#89: Ahoy!

Avast, ye smarmy yellow-bellied landlubber! Today be 19th September, and ye should all be knowin’ the meanin’ of this! It be Talk Like a Pirate day…

Where be me eyepatch?! Raise yer grog, an’ sing a shanty with yer old boy Mad Dog Gus…

#88: Pitchfork

I like to use mpd and icecast2 to listen to my music from a Linux server without a GUI. Previously, I’ve used ncmpc under screen to enqueue tracks.

The problem with ncmpc is that it’s rather a pain to use. It’s not very intuitive, and I often end up inadvertently stopping my tunes halfway through. This annoyed me, so I searched for an alternative.

I found Pitchfork a while back, which is a great Ajax-powered web frontend for mpd. It seems, unfortunately, that their website has fallen into disrepair - if you click the link above then you’ll find a SquirrelMail login. This means that it’s pretty hard to find somewhere to download it.

Fear not, however! I delved into my old ext3 partition backups and found a tarball of version 0.5.4 of Pitchfork. It’s not the most recent one that they managed before the server went bust, but only one beforehand from what I can tell, and it works perfectly. I’m linking it here for download so that anyone who might find this via Google is able to enjoy its power.

http://www.webvictim.net/random/pitchfork-0.5.4.tar.bz2

I’d appreciate a comment if you find this post useful.

#87: Work and play

It was my work Christmas party last weekend. “Christmas party, Gus?! But it’s September!” I hear you say - well, yes. It was officially known as a “summer barbecue”, but considering that it was the major social function of the nationwide office calendar for the year, and also that it was mostly pissing with rain and not barbecue weather at all, it was essentially the Christmas party.

During the day, we did laser clay pigeon shooting, a treasure hunt and my personal favourite activity, duck and goose herding with a sheepdog. Fantastically amusing to watch and more fun to do, I felt just like I was in a farm story or something. Shouting “away to me!” and watching a dog make an anti-clockwise circle around a flock of running geese while you usher them through some gateposts is definitely an amusing way to spend some time. Nobody knew that was coming and it was a great surprise.

The evening was the usual sort of affair which started out civilised and degenerated into a massive piss-up, as any good office party should. I danced like a total loon, as I always do at Christmas parties, and drank a decent amount of wine. Myself and a couple of others managed to sneak off with a bucket of booze at the end too and carried the party on back in the hotel bar which was a great laugh. I did feel the consequences in the morning, but had an absolutely fantastic time and wouldn’t change it at all. Even the drive home was a brilliant laugh, discussing all the drunken quotations and dancefloor moments from the night before. You can always tell a party’s been great if you feel completely ruined the next day but don’t regret a moment of it.

I bought “Rock Band” for the 360 on a bit of a whim as a payday present at the end of last month, and it’s properly awesome. There’s something that’s just brilliant about singing and playing the guitar at the same time - makes you feel like a rockstar even if you’re useless at it. Brilliant stuff!

#86: Shocker

I should update more. I know I’m useless and terrible, I just haven’t found the time to write about things yet. Soon, I promise.