port7 – co – uk

I have just got back from the Stereo Graffiti Gig over at The Globe in Glossop

Stereo Graffiti is a Manchester based Podcast by my mate Andy and bunch of his mates, it is a showcase of both local and international music talent. Tonight they did the first ever live gig, with performances from a load of very talented singer / songwriters from the Manchester area

I had not seen Andy for a few years now and it was great to catch up with him and his missus Julie. I had also not been in The Globe for a few years and am glad to see that it has smartened it self up, and it seems to have become a bit of a musical hot-spot, with a great room upstairs for performances and where tongihts gig was held

The performances tonight were amazing, I was really taken back with the quality of the performers, it just goes to show that the music that you see and hear in the charts are a pale reflection of the talent that is out there. And it is amazing that all this was all on my local doorstep here in Glossop!

You all need to head over to Stereo Graffiti and download an episode or two, and check out the great music on there. Also if you are in a band send the Stereo Graffiti team some of your tunes so they can play them on the show, they are always on the look out for good music

Some of my highlights of the night were, Ann English, Lance, Roydan Styles, Darren Poyzer, Room 13, Phil, & there was one other one but I can’t remember his name, I know he was sitting right at the front and reminded me of Shaun Ryder!

It was a great night, I was really glad I went. Next time I am going to try and drag a few more peeps along. It was a great night and thanks need to go to those that organized the night, namely Rae Leeson & Andy Goddard!

Last night before I went to bed I thought I would just check my E-Mails as I had not done so all day, but like the geek I am, I got drawn into something.

3 Hours later at 1am, I had iFolder installed and configured at work. So far I am reasonably impressed, the admin is very slick, the windows client is shiney. I wonder how it scales up, as I might consider using it for our 320′ish depots.

On a recent blog post Mark Shuttleworth put a call out to say that Canonical is hiring!

This is so cool! Showing that the whole Ubuntu thing is not showing any signs of fading away! Also I noticed one of the jobs, the Senior System Engineer role, is working in a Ubuntu support centre Canonical are setting up in Montreal, evidence of one of the revenue streams that could sustain Canonical in the long term.

As probably blogged by many other people today, I am pleased to see that OpenDocument is now an ISO Standard. This is a big win for everybody, it just makes no sense to save your data into formats that are controlled by companies whose main objective is the bottom line, not the security and accessibility of your data.

I work in a world where I daily up against the Microsoft Office flag waving crowd, who think you must be mad to even consider using anything else. If they just sat and thought about the document format issue for 5 minutes they would see they need to be using OpenDocument… Then again maybe not!

Now with this decision I now have some more ammunition that shows propriety formats are not the future.

So today we wander over to the local temple of consumerism that is the Trafford Centre, for a rainy bank holiday wander.

Following the death of our old telly a few months back, we have been half on the lookout for a new one. We have finally decided on (and bought) a 26″ Sony LCD thing, John Lewis had it on at a good price with a 5 Year Warranty on it too, so we snapped it up.

I have spent much of the evening messing with MythTV and ivtvdev to try and get xorg and sound going out via SCART. After several hours of overscan and no sound, I have given up and simply connected the MythTV box to the telly via a VGA cable and a simple jack lead. I am not sure if this is a ‘good’ thing to do, if it will give the best picture or not but it works for now.