The Wedding Present – Morley Town Hall 9th October 2016

Playing town halls in small towns seems to be a thing in 2016. So when one of my favourite bands The Wedding Present announced they were playing my hometown then I’m there.

The Wedding Present

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Let’s be honest the gig wasn’t exactly sold out but there was a good attendance for a Sunday night in a small town.

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Setlist

The setlist was a great blend of “greatest hits” mixed in with a few new ones off the new album “Going, Going”. Just before “Go Out and Get ‘Em Boy” the boy Gedge announces “This is one of the first songs I wrote….about 10 miles up the road from here”.

Give My Love to Kevin
Come Play With Me
Brassneck
Always the Quiet One
Two Bridges
Spangle
Go Out and Get ‘Em Boy
What Have I Said Now?
Rachel
Birdsnest
Drive
My Favourite Dress
Dalliance
Dare
Bear
Take Me!
Santa Monica

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Surprisingly the acoustics in the town hall were pretty good. I’ve never seen a band here before and the only times I’ve been in the hall was to give blood so it was great to see a gig here.

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Sherwood Hideaway Review

We were looking to get away to Europe for a late Summer’s break in September 2016. There was plenty on offer but these late last minute deals are there for a reason. Every time I checked a review for a hotel in Greece or somewhere I was met with shocking reviews. So in the end we decided to look at getting a cabin somewhere away from in all in England.

We’d done one of these forest holidays before and I immediately looked to go back but they were booked up. My second choice was “Sherwood Hideaway” on the edge of Sherwood Forest.

We booked one of the “Woodland Rustic” cabins. Just 2 years old the cabin was stunningly presented. Spotless on arrival and feeling very modern we were suitably impressed.

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We were incredibly fortunate with the weather – The temperature was around 27C on the Tuesday and Wednesday we were there with blazing sunshine for the rest of the week apart from Friday when it rained (we were leaving at the checkout time of 10am Friday so we weren’t really bothered).

To enter the forest was a 50 meters walk from our cabin. Parts of the forest have been shaped into walkways. One morning I decided to go for a run and it was ideal. I was getting over a recent calf injury and it started playing up so I had to cut my run short but the forest is ideal for walking and running.

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There’s a great walk just a few miles from the cabin that leads you through farm land to Thoresby Hall. Set aside the best part of a day for walking there and around the estate, taking in some food then the walking back.

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The double patio doors lead out onto decking complete with ratten furniture and a hot tub. Perfect for unwinding after a days exploring.

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Cheers!

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Pouring down on our last day.

British Sea Power – Freedom Festival Hull – 3rd September 2016

A free Northern festival with BSP and decent ale. I’m in!

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Train tickets booked to arrive fairly early in the afternoon to take in the sun, beer and festivities. Unfortunately though there wasn’t much in the way of sun and it rained the entire day, really persisting it down at times. What’s a chap to do? We took shelter in the nearest pub only to leave to dash across the road to another pub. Head Of Steam doing a pretty decent halloumi burger washed down with Magic Rock’s High Wire Grapefruit.

Some small miracle is performed and the rain starts to die down just in time for BSP to take to the main stage. I was familiar with the area the main stage was as I’d seen Hugh Cornwell play the Fruit venue in the fruit market a couple of years before. Quite a crowd turned up in the end to watch BSP good to see a mixed crowd rather than the usual mix of balding 40-60 year old blokes :). The new songs are sounding stronger than ever and done right they could be in for a classic album once they get in the studio.

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The festival itself was great but other factors out of their control hampered it somewhat. The weather which seemed to have a knock on effect in other acts and entertainment cancelling at the last-minute. The constant road works, barriers everywhere. Hull is being dug up at the moment. That said, if there’s something of interest there next year I will make a return trip.

SSIS Forced Execution Result

I was tasked with making changes to a fairly old SSIS component the other day which wouldn’t normally pose a problem but headaches and wasted time was heading my way.

There’s a particularly nasty property within SSIS which when set to TRUE can simply force the execution result of the component to success (TRUE).

A colleague had made some changes and everything seemed to work fine but I wanted to carry out some regression type testing. On inspecting the SSIS component I could see that some of the tasks had been copied from another component and some of the steps weren’t applicable and didn’t make sense. I smelt a rat so decided to have a poke around and a test.

I purposely failed the component by feeding it duff XML to see how it handled errors and exceptions. To my astonishment when running the component at design time green ticks filled the screen and success was reported. WTF?!

After around an hour later of head scratching and checking that the Success and Failure result outcomes would work as expected I started to look at the properties of the component. There must be something that’s completely ignoring the result outcome. I noticed ForceExecutionResult was set to Success. Clearly who’d ever worked on this in the past had put this in place to fluff through some testing/validation and had forgot to switch this off. Once I’d reset this back to the default value of None the component was working as expected and confidence returned!

The Stranglers – Bradford St Georges Hall 2nd March 1990

This is where I check in.   My first gig of many.  14 years old. I had no fecking idea what I was getting myself into.

Even then I’d been a Stranglers fan for a few years – They were due to play this in Oct 1989 but they pushed back due to recording issues.  Bradford was part of the UK 10 Tour and it was pretty serious.  By today’s standards this was a mammoth UK tour which saw bomb scares and mass stage invasions (just fan love really).

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It was winter.  I had to go with my mother. I was 14. Here’s what I wrote for Robert Endecott’s excellent Peaches book.

Peaches A Chronicle Of The Stranglers 1974-1990 - Robert Endeacott - Google Books - Google Chrome

Setlist:  Shah Shah a Go Go, I Feel Like a Wog, Straighten Out, Shakin’ Like a Leaf, 96 Tears, Someone Like You, Sweet Smell of Success, Always the Sun, Ships That Pass in the Night, Peaches, Where I Live, School Mam, Let’s Celebrate, Tank, Uptown, Was It You?/Down in the Sewer

Although I would see many more gigs in my lifetime this one will always resonate.  Not just because it was my first but because a Hugh Cornwell fronted Stranglers was quite simply the best live band in the world.