Spanspek

Yesterday I went to the inaugural Surrey Hills Music Festival, held by the Surrey Hills Neighbourhood Centre.

(I haven't linked directly to the festival pages, because now that it's over that page might disappear and there'd be a dead link on this page.)

The Festival had all sorts of great music, including Anadromiki Compania, the Victorian Flute Ensemble, the Surrey Hills Orchestra, and a young quartet of jazz players calling themselves the Zac Lee Band (can't find a link).

The highlight was seeing The Tealeaves, with their gentle country folk music. I'm buying the record and keeping an eye out for other gigs.

The only downside was the bunch of arseholes at the back of the hall who were more interested in yapping and drinking than hearing the music.

I heard Bowie's Young Americans on the radio yesterday.

I had forgotten just how loose the playing is on it. They don't make records like that any more.

Some friends of ours hosted a special wine event at the weekend: a vertical tasting of pinot noirs from Morningside in the Coal River Valley.

Here are my notes:

2008
Reserved, slightly sappy.

2007
Quite well developed. Good varietal characters.

2006
Initially a bit austere and spicy. After one hour, it really opened up.

2005
The last wine with a clone which produces big flavours. (Now used for a lower-priced pinot for heroes!) First of the wines sealed with a Diam closure. Wild and stinky with a marked vanilla overlay. Almost creamy mouthfeel. A second bottle, less developed, exhibited more restraint.

2004
Brick red. Stinky but more restrained. Opened up after 10 minutes to be quite fragrant. Slightly viscous mouthfeel.

2003
Purple. Funky characters like the 05, but more herbal.

2002
Very fragrant. Stink blew off after a few minutes. Sweet, smooth, slightly sappy. Delicate in the mouth. A second bottle showed a beautiful balance between youthful acidity and aged elegance.

2001
Much more restrained on the nose than 02. Slightly dusty character and drier on the palette.

2000
Dry finish. Slightly astringent.

1999
Fragrant and restrained. A little funky.

As you can see, the odd years mostly seem to be funky. I compared them to a Urei 1176. The 2005 has all four ratio buttons pushed in: nasty compression, but with the right signal just the ticket. For the pinot, choose the right food!

I just heard National Party politician Ian Macfarlane on the radio claiming that:

The mining industry is now in jeopardy in terms of its future going forward.

Gee, I'm glad it's not going backward. And if it were, what would that look like? Or maybe he means that its future is going forward... not that one could do otherwise when moving from the past to the future, so it's barely worth mentioning.

And the jeopardy is in terms of the future. WTF?

Listen people, it's time to stop abusing the phrase "in terms of". Let me give you a correct example:

"Our business is successful in terms of turnover, but less so in terms of profit."

In other words, we're using the measures of turnover and profit to give use an indication of the success of the business. Whatever follows the phrase "in terms of" tells you something about whatever precedes it.

But abuses like Macfarlane's are meaningless: "its future going forward" says nothing about the mining industry or its supposed jeopardy. What he should have said was something like, "In the future, the mining industry will be in jeopardy". If you can state that any more clearly, then feel free to comment.

One would have thought that in order to reach a high public office, one would have to be functionally literate. Apparently not.

The only reason any of you use "in terms of" like that or say "going forward" when you mean "in the future" or "from now on" is because you've heard someone else say it. For young people, the same thing applies to "my bad". What exactly is it of yours that is bad? It's a fucking adjective—there's supposed to be a noun following it.

Have you notice that they're all egregious Americanisms?

Look, if you continually pepper your speech with meaningless cliches, you're making me work harder to figure out what it is you mean. I'm a sound guy. I care about signal-to-noise ratio. Modern speech has too much noise and not enough signal.

Oh, and before you launch a tirade bitching about how no one understands you, stop and consider that maybe it's because you can't even string two words together in a coherent sentence.

For one unit I teach, I've been using a home-baked web application. At the time I wrote it, I needed to find a web app framework in PHP that could get me up and running quite quickly.

Well, little did I know that Cake 1.1 was a bit of a dog. There were several WTFs such as having to specify form fields in a certain way, even though the model would not return results in the same way— very inconvenient if you wanted to autofill form fields. Little things like that made what should have been a quick and dirty development turn into a 200 hour pain-in-the-rear-end.

Anyway, that can now be considered a "legacy" app, and I really should have rewritten it by now using something nice and relatively straightforward, like konstrukt. I don't have time, and after this year I won't be teaching that unit, because it's being junked along with the rest of the Music Industry Training Package CUS01.

So I have to make it PHP5.3-compatible, so I don't get messages like this:

Deprecated: Assigning the return value of new by reference is deprecated in /www/audioio.com/include/cake_1.1.13.4450/cake/libs/class_registry.php on line 55

There's a bit of editing by hand to be done, but I found a little script for multi-file search and replace that really helped.