Not sure how many of you are using the Spotify software.  But I have set up a playlist and a blog to go with it.

Love to get your comments on the music and the drivel I've written about some of the tracks. 




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Playlist Link

What a pleasant way to spend a Monday night, drinking tea, talking rubbish indulging in intellectual conversation with morienosand watching as my daughter trys to deal with the worlds most enthusiastically friendly canine.

No dogs allowed in our house, my wife is terrified by them, so my daughter loves to visit houses where the little beasts reside.  (We do have two rabbits, AKA the slippers, who live in a far too expensive plastic hutch, having eaten holes in the two wooden hutches we had for them before.   But plastic and wire have sorted out their gnawing activities!). 

As a twelve year old, my daughter is just starting to find me more embarassing than funny, but after a couple of hours with the dog last night she was talking twenty to the dozen on the way home and totally forgot to try to be cool.  Nice times.

I'm about to start a week off work.  I was worried that I was getting behind with the projects I inheritated when my boss was transferred, that I made extra efforts to catch up last week. (Its called delegation) As a result I was left with two phone calls and a one hour meeting to get through today and then I will be fully up to date.  I'm hoping to have everything out of the way by lunchtime.

This just depresses me.......

Its a part of our heritage I thought we would be able to consign to the past, but there appear to be some amongst us who can't seem to let go......

Just back from a long weekend in Nice in the South of France.  A good break from the office, but the discovery that my boss had moved to another division in the two days that I had been away marred my return somewhat when I discovered that his work had been passed on to me.

Temperature was between 25 and 30, roughly the same as when we were there in the summer, so it was far too hot for me, but perfect for my wife who regards any temperature below 20 as baltic.  Spent a very pleasant time reading in bars drinking good coffee and Pastis while my wife shopped.

Until this summer i'd always avoided the strange cloudy drink that my brother in law drank, assuming that it would be as vile and sweet as I remembered Pernod to be.  But the variaties available in France were very different, not sweet, and, when cold, very well suited to a hot Saturday afternoon.

I was also struck by how friendly the French were.  I'd always assumed that the stories of the unhelpfulness of their waiting staff and their refusal to speak english even when they could were true.  Not my experience at all, although I suspect my Norn' Irish accent might have helped in that regard.  I did witness a waiter feign an inability to speak english with an english couple and then procedd to speak quite clearly in english to me. 

But then they had been quite rude to him  on their way into the resturant.

As usual I spent a little bit of time in a comic shop on Saturday morning, in the wonderful BD Fugue Cafe .  Staff were very friendly, coffee was good and the selection of French BD was awesome.  I wish I could read the language, the variety of material available is stunning, from westerns to scifi, historical stories and humour..  Heavy Metal really does not do the european scene justice.

Even the Marvel Soleil books, while welcome are nothing in comparison to the originals which are published in much bigger volumes (in terms of page size, rather than page count).  No wonder they, along with the Savage Sword of Conan reprints which eventually led me to get glasses.  The same applies to the Lewis Trontheim Dungeon books, published in little more than paperback size by NBM, in France they are on the same size paper as Dc's absolute books.   

In the end I bought very little, but I couldn't resist picking up an excerpt from Jacques Tardi's 1914-1918 published in newspaper form, a little like wednesday comics but in black and white and featuring a single story.  The words were not necessary to understand what was being said.  As vivid a treatment of the horrors of the first World War as i've seen anywhere.  I may order the collection at some time even if it is in french.

Not often that music makes me laugh out loud.  But when I realised that the song I was hearing on my ipod this morning was a cover of T.A.T.U.'s "All the things they said" I lalmost spat my coffee over my PC screen.

Performed by Bosshoss, who were supposed to be playing in Belfast on Saturday but cancelled, its a really raw Country version of the song.  Well worth a listen if you treasure inappropriate covers of songs like I do.

Picking on Santana (Bluegrass covers of the works of Carlos) and 'Dub Side of the Moon' are highly recommended.

I've been hiding inside my headphones this morning.  Lots going on in the Office that I really cannot be bothered with today.  Another set of reshuffles is underway, trying to find the capacity for an additional 250 voluntary redundancies.  Lots of angry noises coming from the union at the moment 

By the time this is finished we'll have cut our staff by 1000, or 15%.  In some areas that isn't a big problem, like most other Irish banks we have a large 'sales force' who were involved in servicing the property market and other borrowers.  As a result  of the crash in that market, and the severe dowbturn in the Irish ecconomy,  the level of loan applications to be processed has fallen dramatically. 

Potential customers are in short supply and many of those who are applying fail credit checks on the basis of Stress Testing.  In other words they are applying for mortgages they can afford at current Interest Rates, but which they will quickly find impossible to manage when the inevitable Interest rate hikes start to appear.

So cuts in front line and loan support staff are easy to find, but for many other areas there has been no reduction in workload.  Indeed there are a number of growth areas.  Dealing with the financial regulators, or managing potential bad debt spring to mind.

Cuts are falling mainly in the Republic of Ireland, the Irish government and employers have been very good to themselves over the past few years.  There has been a government approved rate for pay increases applied to salaries year on year during the Celtic Tiger period.   The difference in settlements has been such that my equivalent in ROI is paid 20-30% more than me in real terms.   I suspect that trend will start to reverse itself in the next few years and Irish tax rates will again move way ahead of the UK,

Our workload has increased quite considerably in recent weeks.  Instead of us having to push for process reviews they are now being requested, but my line Manager has been transferred leaving all of his work behind him.  Including some of the dullest audio meetings known to man.  (The one i'm in at the moment isn't exactly thrilling)  Very shortly I'll be required to say 'no, we don't sell that sort of product' and that will be my full contribution for this month.

A busy few months ahead I suspect.

Giants 4, Blaze 5. 

Belfast Giants game on saturday was also showing the effect of the Credit Crunch.  A much smaller crowd than last season and a poor atmosphere.   It may be my imagination, but I suspect we are seeing a lower standard of play as well.  Players who last season were on 2nd lines have been promoted to first line status and not, I suspect, because they have improved.  The Giants have replaced their main sponsors and do not appear to have been able to afford the quality of overseas players they had last year.

Even with that they had to work hard to lose this game.  They seemed to be by the better team by a long way, more than double the number of shots than Coventry.  But they were lacklustre in defense and suffered badly for poor goal tending.  They were 4-1 down by the end of the first period with two of the Blaze goals coming from unlucky/silly goaltending errors.  It was only in the final period, when they were already well down, that the Giants came to life but Coventry held on for the win.  In the end the best thing about the evening was the Thai Red Curry I had on the way home.

House a bit of a mess at the moment.  After 90 years the pebbledash on the outside walls had started letting in water.  So its being replaced.  Never in the field of human building have two workmen drunk so much tea in so short a period.!
 

Shuffle is a wonderful inverntion.  Doing my usual pre-8:00 stunt in work, firmly plugged into the headphones on shuffle.  I loaded a batch of seventies music along with albums by Drive-By Truckers and Booker T last night.   About 7:35 I was shocked to discover a listenable ELO song that I'd forgotten about.

The 10538 Overture was the first single by the band and Roy Wood had not yet departed to form Wizzard.  Very different from the blandness that was to come from elo.

The riff was later used by Paul Weller for his song Changing Man. 

This is an utterly pointless post.  But as of Friday, I've spent 30 years working for the same employer I joined straight out of school.  One of the Irish High Street Banks, and today someone has produced a photograph of me taken on my first day in the training school. 

Sadly (I won't be able/don't want)  to reproduce it here (it won't scan very well and too many people would laugh at me)  but it was interesting to look at the photograph and think back. 

Of the eight people in the picture, three of us are still working in the bank ,all of us having graduated to Head Office departments and sitting barely 15 yards apart.

Of the others, one, the one we used to tease about having fat ankles, became Miss Northern Ireland and now runs a model agency.  Another is dead while a third, the only one I ever worked with again, left the bank almost fifteen years ago to be a full-time mother.  One guy left within two weeks and escaped into the real world never to be seen again.  Not really a surprise, as he wasn't able to do anything that we were being trained in,  A bit ironic because, as far as I can remember, he was the only one who wanted a career in the Bank.  For the rest of us this was the best place to make money while you thought what you would do after screwing up your A Levels.

The only alternative with the same level of pay was the Police and you thought very hard about that in the Northern Ireland of 1979.  About a year later a Bank Manager was killed when a bomb was planted under his car, the car he'd bought from a Policeman that very day.

The last girl in the photograph, the one all the guys fancied, eloped to the Isle of Man with the Assistant Manager of the first branch she worked in.  They'd known each other six weeks.    

This story in today's Guardian makes interesting reading.  Especially considering the profits Barclays have made from picking over the bones of the collapsed american bank Lehman Brothers.

I think we are now beginning to see the roles which governments played in the banking collapse and the subsequent global ecconomic downturn that is putting so many people out of work.    The collapse of Lehman's was the key event in the crisis and to see that the Bristish and American government's were not able to organise some form of rescue is stunning.

At the end of the day, Lehman's was an American Bank, and if action was needed it was the responsibility of the American authorities to make sure that all the t's were crossed, but Mr Darling does not come out of the story very well.  But then his handling of Northern Rock did not exactly inspire confidence.

Football violence can inflate your pants.

I'm not talking Yes and their Tales from Topo-bloody-graphic Oceans or any of that poo-faced rubbish, but an album with an overarching theme, Cricket. 

The Duckworth Lewis Method is the name of the album (and the band) and I reckon anyone who likes Cricket will enjoy it.  Even my Dad, whose musical taste we will not even begin to discuss.. 

Neil Hannon, from Devine Comedy and  Thomas Walsh of Dublin based Pugwash are the core of the band and they have treated their subject with real affection and wit. 

There is even one song, Jiggery Pokery, about a single delivery, which made me laugh out loud.   Its takes a lot of skill to craft a lyric like this into a song

"Robery, muggery, Aussie skullduggery,
Out for a buggering duck!"




Strange that it is two Irishmen who have put this together.  I do wonder how it will play with those who are not interested in Cricket. 

In a totally unscientific study, I have to say that it is one of the few CDs I have ever seleted to play in the car where my wife has asked me to 'Play that Again' as soon as it was finished.   


  

 

This is really quite scary.   

Fills you with confidence over safety standards in the Rail Network in Ireland.   The viaduct concerned was inspected just two days before it collapsed into the sea.  Inspection was probably of the "aye sure its grand"  type.

Somehow I can see huge increases in the use of video conferencing over the next few months. 

I had a wee rant a while ago, about Esther Ranzen and her outburst about the people of Northern Ireland. 

It all stemed from reports of racist attacks on a group of Romanian families living in Belfast.  Attacks that caused them to flee the country vowing never to return.  At the time there was something odd about the reports, as the Police here were saying that the trouble started as a result of difficulties within the Romanian community.

Another slight twist, having been flown home by the government a couple of months ago, many of the same families have come back.  Maybe Belfast isn't such a bad place after all? 

I thought i'd post this before morienos does.  This is not what I look like.  The differences are:

1. I have a beard and some hair
2. I am not green, at least not that green.
3. I would never wear a pair of white tights.
4.With the state of my knees I couldn't sit on that wee tray for more than 2 minutes.

otherwise, close enough.




Time for work, whoop-de-do.  Thank heaven for the Shakedown Stream podcast.  A new Grateful Dead live show every week.  Check it out bingobison !

Nothing to see here, move along.

bingobison another resident of North Down.

Arrived at work this morning to find a guy taking all the coffee out of the vending machine, he'd mixed the decaf with the real stuff earlier in the week and had to replace it all.  I'm not sure how anyone noticed but that may explain why I didn't sleep last night.  I spent the whole day yesterday running workshops and that means I  was chain-drinking coffee-machine coffee.   

Usually I don't much like decaff, coffee free coffee, pretty much describes it.  (That pod stuff you had, morienos  is an exception) but the coffee machine stuff tastes no worse than the brown liquid which passes for ordinary coffee in our vending machines.  Lowest common denominator, but it was interesting to see that there are actually different packages for the various drinks offered as everything seemed to taste the same.

Can't really complain as its all free.

Guys in white suits out the back of the office today and the street behind us is sealed off.  Our security men told us that "Some bleather got a wild kicking, yonder"  which is Ulster Scots for "A gentlemen was asaulted in that street". 

CSI Belfast seems a fairly laid back affair which mostly involves chatting and standing about with your hands in your pockets.

Couldn't hear exactly what they were saying but I decided it was:

CSI Belfast officer 1   "Here, that's blood that is".

CSI Belfast officer 2.  "Aye".

I think morienos should write the new series.

OK, audio meeting over, back to doing something useful.