Someone asked a question on Harmony Central

They asked who had burned out.

Their experience was that they gigged for 10 years solid, bars etc, just got fed up with the energy, time, drunk-management and general hassle of playing out. There's a lot more stuff in their post, but that's all beside the point.

But it got me thinking.

I posted:

Hmmm. My experience is slightly different, slightly similar.

Started playing when I was 16, put a youth group band together when I was 18 and have played worship in churches ever since with 2 breaks (12 months and 6 months) the last being around 12 or 14 years ago.

It's different, in that the audience are mostly sober and the sets are shorter, while there is a lot of inspiration. But the last 10 years I've been gradually deteriorating, being less inspired, less adventurous, less excited and my playing has slid to a level below mediocrity. I can't even play a decent lead line right now, but I'm still bashing out rhythm stuff (that I'm good at, but don't really enjoy) every week.

Unlike you, it's unusual to have major bust-ups with band mates - more often you go away frustrated with each other, wishing they'd do stuff differently. Much modern worship is bland, tuneless and gutless, often with just a single good chorus hook line plus 4 verses and a middle 8 of bleh. This adds to the frustration, and the modern pop-guitar styles are just lousy - they stink to me.

And I have a demanding full time job, plus run the worship band, plus run a house group, and in this time my children have.... well one is 20 and the other with Jesus.

So I guess, yes, I'm probably burned out right now in a way. Not mental breakdown and thrashing style, so much as swimming through quicksand, getting more tired and less inspired.

Thanks for posting this. I've not stepped back and considered what's going on in this way before. Hopefully I can do something about it.

There's a lot more to my feelings of 'burned-outness' than this, and some has to do with excessive pre-occupation with the computer and internet - something that has a good side and I enjoy, yet has become too much. These are aspects of my life and personality I must control, and I can't just simply cope by avoidance/abstinence as I would have done in times past.

But control is sometimes difficult, requiring energy and the need to deal with the consequences when control fails.


This morning at the mens prayer meeting (7.30am on a Saturday morning!) a bunch of thoughts and insights crawled out of the woodwork, and this covers and builds on some of them. Not sure where things go from here, but I believe I've been round a particular loop because I need to build character in certain areas, and another intersection is approaching where, if they're built, I might step onto a different highway.

Or not.

We'll see.

Film posters - as they should have been.

Courtesy of Charlie over at the Bikemagic formerlies forum, who has discovered b3ta.com

An interesting evening.

We went along to a little Anglican church plant that is literally just down the road from us this evening.

They have their adult meeting on a Thursday night: had the feel of s slightly overgrown housegroup. People were friendly, participated in worship and were open to the Spirit of God moving. It's triggered some things in both of us, particularly as we want to see something happen locally. This may be not be anything or it may be the start of something new. I don't know yet.

I'm trying to figure out

why the sidebar takes so long to load.

Leaving out clustrmaps and the link to Haloscan doesn't make any difference. Surely it's not the number of blogs in the blogroll? I only noticed the side bar taking WAY to long when I added a bunch of additional addresses.

Any wisdom oh mighty blogmakers?

We went for a walk yesterday.

South Oxfordshire - almost wiltshire - has a stylised shape of a horse cut in the hillside. It isn't just the grass cut away, but instead people inserted chalk blocks to make the image white. We walked for a couple of hours solid around the white horse, then up to Uffington 'castle' before heading along the ridgeway to Waylands smithy (an ancient barrow).

Naturally I took a camera.












The full collection is available here - link fixed now.

Just like to say

A really big "Thank You to all those that left flowers on Sarah's grave, sent us cards or remembered us 'on-line'.

We really do appreciate the way so many of you have remembered both her and us.

Something odd is happening.

I'm wanting to sell guitar gear.

Almost unheard of!

So far my POD Pro, Celestion Gold, Dean flying V (almost) and a chorus pedal have gone.

What's also odd is that, although I would like to acquire more gear, I actually turned down a really good deal on something last night because I can't specifically find a place to use it. There was a time I'd have bought it, then MADE a place for it.

Could I be changing?

I'm sure I'll get more stuff at some stage, but vive la difference for now.

Yup, another of those all-encompassing once-a-week type posts.

I'm sat here perspiring after an hour of cutting the grass.

Todays weather was meant to be wet, windy (it is, a little) and cold. The outside thermometer says 20'C, but the sun is strong, and even working with my shirt off in order to build tolerance for Greece (in 4 weeks) I'm hot.

This week has been a mixture. Much less difficult for me than Chris, we had our combined crisis point Tuesday night when I took that photo. That was around 7.00ish, when we wanted to visit Sarah's grave before everyone else left flowers. From there, we went on to church housegroup, and being with our larger family really seemed to produce a change of heart in us both. There's something about being with those you love that love you back that can ease hurts, even when the cause is still present.

Wednesday and Thursday for us have been times of some stress: Chris because of a work meeting in which she appeared to be the only one who knew (financially) what was going on, me because our Quality systems consultant was in and, while I like him very much, he has a manner that makes you think you must have failed somewhere.

But yesterday. Yesterday.

Fine for me, bad, bad day for Chris. It culminated with Ben driving one of our cars into the other, literally just back from being repaired from our 'road rage' incident.

Repeat after me "it's just a car".

So we veg'd last night. I popped out to fix a reclining chair for my mum, only to then discover she's got a water leak from a pipe in the concrete floor in her flat.

Repairs are what bank holidays are for, aren't they?

Chris writes

A few months ago I found a piece of paper in Sarah's desk on which she had written the following:
"I want my family to say that I was always loving & caring, always there for them when they needed me & that I was patient."
"I want my husband to say that he loved me because of these things, was always a laugh."
"I want my friends to say that I was aways a devoted follower of God & that I was an encouragement to them when they weren't feeling very holy."
"I want to serve God faithfully 'til I die!" (emphasis Sarah's)

Tomorrow I might not post here.

If anyone plans to leave flowers, please pop them in the jars so they'll last longer.

Thanks.

One thing I will do.

Firefox users - want a faster browsing experience ('course you do).

want to REALLY tweak your browser

In the address bar type about:config

WOW!

Scroll down to the network settings. Take a screen-grab and file it away in case you need to change things back to default.

Change
network.http.max-connections to 128
network.http.max-connections-per-server to 64
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy to 24
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server to 8
network.http.pipelining to true
network.http.pipelining-requests to 64

Close firefox and restart. Enjoy some new-found speed.

This will not give you extra bandwidth, so if you have a slow connection, nothing will make images come down any quicker. Instead, what this does is grab information from the site you're trying to access more quickly, so where you're not bandwidth limited, stuff will load faster.

I didn't discover this for myself, but come across it while hunting down the about:config command to switch off IPv6 in a new Linux install.

Enjoy

BTW Dan - Fedora 9 Sulphur is buggy. :-(

It's that time of year again.

May used to be a good month - oh well.

We're basically OK. Well mostly anyway.

Lorraine - thank you for your kind comments, prayers and care you expressed this morning. And everyone else too, but I know your life is SO busy.

So it may be a lean posting time (leaner than even before) or I may develop typographical diarrhea and spout the usual sort of useless stuff.

I'm a little busy too, selling of some surplus guitar stuff, plus some of Chris's dad's old stuff.

So I dunno.

Now I think about it, I'm not really alright, but I'm not really bad either.

And worthwhile bloggable thoughts are like eels: as they wriggle away, trying to grip them makes them disappear even quicker.

Friday a week ago we experienced road-rage first hand, and along with everything else, I think that is still having an impact on me. I didn't mention it earlier because I didn't really think about it, and I won't talk much now. However It's had a much deeper effect than I would have ever expected, and I'm still working through the fallout. Curious the effects things like this can have on a person.

That'll do for now.

Calling Randall Friesen

Here's some preaching for you to live up to.

You'll need the sound up - it's a youtube clip (I won't embed them anymore as it slows the page too much).

Want to meet in meatspace?

I'm going bowling at the Banbury Superbowl for a bloke's night out on Friday night - 8pm start.

Just to remind you what I look like:


If you miss me - that's your fault!

Remember my earlier post about 'freetards' and Radiohead?

Well I received this in my inbox about 5 min ago:

Dear Musician,

The online world is becoming more and more relevant—not just as a center of communications and commerce, but as a place to try out new ideas and get instant feedback. Case in point: Trent Reznor has released his new album online, and you can download the whole thing—free—at www.nin.com. What's more, it's available in multiple formats, including MP3, FLAC, and high-res 96kHz/24-bit. Still want more? You can download some multitrack files as well, and mix them yourself. Seriously.

Does this devalue music? We'll find out, but according to the site, Reznor simply wants to give something back to the people who have supported him all these years. And, the album will be made available as a physical product you can buy. I don't think music will be "all free, all the time" any time soon, but I do think what Reznor has done will get him publicity and notoriety that no amount of money could buy. It's just one more example of someone taking full advantage of what the online world has to offer.

There are so many ways to get your music heard online, whether it's putting a link to your website in your sig on the forums, using an outstanding service like TuneCore (www.tunecore.com), or taking advantage of social networking sites.

Yes, it's an exciting time to be online. . . which could be why HC's traffic has jumped by about 200,000 unique visitors in the first quarter of this year alone. Thank you so much for being a part of it!

- Your Harmony Central Team

One more thing that makes this worthy of consideration *to me* is that I know zip about NIN, but I'm tempted to actually download and listen. Would I buy the album? Who knows?

Darth Vader is alive and well and living in Wales

Well, if you're going to have Jedis, why not?

And a week goes by.

This last week has been a time of business and recovery.

Work has been getting back on track, as I'm recovering from the chest infection and have mostly regained my strength, ability to think and plan.

Church, friendship and family activities have occupied every evening for the past 7 days - we've not had a single evening free - although it's all been good. Tonight we had a spontaneous barbecue (thanks Penny - my tummy is still bulging) and we've literally just got home. Our first night off is Thursday evening.

So nothing of any real substance to say, report or comment on. Right now anyway.

Does anyone here hate by association?

There's one particular hatred I have that's staring me in the 'face' - well, nostrils actually.

Lillies.

They produce a sickly, sweet and almost choking perfume. Worse is that they are always bought for funerals, and will forever have an association with Sarah's death and particularly that time of pain.

If you plan to ever buy us flowers, DO NOT buy lillies.

If we get bought any more they are going straight in the bin.

Evolution of desktops

Just found this page.

The thing I find most interesting is just how ropey some of those Mac screengrabs look compared to some versions of windows. System 4 or 5 (I forget now, 1990 is a long time ago) was what introduced me to useful computing (PCs mostly seemed to run DOS which, frankly, stunk. And SMART really wasn't). I had a love affair with Macs right up until Windows 95 had been out and refined for a couple of years, at which point I realised Apple had failed to keep up with user interface development. Fortunately no-one told them.

The writer must be a Linux fanboy - those KDE screengrabs look far in advance of either Windows or Macintosh. Reality as I remember it was somewhat less refined from my experience with mandrake 9.0.

One more linux install later

I've RMA'd the Samsung drive, requesting a like-for-like swap. It seems I have to call Ebuyers technical people first before it can go back. Sensible, I guess, as if the drive is truly dead there's no point posting, plus they might have ideas to make it go again if I were a hardware numbskull.

Less joy for Radiohead fans?

Apparently all the freetards that helped restore Radioheads fortunes are out of luck this time.

Fern - you were asking my opinion

about those 750Gb Samsung drives.

Mine died last night - electro-mechanical failure.

I had the PC running shortly after getting home. read some blogs, checked mail etc, restarted to run Linux.

Click, click, click, click. PC starts to post, hangs at 'WINFAST' bios entry screen before reaching beeps.

Tried several times, eventually removed data connector, clicks still heard but PC now boots fine. Removed power connector, no clicks.

Looks like an RMA, possibly with a like-for-like replacement depending. It's very disappointing, as it was quiet and very quick. It's also a real nuisance being without that drive. Glad I didn't migrate everything across.

Reading through the ebuyer reviews of SATA drives in general, they seem to fail much more than the equivalent IDE drives. It doesn't seem logical, but that's definitely the impression I got.

Medicine that is hard to swallow.

Not Amoxycillin, but a cure for the ridiculously over-inflated British housing market.

It seems that house prices are starting to fall.

We desperately need cheaper housing - prices have become ludicrous as cheap loans became available and larger mortgages more affordable. At one time a mortgage of 2.5X the larger income, 1X the smaller was all that any building society would offer. Then came Maggie Thatcher and the ethos became greed is good - house prices skyrocketed at the rate of £1000 a week in London in the mid 80s (that's £1000 a week on a £35,000-£40,000 house). We moved from our maisonette to a 3 bed house at this time, and in the next 5 years it went from £36,500 to about £100,000, then back down to the £74,000 that we sold at to move to our present home in 1990.

At the time of our move we met many in the trap of negative equity - owing more on a mortgage than their house was worth. It was also the time of crucifying interest rates, at 15% or more, and many simply lost everything they'd worked for, unable to maintain mortgage payments or recover equity after selling their homes.

Chris and I still remember the young couple whose house we viewed in Didcot: he was a builder, and there was no work, they'd bought at the crest of the boom and done the house to suit themselves. The girl was younger than Chris and had a baby in her arms - the look of despair on their faces was painful, and we almost wished we could buy the house to help them, except that wouldn't even clear their debts. And there were many like that.

The result of that era, plus joining the EU laid the foundations for todays housing market. A shocked mortgage industry found ways to make mortgages more affordable, while the European banks required UK interest rates reduced down to their levels before allowing the pound to be linked to Euro rates. But underlying that is the fact that housing stock never depreciated back to the level it was at before the boom started, and has remained far too high ever since. Conditions aren't right for a market crash like we experienced then, and as long as interest rates don't escalate it'll never happen. But we do need a reduction in the price of housing compared to salaries, and this is the part that will hurt. If they could just remain static for the next 15 years then that would help a very great deal.

Heard Gordon Brown on radio 4 this morning.

I'm sorry to say that he wasn't hugely impressive, although that particular interviewer has shredded lesser mortals. I feel slightly sorry fro Brown, as he really isn't prime minister material - OK in number 2 position probably, but not the man up front. He's having to smile way too much.

Wonder what sort of government the next round of elections will bring?

Please turn off....

All your bloggy widgets, twitters, youtube inserts and all the rest of the guff that's slowing down the web. Apparently bloat is a real problem.

So this morning

I go to the doctors.

This is all feeling horribly familiar: no energy, fuzzy fuzzy head, continual deep coughing, distorted sense of taste, filling up with goo from bacteria growing happily somewhere they don't belong, joints aching for no good reason.

10 days like this now, It has the feel of when I had pneumonia about 12 years ago, although less severe - then I was really ill, and took a fortnight off work. Now I just feel bushed all the time, but not SO ill that I can't get some stuff done. Hey ho penicillin, I bet we meet again.


Chris is struggling right now too. Not with health, but with feelings. May is THE month we're reminded our personal world stopped for a while. I joked this morning about emigrating to Australia, as the seasons would then mis-match the names of the months, and we'd be less aware of the time of year.

There are a number of changes happening in this household.

Chris has resigned her job, effective end of May.

Ben has resigned his job, effective end of now.

If anyone hears of motorsport-type apprenticeships going, he'd love to know. It's where his heart has been the last couple of years, and we've had the cars to prove it.

First post from within Ubuntu

Midnight, feeling fairly bushed after an evening of attempted song-writing and still 'enjoying' the pleasures of this cold, including an unhelpful headache that's been around all day.I'm sat here with a substantial amount of sloe gin in the hope it'll quieten the throat and stop me coughing all night.

I ended up losing my blogger password, so I've re-set it and can now blog from previously un-used places.

The Ubuntu font issue has mostly resolved itself. Further reading indicates that many, many others have found the same thing, and it's a result of especially poor 'standard' font choice coupled with badly implemented anti-aliasing. The anti-aliasing is what makes the font actually blur. The poor font choice just makes the page bad to read in exactly the way you would expect regardless of operating system.

In some manner completely unknown to me, most of the anti-aliasing issues have disappeared now, and I'm left with icky fonts. I know how to change standard fonts, but I just need to install decent (i.e. true type) ones. This may be where Sabayon wins, as the Italians appear to understand aesthetics, while the rest of the world just looks on and wonders how they're so stylish.

So Ubuntu works. - Randall, this is probably *the one* for you, using WUBI.

Seems it's always one of us.

Chris is in bed now with a migraine, while I've actually felt better today (thought I was going to pay the price for working yesterday - 1st thing was a bit grim). We've had some good weeks together, and now we're not. Best be grateful for the good times rather than grumble about the bad ones.

Talking of good times, spring has arrived, truly.

Outside temp is around 20'C. I've been cutting the grass with my shirt off. Contrast this to earlier in the week when I was ill, sure I had a temp, but the house felt freezing, even with the heating on. My hands went numb a few times.

Great, great weather. Hope it stays warm tonight - we've friends coming over IF Chris is up to coping.

After being less than encouraging about WUBI

It sounds like a woman's name, spoken with a lisp. I was probably being grumpy because of illness.

Anyway, Randall suggested Ubuntu and WUBI together. Bearing in mind that Ubuntu 8.04 has been out for about 2 days I thought I'd give it a go last night. In addition, WUBI is supported and recommended by the Ubuntu people, and isn't (as I imagined) a flaky independent add-on by a couple of guys in a dark room somewhere.

WUBI is a small program that runs under windows which creates a Linux partition within a windows partition and automatically installs Ubuntu, sets up the bootloader etc. You choose the size of the partition and the place it's created (I bunged it on the Samsung drive) and it installs a bootloader that is run AFTER windows begins booting. To install you can either use the Ubuntu CD (download the iso file and burn your own) or if it can't find that it will try to download ubuntu direct from a mirror.

My first go wasn't successful as I had both WUBI and the Ubuntu ISO file on an external hard drive. Of course as an ISO the data weasn't visible to WUBI so it tried to download the OS, which I stopped. D'oh. I un-installed WUBI, burned a CD, popped it in a drive and then re-ran WUBI. It found the CD, asked me how much space to use (default 15Gb) and where to install, user ID and password then just got on with it.

After around 10 mins it asked me to remove the CD and reboot. A menu was offered after starting to boot to carry on to XP or start Ubuntu. On selecting Ubuntu it completed the install, taking around 15 mins more. Bear in mind that if you were installing on an older system it might be quite a bit slonger - I'm running 4Gb RAM, and that Samsung drive is really quick.

Install completed, one more reboot, select Ubuntu and it worked first go. Firefox beta 3 v5 is the default browser - no IPv issues here, and it worked from the start. It also detected I had no proprietary drivers installed for my graphics card, and offered the option of downloading and installing automatically, which I accepted. One more reboot and it's all there. The reminder then popped up to tell me I was using non-open source drivers, and in fact popped up after EVERY boot. Hope there's a switch somewhere to turn that off.

The good and bad:

Good - it's free, easy to install like this, quick, seems to have automated driver installation (one of the most awkward areas of Linux for years)and is very functional. By reputation it's the easiest to use, most friendly version of Linux available, and it does have a warm, fuzzy, friendly feel to it.

Bad - screen fonts are, frankly, just frightful: all smeary and blurry. I used the correction tools built in (Mandriva used to have them - now does it automatically) and it became bearable but not good. Fonts in Mandriva are MUCH crisper - I'm using a syncmaster 206B 20" LCD at 1680X1020 and in windows the fine dot pitch makes for very clean fonts. Mandriva shows some of the smear issues, but nothing like as bad. I may try to import the imported windows fonts from Mandriva to Ubuntu. Another irritation is the lack of joined-up control, where each time you want to alter a key setting you have to log in as root instead of just working through something like the Mandriva control centre.


Based on my experiences so far, there seems to be a trade off between display quality and stability in Linux OSs (don't ask me why!). Sabayon is still far and away the best in terms of appearance, with the sharpest fonts, coolest interface, but is way unstable. Mandriva is second, with OK fonts and crisp, clean interface that feels like a marriage of OSX and XP. Ubuntu threw no glitches in the short time I tried it and has a pleasant feel, but I'd struggle to spend a day working in front of that display.

Guess that's sealed my pigeon-holing in the backwaters of geekdom.