“I’m so f***ing happy it hurts!” “That was AMAZING!” “It was a lovely night.”

Some quotes from Anorak about Phil Wilson’s London gig last week. (The last one, in fact, is by Mr. Wilson himself.) Normally I envy those London people for being able to see great gigs like that every week, but there is no reason for that now: Phil Wilson will play in Exeter too. Tomorrow, at our Exeter Goes Pop! club night.

You might know Phil Wilson as a founding member of The June Brides, one of those bands that pushed post punk into the direction of pop and who were one of the forebears of C86 and all that. Or, to put it differently, they were just one of the best pop bands of the 1980s. Phil currently resides in Devon and, I suppose unrelated to that, is recording some songs again; a double-7″ with cover songs will appear on Slumberland in not too long. Some of these covers he might actually play tomorrow.

As usual, it’s at the Phoenix and you can get in for free. We will start playing some tunes at 8pm, with Phil’s set starting a while after that. We will not leave the decks until 11.

Mental note: not to write blog posts a 1am. And not just because it changes the meaning of ‘tomorrow’; obviously Thursday the 17th. Read more about the gig at Alistair’s.

I am an IT professional; hence I am supposed to know a fair bit about computers. The thing is: I don’t. I suppose I know more about computers than the average person, and I really am your man if you want to know how to write plugins for AxKit2 or to set up a mod_rewrite engine for Apache. But that somehow is not what people tend to ask me.

I had never installed Windows XP on a computer from scratch until this weekend. I was surprised by how many things can go wrong while doing so, especially since I had installed various Linux distributions in the past. But perhaps with Linux your expectations for it to recognise all your external devices are low and when it does recognise your printer and sound card right away you are just happy; with Windows you have reason to expect that some of the zillion Microsoft programmers had thought of writing something that recognises your monitor as soon as you had plugged it. They hadn’t.

But finding appropriate drivers was the least of our problems. What was more worrying was that during start-up, we were presented with a black screen that contained a white progress bar. The progress bar took more than five minutes to fill completely, after which the computer worked fine. Google is one’s friend in such cases and indeed we weren’t the first ones to have experienced this problem. Unfortunately, most posts on computer forums only attracted replies from people who had a similar problem. We fixed it though — and by posting it here I might help others who have the same problem and are searching for a solutions. We needed to defragment our hard drive. Why Windows put its files more or less randomly on a newly formatted hard drive, especially if that might cause problems, is probably known to only Bill Gates himself.

After we had fixed this problem, the computer did not recognise the printer any more; it had worked before and it turned out that at some point we had set the boot options to the failsafe defaults, which had disabled all USB ports. And then, once we had re-enabled them, upon restarting the computer refused to go past the opening screen. That was pretty scary, but was solved by simply unplugging my mp3 player; apparently, one is not supposed to disconnect any USB-storage devices when rebooting.

Just so you know — in case you run into similar problems. I might not run into them again, for I also installed Kubuntu. The first time in two years I am running a full Linux version again. I had forgotten how much I like it.

“When you’re in a gang, you feel strong in your tummy. You run and shout and everyone else is afraid. But they don’t want me any more because I’m a dreamer [...].”

Dimitra tagged me in a meme, where I had to post lines 6, 7 and 8 of page 123 of the book that’s closest to me. I tend to wander around the flat rather a lot, so that book changes several times a minute, but at that very moment it was Hugo Hamilton’s The Speckled People, which after a short break I finished this week. It’s one of these books that makes you sad after you have finished it; not because of an unfinished story, but because it is so beautifully written and reading it had been such a pleasure.

I picked it up from the local library, after I had seen it being recommended by Rachel Seiffert. It does fit well in that list of books about troubled families, for it is about growing up with a father whose apparent well-meaningness is disguised by physical violence against his children and a mother who had a troubled past, even compared to the circumstances of Nazi Germany. But the book, a true memoir of Hamilton’s youth in 1950s and 1960s Ireland, lacks self-pity or a cynical world view. Rather, it is a sweet and well-written story of the common and slightly less common things that happened to the Hamilton family. I’ve read a fair number of Irish books recently –and just started another one– but this one I enjoyed the most, by far.

People in my blogospherical neighbourhood have been talking about Zipper since forever but I had somehow managed to ignore the Spanish band until this very morning. Now I am hooked to the one song I know: Former Friends. Tom linked to it last week but it has been on Cloudberry’s website for about a year now. That just goes to show my ignorance.

What matters though is that this is brilliant gem, of the kind that they used to make in Oxford in 1986 or in Gothenburg in 2004. It took me a while to find out which language they sing in (it turns out to be English after all), but that is a good thing in my book. There is a full length album out too, 11, and the band will come and play London and Stoke-on-Trent next month, which is great news, especially if you happen to live in or near one of these cities.

Oh how nice it is, after months of listening mostly to girl groups –well, and The Lucksmiths, of course–, to listen to some fresh, happy indiepop again. So the news that The Garlands' debut EP will be released in a week from now is as welcome as the arrival of spring.

And since we’re talking about sweet pop bands: Dutch blog Alankomaat linked to a lovely short song by Indonesian White Shoes & The Couples Company, sung in their native language. Equally sweet, though sung in a language better known to me, are the four songs that Hot Out Herre posted of The Best Wishes a while ago.