Author Archives: Tim Hall

Cloud Atlas Album Launch

Posted on June 30, 2014 by Tim Hall

Cloud Atlas album launch at Tokyos in York

A few photos from Cloud Atlas’ album launch in Tokyo’s in York, moved at short notice from the original scheduled venue, Fibbers.

Cloud Atlas album launch at Tokyos in York

The songs from the album “Beyond the Vale” come over well live, which given the raw, live feel of the album shouldn’t really have been a suprise. Heidi Widdop has a voice that goes from Alison Goldfrapp to Janis Joplin, and lead guitarist Martin Ledger made a strong impression with his melodic and powerfully atmospheric style.

Cloud Atlas album launch at Tokyos in York

Cloud Atlas have quite a few more gigs in the pipeline, including an appearance at the Cambridge Rock Festival at the beginning of August. They are going to be a band to watch.

Posted in Live Reviews | Tagged | 1 Comment

The NMT Comes to York

Posted on June 30, 2014 by Tim Hall

The Network Rail Measurement Train at York on 29th June 2014

Network Rail’s High Speed Measurement Train pauses at York on June 28th.

This train is a familiar sight for regular train travellers throughout the country. Converted from a High Speed Train a few years back, it records the state of the track, criss-crossing the country, covering each line every couple of months.

Posted in Railway Photography | Tagged , | Comments Off

Shut Up, The Band Is Playing

Posted on June 30, 2014 by Tim Hall

I’m not going to name the band in this post. I know it’s not going to be hard for regular readers of this blog to identify the gig, but I don’t think it’s fair on the band themselves to have such a negative post showing up in Google searches for their name.

I’d love to have been able to write a glowing review about their actual performance, since the band themselves were excellent, but unfortunately what should have been a wonderful night was ruined by the behaviour of a segment of the audience. I’ve had gigs spoiled by intermittent distracting talking before, but this was the worst instance I can ever remember. This wasn’t just a buzz of chatter coming from the back of the hall, but selfish idiots talking continually at the top of their voices clearly audible from the front row even during the loudest parts of the set. There was even one group of knobheads who ignored repeated requests to keep the noise down.

I very nearly walked out the gig after two or three songs in disgust.

I have never seen a worse case of disrespect for both the band and that part of the audience who was actually there for the music. It’s as if the band were nothing more than the soundtrack for a lads’ night out. Audiences for free-entry gigs by pub cover bands behave better than this.

I know from speaking to the band afterwards that it distracted them too, and it’s difficult to imagine that the behaviour of these clowns in the audience didn’t take the edge off the band’s performance. The dynamics of live music means the best gigs are those where the band feed off the energy the energy they’re getting from the crowd. This was not happening here.

Posted in Music Opinion | Tagged , | 6 Comments

Facebook: As Creepy As Hell

Posted on June 30, 2014 by Tim Hall

The media have now picked up on the story of Facebook tinkering with users’ feeds for a massive psychology experiment.

Even if this is technically legal under the small print of Facebook’s Terms of Service, there is no way in hell what they did can be remotely ethical. Although it’s difficult to describe it as a “betrayal of trust” since nobody in their right mind should be trusting this creepy organisation as far as they can throw them.

I really hope this revelation encourages more people to log off from Facebook and find other, better ways of keeping in touch with the people they care about.

Posted in Social Media | Tagged | Comments Off

Dave Kerzner launches Kickstarter campaign for new album

Posted on June 27, 2014 by Tim Hall

Dave KerznetMantra Vega and former Sound of Contact keyboard player Dave Kerzner has launched a Kickstater campaign for his solo album “New World”, with an impressive array of guest appearances.

I’m Dave Kerzner, also known by my nickname “Squids”. “New World” is my first solo album after splitting with award-winning Progressive Rock band “Sound of Contact”. My new Prog record brings classic rock elements of the 60s and 70s into a modern musical soundscape. New World is a concept album done in two versions, a standard edition with over 70 minutes of music and a deluxe double disc extended edition with over 140 minutes of theatrical, rich and picturesque music to dig into! The subject matter of the storyline deals with the journey of human emotions from the darkness of facing your demons to rising above the obstacles that hold us back in life.

All of the lyrics and music are written, produced and sung by me and I am joined by some amazing special guests such as Steve Hackett (Genesis), Durga McBroom (Pink Floyd), Francis Dunnery (It Bites), Nick D’Virgilio (Tears for Fears, Big Big Train), Jason Scheff (Chicago), David Longdon (Big Big Train), Fernando Perdomo, Heather Findlay (Mantra Vega, Mostly Autumn), Adam Gaynor (Matchbox 20), Ana Cristina and more!

The album has a projected release date of October, provided the project reaches the funding goal of $17000.

Posted in Music News | Tagged , | Comments Off

Ann Coulter Auto-Poes

Posted on June 26, 2014 by Tim Hall

Infamous foaming-at-the-mouth American conservative pundit Ann Coulter thinks any growing interest in soccer a sign of nation’s moral decay.

A taste:

The same people trying to push soccer on Americans are the ones demanding that we love HBO’s “Girls,” light-rail, Beyonce and Hillary Clinton. The number of New York Times articles claiming soccer is “catching on” is exceeded only by the ones pretending women’s basketball is fascinating.

The whole thing is either a hilarious parody worthy of The Onion, or a terrifying insight into the world-view of American conservatism. And there is absolutely no way of telling which of the two it is. Another example of Poe’s Law in action.

If there are conservatives that genuinely take her seriously, it’s proof that spending too long in any echo chamber makes your bullshit detectors stop working.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Cloud Atlas album launch – New Venue

Posted on June 26, 2014 by Tim Hall

Cloud Atlas have moved their launch gig on Saturday 28th June to a different venue. The gig is now at Tokyos on Toft Green, York.

The original venue, Fibbers, is temporarily closed because of a dispute between the venue and the landlord.  As it says on the Fibbers Facebook page:

Due to a longstanding dispute with the landlord, Fibbers is TEMPORARILY closed but we expect this to be resolved AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!

Since “as soon as possible” may well not include “by Saturday night“, moving the gig does sound like the only possible option.

Posted in Music News | Tagged , | 5 Comments

Should you log every bug?

Posted on June 18, 2014 by Tim Hall

Are all bugs serious enough to log?

I found one during testing today that raised the question of the costs of raising, triaging, fixing and retesting a bug compared with the costs of just leaving it in the system.

It set off some interesting discussions on Twitter on the subject.

The bug in question was a drop-down list for an optional value in a create dialog in a relatively little-used part of the system. One of the values in the dropdown was not valid, and quite obviously not so, at least with the data in the test system. If you selected that bogus value and saved the record, the server-side code didn’t throw an error, but inserted null into the column.

Since neither the field nore the underlying column were mandatory, the bug didn’t result in any data corruption, and it did save the correct value to the database if you selected one of the legitimate, valid values.

From a user perspective, it’s more of an irritation than a major issue; it certainly doesn’t prevent you from using the feature in its intended way.

In the end I discussed it with the business analyst, and we agreed to log it in the bug tracking system, but assign a low severity.

Posted in Testing & Software | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Winter in Eden album pre-order

Posted on June 18, 2014 by Tim Hall

Court_Of_ConscienceWinter in Eden announce pre-orders for their third album “Court of Conscience”.

2014 brings us Winter In Edens highly anticipated third studio album ‘Court of Conscience’. Recorded in the Netherlands it contains eleven songs which build and further refine the unique style that is Winter in Eden. Produced by Ruud Jolie (Within Temptation) and mixed by Stefan Helleblad (Within Temptation), it also features guest vocals by the multi award winning Damian Wilson (Threshold) and Jermain van der Bogt (For All We Know, Ayreon).

The result is powerful, modern and balanced. Each instrument can clearly be heard within the Metal and the Symphonic, and the live strings on ‘The Script’ are truly wonderous. ‘Court of Conscience’ retains the band’s signature of thought-provoking lyrics mixed with memorable melodies. Whilst no two songs are alike, fans will be delighted to hear that the band’s approach to this album is a familiar one. With hard and heavy anthems such as ‘Knife Edge’ and ‘Toxicate’, more chilled and progressive tracks such as ‘Burdened’ and ‘It’s Not Enough’ along with the blues rock of ‘Affliction’, this collection of songs has something for each taste and mood.

You can pre-order it today from the Winter in Eden online shop.

Posted in Music News | Tagged , | Comments Off

Is This A Bug?

Posted on June 17, 2014 by Tim Hall

On the reset password function, Username is case-insensitive.

On the login function, Username is case-sensitive.

So if you try to log in with the exact same username as you used to reset the password (i.e, with the “wrong” capitalisation”), and the brand new password you just created, it’s rejected as “Invalid username and password”.

Logon and password reset features are basic functionality for all websites. But still some people get it wrong…

Posted in Testing & Software | 2 Comments