Skip to main content

Ten Minutes with Winterfylleth

Image
By

Would you travel for over 4 hours to spend less than 10 minutes with one of your favourite bands just to get their latest album signed and a photograph? I DID! Although, someone came from Germany, so it wasn’t the longest anyone travelled.

I don’t think I’ve been to an album launch signing since July 1997 when Paradise Lost played the London Astoria on a Sunday night and they opened the Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street so that we could buy the album at midnight and have it signed. (Remember when album releases were on Mondays?).

When the email came through that Winterfylleth were doing a number of album launch appearances and one of them was in Camden on a Friday night I immediately wanted to go. And then I panicked! I’d already pre-ordered the album. Would it be here in time? Worry not! I’ve got plenty of other albums of theirs they could sign.

To add insult to injury, Mark Deeks wasn’t going to be there either.

It’s Wednesday evening. I’m in Skegness with work and I get an email saying the album’s been posted and the hoping starts. It’s late Thursday morning and I’m walking through the front door. Ring has already shown me the postman has been and there on the mat is a small, CD sized package. Could it be the album? IT IS!

I finished work early and jumped on a train to Raven Records in Camden. It’s a tiny record shop with a cafe and an alcohol free bar with lovely and welcoming staff. Just after six a nervous sounding Chris welcomed us all, invited us to have our things signed and the shop started playing the album. A few minutes later we were invited downstairs.

Chris, Simon and Nick were sat chatting to another fan who was on their way out. We sat down and they seemed genuinely pleased to see us. We chatted for a bit, Chris sent my friend Clare, who’s a massive fan and couldn’t come, a voice note, we got our stuff signed and a picture taken. I asked them to come and play in Norwich and they pointed out they were playing in Ipswich soon. Chris was not impressed when I said I was already taking my wife to see Nick Cave that night.

It was all over in fewer than ten minutes, but well worth it!




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7

By
I recently upgraded from Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7 and all of my Ant deployment scripts stopped working. I eventually worked out why and made the necessary changes, but there doesn’t seem to be a complete description of how to use Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 on the web so I thought I'd write one. To start with, make sure Tomcat manager is configured for use by Catalina-Ant. Make sure that manager-script is included in the roles for one of the users in TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml . For example: <tomcat-users> <user name="admin" password="s3cr£t" roles="manager-gui, manager-script "/> </tomcat-users> Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 6 was encapsulated within a single JAR file. Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 requires four JAR files. One from TOMCAT_HOME/bin : tomcat-juli.jar and three from TOMCAT_HOME/lib: catalina-ant.jar tomcat-coyote.jar tomcat-util.jar There are at least three ways of making the JARs available to Ant: Copy the JARs into th...
22 comments
Read more

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

By
I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv...
Post a Comment
Read more

Do software engineering professionals still read? - survey results

By
  In order to gauge the potential audience for my book, So you think you can lead a team? , I conducted a small survey of my colleagues, co-workers and anyone from Linked. I read regularly, for work and pleasure, and assumed everyone else did too but did the responses I received confirm this? I polled 173 people, all within the software engineering field (including Product, etc), with a range of ages and years of experience in their role. What surprised me the most was that the majority of people, young or old, just starting or seasoned, still prefer reading physical books to blogs or e-readers. It also seemed that the older and more experienced were the most keen in learning more, and reading to expand or update their knowledge.  When it comes to reading habits between different roles the survey showed that software engineers and team leads read more regularly for their career than other roles, with 55 years old and over and 16+ years experience being the biggest readers over...
3 comments
Read more