<ARCHIVE> Wilmer's stuff

The event happened almost a month ago, but I really did intend to mention it here. Oxegen 2009 was a rainy bunch of fun. From what I still remember:

Bottom:

• The rain, there were some dry spots but especially on the last day I experienced some real showers. It was really good to have some boots.


• Careless people on the camping, please learn to walk people, I had to fix up my tent pretty much every morning.


• The average age of people there, which confronted me more with the fact that I'm getting old myself!


• People from Dublin, apparently all people who steal beer and beg for free cigarettes are from Dublin. The nice girl from Waterford (?) told us on Thursday evening that only Dubliners do that. ;-)

Top:

• The Mars Volta, played for only about an hour, which is way too short. Cedric (singer) didn't like this either and tried to destroy the stage clock.


• Mogwai, indeed extremely loud!


• The rain, better said, how nobody seemed to care and rain pretty much added an element of fun. Mudfights are fun as long as you can just watch.


• The people, mostly as much fun as they were last year. I was especially amused every time a group of 5-10 16-year-olds wade their way through an audience, holding each other's hands to stay together. Somehow seeing that made me feel like a car driver waiting for a family of ducklings crossing the road.


• The trip back, a few hours after the last concert. We managed to pack ourselves very quiclky in the dark and I think we didn't even lose anything. In the bus someone upstairs took a guitar and played Blur and Oasis. Things did get out of tune more and more as we got closer to Dublin. At some point the bus passed police cars that were stopping cars (for obvious reasons, especially in Ireland :-P), from upstairs we could hear a very loud "SHIT, THE GUARDS! HIDE YOUR BEER!"

Other scary fact: We (Jelmer, Erik and I) got into the bus to the festival on Thursday, and I noticed the people next to us had a schedule with them already. I asked them where they bought that now already, and the response was "Wij spreken ook Nederlands hoor." Eh? And they were sitting right next to us! But in true un-Dutch fashion we did not set up our tents next to theirs.

All in all, a fun experience. If the lineup is really good I may go again next year, otherwise maybe just for a day to pick up the atmosphere.

Writing from Mountain View again! Landed on Thursday, spent one day at work so far and today I got my bicycle fixed up so I can use it for commuting again. It's nice how year after year, the thing still works for me, all it needs when I come is some extra air in the tires. :-) One thing California is really not doing well this year is the weather, though. It's raining for two days already!

In other news, I should definitely be plugging The Australian Pink Floyd Show in this post. They were in Dublin about a week ago and they're amazingly good. Even a singer that sounds a lot like Roger Waters! The show was great too, with inflatable animals and everything, and the music sounded perfect. This tour they're playing all of The Wall, and for that that means not just a "copy" of the CD, but also many of the little filler pieces that PF used to play during the concerts.

Also working on a bit of OSS these weeks, adding more "diversity" to the already bloated landscape of gallery webapps. I'm making a difference though, SRSLY! I found myself making a lot more pictures since I bought my first dSLR and many of them aren't really part of an album/event or anything like that. I could just put them on Flickr or Picasa and be done with it, but that'd break my time-wasting tradition of hosting everything myself.

I already use F-Spot to manage my pictures, so it'd be nice to have a web gallery that can automatically use tag information from F-Spot. Turns out there are two programs that can do this already. They're not for me though; they automatically export everything, and there are pictures that I'd rather keep for myself. :-P

I then tried to adapt "original" to my wishes, but gave up when I saw it doesn't quite use templates and am rewriting it now using web.py and Cheetah templates. Going well, but TBH I feel homesick to PHP. Not that it's such a great language, it's more that I fail to understand why there are 982397832 different webapp frameworks for Python/WSGI/mod_python/whatever instead of just one that actually works.

This is a work in progress, and the progress is good. :-) Once it's done, I'll be able to post pictures here of my new radio-controlled airplane and other neat stuff. Yaaaay...

As Jelmer already said, Irish people rock. Spent last weekend at the Oxegen festival, and I really meant to write something about it, so that's what I'm doing now. :-)

A little while ago Jelena saw an ad about Oxegen on TV. As soon as I heard of it, I checked the lineup and got as happy as a four-year-old kid on his birthday. I absolutely had to go there! Until then I really had the impression none of the bands I care about ever come here but just to the UK. Turns out I was wrong.

Aphex Twin was there, the schedule promised a half-an-hour gig, which turns out to be a whopping ninety minutes of, errrm, eargasm. And of course RATM on Sunday evening was great. But what we both really liked were the people. Some say that at Lowlands everyone's your best friend. Sure, the atmosphere there is nice, but still, it's a festival full of closed and shy Dutch people who live for themselves. :-P

The Irish at Oxegen, however, were absolutely lovely. Everyone seems to know you. People are more open (like how people here are anyway, especially outside Dublin), kinder. Random people walk greet you and/or want high fives, especially after good gigs. Of course the free hugs, people who ask how tall I may be (complaints about my hairs also appeared near the end of the festival, but I must admit my hair "styling" doesn't really improve from not seeing any shampoo for four days ;-)), someone even asked if we were maybe speaking Finnish (I guess this was the first time he heard Dutch)... At the Seasick Steve concert I helped someone to make one movie, since it was easier for me to hold his camera high enough to actually see something. The guy thanked me at least three times. :-D At Lowlands, where everone's supposed to be "your best friend", nobody trusts you enough to hold his/her camera in the first place...

The camping really never "slept", many people had a guitar with them, everyone speaks with a great accent, neighbours who explained us how to say "Shut up" and "Kiss my ass" in Gaelic. And of course, at the end of the festival, most people were too lazy to actually clean up their tent. We left a camping that was so full of tents, but otherwise so empty...

It was fantastic. Just a little bit expensive. More than 200 euros for the ticket. Any decent food costed at least seven euros. You even had to pay ten euros to get a programme (which was 50% advertisements). A beer costed eight euros (although you could get three back if you return the cup) There were lots of security folks on-site, I suppose a lot of the money went to them. Even at the campings there was always a security person on every 50 (?) meters. Not that they could prevent some tent graffiti and camping fights from happening, but okay...

Maybe the most amazing thing was that, even though this was a festival with almost 80k visitors, we never ever ever had to queue for ANYTHING. Well, okay, we had to wait for a few minutes to enter the supermarket once, but once we were inside everything went very smoothly, and we were back in the tent in no-time with some buns and slices of cheese (much better/lighter on the stomach for breakfast than the hotdogs most people were eating).

Anyway, it was absolutely great, and well worth the extra money. I can go on about this for ages, but I should be sleeping now. Thanks for reading this until the last line. ;-)

Okay, Tool resumed their European tour a few days ago. I just saw the setlist and had the strong impression that I saw this before. Seems they didn't change anything.

No matter how great their music is (also when played live), a little bit of variation wouldn't hurt, guys. :-/

Oh well, I got the ticket already, so let's just enjoy it anyway. Maybe there will be some surprise(s) after all.