Pete Ashton’s Blog

A while ago I attempted to upgrade WordPress for this blog to 2.6. It went wrong and I rolled it back temporarily intended to sort it out later. Now being later, and in the mood for a few minutes procrastination, I tried again and again it went wrong so I decided to do a fresh install to 2.6.1. In doing so I went through the usual backup routines but somehow neglected to backup my wp-content folder which, if you’re not aware, contains the themes and plugins I use on this blog. In doing a fresh install I managed to delete that folder and have therefore spent a good hour finding old backups, re-installing plugins, hacking the css and attempting to bring things up to date. As such there may be things that don’t quite work on the blog at the minute and I’d appreciate it if you could let me know in the comments to this post if you come across anything. (If the site simply looks a bit wonky try reloading it first. It’s lost functionality from missing plugins I can’t remember having that I’m more concerned with right now.)

Those of you who just come here for the words and pictures and haven’t got a clue what the above means, don’t worry. It’s all good.

The RIAA have spotted Muxtape and, like the idiots they are, have shut it down. Nice one. As Adders so perfectly put it: “The Music Industry spends an awful lot of time killing things for something that claims to be a creative industry…”

But I’m not that worried. While it would be nice to have a stable YouTube-style repository for audio I’m confident that something will come along to replace Muxtape and that it’ll be better. And then when the RIAA find that in a few months and crush it something even better will come along. And so on. We should be grateful to the morons for stopping music sharing from stagnating. After all, if they hadn’t stomped hard on Napster we probably wouldn’t have the wonder of BitTorrent.

The thing about Muxtape was it was an incredibly simple website. You uploaded mp3s (which were stored on Amazon’s scalable S3 service, if I remember rightly), they streamed them through a Flash player and you could add other Muxtapes to your favourites. That was pretty much it. I suspect someone with a bit of programming savvy could build a replacement in an afternoon, and that’s not to denigrate Muxtape in the slightest. Its beauty was its simplicity.

So what’s next? Some say it might be Blip.fm but I’m not yet convinced. Interesting service but not in the same “simple as shit” league as Muxtape. I expect to see a replacement in, ooh, a week at the most.

For years now I’ve been sniffy about forums. They’ve always seemed clunky with their own strange markup code that’s supposed to be easier than HTML but isn’t really and are a bitch to get going community-wise. I’ve seen enough dead forums with a couple of ancient posts to put me off bothering to start one myself or recommend others do. A blog can survive with a handful of readers but a forum needs a critical mass.

But a couple of projects I’m involved with really need a social environment where members can dictate the subjects under discussion and a forum keeps coming up as the best-fit option. So it was looking like I was going to have to get my hands dirty with something like phpBB. But then WordPress, the software which powers most of the sites I run, started work on bbPress, a forum app that integrates well with WordPress and, critically, is designed to be lightweight. So I whacked it on my server and had it up and running in about half an hour. And I have a head cold today. Not bad.

It works, and that’s great, but now it’s there I’m wondering if it might be a useful thing for peteashton.com to have. There is a community of regular readers here - probably a hundred or so of you who read my witterings regularly and comment - so there’s no reason why you, yes you, might not make use of a community space that you, yes you, can control. That, of course, is assuming that being “someone who reads Pete’s blog” is a strong enough social glue.

But even if it isn’t a forum could still be a useful thing if I tie it into existing social environments. Twitter is, as ever, a nice example of this. I don’t post links to every blog post to my Twitter account but if there’s one which is relevant to my followers on there or to which I’d like a relatively instant response, I’ll post it to Twitter. Depending on the time of day I can instantly get 50 or so hits to that post in minutes, a much better result than through RSS, but it has to be done carefully so as not to effectively cry wolf.

One thing I’m keep to develop on the forum is a virtual version of my Social Media Surgeries where people come along to a cafe every Monday to ask my advice. If you have a question whack it on the forum, something I’ll be doing with questions I get sent through email. The hope is the community will help out there, rather like Ask Metafilter.

Obviously at this stage I have no idea how well this is going to work. It might turn into another ghost forum in a few weeks, it might blossom into something that’s vitally important. Let’s see, eh?

Here’s the forum. Sign up and say hello!

Last Xmas I went to New Zealand for the first time to visit my mother and sister’s family who had relatively recently emigrated there. It was so good that this year I’m going again. What I’ll do when I’m there is still moot but the initial trauma of choosing from the myriad of airline routes has been overcome. Last year I went via Japan on the outbound and China on the inbound. Japan was lovely while China was a nightmare. No sign of Japan this time so it looked like I had to chose between China and the USA, the latter of which is generally off the table these days due to security paranoia. Then I spotted Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia which I’d sort of written off as being a bit backward. Damn my blinkered western prejudices for being all wrong. Judging by Wikipedia’s entry it looks to be quite lovely:

Within the terminal, wireless internet (Wifi) are provided free of charge. The terminal also has prayer rooms, showers and massage service. Various lounge areas are provided, some including children’s play areas and movie lounge, broadcasting movie and sport channels such as Star Movies. The terminal also features a natural rainforest in the middle of the terminal, exhibiting the Malaysian forests.

So it looks like I’ll be spending my five hour stopover eating satay in a rainforest surfing the internet. I think I can live with that.

I’m leaving (on a jetplane) on December 9th and returning (when I’ll be back again) on January 15th. And after this fantastically weird and wonderful year which isn’t even over yet I am so looking forward to it.

As part of my journey towards being a live electronic noise musician I went and bought a load of cables at Maplins today. I like Maplins. It’s a very functional shop but not overwhelmingly nerdy. So I came out with what I hope are enough wires to connect up my bleep machines to the mixer when the second two arrive in the post (and after I solder them together of course, which will be a whole ‘nother adventure…). for now, though I made do with what I have, which turns out to be quite a bit. You’ll see in the above photographic representation my brother-in-law’s mixing desk which is much more powerful than I’d suspected having 10 tracks and 14 inputs. I think. Whatever, it’s more than enough for my purposes. I’ve got the Thingamagoop plugged into track 1, the laptop running drum beats through track two and a microphone going into track 6 with it all coming out through my hifi amp. And it works beautifully.

Just waiting for the two Thingamakits to arrive now…

Thursday saw me spending a night at the opera, but since this was a performance by the Birmingham Opera Company it wasn’t what you might expect from a night at the opera. For a start it took place in a disused warehouse in the district of Ladywood, not an area renowned for its artistic vibrancy. Here’s the site from the air:

After being greeted by the huge mural shown above and entertained by a dance performance overlooking the canal and wasteland we were shepherded into relatively small room where we crowded around bags of rotting oranges giving of a pungent, heady scent the reminded me of certain Peter Greenaway films while a couple of thugs in butchers aprons strode around menacingly. Suddenly they grabbed a guy and dragged him through the double doors. We followed and found ourselves in another world.

I don’t want to spoil it for you but, to be honest, I don’t think my words can spoil it. Warehouses are massive at the best of times but this one was sculpted using 2,500 tonnes of earth into a rolling landscape around which we were allowed to roam, though the chorus did guide us to suitable spots. Here’s a sneaky photo I took while perched at the top of “the hill”.

And then the opera commenced. I have no idea what the story was. Even reading the Wikipedia summary has left me none the wiser, but it didn’t matter really. What mattered was the spectacle. No, what really mattered was being utterly immersed in the spectacle. The set design was such that the space was enormous yet oddly intimate and the acoustics were remarkably good, possibly dampened by the ocean of soil, giving a clarity to the soloists and power to the chorus. Unlike the echoey NIA where I saw their performance of La Traviata last year this warehouse, with it’s rusty pillars and pealing paint, was perfect.

Birmingham Opera take the concept of “community engagement” to commendable extremes, using members of the public to make up the cast but making sure the performance is professional to an international standard, and then plopping the end result in an environment that opera has probably never been seen in before. The effect, I suspect, is that no-one knows what to expect from first-timers to hardcore opera buffs.

It’s worth noting that Birmingham Opera were threatened with losing their Arts Council funding eight months ago without which they wouldn’t be able to do this sort of work. When they were saved at the 11th hour they obviously had something to prove. With this performance I’d say they’ve proved it in spades.

Pun not intended.

CiB is doing the Collective Memory thing with links to reviews by people who actually understood what was going on. The show continues on August 16, 18, 20, 22 and 23rd, tickets are well worth £17.50 and I highly recommend you give it a go. I might even go again myself. Here’s the flyer.