Life of Wiley

Beer Spill Shorts Out Iron Maiden Concert

It’s a pity nobody did this for the support act, Funeral for a Friend, at the Maiden concert I went to before Christmas; I’m sure they would’ve fixed it before Iron Maiden came on!

Argh! My DSL router blew up yesterday evening which will explain why you couldn’t access this site, Watford Band’s or Trinity’s websites. Sorry for the inconvenience. Kudos to THUS and BT for their speedy resolution. From a call at 10am this morning, the router was replaced and working again by 12.30pm!

Before the DSL incident I was going to call this entry IR Blues, but IR in this case means Inland Revenue (Infra-red blues wouldn’t make any sense would it?) I owe nearly a grand in back tax from 1999-2000 which is fair enough as I’d forgotten to declare some shares that I’d exercised. However, it was the IR that assessed me for tax that year and it wasn’t until January last year that I had to complete the Self Assessment form. The result? I’m now being threatened by the IR for payment when I’ve already paid more than two thirds of the outstanding back tax and I’m waiting acknowledgement of my interest payment appeal. Can you believe that they’re charging interest from January 2000 rather than the deadline for the Self Assessment, January 2003?

On the advice of lowculture I watched Channel 4′s Grand Designs on Wednesday night. The programme tracks people who are developing their own properties. In Wednesday’s programme they followed a couple who were converting an old violin factory in their dream home.

The house, when it was completed, was stunning and included all the latest hi-tech gadgets. However, I did find myself agreeing with the presenter about the open plan dining room/kitchen. Yes it was huge, yes the table was about 20m long, but it looked more like a restaurant than a dining room in a home. Added to that was the fact that they’d had a gas cooker installed that cost a staggering £34,000! And it didn’t even work properly, the thermostats didn’t function.

I must say though that I’d love to be able to build my dream house, just the way I wanted it. Not sure I could spend £1.2m on it though!

Apologies for the title of this entry, been listening to too much Alan Partridge.

Last night’s rehearsal was excellent. I got to go because Louise was very busy with some work that needed to be written up so wasn’t going to be much company for me. I got there quite early and what a difference a day can make. Martyn, our MD, and Lou, his wife, had been down the previous evening and cleaned the whole place up ahead of our AGM next week. Then the band started to arrive and what a band it was. We’d got 8 across the back row cornets, 5 horns, all the baris, euphs, trombones and percussion. In fact the only members not present were 1 bass and 1 solo cornet.

We started off playing a couple of new pieces; Windstar by Darryl Barry which was quite good, in a western movie kind of way and then a collection of short Irish pieces called Celtic Moods. This was excellent, though for the solo cornets some of it is a bit like an Arban exercise (that’s good really because it means I can take it home to practise and it’ll be a lot more interesting than doing Arban exercises). In the second half we spent going through the contest pieces for Milton Keynes. They were pretty good again tonight, but we’re still too loud and I’m as guilty for this too. After the rehearsal I listened to a CD of the top bands playing some contest pieces and you could certainly hear how controlled their volumes were.

An interesting thought (to me anyway) came to me after the rehearsal from something that Martyn said during it. When he got Celtic Moods out he said that he wouldn’t get Riverdance out as he couldn’t conduct it. So it’s clear now that if Martyn can’t conduct something he gets to choose not to do it, but if we can’t play something we’ve got no choice! Actually we should make Martyn conduct it so that he can improve himself! [Martyn, if you read this, I'm only kidding!]

A few days ago I pointed out the farce surrounding match day parking on New Year’s Day and that I’d write a letter to the Watford Observer. Well guess what, they printed my letter. Not that I win £25 or anything!

Thanks to Dave for pointing me to SquirrelMail for a webmail solution. That was dead easy to install and get working once I figured out I needed to add an Alias directive to the Apache config.

Oh dear, not feeling with it today at all. Last night I only got about 4 hours sleep instead of my usual 8 and now I’m suffering (hence my imood at the top of the page).

I couldn’t sleep because my mind was racing. It’s the band’s AGM next Tuesday and, as I’m acting Chairman, I’ve got to do a report and orate it to the assembled mess, I mean mass! It’s not the public speaking that bothers me (I do that all the time with my preaching), it’s the fact that I’ve got to try and cover off the highs and lows of the previous year and try and enthuse the band for the coming year; all this whilst making sure I don’t forget to thank certain key people.

Oh well, at least I managed to get the virtual domain stuff working in Exim and Courier IMAP on the new server I’m putting together for home. I’m building it on an old Toshiba laptop running Linux (RedHat 9). The idea is that I can stick this in the loft where it needn’t be turned off whenever guests come to stay, as currently happens with the Windows PC in the spare bedroom.

Getting the webserver (Apache), PHP and MySQL database server working was a doddle. Once I’d dumped and then imported the current MySQL data into the new database Moveable Type (weblog) and Coppermine (photogallery) just worked. Getting Courier IMAP working was just a matter of going through the documentation to get the maildir and authentication stuff working, and then the only problem was with Exim deliveries but that didn’t take too long to suss out. So good work on the documentation for all those software packages. I’ve just got to check that awstats works and find a decent webmail package.

Last night’s rehearsal was a bit different. I wouldn’t what on earth was going on when some guy was setting up a PA system; I mean, the band room is not that big. It turns out that for our concert in June we’re going to be having a singer, as well as a choir and guest soloist, and he’s going to be singing with the band. As you may have guessed from the title of this entry he’ll be singing a selection from Robbie Williams’ Swing When You’re Winning album (an excellent album if you’ve not already heard it). I was looking forward to having a bash (literally!) at the trumpet solo in “Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me”, but unfortunately that doesn’t feature in the medley. It’s great actually because the solo cornet part just has the melodies and as they are being sung we don’t need to play, so that’ll be a nice 10 minute break for us in the concert!

We also had a new cornet player last night. Kimberley’s still at school but is already working towards her grade 7 so I expect she’ll be joining us on the front row soon, once she gets her confidence in the band.

It’s always nice to have new players, I mean proper new players rather than folks moving from band to band. Apparently she found out about the band from the band’s website and even managed to find her way to the band room using the directions on the website, which is no mean feat as I wrote the directions off the top of my head and it’s not the easiest of band rooms to find in the dark.

Anyway, Kimberley is already getting her feet wet as she’s going to bring along another cornet playing friend next time and she’s going to be coming along to the band social.

Whilst we’re on the subject of new players we should be having a new bass trombone player coming along for a blow soon; ex military so should be good. And I think a new tenor horn player too. If we’re not careful we’ll soon be over-subscribed! (Which will be nice)

Speed camera clocks motorist at 406 mph

This article made me chuckle.

I was totally amazed, or to use a northern English phrase, “gob-smacked” on Saturday evening.

We were at my brother’s house in Lichfield and I’d gone out and bought his girlfriend’s son, Liam, a birthday present and card. I’d wrapped the present (a small BMW Z4 remote control car which is excellent value for money from Argos!) and wrote the card out bar signing the names when Euan came into the kitchen. So I collared him to write his name on the card. Now normally we lightly write his name in so he can copy over it, but this time I just gave him the pen and called out the letters and he just wrote his own name out! I couldn’t get over it, he’s not yet 4 years old. I was so chuffed (another northern English phrase) that I went out and showed Lou, but apparently this hadn’t been the first time he’s done this. In fact Lou’s just gone and found another example that he did at his old nursery before Christmas.

Just, like, wow! It can be really great being a dad.

I’m very much looking forward to our second child’s birth, due in May. We could see it kicking last night and it’s been at it again tonight. Lou thinks we’ve got a ballerina or footballer; I suspect she’s hoping for the former, but we’ll be thrilled whatever. Euan wants a brother… to beat up I suspect!

Phew! I think I’ve sorted the band out for the upcoming Milton Keynes contest now. I’d forgotten to put down one of our cornet players but the organiser has kindly agreed to add his name. Also our new trombone player, Kenny, should have his transfer completed just in time to play too, which is good considering that on Tuesday I didn’t think we were going to be able to field a trombone section.

Hopefully from now on things should be a lot simpler now that we’ve got pretty much a full compliment of players on our membership register. It’s just persuading them to play at the contests that will be the problem, but I’ll leave that up to Martyn , our musical director!