Diary 2007-07-04

While my apartment is still getting painted (4 weeks after the initial dead-line date, don’t you just love contractors?), I’m now on the verge of planing and installing the home network.
I still loathe cables and I have to connect two separate network segments so I’ll have to look at what’s out there in terms of Ethernet over the power infrastructure (again) and wireless bridges.
I sure would love to go with a wireless bridge, but I’m not really aware of what there is in the portuguese market right now that could possibly allow me to do a cheap (or at least not ridiculously over-priced) simple ethernet bridge. I have my Linksys wireless ADSL router, so I would be most happy to find something that could plug into a hub and extend the network from the Linksys to that segment.
I’ll have to see what I can find. Not in the mood to waste a lot of time on this though…

Other than that the last few days have been interesting… I’ve been to the Super Bock Super Rock festival last evening and it was pretty great.

I’ve also been driving a small Ford Fiesta since last Wednesday (when my car went into the shop for a routine maitenance and ended up being sequestered there for what is now a full week!) and I must say I had forgotten (again) how utterly fun the Fiesta is to drive.

On another happy note, last Friday I went to my first sax lesson after a full month of not even touching the thing and it actually turned out pretty well. Kudos to the teacher for helping me get up to speed again (as much as possible), but his choice of method was really great: he put on a few CDs and we’d just play along, following the tunes or even improvising, going over the stuff we had already covered before my dive into moving and home-repair hell. And instead of being another one of those awful “gosh, I haven’t practiced or studied this at all for this lesson, I’m screwed and this will be a complete waste of time“-type of situation, it ended up being great fun indeed!

Act 2 - Day 1 of Super Bock Super Rock 2007

I managed to attend day one (or should I say evening one?) of the festival, as planned, and the recap is pretty simple:

• The Gift is not all that good on a festival such as this, they’re definitely more of a small-venue kind of band. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t all that good either and I think the choice of songs and arrangements wasn’t particularly fitting for this context;

• Klaxons is OK, not exactly my cup of tea, but I’ll keep an eye out for them in the future;

• Magic Numbers is bad, mkay?

• Bloc Party is ok-ish… Again not my cup of tea, but they do put on a good show and play really well;

• Arcade Fire live is something that has to be experienced to be completely understood. This was probably the best rock live show I’ve seen in a good while (although yes, I’ve been attending other kinds of shows lately) ;-). I really liked that band before, but after last night’s performance I’m a total convert to their cause. Absolutely brilliant show!

If I were to go to the festival this evening I’d go in just to see the Jesus and Mary Chain and probably stay to check out the LCD Soundsystem’s show, but I’m not betting on it happening.