Grandaddy

Last night we took Caro through to Glasgow to see Grandaddy play at 02.

The tickets stated that the doors opened at 7pm, and most people apart from ourserves seemed to know that this meant that nothing happened until nearly 8pm.  However, our early arrival meant that we were able to claim one of the few seats.

White Star Liners were the support, and very good they were too.  They are from Brighton, where there’s a big music scene.

I thought that Grandaddy were superb.  They are a tight-knit operation who play a distinct brand of indie rock music with many creative features.  And they play loud.  The drink in front of me vibrated like that well-known scene out of Jurassic Park.

The capacity crowd really enjoyed the music.  Because it was a relatively early start (the band finished at 10.15pm) this was not a drunken audience expecting to clap along with churned-out old hits, and then stagger home.  Instead, everyone listened very attentively to some fantastic sounds, and then showed their full appreciation.

Typical was one chap that I spoke to at the bar.  “That band can play!” I said.  “I’ve waited All my life for this moment” he replied.

The encore included one of the most spectacular songs you can imagine.

Here’s a proper review of the gig.

Fantastic Afrikaner music

In 1995, after a trip to Lesotho, we were trying to make it back to the Bophuthatswana/Botswana border before it closed for the night, and somewhere on a backroad near Kroonstad we took a wrong turning and ended up 20 miles along a dirt-track going in the wrong direction.

I turned the car around, and was driving too fast along a road which hadn’t been graded for some time when I lost control in the deep ruts of a sharp-cambered corner.  For a moment, I thought we were goners.  The Toyota Corolla stayed upright, but turned 180 degrees and ended up facing the other direction in the ditch.  Fortunately, the only damage was two burst tyres.

So, not being the most practical of people, I stood scratching my head and wondering what to do, when a bakkie came along, the first car we’d seen for half an hour.  The driver jumped out and greeted us in Afrikaans.  His name was Pete, or more likely, now I think about it, Piet, and he was a thick-set, heavily-bearded farmer.  Tough and strong as nails.

He immediately took charge of the situation, and as I was still describing what had happened he got my spare tyre out and changed it for one of the burst tyres, which he bounced into the back of his bakkie whilst I stood around feeling spare and unmanly, and we headed off for the nearest garage.

Piet spoke very little English, so conversation was quite limited.  It was 20 kilometres to the nearest town, and a garage that repaired the tyre, then he drove me back to the Toyota where he took the other burst tyre off and replaced it with the repaired one.

It was an extremely kind act of a good Good Samaritan.  I offered him the biggest banknote I had, but he refused, and only went on his own way once I’d started up the Toyota and he saw that we were OK.

So, without wanting to generalise too much, I can say that Piet was a perfect example of many helpful Afrikaners we have come across over the years.

On another trip, this time to Thabazimba, we pitched our tent at a campsite near the entrance to Marakele National Park.  We were tired and looking forward to a good night’s sleep and an early game drive the next morning when a group of about thirty Afrikaners drove up in several bakkies, formed a kraal not far from our tent, and got their braai going.  Then the music started and they began a singalong.  They had at least one accordion and several guitars, and as the beer flowed they played louder and louder.  It was well past 1am when the noise died down.

Now, I’m not one to complain about parties, but what upset me was not the noise but the fact that their music and singing was dreadfully awful.  And the songs were bad as well, based mostly on oom-pah – oom-pah, but rendered without the necessary vital understanding or mastering of a basic two-beat rhythm.  I don’t think that any one of the thirty of them had even the slightest musical talent.  This didn’t stop them from having a whale of a time, though.

As an aside, I would say that I got my own back early the next morning when I took my son Jamie, who was three, for a walk.  He shot straight into the now peaceful and sleeping kraal and proceeded to undo guy-ropes, turn taps on, pull up pegs, tip up bags and so on.  Normally, of course, I would have stopped him, but in this case I just left him to his usual whirlwind activity.

Again, without wanting to generalise too much, my experience in Thabuzimba and elsewhere has mostly been that Afrikaners have not impressed me as being a particularly musically-orientated people.

So, what I’m saying is from these and other experiences, I’ve found Afrikaners to be helpful, strong, practical, hard working, hard partying people, with almost no musical appreciation whatsoever.

Thus it is that I cannot explain how I’ve found such a rich vein of what I consider fantastic, fun, foot-stompin’ Afrikaner pop music on YouTube.  Also, the self parody in the videos shows a much better sense of humour than anyone would expect from the traditional clichéd views of Afrikaners that we get from the media in the UK.

Of course, this music sounds far better played very loud (at least warp 23 on the headphones) after some beers (Castles, if you want to do it right), which I advise you to have before clicking on the links below, and then one more beer for each video.  The important thing is that in most cases, due to the videos, you don’t have to understand Afrikaans to enjoy the songs.  I don’t know any Afrikaans, so I hope the words are not too rude.

First off is Rooies.  Listen to the excellent mixture of English and Afrikaans words.

Just to show that Rooies is not a one-hit-wonder, above is: Hou jou hanne van my lyf af

Robbie Wessels – Macarena Mambo

It’s Robbie again, but look away if you’re offended by budgie smugglers.

Bok Van Blerk.

Oeps Didi – DJ Ossewa

Anton Myburgh – Visgat.  Boerewors is a type of sausage, essential eating in South Africa.

This one, by Andriette, is set in a library!

OK.  They are getting more oom-pah – oom-pah, this one doesn’t get going until 1:18 and it may not be safe for work.

Bruce & Die Flooze.  Watch this one to the end.

Kurt Darren – Lekker Lekker

If you’re under 25, there’s also someone called Snotkop, who looks as if he’s not the sort of chap you’d take home to meet your Mum & Dad.

From the above, you can see and hear that South Africa could win every Eurovision Song Contest by a mile.

To finish off, here’s one with a beautiful slide-show (which of course manages to feature boerewors) entitled: Kom Huis toe… for homesick South-Africans.

Tip – For a unique experience, why not play two of the above, at the same time, through the heads.

Blotted copybook

The good behaviour was bound to end at some point, and after the meal last night at Tapa Leith, it did.

Tapa

I would just like to reassure neighbours and anyone else who may have been disturbed late last night that the 4 am rendition of ‘California Dreaming’ by Roddy and The Babes was definitely their final performance, and that there are no plans whatsoever for a reunion gig.

Non-stop catering

It’s been a hectic week of partying, in celebration of Shaun’s 21st.  Various people have been staying here at different times, and I’ve been busy in the kitchen catering for 6, 7, 23 and 21 mouths.

Shaun’s girlfriend April brought with her some impressive vegetables from her Dad’s garden.  I used the onion below in a paella.

A French onion

The next evening it was a braai for Shaun and his friends.

In the gazebo

When the drinking games started, I made my excuses and left.  I wouldn’t want to show up the youth.

The next evening it was an appropriate 21 family and friends for the 21st slightly more formal party.  I wasn’t aware of any drinking games at this one.

The birthday boy with the Rubic’s cube cake that Lindsey made.

Shaun’s 21st

Later on, Andrew entertained everyone with some impressive guitar playing

Edinburgh Travel Guide

The Hotels4U.com Blog has just published an Edinburgh Travel Guide.  When to go, things to do, nightlife, day trips, shopping, culture, transport, etc.  Very useful for visitors.

If you scroll right down to the bottom, you’ll see tips from local bloggers, including some information on print and online guides, from moi.

Another excellent meal at the Bridge of Lochay Hotel

Back in March Lindsey and I enjoyed a great meal at the Bridge of Lochay Hotel, so I was looking forward to more good food during the family outing to Killin last weekend.

I wasn’t disappointed.  The chef knows what he’s doing.  The desserts are superb.

Rib eye

Family meal

Some of the family group stayed at the Maragowan Caravan Club site, some at the hotel, and some in a yurt at Loch Tay Highland Lodges.

The yurt

Inside the yurt

Killin Show

Fat Mac doesn’t get much fresh air nowadays, and this is probably one reason why he catches ‘flu so often.  It’s only 100 yards from his flat to the offie, and often that’s the only exercise he gets each day.

I had a touch of ‘flu towards the end of last week, but unlike Fat Mac who revels in sickness, I shrugged it off and we went up to Killin for a fresh-air family outing.

There was lots of it around – fresh air, that is.  It was also the weekend of the annual Killin Show.

Pipers at the Show

There was an excellent turnout.  We saw a pipe band, and some terrier racing.

Terrier racing heat

Then it was time for the tug-of-war.

Tug of war

Anyone could join in for the first tug.  Then it was down to the more serious teams.

The Fire Brigade

The ‘fermers’

My money would have gone on the Fire Brigade, but despite, or maybe because of, beer at half time, the Farmers eventually won.

There was a parade of vintage tractors, which the wee boys in the crowd liked.

Vintage tractors

Triple challenge

The triple challenge involved teams of three.  The first one rolled a bale of hay from one end of the field to the other, and then stood on top of another bale.  The second one ran and jumped up on the bale, and ate a pie, and then the third one ran and jumped up on the same bale and drank a can of beer.

Triple challenge

There was then a sheep shearing demonstration.

Sheep shearing

Gus Casely-Hayford & Alastair Hazell

When it dropped through the letterbox, I spent an obligatory hour going through the thick Fringe Festival brochure – page after page of shows that might, or might not, be good.  Nothing particularly stood out.  No connections with anything in particular that we’re interested in.

It wasn’t quite the same with the Book Festival, but some interesting shows clashed with other things, and the only talk we’ve been to was Gus Casely-Hayford & Alastair Hazell.

It was a very good talk – or talks to be accurate, as Casely-Hayford and Hazell both spoke about different topics.  The common theme was African history.  Shaun and Lindsey also enjoyed the presentation.

Casely-Hayford on the left, and Hazell on the right

I’d previously read Hazell’s book, The Last Slave Market, “…the extraordinary story of John Kirk, the Scottish botanist who singlehandedly ended the slave trade in East Africa.”

A busy Charlotte Square Gardens

It’s always nice spending a half hour walking round the venue in Charlotte Square Gardens.

You’ll like this a lot: a customisable current awareness service with a super-admin-user (that’s you!)

This post is aimed mostly at librarians and information providers in academic, research and special (corporate, law, medical, etc) libraries and information services.  It introduces an exciting new opportunity for creating effective, low-effort, low-cost, customisable current awareness services of scholarly journal articles for researchers and academics.

Have you ever found yourself in the following situation?  Your library/information centre has subscribed to a new service, and now you need to get the message out to your users/clients.  You publicise the service, circulate some emails, mention it on your blog or newsletter, and so on.  There’s only a small response, from those users who often take an interest in such things.  The next step is probably to arrange a seminar for those few who always turn up to such things.

It’s hard going, and you well know that your users are bombarded with such things, not just from you but from outside your organisation as well.  What is their motivation for going to the trouble of learning how yet another service works, creating a user-ID for yet another system, and essentially putting quite a bit of effort into something that, as far as they are concerned, has not yet proven its value?

You know that the service in question will undoubtedly help their information needs, but they don’t.

Does any of that ring a bell?

And does the following ring another bell?  You are not convinced that your users are adequately keeping up-to-date with all the new articles being published in their fields.  They are definitely missing relevant scholarly papers.  Who can blame them for that – after all, it can be quite complicated to keep up-to-date, as I showed in my post of November 2011: Where to find new scholarly research papers: 30 key, free websites – and that post only deals with freely available websites, and not paid-for services or subscription databases with alert options.  Incidentally, that post has now had over 8,000 views, which for a relatively obscure blog like this one only goes to show that there is immense and unsatisfied interest in keeping up-to-date with the latest research.  People (perhaps including some of your own users) search the Internet for “latest articles” “where to find new articles” “new scholarly research” and a myriad of other similar search terms, and some of them end up at that post.  Others probably give up.

The third bell I’ll actually ring for you myself, because it’s so obvious.  That’s the one that says you would like to increase usage of all the scholarly journals your institution subscribes to, and at the same time raise awareness and use of quality Open Access journals.

So – this is where it gets interesting, and here’s a current awareness service solution that you can implement on behalf of your busy users.

Armed only with a list of some of your users’ email addresses and a list of the particular scholarly journals they are interested in (ones your organisation subscribes to, ones you don’t subscribe to, Open Access journals, hybrid journals to which you do, or don’t subscribe – it doesn’t matter which – it’s up to them, and they can choose to limit as they wish), you can act as a super-admin-user and set up a personalised web and email based scholarly journal Tables of Contents alerting service for them, with ease!

Not only that, but this would only be the start.  If they so wish (but they don’t have to if they don’t want to) your users could also, with ease and without going via you, add or subtract from their list of journal Tables of Contents (TOCs) that they follow, and do other things as well, such as set up keyword search alerts, and view new TOCs in a Web interface rather than by, or in addition to, email alerts, etc.  You also will be able to monitor what they are doing and add to the original journal list for them, if they so want.

When selecting journals, because the service I am describing knows your subscribed journals, it will always be obvious which journals are subscribed to, and which ones are not.

And the whole thing can be linked to your institutional ezProxy or OpenURL resolver, so that the full text links will work for your users (as long as the articles are in journals you subscribe to or are OA) when they click on an article title in an email alert for a new journal TOC that will automatically be sent to them (and note that the email will also mention your library/information service – so they know who to credit).

The service I’m describing is one of the best new things I’ve seen in a long time, and it really is as simple to do as I’ve explained.  In fact, some of it can even be semi-automated (importing and exporting your users’ accounts and journal lists).

The actual content behind all of this is comes from the freely available JournalTOCs database, which contains TOCs for 19,500 journals, including over 4,000 Open Access journals.  Journals from over 1,100 different publishers are featured.  19,500 is a fair whack of the total number of e-journals currently available (I estimate that it’s 82% of the total number of online scholarly journals that are published currently (source Ulrichs)), so this will be a pretty complete current awareness service that you can offer.  I’ve mentioned JournalTOCs before in this blog, and it’s something I contribute to in my spare time.  The new super-admin-user customisation capability that is the subject of this post is the latest offering from JournalTOCs.

I reckon that with less than a couple of days effort, you can have the basics of a very efficient journal/article current awareness service set up for more than 20 of your users, and you can add more users as you go on.

Here’s what your super-admin-user page would look like, after you’d entered brief details of 7 users from your institution and listed some journals that each of them wanted to receive alerts for:

And below is what you’d see when you clicked on ‘user2@your.institution’

You can see that, so far, you have selected 8 journals that user2 is interested in and for which they will receive email alerts, each time any of those 8 journals has a new Table of Contents.  You can easily Find and add new journals for this account (i.e. for user2), from any of the 19,500 journals included in JournalTOCs, by searching the box towards the top right.  You can also easily turn the alerts off, if you or they so wish.

I hope that you can see from the above screen dumps how easy the whole thing is to administer.

There’s a lot more to the JournalTOCs customisable service than what I’ve written about above, such as additional advance search and browse options for all users (for you the super-admin-user, and your other users if/when they log in to the service), customisable API calls, detailed usage stats, branding with your library/institutional logo, and so on.

It strikes me that all of this is quite clever, and as I said, it is easy to set up.  It’s an excellent way for a library/information centre to provide a current awareness service for its busy users.

Are you interested?  Yes!  Of course you are, because this is the sort of service that will help your users, improve your own library/information centre profile, help exploit your paid content, and it’s the sort of thing that library and information professionals want to do for their users.  It’s almost a no-brainer.  If you currently provide a scholarly journal current awareness service using cut-and-paste techniques, or printouts, or leave the whole thing to your users to discover and work out for for themselves with all the hassle that involves, or pay for a much more expensive current awareness service, then this is a must.

The bottom line.  There is no cost for setting up a trial JournalTOCs customisation for your library/information for the service I’ve described above.  It doesn’t take long to set up a free trial, you can play with the set-up and try out its various features using real or created users, there’s no commitment on your part and you won’t feel harassed with follow-up calls.  For an ongoing service, there is a cost.  Fortunately, because JournalTOCs is a non-profit, that cost is small.  The price of an annual licence starts at £300.00 GBP and is in proportion to the number of journals, the estimated number of user accounts and the amount of tailored unique features requested for the customisation.

You can register for a free trial here, where there’s also more details.

JournalTOCs – the home of current awareness.

Speed of Light, Arthur’s Seat 11th August 2012

Last night Caro and myself went to see Speed of Light, a mass choreographed act of walking and endurance running with lightsuits, on Arthur’s Seat.  The event is part of the Edinburgh International Festival.

Lindsey was taking part as a runner.  Of course, we didn’t know which one of the hundred or so runners was Lindsey, because it was dark.

It was a unique experience.  You receive a briefing in the Speed of Light compound, and are then given a lightsabre, which helps you find your way up to the top of Arthurs Seat, guided by several volunteers.  We were the last group of the evening, and started out at about 11pm.  As well as the performers running and walking in parts of Hunters Bog, we had a good view of the nightly Edinburgh Festival fireworks at the Castle.  After about an hour, the lightsabres began to hum, which is an additional part of the ‘show’.  In fact, the audience is also part of the ‘show’, and you can watch other audience groups snaking around the hill paths.  Quite weird.

The above video was taken right at the end, as the performers came off the hill and down to the compound, at about 1am.  We found out later that at 0.36 and 0.40 it’s Lindsey who slips twice.

Here’s an impressive slide show that someone else made.