Car check time!

It's decidedly not warm out there today. Yesterday was gloriously sunny and warm, and yet today is gloriously sunny and cold. WTF, British weather?

Anyway, car check time! Last time I posted this was um, February, but I have still been doing the monthly checks, promise! Today the tyre pressures were all spot on (aside from the spare, but I can't be bothered to dig out the compressor for 0.05 bar's worth). Tyre wear on the fronts also seems to be more even these days so I'd call my experiment of slightly under-inflating them a success! Oil-wise, the level was sitting at around 2/3rds so I fed it most of the remaining 500ml. The oil consumption does seem to be a bit higher than last year but it's still well within expectations.

I have spotted what may be a leak on the filler neck of the windscreen washer fluid bottle which is annoying, though I only say maybe - yesterday when filling it the screenwash frothed up and coated everywhere with bubbles so it might be residue from that. I'll have to keep an eye on it, though since it's at the top of the bottle it's only an issue when filling it.

Mileage wise... well in February I did all of 427.3 miles, March was a bit more at 684.9 miles but April is yet another new record with 989.2 miles. Still not reached one thousand miles in a month, though the odometer has now ticked over past 60,000 miles (of which 11,000 are mine).

What I listen to meme

Today's meme is from allegramente over on A letter from home...

"You can tell a lot about a person by the music they listen to. Put your mp3 player, or whatever, on shuffle and list the first ten songs, and then tag 10 people. Rule: No skipping."

I've got a choice of two here: the full set of songs on my desktop, and the dozen hours' worth that's currently loaded onto my MP3 player. I'll start with my desktop since that's what I'm sitting in front of:

1. La danco de la vento by Andreas Viklund
2. Brother by Murder by Death, from a HMV 2007 sample album
3. The Heart Asks Pleasure First by Michael Nyman, from the collection The Very Best of Pure Moods (I always confuse this with the Downtown Abbey theme)
4. The Nutcracker Suite: Dance of the Reed Flutes by Leopold Stokowski, from the film Fantasia
5. Tallon Overworld theme, from the game Metroid Prime
6. Song of the Winds by Warder
7. In the Line of Fire from the game Command & Conquer
8. Pyroclastica (Norfair1) by Children Of The Monkey Machine, from the fan soundtrack Relics of the Chozo
9. A Long Time by Moby, from the album Innocents
10. Lost in Time by kb

What can I tell from that? Well, I've got a lot of game-related music, and an awful lot of instrumentals (the two are probably related). Only three of the songs there are from commercial albums. There's also a couple of tracks that I don't recall hearing before, while others are ones I recognise instantly. Lost in Time in particular puts me strongly in mind of Falmouth, and also curiously enough my university days - there was more than one evening when I had that on repeat and if you go digging through the archives you'll find it mentioned in one or two of the more rambling posts.

Speaking of Falmouth, it's been many years since I was last on holiday there. Perhaps it's time for another random holiday, maybe in a different cottage. As amazing and awesome as it is to actually stay inside the walls of Pendennis Castle (you even get a key to the sally-port in the gatehouse doors!), there must be many other wonderful and/or bizarre places to stay.

And my music player is still capable of mood whiplash, though it was being relatively tame today - where's the metal?


Anyway, now now for the MP3 player. Let's see what I'm actually listening to at work these days:

1. Funabul by Cirque de Soleil, from Varekai
2. Goodnight and Go by Imogen Heap, from Speak for Yourself
3. Waylands by Nightbeat
4. Parce Mihi Domine by Jan Garbarek & the Hilliard Ensemble, from Officium
5. Beata Viscera also by Jan Garbarek & the Hilliard Ensemble, from Officium
6. Loose Ends by Imogen Heap again, from Speak for Yourself
7. In nomine XIX 'Crye' from English Heritage's Music from Tudor England (I picked this album up during the last Wales holiday from Stokesay Castle - they had it playing in the shop)
8. Sanctus also by Jan Garbarek & the Hilliard Ensemble, from Officium (the random number generator likes this album...)
9. Dan y Dûr by Enya, from The Celts
10. T.N.T. for the Brain by Enigma, from Love Sensuality Devotion

Currently it's mostly loaded with easy listening music (with the exception of Imogen Heap but that's quite laid-back by pop standards) - good background music when I'm bashing some code out at work. That said there is also some VNV Nation on there, though there's no metal or rock currently loaded.

It also shows how small the MP3 player is compared to my main collection by how many randomly-selected tracks share an album. The player is a mere 512MB, which was crazy large when I bought it back in 2005 or thereabouts but feels rather small these days.


Oh yes, and I need to tag people. Hmm... in no particular order I choose brokencube, pewterfish, pleaseremove, choros, talismancer, ptristan, elemnar, rustica, milestogo13, and olego.

boggyb's highly inaccurate guide to the Eurovision Song Contest

This year appears to be WTF Eurovision. As in, WTF is that dress, WTF is that hair, WTF argh my eyes, WTF how is that even possible, WTF will the new voting system result in, WTF are the judges on (really, UK judges, you voted like that)? So here's my highly inaccurate WTF does boggyb think of it all guide...

1. Belgium: meh
2. Czech Republic: I'm not sure why, but I really like this one. It all fits - the lyrics, the images, the theme. This is quite possibly my favourite of the evening.
3. Netherlands: meh
4. Azerbaijan: meh
5. Hungary: So their trick is a mad monk with a giant drum.
6. Italy: Pretty, though I had no idea what was going on - there's no English subtitles of the lyrics this year.
7. Israel WTF is that hair?
8. Bulgaria: And this song's trick is light-up jewellery/clothing that only turns on near the end as just static white. Meh.
9. Sweden: meh
10. Germany: Alice (of Alice in Wonderland) is in some sort of gothic wood? I have no idea what's going on.
11. France: Nice use of the video floor/wall. There's quite a few this year that are actually using this as part of the performance with more than a simple backdrop.
12. Poland: meh
13. Australia: This one started slowly, but grew on me - it's another of my favourites this evening. There's also a video overlay at one point but unlike in Italy where it was some random scribbles, here it's actually linked into the choreography and the singer interacts with it.
14. Cyprus: Well it's presented as being some gritty metal song... and actually sounds like a tame bit of rock (Nickelback is more aggressive). I think they were trying for Lordi's success.
15. Serbia: Some sort of goth theme?
16. Lithuania: Another good use of the video floor/wall and overall I like it.
17. Croatia: So the latest WTF dress is a plastic sheet?
18. Russia: Oh, that's pretty neat. Heh, it's almost like a game of Rhythm Thief. Wait -- WTF HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE? It's unfortunately let down by the truck driver's gear change at the end - the last part feels like they ran out of ideas and tried to fill the time with a more traditional Eurovision entry - but aside from that, it's very well done.
19. Spain: meh
20. Latvia: Yet another good video.
21. Ukraine: Possibly the best use of the video wall/floor today. The singer is also putting an amazing amount of emotion into it.
22. Malta: meh
23. Georgia: ARGH MY EYES.
24. Austria: Very pretty. I think it'll be overshadowed by the other entries
25. United Kingdom: Actually a pretty decent entry.
26. Armenia: meh

To sum up: Czech Republic and Australia are my favourites, Russia's entry DEFIES THE LAWS OF PHYSICS, and Georgia will MELT YOUR EYES with retina-destroying strobe lighting and eighties video effects. But wait, there's more!

First interval act: meh

Second interval act: AWESOME. What they've done is to create a song with every single musical trope from TV Trope's Eurovision page combined with every single winning act - and not only dare to perform the result, but actually make it work.

Third interval act (just after lines close - and no, this is not Heroes): The song is alright - nothing special - but the staging is impressive. They're performing motion capture of the dancers (that's what the little white dots on their suits are for) in real time and feeding it into the video floor.

...And now we've run out of songs and are into the voting. Which is weird this year - no, I don't mean the new system (which supposedly makes it more suspenseful, and definitely makes it go faster) but where the points are going. The top scores are all over the place! Interestingly when it got to the popular vote the public has a completely different opinion to that of the juries... and the voting itself went right down to the wire with the winner unknown until the very end (the combined popular vote ended out handing increasingly crazily high scores, so what looked like on unassailable lead suddenly became very uncertain).