FairgroundTown.co.uk

Me!

It has been a while... but I've not stopped blogging. I'm just doing it here: http://dataacademy.blogspot.com/ ... and here: http://twitter.com/FairgroundTown See you there!

La Oreja de van Gogh, Amaia Montero

When a band's iconic lead singer "goes solo" in search of ~~more money~~ artistic freedom, it rarely ends well for both the singer and the musicians he or she leaves behind. In fact, we can think of only two genuine examples where both have prospered, and one of them is Genesis, so we are taking a very loose definition of the term "prospered"! (The other being Van Halen.) So when Amaia Montero announced that she was leaving La Oreja de van Gogh, we understood that there was only ever likely to be ONE George Michael in this divorce.

Voices Of A Distant Star

Makoto Shinkai's anime 'short', Voices of a Distant Star, is not the greatest movie ever made - the animation is jerky, with a shocking amount of re-use for such a short film; the battle scenes are confusing and derivative; and following the plot is a bit like reading one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books IN CHAPTER ORDER! However, it is also possibly the most culturally significant movie of the 21st Century.

Private Practice

As a computer programmer, we often find ourselves peeking at OTHER people's software and wondering how it works. Will study the URL of a web site for database keys and session identifiers; or step through a linked source file to see how a particular piece of JavaScript functionality operates. (We were particularly impressed recently by the way StudiVZ.de disables Firefox's disabling of JavaScript's ability to disable right click!) So we should not have been especially surprised when an actress-friend of ours mentioned that she does the exact same thing when she watches a television program. But we were...

Source Safe

Okay... okay... so we use Source Safe! We know - it is ugly, unreliable, and so old that it probably has a few Elvis "78"s in the loft. But what we have to say applies to ANY Source Code Control [SCC] system, so quit giggling and listen up!

Indiana Jones & The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

FairgroundTown is not a "blockbuster movie" kind of guy. The last one we saw was Spiderman I, which got reasonable reviews at the time, but which left us feeling like we were maybe just getting too old for this sort of thing. Interestingly enough, "too old for this sort of thing" is exactly what people have been saying about Harrison Ford in the new Indiana Jones film; but when an old school friend suggested it might fill a few hours on a lazy Sunday afternoon, we said "what the hell".

Billy Bragg - Mr Love & Justice

It must be over twenty years now since Billy Bragg admitted that he no longer wanted to plant bombs at the last night of the Proms - he is, after all, only human; and radicalism in most of us diminishes with age! But can it really be true that the Bard of Barking has joined the aristocracy?

Tales From Earthsea

Tales From Earthsea, the new Studio Ghibli movie, has been the subject of much controversy among fans of anime. Some, including his own father, believed that Goro Miyazaki was too young and inexperienced to direct the film; and subsequently the movie topped both "best" and "worst" film polls upon its release in Japan. So, is it any good? Well, as Alan Hansen might say, it's a game of two halves.

Beatrix Potter

Our grandmother will tell you that the tales of Beatrix Potter are timeless classics; but we recently pulled them off the shelf to read to our four-year-old, and we were shocked.

John Mellencamp: Freedom's Road

By the time they are approaching their sixties, most rock starts are either working on their pension plans (see The Rolling Stones) or have been reduced to churning-out sad parodies of their former glories (see Bruce Springsteen). John Mellencamp, however, is still trying to change the world... one chord at a time!