Every couple of months I hear a tune that I become obsessed with. I play it many times a day for a few days. Normally it’s some crunchy electronics with a synth hook that just catches me emotionally for some reason (e.g. Plaid’s Bo Bootch or Aphex’s Laughable Butane Bob). This time it’s Dokaka‘s cover of Metallica’s Creeping Death.

Why is this insane? Dokaka are an Otaku A Cappella act. One guy, he covers tracks by paintakingly imitating each instrument layer of the original track and mixing the lot together to form a really dense but highly nonsensical sound. It’s utterly compelling though.

I made Tom Yum soup. A spicy citrusy Thai soup. I made it with two recipes and some “innovation”. It was good but I used chicken stock as the base which was OK except it was a bit greasy and a bit strongly flavoured. I also stuck too much lime juice into it, it came out with those flavours grossly blocking out most of the others. This is the usual outcome when I cook, it comes out brash and over-flavoured. I need to learn subtlety.

I’ve just noticed that I’ve been posting for 1 year and 1 month. I started on the 25th of July, 2002.

On July 25th, 2003, I posted my 352nd entry. That’s an average of very nearly a post a day. Not bad, not bad.

Notting Hill Carnival is cool.

Charlie and I got there quite early this morning. It was before the procession started and long before the crowds really intensified. We wandered around the “eye of the storm” area in the middle of the U-shaped procession route, checking out the soundsystems and chicken roasting operations. Eventually we found ourselves up behind the Westway at the point where the procession was setting off from. We saw the king and queen kicking things off followed by the highly energetic initial dancing.

We kind of lost the plot a bit after that. We couldn’t be content with letting the procession go by, so we ended up walking along the route with the first people for much of the way. That was weird. As a result we got very knackered, walking and walking, and also failed to see a large percentage of the floats and groups of dancers. Oh well. We saw a lot of people having a good time and meandered around looking at stuff for ages.

As the day went on it got pretty damn busy, to the point where it was taking half an hour to move a few hundred yards. We lost a good hour when we sat down and then walked from Portobello Road to Ladbroke Grove only to discover that I had left Louise’s mini-umbrella where we were sitting and then going back. It wasn’t there unfortunately. Not long after that we decided we were wasted enough and came home on the number 295 to Fulham Broadway via Hammersmith.

The procession was really cool. All the people had made so much effort and put so much thought into their performance. There were some huge costumes, 20+ feet high and the same wide. There was a lot of glitz being shaken. One thing that I noticed at the beginning was that the women in the procession all looked like they were having the best time ever. Dancing in the street in exotic shiny costumes while thousands of people line the street just to (seemingly) see you, you can see why! That made me happy as well. Lots of things made me happy really. All day long. Another good one was the kids that were involved, some of them carrying pretty big outfits. They must have been worn out by the end, but they danced along the route with the best of them.

I’m definitely going to go again and next time I’m going to go and find myself a great vantage point on Westbourne Grove and let it all come to me. Although, watching the procession did kind of make me want to join in and I would definitely be up for playing on a soundsystem somewhere around the place. One thing is for sure, I’m going to walk less. I’m absolutely knackered.

Photos in iPhoto, hopefully will make gallery at some point. Shaky shaky! Ra!

My Emusic score is now 5.5Gb. Some 80 albums, of which I’ve listened to about 15. I’m going to run out of disk space of my laptop sometime next weekend.

We spent today up at Camden where Louise’s parents had moored for the day. We got food from the market, which was fit, and pottered down the canal to Little Venice, about an hour round trip maybe. We explored the market a bit and did some clothes shopping. I nearly bought some trousers (they didn’t have my size in the right colour, they’re in another shop) and Louise nearly bought a skirt (she was too indecisive). Quite remarkable for us really. What with Portobello yesterday, the is the weekend for markets.

Watched Dickie Attenborough’s A Bridge Too Far tonight. It was an awesome, huge war movie, with absolutely everybody in it. Really gritty as well, I almost cried and not because of a pull out all the stops schmolze ending, because it depicted a lot more of the really horrible bits of war accurately. I thought the Thin Red Line was good, but A Bridge trounces it.

I just applied for a Barclaycard. I have credit issues for some reason. I’ve never had a credit card and I’ve never defaulted on a debt of any kind. I have a student loan but no other forms of finance. I have no idea why I have credit issues, but I got refused for a current account twice with Smile and once with Cahoot a couple of times. I’m hoping that if I can get a credit card then I can just use it as a delayed action debit card and that will help ingratiate me with the non-high street banks. I think that the reason I’ve been turned down a couple of times is because the non-high streets have stricter policies regarding who they’ll accept.

Anyway, if I don’t get accepted for a Barclaycard I’ll get one of the horrendous interest rate bad credit cards, like the CapitalOne one. I don’t intend to keep a balance on it so what could possibly go wrong? :-)

Oh yes, Accenture didn’t want me either. I’m quite sad about this. I had just been thinking about how good it would be to work for them. I could have asked for a transfer anywhere in the world after a bit.

Earlier Louise and I went up to Portobello Road in Notting Hill. I’ve never been there before. It’s a famous antiques market. Today it seemed like just more of a market although there was a lot of antique stuff, old war memorobilia, Holmesian magnifying glasses, spoons, old cine stuff, a shop of crazy old sixties furniture, a gallery blasting Tone Loc and Wu Tang. All kinds of things. I think that all the real antiques trading is done in the early morning and that we missed it. It was pretty cool though and the rest of Notting Hill seemed very nice, even more ra! than Fulham. They were beginning to set up for the carnival — not as much as I expected though. I hope to attend aforementioned million-strong partay on Monday.

I’m currently downloading the all of the Mille Plateaux catalogue that’s available from Emusic. Right now, I’m very much enjoying some Frank Bretschneider.

I joined Emusic today. I’ve had well over a gigabyte off them already. It’s ten bucks a month if you sign up for 12 months. The selection is not perfect, but it’s always going to be bringing in a stream of new music and it is getting better. They have enough stuff in the genres I like for me to be very happy (I’m particularly happy with the large amount of Mille Plateaux material available). Sure I’d like more Aphex Twin and Wu Tang Clan, but I just can’t get it so never mind. DJ Assault it is.

Woo! It’s gonna be good. No spoilers for those relying on the repeats.

Getting back into the routine of everyday blogging, it makes no sense to block blog activity until I’m ready to do the holiday post, that way leads to never blogging again :-)

Anyway, I just had a first round telephone interview with International Consultation MegaCorp Accenture. They are recruiting a fairly large number of software people to work on big projects within their technology services department (I think).

The questions focussed on my goals, they asked why I applied, as expected, but also a bit about why I might want to leave freelance and stuff. I answered all this pretty easily. They have big projects, I want to be part of a big software project team. The tricksy one was a question about mobility. The initial form had mentioned this and had ticked the equivalent of “Mobile? Of course!” But then she asked what I thought they meant. It was either going to be mobile within London, nationally or internationally and I gave her my views on each of them. I said I was happy to do international and local travel and I didn’t rule out national travel completely, although I did imply that I wasn’t raring to spend 3 months working in Newcastle or something like that.

As I get older it is easier to tell where my weaknesses lie. In this situation it’s going to be the travel thing, though it’s difficult to say what the competition will be like there. Also, they may well just think that I don’t have enough experience for the role. My paper experience is not great, I feel it doesn’t reflect the breadth and depth of my skills as a software engineer. I know I’m not the best, but I think I’m good enough to put my foot in the door and keep it there on a big project. My focus for my next career move is definitely to find something that will look good on paper and Accenture is nothing if not that.

But slack, I’m warming up for a big “what happened?” post and of course I have photos, but for now:

1. Italy was really nice, thanks Louisa and Alberto!
2. Being back is OK, could easily be much worse.
3. Louise was violently sick for hours on Monday, we had to go to A&E. She’s OK now though. Weirdness.
4. I’ve just closed Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. I liked it. Not as much as previous books maybe, but I’m reserving judgement until when I’m less tired. Certainly it was a page-turner and I’ll always have time for his sense of cool. I want to go to Moscow!

We’re all goin’ on a summer holiday,
No more postin’ for a week or two…

Found another quality Soho record shop today, again on Berwick Street, it’s called Koobla. Berwick Street is vinyl mecca. I’ve never seen anything like it. So many electro sections, so little time!

Anyway, I picked up a new Shut Up and Dance single, Supernova, with characteristically rough bass action. Also a Radioactive Man single and an album. Haven’t checked out the album yet, but the single, some remixes of Wrecked, also contains potentially dangerous basslines, particularly the ‘ave That mix by Tim Wright.

I did another installation today. Last week I wore a suit and it didn’t work. Today I didn’t wear a suit and, despite a few minor teething problems, it worked and I got free ice cream. I got let out at four as well so I went and had a pint outside just off Tottenham Court Road and read my book. I’m trying to finish Hacking the Xbox before I go away on Saturday morning, but I’m not sure that’s very likely. I’m into the appendices now, but they’re things like soldering techniques and so pretty interesting for somebody like me who knows nothing about electronics.

Zoo!

We were really rushed because we’re so slack, we only got there at about four and had about an hour and a half to get around 36 acres of beasts. We saw the major things we wanted to catch: lions, tigers, giraffes, gorillas, chimpanzees, gold-headed lion tamarins, sloth bears, anacondas and more. We missed the fish and the bugs unfortunately as well as quite a lot of other things. Still it was an adventure. Hopefully we’ll go back again fairly soon and be a bit more organised next time.

It was good to spend the weekend taking advantage of one of the many cultural experiences London has to offer. We’ve done so few since we arrived, it’s a real shame. Going to the zoo was pretty much a result of watching American Beauty on Friday and going “Life’s great! Let’s embrace it!”

Tom spent the weekend building a model scene to use to shoot a test of an effect the company he works for are considering using in one of their productions. He spent ages lovingly creating a house and garden scene, replete with archways, grass, benches, walls and everything else. He worked on it last night as I watched The Music Of Chance, a film in which a poker player and his new found friend get on the wrong side of some creepy millionaire model makers. It all got a little surreal to be honest. Still, the film was good, even if it lacked a real ending.

Plus our little tortoise friend, Madonna, has been returned to her actual owner, Louise’s mum, leaving a gap in our front room. A nice gap actually, that I’m glad to see again.