Teutcher music

Some time ago, and apropos of nothing, I thought that in the highly unlikely instance of me running a successful ceilidh band, I would call them Kroftwerk. Get it?

Anyway, on rushing to the nearest computer I was disappointed to find that there’s a band in Stornoway with just that name. I’ve mentioned this to my brother who told me he saw a CD recently for a band called Ceilidh Minogue. With his crofter’s hat on, he’s come up with suggestions for some more Teuchter versions of bands. Here they are, with the real bands in Italics.

Wirelesshead (Radiohead)
Byre 7 (Shed 7)
Trough (Oasis)
R Ceilidh (R Kelly)
Peat Ash (Ash)
The Farm Animals (The Animals)

And I can think of:

Peat Loaf (Meat Loaf)
Mobile Bank of Sustainable Crofting (Banco de Gaia)
Sheep Dip (Shampoo – remember them?)
Sheep Dog (Snoop Dog. What’s he called this week, incidentally?)
The MacTurtles (The Mock Turtles)
Whisky’s Big Adventure (Misty’s Big Adventure)
The Subsidy Dwellers (The Subcity Dwellers)

Any other suggestions?

Looking forward

I’m barely back from two weeks’ wandering about the place, and I already have my eyes on going away again. I have one or two of interesting weekends away in the next couple of months (more on them later), but what I am really looking forward to is the Faroe Islands in June.

It’s Justin, Niall and myself, and a week of exploring our neighbours to the north. And hopefully, if we can get tickets, the Faroes playing Scotland and Italy. Not at the same time, mind, that would be most unfair.

I got a bit of a shock when looking at some accommodation prices on the web the other day – I knew Scandinavian countries were a bit pricey, but some of the costs per night could get you a month’s rent in parts of Glasgow. This doesn’t bode well given that I am also trying to save money for the big travels in September.

To move my mind on to the positives, I’ve started reading my guidebook to the Faroes, and thought that I could share some of what I discover as I read. For starters, did you know that the Faroes were first inhabited by Irish monks? Or that the Faroese language was only properly written down in the 1800s? Or that the islands have an excellent bus network, and surprisingly cheap helicopter trips?

Maybe we could just sleep in helicopters…

I hate technology: a plea for help

I really don’t know an awful lot about computers and stuff.

Yes, I have built my own website, I write a blog, keep a Flickr account, and come out in a mild panic when I don’t know where my laptop, iPod, digital camera and mobile phone are.

But I’m not that much of a techie. I know a bit of HTML, but still don’t know what HTML actually stands for. I don’t know any programming languages. I wouldn’t have a clue what to do if I unscrewed my laptop and looked at the scary, flashing bits inside. I don’t really understand LAN, WAP, ISP, ISBN, PAYE, BYOB and all the other technological acronyms you seem to come across so often.

Sure, I know that “wireless” no longer means the thing you sit knitting next to while waiting for news from Dunkirk, but I do still think that Java is an island in Indonesia.

I use technology a lot, I admit, but I genuinely don’t understand it. Rather like God – I’m all in favour, and I’ll do what I can to make the most of it and sing its praises, but it still mystifies me sometimes.

Just a couple of months back, for example, when the wireless internet in my previous flat broke, I had to cry plaintatively down the phone to a friend in Edinburgh and bribe him with a train fare and dinner to get him to come through and help me identify the problem.

And recently, I have been angsting about two major problems. Maybe you can help.

The first is wireless internet. In my new flat, it’s all set up and ready to rumble, and my flatmate can use it fine, but I can only access it on my laptop if I am sitting just a couple of feet away from the router, which is in my flatmate’s room (the router is the antenna-like thing that plugs into your phone line, wirelessly and invisibly projecting your internet connection like a magic radio wave. Or something).

Thanks to a helpful friend I chatted to online yesterday, this seems to suggest that the wireless card in my laptop is somewhat buggered. The wireless card, I believe, is the bit of my laptop that acts as a sort of receiver or “crow’s nest” by searching for wireless networks in the area. Put simply, the closer the wireless card needs to be to “see” the wireless network connection emitting from the router, the rubbisher the wireless card is.

I could buy a new wireless card (an MSI CardBus CB11B2, if that means anything to anyone… it certainly means nothing to me), but are they easy to buy? And how can I be absolutely sure that this is the problem and I won’t be wasting money by buying one? And is it a problem that my laptop is made by Tiny, a company that has gone bust? And is this another of those “if I had a Mac, all would be right with the world” moments?

Oh, and the second problem is a slightly more long-running one – wireless speakers. I used to have some wee speakers that plugged into my laptop so I could play music, videos and so on. However they died a natural death a few weeks ago, and I figured it would be nice to get some wireless ones, which would minimise the risk of me tripping and breaking my neck.

And for the technophobes among you, wireless speakers would mean ones that would not be physically connected to my laptop – meaning I could move my laptop (or indeed my speakers) to anywhere in the flat and still listen to whatever music I was playing. So I asked around a few nearby shops. All said “no sorry, try PC World”.

So I did, just last week, during my mid-holiday break. PC World said they’d given up selling them because “the technology is not quite there yet” to get over things like interference from mobile phones, taxis and thick walls. I find that hard to believe. Though I confess my disbelief is down more to naïve optimism than any knowledge of wireless technology.

There are one or two for sale on various sites like Amazon, but I don’t know which one to go for, but I’ve generally only bought techie stuff after advice from trusted friends who know about these sorts of things.

So I thought I would cast the net wider to readers of this blog to solve my current problems.

Is it really too much to ask in life that I can spend a lazy Bank Holiday Monday, the final day of my two weeks’ holiday, lying in bed surfing the net and listening to music, rather than camping on my flatmate’s floor for a few minutes while I upload a rant written the night before?

Specifically, dear readers, your starters for ten are:

1. Does it sound to you like my wireless card is really broken? Despite working fine barely a month ago? Any suggestions?
2. Wireless speakers – let’s have your informed suggestions and recommendations.

And because I am so hapless without expert help, there’ll be an as-yet undetermined prize for any advice which turns out to be the full solution.

The end of Lent

Happy Easter, everyone. I hope you had fun commemorating the rising of the Easter Bunny after three days of rolling down a hill. Or something.

Talking of Lent, I have a confession to make. I realised a couple of days after my weekend in Carbisdale Castle that I’d eaten sliced bread while up there. It was an absent-minded mistake, and I can blame nobody but myself for my failure. My apologies for the anti-climax of what you probably all hoped was going to be a tale of self-discovery of Damascene proportions.

The only reassurance I can take from my first failed Lent observance is that if I had succeeded, I would have looked the equal of Jesus: levelling with him by successfully commemorating what he did in the desert. Just as well I accidentally demonstrated my humanity, otherwise I’d have to declare myself the Second Coming. Which would have been just far too much work for the likes of lazy old me, and would really have been the talk of the St Silas blogging circle!

What little I have dwelt on the issue has led me to ask: can’t we celebrate and uphold Jesus’s triumph over temptation all year round? What exactly is the point of Lent? My feeble attempt to observe it taught me little or nothing. Maybe I’m just too cynical, or too untrained in the practice of ritual observation, to have properly learned from such activities.

Does that mean there’s something wrong with me, or with Lent? Who knows.

GGF4

 

The Join Meet in Nottingham was great fun – the usual spreading of chocolately kindness around the so-called “city of Legends”, plus meeting many old friends and new.

One of the highlights was the annual and ridiculously over-hyped North v South football match. Sadly the North lost 3-2, but given that we were 3-0 down at half-time due to some very basic errors, I am sure that paints you a picture of a spirited second-half fight-back.

I got many plaudits for my annual engagement with that thing known as exercise, mostly consisting of penetrating runs and deft movements of the ball down the left flank – despite not being left-footed.

But in my modesty I must point out that such flashes of brilliance were too frequently punctuated by lengthy periods of panting heavily on my hands and knees, and sadly underlined by some truly porous defensive work. I also let myself and the glorious North down with a lot of my final touches. And actually some of my first touches were a bit lacking too. As were most of the touches in the middle, come to mention it. But apart from that, I was on fire.

Many South players magnanimously declared football itself to be the true winner on the day. But if you’d witnessed the spectacle of 22 players who were variously unfit, terrible footballers, atrociously hungover, or just playing in jeans while clutching cans of cider, you’d have agreed with other observers that football was actually one of the heaviest casualties.

The series stands at 2-1 to the South. Roll on the revenge that is next year.

Mid-holiday break

I’m back in Glasgow, but only for a couple of days.

The past weekend has been spent in Skye, where there was glorious sunshine, walks on beaches, and lots of photo opportunities (some of which you can only see if you are one of my friends/family in Flickr).

On Sunday I went to a Church of Scotland, and by chance it was communion, so I enjoyed the novel experience of getting the bread and wine brought to me – none of this pisky queueing malarky!

That said, communion was only served to the pews at the front, and as the intimation sheet said, “Those who are partaking should seat themselves in the front pews draped with white linen.”

Rumours of the Skye and Lochalsh KKK attending in force cannot be confirmed.

On Thursday I head south to Nottingham, to the annual joinee gathering known as Good Good Friday. Besides catching up with friends and bringing kindness to the streets of Nottingham, I’m looking forward to the annual North v South joinees football match, for which I won the man of the match award last year.

With the series balanced at 1-1, it will be a much-anticipated game of passion, energy, and about much top-drawer football as a Scottish third division match in February.

Fingers crossed for a North victory…