larryni.me.uk

Yeah, I know. It’s nearly a week since they played here in Derry, but better late than never.

It was my first weekend off work in over a month and even longer since I had a good night out. And what a night it was – a great crowd, hot sweaty atmosphere, plenty of beer, rocking music… you get the idea. Oh yeah, there was also that large plastic container filled with home-made organic elderflower and chili wine courtesy of the guy from Ard Ri – fucking rocketfuel!

Here Comes the Landed Gentry just keep getting better each time I see them, loved the new tracks they played too. I knew the Black Diamond Heavies‘ A Touch of Someone Else’s Class and Every Damn Time albums, and they don’t do their live show proper justice. I woke up the next day and my voice was practically gone. It took until Wednesday to go back to normal – not ideal if you have to answer phones all day long

Here’s my Flickr set slideshow of the night:

He, we should get a bunch of people together with signs like that for the next time our own local christian moral overlords are standing protesting and harassing gays at the launch of gay pride outside the City Hotel, or protesting some play they haven’t even seen outside the Millennium Forum.

The place to be on the 25th October? Masons Bar, Magazine Street in Derry!

Beatnik Soul presents the awesome Black Diamond Heavies with support by Here Comes the Landed Gentry – one of the best bands to come out of Derry in recent years.

You can also catch the Black Diamond Heavies in Belfast where they play Laverys on the 29th October, and on the 24th October in Eamonn Dorans in Temple Bar, Dublin.

I was just browsing the Journal’s website when I saw the heading ‘Local author says God is female’. Usually I couldn’t care less about religious topics, but somehow this one peaked my interest. There are quite a lot of books published by local authors, many of them good and interesting. Why on earth this one was even getting any space in the Journal is beyond me. Check out the article for yourself.

The book’s author is John O’Connell. The good folks from the Journal were kind enough to include a link to his website. There are quite a few religious nuts in Derry, you often come across their letters in the local papers. But I think this one is ’special’, have a look at his About Me page:

I am the returned Christ, who has come in glory to judge the living and the dead, and whose kingdom has no end. My work as the Christ is recorded in my work as an author of ten books, countless letters and articles. Read “Revelation” for the conceptual framework of my coming straight from the Book of Revelation.

God has nurtured me all my life. In 1986 He let me into a secret – Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams and DUP leader Ian Paisley, whose names come out at 666 on a numeric alphabet, are the two beasts of the Book of Revelation.

Driven by a mysterious illness which began in 1990 when God began to speak to me in coincidences, one of which was the death of Cardinal Tomas O’Fiaich, aged 66 and 6 months, I have gone on to write and record my judgement and to war with the enemies of God who have been forced to end their wars so that their departure from the political scene is the only act that remains outstanding.

Oh yeah. We have our very own Christ incarnate. And it gets better – Derry is the new Jerusalem!

Derry was important to me. It was the New Jerusalem so far as I was concerned. It had the walled inner city, the most complete set of walls in Europe, and these walls were symbolic of the New Jerusalem’s walls in the Book of Revelation. Indeed the old Jerusalem had its walls, which the Romans had destroyed only to find that a new empire, based in a different part of the world, and in a different era, had built another beautiful fortress where the Lamb was to reside.Derry, the place of so much oppression over the last several hundred years, was the place where the 144,000 citizens, who had the name of the Lamb and his father written on their foreheads, were to reside.

Then I looked and there before me was the Lamb, standing on Mount Zion, and with him 144,000 who had his name and his father’s name written on their foreheads. (Rev 14:1)

Thus the Lamb was to have a name, and his father was to have a name, and in human terms this name would be significant for the 144,000 who lived in the New Jerusalem.

Keep on reading, it’s pretty wild.

Remember that 666 BS he mentioned above. Well, there’s a bit more on that in his Gerry Adams’ secret fear article:

It was like lightning struck me. It was to do with the other part of a calculation a friend had shown me in my days at St Columb’s College as a fifteen year old. That calculation worked out the name of Ian Paisley at 666. I had checked the references in the Book of Revelation at that time and I knew that there were to be two beasts.

“Gerry Adams! It has to be!” I roared to myself in the kitchen of the small flat where I had my experience of great love and peace.

I set down the same numeric alphabet, and calculated Gerry Adams’ name at 666. It was the icing on the cake.[...]

Well, Gerry apparently didn’t like that one too much:

It wasn’t long before I heard from Sinn Fein. Others may make up excuses but I know that the attack on our home, smashing several windows, in August 1986 was a warning from Sinn Fein. But it was too late. Their war was over. I had taken out their king and all good chess players will know that that is the game over.

But never mind, it changed Gerry and turned him from violence to peace:

Within months of that time, Gerry Adams was sending signals through Fr Alec Reid that he was prepared to end the IRA campaign. My experience had sown the seeds of doubt in Adams’ mind and unnerved him completely. He didn’t want to the Antichrist. More accurately, he didn’t want to go down in history as the man who was regarded as the Antichrist.

In Spring 1987, a year after my experience, the peace process began in earnest with talks between John Hume and Gerry Adams arranged through Fr Alec Reid, and so the history books record a rational explanation of the ending of the IRA campaign.

It unnerved him? He must have been quaking in his boots!

Maybe John should get some help.

Elvis might have had the really big hit with Hound Dog, But Big Mama’s version just wipes the floor with Elvis’ each and every time!

From the tracks’ Wikipedia entry:

The blues singer Big Mama Thornton’s biggest hit was Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller’s “Hound Dog,” which she recorded in 1952. Thornton’s “Hound Dog” was the first record Leiber and Stoller produced themselves. They took over the session because their work had sometimes been misrepresented, and on this one they knew how they wanted the drums to sound; Johnny Otis was supposed to produce it, but they wanted him on drums. Otis received a writing credit on all 6 of the 1953 pressings. This 1953 Peacock Records release (#1612) was number one on the Billboard rhythm and blues charts for seven weeks.

Thornton gave this account of how the original was created to Ralph Gleason. “They were just a couple of kids, and they had this song written on the back of a paper bag.” She added a few interjections of her own, played around with the rhythm (some of the choruses have thirteen rather than twelve bars), and had the band bark and howl like hound dogs at the end of the song. In fact, she interacts constantly in a call and response fashion during a one minute long guitar “solo” by Pete Lewis . Her vocals include lines such as: “Aw, listen to that ole hound dog howl.. OOOOoooow”, “Now wag your tail”, Aw, get it, get it, get it”. Thornton’s version is a slow, powerful, country blues.

The other musicians on this recording are Devonia Williams (piano), Albert Winston (bass), and Leard Bell (drums), and are listed as “Kansas City Bill & Orchestra”.

Check out Big Mama Thornton’s great version together with Buddy Guy recorded in 1965:

One of the first applications I get right after a fresh Ubuntu install is Ubuntu Tweak. It’s got a great selection of tweaks for your desktop environment, you can install official and 3rd party software, add document templates and scripts to Nautilus, etc…

Today version 0.4.0 has been released. One of the first things you’ll notice is that TualatriX has removed the large banner at the top. This was done so it actually fits on the screen of Netbooks which have a lower resolution. It also looks much cleaner and fits in better with Gnome.

A new feature that stands out right away is the Package Cleaner in the application section.

Package Cleaner lets you remove any redundant packages that are left over after installing/uninstalling software. You also can remove packages from the cache to free up additional space. Sure, you could quickly remove them with sudo apt-get autoremove and sudo apt-get clean from the command line, but it will be a welcome addition for people not so comfortable with the terminal.

Other not so obvious additions are that the Third Party Software dialogue also now gives you information about the package source and with one click lets you access the developer’s website. You can organise templates and Nautilus scripts now in folders, change the Gnome menu icon, and the User Folders settings can now be reset to defaults.

Check out TualatriX’s release post for more screenshots and details. At the end of the post there are also repos to add to your Hardy or Intrepid sources list. Or just download the deb or source from the download page.

Until not too long ago I still had a Windows XP partition on my laptop. The only reason I still had it was to use Nokia’s PC Suite so i could back up/update my phone, I never booted into Windows for anything else. Then a bad Windows update in combination with the ext2 driver trashed my home partition and I could not log back into my Ubuntu user account. I was pissed. I just happened to have a GParted disk lying on my desk, popped it into the drive and removed Windows and made more room for my main Ubuntu install.

Since then I managed to find ways of syncing my N95 with Ubuntu – multisync works great to sync contacts with Evolution via Bluetooth, ScheduleWorld lets you sync your phone’s calendar with gCal through their Firefox extension via Bluetooth (only seems to work half the time), I can transfer files using Bluetooth and USB, and I can manage my music through Amarok.

Unfortunately all the above are far from ideal as you need different applications for each task. Not to mention that it is impossible for me to upgrade my phone’s firmware without Windows!

Yesterday I sent an email to Nokia to see what their plans were to support other operating systems, considering the amount of people who switch to Linux and Mac OS. Here’s the reply:

Dear Laurent,

Thank you for contacting Nokia Care.

I hope all is well with you. We do understand your current predicament on using the Linux operating system. However at this present time we are unable to confirm if there will be future changes to include Linux as Nokia’s supported operating system. However, I will definitely forward this as a feedback to the relevant department for further review.

We do thank you for highlighting this to us because we appreciate such as constructive feedback from our customers, Laurent.

Out of luck for the time being then.

I tried to get the PC Suite working by running Windows XP in Virtualbox (yeah, I know, but at least it’s not taking up a full partition now or mess with my Ubuntu install ), but USB refuses flat out to connect my phone and Bluetooth connected only once and now keeps giving me an error message each time I try to activate it.

What do you use to sync your phone with Ubuntu/Linux? Do you know of any Symbian applications that help with syncing gCal reliably?

My palms got sweaty just watching this!

Kiiking on Wikipedia – Official Kiiking website

I launched Skype on my mobile phone yesterday for the first time in a while and to my surprise my non-Skype contacts started to show up, before it would only let me call other Skype users. And in the Options menu is now an entry to check my SkypeOut credit balance.

I quickly found out that it is only to call landlines/mobiles outside the UK, but that’s pretty much all I use Skype for anyway. I hadn’t heard about 3 allowing their subscribers to make interntational calls through Skype until now. A quick search brought up an article on The Register saying that it started on 1 October:

UK operator 3 is to allow Skype users to make international calls with their SkypeOut minutes, bypassing the operator completely, while the VoIP pioneer’s desktop client continues its slow progress towards version 4 with a new beta release.

Punters equipped with a Skypephone, or compatible handset such as an N95 or C902 on 3, are already able to call up other Skype users for free. But from today they’ll also be able to make international calls using the Skype network with the rate being deduced from their SkypeOut minutes.

The customer will be able to choose if a call should be handled by Skype or the traditional 3 network, and will pay appropriate rates. Chief Executive at 3 Kevin Russell said: “Although 3 customers enjoy the best value international calling tariffs in the UK, we know that people are apprehensive about using their mobiles to call internationally, especially as international minutes aren’t typically included in mobile calling bundles.”