The Liverpool FC crest

In keeping with my new agenda to post on any topic that takes my fancy, I’m going to talk about football today. That’s English football. You know, the game you play with your feet. I just wanted to say up front that the following is a football rant.

It’s pretty much the end of the season now for my team Liverpool FC. We’ve played 37 league games and only won 14 of them. There’s one more to go at the weekend and if we win that we could finish a mighty 7th in the Premier League. Not good enough by any measure. I’m not going to hark on about the past, others do that more than enough and while I’m proud of our history it’s the future that concerns me. I’m not delusional like some other LFC fans either, we have no right to be at the top of the league these days. We’ve slipped a long way down the pecking order and while I don’t like it we have to be honest with ourselves. We’re light years away from the Manchester clubs and we’ve even been leap frogged by teams like Tottenham in recent years. So what’s our biggest problem? I’ve been giving it a lot of thought and one thing keeps coming back into my mind.

You might expect me to say “lack of goals” here. True, we’ve only scored 47 goals and that’s definitely a problem, but I can sum up our most pressing problem in one word – midfield.

Take a look at the midfield we had out for the FA cup final. We were effectively playing a 4-5-1 formation: Gerrard, Spearing, Henderson, Downing and Bellamy. If you believe this is a world class midfield then you need to your head examined, and probably your eyes too. Steven Gerrard has been a fantastic servant to the club and bailed us out many times over the years, but on Saturday he seemed to be attempting to play 4 positions at once while covering for Spearing, Henderson and Downing. Nobody can do that. Not even Gerrard in his prime could have. I don’t subscribe to the argument that he’s “past it” now. I’m probably biased as we’re only 5 days apart in age but he turns 32 at the end of the month, it’s not that old. I think his problem this season has been injury and lack of playing time. He hasn’t been able to build up any form or rhythm. Long term we’ll have to look to a younger player of course, I don’t argue with that. But he has 2 or 3 good seasons left in him. Possibly in a less mobile role slightly deeper breaking up play. Moving on, Jay Spearing seems like a really hard working lad and he’s trying, but I’m not convinced he’s up to the level we need, or whether he ever can be. Henderson looks lost since moving from Sunderland. We paid 20 million for him in the hope he’d be “the new Gerrard” but he hasn’t showed much of that so far. It’s only his first season and I know he’s young, but he needs to start improving fast. Neither Spearing nor Henderson look capable of breaking up play and controlling the midfield. The “midfield general” is an often used phrase in football folk lore and right now we don’t have one. Every successful Liverpool team had a clear boss in midfield, from Emlyn Hughes to Didi Hamman and many others. Lucas Levia was doing a reasonable job in that role and losing him to injury for most of the season hasn’t helped, but come on. It says something when the stats point out that Lucas has still made more tackles than any other Liverpool midfielder this season. He hasn’t played for months!! You need more squad depth than that. Charlie Adam isn’t going to fill this role either, he had a good season at Blackpool but he just isn’t up to it. We need a midfield anchor and that would be my priority in the summer. It’s the unglamorous but essential heart of every decent team. The reason Bobby Charlton and George Best looked so good was because they had Nobby Stiles winning the ball and giving it to them. Ok so they were obviously special players, but they needed a provider. I don’t see that in the Liverpool team today. A few years ago we had Mascherano and Alonso in the middle, we’ve definitely gone backwards in this department.

Onto the wingers then. Bellamy has done well when he’s played but he can’t be relied upon every week. He’s not fit enough. When we signed Stuart Downing from Villa last summer and Ashley Young went to Utd people said things like, “oh but Downing is the better crosser, we’ve got the better player”. Bollocks, utter bollocks! I said it at the time and I still believe it. Young is infinitely better than Downing in almost every department and Man Utd certainly got the better deal. I still believe Downing can be a useful for Liverpool next season but the key thing is he needs to believe that himself. He seems to lack confidence and I’m not sure how he’ll adapt. Our other options on the wing this year are Dirk Kuyt, a man who’s never been a winger but forced to play there by Rafa Benitez. He’s done a lot for the club and I like him. How could you not like his attitude and effort? But he’s still a striker out of position. Maxi Rodriguez is a good player and he’s been criminally underused this season. He’s coming to the end of his career now though and looks set to leave the club anyway.

It’s not all doom and gloom, I like the look of young Jonjo Shelvey. He seems to have a lot of potential as a playmaker in the middle of the park. We should give him more of a chance. Perhaps there are some other youngsters we can try. We might as well. That big expensive academy out in Kirkby has produced precisely nothing and it’s becoming a white elephant. There must be talented kids out there, so why aren’t they coming through?

Our defence is pretty solid and the record supports that. Reina is a good goalie and Luis Suarez is probably our only world class player. Andy Carroll is another one who needs confidence and people forget he’s only 22. It’s not his fault we paid far too much for him and I believe he will come good eventually. We could still use at least one more decent striking option but if Kenny Dalglish really wants to fix this team he needs to look at the gaping quality vaccum in the middle of the park. That’s where the problem lies. Napoleon said an army marches on it’s stomach, well a football team marches on it’s midfield.

You can comment over there and also share the article. Hint hint. Thanks

Dan

OggCamp 11 - Photo by Henry Patrick Reilly

If you’ve followed this blog or listening to my podcasts for any length of time you’ll probably know what OggCamp is. If not, I suppose I’d better explain. OggCamp is a 2 day Free Software and Free Culture event we organize every year. Since we began in 2009 it’s grown to become the largest Linux and Open Source event in the UK. Last year we had well over 400 attendees and this year it looks to be even bigger.

We’re returning North to Liverpool for OggCamp12 on August 18th & 19th and the official website has now been launched. The tickets are available via Eventbrite and they’re completely FREE. All we ask is that you’re serious about coming when you claim a ticket. If not then please leave space for someone who can actually come.

I’m really excited to be hosting the event in my city again and I think it’s going to be the biggest and best OggCamp ever!

If you’re still unsure whether OggCamp is for you then just ask around, anyone who’s been before can tell you why you shouldn’t miss it.

I hope to see many of you in Liverpool later in the year

Dan

(Photo credit – Henry Patrick Reilly. I got this from Google+)

I think my main problem (amongst many) over the years has been fragmentation, or to put it another way, spreading myself too thin. Originally I set up different websites to post music, Linux reviews, personal articles and many other things. Each new idea I came up with had to have it’s own dedicated site. I thought this would make it easier for people to concentrate on the parts of my output they were interested in. In reality though all that happened was I ended up with a lot of sites that were hardly ever updated. It seems a bit silly looking back but I swear the plan made sense at the time.

Now though I hope to post live music videos, photos and articles about everything from Linux to Liverpool FC all in this one place. I want to make this a proper hub for all my online activity. I’m still mad busy and can’t promise the output will be prolific, but I’ll certainly do my best. Onwards and upwards!

Stay tuned, and thanks for your patience

Dan

March has given way to April and spring should be on the way. You wouldn’t know it from the recent weather though. Last week it was over 20 degrees Celsius and now we’re back near zero. Snow in some parts of the UK and ice on the roads. I knew I shouldn’t have put my shorts on last week, it was only tempting fate. Anyway, I’m sure Al Gore has some thoughts on this. If he’s not too busy jetting around the world warning people about their carbon footprints. The little tinker. But I digress. I last reported back in mid-March and since then I’ve posted about my planned changes to this very site. Those are still ongoing but should be completed in the next week. I’m migrating a lot of stuff from Drupal to WordPress. Not because I have anything against Drupal of course, it just seems silly to use both on one site when I don’t need to. I’ve transferred most of the content and got the new site structure sorted. I just need to find (or knock together) a decent theme and then I’ll switch them over. I don’t want to break the RSS feeds or current URL structure if possible so it’s a delicate process. Stay tuned.

What else have I been up to? Well, I finally got myself a new phone. An all singing, all dancing, Galaxy Nexus, running the shiny new Android 4.0. I’ve only had it a week but I’m settling in already. I unlocked the bootloader straight away and got it hooked up to the Android developer kit on Ubuntu with the help of Andy (Oscillik) from LivLUG. He’s had the phone a bit longer and he’s my go to expert on these matters. I let the phone restore all it’s setting from “the cloud” as the kids like to call it, and it seems this was a mixed blessing. It was cool that it knew all my wifi networks, installed all my apps and updated so easily. But I have been seeing some stability issues with the Android browser and suffering app crashes. The browser is embedded into so many other apps that I think this is the culprit. I have a plan to reflash the phone and not restore anything this time but set it up manually. I’ll let you know how that goes. Minor niggles aside I’m enjoying Ice Cream Sandwich very much. It’s slick and seems a big advance from the Android 2.3 I was running before. I’m still waiting to see what CyanogenMod 9 brings to the table when it’s finally released. This phone is so powerful it feels more and more like they’re starting to be our main computers. I’m reminded of Quantum Leap in a strange way but it feels like we’re heading there. Not time travel, but ever more sophisticated handheld computers at least. I eagerly await the day my phone will remark – “Ziggy says there’s a 90% probability you’ll enjoy this fart app Dan”. I can dream.

In other news we announced the long awaited details of the next OggCamp, and decided to keep the name after all the renaming drama. It will be called OggCamp 12, to the relief of many. It’s happening on the weekend of 18th & 19th of August in Liverpool again. Yeah, you can blame me for that. It may be a bit further for all you Southerners but it’s a lot nearer for those coming from Scotland and other places. So it cuts both ways. We have an amazing venue in LJMU Art & Design Academy and I have to thank my wonderful friends at Open Labs for all their help. They’re sponsoring all the venue costs for us and taking care of a massive chunk of the hassle. We have an official hotel which is in sight of the venue and 5mins walk if you’re slow. So no paying for taxis to and from the venue this year. I’ll let you all know the hotel details as soon as we release them. If you want to keep up to date you should follow OggCamp on Twitter, Identi.ca, Google+, Lanyard or Facebook. You can also keep an eye on oggcamp.org where more details will be posted soon.

I seem to be rambling a fair bit so I’ll summarise some of the other recent events more quickly. I presented FLOSS Weekly with Randal last night and our guest project was Chamilo. It made a fascinating show and I really recommend you have a listen. I didn’t realise the size of this project and if there’s one area where free and open tools matter most it’s in schools. Rather dramatically a sound proofing panel fell out of my studio window and hit me on the back of the head during the show. It was only light so didn’t really hurt, but left me pretty dazed. You’ll hear a loud noise in the background at the start of the interview, that was it. Luckily I wasn’t on camera at the time but it would have made a hilarious blooper. I also attended Liverpool LUG last night where we had a great talk from Bob Ham on IPv6. Not a subject I know a massive amount about but I felt more confident after it.

My band 20lb Sounds are on a short sabbatical right now while our drummer follows England’s cricket team out in Sri Lanka. Alright for some hey? He’s back after the weekend and then we’ll crack on with training for our upcoming gigs. We have 3 in a week which is a first for us. Starting with the Rathole Radio live event at LEAF on Friday May 11th, we’ll continue with a gig at The Cavern Club the following Tuesday as part of the International Pop Overthrow Festival we played last year. Finally there’s another gig at The Cavern Pub on the following Friday. It should be fun and I’m looking forward to it. In the meantime I’ve stalled on completing my long threatened solo album but it is getting somewhere I promise. I hope to have that ready in the next few weeks. That just about brings us up to date. So let’s talk about what’s coming up.

Upcoming:

First up is Easter weekend obviously. Linux Outlaws may be pushed back a bit from Monday night but will happen early in the week. I may well be co-hosting FLOSS again on Wednesday but I don’t know for certain yet. Then there’ll be another Rathole Radio on the following Sunday, April 16th. I’m also in the process of completing a slightly overdue article about digital development in Liverpool and Internet access for my Seven Streets technical column. I’ll let you know about that as soon as I can. In the meantime stay tuned for website changes, more music, more writing and a lot more podcasting. I hope you all have a great Easter Holiday and take care of yourselves.

Over and out,

Dan

That’s right, Otis Redding famously sang the phrase and I’m gonna say it too. A change is gonna come. Ok, he was talking about segregation and civil rights in America and I’m talking about changing my website, but it’s still a change nonetheless.

I’ve been pondering how best to utilise DanLynch.org and get the most out of it for a while. I want to see a lot more activity here and I don’t want the blog to be so separate from everything else. The reason for this separation is technical. The blog runs on WordPress but the rest of my site is built with Drupal. They’re both lovely Open Source PHP systems but it struck me recently I should really just use WordPress for the whole thing. All I’m doing in Drupal now is making some static pages around this blog anyway. WordPress can do that. So as we speak I’ve copied this blog onto some development web space and I’m reworking that version. Kicking the tires, checking the oil, and other such motoring metaphors.

The content is already in there and it shouldn’t take long. Famous last words. It probably won’t mean much difference for anyone reading this but it’ll allow me to centralise. I’ve been trying to do too many things at once and spreading myself a bit thin, as is often my way. Music, podcasting, production, videos, technical writing and more general blogging can all be incorporated. This way I can feed all content into here and activity will go up. I can use a music page to embed tracks from Bandcamp, post YouTube videos of performances and much more. Hopefully building momentum.

I hope it won’t take long but expect to see some changes very soon. A new leaner, meaner and angrier (angrier? I’m running out of now) machine. I’m back to motoring metaphors, I don’t even care much about cars, never been an interest of mine. I must have absorbed too much Top Gear from the TV earlier tonight.

Stay tuned, thanks for your patience and in the meantime you can enjoy the genius of Otis with the video above

Dan

UPDATE: Apparently that song was written by Sam Cooke originally. Otis did a famous version.

Head over to badfeelingfilm.com and support the fund raising effort if you want to see this film made. There are some perks available to supporters. I wanted to help spread the word.

Thanks for reading, may the force be with you

Dan

Podcasting has continued at pace and I’ll deal with each show in turn. There’s been plenty of episodes of Linux Outlaws in the last month. We’re closing in on 1 million downloads now since our time on Libsyn. That’s a crazy figure when you think about it, but actually I reckon we probably broke that some time ago. We ran the show for a while before joining Libsyn and there’s always people mirroring episodes on their own servers. None of that counts towards the grand total. So if anyone asks I just say “oh yeah, we’re well over a million downloads” and cross my fingers behind my back. Well, they don’t know… oh, unless they read this. Did I mention we’re over a million downloads? *ahem*.

It’s been an eventful month for my Linux Outlaws co-host Fabian Scherschel as he left his job with an ISP in Cologne, and now he’s a professional Open Source writer for The H. He’ll even be moving to London in June to work full time at their office. I’m really happy for him and I guess now we can say we have a legitimate member of the tech press on the team. Since Feb 8th when I last posted here there have been 6 new episodes released. You can catch up on Linux Outlaws via the website at any time, you’re more than welcome aboard.

I’ve also appeared on some episodes of FLOSS Weekly in the last month. 3 to be precise. On Feb 8th I was drafted in to host the show with Simon Phipps. Randal injured his shoulder that day and couldn’t make it. The whole thing was very last minute but I think Simon and I pulled it together nicely. You can judge for yourself in episode 201. I then joined Aaron Newcomb the following week for episode 202 on Stunt Rally. Finally, last week I rejoined Randal to interview the guys behind oVirt. That was episode 203 and you can grab it now from the TWiT website. I’ve also continued with Rathole Radio of course and there’s been a couple of new episodes since my last update, episode 72 and episode 73. Both contain the usual eclectic mix of music you’ve come to expect, plus a fair amount of waffling which you probably expect by now too. As I write this it’s just under 2 months to this years Rathole Radio live event, a fact I’m becoming increasingly aware of. We’ve got a venue, LEAF On Bold St. We’ve got a date, Friday May 11th. However, I still need to complete the line up and sort out what I’ll do about tickets. Whether I’ll even use tickets or just make it free to attend this time and take donations. It’s hard to say right now. Lots to decide. I’m close to sorting out the line up and announcing it, that’s something. The rest of it I really need to get cracking with. I’ll let you know more about that ASAP.

One act I do have confirmed for the Rathole Radio gig is my own band 20lb Sounds. We’ve been busy of late. We had another gig at The Zanzibar on Saturday March 3rd and while I didn’t feel I played that well, others told me afterwards it was really good. So I guess it’s all a matter of perspective. Many friends came to support us which I really appreciated but our turn out was a bit low, I don’t know how many more gigs we’ll get there in future. We have one in June, I guess that’s make or break time. It’s difficult because I’ve tried hard to push our gigs and promote them around town. I’ve contacted all the local media outlets, got posters printed and put them up, and I’ve also been spreading the word in person wherever possible. Despite this we’re just not drawing a crowd and it can be disheartening. I think we’re a good band, I suppose I should I’m in the band. I’m biased, but we have many good songs and we can play a bit. When people do watch we often get a good reaction, yet getting them to come back is a battle. I suppose at some point I have to face the fact that most people just don’t like us as much as I hoped. I dunno, this all sounds rather like shoe-gazing self-pity doesn’t it? We have plenty of gigs coming up in the next 2-3 months so we’ll pick ourselves up again and try to win people over, one at a time if we have to.

While we’re talking about music I should let you know what’s happening with my long overdue album. Fresh with New Year energy and optimism I said I’d have this done and released in no time. In retrospect I don’t think that was ever very realistic. I underestimated my perfectionism and incessant need to tinker with things. I’m never totally happy with anything I do and it’s tempting to keep changing them. First I recorded 10 acoustic songs live. That went well but later I discovered the vocal mic was distorting at times during the performance. Back to the drawing board. Now I’ve been working on all the songs again and I have the basis of about 7 recorded. I will keep it simple as promised. 1 or maybe 2 guitars at most, vocal and harmonica. I also plan to record a couple of piano songs I wrote many years ago. The working title for the album right now is “Long Forgotten Tales”, that may change though. I’m going to make some little live videos to put on YouTube as promotion and I’ve been trying to clean up this very website in preparation. The bottom line is it’s progressing, just not as quickly as I’d hoped. I’ll post some videos and updates as I go along. Perhaps blogging through the process will help me work things out.

Something else that’s reared it’s head in the last month is the mythical beast known as OggCamp planning. Every year it pops up again. I love doing OggCamp though and I love that other people enjoy it most of all. I can’t reveal too much yet but things are taking shape. I’ve been pounding the pavement, having meetings and generally sorting things out. Our intrepid band of organisers are all working hard to bring you another OggCamp.

There’s so much more I could say, a month’s worth of stories but I think that’s enough for today. We’re pretty much up to date.

Upcoming:

I’m not appearing on FLOSS Weekly tomorrow but it’ll be the first one I’ve missed in four shows, so I can’t complain. There’s Jelly Liverpool at LEAF on Thursday and following that in the evening we’ll be doing Ignite Liverpool as well. It’s the 9th Ignite we’ve organised and they’re always fun. The basic format is 5 minute talks from a wide selection of speakers about a varying range of topics. Anything the speaker cares about really. It always throws up discussions and opens your mind. It’s 6pm on Thursday 15th March at LEAF On Bold St. Entry is free and the venue is lovely. Come along, it’s worth it. At the weekend I have more live Rathole Radio on Sunday and we’ll be back with live Linux Outlaws on Monday evening. There’ll be much more to talk about next week and I’ll be sure not to leave you hanging this time. I have said it many times before but I’m confident regular posts are just around the corner. If you’d like to leave me a comment or discuss anything I’ve mentioned please do. All thoughts are welcome.

I’ll report back soon, until then you take care of yourselves.

Dan

I’ll begin with Saturday Jan 28th where I appeared as a guest on the Alt3red Egos podcast. It’s a comics show and it was great to geek out talking about The Punisher, Watchmen and some of my other favourites. I would never call myself a comic book expert but I do have a small collection of graphic novels and I’m a bit of nerd on the sly. Or perhaps not on the sly, most people can probably see it a mile off. The show was a lot of fun and it was released the following week, you can grab it here.

On the Sunday (29th) I edited another Free As In Freedom and rehearsed with my band 20lb Sounds. More on that later. Fast forwarding to Monday we did another live Linux Outlaws in the evening. Episode 249 to be precise. You can download the show now from our website – Linux Outlaws 249 “Inflatible Tanks”. I processed and synced up the audio later before bed. The following day (Tuesday) I got up early and headed to the offices of LJMU Open Labs on Edge Lane. I was there for the second day of our video course and we had a great time playing with all kinds of fancy camera kit. The course was led by Chris Chadwick of The Hatch who’s a lovely bloke and knows a thing or three about video production. In the evening I walked down to DoES Liverpool for a GeekUp Liverpool meeting where Chris was again presenting about video. I haven’t been to GeekUp in a while but I was glad I made the effort. I should get down there more often.

On Wednesday it was a bumper podcasting day. I had a meeting early in the afternoon but scampered back to the studio to record our Linux Outlaws Digital Rights Update with the good folks from the Open Rights Group. It’s a new thing we plan to do every few weeks, probably a short section within regular shows but this time we wanted to do a full episode to introduce the idea. I edited that the following Monday (Feb 6th) and it should be released as episode 250 of the show very soon. Almost immediately after finishing one recording it was into another for FLOSS Weekly. I joined Randal for episode 200 which was an honour. Our guest project was Autotest, a powerful tool for automatically testing builds of the Linux kernel. It’s also used to test many other things now and seems to be growing all the time. You can download that as FLOSS Weekly 200 – Autotest.

After FLOSS there was time to quickly make some food before heading down to Liverpool LUG on Bold St. We had a talk on Java3D from Tony Burrows which I found most interesting. I looked at Java3D almost 10 years ago when I was in University but had lost touch since. It seems like it’s come a long way. Finally for Wednesday I headed over to Dale St after the talk to meet up with the band. We had extra practice for our gig. On Thursday I was at LEAF all day for Jelly. I also got some flyers printed for our gig on the Saturday and tried to drum up business. Then after Jelly guess what? Yep that’s right, more band practice. Our regular Thursday night practice this time.

On Friday I was in need of a rest after a busy week but I did find time to rewrite my tech article for Seven Streets. It’s a really popular Liverpool website with news and reviews for all the goings on in the city. I was asked to become a regular technology columnist before Christmas which is a great honour. Unfortunately the first draft of my article went off on a tangent and wasn’t really Liverpool-related enough. I took another stab at it and rather than adapting the first article I just wrote a whole new one. Fortunately this was much better and the editors liked it. The article was published yesterday (Feb 7th) and it’s had many nice responses. Now I just need to come up with something for next month.

On Saturday morning I made the short walk over to the LJMU Art & Design Academy for TEDx Merseyside. TED is well known and I’m sure some of you will have been to one of their events or watched a video online. TEDx is a small independently organised event under their umbrella. This one was titled “The New Futurism” and I had no idea what to expect going in. When I got there it seemed to be a mixture of motivational talks, lots about giving birth and other rather random stuff. I wasn’t sure what to make of it all but I did find the stuff about facial expressions and reading body language particularly interesting. I chatted with friends and hung out there until mid afternoon when I had to retire and get ready for the gig. I met the band at our rehearsal room and we loaded the stuff up then set off for sound check. The weather was particularly bad on Saturday, the ice was thickening and we had severe snow warnings. The sound check went well and we headed off to get food before the gig. I got back there in time to see the opening band called The Dots. A trio featuring acoustic guitar, melodica and human beatbox, a unique sound indeed. They were incredible and I hope to book them for the Rathole Radio gig on May 11th @ LEAF. If I can find them again that is. Searching online hasn’t turned up much information. Fingers crossed.

We got on stage at just before 10pm and played a 35min set which was great fun. The crowd reacted kindly and although the weather had affected the turnout there was still a few people there. I put everything into it and was pretty much running on adrenaline for the rest of the night if I’m honest. We’ll be back there on Saturday March 3rd and I hope to see some of you there!

On Sunday I was pretty exhausted after the gig but I still found time to put together the tracks for another live Rathole Radio in the evening. I broadcast the show as normal and had a great time chatting to listeners as it went along. I released that yesterday and you can grab it here – Rathole Radio 71.

On Monday I edited the Linux Outlaws digital rights update and shipped it back to Fab. I also sorted out my personal site a little bit and caught up on other bits and pieces.

Upcoming:

It’ll be an interesting weekend as I head to Preston for Hack To The Future. I’m going to be talking to a bunch of kids about podcasting, how and why to do it. That could be daunting as I’m no experienced teacher but I’m sure we’ll get on fine. We’ll have another live Linux Outlaws on Friday night at our usual time. I’m sure there’ll also be much to report on that I’ve forgotten. I’ll update you all next week.

Until then, take care of yourselves in that ice!

Dan

I believe I last left things late on the afternoon of Monday January 16th, so let’s pick up there. I went on to broadcast Linux Outlaws with Fab in the evening. You’re probably tired of hearing me say this but it really does seem odd that we can be 247 episodes into this podcast now. As we close in on 250 episodes and 5 years in the business of pod, I don’t think either of us ever imagined this popularity or longevity could happen. The show was fun as always and I edited it later that week. You can grab it now as Episode 247 – “Poke Him With Your Pipe Old Boy”.

On Tuesday I got a nice visit from my mum and we found some time to catch up. We also did some cooking and she taught me a new chicken dish. I’m not bad at cooking but I think I need to expand my repertoire a bit. I’ve considered a cookery class, maybe I’ll look more seriously at that as the year goes on. I went to band practice in the evening as we prepare for an upcoming 20lb Sounds gig. I won’t go on too much about it now as there’s many more band practices to mention. I did some work on my websites and began the long process of migrating all my music to Bandcamp.com. If you check out danlynch.bandcamp.com you’ll see that all the stuff from my main site is uploaded now. I just created an album and put it all in chronological order. You may wonder why I would choose to do such a thing but as I recently discussed I want to get more serious about music professionally. The migration isn’t all about making money and the album is actually free to download. It just seems sensible to keep things in one place and I’ll be doing the new acoustic album on there soon. I’ll redirect danlynch.org/music and look at incorporating the design. Bandcamp do mp3, ogg, FLAC and almost any other format you could want, plus I really like their simple management tools.

On Wednesday it was the big SOPA blackout protest and in accordance Fab took down Sixgun.org. The most noticeable take down was probably Wikipedia. It seems as though the legislation has been postponed (not killed or abandoned as some believe) and it’s a victory for all involved. We still have a lot of work to do though and the war isn’t over. If anything it’s just beginning. I have to confess I didn’t take this site down or RatholeRadio.org, not because I didn’t believe in the cause, more out of a lack of time and planning on my part. I feel a bit guilty about that but I’m pleased to see the protest had some effect. On the day I was also set to appear on FLOSS Weekly and the TWIT Network took and interesting stance. I joined Simon Phipps to interview James T. Nixon III about file storage solution FreeNAS. The show was in black and white to highlight the protest and we spent a long time discussing SOPA. You can download it as FLOSS Weekly 198 – FreeNAS.

On Thursday I got on with some Drupal stuff on various sites and also attended Jelly Liverpool down at LEAF. In the evening I stopped by the Merseyside Skeptics meeting at The Head Of Steam pub on my way to band practice. They’ve been having some PA problems and getting bad feedback. My friend Siobhan asked me to have a look. I wasn’t there too long and I don’t think I really offered much by way of a solution but hopefully it helped a bit. I then went to rock out with the 20lb boys. On Friday I edited the Linux Outlaws recording from Monday and prepared Rathole Radio for the weekend. Saturday involved more RR prep and then a Liverpool LUG afternoon meet at Studio 2, Parr St. The turnout was low unfortunately and most of the meet involved paying pool with Bob and Steve. Not a bad way to spend your Saturday though by any means. I was scheduled to appear on the Alt3rd Egos podcast in the evening to talk about comics. So I nipped over to Forbidden Planet to do some research. I am a comic book fan and I own plenty of graphic novels but I’m not up on current happenings in the medium at all. I know there’s been a big fuss over the changes to the DC Universe but that’s about it. I headed home and waited for the show but as time went by I began to wonder if I’d messed up the timezone conversions. Eventually I got a message off one of the hosts saying they’d had a family emergency and couldn’t make it, which is understandable. I wished them the best and we planned to reschedule. After this I went to catch up with friends at a whiskey party. I’ve never been to a whiskey party before but my friend Rachel is off to Australia and was emptying the drinks cabinet before packing up the house. I was ashamed to admit that I don’t really drink whiskey, or spirits of any kind for that matter, but it was actually really fun.

On Sunday I headed down to Dale St for another 20lb practice and we got in gear for our gig on Saturday Feb 4th at The Zanzibar.  I’m really looking forward to it as it’s a Saturday night and I hope we can get plenty of people along. It’s only £4 and the doors open at 8pm. If you’re in the Liverpool area come and join us. It’ll be fun. In the evening I broadcast Radio Radio 70 and had fun chatting with the listeners. That was released on Wednesday this week. Check out my slightly ropey version of “RE: Your Brains” by Jonathan Coulton. I had fun learning that. On Monday it was back to Linux Outlaws and the recording of episode 248. That isn’t out yet at the time of writing but should be soon. On Tuesday I headed up to Edge Lane for a day’s video production course with Chris Chadwick of The Hatch. He’s a top bloke and we had a really good day. Spending time with real video experts makes me realise how little I actually know about this though, I’m trying to get up to speed. I headed to LEAF in the evening with Neil on PodFactory business. We streamed the BigSWIG event live and it all went very well. SWIG is a Liverpool WordPress users group and this was their first big live event. The audio wasn’t quite as good quality as I would have liked due to a last minute workaround. It seems our video conversion box is on the fritz. It did the video as normal but the audio wasn’t playing ball. I had to put that into the internal sound card on the laptop. As some of you will know they never sound good and often pick up mains noise. Despite this the SWIG people seemed happy and I was pleased we could help them out. I’ll be working on that audio problem for next time and packing my USB sound card in case we need it. Finally on Wednesday (25th) I sat down and wrote my first article for Seven Streets, a popular Liverpool news site. I’ve been asked to do a monthly tech column and my article was about indie gaming culture. I don’t know if they’ll think it up to standard but hopefully it’ll be published soon. I’ll let you know.

There’s bound to be a couple of things I’ve missed but for now that just about brings us up to date.

Upcoming:

Tomorrow night I’m be on the rescheduled Alt3red Egos podcast talking about comics and so on. There’s no live stream but I’ll let you know when it’s published as a podcast. On Sunday I plan to finally get down to recording this acoustic album and in preparation I’ve been playing the keyboard a bit of late. I’d like to do some of the songs on piano, so we’ll see how that goes. On Monday night we’ll have more live Linux Outlaws. You can join us at sixgun.org/live from 8pm UK time. There’s chat via the IRC channel and a live audio stream. It’s an hour later than normal as we’ll be recording another Leave Your Hat On with LO community legend Jezra. On Wednesday I have another FLOSS Weekly booked in. You can tune into that live at twit.tv/live from 4:30pm UK time, an hour earlier than usual. At the weekend it’s TEDx Merseyside and I also have the 20lb gig in the evening.  Then on Sunday (Feb 5th) there’ll be another live Rathole Radio from 9pm. Other exciting things are happening right now and I’ll tell you more about all of those as they develop.

Until next we meet, take care of yourselves.

Dan