Last week things weren’t going so great (and I wasn’t doing anything much with my time anyway) so I decided to cut my vacations short and went back to work on Wednesday. It actually felt good to come back after a week (and change) away, I felt a whole lot more relaxed about work and things felt into place much easier, their relative importance much clearer in my mind.
It turns out I really needed that vacation, even if I did fill it with music and other tiresome activities. Tired body, much more relaxed mind.

Last night I finally went to the Meninos Do Rio bar, near Cais do Sodré. Didn’t stay long because I desperately needed to eat something before going to the club and they didn’t serve food at that late hour (huge mistake, I think, but they should know better than me, I guess), but even in the short time I was there I really liked the atmosphere. Also it is open in the afternoon, so it may be a good spot to stop by on the way home and lounge a bit, maybe even eat a burger when I can’t be bothered to cook. (Which is something I hardly do at all these days —at home, at least— given that I eat out almost every single week-day. It’s getting to the point where I’m beginning to miss cooking a little.)

Sadly I must report that after having been to Nr. II and trying out the ponchas, it didn’t do much for me. (Neither the ponchas nor the bar, but it was just a time-killer on the way to the club I was going to, so the bar part was not so bad)
I tried three different ponchas and didn’t particularly like any of them. After having been told so many times how great they were I was rather anticipating it, but in the end it just didn’t taste all that good to me. Sorry Under and Lua, I know you’ll be disappointed. ;-)
But then it turns out I’ll be heading out to Madeira for some vacation time in September, so maybe if I try them out right there in their natural habitat things will turn out differently.

The music school closed down for the summer, so yesterday was the last class of the year. Let’s see if I can keep the study-plan going strong until September, for the beginning of classes. If I do there’s a good chance that I’ll jump ahead by a level or two which would rock. So now it’s all up to my will power.
Oh dear…

This week I’ll attend both the Kings of Convenience concert on Thursday and the Lisbon Calling mega 80s concert on saturday.
I also plan to stop by Ondajazz on tuesday for the Big Band Reunion concert. I’m assuming they’ll close up shop (the band, not Ondajazz) during August, as they did last year, so I want to be sure to check out their show one last time before that.
Should be an interesting week ahead…

And now, after a thoroughly miserable day, the sun seems to be breaking out a bit, so I’ll leave the laptop and head out to the beach to see if I can at least get a decent sunset (which is still a couple of hours away, anyway).

So now that the season for the music festivals is over (for me, at least, because there’s still plenty out there to be enjoyed by those who can. The bastards!) ;-) here are my notes on it.

I attended both the second part of the Super Bock Super Rock festival (the part in Lisbon) and the Optimus Alive!08 festival. One particular evening I attended both of them. The stupidity of scheduling them both in Lisbon and on the same dates hasn’t yet ceased to amaze me (yes, I now all about the commercial interests at stake but no one can convince me that the pie wouldn’t be bigger for both of them if they did it in another way).

Anyway, on the 10th of July I went to the Alive! festival in the afternoon and stuck around until after the Rage Against the Machine concert and then took off to Super Bock Super Rock, where I still got to listen to Digitalism for some half-hour and then caught Tiesto’s full set (my main goal for going there).

Other than that anomaly, everything went really smoothly. I was devastated that Nouvelle Vague canceled (it’s the freaking third time I fail to see them live. Come on! Someone’s got it in for me for sure. A friend of mine told never to try and go to a Nouvelle Vague concert with her again because she would really like to see them and it seems it is impossible to do so when I’m around. It broke my heart!) ;-) but as far as Cansei de Ser Sexy is concerned I couldn’t care less that they didn’t do the show.

In the end, then, this is what I took from the festivals.

What I liked (and already knew I did)

• Iron Maiden - UP THE IRONS! (not much else to say, read it here);

• Vampire Weekend - They sound just as good on stage as they do on record and they put on a decent show. Can’t wait for their second album to either fall completely in love with them or to forget them;

• Rage Against The Machine - You want to know what dynamite is? This is it!

• The Gossip - What can I say? I liked them last year and I loved them this year. For this I was definitely front-and-center, where the action was;

• Ben Harper - I’m a fan, so there’s not much I can tell that won’t sound like fanboy-ish praise. It was good. As it should be and it always is (this was my third concert). Dig it;

What I discovered and was a good surprise

• Hercules and Love Affair - Good beats, very interesting sound. A friend-of-a-friend told me they sound even better with Anthony (of the “Anthony and the Johnsons” fame), but they were not with him there and I still liked them. A must-check, for sure;

• Tiesto - voted best DJ in the world six years in a row…
  Well, I don’t know about that (I was really expecting something outstanding because of this factoid —what, I don’t really know), it didn’t blow me away all that much but it was still a very good set, it kept me dancing until the very end.
  But that ending was really weird, I guess he either had to stop because it was time (he stopped at 05h30 which was the time he was supposed to, but he began an hour later than scheduled) or else something went wrong, but either way that ending didn’t feel natural at all.
  Maybe electronic dance music really isn’t my strong suit. I liked it a lot, mind you, but this guy, being “the best in the world” left me wondering how bad the others can be… :-)

• John Butler Trio - A great surprise indeed. I didn’t know these guys at all but they played an extra-long concert (to make up for part of Nouvelle Vague’s absence) and I was left with the will to go and check out more of their stuff on record;

• Xavier Rudd - Another total stranger to me, I loved his music from the first moment. It is nothing short of amazing how he can transmit such calm and serenity with all of his songs, even the ones which have really high rhythmic beats.
  Very tribal in it’s essence, very “balanced”, very good;

• Róisín Murphy - I never knew Moloko to begin with, so the description I was given (“she was Moloko’s singer”) didn’t tell me much at all.
  Well, it turns out this lady is amazing on stage. She sings and dances like nobody’s business.
  Left me breathless —and that’s from all the jumping and dancing, it had nothing to do with the t-shirt. OK, almost nothing. Well…

• Donavon Frankenreiter - I already expected it to be a good concert, given the descriptions of his music I’d heard and read, but I’d never really listened to this guy. Turns out it was indeed a good concert with some very nice and smooth music;

What I didn’t particularly like

• Gogol Bordello - They might be dynamite on stage, but I just can’t bring myself to enjoy the music enough to get up there, front and center and get into the mood to jump around like a madman to their songs. “This is not about you, it’s just me”;

• Neil Young - I really tried to like his concert but I just couldn’t get into it for some reason. It wasn’t at all like Bob Dylan, mind you (read below), and he did end up with an amazing version of the Beatles’ “A Day In The Life” (which I would love to get my hands on a recording of), but in general the show just didn’t do anything for me;

What really sucked

• Nouvelle Vague canceled;

• The amazing whirlwinds of dust through almost all of the Alive! left all of us with sand and dust ingrained into our hair and clothes;

• Bob Dylan - I’m so sorry, but I can’t be charitable here. Such a great artist as him (in his day) should get a clue and stop milking it when it gets as depressing as this.

Porque é adequado. Porque tem de ser. Porque ainda dói (e já não devia).

E… E porque sim.

Mas isto é para apreciar com toda a teatralidade, o dramatismo e o “flair” do Freddie, nada das versões dos Platters ou Roy Orbison ou afins, hein!

Oh yes I’m the great pretender
Pretending I’m doing well
My need is such I pretend too much
I’m lonely but no one can tell

Oh yes I’m the great pretender
Adrift in a world of my own
I play the game but to my real shame
You’ve left me to dream all alone

Too real is this feeling of make believe
Too real when I feel what my heart can’t conceal

Ooh ooh yes I’m the great pretender
Just laughing and gay like a clown
I seem to be what I’m not (you see)
I’m wearing my heart like a crown
Pretending that you’re still around

Yeah
Too real when I feel what my heart can’t conceal

Oh yes I’m the great pretender
Just laughing and gay like a clown
I seem to be what I’m not you see
I’m wearing my heart like a crown
Pretending that you’re
Pretending that you’re still around

These last few days I’ve been on vacation and I stayed home getting ready for the summer concerts and getting some beach and pool time in.

• Friday evening I went to Plateau with a bunch of friends. Amazingly enough (given my dancing music tastes) I’d never been there before. I don’t know how I can love dancing to 80’s rock music and never having been to Plateau but well, that’s taken care of now. Anyway, my friends tell me that the songs they played were more or less the usual stuff for the place and as far as I’m concerned they could ditch the disco stuff and stick to the rock and pop but, well, I can’t bring back the thursday (or was it friday?) nights at Coconuts with Miguel Simões pumping out rock’n’roll like there was no tomorrow now, can I?

• Saturday I went with a couple of friends on a lighthouse-seeking quest near where I live. It was fun and the Farol de Sta. Marta in Cascais, near the marina (the one in second life) has an interesting museum. You can not (yet) visit the lighthouse itself, but apparently that will change in the near future.
  Unfortunately I didn’t know that Cabo d Roca’s lighthouse was being renovated so that was the main disillusion of the day…

• After our little lighthouse-hunting excursion we went to Sintra to the Fire & Ice “and friends” concert. I didn’t know any of the bands and went there on my friend’s Marcos suggestion.
  My take on it is that Àrnica sucked, Barditus did an excellent job supporting the other two artists and they, in turn were quite good. Orplid put on a great and powerful show (it made me really sorry that I don’t understand german, but most of it you could understand perfectly just from his small —english-spoken— intros and the way he sang it).
  As for Fire & Ice, well, there was a gentleman who really knows how to move an audience. I loved his songs with Barditus and also liked very much the two traditional folk songs he did on his own during the encore (when Barditus decided that they’d had enough). I think the best way to describe his voice is haunting.

• Meanwhile I’ve been to Lisbon a couple of times this week and ended up visiting Louie Louie’s Chiado store, again on a recommendation from a friend. So I came away with a few LPs under my arm and I’ve been listening to them over and over. There’s no scrobbling for vinyl, but I really don’t care, what I found there were some real gems. I even bought my very first vinyl copy of Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band (yes, I know, I’m unbelievably late to the party, sue me). ;-)

• And just yesterday the festivals started, with Super Bock Super Rocks’s second act. I skipped all the other bands and went there just for the Iron Maiden show.
  What a show! As expected, of course. These guys are so great, even after all these years, it’s eery! An excellent concert, appart from a time in the middle of it when the usual stupidity set in and they stepped the volume up so loud that the bass and the guitars started sounding all distorted. Can you imagine Maiden with a crappy bass?? Urgh! Fortunately they decided that it was best to turn the volume down a bit and have decent sound (it still left my ears ringing, mind you, as any such concert should).
  A friend I met there told me the line-up for this concert was exactly like the on all their latest shows and DVD and I can see why. It really, really works. Both the main show and the encore (surely one of the most powerful I’ve ever seen).
  Amazing show, filled with only the classics —the Bruce Dickinson songs mostly— that everyone knew by heart (I surely did and I screamed like a madman through it all.)
  UPDATE: See another wildly emotional review of this concert (in Portuguese) here.

Now I have to go rest by the pool to get my throat back in shape for this evening at the first day of the Optimus Alive! festival. It’s tough being on vacation during the festival season… :-)

• easy_install rocks. Yes, I’m still at that stage in my python dwellings. In fact I still have some trouble deciding when to use list comprehensions or plain-old loops when doing something more complex than scanning or filtering elements on a list. Baby steps…

• When it rains it pours. I just found myself wanting to attend two concerts on the same day, and I’m not talking about the overlap between Super Bock Super Rock and Optimus Alive! (which did not take a great deal of thinking to decide go the Alive! way), but rather I’m going to the Fire & Ice concert in Sintra with some friends and just today (late, very late), I found out that António Pinho Vargas is doing a concert at CCB, related to the release of his new CD. The concert will be a solo piano recital of new versions of his songs from his jazz days, long ago —my favorite period. Oh well… Fire & Ice came first.

• Last friday (June 20th) I went and got my braces installed (I am so sure this is not the right word!) on my upper teeth. The lower teeth will follow in a few months. This is something I’ve been putting off for some 18 years or so (that’s when I started the treatment and took out some teeth in preparation for the braces). So now I have two years to look forward to eating at snail’s pace and spending an inordinate amount of time cleaning my teeth every day. Should have done it already but I obviously let it slide until the “it’s now or never” time. Typical.
  The worst part, so far, is that I had to leave the sax lessons. I still had some hope I’d be able to cope (and some people actually do it), but it only took me the upper brace to realise that I don’t want to go through that kind of pain, especially when I have multiple other means of enjoying and making music. I’m just not a sufferer.
  So next week I’ll start with the music theory classes and I hope to be able to get into composition (my main goal) in a few months. As for playing music, I just had the piano tuned last week so (again) neighbors beware!

• Luckily the braces don’t affect me much in my everyday life (i.e. so far they don’t actually hurt —much), so this has been one really good weekend, with beach, running and swimming pool all combined to optimize chill-out and relaxing. Summer started yesterday and the days are going to get smaller and smaller, so now is the time to make the most of it;

• And running has really been very good; not only do I feel better running for greater distances (even with increased heat), but I am also getting much more flexible when I do the post-run stretches. For someone who was always as stiff as a board (even when I practised yoga), this is a very welcome novelty. The feel-good endorphins that running stimulate are not all bad either.
  Now that the weather is finally good, I also started swimming a bit after running (at weekends), mostly arms, as the legs are already being well exercised. If I could actually turn this into a weekend-routine it would be really great and I’m sure I’d be in tip-top shape by the end of the summer. Then again I know me pretty well and the lazy-ass in me is going to come out sooner or later, so I’m not pinning my hopes on that happening…
  I have been keeping my run-logs at runner+, but I’ve never been very parcial to having my content (especially written) kept outside my domain and my server, so I’ll start copying them to my weblog. Must do a service to diffuse them to both sites.

Lots of things, none of it important… Let’s see:

• Traded in my trusty old Ford Focus CMAX.
  Every 4-years (or so) I switch cars (company car) and this time I must say that even though I love my new wheels, the CMAX was one great ride!
  I loved that car (even if I had to choose the gas version over the diesel at the time). It was reliable, sturdy and saw me through some very nice times and adventures. Good bye old friend, I’ll miss you! (insert suitable mellow music here);

• The drobo I’ve been raving about is really a nice piece of hardware.
  Alas, with my physical setup —which does not allow for decent ventilation for something as heat-generating as this—, the disk fans are always stuck in full throttle, giving my living-room the ambient noise of an airport (even using the cooler —pun intended— Western Digital disks).
  I definitely have to get my act together and do the renovations I need to do in the kitchen in order to stuff the disks, home server and modem in there;

• Just spent a really nice weekend up north, playing baby sitter to Melo’s kids.
  I can totally see why he gave up living in “the big city” and moved to the country. I actually got to sleep a whole night through until late in the morning (around nine-ish!)
  Also, I think I’ve gained a new fan, who wanted “uncle Nuno” to stick around for longer. Good times! :-)

• I am not getting in line to buy an iPhone. Sorry, I just can’t get excited enough, not without MMS, a decent camera and a few other tidbits.
  I’ll just wait for someone else to get one, let them use it for a few weeks and then I’ll try it out and talk to the users. That’s when I’ll make my decision about the new phone which I am now entitled to get, even though my Sony Ericsson K750i still rocks and I would really like to keep it for a bit more (although, of course, being 2-years old, it has decided to start acting up this very weekend! sigh…).
  Oh and I do know that the camera on the K750i is a 2mpx one, just like the one on the iPhone. And of course I also know that not all mpx where created the same and the K750i has one fantastic camera which blows away all others in it’s range. Sorry, that’s just the way it is;

• I’ve been running more and more lately and I’m starting to really get into it.
  This is something both new and unexpected. I’ve never liked collective sports, but even on the solo ones I’ve always preferred swimming or mountain-biking to running. Still, after I’ve lost some serious weight a while back, running became possible (without the almost certain prospect of some serious back injury) and now I find myself actually doing it with real pleasure.
  Up to now, though, I run with the bare minimum of stuff with me, the only gadget I take with me is a tiny (and ultra-light) iPod shuffle. But now I am starting to be lured into the realms of the social running sites (stuff like runnerplus.com) and so I have a decision to make: either I give in to the gadget- and stats-geek in me and get me something to monitor and report on my runs (I run with Nike+ shoes, so an iPod nano would do, but I could also go with myriad other solutions); or I just stick to the basics and track my runs by hand, with approximate values for length and duration.
  Knowing me, if I start to feed the geek, I’ll end up not feeling good about running “light” and I’ll have to take all the gadgets with me every single time I run (“gah! I missed one run, the stats will all be skewed from now on!”), but I just love feeling totally light and gadget-free while running (especially in the rain) so… I don’t know, I hope I can resist the temptation of geeking-up my exercise because there’s nothing that compares to the sense of freedom I get while doing it “light” (at least for now, that getting back to sailing is kind of out of the question;)

• I’ll also be trying to be a more social-geek (now there’s an oxymoron, if I ever heard one!) and start to be around other “people like me”. To that effect I’m planning on going to the second edition of Twittlis —the informal gathering of twitters in Lisbon. Anyone else planing to go? I hope this time I’ll be able to, honest!

So there you go, that’s my last few weeks in a nutshell. OK, a tiny, tiny nutshell. I’ll try to blog more often (and also about some more geeky-meety-stuff). But I’ll obviously fail. :-)

Today, due to the massive problems that Twitter has been facing for quite some time now —which got really worse in the last couple of days—, lots of people in the “portuguese geek scene” went over to Jaiku to check out the service.

Now, I’ve been using Jaiku for quite some time now and I know it is far from perfect, but given Twitter’s latest trend of (at least partial) unavailability, I think Jaiku may look like a viable alternative to some people at least.

I don’t believe that people will actually flee in droves to Jaiku and the most probable outcome of all of this is that when (if??) Twitter deals with it’s load issues (and they should be more than on the ball on this one, especially now that they’ve got the funding to do it), everyone will just come back “home” and twitter away to their heart’s content, their Jaiku accounts soon forgotten.

But in the off-chance that the people at the big G do try to grab some serious market-share at this time, here is my (very personal and off-the-cuff) wishlist for nifty Jaiku features:

• Let us choose which if our contacts we want to receive notifications on our mobile devices from and which ones we just want to see updated on the web. (Twitter does this);

• Let us group our contacts and give us a nice and easy interface to turn on mobile notifications for those groups of contacts. An (admittedly esoteric) extension of the above feature which I would find most useful;

• Remove the spurious characters we get when we receive an update via SMS which is actually a comment on some message. What’s the point of those characters anyway (am I just being dense and not getting it, I wonder…);

• Am I missing something or is there no direct messaging capability? If it really isn’t there, do add it;

• Stability, stability, stability;

• Speed (but only after stability);

• Design it to scale, please, while you still can! Hurry up moving it to the App Engine.

More things are sure to come into my mind, I’ll update the list if/when they do.

Well, with the amount of rain that we had today my hopes of spending the holiday basking in the sun were shot to high-hell, so I had to improvise…

Got a few KMs in this morning, running in Estoril. Nice weather for that, at least, as people tended to stay at home or at the mall and weren’t inclined to go near the beaches. Also not too hot. I feel like I’m getting back in shape, which is nice.

Then I came home and finally put a new episode of the Undercover Songs podcast on-line. I had recorded it a couple of days ago, actually, but hadn’t taken the time to grab all the links and note the starting times of each song…

Yesterday I just lost patience with my storage woes at home and ordered myself a drobo. Hope that takes care of my current and middle-term storage needs.

And now, since it’s still pouring out there, back to my “Anthology at the End of the Universe” and a cup of tea.

Youth without youth (the newest film by Coppola) is weird —almost (but not quite) as in David Lynch weird— but very interesting. Can’t explain exactly why, but I liked it a lot.
Yes, weird.

My external hard drive — the one where I keep my backups and my mp3 collection at home— seems to have gone meet the great HD in the sky.
I do have backups of the stuff I keep there (for the most part, at least), but it will be a pain to recover everything.
I’ve been meaning to get a full RAID solution for this stuff, but never quite liked what I found out there in the stores. Also, I want a stand-alone, one-box kind of thing. Which cannot be too noisy. (Oh and the RAID is meant to be for redundancy, not for extra capacity, this is a backup solution at heart, not a mega-disposable-disk, so RAID-0 solutions are not an option).
So now I’ll have to look at what’s available on the shelves and then carry on the recovery of my old stuff. Sucks!

The pre-wazup Google App Engine app is coming along nicely. I already have user management, along with user preferences storage and I hammered the python-twitter API in order to be able to call it from within the App Engine sandbox. This would be much faster for me, would I be able to do it in Perl, but still Python is proving to be… interesting.

Got a new Undercover Songs episode ready to post but haven’t gotten around to fetching all the links to all the bands and stuff. It will be posted soon, though. At least I hope so, the mp3 disk crash isn’t making this very easy… :-/

The summer concerts’ line-ups are beginning to stabilize. Apparently Paredes de Coura will be the place to be this year.
“And you’re so far away from me…” :-)

In preparation for tackling Wazup, I started learning a little bit about Python (I know many people have said this already, but Dive Into Python is a really good book!) and I decided to try out a much smaller (and hopefully easier) app to begin with.
So I began coding a little toy that does some stuff with my twitter friends list.

I’m using python-twitter and the app is coming along nicely, except…

Well, like I said earlier, I’m something of an old-hand at programming and my first instinct when learning a new language or tackling a new kind of problem is to first get it working on the command-line and then get the code to work on the web (or whatever happens to be my intended platform). Yes, and my IDE is vim OK?

So what’s the big deal, you may ask?

When I ported my app, which was running perfectly on the command-line, into the App Engine development platform it started bombing, complaining about not being able to get the current user.

Say what?? Well, one thing I’m more than used to is to debug stuff, even in languages I don’t master. And this was very easy to do actually, so I got to the point really fast: python-twitter assumes you’re running on a real machine and implements a caching mechanism that assumes you have such things as a tmp dir where you can store your temporary files.
The code was trying to determine who I was in order to find out where it should store it’s temporary cache files.

Of course in a sandboxed environment such as the App Engine, there is no such thing as disk-based storage (or even system users for that matter), so it was failing miserably.

Turns out that someone else had already been there and the way to work around this is to modify python-twitter and make it use App Engine’s own datastore for the caching. That is if I do think it needs caching at all, I’m still not too sure about that.

Oh well, my first project to “ease” myself \into the language and already I’m making changes to other people’s code…

It’s been fun, though, I must admit to that!

Já me tinha ocorrido escrever sobre este tema, mas por alguma razão esta foi uma daquelas coisas que ficou sempre para trás, sempre esquecida. Por vezes as coisas que nos são mais familiares, ainda que as apreciemos bastante, acabam por perder protagonismo face à novidade…

Vou então deixar aqui umas notas sobre a rádio.

Mas não é da rádio da manhã, com os locutores frenéticos a tentar manter os condutores acordados enquanto conduzem para o emprego, tentando enfiar um máximo de piadas pelo meio da miríade de spots publicitários, indicações de trânsito, previsões do tempo, resumos das não-notícias dos jornais da manhã e músicas das playlists gastas que nos fazem ficar enjoados de tanto as ouvir.

Nem tão pouco da rádio da tarde, com menos interrupções de trânsito e de previsões do tempo, mas mais cheias ainda das playlists, a esta hora ainda menos ousadas, mais gastas e mais chatas.

A rádio de que eu quero falar brevemente é a rádio da boa!
Aquela que nos faz ter vontade de ouvir rádio. Que nos faz ter vontade de reservar um pouco do nosso tempo para simplesmente prestarmos atenção ao que estamos a ouvir. Aquela que nos obriga a fazer o esforço para estar disponível àquela hora para ouvir aquele programa. Ou então a arranjar alternativas… Mas já lá vamos. ;-)

Quem ler este artigo e tiver idade para tal, talvez se recorde de um conceito antigo —e já (quase) esquecido— da rádio chamado “programas de autor” (musicais, claro). Pois é, aqueles programas que passavam músicas escolhidas a dedo pelo seu autor. Músicas que de alguma forma encaixavam umas com as outras, de acordo com uma sensibilidade muito própria de quem fazia a selecção. Podiam ser novas ou muito antigas, podiam ser êxitos de vendas ou lados B de cassetes (lembram-se?) promocionais, mas de alguma forma, se o dito autor fosse bom no que fazia, o conjunto de todas essas músicas valia muitíssimo mais do que as músicas todas, individualmente.
Tempos houve em que este tipo de programa era bastante apreciado e eram produzidos vários deles em várias rádios nacionais.

Assim de repente vem-me à memória a “Hora do Lobo”, do António Sérgio (que foi retirado do ar, pela Comercial, há coisa de meses), as “Noites Longas do Fm Estéreo”, do António Santos (cujo livro de pequenos textos o meu pai comprou e me lembro perfeitamente de andar lá por casa), o mais popular “Oceano Pacífico”, do João Chaves (que nunca apreciei tanto como os outros que mencionei e que penso que talvez ainda seja emitido)…
Penso que hoje ainda temos alguns programas de autor, sobretudo na Antena1 e Antena2, mas estes são de cariz muito específico, com géneros definidos. Os grandes programas de autor de música pop/rock/folk, esses, na prática, acabaram…

Ou pelo menos eu pensei que sim durante bastante tempo.

Talvez fruto de ter sempre vivido (e estudado) na zona de Lisboa, nunca entrei em contacto com essa mina de pequenas jóias que dá pelo nome de RUC (a Rádio Universitária de Coimbra).
Já se percebe pelo discurso que entretanto esse mal foi sanado e, há uns meses (coisa de dois anos, talvez), deparei com um programa que dá pelo nome de “Íntima Fracção”, que era distribuído, na altura em formato podcast, pela própria RUC.

Quando ouvi pela primeira vez a Íntima nem queria acreditar!
Não queria acreditar que ainda havia programas destes e, sobretudo, não queria acreditar que eu me tinha esquecido que, em tempos, uma grande parte das minhas noites era passada a ouvir, precisamente, coisas assim. (Aqui convém explicar que, felizmente nunca fui muito de me colar à televisão, hábito que hoje se tornou ainda mais vincado).

Bom, fui acompanhando a Íntima Fracção como podia, inicialmente via podcast da RUC, depois via podcast GavezDois, até que a Íntima “saiu do ar”.
Foi triste, mas o Francisco Amaral sempre disse que a coisa não se ficava por aí.

E as boas notícias estouraram há umas (poucas) semanas —as tais de que quero, enfim, falar: a Íntima está agora a ser distribuída pelo Expresso On-Line e o último programa, de seu nome “Sonhos e realidade” é, na minha opinião, dos melhores que foram produzidos desde há bastante tempo.
Já tinha saudades da Íntima. Já tinha muitas saudades. Ainda bem que ela voltou!

Entretanto e para não dar a ideia de que este é o início e o final da coisa, existem mais alguns programas de rádio que consumo —geralmente em formato podcast— e que posso recomendar vivamente.

Temos, por exemplo, o “lado B” do Pedro Esteves, que passa em algumas rádios que muito poucos têm a sorte de conseguir recepcionar (Miróbriga fica longe para quem mora em Cascais e já terminei o meu curso no IST há mais anos do que quero admitir) :-)

E não posso deixar de referir o fabuloso “Vidro Azul”, do Ricardo Mariano, que recentemente ganhou honras de emissão na Rádio Radar, de noite, bem de noite, como cabe a um programa deste género.

É bom ter rádio assim. Mesmo que não a oiça via éter, como o fazia há muitos anos, mesmo assim costumo guardar estes programas para a noite, quando eles sabem melhor, quando eles foram feitos para ser apreciados.

Para mim é totalmente verdade que o vídeo não matou as estrelas da rádio.

Yesterday Bobby McFerrin gave a concert in Lisboa, at the Coliseu.

It was a “solo” concert, which consisted mainly of the man and his microphone. And it was enough to blow me away (along with the rest of the audience). If you’ve ever seen the videos of other concerts by Bobby (most notably his Bach pieces) you have an idea of what it was like.

We had mostly jazz tunes, but also the occasional classical piece, all sung by the man himself.

Except when it wasn’t just him (I did put the word solo in quotes up there,) and he got the whole audience to sing with him, or the time when he got some 30 people on stage with him and he conducted them into an impromptu choir. Or when he asked someone to come up to the stage and dance to his singing. Oh and I mustn’t forget about his foray into the crowd, fetching volunteers to sing some simple pattern to act as a basis for his improvisations.
He also had a guest guitar player which, when compared with all the rest of the evening, pales a lot (even though his performance was extremely good).

It was an incredible evening, that’s for sure and the feeling I got was that everyone felt a real connection with the show and felt themselves as making part of it at some stage or another, which is something I think is quite rare. Even when he went down into the crowd to look for (quite a few) volunteers to do the small skits with, people (mostly) participated with sheer joy, instead of shying away.

As for his vocal qualities, well, there’s not much I can say here that hasn’t been stated time and again by people who know his music. The sheer vocal range he has, the impeccable sense of timing and rhythm, the joy of his singing… People don’t call him a musical genius for nothing (and I’m not even alluding to all of his many accomplishments in so many fields of music!)
And the man has a sense of humor. He sure does!

Truly a unique experience.

If you have the chance to catch Bobby playing —or rather, singing— live I heartily recommend you grab it without hesitation. I know I will, if ever the chance comes again.

I have multiple ways of using my iPod in my car, while driving to work: sometimes I listen to podcasts; other times I select an album or artist to listen to; others, still, I listen to my “mixed tape” (or other, thematic) playlists.
All of the above stem from a conscious decision to listen to that particular show/artist/album/compilation.
But then, some other times, I just put it on shuffle and let it rip, usually inside a restricted context —shuffle all of the songs which are rated 3-stars and above, which have been played least recently — (yes, I do actually have automagic playlists such as these, I am, after all, a geek).

And then there are those days when I feel like listening to a good shuffle, but I want to feel somehow productive while doing it. And on those days, instead of stuffing the iPod inside the glove compartment (where the “aux” connector is) and controlling it with the remote, I just lay it on the passenger’s seat and make it shuffle through the “Unrated” playlist. I then listen to the songs, one by one, without the benefit of the whole album they belong to, and after I’ve caught the gist of them I rate them on their own merit. On a bad traffic day I sometimes rate 20-30 songs. It sure helps to pass the time!

So what does this have to do with perception?

Well, I found that when I’m doing this kind of (supposedly) objective listening, I can have my perception thwarted in a huge way if I’m not careful about it. And I find this to be most amusing.

This is what happens: some days I’m mostly stuck in traffic and I’m stalled most of the time. On those days I tend to look at the iPod whenever a song begins and upon seing the artist and album it belongs to, I immediately get a sense of how I’ll rate the song. After a few seconds I just rate it and then (if I’m not in the mood for that particular song) I just skip it and get to the next one; Other days, though, traffic is a bit lighter (or I’m just distracted with something else), and I don’t bother to look for the details of the song, I just listen to it, usually for a much longer time than when I know who’s playing and what it is and then I rate it.
And it is at these times, when I rate it before I know what it is that I truly appreciate each song on it’s own. And the funny thing is that I sometimes get some huge (and great) surprises.

Case in point: today I was doing just that kind of rating, while driving to work and I started listening to a song which fell a bit out of my usual league (and definitely out of the groove of the previous ones, which were mostly hard rock). This was a song which had a slight country feel to it, but was still enough of a rock song for me to enjoy. It was not an absolute marvel, but it had a good vibe, which I really quite liked (it sort of fit the mood of the day, which also helped). Now some songs you just know what band they’re from, just by listening to a few chords, but this one was kind of baffling me. I couldn’t quite place it (I had a few educated guesses, which turned out to be quite close, but I wasn’t sure about it).
So what was it? “Try And Love Again” by the Eagles.
This is a song from the Hotel California album which I (obviously) don’t know all that well. I’ve listened to it, sure, but I’ve never really listened to it and the proof is that I haven’t rated most of it. If I just decided to put the album on, listen to it cover-to-cover and rate the songs as I went along I would probably get a bit tired of it (like I said, this is not exactly my favourite genre) and would rate most songs rather poorly.
Had I looked at the iPod before listening to the song and saw that it was an Eagles song, chances are I’d have given it a medium-type rating and skipped it after a few seconds.
As it happened, though, I really listened to the song, enjoyed it for it’s own sake, and then gave it a good rating. Because it is a really nice song and it made me feel good. And that’s (at least partially) what music is about.

Our perceptions are so easily biased that it kind of scares me to think about it.
What happened here was nothing that surprises or shocks me, I know that we are all prone to this type of thing and I understand the basic mechanisms behind it. In fact, this is why people invented things like blind wine tasting and other such activities, but it is always kind of funny —and scary— when you get such a sobering example of just how prone you are to falling for something like this.

• Twittering from the mobile phone is something that I do a lot. I can honestly say that for me the killer feature of Twitter is the SMS interface. When I am on-line I already have a number of virtual worlds (text-based) that I’m usually connected to and I also still hang around a couple-three IRC channels, not to mention having accounts in almost every single IM(-like) system I can remember, so on-line my instant communication needs are pretty much met, thankyouverymuch! But Twitter (or Jaiku, which is better than Twitter in principle, but is still just not all there yet) bridges the gap from on-line and IRL in a very nice way (especially if you remember that off is your friend!);

• Of course not everything is perfect with twittering on-the-go. The predictive technology mobile phones use is a God-sent to be sure, but sometimes you get some truly amusing mistakes. Just this week I sent out something along the lines of “it takes all lines”, when I meant “it takes all kinds”. It obviously gave rise to a crack about peace, love and fat joints. Oh the humanity! ;-)

• Another aspect of Twitter-by-SMS is that it only works if you keep a judiciously chosen list of people from whom you wish to receive updates on your “devices”. This list, I find, is in constant flux, with a given person entering, leaving and re-entering it as I feel more inclined to chat about this or that type of topics. In fact I find I have a few small groups of contacts which are usually “on” together. I wish there was an easy way to materialize these groups and change the mobile “subscription” based on those. Hum… now that I think about it, there may be an opportunity for a nice web-app here…

• And while I’m on the mobile phone subject, I think it is Melo who says that he constantly has his best ideas on the shower. Well, it regularly happens to me too so I’ve taken to dictating said ideas to my mobile phone (much as I do when I’m driving or otherwise occupied) and hopping I’ll later remember to write them down and maybe even act on them. It turns out I usually remember them pretty good after having dictated them, but the interesting fact is that I now find myself having almost 50 voice notes hanging around, waiting to be listened to, processed and deleted. Ouch!

• On a totally unrelated note, if you’re into music, do be sure to check out the latest episode of the Contrast Podcast to which I contributed with a rather nice (IMHO) song!