A postcard we created to announce Robert’s birth. Click for a bigger version.
The Geneva Bugle
January 15th, 2012 · Amusing things, Interesting things, Photo things
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Pimping our music collection
December 20th, 2011 · Music things, Tech things
Having a couple of months off work after the move to Geneva, plus some late nights sitting up baby-watching during Robert’s first few weeks while Nadine caught up on sleep gave me some time to do a few things that have really given a new lease of life to our music collection.
A new toy

Rediscovering Teaser and the Firecat on the Squeezebox
When we moved into our new place we bought a Logitech Squeezebox Touch and, to accompany it, a NetGear ReadyNAS Duo (which is basically a 1TB home server). The Squeezebox sits underneath our TV connected to the stereo system, from where it communicates over our wifi network with the server. The Squeezebox is basically a touchscreen interface that lets you browse through your music collection or very easily access internet radio stations. There’s also a remote control and a smartphone app, either of which can be used to control it.
The user interface is really superb – I have the feeling that it was designed by people who listen to a lot of music and understand how music fans want to interact with their collections. Since we got it we’ve found ourselves listening to albums we forgot we had. There’s something about the interface that reduces the tendency to overlook albums you’re less familiar with and just skip straight to the stuff you listen to most often. I’m not sure why that is, but it’s a lot more satisfactory than playing from Windows Media Player, WinAmp, MediaSource, etc.
Spring cleaning the collection

A screenshot from Musicbrainz Picard
Buying the Squeezebox also made me realise how messy our music collection had become, with incomplete tagging, duplicate files, missing album artwork, etc… None of this mattered until we had this super interface that gets so much out of the metadata attached to the music files (the ID3 tags that get added when you rip CDs or come attached to music downloaded). I found a great piece of software that made the task of cleaning up the tags on more than 40GB of music much easier. Musicbrainz Picard scans through your music collection, tries to recognise what the albums are, and adds the correct tags overwriting whatever errors crept into the collection over the years. It pulls its info from a huge and impressively complete database.
We stopped buying CDs altogether about three years ago. Just about all music we buy now comes from 7digital.com and therefore usually comes properly tagged. But some good tagging software is handy for when you get compilation CDs from friends (you can’t beat a good mixtape!) or buy music direct from artists at gigs, etc.. I’ve found Mp3tag to be really good for this.
Now I just need to find the time to work out how to access the home server remotely so that we can access our music collection from anywhere. For now we’ll continue to use MP3tunes.com for that.
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Ch, ch, ch, changes
November 24th, 2011 · Interesting things, Miscellaneous
More than three months have passed since I last posted anything here. A little lazy on my part perhaps, but I have some pretty good excuses. In those three months I have…
- Moved from Amsterdam to Geneva
- Taken on some freelance work developing a website and a printed review for a charitable foundation
- Succeeded in finding a new job fulltime job which I’ll start next week
- And, most importantly, I’ve become a father!
Robert O’Sullivan was born on Sunday 30 October 2011 at 23:04. He weighed 3.3kg when he popped out, after some amazing work by my amazing wife Nadine. As of last Tuesday he was up to 4.5kg, which is an indication of his fondness for breast milk. He sleeps, eats, poos and, sometimes, cries a bit. All the things a baby should be doing. And he’s the most wonderful and worthwhile thing that has ever happened to me. I’m glad to have had this month off work to spend with him and Nadine. It’s a steep learning curve for sure, but being a father changes your perspective on so many things, not least the joys of nappy changing.
I’ll probably post various other bits and pieces about Robert’s life in the weeks, months and years to come, but for now here are just a few photos from his first days.

Nadine travelled to the hospital by tram, and we all travelled home together the same way. His first tram ride at just three days old!
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Taking stock: two years of live music in Amsterdam
August 18th, 2011 · Music things
Amsterdam’s live music scene was one of the main attractions for us when we moved there from Geneva in June 2009. In the last two years I’ve been to around fifty gigs, mostly at the Paradiso and Melkweg, two of Europe’s great music venues. With our return now to Geneva I thought it’d be fun to take stock: certainly there were many forgettable evenings in there, but also many really good gigs and a handful that will live long among my favourites. The full list is below, but the ones that rose above all the others for me were, in no particular order:
- Laura Veirs: six months pregnant, singing with her band in the small room upstairs in the Paradiso. A polished performance of intelligently crafted songs.
- The Swell Season: Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova with a few of The Frames, holding the Paradiso in the palm of their hands. I’ve never experienced so much silence, so much respect for musicians in Amsterdam.
- Josh Ritter: I’ve seen him three times over the last two years, twice with his band for entertaining full sets. But the best was his solo set in support of the Swell Season, when he too commanded the silence and respect of a packed Paradiso with just his guitar.
- Tunng: quirky, rootsy pop songs performed with a real sense of fun; watching the percussionist at work was worth the ticket price alone.
- Nada Surf: my first time to see this band who I knew had a great live reputation. All I can say is that it’s well deserved – they rocked the Oude Zaal at the Melkweg with their harmony-laden, guitar-driven pop. Brilliant!
- The Tallest Man on Earth: brilliant on both occasions I saw him. Intricate acoustic guitar and passionate singing, with a larger than life stage presence. Strongly recommended viewing.
Also worth mentioning are great gigs from Iron & Wine, Bright Eyes, Bell x1, Villagers and DeVotchKa.
The full list – two years of gigs in Amsterdam
I’ve included links to my own reviews of the gigs, which I only started doing in March 2010.
- Peter Broderick – Paradiso – 07.06.2009
- Fleet Foxes – Paradiso – 30.06.2009
- Sunset Rubdown – Paradiso – 08.09.2009
- Grizzly Bear – Melkweg – 09.11.2009
- Andrew Bird – Melkweg – 15.11.2009
- Gomez – Troxy (London) – 20.11.2009
- Devendra Banhart – Paradiso – 04.12.2009
- Laura Veirs – Paradiso – 31.01.2010
- Midlake – Paradiso – 10.02.2010
- Florence and the Machine – Paradiso – 22.02.2010
- The Swell Season (support: Josh Ritter, solo) – Paradiso – 23.02.2010
- Vampire Weekend – Paradiso – 24.02.2010
- Tom McRae – Melkweg – 29.03.2010
- Laura Marling – Melkweg – 05.04.2010
- Tunng – Melkweg – 20.04.2010
- Mumford & Sons – Tivoli (Utrecht) – 26.04.2010
- Flight of the Conchords – Melkweg – 03.05.2010
- Angus and Julia Stone – Paradiso – 05.05.2010
- Beach House – Paradiso – 26.05.2010
- Villagers – Paradiso – 14.06.2010
- The Hold Steady – Melkweg – 21.06.2010
- Crowded House – Heineken Music Hall – 20.06.2010
- Tegan and Sara – Paradiso – 17.06.2010
- Nada Surf – Melkweg – 14.07.2010
- Broken Bells – Melkweg – 19.08.2010
- Eels – Paradiso – 31.08.2010
- The Tallest Man on Earth – Melkweg – 02.09.2010
- Modest Mouse – Melkweg – 07.09.2010
- Josh Ritter and the Royal City Band – Paradiso – 14.09.2010
- Neil Hannon (support: Cathy Davey) – Melkweg – 27.09.2010
- Yeasayer – Melkweg – 29.10.2010
- Suzanne Vega – Melkweg – 05.11.2010
- Bell X1 – Amstelkerk – 09.12.2010
- Eurosonic Festival (various acts) – Groningen – 13/14.01.2011
- The Airborne Toxic Event – Paradiso – 07.02.2011
- Broken Records and Freelance Whales – Melkweg – 09.02.2011
- Iron and Wine – Paradiso – 15.02.2011
- Bright Eyes – Paradiso – 21.02.2011
- Alexi Murdoch – Bitterzoet – 07.04.2011
- Josh Ritter and the Royal City Band/Villagers – Motel Mozaique (Rotterdam) – 09.04.2011
- Timber Timbre (support: Little Scream) – Bitterzoet – 18.04.2011
- Ron Sexsmith – People’s Place – 28.04.2011
- Alela Diane – Paradiso – 04.05.2011
- Broken Records and Young the Giant – Bitterzoet – 14.05.2011
- The Tallest Man on Earth – Paradiso – 18.05.2011
- DeVotchKa – Melkweg – 23.06.2011
- Ryan Adams (support: Laura Marling) – Concertgebouw – 28.06.2011
- Pete and the Pirates – Paradiso – 19.07.2011
And lots of fun evenings and afternoons with various artists from the Amsterdam Songwriters Guild, including Case Mayfield, Lake Montgomery, Ro Halfhide, Max Vanremmerden, Luke Nyman, Chinup, Amarins & la Gatte Negre, and many, many more!
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Generating a customised Google map of zoo locations from a spreadsheet
July 27th, 2011 · Design things, Tech things, Useful things
In searching for a quick and effective way to map the members of the organisation I currently work for I came across a very useful tool from the Google Earth Outreach department. The Spreadsheet Mapper tool allows you to generate the code that Google Maps and Google Earth both use to display information. Very clear instructions are provided, but it basically boils down to the following steps:
- Open the spreadsheet in Google Docs, select the basic configuration options and then publish the spreadsheet as a web page from Google Docs
- Add the geographical coordinates (latitude and longitude) of each point you want to map along with whatever data you want to display in the balloon that pops up
- Update the layout templates provided so that the information is displayed in the way you want it to appear (this takes a little bit of time and some knowledge of html is helpful)
- Republish the spreadsheet regularly to check your progress and view the results in Google Maps.
KML, which is the markup language used, doesn’t seem to be very forgiving of errors. I found it was quite easy to “break” my map if I added a tag in the wrong place when adjusting the template tabs, for example. But if you take your time, and check the results of each change made as you go, you can generally find the error causing the problem.
The map I created shows all of the members of EAZA, the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria. The placemarker icon I used came from the Map Icons Collection which allows you to generate placemarkers in just about any colour. This allowed me to take their “zoo” icon and generate various versions to represent the different categories of membership.
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Pete and the Pirates – Paradiso – 19.07.2011
July 20th, 2011 · Music things
The Kleine Zaal at the Paradiso was packed to capacity for last night’s gig by these not-at-all scruffy young chaps from Reading. The lead singer is remarkably well-spoken: I could imagine him leading a delegation from the UK Foreign Office to the United Nations. He sings well too, a little bit Bowie, a little bit British-version-of-Brandon Flowers. They play pretty good guitar-driven pop rock. At times there are three electric guitars, bass, drums and three voices, adding up to a full sound that, on the best tracks, is as good as any guitar pop I’ve heard.
The problem for me was that they didn’t really have enough strong material to fill the hour-long set they played. It went a bit flat in the middle as they played four or five unremarkable songs that all blended into one for me. If they took the opening couple of tracks, plus the last few tracks of the main set and the two from the encore, they would have had a blistering 30 minute set and really created a buzz. (It annoyed me that they held two of their best songs for the encore – if a band has only two reasonably good albums of material to choose from it’s kind of insulting to hold good tracks in reserve for an “impromptu” encore.)
So they were good and will probably do well in the early evening slots at summer festivals across Europe. But they need a few more catchy tunes to really set the world alight: in comparison I can think of a Maximo Park gig I saw a couple of years ago in Fribourg, Switzerland, when they too were two albums into their career. On that night every tune grabbed the attention of the audience and the energy levels from the band, and in particular the lead singer, created a much livelier, more intense atmosphere. Pete and his Pirates aren’t there yet. But they’re such nice polite chaps that I hope they make it!
→ No CommentsTags:amsterdam·live music·paradiso·pete and the pirates·review
Initial thoughts on Google+
July 13th, 2011 · Tech things
[These are some thoughts I jotted down for a web professionals discussion group I follow. The question asked was how people are considering using Google+, the people in question working mostly for international organisations and associations.]
One of the big differences with Facebook is the asynchronous nature of relationships: when you add a friend on Facebook they must grant you permission to do so, whereas on Plus anybody can add a contact to one of their circles. The person in question is notified by email that they’ve been added to one of your circles, but not which circle. (I don’t think the email notifications are going to non-users of Plus in all cases yet.) Incidentally, while the interface for manipulating circles is really quite slick, I can see it getting complicated very quickly: I don’t think it’s going to prove all that easy to decide which circle(s) to add somebody to or which circles to share particular content with.
One of the default circles created when you first sign in is “Following”, the idea being that you might use this circle for people that you don’t know personally but that you want to follow (as per Twitter) in your stream. I don’t know how this is going to pan out in terms of the issue of trust and authentication – how do you know the account you’re following is really that person? Of course that’s an issue on Twitter too, but there’s something about the ease with which circles are created and contacts added that suggests to me it will be a bigger problem on Plus.
If there is a big take-up of Google+, which seems quite likely, organisations will have to start thinking about how they manage their presence in the social network, where up to now they may have had a Facebook page or Like buttons on their own sites. Instead of a “Like” they’ll be looking for a “+1” on Plus. But whereas the Like button on Facebook is something that feeds into the user’s own social network, with Google+ I think the +1 will rather feed into search results as a kind of additional quality rating of some sort. So we see elements of a Reddit/Digg approach coming in here too.
It’s unclear to me so far how Google intends to allow organisations to have a presence or profile on Plus. Perhaps, given that they already have search and indexing more or less sewn up, we’ll see less emphasis on organisations having a separate dedicated page or profile on Plus, and instead the focus will shift back to your own website and how Google interacts with that. Personally I think less fragmentation of an organisation’s web presence can only be a good thing. Having said that, this blog and video points to a Google+ for Business coming along later this year. Oh well…maybe now we’ll have to maintain both Facebook and Google pages, plus that Twitter feed. (Maybe time to kill the MySpace page?!)
At the moment it feels like a new housing development with only a few people having moved in and the social amenities half-built. But I sense the impending arrival of the hordes on the horizon!
That’s my tuppence-worth for now.
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I’m loving SoundCloud
July 4th, 2011 · Music things, Tech things, Useful things
I’ve never been 100% happy with the way I was presenting my own recordings on this website. I used a neat WordPress plugin called WPaudio that looking for links to mp3 files in the page and puts a little player on top of them. But what I was really looking for was a player where I could upload a whole lot of tracks and have them play sequentially – and ideally one that looks good too. Enter SoundCloud.
I first signed up for SoundCloud about three years ago, but I think it had only just launched then and didn’t have the full feature set it has today. I’ve seen it popping up here and there since then and I finally decided to take another look. It turns out that it does pretty much everything I’d like it to do now. I realise that BandCamp can probably do the same thing, but my recordings are all in mp3 format and I can’t be bothered trascoding them to a format that BandCamp will accept. So for now I’m going with SoundCloud. There are a couple of players like the one below now on my Songs & Music page, one featuring my own compositions and one with a few covers that I’ve recorded over the years.
Roughly Covered: Close Encounters – Lake Montgomery
July 3rd, 2011 · Music things, Roughly Covered
Last week on Facebook my friend Max Vanremmerden posted a challenge to members of the Amsterdam Songwriters Guild: “Cover and record a song you like from one of the members of the ASG and post the link to audio or video on this events page.” Challenge accepted!
One of the ASG artists that impresses me the most is Lake Montgomery. Originally from Paris, Texas she can be heard playing in various venues around Amsterdam and elsewhere in Europe. She has a great voice, plays guitar brilliantly, and writes really excellent songs with smart lyrics. With the right wind at her back she could be a really successful artist.
For this challenge I decided to sing her song, Close Encounters. It’s a quick and dirty single-take recording and is far from perfect, but hopefully it fulfils the challenge:
Close Encounters
Song by Lake Montgomery, performed by Eoghan O’Sullivan
But why listen to me when you can hear it from the woman herself? Here’s a video of her singing Close Encounters. You can find lots more on YouTube – just search for Lake Montgomery.
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