Open days

Just survived the final 2 Birmingham City University open days of the year, now no more until next June! As you might have gathered they are not the favourite part of my job. The reason is because open days involve far too much interaction with meat space...

This time the open days were a bit different for me, after dozens of open days at Perry Barr (including in June) this time i was at Millennium Point (which we call City Centre Campus) and i enjoyed the experience a lot more. Lot less busy for a start and nicer surroundings. The engineering faculty is here and thats where computing courses are these days and i did see a couple of my old lecturers still hanging around. Engineering also means you can have some nice props on display, like this:

Hannover coming along

My latest kit, a Hannover Cl.IIIa WW1 Luftwaffe fighter bomber is nearing completion. I did the bulk of the paintwork first though building was not without the odd emergency. One day i'll manage to build a biplane where everything fits into the holes correctly...

Comics : Blake & Mortimer (11) : The Gondwana Shrine

The latest Blake & Mortimer volume translated and published in English by Cinebook follows on from the excellent Sarcophagi of the Sixth Continent two-parter (part 1, part 2), although it can't be considered "part 3" it does follow up quite a lot of the plot... though everything is recapped so you can read this on its own and understand whats going on!

At the heart of this story is that staple of books of Blake & Mortimer's ilk : lost civilisations. Though in the case of the Gondwana Shrine the civilisation is truly very ancient (as in millions of years) and that does stretch credibility a bit. Professor Mortimer takes the lead in this story though of course Blake is never far away and a certain persistent villain also makes a reappearance. To be honest though it would be nice for Blake & Mortimer to have some other enemies...

As with all Blake & Mortimer books its a dense storyline and full of intrigue and adventure, and of course very well drawn. However as the central concept of the story is a little too far-fetched it did detract from the story a little but still well worth your time.

Compact Discs

Listening to Billy Joel's "52nd Street" album on CD earlier made me think about the early days of compact discs. Why Billy Joel? Well this was the first album to be released on CD in Japan on October 1st 1982, though interestingly the first commercial album to be manufactured on CD was ABBA's "the visitors". Of course CDs are still ubiquitous nowadays even in the age of the mp3 and other digital only formats. I buy dozens of CDs a year (at last count 52) still and have hundreds in my house (maybe over a thousand by now, never actually counted them all, maybe i should). Added to that are dozens of CD-Rs and data CDs, though these are becoming more scarce now as people store in the cloud or use USB keys.

My Dad bought a CD player in about 1988 (Matsushita i think), and i got my own a couple of years later when i got a stereo for my 18th birthday, yay!) The first CD i ever bought was Waylon Jennings' "Hangin' tough" which i still have got and it still plays perfectly after 23 years. I still bought vinyl mostly though for years afterwards, vinyl was a lot cheaper for a start. I also bought mostly 7" singles in the early 1990s as i discovered indie pop. In about 1998 i had to throw all my vinyl away though which was a shame, but i was engaged and my future wife needed somewhere to store her stuff in my bedroom (as it wasn't until a few months after we got married until we got our own place). Now i shudder at the loss of all those Sarah singles and other C86 rarities, especially as i probably didn't need to throw them away (and we got divorced eventually anyway!)

As more and more people consume music digitally the CD is becoming a rarer beast, like vinyl it will survive but will become more of a niche. Although i do get music digitally (iTunes, Amazon and free stuff) and play most of my stuff on my Mac in iTunes i do prefer having a physical artefact to look at and fondle (oo-er). I'm not happy with my music collection being one hard disk crash away from oblivion but we'll see just how convenient and secure these cloud services like iCloud turn out to be.

TOTP (23/09/1976)

Smokie - i'll meet you at midnight
At one stage i was tempted to just describe all of tonight's acts in this feast of pop music in one word. But then i thought people would feel a bit shortchanged. The word for this would have been "class" anyway.

The Wurzels - i'm a cider drinker
Oo-arr!

Kiki Dee - loving and free
Kiki warbles along in the distance all in white amid an ocean of darkness. Maybe she was a kind of angel, or this was cheap staging. I find the fashions of the audience always interesting in TOTP, for some reason hats ringed in tinsel seemed popular in late September 1976, Christmas might be understandable but September? Tony Blackburn asks a couple of tinsel hat wearing girls if they still like the Bay City Rollers. Unfortunately they do.

Bay City Rollers - i only wanna be with you
Rollermania was still going strong then, at least for the moment, this time in a studio to avoid the lads being torn apart by girls. Tough life.

Rod Stewart - sailing
This song might be the first song i remember, i would be not quite 5 when this was released but i clearly remember it playing out of Dad's stereo. Rod gives a rock performance (albiet a bit toned down) in front of a group of badly swaying children and a choir. Its all a bit odd but i do love this song.

Ruby Flipper get tasked with the novelty disco hit "Disco duck" by Rick Dee's Cast Of Idiots, after some basic disco dancing they start turning into ducks and mayhem ensues, though to be honest i'd say they looked more like geese.


Manfred Mann's Earth Band - blinded by the light
A different performance this time with the singer wearing a Superman tee-shirt and not looking like one of Rod, Jane & Freddy.

The Drifters - every night's a Saturday night with you
High trousers and medallions, ugh.

ABBA - dancing queen
I think this was at #1 for some time, so here is the same stage performance again as last time. TTFN!

Its art!

My latest model project is Project 024 a Hannover Cl IIIa biplane fighter from WW1. Having successfully completed a couple of biplanes this year my confidence is higher (though the Walrus ended up a bit wonky) but the main feature of this project is the very intricate paintwork with a multi-coloured camouflage scheme. With this project i am doing as much of the painting i can first before final assembly from experience i have found out that biplanes can be tricky to paint when assembled, especially the underneaths of the top wings. I am enjoying the opportunity to be a bit more creative.