John Allsopp

Professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans

Beached 2008: 18 August 2008: It was Beached weekend, Scarborough's biggest music event.; I think Scarborough's quite an unresponsive crowd. Maybe, a bit Yorkshire, a bit: "c'mon then, entertain us, we've come down from t'old town for this" .. in attitude at least. It's a free festival, we can come and go as we please, so the band's had better be good or we'll just wander off.; I felt that even for One Night Only who we really liked, but the crowd just didn't seem to go wild enough for, somehow :-); Manfat Voodoo (who appear to defy all attempts to find them on mySpace by cunningly naming their page "manfat voodo0" with a zero replacing the last 'o') played on the Truck stage on Saturday night at about 5pm. Here's how it looked just before we went on .. this is The Occasion and their audience.; It was very beachy this year. There was surf and surfers, sun, and .. I'm not sure the organisers got their tide times right because when Detroit Social Club came on, there was nowhere to stand where you wouldn't get wet. Maybe the surfers were there because the planned Cayton Bay surf party got cancelled.; Oh, I almost forgot to mention Dodgy's lesson in how not to use a backing track. The end of something like the third song had to be basically abandoned after what turned out to be a pre-recorded backing vocal track didn't switch off and interfered with the next part of the song which was in a different timing. It was switched off with a pedal after the song ended, so I don't know what the problem was, but it forced the end of the tune anyway.; Beached always seems to throw up a band that I really like (but had previously never heard of). This year it's Detroit Social Club. Watching the drummer for One Night Only, very capable, but in the modern style .. fussy, playing drums like an instrument rather than like a rhythm machine. I like my rhythms clean, and Detroit Social Club is as clean as rhythm gets. One song ('Black and White', I think) seemed to be entirely bass thud, snare, thud, snare, thud, snare, thud, snare. Not even a hi-hat. Yet it grooved. Think of the rhythm of Queen's We Will Rock You if you don't think a clean rhythm can work.
Solzhenitsyn's hair: 14 August 2008: As you probably know by know, I'm spending a fair amount of time nowadays promoting hair loss solutions, so when Solzhenitsyn appeared in our newspapers recently for dying, what stuck me was his hairstyle.; I'm slightly irritated that I can't find the picture I'm looking for, I'm sure it was in the Grauniad but I've been through their Solzhenitsyn pics and it's not there, this probably illustrates it best.; In the pic I saw, he looked stern and rather like a bear. And then there's the hair. It's male pattern baldness giving the bald pate, but then he's grown hair everywhere else. I don't want to say it's comedy, although there is something slightly comical about it in the sense that getting told off in class makes you really, really, want to snort with laughter. There's something about the fulsome bushiness of the hair everywhere .. except on the top of his head where he's completely smooth. It's a challenge. It's "I'm Solzhenitsyn, and I made my hair this way on purpose .. got anything to say about that?" which is kinda fantastic.; I should probably take it a bit more seriously and work out what he spent his life doing, I'm sure he's worthy of a damn sight more respect than I appear to be showing him here. I am very respectful in truth, but time's short, as always, so if I'm going to get political, I'll probably stick to something a little closer to home.
The Analects: 8 August 2008: I'm not religious, but one of the few things I do like about religion is how it might give us rules for living, albeit that (perhaps especially in Western religions) those might well have been adapted by whatever power structures are around (religion being one) in order to keep the plebs down.; But in the Kama Sutra .. well in the version I bought and read, anyway, which for some reason wasn't illustrated and didn't bang on about sexual positions .. I found a really inspirational page about how everyone should have some basic skills, and they were things like .. how to make a perfume, how to cook, and how to sing. Sounded, and sounds, fabulous to me. And what harm would that do other than taking up our time that might otherwise be spent chiselling away at the structures of society?; So, anyway, in last Saturday's Guardian there was a guide to the Olympics, and each day contained a Confucius quote, and I found them particularly inspiring. My favourite: "It is better to light one small candle than to curse the darkness". It turns out Confucius' teachings were distilled into The Analects and from there we can get more quotes than you can shake a stick at.
Wearpalettes: 5 August 2008: "Yeah, yeah, when do I ever go shopping for designer clothes?" (Err, I do actually, every now and then). That was my first reaction to Wearpalettes, a palette of colours extracted from photographs in a style blog.; But when I looked closer, I loved the palettes, and could see them used strongly in website design.; Because I haven't quite cracked the colour rules. I mean, actually colour is a whole lot more complicated than it seems. For instance, you see rules that go like this: take a colour, put it into Photoshop (I use The Gimp, but then I always was awkward) then using the same saturation and value settings, choose other hues, preferably ones a particular distance away from your starting colour to achieve the effect you want .. opposite if you want to knock them off their seat, slightly different if you want them to stick around and drink cocktails.; But there are two mammoths wrong with that. The first mammoth .. shall we give these mammoths names? Yeah, let's call them Reality and Perception.; These are speaking mammoths, btw. Quite clever. So Reality mammoth says this. RGB and HSV and whatever other crappy ways we've come up with to make colours on screen are just there to drive the technology that creates the colours on screen. In other words, we only use RGB because screens are full of red, green and blue pixels and between them all they make the colours we see. The problem is, take a look at the diagram here. See the coloured triangle? That's what RGB can give you. See the big grey 'other' curvy bit? That's all the other colours there are, that RGB can't give you. So whoa .. screens .. tv .. only gives you about half of the colours you can otherwise perceive. Pretty crappy isn't it?; Now, Perception mammoth advises a quick peek at Josef Albers' Interaction of Color, which basically says that colours look very different depending on the other colours that are adjacent. Perception mammoth is a mammoth of few words.; All of which says: when working out a colour scheme, yeah, it's nice to know all that theory nonsense, but what looks good looks good.; And when you look at Wearpalettes, that's what you get. Yes, OK, you can start to think of the theory of how a palette works and then it just seems to fall apart and you end up with .. you know what? It just works.; So inspiration is good and this is good inspiration. Now if you don't mind, I've some mammoths to feed.
Fair Trade organic chocolate: 2 August 2008: Sometimes I'm writing about finance and accounting, and sometimes I get to write up a Fair Trade chocolate taste test. It's a tough job, etc.