AZ: Bows + Arrows by The Walkmen

B: Bows + Arrows by The Walkmen
As suggested by Beth Ward

I find this album a little hit and miss. The first track, What's in it for me is a perfect example; first it's a miss - there's not a lot going on musically and it's just a bit dull, hit - the lyrics are great, they're an orginal telling of the standard lyrical theme, break-ups.
Second song - hit, third - miss, fourth - hit, you get the picture.

So what are you looking forward to when listening to this album? Well if you like the musical stylings of Bob Dylan, Pavement or The Smiths then I urge you to give it a try. Imagine a smush of all of the above with the overdrive turned up high and the temperature turned down low.

So all in all, the lyrics and general feel of Bows + Arrows is really enjoyable but at times the drones and lack of much musical diversity can cause a bit of tedium, which is probably why it's taken me four months to write this piece. Or maybe the reason is that I've just been waiting for the right weather to suit the album.


5/10
Serving suggestion:
Stick it on on a sunny summer's day whilst sipping on that cool beer and lie back and drift into that pre-sun-stroke daze.

Big Tent

As I was perusing Google+ on Wednesday, I stumbled upon this post by the keen G+ advocate, Robert Llewellyn (Red Dwarf, Scrapheap Challenge). He wrote:

I was going to attend the Google Big Tent event tomorrow up in Watford, then different commitments crop up and now I can't make it.

As it so happens I was planning on visiting my parents, not 15mins drive from Watford. This seemed like too good an opportunity to miss. Now I had not heard anything about this Big Tent event, it had not been advertised at all and seemed to be an invite-only do, however, after a little Googling, I found a registration page.
Seeing as this was the day of the event and that it was still probably invite-only, I thought of it as a bit of harmless fun to fill out the form. So fill I did and to my surprise immediately received a confirmation email claiming to be looking forward to seeing me on the big day.
Again, I thought this was too good to be true and that some automated thing had messed up and I'd get to the event and be turned away by a big burly bouncer looking up and down on a list which didn't have my name on it. But 15mins drive is nothing so it was worth a try, eh?

The event was being held at The Grove. Upon pulling into the grounds of the massive hotel I was sure something had gone wrong. There were no signs of any Google-life anywhere. So myself and my dad (who I had conscripted to accompany me for some company in the likely event that everything went tits-up) drove around for a bit being slightly perplexed as to where to go. A young lad working for the golf course pointed us in the right direction of, unsurprisingly, a big tent.

The tent itself was in a walled area and after parking, we walked up to the entrance where the afore-prophesied big burly bouncer stood. Tentatively we approached and I asked where we pick up our IDs (hey, you gotta pretend you belong, eh?). After a second of being ignored, the bouncer apologised for being dazed by the heat and pointed us in the direction of the welcome desk.

The welcome desk along with punters splayed across various sofas, pool tables, buffet tables, scantily-clad Coca-cola-serving ladies, was contained in a huge temporary green house. 

The Green-house

Pool and air-hockey tables

So after giving our names and, unsurprisingly, the ladies at the desk looking up and down the ID cards to come to the conclusion ours were not there. No problem - a handy printer was at the welcome desk for such an occasion, and within minutes we were the proud owners of Big Tent IDs.

I pretended to be part of my dad's company, so what?

After a spot of lunch (couscous and some little bread things with cream cheese and chutney), we headed into the lecture-tent a little early and sat in the second row. Due to our late arrival, we had missed the morning session (in which the official hash-tag had to be changed from #BigTentUK to #BigTentUK12 due to a porn-spam-hash-tag-hijack (which was ironic/coincidental/appropriate due to the mornings topic being on porn)) but here we were, awaiting the arrival of the man himself, Eric Schmidt (executive chairman, Google).

An empty stage

Introduced and informally interviewed by Channel 4's Krishnan Guru-Murthy, "5 Billion Voices: Eric Schmidt in conversation" gave an interesting insight into Google's perspective on getting mobile devices to citizens of growing countries as both communicational and educational devices. He also criticized Britain for not keeping up with our computing heritage, although welcoming the changes in the national curriculum regarding computer science he said that there is still a lot of work to be done. 

On the subject of censorship, specifically David Cameron's Iron-Porn-Firewall, Schmidt was very careful not to voice too much of his own opinion, saying that it's up to governments to make their own policies, however, that these policies must be clear cut and easily implementable.

Under questions from Guru-Murthy and the audience, Schmidt kept his cool and gave, if not practised, very informed responses. Regarding accusations that Google's search results prefer Google products his response seemed evasive, rather than going on record to say that they don't (or do) he asked whether it was illegal if they did do it. Schmidt seemed very happy when asked whether Google+ has been a failure (especially when compared to the behemoth, Facebook) citing that Facebook has had many years to get it's user base and that 150MUsers in the time Google+ has been active is an extremely good result.

Eric and Krishnan

Next on the agenda were three presentations by journalists from the Guardian, Burum Media and the Huffington Post about the use of modern technology in journalism followed by a discussion and Q&A. Although journalism is not really my field (as you can tell by reading this!) this was extremely interesting, specifically the talk by The Guardian's Simon Rogers on how they used data to better understand what was happening during the riots.

Following a short break, in which I had some liquid nitrogen made, Eton mess flavoured ice-cream, was presentations and then a debate by two authors, under the title "Good or Evil: has the social revolution enhanced or diminished our society?" First up was Andrew Keen, author of #digitalvertigo: How today's online social revolution is dividing, diminishing, and disorienting us, followed by Nick Harkaway; The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World. Both authors were concerned about how to retain humanity under the ever increasing influence of people who are fully immersed in the online experience. This, however, was the sum total of their agreement.

Harkaway took an optimistic view of the whole scenario and I look forward to reading his book (copies of both books were given away free at the end). Keen on the other hand came across extremely pessimistic, ignorant and frankly just a grumpy old man who wants things to go back to the way they were. We all know the famous saying "if you're not paying for something, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold" and Keen is of the opinion that in the future people will pay for the premium of having their privacy protected. This is an interesting concept but as it stands, this is not the way the trend seems to be going. His arguments stood some ground throughout the Q&A until he came out with this humdinger:

Free services like Wikipedia I don't think benefit anyone.

 ...away crumbles a large chunk respect I have for the man. I'd bet good money that he has not known something and proceeded to look it up on Wikipedia and has benefited from it! I could vent on this subject for a while but I feel my coherence may be marred by my frustration so I'll stop here!

Overall, Big Tent 2012 was an extremely engaging event with anybody that you sit down next to being friendly and talkative. The most interesting points raised were that of privacy - people are willing to give up some for the benefit of the service provided, and you can't erase the past on the internet, and that of what comes after "The Social Web".

So all there is left to do is to thank Robert Llewellyn for "letting the cat out of the Google sack" and that I look forward hopefully sneaking myself in again next year.

I bought a suit the other day

This post is done in a Richard Herring, Me1 vs. Me2, style. I've never actually listened to his multiple personality podcast, however, he tweets enough about it...


Me 1: So David, back in January you made a commitment didn't you? Could you please comment on that a little?
Me 2: Ah yes. Back in January, I made the claim that I would write 26 album reviews corresponding to every fortnight in the year and every letter of the alphabet.
1: ...and what happened to that?
2: Well my first post was a little late, "no matter," I thought; it was easy enough to write and a fair bit of fun. The second album, however, I ran into some difficulty - the words just weren't coming. So I put it off a little. And then a little more. In the mean time, I moved home, which took up a bit of time, and started working more, which took up even more time.
1: So you just kept putting it off?
2: That's right, and now I'm ten albums behind schedule.
1: Will you ever do it?
2: Honestly, I don't know. I can try catching up, but the fact is that I may not ever get round to it.
1: So that's it then, no more blogs?
2: Not at all! The purpose of the A-Z project was to give myself practice writing as apparently it's a useful skill. I'm going to try keep doing some writing on things that more interest me at the time. Not such a long term commitment but maybe it will make the A-Z project come easier in the future.
1: The title of this post is "I bought a suit the other day", care to expand on that?
2: Well with my friend Sam's wedding coming up and a meeting in Italy at the start of next month, it was time for a new one.
1: Can we see it?
2:

Waistcoat FTW