Last night Fredrik, Mel, Nina and I headed off to see Clare play down at The Vanguard after being cajoled into going again. It was a good show, punctuated by pangs of sympathy for the trucker support act and delicious cookie cocktails. I was really sleepy though, and there were points where I was so comfortable that I may have drifted off into a micro-sleep (sorry Karl). I'm a bit of a Clare convert now, and I quickly signed up to her e-mailing list. Getting home was a real pain, which I largely blame on the fact that I couldn't get access to any timetables. I was very tempted to ring up and get someone to do some intarweb searching for me, but instead I just winged it on some of the night-ride services. On the upside, at least I didn't have to run all the way home.

I swear people like me must have been the target audience for Shaun of the Dead. Talk about appealing to a tiny demographic. It's a Rom Comzom flick, with humour in the same vein as The Office. Now, I'm a big fan of zombies, they're just comical in the way they run around being very slow and stupid, and are probably the least scary in a hypothetical menagerie of scary things. My favourite movie in this genre is Evil Dead II, a true classic. So the idea of a zombie comedy immediately appealed to me, and I would have been just happy with the movie on it's own. They took their credibility with me up a fair number of pegs when I saw the number of Ninja Tune posters plastered up in various scenes in the movie. These guys had seriously good taste in music. Extra points as well for working in a reference to "A Clockwork Orange", and aracde-shooters, especially with monsters coming in everywhere except from through the front door.

Playing around with Adium, a multi-protocol chat client, I decided to have another stab at getting cover art for the currently playing song in iTunes to display as the buddy icon. I'd just managed to get Growl notifications to work with the shared libraries (served up using mt-daapd, so I thought it would be a simple extension to tie it in with Adium using AppleScript. Luckily Adium had a very rich library to work with under applescript, and after a whole bunch of playing around (up till 2:00 am), I managed to get it all connected up.

Here is the song as selected by iTunes.

Growl pops up a notification that the song has changed.

and Adium updates the buddy icon to reflect this.

It's like magic! View the source-code here

I should really have done some rudimentary research before I claimed that I never get a chance to see anyone do their crazy live sets. The Avalanches are playing on the 12^th November, and Mr Scruff is playing on the 27^th November as part of the Parklife festival. The tickets are a bit expensive for that gig though, and I'm not sure if I should be going so close to my international adventure. Maybe I'll try and catch him at one of his Keep It Unreal nights in sunny Manchester.

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Thanks to the wonders of BitTorrent I've been getting a hold of a whole bunch of live sets for various artists, most of which come from The Breezeblock Radio 1 show. The live mixes from The Avalanches, DJ Shadow and Mr Scruff are excellent. In the case of the Avalanches and Mr Scruff, there are excellent choices of tracks, and all of them have some crazy-ass mixing. I missed out on Dexter (now ex-Avalanches) playing at the Gaelic Club, so I've been hanging out to go see some live stuff. Luckily for some people who live in Zurich, Mr Scruff is playing at X-Tra Limmathaus on the 25^th of October. Consider yourself notified Ben.

I think I'm a lightning rod for minor celebrities. After getting all the story mileage I could possibly get from going to the birthday party for Nuala a few weeks ago, I was in dire need of new celebrity sightings to keep on one-upping Andrew, who was rubbing shoulders with various political types. So last night, Shaunak and I decide to go to King St Wharf for a couple of sociable ales. Our first port of call was the venerable Cargo. As usual, the venue was nice enough, but the place was pretty packed out and there weren't any places to sit down. This quickly accelerated our move out from Cargo towards The Loft. The last time I was at the loft, I was sort of crashing the Yahoo office christmas party, so it was nice to make it in without too much trouble this time (especially since I had the wrong shoes on). So we're hanging around in one of the comfy lounges, drinking down Tibetan and Mediterranean Cocktails, generally having a good time (Of note is the fact that this place has Asahi on tap), when in walks Grant Hackett, Daniel MacPherson and Ian Thorpe amongst a throng of beautiful people. This provided us with a great deal of amusement, as we thought of dumb things to say to them. We ended up deciding to go up to Daniel MacPherson, and shake his hand, saying "Love your work on the Bill!". He seemed to take that gesture with good humour. We talk to him for a bit more, and it turns out he's a ex Sydney Boy, graduating in the same year as me (and he doesn't really know Henry).