Wasting Time
Ale, music and enjoying life.
Long Division Festival – Wakefield 11th July 2016
Long Division is in it’s 6th year and the 6th time for me. Every single one of them being incredible value for money and a great mix of bands both young and old.
Arriving at Wakefield station at around 3pm and a quick step next door to the Orangery for wrist bands then greeted by 11 (count them!) ducklings with their mother crossing the road. Awwwww!
Quick pint in the newly opened Wakefield Beer Exchange and we’re on to the first venue the Snooty Fox (I saw Cowtown play as part of Long Division festival here a couple of years ago). Mammoth Penguins take to the stage to a packed humid! venue. “Propped Up” and “Strength in my legs” are the only songs of theirs I’m familiar with but on the whole they’re sounding particularly good live.
Straight out of the Snooty Fox and round the corner to the splendid Wakefield Theatre for Her Name Is Calla. The theatre seems an ideal venue for them as their lush sweeping songs ring throughout the venue. The punk in me battles against their songs that seem to weigh in at around 10 mins on average, but there’s a real spirit to their performance only hampered by the occasional crying baby. Never really witnessed that at a gig before. One minute a baby is crying to the left of me, the next there’s one wailing at the back of the venue. On leaving the venue I notice that some band members have brought their babies to work.
We check back in to Wakefield Beer Exchange for some much needed decent ale. Then we’re on our way to the chapel for Pictish Trail. The last time I saw them was at a British Sea Power Krankenhaus and they were jolly good fun then. Today a stripped back Pictish Trail are very entertaining and performing in the chapel adds to the stripped back semi-acoustic performance. Most pleasant!.
Food stop, Mexican.
Onto Warehouse 23 and Red Stripe looks like the best of a poor offering at the bar. We make our way to the front and await the arrival of Bis. Sadly Bis don’t look in any danger to selling out the venue this evening, which is probably not helped by England’s first game of Euro 2016 taking part at the same time (not to mention Malcolm Middleton and Los Campesinos! taking to the stage at the same time at other venues nearby). Not to worry, Bis deliver the goods even without their drummer. Faves “This is Fake DIY”, “I’m a Slut”, “Kill yr boyfriend” and “Kandy Pop” (of course) get things moving.
Brother John Robb and his Membranes over at the Unity Hall (witnessed them previously here at Warehouse 23). Thankfully, the England match on the big screen is firmly switched off to be replaced with celestial imagery to coincide with their recent excellent Dark Matter/Dark Energy album. John and co giving it a high octane performance as usual.
Back to Warehouse 23 to witness the last band of Long Division 2016 and it’s Brix and The Extricated. I’ve seen Brix and co live a fair few times now since they put the band together a few years back and they’re always entertaining. Fall faves with a bit of Adult Net and some new stuff (all sounding incredible, looking forward to the new albums).
The time seems to fly by and before I know it I’m in a taxi home.
All this for less than £25! Long may it continue.
Hugh Cornwell @ Cork, Ireland 25th May 2016
Staying at the Jury’s Inn in the centre of Cork we’ve not far to walk to reach the venue. In fact it’s so close that we stop off at a couple of pubs along the way (rude not to). Having spent the bulk of that day in the delightful Kinsale we were rounding off a perfect day with drinks, food and a Hugh gig.
Arriving at the venue shortly after doors opening at 8pm I find we instantly double the attendance. Heading to the bar for a couple of glasses of wine I’m informed that Hugh would be on at 8.45 and the bar would be closed whilst he was onstage. Fine by me, I’ll get this wine down me then head for another before he hits the stage. 8.45 arrives and there’s no sign off Hugh. On the upside however the crowd has increased dramatically and if everyone was sat down then all seats would be taken. It’s a good solid turn out for a midweek gig with little publicity.
Hugh walks through the crowd and takes to the stage at around 9.10. It’s a similar setlist to what he toured back in Blighty towards the end of last year. I was expecting he would do that not having played this set to the Irish fans (they were in for a treat). The set is a potted history of Stranglers right through to current day solo stuff. He starts with Strange Little Girl and ends with the yet to be recorded Grand Dame (off the forthcoming “Villains” album). The crowd are very receptive and having a good old sing-a-long.
After the gig Hugh fronts the merch stand and is there for any fan who wants to chat. I wait around to have a chat with him and he’s trying to hint for a drink “*clears throat* Ooo I could do with a drink” all fans seem to ignore his repeated calls. “Hugh can I get you a beer?” “Jim! thought you’d never ask” – I grab him an ale (it’s the least I can do) and we have a catch up. Another classic Hugh gig!.
Credit to Mick on the forums for a much better review and setlist
http://www.themeninblack.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=21534
01-Strange Little Girl 02-Get A Grip On Yourself 03-Dagenham Dave 04-Outside Tokyo 05-Duchess 06-Second Coming 07-Tramp 08-Never Say Goodbye 09-No Mercy 10-Always The Su 11-Break Of Dawn 12-Man Of The Earth 13-First Bus To Babylon 14-Black Hair Black Eyes Black Suit 15-Lay Back On Me Pal 16-Under Her Spell 17-Beat Of My Heart 18-I want One Of Those 19-La Grande Dame 20-Nice N Sleazy 21-Cadiz 22-Golden Brown
Twitter Bot with Python
Pretty easy really:
- Create your twitter account for your bot.
- Go to dev.twitter.com
- Register your app
- Gain your app keys
- In your Python script “import tweepy” (you may need to pip install tweepy first).
- Add a function to perform the tweet
- Simply then call your function passing in the message you wish to Tweet.
def tweet(message):
#enter the corresponding information from your Twitter application:
CONSUMER_KEY = "" #keep the quotes, replace this with your consumer key
CONSUMER_SECRET = "" #keep the quotes, replace this with your consumer secret key
ACCESS_KEY = "" #keep the quotes, replace this with your access token
ACCESS_SECRET = "" #keep the quotes, replace this with your access token secret
auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET)
auth.set_access_token(ACCESS_KEY, ACCESS_SECRET)
api = tweepy.API(auth)
api.update_status(message)
Kudos to http://www.dototot.com/how-to-write-a-twitter-bot-with-python-and-tweepy/
Using Deploy Keys with TeamCity and Git
Had a number of TeamCity projects connecting to the Git repo using my user account. Was thinking I should really request for service accounts to do the connection. This becomes a pain when I change my user password as I have to remember to go in to TeamCity and Octopus Deploy to update the passwords on anything using my user account. Really bad practice!
After doing a bit of digging I stumbled across “Deploy Keys” whereby you can gen ssh keys to configure Git and TeamCity to play nicely with each other so that deploy keys are then used to establish a read only connection from Team City to Git to pull down the repository.
Steps as follows:
- Generate ssh keys ssh-keygen -t rsa -C “your.email@example.com”
- Go to Git project settings. Click on Deploy Key – Add the public key – I had to paste the full contents of public key here although I believe some versions will allow upload of file.
- Go to TeamCity. Click on the Project. “Edit Project Settings”…….”SSH Keys”…..”Upload SSH Key” – Upload the private SSH key.
- Now go into the Team City project settings and “Edit Configuration Settings” ….. “Version Control Settings” …..”Edit”…..Under “Authentication Settings” change the “Authentication Method” to “Uploaded Key” and select the “Uploaded Key” to the key you uploaded in step 3.
- Depending on how you had the Version Control Settings configured previously you may need to now switch to the SSH version of the “Fetch URL” in the configuration settings.
All done. No more dodgy personal accounts used for TeamCity and Git interaction.
Wussy – The Crescent Working Mens Club – York – 29th April 2016
Last (and only time previously?) time Wussy toured the UK was about 4 years ago. They played York at the time at the now defunct Stereo venue. Once heralded as “the best band in America” they’ve never really broke the UK, evident by the 20 fans bothering to turn up last time I saw them. Although tonight the numbers seemed to have doubled Wussy are still relatively unknown in the UK. They’ve released a couple of albums since then and tonight they’re promoting their recent “Forever Sounds” album which is a return to form IMO.
Tonight’s venue is great. It’s a typical old Working Men’s club, no fuss bar, a bit of bunting up across the stage, nice big dancefloor and a stage that’s probably seen many a tombowler draw and bingo nights.
Highlights for me:
new tracks She’s Killed Hundreds and Hello, I’m a Ghost sounding particularly good live. Lisa Walker’s vocals are in fine fettle on To the Lightning. The band end with Maglite and a cover version (for the recent RSD 2016) of New Order’s Ceremony. It ends there but there’s something rather fitting yet bizarre about an American band covering a Joy Division/New Order song in a Northern Working Mens Club.