cameras were meant to be so easy to use that we even suggested she got one, I don't remember if she ever took that up. Disc cameras were meant to have virtually eliminated blur, but they did this by using very fast film, so the photos were always very grainy.

I never really knew how old the Praktica was as I bought it second hand. One of the websites I visited today said that they began production in Praktica's Plant in Dresden in the former East Germany in 1972, but anyway - it gave up on me around 1988 and I was advised that it'd be more money than it was worth to fix it. So I took to borrowing my Dad's Olympus OM10 and it became my favorite camera for many years.

I bought a little plastic Olympus compact in 1995, really just to have something small to put in my pocket for my friend Steve's wedding, that became my main camera before I left it, somewhere in Aberdeen on a rather drunken night in 2001. I then took to using a load of cardboard disposable cameras - well, it wouldn't matter if I lost one of them! The cardboard age lasted (with a brief departure with a very very cheap Boots own brand compact) from 2001 to 2004 when my Dad gave me his old compact digital camera, another Olympus and I was in the digital photography age.

I just realised that the Nikon digital SLR is therefore the first SLR I have bought for 25 years!

I'm really struggling to think what my favorite photo is that was taken with the Praktica, but this is pretty representative of the era. Taken by flatmate Nicci Vernolini, this is me and Inca the dog in the autumn of 1985. The Praktica being augmented by a flashgun, bought at great expense (or so it seemed at the time when I also had to buy Led Zeppelin and 10cc records!) the previous year.

I rather like this photo also taken with the Praktica in the Summer of 1985 of Kirkcaldy band, The Crucified Brains.

Has it really been a month?

2007-10-16T20:08:00.000-07:00

I can't believe it's been a month since my last post. Well, actually I can. I've been trying to get round to this for ages. I like to think about the internet as a vast sea of content. I think that's a good metaphor - there used to be this great advert in the UK (I think it was for a search engine), of someone with all their bath and sink taps stuck on, drowning. The metaphor was that you could drown in the sea of content that is the internet. So, I've been drowning in all the material for Kirkcaldybands.com in the last few weeks - gots lots of exciting new stuff, posted most of it - many times whilst sitting on planes, in hotels and in cars.

I have had a great batch of material from Mark Nicol (ex Nationwide and Ghost Train, Nationwide are pictured above). Nationwide's original demo sounds great. I only got one track from it, which was "Dusty Bedrooms". Mark thinks this may have been recorded as long ago as 1980, imagine that, 27 years ago!

Since my last post I've also been back in the UK for a week.

I flew through Atlanta on my way to Scotland. I still think Atlanta is a rather strange place. The hotel bus driver took me past a pub on the way to the hotel. Great - I thought somewhere to have a beer and some food before bedtime. However, I went in the pub, having been warned "not to carry anything in the street by the hotel receptionist, as it is a bad area!" and was the only non "African American" person there. Despite a number of funny looks by the other customers, this didn't seem a big problem for anyone there, especially the staff, but it's a shame that 40 years after Martin Luther King died that there is still a form of self-created segregation in the southern states of the US. The pub I was in last year near the hotel was all white!

Some nice food I had in 'Frisco airport before I got the plane. Can you imagine that this was $17 though?

I took lots of nice pics with my new Nikon camera. This is Edinburgh coming into view! I went Continental, I like to support the airlines that fly direct to Scotland. However, having lost my luggage (then found it again 5 hours later) and neglected to deliver the vegetarian food I ordered, I'm not sure I'll use them again.

Scotland can look beautiful at this time of year. I got great weather when I was there in April, then amazingly good weather in October. I believe the bit in between that I missed was not so good.

I do love the kind of effects you can get shooting in the late afternoon light. This was Broughty Ferry looking particularly lovely.

Had a fun day with my sister (magnusmog.blogspot.com) photographing venues in Kirkcaldy for the website. This one, unlike three of the others that are now old people's homes, looks pretty much the same as I remember it when we played there in 1986.

Back down to Edinburgh later in the week, staying in a different Travel Inn this time. This one is in Lauriston place, sad to say I believe this may have been built on top of the classic Edinburgh goth pub, the Tap of Lauriston. At around 10.00 every morning I kept hearing voices.... The above was the answer, the tour buses outside my window, stuck at the traffic lights.

It was great to see the guys again. As a coincidence, my mate Andy of Tom's New Shoes (he's on the right in this pic, Craig who was the bass player of TNS is on the left) was playing with his new band "The Smallest Bones" in Leith on the Saturday when I was there.

Went on a little nostalgia tour of places I used to know. Some of my socialising was screwed up my my cool Sony Ericsson camera phone being no good as a phone in Scotland!

Back to the US via Atlanta Georgia for the Procuri conference.

We had to go up on the stage on the first day in front around 250 people. Good thing it was early on the first day - got it over with quick!

See what I mean, big hall!

My colleague Amit up on the stage.

It was nice to catch up with some of the team in Atlanta again.

They are building some impressive new buildings around where my hotel was in the Buckhead district. Some of these are doing for as much as $1M.

Back home to 'Frisco and is this not the most cliched image of someone in San Francisco you can imagine! Third time on a trolley car, but I'd never hung off the side before! I finally got my green card, having been approved for it back in May. I have a pic of me holding it, but I'm advised I may be a victim of identity fraud if I post that!

Scotland Wins Third Consecutive World Cup

2007-09-14T16:10:00.000-07:00

September 14, 2007 - Sun Scotland defeated France to win the Sun Soccer World Cup. After regulation ended scoreless, Scotland outscored France 3-1 in a penalty shootout to win the trophy for the third consecutive year. The Netherlands A team beat Spain 2-0 for third place.

Shame it's not the real world cup, though nice to see that Scotland can beat France at Sun football as well as the real thing!

France 0 Scotland 1

2007-09-13T20:53:00.000-07:00

Scotland scored probably their best football result ever yesterday. Having managed to beat France in Scotland one nil, we beat them by in France one nil too. I really enjoyed the celebratory podcast in the car when I was driving to work this morning.

Spookily enough, here is a copy of a mail I sent to a friend in San Francisco two days before the match - "....Aw ra best and hae a guid time. Scotland 3 Lituania 1, France 0 Scotland 1". Now, who could have predicted that result?

Ron the Walker

2007-09-11T21:00:00.001-07:00

L1020328.JPG
Originally uploaded by tomreid

We met this amazing guy on Sunday. I had been persuaded into doing a "slightly challenging" walk on Sunday. This was at Marin Headlands which is just over the Golden Gate from San Francisco. The area slightly to the north of 'Frisco is very different from the urban nature of 'Frisco and is full of open spaces.

We met Ron whilst we were having lunch. He walked up to us shouting that this was his first sight of the Golden Gate Bridge, we gave him some plumbs.

Ron is walking from Portland Oregon to Morgan Hill California, 865 miles! Ron seemed an amazing guy and his son is documenting his travels at http://www.solowalker.thruhere.net/

Happily I survived walking four miles (as opposed to Ron's 865!) with some knee trouble for a bit, which has cleared up now.

Marin Headlands was home for a while around World War 2 for some coastal defenses. These contained huge guns, which happily were never fired in anger. The buildings containing the guns have been disused for years, but are now open every so often, staffed by volunteers.

There is loads of strange grafitti in these old buildings, it makes the space seem quite surreal.

I took this pic using a flashgun, this was a huge tube behind a reinforced door. They used to use this tube to test bombs. The graffiti only becomes visible when you use the flash.

Poor Stitch was a bit knackered towards the end of the walk, he only has little legs.

We finished the day with a huge fondue meal. I particularly liked dipping the sweet things in the chocolate sauce.

More Amusing things seen in San Francisco

2007-09-03T16:55:00.001-07:00

At a coffee shop in the Mission -

Political comment -

This is what I look like most of the time

2007-09-01T12:13:00.001-07:00

Technology is incredibly useful. Computers are, I think, the most useful and interesting of all. The problem I'm having at the moment is keeping away from them. So this is what I'm looking like most of the time at the moment, despite my long suffering iBook beginning to exhibit some rather eccentric failures of keyboard, probably due to over-use. The number three is now impossible to type on this machine now.

One of the many things keeping me tied to the computer at the moment is all the interesting Kirkcaldybands.com material that's been coming in. The above came from Andy Carr. I hadn't heard from Andy since 1992, it was great to hear from him again. My mate Ritchie (see the post about him below) had guested on many occasions with Andy's blues band, The Summerfield Blues. I love this picture of Ritchie above, he looks like a real blues man.

I've also had some nice e-mails this week from Bil Gimix and Dave Acari from back in the day - keep your e-mails coming guys, knowing you are enjoying the website makes sitting here on a sunny San Franciscan afternoon working away on a website seem worthwhile!

Actually this is one of those few days in San Francisco where you wish you had air con. The window opening here is not that much use without wind! They are more like a "dow" just now, if you see what I mean. Air con provision as standard seems to stop at an invisible line as you drive up the San Francisco peninsula, around San Mateo. I suppose it's better for the environment not to run air con.

However, I have a distraction now this weekend as we have a wedding to go to. I have not worn a suit and tie since 2004 and that was just for an (unsuccessful) job interview. I had to buy new suit specially here, as I didn't even own one. Come to think of it, I don't think I even owned a tie. I can't wait to see what we look like all posh for the wedding.

Why is this bunny tied to the lampost?

2007-08-27T21:17:00.001-07:00

DSC00568.JPG
Originally uploaded by tomreid

Funny things seen recently in San Francisco

2007-08-27T21:13:00.001-07:00

DSC00565.JPG
Originally uploaded by tomreid

A bread turtle in Macys.

What is this doing here?

2007-08-26T13:26:00.001-07:00

DSC00557.JPG
Originally uploaded by tomreid

Spotted in San Francisco today.

Golden Gate Park

2007-08-25T22:46:00.001-07:00

Spent a very pleasant afternoon today in Golden Gate Park. My first introduction to Golden Gate Park was the 1986 Movie Star Trek 4 - the one where the save the Whales. They nick a Klingon spaceship that can make itself invisible and somehow fall back through time and end up in Golden Gate Park in 1986 - where they park the invisible Klingon spaceship. I always think of that invisible spaceship when I'm back there. When it landed in the movie you could only see the dents in the grass - so much for 1980's special effects.

This photo was taken in the Conservatory of Flowers, we thought it looked a bit rude!

We also spent a jolly time in that archetypal 'Frisco location - Height Ashbury. Amoeba Records on the Height must be the best record shop in the universe. I bought a ton of deleted Jazz Butcher CD's the last time I was there. Today I bought most of Robyn Hitchcock's latest works - and got talking to the guy on the till who was a big Robyn fan, although he wasn't into Syd Barrett - strange. He also thought he had all of Robin Hitchcock and the Softboys albums, but had never heard if the rare as hell "Live at the Potrtland Arms" album I have. I also bought an old favorite that I listened to incessantly in 1985 - The Violent Femmes Hallowed Ground Album. I have it on just now. Great.

I've been listening to Robyn's song - "A Man's got to know his limitations - Briggs" with it's classic 'Frisco lyrics - "You were driving in the streets of San Francisco, driving through the weather and the rain", etc. Great.

The Saddest Story from the days of the Kirkcaldy Bands

2007-08-25T07:12:00.000-07:00

I'd held off writing this story for my website for years. I suppose writing about the death of one of your closest friends will always be difficult. I also was slightly concerned about my friends family coming over the page on my website and being upset. Ritchie's been gone now for fifteen years, so I feel, if nothing else, all the feelings I had at the time he died are a bit less raw now. At the time it seemed such an inexplicable event that I think a part of me couldn't take in that one of my contemporaries had died at the age of twenty five. I had re-occurring dreams where he would just show up somewhere like nothing had happened and not believe why we would think that he was dead. I think a part of my sub-conscious just couldn't believe it. More recently I had that dream that I think most people get, the dream that you go back in time, you look like you did at the time, but have the knowledge you have now. In the dream I went back in time to 1985 and was in my mate Mark Deas's room in Dunnikier Road in Kirkcaldy, where we spent loads of time that year. All of our circle of friends was there and I had the biggest dilemma of my life. How do you tell one of our closest friends that he'd better enjoy life as he only had seven more years to live? In the dream I held off telling him. Who could say what the best thing do do would be?

The rest of this blog post is a cut and paste from www.kirkcaldybands.com. I used to have the music file up on the old site, but I couldn't bring myself to write the story behind the song. I'm glad I did it now. Ritchie was such a great guy and a huge music fan, I'm sure if he could give an opinion, he'd have wanted his 1986 debut to be available to the world.

Of course, the actual MP3 file can only be downloaded from the page at Kirkcaldybands.com, which is: http://www.kirkcaldybands.com/HTML/workshop.html

"Bill Gimix used to organise Workshop evenings in the St Clair tavern in 1985 and 1986. These were a great idea. He'd do the disco and the idea was that new bands, that didn't have the money or the fan base or the contacts to get a gig of their own, could come to the the workshop and play a 10-15 minute set. It gave many of us, including me, our first taste of being on stage. Guys would really respect the timings, not play for too long, and you could see around four or five new bands in one evening - I think the Family Shampoo (who later became the Silent Falls) played their first gig at a workshop.

The ends of workshop evenings were often a bit special. Bill would run out of bands to put on, and often we'd improvise a jam from whoever was there. My first appearance on stage was at one evening like this, in the summer of 1985. My memory is a bit fuzzy about who was actually playing in our improvised band, but I recall Mark Deas was on the drums, Andy Carr on guitar and I think Mark Carr was involved somehow too, he was maybe singing, I was playing bass. We had no concept of what we would play and Mark Deas just said, "lets just make a racket for 10 minutes". It was great, I just played whatever I felt like. I have no clue what it sounded like to the audience, it seemed to go down quite well at the time, but this was the end of the night and everyone was probably quite drunk.

The recording below was made at a workshop on March 28th 1986. There are MP3's of The Surgical Wars and Sphincter Control on this site from recordings that were made that night too. I only recorded the workshop from The Surgical Wars onwards, so I'm not sure who else played that night, maybe it was The Family Shampoo or Gene Regulation.

This is another jam, made out of members of other bands. Andy Carr (after he left Sacristy and before he formed the Summerfield Blues) is on bass (playing my bass in fact) and sings the first vocal, Davey Wallace from the Gimix is on guitar and sings the second vocal, Bill Gimix from the Gimix, Sphincter Control and The Surgical Wars is on the drums - making his third appearance on stage that night and Andy Carr, Mark Carr and I's old School friend, Ritchie Smith is on Harmonica.

This may have been Ritchie's first appearance on stage. He had been talking about learning to play the harmonica for a number of months, but I had never heard him play with a band before. Seeing him go up on stage that night, I was concerned that he may be no good - but I was blown away by his playing - he is by far the best thing about this recording. I was amazed by the volume too!

Ritchie went on in the late '80's and early 90's, to play with a number of local blues bands. I regret it now, but not being much of a blues fan myself, I only saw him play once or twice, and can't recall which bands he played in. He may have been the Tubesnakes amongst others - Robin Deas (Mark's brother) played with them too. Ritchie used to drag me along to see blues bands at places like the Preservation Hall in Edinburgh, but I could never completely get into it - I guess blues is something you either get or you don't.

Ritchie and I were close friends towards the end of high school, lost touch a bit in his first year of university, but met again in the glorious summer of 1985. He had taken on a "hippy" image at Edinburgh Uni and I can still picture him walking towards me wearing an afghan coat, hair all over the place, in the Bevie Park around July 1985. He was a big part of our little circle of friends in the mid to late '80's and he was one of the people who made that time so special.

As the '80's turned into the '90's Ritchie developed clinical depression. To my enormous regret, I think we were all too young at the time to really see how serious his condition was. He also began to slowly distance himself from our crowd, I learned later that this need to isolate yourself is a classic symptom of clinical depression.

Ritchie took his own life in October 1992. It was a huge shock, almost impossible to believe one of our circle of friends was gone. In all the confusion, I almost missed the funeral - but Dave Acari of the Summerfield Blues called Ian and we managed to make it over to the funeral on the day. Standing outside the crematorium was the last time most of our circle of friends from 1985/6 was all together in one place. It was so strange to see all the guys again and Ritchie not to be there.

Taking his own life seemed an almost inexplicable act to me at the time, we all seemed to have so much to live for in the early '90's. As I've got older, I've got more insight into depression and can see now how life can become unbearable for some people who's minds work in a certain way.

He'd have loved this website. Back in the day, we'd show up to any gig that was on in town, he'd have been at many of the late '80's gigs that have recordings on this website, I have happy memories of many conversations with him in the Wheatsheaf, the Heritage or the Harbour Bar on the relative merits of the Ghost Train and the Gimix. He was also a huge technology fan, although he didn't live long enough to experience the internet.

So this is the way I'd like to remember him, on stage for the first time, playing the blues, in his element.

If you turn up the volume at the end of the song, you can hear some classic Skittle atmosphere. Bouncer Neil McDougal (or big fat hairy Neil as we called him) asks the band to call last orders for him, Andy Carr and Davie Wallace shout "last orders at the bar please" together and Neil shout's back "stereo!". You can also hear some friendly banter with me shouting at Ritchie and some conflicting option expressed between my sister and I on Mark Deas's jumper!"

Simon Richard "Ritchie" Smith, December 14 1966 - October 1992

Pictured in Summer 1985

Strongman and my first reel of film

2007-08-24T20:28:00.001-07:00

Strongman and my first reel of film
Originally uploaded by tomreid

I have been inspired by my sister to check out a Flickr group called Flashback Friday. You have to load a pre-1985 photo of yourself based on a certain theme every Friday. As I scanned 99% ish of my photos before I left the UK, I have many old photos easily accessible.

Photos's interest me - but the stories behind photos fascinate me even more - so here is the story I posted on Flickr:

I just love this photo. This is me at the age of 10 and a half in the summer of 1977. This photo was taken from the first reel of film I ever took. I spent the happiest days of my childhood spending long summer holidays with my Gran in Forfar (a little town near Dundee in Scotland). My Gran had given me a camera, she had got it free somehow, through some special offer or other, around 10 years previously. I still have it somewhere, it was sooo basic. It used 127 film (remember that) which took square photos. My Gran bought me a film and paid for the processing from Boots in Forfar East High Street. The film only had 12 exposures and I remember thinking long and hard before I pressed the button each time - this whole taking photos business seemed VERY expensive! I think about that these days when I continually click away with my digital cameras, what a contrast.

This is the only photo of the 12 exposures that I didn't take myself. My Gran took this one, at the bottom of the Boyle park in Forfar - oddly enough she would move to sheltered housing a few minutes walk from here around 11 years later. The T shirt is my "Strongman" T shirt. I would wear it to Physical Education at school - particularly the year previously, when we lived in Inverness. I think there was a certain irony involved in the purchase of this t shirt - I'm now blanking on who bought me it, but it seems to fit with my mother's sense of humour. I was always a complete disaster at PE and games at school and a strongman - I never was going to be. I remember having great laughs with my friends at school in Inverness with this T shirt.

When I had finished taking all of my 12 exposures of my first reel of film, and got them back from Forfar Boots, I remember being too excited to see them, opening them all on the bus, and dropping the lot on the floor. In those days people could smoke on the buses, and they'd use the floor as an ash tray, so all the photos got covered in fag ash - yuk.

I lost all my pre 1985 photos in 1985. I took my photo albums to my first student flat and left them there and never remembered to get them back. Fortunately I kept the negatives and, after a long search to find a negative scanner that could handle 127 negatives (most negative scanners have slots that are molded to handle 35mm only), I spent many happy hours in early 2002 seeing pictures that I hadn't seen since 1985 slowly emerge on the computer screen. I think I scanned the first reel of film I ever took first, it seemed kind of fitting. I was pretty surprised that the quality seemed to good. As well as the negatives surviving well for 25 years, the photos this funny little cheap 127 camera took were really quite good. My Gran thought you should only use the camera in the Sun, so the photos give the impression that summer was very sunny. The subject matter is sometimes funny. As I had to think so much before I took a photo, as they were expensive, and I only had 12, why did I take so many photos of the front and back of my Grans house?

Anyway this set of 12 photos is significant in so many ways. The birth of my interest in photography (I just noticed I have 9000 photos in my iPhoto), but most importantly, it's a little bit of time travel back to the golden days of my childhood, just before the horrors of High School, in 1978, and the onset of adolescence in 1980. The days of strawberry rolls with sugar on the top (the strawberries picked from my Grans own garden), coffee mornings with my Gran and her sisters, black and white TV and Jimmy Young on the radio. But the fondest memories are about spending summers with my favorite person - my Gran. Eleanor Allan Grieve, 1911 -1995, she's gone now, but lives on in my heart every day.

I shrunk my guitar

2007-08-24T12:53:00.001-07:00

Before:

After:

I hope nothing else will suddenly get smaller.........

Satisfaction

2007-08-23T20:20:00.001-07:00

After all the work, I'm happy to say that www.kirkcaldybands.com is up and running and better than ever - even if I say so myself. It's amazing how a tiny little thing can mess you up at the last minute though. After pretty much three days solid working on the site, I took the plunge and deleted the old and uploaded the new. Of course it didn't work the first time. I hadn't realised that the web server at the hosting company was case sensitive. Every website needs a page called index.html in its root directory, or it won't work. My "Index.html" was the reason I had to spend 40 minutes on hold with the customer support people and the world had to do without my main website for a day and a half. It shoud have been small case "index.html" - computers, eh?
There has been some, very tentative, but very interesting, excited talk over the Kirkcaldy Bands e-mail about a possible one off reunion of one or more bands next summer. As a few band members, like me, live abroad from Kirkcaldy (imagine anyone wanting to do that), this is being planned on a long time horizon - so we are talking about next Summer. But I suppose it's been 20 years, so what's another year. If the website results in even one genuine reunion of a great band from the past, to me that'd be success beyond my wildest dreams, when this website was just a funny little idea in my head in early 2000.

Above is my favourite pic of me. It was taken during the happiest period of my life (so far, there may be another........) in late Summer 1985, in Oliver's in Kirkcaldy. My sister took this photo, I was 18 at the time. It was this jacket that I wore everywhere in 1985/6 and I wore this jacket and these sunglasses at out first gig. I still own the jacket, but didn't wear it much after 1986 and stuck it in a cupboard. In the early '90's I found it again and realised it's pockets were a funny little time capsule, stuffed with bus tickets, Bentley's party invites and other junk from the day. I think there may even be a little note that Pru, who I was secretly madly in love with in the summer of '85, wrote me.

If this one off gig comes off, I hope we can get our old band, The Surgical Wars, back together again. We'd have to be bottom of the bill, because were were shite - but it'd be fun to do it. I was just thinking that some of the children of the band members may be coming up to the ages were in the mid '80s. The jacket survives with it's time capsule pockets, contained in my Edinburgh storage locker - so I'll wear it again for the gig, if I can get into it. The sunglasses got nicked at out first gig. I think I must have taken them off between songs, so I could see the audience, put them on top of an amp, forgot about them, then of course they got nicked. The "battle of the bands" prize got nicked that day too. The 21st of February 1986 was an eventful day. Lets hope for another.

Tom the Website Hermit

2007-08-19T22:32:00.000-07:00

Having finally got rid of my cold virus and had a relatively productive week at work last week, I have become a hermit this weekend. I tend to do these things. In the planning stage it seems like a good idea to tackle large website related tasks in one go. I re-created www.kirkcaldybands.com over a weekend or so in April. Having used the most crap website creation tool in the world (Rapidweaver) to do so, I now find I have to re-create the site for the third time.

Having toyed with writing my own code, and having been quite proud of myself that I managed to do a page or two, I decided that life was too short to spend it manually typing out XHTML every time I needed to add a image, etc. It's especially laborious for images, you have to type out the exact pixels you want the image to be, etc. I therefore spent the $400 that I've been putting off spending and have bought a "state of the art" GUI web creation tool, Deamweaver.

It's really not the easiest thing to use in the world either, being pretty complex and most of CSS (cascading style sheets) are still a mystery to me. But I'm delighted to say that, as of 10.30pm local time, the re-born site is happily uploading to the remote server, the result of a weekend and a half's work. There will be some loose ends, but it has been worth it. I think the site looks better, and most importantly, I can update it again without all the aggravation of the mind numbing slowness of Rapidweaver (an inappropriate name if I ever heard one!) and the frequent crashes whilst saving, resulting in lost work.

It's great timing, as the site has uncovered some very interesting finds in the last weeks which I've been able to upload to the new version. Julie Watt of The Amused, who now works for Telstra in Brisbane Australia, was in touch and she e-mailed me some very cool pics of the band, one is above.

My favorite find though, is Davie Brown from the Ghost Train's audio tape, which Ian enhanced, edited and transfered to the above CD, which I got on Saturday. It contains some absolutely cracking material, I now see that it is not just nostalgia, the Ghost Train were a tremendous band - shame they split 17 years ago. There is even a radio interview with some of the Ghost Train members, talking about the local scene and their plans to make it big - amazing.

But, of course you can only sit with an iBook for so long and I'm now going slowly mad and am desperate to do something that does not involve computers for a bit. Not an easy task in 2007! It's almost 11pm now, so time to go to bed. Then I'll get up on Monday morning, get dressed, have a shower, something to eat, then - guess what? Go to the computer to begin work! At least it'll be a different computer.

Back in the land of the living (almost)

2007-08-12T22:19:00.000-07:00

Having managed to go to India and back in a week and covering three different Indian cities when I was there, I had quite a contrasting week last week, in that I only managed a brief and unmemorable trip to Menlo Park, but apart from that I didn't leave the apartment at all from Monday night to Friday night. I feel like the rest did me good, but still can't completely shrug off this bloody cold virus.

I have been busy re-creating www.kirkcaldybands.com using Dreameaver this weekend. Dreamweaver is a very complex web creation and site management tool and I've only mastered a tiny amount of its functionality. However, I think the new site is looking good. It'll probably be next weekend until I have it in a state to upload and replace the rather tatty looking Rapidweaver version (or rather, it looks tatty now compared the new version).

I was at the Ex - Pat European's club in San Francisco today, although it's now been re-branded "Bay Area Friends of Europe". It was good fun and I finally met someone from the same country as me, an Aberdonian no less. It was the very first time that, when I had that sinking feeling in my as I was asked one of the "stock" questions that I always get asked - "which part of Scotland are you from", that I had finally met someone who would know where Forfar was!

Geoff Lewis, who is the brains behind Bay Area Friends of Europe (or BAFoE), is pictured in the middle of the group above. Erdem from Turkey is on the right.

Double Yuk, Not Amused

2007-08-07T20:35:00.000-07:00

I've taken a rare day off sick today. It's been a funny day at Sun. I just got my biggest bonus ever and the company also announced further job cuts on the same day. They are "targeted job reductions" so it's not across the board, but the hint is that it'll effect our group. I'm pretty sure I'll survive this as I have the five or six other layoffs I've survived since 2001, but it's a rough old corporate world out there. No wonder most people worry about being off sick in this country. Personally, I just think it's a toss up between being sick for a week and being ineffectual at work as a result, and taking a day off, completely relaxing and getting your energy back, in the hopes of a speedier recovery - which seems to be coming.

So I've been passing the time with mindless web surfing and I just watched 3 episodes of Heroes on my iPod. George Takei and Chris Eccleston in the same episodes - targeted guest stars for the sci fi fans, or what? Having said that both were pretty good, Chris Eccleston especially, though it was funny to hear Mr Sulu finally speaking Japanese.

I also got some nice mails today from Julie Watt who was the singer in the Amused, as featured on the Kirkcaldybands website. She lives in Australia but says she still has her Ghost Train badge. I didn't know they even had badges.

Tom's New Shoes - The Video

2007-08-07T18:47:00.000-07:00

A taster for the forthcoming website: www.tomsnewshoes.com

Tom's New Shoes were a band from Edinburgh in Scotland. They were active in 1990 and 1991 and played a kind of catchy inde rock. They centered around the musically talented lead guitarist Andy Jeffries and Craig Smith on bass (later of the Joyriders). Craig wrote this song. Andy Tait was their singer and he had boyish good look s and all my female friends fancied him. They are shortly to be immortalised on a new tribute site.

Please look at my India Pics:http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomreid/

2007-08-06T19:50:00.000-07:00

I just added some informative captions to my 90 odd India pics at my above Flickr page. Please take a look. Maybe you can help me identify where this is and why there is a big pic like this in a Bangalore hotel. I think the building style looks just like Edinburgh. Or am I imagining things?

Yuk

2007-08-06T18:54:00.001-07:00

Having spent loads of $ on "airbourne", that American preventative for getting germs off your fellow economy class travelers, I have come back from India with the thing I least expected - a cold!

I was thinking I got it when I was there, but maybe I got it on the flight. I always pride myself at having a really good immune system, when most people get viruses they normally seem to pass me by. I must not be immune to this virus as I probably got it off an India person, or maybe a German person on the Lufthansa flight.

Having struggled with it all day I went for a drugs shop at Safeway. This stuff is great, the effect was almost instantaneous. I had been sniffing and wiping my nose all day and it dried up almost immediately. Hope there are no nasty side effects.

So stuff Airbourne - does anyone believe it works?

Bangalore Traffic

2007-08-06T18:09:00.000-07:00

You really have to experience the traffic issues in India to really believe it. Before I went there for the first time I couldn't grasp why the guys I worked with kept going on about it. Well, here is us trying to turn left at one of the busiest intersections in the country, the left turn into Electronics City in Bangalore. This car ride took 90 minutes to get from the airport to Electronics City. Our plane journey from Hyderabad to Bangalore only took 60 minutes!

New Shoes, New Website

2007-08-05T23:00:00.001-07:00

My next web project is a tribute site to the band that was named after my shoes - Tom's New shoes.

Andy J, guitarist of the band, has been sending me images, most of which I haven't seen before, and has sent me most of the bands recorded material. It's been hugely enjoyable hearing the band again and I have loads of ideas for their website.

Another Tag

2007-08-05T12:22:00.000-07:00

Owing to only being able to dive into the blogosphere every so often over the last two weeks, I only just noticed that my sister (magnusmog.blogspot.com) had tagged me with this new task. So I will try to dig out some ideas out of my miasma of jetlag.

What were you doing 10 years ago?

Working very hard to get out of Swindon, where I throughly hated living. I had moved there as it was the only way to get my much deserved promotion from BT. This working very hard involved much traveling back to Scotland for job interviews and also much traveling to Ireland for job interviews too - Ireland being my other Celtic country I fancied living in. Goodness knows how I managed to take so much time out of what was not an easy job I was doing at the time. It eventually paid off with a move to West of Scotland Water in Glasgow in 1998. Just goes to show you that if you work hard enough at something for long enough that things tend to work out.

What were you doing 1 year ago?

Getting acclimatised to a new life in California, beginning to get used to the place and to quite like it. Probably spending a load of time driving between San Jose and San Francisco, to do loads of events with www.bayarealinkup.com in 'Frisco.

Five snacks you enjoy:

I'm not tremendously interested in snacks, much to the mystification of other people I spend time with. I think not eating between meals was pretty much drummed into me when I was young, so I never got into the habit. But here are a few things from the top of my head.

1. Cheese biscuits

2. Chocolate digestive biscuits, especially the chocolate orange ones

3. Crisps

4. Black olives

5. Cheese

Five songs that you know all the lyrics to:

I don't think I can answer this one, as remembering song lyrics is one of my special powers and there are probably around 5000 songs that I know all the lyrics of. OK, instead I'll do five songs that have the lyrics that are most likely to pop into my head at any given moment. These pop into my head either because they express a thought that I have often, or are just soooo good:

1. Wreckless Eric - Whole Wide World

2. The Only Ones - Oh Lucinda (Love Becomes a Habit)

3. Van Der Graaf Generator - Lemmings

4. Pink Floyd (Syd Barrett) - Mathilda Mother

5. The Beatles (John Lennon) - I'm So Tired

Five things you would do if you were a millionaire:

I'm not really a very materialistic person. I think the bulk of consumption, especially in this country, is a capitalist con. I've probably got enough money just now to have most things I actually want, which is not much really, but if we are in fantasy land, then:

1. Donate to KALX. They can be found at kalx.berkeley.edu and are by far the best student / volenteer run college radio station in this area. They are on just now and are normally the soundtrack of my Sunday mornings.

2. I was always very sad that I never got to know my grandmother on my fathers side. She was born within a year or two of my grandmother on my mothers side who I was very close to until her death at the age of 84 in 1995. My grandmother on my fathers side died of cancer in the 1950's. It seemed so unfair that one grandmother had half the lifespan of the other, so I'd donate a ton of money to cancer research and hope that one day we can find a cure and /or better treatments. I also had a friend who died of a brain tumor at the age of 35 in 2002. What a waste.

3. I'd buy a house overlooking a loch in Sutherland and have a spare room full of recording equipment. I'd quit my job, move there and finally have enough time to play instruments properly and write and record all the songs that are just ideas in my head at the moment.

4. I'd donate money to help people with depression. One of my best friends died through suicide caused by depression in 1992. I think of him a lot and it's still impossible for me to really understand how he could find life so unbearable at the age of 26 that he was driven to end his own life. I've had such a great life and want it to go on and on and I think what he could have done and achieved from the age of 26 onwards. He should have had the chance. He was one of the guys who I had the best time of my life with in the summer of 1985, which was the time in my life that inspired me to create by creating www.kirkcaldybands.com. It seemed that by 1992 the party was truly over.

5. I'd have a big party and form a band with my mates and play a long set of my own songs. I think I would only have an audience for a live set if I bought people free drink to watch it!

Five bad habits:

1. Starting books and never finishing them. My sister had much better reading habits than me when we were growing up and I think I never got into the habit.

2. Not answering the phone, I hate the phone.

3. Not cleaning the bathroom often enough.

4. Being nasty to the cold calling people when I do answer the phone. It's annoying have someone try to sell you something when you are not at work and you are a professional Buyer, but I'm sure no one is a cold calling professional out of choice.

5. Being grumpy with the flight attendants on long flights when I feel like shit.

Five things you like doing:

1. Writing my blog

2. Listening to loads of good music on Mr Pod when going down to the Mission Ale house on the little train and then having a beer at the Mission.

3. Writing songs

4. Taking photos

5. Watching Doctor Who

Five things you would never wear again:

1. Black raincoat. There were many clothes in my late teens and early 20's that I wore and wore and wore as I had no money to buy any more.

2. Knackered old shoes. I wore the same shoes for so long between 1989 and 1990 that when I got new ones, my mate Andy named his band after my new shoes.

I can't think of anything else here. I don't think that much about clothes. Is this survey designed for girls?

Five favorite toys:

1. Lieca D-Lux 3 digital camera

2. Video iPod

3. Sony Ericsson camera phone

4. Apple iBook. Its so well used that it's track pad is getting shiny. Its batteries go on forever on long airplane journeys and it is so rugged that it seems unbreakable.

5. 20" iMac, lovely big screen, I'm using it right now!

Is blog writing a cure for jetlag? Maybe!

ZZZZZZZ and Mr Pod's Movies

2007-08-05T10:22:00.001-07:00

After traveling for over 20 hours yesterday, I have now managed to sleep for 15 hours. I think that may be the longest ever sleep. I now have this loud buzzing in my head that I think must be a reaction to the roar of the 'plane's engines for all that time.

Especially as the entertainment was so bad on Lufthansa, I was so grateful or the miracle of technology that is the video iPod.

The films I can remember watching were -

Notes on a Scandal - Wonderful performances by Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett and especially Bill Nighy.
Touching the Void - Great scenery, amazing story, but I was tempted to wonder why anyone would be so keen to volunteer to put themselves in so much danger. I'm not a risk taker in that way myself.
Holywood Ending - Poor Woody Allen having temporarily run out of ideas and, very unusually for Woody, it was too long.
Bullets over Broadway - I thought I hadn't seen this before , but as I got into this I realised I had. Some predictable ideas from Woody Allen but very enjoyable.
Orphans - Very bleak, but great all the same. The ripper had managed to get the subtitles stuck on the "on" position, so I had to have the subtitles that were put on the movie so the Americans could understand Glaswegian switched on all the time. They kept translating "fag" as "smoke".
Heartlands - No subtitles, despite the weird northern english accents. I only wanted to see this one as Mark Kermode said that this was one of the best uses of one of my favorite songs, Wreckless Eric's Whole Wide World, in a movie. It was a nice little low budget UK movie.

New York Doll (the Arthur Kane movie) - The only film I watched on the plane that I was knowingly watching for the second time. One of the saddest, most uplifting, most touching and most bizarre stories in the history of rock and roll. Arthur was a true gent and a much better bass player than he was ever given credit for. I'm still so sad he is no longer with us.
New York Dolls (the reunion gig) - Amazing they could be so good after not playing together for 29 years, only having a week of rehearsal and Arthur's bass only removed from a pawn shop a month before. Good old Morrisey for being the guy who got the Dolls back together again.

The Longest Day

2007-08-04T16:09:00.000-07:00

I was sitting here in the departure lounge of Bangalore airport when Saturday August 4th began. I'm now sitting back in my normal living room at 4.11pm on the same Saturday after flying for 18 hours. As we had to connect to our flight in Germany, I've been in three continents in one day.

It's a small world after all and I'm very tired, trying to stay awake until a roughly normal bedtime so I don't mess up my body clock more than it has to be.

Back to Bangalore

2007-08-02T08:14:00.001-07:00

I've now been from Chennai to Bangalore, then from Bangalore to Hyderabad, then back to Bangalore again. Hyderabad was incredibly rainy so we got stuck in traffic for ages last night trying to get to a very nice local restaurant. The Hyderabad area is famous for nice food, I didn't know that before, the restaurant last night was very good.

Back to Bangalore again today and did the normal game of trying to find our driver amongst all the other scrum of drivers, porters and beggars.

A final supplier visit here in Electronics city tomorrow then some shopping, then off back to SFO on Lufthansa again.

With all the travel and jet lag and work I can't remember ever being so tired, but at least no stomach trouble yet.

Rainy Chennai

2007-07-30T15:50:00.001-07:00

Arrived in Chennai very late Sunday night / Monday morning. There was a huge thunderstorm, the sky lit up light it was day again.

The day cleared up quite nicely later thought - it was great to see the team again.

Lufthansa

2007-07-30T15:45:00.000-07:00

I realised I'd need to re-write some of the last post if I was to put the pic in there, so here is a new post with my Lufthansa plane in Frankfurt photo. Dead on time, but no TV's in the back of the seats! The entertainment was very 1970's, everyone had to watch the same move, and it was "Night at the museum"! Thank goodness for iPods!

Picture of big Lufthansa Jet to go here

2007-07-29T01:15:00.000-07:00

I'm in Frankfurt airport, isn't technology wonderful - enjoying wifi at 13 eur for 3 hours off t mobile. It seems the money I gave to t Mobile for 24 hours service in 'Frisco airport is not good here.

It's weird, you hit the regular blogger website address here and it talks to you in German! My German really is non existent, but I can guess what the buttons mean as they are all in the regular places.

Germany is rainy and overcast this Sunday Morning, although my body thinks it's still Saturday night. Welcome to summer in Europe.

My faithful little iBook, not in it's first flush of youth, was a star all the way through the flight from 'Frisco to here and I have finally filed away and deleted a huge quantity of work e-mail that had been bugging me for ages. It was like re-capping on my previous three months work. There is just no way I would have found a spare three hours to sort the e-mail out in any other context than sitting on a plane for hours, even though the laptop had to be at a very strange angle due to to horrors of economy class and the person in front having reclined their seat, as ever. All the e-mail filing made the time go very fast and I only had time to watch the New York Dolls reunion gig and an episode of Heroes on the iPod.

I took a picture of the Lufthansa plane I took over, but I don't have the cables for my Leica just now, so I'll need to upload that later - so this is the first blog post with no pic, for now. I managed to forget to charge the battery for the Leica, so it took the Lufthansa photo with it's last breath of power, red battery graphic flashing away.

I actually managed to forget my charger for the iBook and leave it in the Claremont yesterday, so after a fruitless little attempt at buying a new one (in Best Buy of all places in 'Frisco - aren't they just the WORST assistants in the world there? Youth does not always have advantages) I had to go back to the Claremont and retrieve the old one. So I went from Berkeley to 'Frisco twice yesterday. It wasn't all bad, we found a nice vegetarian Chinese in Berkeley and I had pretend chicken and a nice Chinese beer.

So the flight to India is in a hours time so we better start to wonder where the departure gate is.......

Claremont

2007-07-26T22:06:00.001-07:00

I'm staying the night at this beautiful hotel in Berkeley at the moment. I'm at an "offsite" which is a bunch of us Sun people getting together away from the phones and e-mail for 2 days to strategise.

Seemingly this is one of the few wooden hotels left in the Bay Area, all the others burned down! Our meeting room has some wonderful views over the Bay to San Francisco and the Bay Bridge. I must try to get some pics of that tomorrow.

Off to India on Saturday, more on that later. I'm not looking forward to the journey.......

Being a Tourist in the Bay Area

2007-07-06T11:02:00.000-07:00

I haven't been doing much blogging lately as I have an old friend staying with me and I am having fun taking photographs and seeing my home area like I'm a tourist again.

This is us in Castro Street in 'Frisco on the 4th of July.

Our adventures in photographs are all here - http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomreid/

Authentic or what?

2007-06-24T21:51:00.001-07:00

I dropped into O'Flaherty's Irish pub tonight. On a Sunday, we have the particularly silly experience of an "Irish" band.

I've seen the band vary from around eight people, to the three they had tonight. One thing remains constant though, the music seems as fake as you can imagine. I'm sure these people have good intentions, but you'd need to have never been within a thousand miles of Ireland to think that the noise these people make was anything to do with Ireland.

Real pubs in Ireland have so much atmosphere you could stick it in a bucket and sell it. Obviously it doesn't travel well though, as the inside of my refrigerator has more atmosphere than this place. And the Stella is over priced and flat.

Friendly advice to Americans - if you want to go to an Irish bar, go to Ireland.

"Reasons to love the Mission Ale House" - the biggest reason is not on this poster. That's the reason that is that it's not trying to be Irish. It's just trying to be a good bar, and that makes it the best bar in San Jose.

Pain in the Neck

2007-06-24T21:30:00.001-07:00

I suffer from chronic neck pain. When I was first told that it was really scary. I thought the phrase "chronic pain" meant that you would have it all the time. But like most things, the words really mean something different. "Chronic" in this context just means a pain that happens for no immediate reason, like being hit or anything. No physical reason. That's a good thing too, as I doubt if I could handle the maximum pain levels I suffer with this all the time.

I found these pictures on the internet tonight. It must be one of these bastards that's causing the problems. Saturday of this weekend was really wiped out due to an attack of neck pain. Happily today it seems all over again.

If you are employed in the USA and have good health insurance, the health care here is massively better than the UK. However I think the doctors here have some kind of deal with the drugs companies, as you can't get out of the doctors without a piece of paper to take the the pharmacy for some drug or other. I did a cull of the pills that didn't work a few weeks ago, but that left the above that I've been prescribed for neck pain over the past two years. Even with chucking the most useless ones out, I'm not convinced that any of the above do any good. I don't think Americans can leave the doctors without some magic pills that they believe may solve their problems.

Redwood City Blues Jam

2007-06-22T17:40:00.001-07:00

I haven't been here for ages. This is the Wednesday blues jam at the Little Fox Theatre in Redwood City. The last time was the day before I was supposed to be flying back to the UK for Christmas. I said goodbye to my friends in America, then got stuck in the US due to the fog at Heathrow, so I had to say hello to everyone again. It was just as well, if I had to chose between being in a bar in San Francisco or stuck sleeping on the floor at Heathrow, I know what I'd chose.

We had sushi in a Japanese restaurant down the road. I saw these sushi rolls in the vegetarian section of the menu. They were called "Cats Eyes" rolls, as they had mushrooms and olives in them. I asked the waitress if they were vegetarian or did they really have cats eyes in them, and she didn't understand that was supposed to be a joke. Two of our party had lived in Japan for a while, although they didn't know each other before, they lived in Japan at the same time. I learnt some interesting cultural things from them about Japan.

I took a number of very dodgy photos. This is "Amy Lou's Blues", Amy Lou herself was very lively, if a little scary at times.

One of our party was also singing with one of the bands, she was very good. They did a version of "Take me to the River".

When I left they were playing "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" on a big outdoor screen in the town hall square opposite the Little Fox.

End of the Great American Stella Shortage

2007-06-19T21:55:00.001-07:00

I'm pleased to report that the great American Stella shortage seems to be over, as evidenced by the beer taps of the Mission Ale House on Friday.

Not this even now

2007-06-19T21:51:00.001-07:00

When you do a Google search of "Even Now Lyric" you just get pages of Barry Mannilow. Now this is truly scary:

Barry Manilow - Even Now Lyric

Even Now
When there's someone else who cares
When there's someone home who's waiting just for me
Even now I think about you as I'm climbing up the stairs
And I wonder what to do so she won't see
That even now
When I know it wasn't right
And I found a better life than what we had
Even now I wakeup crying in the middle of the night
And I can't believe it still could hurt so bad

Even now when I have come so far
I wonder where you are
I wonder why it's still so hard without you
Even now when I come shining through
I swear I think of you
And how I wish you knew
Even now

Even now
When I never hear your name
And the world has changed so much since you been gone
Even now I still remember and the feeling's still the same
And the pain inside of me goes on and on
Even now

Even now when I have come so far
I wonder where you are
I wonder why it's still so hard without you
Even now when I come shining through
I swear I think of you
And God I wish you knew
Some how
Even now

What is this? A lost classic from the band that never was - The Uppermost

2007-06-19T19:43:00.000-07:00

Four years after the real heyday of the Kirkcaldy Bands, or my involvement with them, I formed a band with Steve Ellis and Jim Macdonald. Steve called it "The Uppermost" I thought that was a great name, very 1960's. I later found out it was was inspired by the name of a shoe shop that was up the road from no 1 Downfield Place where I lived at the time, and where Steve is pictured above. He also thought "Hair by Alphie" would be a good name too, that was a barbers shop in Fleshmarket Close.

Steve was an amazing guy at this time. We had been mates since school and he introduced me to tons of good music that I still love today. Artists and bands such as Robyn Hitchcock, The Television Personalities, The Velvet Underground and The Only Ones, to name only a few. Steve was in the year below me at college and his best mate from that class was Jim Macdonald.

Jim often spoke about being a guitarist, but I never heard him play until 1990 which is when we decided to form the band. I can't remember why it would have taken the three is so long to think about this, Steve and Jim had known each other since the Autumn of 1984. Could be that we had the collective lack of self confidence in ourselves as musicians and performers that can be in bred at school in Scotland.

However we did get together around March of 1990. Jim on guitar and backing vocals, Steve on vocals and me on rhythm guitar and bass. We worked out the beginnings of a set list and had a few practices in Niddrie Street in Edinburgh. The rehearsal spaces in Niddrie Street were quite an experience. They were in a kind of cellar complex. Water continually leaked in and I had my amp sitting in a puddle for the whole of one practice, I was convinced I would die for my art. If you needed to go to the toilet you had to go to the nearest pub, which was Bannermans in the Cowgate. I always found it difficult to go to the toilet there and not want to stay in the pub.

As ever, our set list was an uneasy compromise between the different band members musical tastes. As I recall, I didn't contribute many ideas to the song selection, so that may have also lead to some unhappiness from me over what we were playing. I can remember doing a version of Nick Cave's "City of Refuge" from his, then current album. I liked "Mercy Seat" from that album better. Though I did love our version of Altered Images "Insects". I liked the thought that I doubted that anyone else would have thought of doing an Altered Images cover. I also nicked, or "was inspired by", the chords in it's verse for "This is Radio Poohead", two years later. I don't think anyone noticed. Actually, there is a Robyn Hitchcock "inspired" lyric in that song too.

The real highlight of the set was the one almost original thing that we did. It was a version of "Wanted Man", which had been recorded by Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash. They lyric lists all the places where an outlaw is wanted:

"Wanted man in Kansas City, wanted man in Ohio,
Wanted man in Mississippi, wanted man in old Cheyenne" etc.

And it ends with the lovely lyric that goes something like: "The only place I'm not wanted is that place inside your heart":

But Steve re-wrote the lyric to give is a Scottish theme:

"Wanted man in costal Dysart, they want me in Kirkcaldy too" etc.

I thought this was great, Steve at his creative best. As this version of the song never saw the light of day, I felt I owed it to the world to write a song on a similar theme that became one of Ian's least favorite Pooheads songs, "Johnny Fife", my fife folk tale:

"Johnny went out traveling across the field of Burntisland
Traveling through Kirkcaldy to find his magic wand" etc.

We had the problem that we had with bands before though, no drummer. Our Niddrie Street practices were therefore drummerless, which made the whole thing less exciting. Tom's New Shoes had just got started at the time and in the fragments of audio tape I have of the Uppermost, you can hear the sound of them rehearsing in the space next door. They had a drummer so were a lot louder than us! I used to play guitar and bass on different songs, which lead to us sounding even more funny. By that time I had got rather bored with bass and the guitar seemed more exciting. Also I never thought I was any good at the bass, which most people seemed to agree with.

As usual, I taped more or less everything we did on my faithful old Marantz mono cassette recorder (bought in 1982 to record the audio of Blake's Seven off the telly, we had a video by this time, but tapes were horrendously expensive!), but we had the normal problem of tapes going missing. Steve lent one to an ex girlfriend of mine, although she wasn't a girlfriend of mine until 1995. I think Steve was into her at the time, he may be trying to impress her. I don't think she was impressed and we never got that tape back. May be a good thing, as my memory of it was that it was not very good. There was only one rehearsal tape that survived and I made a compilation of the bits of that that were reasonably ('reasonably" being a relative term) presentable and that was the only record of this band I had for years until I found the original tape when I was preparing to move to the states and I realised that I had indeed preserved the only bits worth preserving. The complication is only about 20 minutes long as well.

The same girl that Steve was trying to impress with our Uppermost tape had a friend who was much more impressed at the time with Steve and they ended up getting married and having five children together. They got together at the same time as The Uppermost were trying to get off the ground, so I think Steve's mind began to be elsewhere. The girl became known by Jim as "the Yoko Ono of the Uppermost", I thought he seemed to be taking the whole thing to seriously. My interest waned at the same time too, for not as good a reason as Steve's. I think I missed working with Ian, I think we understood each other better. We must do, we have been making music on and off now for 22 years. So The Uppermost fell to bits leaving only a great Scottish version of "Wanted Man" and some chords and ideas I stole for Pooheads songs.

Actually, the Pooheads were born around 18 months after the end off the Uppermost, it seemed that there was a longer gap between the two at the time. I suppose time goes slower when you are in your early '20's.

So why was I thinking about The Uppermost this weekend? Well I found a fragment of a demo tape of ideas that Jim Macdonald made and gave to me to try to get some ideas going for songs we could do. I was not immediately taken with many of the ideas. This is always awkward as it's difficult to say to someone that you don't know too well that you don't like something they've done. I think there were loads of versions of a Scottish folks song called "Wild Mountain Time" and maybe a Johnny Cash song or two.

But one song really stuck in my head and has grown on me over the years. For reasons I can't recall, this was one of the first songs I digitised in 2000, when I first got the equipment. This is a good thing, as I struggled in vain to find the original tape in 2005, so I may never hear Jim's version of "Wild Mountain Time" again.

The song that survived is called "Even Now" and over the years I've been fascinated to know if it was a Jim Macdonald original or a cover. The last time I saw Jim was at Steve's stag do in 1991, so we have been out of touch for a long time. I find the song fascinating though. It has all these strange jazz chords in it. Actually, the same jazz chords that prevented the Pooheads from doing their own version of it, probably a good thing. But the lyric. What a lyric. Weirdly compelling, strange, disturbing and slightly sick. Like some tragic art movie in song. In truth, Jim had a better voice than Steve and his performance on this demo was just right. I can just imagine listening this on a rainy Sunday afternoon in Scotland watching the rain slide down the windows. It's chilling in a spooky kind of way.

One of my theories is that this could have been a poem that Jim set to music, it sounds like the words could stand up on their own right without the music.

Thanks to the wonders of the internet, the song is posted here:

http://www.andrewcrescent.com/page6/page8/page8.html

The level is quite low, so if you listen please turn up your computers. It's also pretty hissy as the MP3 was made from a second generation analogue copy and was probably originally recorded on basic equipment.

I'd love to find out if anyone knows what this song actually is. Or maybe it is indeed a lost potential Uppermost classic? From a quick check of the font of all knowledge, Wikipedia, it states that "Even Now" was Barry Manilow's second album. I don't suppose it was the title track of that.

Talking of Edinburgh bands of the early '90's, my next web project is a Tom's New Shoes tribute site. Well somebody's gotta do it. Andy J, the guitarist of the band that was named after me, has dug up a ton of material so we got a lot to use to put a site together. I have obviously forgiven them for having a dummer and being louder than the Uppermost in Niddrie Street.

So maybe if "Even Now" is a lost classic, all that standing about in puddles in Niddrie Street in 1990 will have been worth it.

Friends of Europe Sunday

2007-06-19T06:23:00.000-07:00

I was at the Friends of Europe meeting on Sunday. I've been going here around once a month since November 2005. The organisation started just at the right time for me, when I was looking for ways to meet new people.

Click here to check out
The Bay Area Friends of Europe!

This is run by a guy from England called Geoff and he has put together a website to publicise the group - www.bafoe.org

I took a load of photos, which Geoff has uploaded, you can see them here:

http://euro.meetup.com/80/photos/?photoAlbumId=175085&photoId=1567419

This was the biggest, in terms of the number of people we had there, ever. Loads of people from different countries.

New Challenge and 100th Post

2007-06-15T18:02:00.000-07:00

As I reach my 100th post in the blog, I've given myself a new challenge. Due to the CONTINUAL crashing of the Rapidfrustration web creation tool, I have taken Mike's advice and decided to re-do the kirkcaldybands.comn website using a much more basic HTML web creation tool, and to stop messing about with these horrible GUI tools that just crash all the time. I just got the above book, and from a quick scan it actually does not look too difficult. All that funny code put me off before, I'm not a computer programmer after all. But the code I've read so far seems pretty easy to understand , so here goes - a new project for this weekend. I think I'll be staying here in the apartment most of the weekend as it's bloody hot out there and it's making me feel sleepy.

I need to be able to re-do the site soon though, as the Kirkcaldy Bands Treasure Hunt has uncovered it's most interesting find to date. More of that in the news section of that site. Some audio of a legendary Kirkcaldy punk hand has been found, they were the godfathers of them all!

The Stix

2007-06-14T21:20:00.001-07:00

After a degree of diary co-ordination and planning, we manged to make it to our regular lunch spot again. Since we moved campuses as part of Sun's real estate consolidation, we haven't made it here much, but we managed it today and it was great to be back. There seems to be a lot of entries about food this week.

Spent the afternoon at the Sun Santa Clara campus where I worked from May 2005 to November 2006. It is a really beautiful campus, it was built in the grounds of a former mental hospital and some of the original buildings are still there, including the clock tower in the picture. It was hell for a while to try to get hold of a flexible office, but things seem to have settled down now, which is nice to know as I only live 10-15 minutes drive from here.

Made it to the really nice Santa Clara gym today, but I am really sore after overdoing it at the stability ball exercise class at Sun Menlo Park yesterday. The gym is part of the restaurant complex above, it is big and free for all employees, but the washing machine is knackered so there were no towels for showering, yuk. Good thing I live near here.

The temperature is rising. I was trying to just open the windows and avoid trying to use the aircon, but you know when you need to use the aircon when you open the windows and it gets hotter inside and you open the fridge door and want to climb in.

Being a Vegan at Happy Bamboo

2007-06-12T22:08:00.000-07:00

I was here for tea tonight, despite being late due to an accident on the I101. It is a Vietnamese vegetarian restaurant in south San Jose, I went with the Bay Area Vegetarian group. It was great because when I normally go to Asian restaurants everyone wants to order lots of dishes and share, but the vegetarians normally only have one or two dishes to choose from so it's not much use for us.

So it was great to go with a bunch of vegetarians, as we could do the dish sharing thing as this place has no meat for sale. They also had these really cute t shits that I wish I got a picture of, they had cute animals on the t shirts, drawn like a child would have drawn them, the t shirts said "Don't eat them, love them".

We had vegan food, very imaginatively done. Now I think about it, I had Chinese for lunch, which was vegan too (not deliberately). So, apart from the milk in the tea, I've had a vegan day. I don' think I've had one of them before. I eat too much dairy anyway.

Why does anyone pay for software?

2007-06-11T22:04:00.001-07:00

I found this really cool free open source web creation tool today. I wish I'd found it before I spent $65 on Rapidweaver. Can't wait to play with it.

http://www.nvu.com/index.php

Rat in a box

2007-06-11T19:26:00.000-07:00

I've had these lines of dialogue from Blakes Seven rattling round my head all day. They are from "Shadow", which was episode 2 of the second series. It has some great Chris Boucher written lines:

"Villa - Orac, Orac are you in there Orac?
Orac - Am I in where? What exactly do you imagine I am, some kind of tame rodent in a cage?
Villa - That's precisely what I imagine you are, a rat in a box"

Well, I suppose they only got Orac on the last episode of the first season, so Villa wasn't really to be expected to know how he worked. I've lived here for 2 years and a month now, and I'm still not sure how the air conditioning controller works, and Orac was a talking super computer with cool flashing lights.

Having been a tremendously indoorsy child, I hated the pressure to go out and do something I didn't want to do, like playing football, and I've found that in adulthood, and particularly since the wonderweb really got going, you can disappear into cyberspace sometimes. Add to that, working from home over the wonderweb too, and you can just spend too, too much time in the apartment. I really feel good about leaving the car sitting doing nothing and not contributing to global warming by making journeys I don't need to, but being stuck in one place all the time has it's downsides too.

So, having had enough of the apartment, I just made my first visit to the outside world since Saturday and I'm really pleased to say there is a wonderful world of California out there still. I'm going to go in the office tomorrow even though I don't really have to. This rat is released.

Rapidfrustration version 3.6

2007-06-10T16:31:00.000-07:00

A short protest note. I'm experiencing a sensation that I haven't felt for a while. Whilst trying to identify it, I'm recalling that I'm experiencing levels of computer type frustration that I haven't felt since the dark terrible days of Windows 98.

I try not to be a Mac fanatic. The important thing to remember is that quality is always relative. In deciding how good a product is, you always have to compare it with something else. So my general view is that all computers should really have been as good as Macs and the problem is that 90 odd percent of computer users only experience of computing is Windows, and that seems to set the standard that other computers are judged by. Windows has got a lot better since Windows 98, but the fact that any software company felt that such a dreadfully unreliable operating system was ready to go to market in 1998 is proof of Microsoft's distorting market dominance. A true "market failure" if I ever saw one. I have a Windows machine, a cheap Dell laptop, I bought it for the very rare task that a Mac can't do because the software is not available. XP is much more stable than '98, but I still find the user interface unnecessarily fussy and busy. I don't enjoy using it.

So I moved to the world of Mac in 2003 and never looked back. Having suffered around three or four system crashes a day on my old Windows 98 machine I really fancied taking it to the back garden and smashing it to pieces, but I thought better of it and finally sold it on eBay in 2005 for around 50 quid.

It's been pretty plain sailing when compared to the days of Win 98 ever since. No computer is ever perfect, but I use computers a lot and I suppose I really test them to destruction, and the Macs generally stand up well.

But of course a computer is only as good as it's software and it's the above software that's causing the Win 98 levels of frustration.

Rapidweaver is a website creation tool for Mac. I actually just paid $25 for the new release (V 3.6) in the hopes that this thing would improve, but no joy. I think the problem is that Rapidweaver lumps all the website content into one file. So every time you save a file the computer is handling a file the size of the whole website, so any system may be challenged by trying to save a 2 gig file for example. This bloody thing has crashed so often whilst saving today that I'm lost count, but I'd estimate it to be around fourteen times.

I'm just managed to update www.kirkcaldybands.com, but its taken forwever. I think this'll be the last update I'll do using Rapidweaver. There is nothing worse than hitting "save" not knowing if you will lose all the work you just did or not.

One of the guys from the Twist, featured on the Kirkcaldybands pages is a website designer and he's recommended Dreamweaver from Adobe. It was only it's $400 price tag and the thought of learning new software that put me off switching to it before now. Oh and of course, it'll be a bloody pain to have to recreate the website in new software. All that cutting and pasting of content and dragging and dropping image and sound files is not very interesting work and time is precious.

It's taken me four years of Mac use to find software written for that platform that is truly useless. There are loads of good free software out there for Macs, and Realmac actually charge money for this rubbish. "We make nice things for Apple Macs". Hmmm, I wonder what that is?

I'm off to watch "The Prestige" on DVD to cheer myself up, I heard David Bowie's accent in it is a laugh.

Once upon a time in Iran

2007-06-10T13:03:00.001-07:00

I stayed in the apartment last night and watched some real quality television on the iMac. Staying in to watch TV on a Saturday night would have seemed like sacrilege to me in my younger years. But this was really good stuff. One of the benefits I have it that my sister puts stuff I may like on DVD and sends it to me, so I get the best of British TV and can avoid all the crap. I don't really have time to watch much TV anyway.

This programme was fascinating. It was about a bunch of Iranian people going on a pilgrimage to Iraq. What was fascinating about it is that it is the first television I have ever seen that portrays Iranian culture from their point of view.

Of course, for a person from the North of Scotland, some of the things they say seem pretty weird. But I felt I was able to really empathise with these people and understand the beauty and importance of their culture and why it seems so different from ours.

I have met many people from the middle east since I've been here. They are amongst the funniest,kindest, friendliest and most energising people I have ever met. It's so sad that there has been so much war and destruction there. If only the internal combustion engine had never been invented, or it had ran on something else, the history of the world may have been very different.

Eurocircle Wenesday

2007-06-09T17:11:00.000-07:00

I was at Eurocircle on Wednesday. I don't really have a huge desire to meet other people from the UK, but it's nice to meet people from other parts of Europe. I met people from Albania, Sweden, Germany, Turkey and loads of Persians. I always find it a bit of a struggle to get out of the house on a weekday evening, work being what it is. Of course, not having the old Celtic drinking habit in the US, you have more chance of making it into work the next day, as an American night out is not always a drinking competition in the way that nights out in the UK can be. I'm glad I made it out though, must do it more often.

Ogre Battle

2007-06-09T17:01:00.000-07:00

Spotted on opposite the bar where a singles event I went to in SOMA in San Francisco was held on Tuesday. Seemed vaguely appropriate in in my twisted sense of humour. There is a whole singles industry developing. I'm yet to be convinced that most of it is not a lot of bollocks, just a way for people to make money, but it's good fun to meet new people if you are, relatively new to an area. SOMA (South of Market Area) is build on land reclaimed from the Bay. In the 1906 earthquake, most of it liquified. I couldn't help but remember that when I was there. I didn't wish that the earth would swallow me up at any time on Tuesday night, but if I had I'd have been in the right place for it.

The other side of shopping

2007-06-09T16:30:00.001-07:00

I've been putting off going to Safeways for three weeks now. I really hate Safeways. So today, having finally completely finished the butter and being on my emergency toothpaste, I could put it off no longer. The food situation is actually even worse than it looks. Some of what little food is here is well over its use by date. I suppose I don't hate Safeways that much. But I do hate the parking lot outside Safeways. In America they seem never to paint lines or make it clear in any way in parking lots who is supposed to give way to who. As Safeway is always very crowded on a Saturday, the parking lot is always very busy and the lack of obvious logic about how it works, as far as traffic flows are concerned, just makes it all the more stressful. Worse, and this is something about America I'm still struggling to understand, why do Americans plant themselves opposite a car that's pulling out of a space, blocking all the other traffic whilst doing so, so they can have the space that the car is vacating. Why not just drive around until you see a free space, thus avoiding all the congestion that the sitting and waiting in the parking lot with no obvious traffic flow causes? When I write my list about what I like and don't like about America, the American attitude to cars will, I'm sure, come pretty near my list of dislikes.
Americans are also notoriously litigious, so the above sign is obviously Safeways being mega careful. I didn't even hear any noise of construction. Also, where are you supposed to get the ear plugs from? As most people that go to Safeways seem to wander round with cellphones permanently stuck to their ears, how are they supposed to do that with ear plugs in? I'm sure they'd find a way.

Seen in the "Foreign foods" section today, which is where I can buy decent tea. I wondered if Safeways decided they had to stick the label with "dressing" onto the bottle in case Americans think Salad Creme is for external use only, like hand creme. Maybe it should be. Do any Americans really buy salad creme?

The shopping cart (as they say in America, and now probably all over the world thanks to to popularisation of the term by Amazon.com, etc) was very full today. I needed two trips back from the car to get the stuff up to the apartment. You will see that I managed to find some HP Sauce in the foreign foods section today.

To me it always seems a peculiar form of torture to put these terrible magazines next to the checkouts. My eyes always end up drawn to them, even though I can't stand them, in the same way that my eyes are always drawn to the American sports on the big tellys in the bars here, even though I have no clue about American sports. People even ask me the scores sometimes, I have no idea. If I was a pessimist, which I'm not, these magazines would convince me there is little hope for society. I just can't imagine why anyone would want to read about some "celebrity's" cellulite. I believe, although I don't have one, there is much more of this kind of thing on American telly. I suppose I was never much good at popular culture.

Smelling the records at Streetlight. Memories of buying records on a Saturday morning

2007-06-09T14:29:00.000-07:00

My parents used to get to the weekly shopping every Saturday morning, they liked to catch the shops before they got busy. Around 1973 I got 50p pocket money a week, and that was just enough to buy a single. Having just been entrusted with the huge responsibility of being able to spend 50p of my own money each week, the only thing I ever wanted to buy was records.

When I started buying records on a Saturday morning, they looked like the one above. I remember they went up to 53p a week due to the high 1970's inflation rates and I had to wait two weeks before getting one single, very annoying. So Saturday morning shopping time began to be associated with record buying around 1973 and it continued to be so, for a large number of years. I'd buy the record in the morning, gaze at it in the car on the way home, then rush upstairs to play it when I got home.

I love the 1970's record sleeves. I searched high and low through images on the internet of my favorite cover. It was the RCA paper cover that they had before they started using the one above. I remember it was very psychedelic, actually probably a little out of date by the time the early-mid 1970's came along, so I guess that's why they replaced it with this swirly design. But I loved the earlier one. I associate it with the incredible excitement of buying my first single, which was "Teenage Rampage" by "The Sweet". "Teenage Rampage" indeed, I was only 6! I dropped it just before I bought it, I can still picture it rolling on the floor, so it always had a crack in it that I had to smooth out before I played it. I can still hear in my mind, the beginning of Teenage Rampage with the little "click" that the crack in the record caused.

I used to buy my singles in Boots in Inverness. This is me outside of Boots in Inverness the last time I was in the city, although the photo is a bit of a cheat, the original was pulled down at the end of the 1970's. This is the new Boots which is part of the indoor shopping centre that was built on top of the old one.

Record Rendevous was just down the road from Boots, in Castle Street Inverness. I don't remember buying much here in the '70's, apart from "Whispering Grass" by "Don Estelle and Windsor Davis". Not as cool as "Teenage Rampage" ("I will not have gossip in this Jungle...."). I remember pronouncing "Record Rendevous" exactly as it was spelt, I had no idea it was a French word. There were always loads of Gaelic and Scottish country dancing records there. I remember being told that the local Gaelic community used to hang around there, I never saw them. This is poor old "Record Rendevous", obviously in it's last days in 2006. I'm glad I caught it on camera just before it went for good.

For reasons I'm not really sure about, I bought less records in the late 1970's and very early 1980's, I was probably too obsessed with science fiction at that time. But as the early '80's rolled on, the shop above became my Saturday morning ritual. I just found out actually that one of the guys in one of the bands I featured in www.kirkcaldybands.com, the Receiving End, worked here. This is Sleeves record store in kirkcaldy. I think it was called "Bruces Records" before it was called "Sleeves", I remember the bin outside still said "Bruces Bin". It was part of a little chain of record shops. I think there were three of them, I remember another was in Falkirk, I can't remember where the third one was. Towards the end of my school days, carrying around a bag with a vinyl album in it in a Sleeves bag, was almost compulsory, if you wanted to be cool. I remember being told off my one of my peers for carrying around a record in Boots bag, seems the Boots habit hadn't quite died.

Towards the middle of the 1980's I remember getting as much as 5 pounds pocket money a week, so one, or maybe depending how cheap they were, two records a week was possible. And as I could now afford albums, I didn't have to listen to the same thing over and over again on a Saturday afternoon. I bought loads of records here. I used to go in and browse and dream that one day I'd have enough money to buy as many records as I wanted. Although looking back I'm glad in a way that I didn't. Some of my musical taste is the same now as it was in the 1980's, some is very different. I'm not sure I really needed to spend money buying every Barclay James Harvest and Moody Blues records.

The ritual was pretty much the same though. Buy the record (always now an album) on a Saturday morning and listen to it on a Saturday afternoon. I don't have my 1980's diaries here, but I recall a diary entry made around May 1984 that said "bought and listened to for most of the day, Pavlov's Dog's "At the sound of the bell"". Now that's one I still listen to.

The above moody black and white shot was taken for the "Kirkcaldy Gallery" page of the original Kirkcaldy Bands website. It was taken in 2000.

Sadly, when I walked down from the train station towards the High Street in May 2004, I noticed Sleeves was empty and looked like it would soon be no more. So I took this shot with my then camera phone. It's obvious why I needed a new camera phone!

My first paying job in September 1986 was in an office block in a place called "Apex House", Leith Walk, Edinburgh. Opposite and up the road slightly was "Vinyl Villains" one of Edinburgh's premier second hand record stores. I think my first pay check was around 200 pounds. When I got it I went straight over to Vinyl Villans and bought 70 pounds worth of records. Thirteen years on from buying my first record, I obviously still thought money was just for buying records with. Vinyl Vllains was great, I hope it's still there. I bought tons of records there. Because it was a second hand place you were never sure what you were going to find there. I remember the excitement as I used to find, what was then, rare Peter Hammill and Van der Graaf Generator albums. One seemed so rare to me that I remember asking the guy to go and hide it behind the counter so that no one bought it when I went off to get money to buy it.

As the '80's turned into the '90's I still bought records, although I switched manly to CDs in the '90's. I still frequented music stores, mainly HMV and Virgin in Edinburgh's Princes St and HMV in Swindon's Regent St.

I got into online music buying very early. One of the constant frustrations of having musical taste that is not the average, was the lack of availability of material I liked in the regular music stores. So, having discovered "CD Now" which was one of the earliest on line stores and realising that you could just search for anything you wanted, I pretty much gave up on record stores after that, especially as the '2000's got going and I saw how amazingly cheap second hand CDs were on eBay and Amazon. The above pic is actually eBay's corporate headquarters, which is just down the road.

One of the huge problems of being a music fan in the '70's, '80's and '90's was the comparatively huge cost of music. No wonder illegal downloading for free got so popular. But with all these second hand CD's around, it seemed a lifetime away from being only able to afford one single every two weeks because they had gone up to 53p.

Having watched "24 hour party people" on the plane over to the UK last time I was there, and with the Ian Curtis biopic due out, I wanted to buy some Joy Division music. I was just about to reach for the iBook to buy them from Amazon, when I decided that I wanted to hear them today.

So then a radical idea struck me, why not go to a record store? And how more appropriate, I could buy then on a Saturday morning 34 years after I had first done this, and listen to them on a Saturday afternoon. So this is where I was today, Streetlight Records in Bascom Avenue in San Jose.

I remember first seeing that in America they put the CDs in these funny plastic holders to stack them in the racks in the stores on our many rummages through the record stores of Manhattan when we were in New York in 1990. I still have no idea why they do that.

Streetlight of course has tons of vinyl. I don't even have a record player at the moment, it's in storage in Edinburgh, so I didn't buy any. But they look great in the rack, much better than the CDs. I even picked up a second hand record and smelled it, took me right back to Vinyl Villains in 1986, somehow the old cardboard of the record covers smells great to me. Must be nostalgia.

I always used to straight to the "V" section in record stores, being a huge Van der Graaf Generator, Violent Femmes and Velvet Underground fan. I used to have to push past all the Eddie Van Halen to find the decent stuff.

Like often, and this is why I went so overboard on on line buying when I could, there was not even a Van der Graaf Generator section, but there was one old friend here today.

I didn't even know that they made vinyl records any more, other than the sort that DJ's use for "scratching", if that's the right hip term. So I was amazed to see this. I wish I had a record player now. This will probably explain where Marketa's songs are that are in the Movie but not "Swell Season".

So having bought the three Joy Division and one Ramones CD in Streetlight records this morning I have spent all this afternoon listening to what I bought this morning. Just like before, it's yesterday once more.

Good old Russell

2007-06-03T20:46:00.000-07:00

This is just a short fan note for Russell T Davis. Some of the more recent Doctor Who's have had their dodgy moments (witness the AWFUL accent of the Talula and some of the stereotype behaviour of the characters in "Evolution of the Daleks"), but the two parter "Human Behaviour" / "Family of Blood" was a classic.

Really thoughtful, moving, touching stuff - making the most of the vast canvas a format like Doctor Who can allow you to paint on. Good for Russell for having the idea to turn this Doctor Who novel into one of the TV shows.

Latest House

2007-06-03T18:14:00.000-07:00

Done today, for the sake of completeness. I'm not very happy with the technical quality, so I'll probably do another. Anyway, this is where I live now, North Park Apartments North First St San Jose California. May 11 2005 - ??????

Edinburgh Bus Journey

2007-06-03T14:47:00.000-07:00

I think this is rather splendid. It was taken by Heather Burns. It is composed of images of a bus journey from Leith to somewhere "up the Bridges" (that's a reference for the locals) in Edinburgh. It contains many archetypal elements of Edinburgh that the locals would know very well, as opposed to the tourist view of Edinburgh. I spotted, in particular, damp streets, a massage parlour, a Leith "scheemy" guy wearing a track suit, and many many purple buses. When I was first in Edinburgh in the 1970's as a child, it was the purple buses that stuck in my mind. Makes me homesick, I must go off and do something more practical now with my Californian Sunday afternoon.

This is another house (2005)

2007-06-03T13:46:00.000-07:00

This was taken when I was around a month away from moving to the US. I had been conducting a HUGE eBay sale of most of my possessions and the video camera was about to be packaged up and sent to it's new owner. Having remembered my 1991 video, I decided to make a record of the flat I was about to leave. I always used to say to myself that I'd know when I'd made it in life when I could afford a flat in Marchmont (Edinburgh). Well, in 2001 I could, and this is it. Of course, things are never as good as you imagine they are going to be and the same student parties that I used to go to in the mid 1980's were kinda annoying in the early 21st Century, especially as I wasn't invited. And I had to make quite a few compromises to be able to afford this place at all. It was bought needing some work done on it and my lack of ability in anything practical and the chronic shortage of tradespeople in Edinburgh meant that some upgrading never got done. I did get a nice new kitchen put in, but as you can see from the video, there was a lot that didn't get done.

I still own this place, and may live here again one day as a consequence. Thanks to the ever growing Edinburgh property market, it's now worth a load more money than the mortgage, which is nice.

Looking at the place again, it does bring back some bad memories of the other side of the work from home equation. The side where you are stuck at home ALL the time, and have to talk to Californians at 12 at night and one in the morning, when you'd much rather be in bed. Also, the place is pretty disorganised because of my big eBay sale and immanent move out.

Still, an interesting record all the same. Particularly interesting, well for me anyway, is to spot which possessions are in both the 1991 and the 2005 videos (some particularly treasured possessions went to their new owners very shortly after this video was made), even better, which possessions in the 2005 video I have here - I came here with only one bag after all. No chance that any of the possessions in the 1991 video are here (I think). Actually, no - one thing has survived it all. I couldn't bear to sell my 1987 CD 20th anniversary re-release of Sgt Pepper. It would have been sitting in Downfield Place in 1991, Livingstone Place 2005 and here it is in North Park Apartments San Jose California USA, in the week of the 40th anniversary of Sgt Pepper in 2007.

Flat 2f1, 21 Livingstone Place Edinburgh where I stayed from the 14th of December 2001 to the 6th of May 2005.

This is my house roll out the red carpet

2007-06-03T13:10:00.000-07:00

This is my first attempt at Youtube. This was recorded as a test for a video camera I had hired from Radio Rentals (remember them?), with my parents money, in July 1991. I got this huge camera home and recorded this just to get the hang of it. It was so big that you could record straight onto a regular VHS tape that you put in the camera. You can see the camera in my bathroom mirror.

What's funny now though, is that this is now a little time capsule of my life in one Downfield Place, Dalry, Edinburgh in July 1991. I had lived in this flat for almost three years at this time, and I was very proud of it. So here is my little life back in July 1991 when I was 24 years old.

Sorry the images are a bit pixelated, I may have compressed the video too tightly. Some of the original has been edited out as there were some pretty terrible technical problems with that too. The background music is The Throwing Muses - for 1991, what else?