Some bizarre ancient ritual that takes place in the last week of March?

No, it’s Mano Panforreteiro playing his Gaita bagpipes in Oxford. With help from some pipes of another kind.

My first cruise of the 2012, the first Torchbox cruise of 2012 and the first outing for the new decking.

After coming back from a team-building trip, I started to notice things were going a bit slow on my work laptop. I took it with me for casual emailing and working on the train, but spent about 4 days not really using it and certainly not ‘working’ on it. It came out once to display the lyrics to a song about Pithivier, and once to check emails, but that was about it.

When visiting Umefolk recently we came across a snow castle in the city centre. It would have been impossible not to have a go…

Play the MP3 and imagine this. I recorded it walking through the musicians.

I spent the last week at Umefolk, a folk music festival in Umeå in the north of Sweden. We met Anton Teljebäck, who runs the festival, at a small festival in the UK and he invited us. Umefolk is well established (the first was in 1986), and Anton was keen to spread the word further afield.

We are no strangers to Scandanavian music in Oxford. There is a budding session which has found its feet in the last few months, run by Ed Pritchard, who plays a nyckelharpa amongst other things. I also listen to whatever I can get my hands on on Spotify and around the web. So we jumped at the chance to go.

I’ve just been on a call with a client. They have Strauss or somesuch a hold music. Orchestral waltzes. The person on the other end picked up exactly at the end of a phrase. It was perfect.

My idea:

On-hold music programmed with meta-information that stores the exact timecodes of cadences and the end of phrases. When the person who is being waited on picks up the phone, the system keeps playing the music until the next point.

I am sorry to announce that the 0736 service to Manchester Piccadilly is delayed by approximately 40 minutes due to engineering works. I am extremely sorry for the severe disruption to the service.

Luckily I wasn’t trying to get to Manchester Piccadilly, but from the reaction on the platform someone was. This well-spoken automatic pre-recorded announcement was clear, and told us everything we immediately needed to know. It was spoken courteously in perfect Recieved Pronunciation. It is the same voice that is used to announce all the official goings-on at Platform 2 of Oxford Station, and at stations across the country. I quite enjoy hearing the voice if I’m honest.

I love Spotify. I refuse to participate in the ‘social networking’ aspect of things. Indeed I find the idea of assuming I want everyone knowing what I listen to, and the assumption that I want to see what other people are listening to mildly offensive. That’s ok, I don’t mind being offended.

That said, here is a list of songs (not a playlist) which use the gradual onset of distortion to great effect. Distortion has been used since the dawn of time to make guitars fuzzier, vocals warmer, snares more brutal.

I have a couple of WordPress installations running on Apache (on a non-80) port, and I’m reverse proxying them through nginx. Somewhere along the line WordPress is getting its knickers in a twist about the port not being the same as it expects. This results in WordPress going into an infinite redirect loop.

To solve this, I put this in the nginx virtual server config:

proxy_set_header Host $host;

Fixed.