Well as you have no doubt guessed from the title, I attended a Duke Special gig last night at the Glee club in Birmingham with the very cheap price of £6 for admission. Okay so you may not have guessed the when, where and how much from the title but you know what I mean

I first heard Duke Special performing "Portrait" in late 2005 on the Jools Holland show and was instantly impressed by how different the music sounded from anything I had heard before. At first I enjoyed listening to the song for this fact but quickly developed a liking for it and the other great tracks on the album "Songs from the Deep Forest".

The gig was, simply put, amazing. The music was great and the whole act was very entertaining, visually too. I could watch it all again tonight and enjoy it just as much. It was as good as my expectations were and better. I particularly enjoyed the variety of instruments played that night. There was, a piano, a keyboard (or synth?), a clarinet, a bass guitar, an electric guitar (which was at times played with a bow), a saxophone, a most unusual drum kit setup, some stick like instrument with bells, springs and blocks which is struck with a drum stick of which I have no idea as to it's name, an accordion and a whisk and cheese greater. All played by four men, though of course, not at the same time. I was surprised by how good a cheese greater played with a whisk could sound!

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Finally, the second instalment, better late than never. Personally I enjoyed the second day of LRL more than the first, even though it didn't last as long. The whole atmosphere seemed more relaxed this was due to having less people turn up the second day which also made more space in the main room. The talks I attended were Ted Haegar on Managing Linux desktop systems, Matthew Garret on Linux & Laptops, Kat Goodwin, Jen Phillips & Phated on Women in Open Source and Elliot Smith on Ruby on Rails. The first three were really funny talks the last was more formal but good none the less. The weekend was great, miles better than last years.

I really had been hoping to link this post to some videos of the talks but alas I can't find these anywhere. I'd rather like to catch up on the talks I wan unable to attened.

Roll on LRL 07!

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The first day is over, and what a day it was. The great talks I listened to were Sarah Ewen - Taking about Linux, Sony and the Playstation, Scott James Remnant of Cannonical - Talking about Edgy Eft, Michael Meeks of Novel - Talking about Open Office and Simon Phipps of Sun - Talking about The Zen of Free.

All were great talks, I wont go into detail about them as the talks should be made available on the net for download so keep checking LUG Radio's Site if your interested. There were many other talks going on which I shall have to catch up on when the content is online, the reason I missed them is because there are so many speakers they have to speak at the same time as other speakers in different rooms.

The venue, Wolverhamton Student Union was much better than last years Molenux Football grounds that had no openable windows. This place had air conditioning, if only it was turned on. Still at least a few windows and doors could be left open which helped a bit. Just as last year the choice of drinks were abismol. No beer just larger, cider, Guiness (Irish Stout) and the usual array of nancy kids drinks like WKD or a Vodka and Coke. Guiness it was then but coke after that. This year actually had a dedicated time set aside for a lunch break which was a welcome change, last year meant walking out in the middle of some interesting talk to get food.

LRL Live and Unleashed (the actual live recording of LUG Radio) was good as always, many laughs were had, many a beard was shaved. One minor negative point was that the speech and music was terribly distorted. I only hope it wasn't recorded like that.

Can't wait for the second half of it tommorow

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Well what better time to blog about LUG radio live then whilst at LUG Radio live? This is my first mobile blog entry and I'm writing it on my Nokia 770 whilst making use of my uni's free wifi (as LRL is actually held at my uni ). So far the day has been great (I'm now halfway through the day), I have seen some great talks which I will blog about later when I have a proper keyboard to write on as I'm rather fond of my fingers so this is only going to be a short post. LRL 06 is far better than last year, apart from having one more day to enjoy the venue is much better too. More later, I'm off to watch the mass debate now

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The nightmare came true! I was sitting at my PC and then, blank screen, the noise of the HD spinning down and then silence. A toaster had tripped the power supply, normally I wouldn't care but it's the same ring that my server is on which had been running perfectly for around 60 days! Luckily, the server restarted itself and it's services, otherwise I may have had to cart a monitor and keyboard down to the garage where it's stored as I run it as a headless server.

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