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On Tuesday, I ordered two Pioneer CDJ-200 DJ decks. I decided that, as I’d been invited to DJ at a few weddings recently, having my own pair of CD decks would be very useful. (At some point I will need to get a PA rig as well).

Anyway, they arrived yesterday, so I gave them a try out. It’s great fun! DJing with CDs is a bit different to DJing with vinyl, and I still hadn’t quite got used to it by the end, but I’m definitely getting there. The tempo slider has a good degree of accurace (0.02%) – obviously not as good as my old analog Technics but probably not enough to make a huge difference.

It was quite strange actually, yesterday – when I was doing my A-Levels I bought a whole load of trance and dance CD singles which I hoped to one day DJ with. Then I went away to university and started buying vinyl and that’s what I cut my DJing teeth on. But yesterday I got all my old CDs out, and it was a bit weird – DJing using CDs I’d bought ages ago before I’d actually started DJing! It made me feel all nostalgic actually. I do miss DJing but at least I’ve got the piano / guitar to play with, which gives me a musical creative outlet. (Not that I’m very creative…)

Still, now that I’ve got the CD decks I will hopefully be able to do a bit more DJing and perhaps get back into it! One of the ‘problems’ with vinyl is that it’s so expensive – these days you can download MP3s of tunes you want and burn them to CD (the CDJ200s even play MP3s!), which makes the whole experience much cheaper.

Anyway, I’ll stop rambling on now!

You just can’t believe some people. A couple “The Borings” (yes, that is their surname, rather unfortunately) are trying to sue Google for invading their privacy. They claim that Google Street View drove up their private drive and took pictures – which is an invasion of privacy.

This is slightly old news (they had their case rejected by the judge and they are just trying to get it reinstated), but still. The stupidity of it is simply mind-boggling. “We don’t want Google invading our privacy. Thus, instead of simply asking them to remove the pictures we are going to bring a lawsuit against them, which is sure to bring the entire world’s attention onto us…”

The funny thing is about all this, if you look at the picture which Google actually took (see here) – I can’t really see what they’re moaning about.

I’m all for privacy, but surely if someone can actually walk up the drive and look at their house without trespassing, nothing wrong has been done? Ah well, I just hope that common sense does indeed prevail in this case!

Last week turned out to be pretty busy! I had a pop quiz at work on Monday night, we were out at Anne-Marie’s for pancakes on Tuesday night, we had Moore Course on Wednesday night, and then I was leading home group on Thursday night. So by the time Friday came round we were just about ready for a break!

And we were able to watch “Into the Wild Green Yonder”, the latest and final instalment in the Futurama DVD quadrilogy. I really enjoyed it – I think it was a fitting end for the movies. Although the ending did conflict with the last episode of the series (“The Devil’s Hands are Idle Playthings”), I think it’s comparable to there being contradictory versions of the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And, of course, if they do go on to do a sixth series they might explain it somehow.

On Saturday, I took the car into the garage to have an estimate done for repairs. Hopefully the insurers will get back to me soon and tell me that I can go ahead with having it repaired! In the evening, James and Tash (some friends from Fordham) came round for dinner. It was a really nice evening! After dinner we played a game called “Mexican Train” which was very good fun – kind of like dominos. More on that later.

On Sunday morning we went to church (to both services!), and then came back home for lunch. In the evening we went to a prayer meeting at Fordham for the new Sunday @ 6 service (which is beginning at the end of April), followed by a “Visual Bible Journeys” presentation. Basically it was an overview of Saul, David and Solomon illustrated by photos and maps. Very interesting, actually! There are two more coming up in March, they’d be well worth coming to if that’s something you’d be interested in. Seeing (for example) a photograph of the valley where David defeated Goliath does help to make the Old Testament more real. And being able to see roughly what Jerusalem looked like is very useful too – often you can read something about the temple but not really visualise what it would have looked like.

Anyway, after that we came back home and collapsed watched “Lark Rise to Candleford”.

I mentioned a while back about “Mexican Train”. Well, it’s basically a dominos game – see here for the rules. You basically have to lay out your ‘train’ with dominos, matching the numbers end-to-end. As we were playing, I kept thinking what the best way of arranging your dominos would be in order to make the longest train.

I thought this would be a good problem for a computer to solve… so I just knocked up a quick python script which will generate the longest chain given a set of dominos. (If you just run the script, it will generate a random set of dominos and a random start number and give the longest possible path). It’s a fairly useless script, but then again maybe it will come in handy next time I play the game 😉

I’ve just found the IT4Communities website. I think it’s an absolutely fantastic idea: charities can visit the site and submit IT jobs that they need doing. Volunteers who are skilled in IT can browse the site and can, if they feel they can help out with a project, get in touch with the charity.

I would love to sign up for this, if only I had a bit more time! Maybe over the summer I will be able to find some appropriate projects.

Either way, if you are skilled in IT and in the UK (and have enough time), take a look and see if you can help make the world a better place 😉

I’ll start with the good news: last week, as I mentioned, we had some work done on our bathroom. That work is now finished! Yay! We still have a couple of things to do, but we don’t need the workmen back in. So the towel rail / radiator, shaver point, extractor fan and plastering is all completed. All we have to do now is decorate, i.e paint and fit some kind of flooring (we had a wooden floor fitted last week, but need to put down some kind of laminate flooring on top. Or something like that).

So we’ve been enjoying the additional space we’ve got in the bathroom, it’s fantastic 🙂

On Saturday we went down to stay with Phil’s parents. On Saturday evening we went out to the Royal Festival Hall to see a performance of Mozart’s 17th Piano Concerto, followed by Mahler’s 5th Symphony. I think my favourite of the two was probably the Mozart – but I would like to hear the Mahler again! I think the Mahler piece is one which you would appreciate much more if you knew it, and unfortunately it was the first time I’d heard it. The last two movements were beautiful, though.

Unfortunately, this is where the bad news comes in: when we got back frmo the concert, I found a note on the car. Someone had reversed into it, putting a dent in the driver’s side door and buckling it slightly. Fortunately the door still opens and locks, and the car wasn’t damaged otherwise, but it is annoying because now I have to get it repaired and deal with insurance and the like. Still, at least the guy who did it owned up – apparently in 70-80% of these kind of incidents, people just drive off!

Anyway, he gave me his details and I have called up my insurance company to put in the claim so hopefully it won’t be too long before it will be sorted. The garage are supposed to be ringing me within 48 hours.

So, it wasn’t the most pleasant way to end the day! But still, these things happen. On Sunday morning we went to church with Phil’s parents, and then after lunch drove down to West Norwood to see my sister Alison. It was really nice to see her, the first time we’d actually been to her flat. And after that we had a fun-filled trip back home… we set off at about 5:00, and got home at around 7:30. Not too bad, I suppose, given that we had to go through central London (well, skirt the edges of it really).

After that we watched “Lark Rise to Candleford” and just crashed out for the evening! So there you have it. Tonight I’m going to a charity pop music quiz, something which the company I work for has arranged. Should be good fun, although I was absolutely rubbish at the last music quiz I went to – I just think I know nothing about music! Not pop music anyway. Ah well.

Once you have a house, that is it: you’ll have a “To-Do” list as long as your arm for life! (Well, as long as you have a house, anyway).

We are currently in the process of having our bathroom fixed up (i.e. the dividing wall between the toilet and bathroom knocked through, new towel rail, a shaver point put in, new shower head rail, etc). It’s a job we’ve been wanting to do for ages, and now we’ve finally got round to it. You’d think that would decrease the list of things we have to do, wouldn’t you? Think again. The electrician (who came to wire up the shaver point and the lighting) said that our lighting circuit is 60s standards (which isn’t surprising given that the house was built in the 60s). Modern standards are different – in order for it to be different we’d need to have the whole lighting circuit rewired. This is actually a fairly big job, costing around £1000. Not only that, but we’d also need to have a new fuse box put in at the same time…

Of course, it’s not urgent that we have the house lighting re-wired. But if we want to have any electrical work done on the house in the future I think we’ll need to have the wiring brought up to modern standards, otherwise electricians will refuse to touch it.

So, I thought I’d give a brief list of things which we have already done on the house, and things which we still need to do. It will be interesting to come back to it in a year or two and see what’s changed!

TASKS COMPLETED

• Re-decorate main bedroom
• Re-decorate spare bedroom
• Re-decorate small bedroom (partially completed)
• Replace facia board
• Paint cupboard under stairs, fit shelves
• Create flower borders, plant up garden (partially completed)
• Paint shed

TASKS STILL TO DO

• Replace boiler (current boiler went out of production in 1983, it’s almost certainly older than I am)
• Re-decorate living room / dining room
• Replace cooker hood & install cupboards in kitchen
• Re-wire house
• Move front door to be flush with front of house (i.e. the porch area would be come part of the house)

And that’s just a sample really – once we’ve got through that lot there will be carpets to replace, rooms to re-decorate (again), and a myriad of small jobs. Ah well, keeps us busy I suppose, not that we really need any help on that front!

We had a brilliant time at the Keane gig! Although I was wrong about Katzenjammer – if you search for ‘Katzenjammer Norway’ it will come up with the right band. This video will give you an idea of the kind of thing they do (there are a few more on YouTube as well). They were actually really good, very unusual but quite fun!

Frankmusik was next, and that was what I expected. They were very good, and I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for the album when it is released later this year.

Keane, the main event, came onto the stage at about 9:15. They started off with ‘The Lovers are Losing’, which was absolutely cracking live. Actually some of the songs they did sounded much more energetic live than they do on the albums, ‘Black Burning Heart’ and ‘Spiralling’ come to mind, but all of them were played in a pretty upbeat way. It was superb!

Let me try and remember the songs that they played (not in order): Somewhere Only We Know, Bend & Break, Everybody’s Changing, This is the Last Time, Bedshaped, Is it Any Wonder?, Leaving So Soon, A Bad Dream, Crystal Ball, Try Again, Spiralling, The Lovers are Losing, Better Than This, You Haven’t Told Me Anything, Perfect Symmetry, Again & Again, Playing Along, and Black Burning Heart.

So we really got our money’s worth 😉 In short, it was a fantastic evening – Keane are amazing live. Worth every penny.

Well, it’s finally here: today is when we are going to see Keane live at the O2! I can’t wait, it’s going to be amazing.

The other two live acts on tonight are Katzenjammer and Frankmusik. I hadn’t heard of either of them before, but apparently Katzenjammer are a sort of comedy piano duo and Frankmusik is a band (also on Island records) who have a similar style to Keane.

So it looks like we’re set for a good night! I just hope that the snow holds off and that we don’t have problems with the trains, that would be annoying. But hopefully that won’t happen!

So, in the past couple of months lots of people seem to have got into Twitter. Specifically, Simon and Alex. People who advocate Twitter seem to think that you can’t criticise it unless you’ve actually used it.

I could never see the point of it, but today I decided that if I was going to criticise, I should at least spend a while trying it out. So I’ve signed up for a Twitter account – you can find me here.

I don’t really know what the point is yet, but then again this blog doesn’t really have a point either and I still do that. I’d consider adding a gadget to this blog with my latest twitter updates, but actually that might cause the site to collapse into a void of pointlessness, so perhaps that wouldn’t be a good idea!

This weekend has been a good one! On Saturday afternoon Foz came up from London. We went round to see Bob and Ruth, who Foz knew from his student days and who now go to Fordham.

Afterwards we headed round to Steve & Karen’s for a gathering of people and spent most of the evening chatting and hearing random stories from a friend of Foz’s who I hadn’t met before.

On Sunday morning we went to church, and then in the evening we had the youth service. I was playing piano in the band, so we had a music practice for it beforehand. It all went well – the whole service! There were more people there than at the last youth service, and I think they all seemed to enjoy it. Apart from one or two minor blips the music went without a hitch, and people were able to sing all the songs without problems. AJ’s talk was really good as well – it involved a lot of audience participation which I think went down well!

Fordham are going to start up a second service on Sunday evenings which I think is going ot be more like a youth service. Hopefully that will pick up some momentum and will go as well as the youth services have gone.

Aaanyway, that’s all for now!