Wasting Time
Ale, music and enjoying life.
Sauna Youth–Belgrave Music Hall–Leeds 10th October 2015
First Sauna Youth gig for me and I was not going to be disappointed. The gig was supposed to be at the newly opened Headrow House but was moved a couple of days before to Belgrave Music Hall – fuck knows why. Oh well it was still free – decided to pop along.
Sauna Youth were the first support band on and took to the stage around 9ish. The venue was pretty busy and they basically rattled through their new album without any interruption. They didn’t even leave time for applause between tracks. A real onslaught of quality tune after tune. Once they finished their set we didn’t hang around (hipster central!) to see the next support bands but they would have found it difficult following Sauna Youth.
I’m loving their new album and it reminds me of how Buzzcocks can rattle out buzzsaw style track after track but whilst still retaining that melodic underlying something that keeps you hooked. Spot on, looking forward to the next one.
Forest Holidays – Keldy Cabins
Keldy Location
Just back from 5 days Forest Holiday at Forest Holidays Keldy. Located in the heart of the North Yorks Moors there’s 2 sites close to each other that “Forest Holidays” offer. Keldy and Cropton. Doing a bit of digging before I decided to go for the Keldy location. From the reviews Keldy seems to be located further into the forest whereas Cropton sounds like the cabins are located in a field.
Arriving at Keldy around 5pm on the Monday I was advised that the cabin wasn’t quite ready yet as the cleaners were still working on it. No big deal, we were offered free drinks while we waited and we can’t have waited any longer than 30 mins.
Keldy Cabins
Our cabin (number 16) was ideal – Located very close to the main reception/shop cabin but in a position that was surrounded by trees and not overlooked (unlike some of the other cabins around us). If I was to stay at this site again I’d probably pay the extra money to reserve cabin 16 for this reason.
Although it was nice to get away from civilization there was plenty to do on the site itself. We did the “Night Walk” on the Tuesday evening which promised top end quality night vision goggles for spotting the forest’s wildlife. It almost started badly with the organiser/ranger (Gareth) failing to shout out in the reception area (where we were told to meet). Thankfully, I was walking around the reception (first at the front, no sign of anyone then at the back where he seemed to be waiting). The night vision kit was a bit frustrating, wires wouldn’t stay connected it really needs a bit of an upgrade. That said, Gareth seemed to know his stuff and was very professional throughout the walk. Well worth the 10 quid.
There’s plenty of signposted forest walks to keep you occupied for a few days – we did quite a few of them including one that ended in a pub!. There’s plenty of walks for dog owners and the ratio of dog to people was pretty high. I managed to go on a run early one morning around the forest as well. Walking to the Cropton site one day I realised the reviews I’d read are correct, the cabins were mainly gathered around a field and didn’t feel as welcoming as Keldy.
Points to note; There’s no Wifi or phone signal on site. If you’re lucky you might get the odd 1 bar signal whilst out walking. Not always a bad thing as most people would get away to avoid technology. You can upgrade to get WiFi and Sky Sports in your cabin for £40 – I chose to decline as I’d only be interested in the occasional WiFi usage and little else. You could get on WiFi at the reception if you needed to grab your email.
The pizza’s ordered through room service and delivered to our cabin were pretty good for the money – worth doing one night when you can’t be bothered cooking.
All in all an enjoyable 5 days and we’ll probably be back at some point.
British Sea Power @ Hebden Bridge Trades Club 31st July 2015
Another BSP gig at Hebden Bridge Trades Club. The last one was a corker and tonight’s didn’t disappoint.
Things started off a bit too calmly (for my liking) – felt like I was the only one pogoing down the front at one point but about halfway in everyone got into it. The end was typically chaotic. I was carrying Noble in the crowd at one point whilst Yan was flying past. Very enjoyable. Wish they’d drop Machineries from the set though (just doesn’t work live). Beetroot, Apologies, Blackout, Larsen, Carrion and All In It being particular highlights this evening.
Hugh Cornwell @ Hebden Bridge Trades Club 9th August 2015
Having enjoyed a couple of days at the first weekend of Edinburgh Fringe and my body crying out for sleep and a nice quiet night in the thought of Hugh at Hebden Bridge is too much of a temptation.
Replenishments got us through an otherwise uneventful train journey to Hebden Bridge.
I didn’t expect a sold out venue (and it wasn’t) but there was a very healthy turn out for a Sunday night in Hebden Bridge. A bit of a buzz around the audience and Magic Rock’s Cannonball on the bar was most welcome.
Hugh didn’t disappoint – A solid blistering performance of classic Stranglers intertwined with classic Hugh solo material. One of his rare full band gigs this year left me wanting more. Drummer Chris Bell and bassist Caz Campbell being very much a part of a fantastic performance.
Gacutil fails to register a dll and fails silently
I hit a bit of an issue the other day.
Me and the DBA were rolling out quite a sizeable deployment into production. We were about half way through our deployment checklist (also known as the runbook). It was going well, too well in fact. We’d had no issues and everything was incredibly smooth.
Of course there shouldn’t really be any issues, as by this point, deployments (hopefully automated) to test environments and pre-prod/UAT will have happened along with the runbook documented and approved with all relevant team members and Change Manager(s).
So, I’d deployed out some of the apps as part of the product rollout. I moved on to some SSIS components that are doing some fairly sizeable file processing and number crunching along with many transforms. Myself and another Senior Developer had written a class library that was referenced by the SSIS components. The class library needed registering in the GAC. Not an issue, I’d copied the gacutil command and the dlls required for registering into a folder as part of the deployment pack. On the production server I cracked up the cmd prompt with Admin rights and issued the following:-
gacutil /i CompanyName.Library.dll
And nothing, well we had a response from gacutil which gave us the gactuil .net version and the command prompt. No error, great move on, but I noticed I’d not seen an “… installed” message. Confused I checked the Gac and sure enough the library was missing.
Hmmmm, this is strange. Had I inadvertently build the DLL targeting the wrong .Net Framework (that’s pretty amateur!)?Back to my DEV VM and I checked the framework. No it’s fine so what gives??
The Gacutil MSDN page doesn’t offer anything else apart from what I already know. After a quick stackoverflow search and google nothing was really giving me any clues. The release schedule window was ticking away and I was running out of ideas.
Luckily, a colleague had done something similar just mere weeks ago. Having chatted to him he mentioned something about the 1033 folder and a further dependency DLL residing in said folder. Once you have the other dll in the folder and gacutil issuing the command again gives you the install message and all is good with the world!
Of course once you know about the 1033 folder googling brings up lots of results on this issue