Gotye Hammersmith Apollo (by sarah)

So we finally went to see Wally perform - we ended up being scooped in with the VIPs and what have you mainly due to my stick and the fact that I'd over done it at the Tate Modern so could hardly move and was shaking! I took loads of photos and video of the gig most of which is no good as the light levels were so low and we were so far away - I am placing my blurry gig photos on the blog anyway as it is mine and Al's external memory 🙂 Considering my little happy snappy camera and the fact I was sat in the circle I am actually really happy at the photos I got.

String bean physic and a penchant for electronics - it really was like watching some relative of Alaric's on stage.

We found Gotye because people said he was like Alaric to look at 🙂

Alaric I think has kept his hair short after having been repeatedly mistaken at festivals this summer as The Gotye Impersonator 😉

Alaric was excited to discover Jonti at the concert and happy to hear Gotye who it had turned out we did own music off but had him squirreled away in Al's electronica stuff.

I did alot of experimenting with the light settings and stuff on the camera and think considering how far away I was and the light levels some of these really aren't that bad.

It is beyond me why people feel they have to spend the whole concert getting up and down from their seats - I started to get murderous over it! Especially if it was when I was trying to video or take a photo.

I loved the visuals and am constructing some short stories based on their inspiration!

They confiscated my bottle of drink at the beginning when we went in but Alaric bought me a glass of diet coke.

Alaric commented that he thought Gotye looked more like our friend Richard than himself. I just smiled and said that the official vid of Easy Way Out is like a merger of him and Richard.

There was a plinky plonky instrument that I itched to have a go on and part of me was thinking - you know I have my laptop but no microphone on me damn!

We tried taking pics putting the monocular on the camera but we just could not reduce the shake enough.

Alaric's comment about one of the songs was 'that reminds me of our hammond organ' to which I responded 'I think he sampled some of it from one'. We almost bought a T-shirt but were running low on budget.

Have I mentions the weird blowy instrument he appeared to be using? Not sure what it was or even if it was a wind instrument and I didn't get to see it properlly as it was gone by the time I wrestled the monocular off of Al.

The voice synth was halarious he really played it up!

This was mine and Alaric's first concert - I've stewarded events and works at events and performed at events but that whole audience thingy? Never really done it. Mainly due to the crowd and sitting down issue. I got these tickets as there were seated ones.

I do like my pics of pretty lights 🙂

Eyes Wide Open is my favorite song and one that I think the Green Unconference should have as a theme tune 🙂

The live visuals did differ alot in some cases and only a bit in others from the official musical vids.

This one I've kept just because I think it looks arty - it's called Ghost of Gotye.

I wonder if a better camera would have gotten me better pictures or if it is just my lack of skill!?

I loved the way all the musicians lined up and sort of bobbed their way through this one 🙂

There was only one song that I would have liked to have heard missed - everything else was covered.

This song Don't Worry We'll Be Watching You freaks me out slightly!

Some of the tunes are so haunting.

I was wondering about the sort of procussion rings that he was using - what are they?

It was quiet cool the way he would announce so and so on the synthasised/sampled sax and things like that. The thing is it does take skill to put this type of stuff together for a live show.

He is an amazing drummer - I would have loved to get hold of one of his drum sticks.

The band were so slick that it was only when a bit of sound engineering went wrong that it differed from the recordings really - this was amazingly good to the point I started to suspect mimining until he accidently mucked up the acoustic as the Apollos more of a theatre.

The moods of the different songs were caught via the lighting - the crew should be very proud of themselves.

One of the songs Gotye had the responsibility of a little tiny cymbal - it was so funny the way he emphasised this 🙂

Wally's little whitasisms thought out made us smile.

I took quiet a bit of video of the gig but it is for a holiday vid of mine and Alaric's break rather than concert specific.

Bronte is Jean's favorite Gotye track though she finds it too sad as the girl doesn't get to say goodbye to her friends - I personally wonder if there is a more sinister ending.

Lots of people left as soon as the band walked off - this was in my opinion a rookie error - and I was right.

We thought for a bit there that Ozzy's might not do oncors but they came back out and I have to find the name of the guitarist (I know he said it but I forgot it!)

The energy of the concert was fantastic mainly due to the musicians habit of noodling around on stage from one instrument to another. Wally/Gotye being the most noodly.

It was an amazing evening were I ruined Alaric's Christmas surprise by getting myself a signed copy of Making Mirrors!

Alaric thanked me for organising it at the end and agreed we should catch concerts in the future - we would love to go to Australia to visit my family at some point - it would be brilliant if we could see him on his home turf at the same time but that sort of trip is way out of budget at the moment.

Jonti and The Chap – Gotye Hammersmith (by sarah)

Gotye has quiet a diverse taste in music so we were intrigued as to what type of music would be the support bands. So we got to the Apollo early thinking we could go in and sit at the bar (this is what happens when you live outside of London for anytime you forget about all the people!). There was already a huge crowd and we couldn't find the end of the queue. A nice doorman person at the end came up to us and directed us to another door - were we were scooped in with the VIPs and what have you. I think this was because I was on my stick and to be honest I had completely over done it and was shaking with fatigue just standing was painful so I am extremely grateful though was a bit grumpy that the seated tickets were upstairs and there was no lift so me and the people on crutches made a slow rise to the circle which fortunately did have loos and drinks (they'd confiscated my inch of severn up!). I took pictures of pretty lights whilst we waited for the first act 🙂

The first act was Jonti for Alaric this slightly topped Gotye as it was interesting and new were as the Gotye tracks were familiar and comftable and fun due to the little quirks put in.

Jonti

I attempted to take some of the photos through the monocular - it did work brilliantly but I quiet like this pic of Jonti.

This guy wizzed about doing funky electric synth mix stuff with like little dance movements inbetween - I think the universe might implode from music awesome if he ever met Brown Torpedo. He had a guitar made out of an old oil can and a funky looking uke (I think). Alaric was entranced and enthused 🙂 To me he was bordering on a Dr Who-esk style performance.

The Chap

• I swear that I already knew these guys I had a vague impression of having danced to some of the songs with my friend Aiofe and they were very much her type of music! I also almost said hello to the drummer before the show (before I knew he was one of the bands - it was surreal I thought I recognised him and then realised I didn't). I enjoyed them though the people behind me didn't to the point were I was ready to throttle them for making comments all the way through :/ Yes it wasn't the same type of music as Gotye and yes everyone was waiting for the big act but you know some of us were trying to listen and cough dance in their seats.

At the end we went and talked to Jonti and The Chap and got them to sign the ticket though we were missing the girl from The Chap - I was in a lot of pain so didn't want to hang around and was perhaps a bit snappy when it was pointed out that a band member was missing 'Yes well!' which was a bit rude but there you go. We were going to by music by them but somehow failed to do so though we did end up with a signed copy of Making Mirrors by Gotye.

Us with The Chap

Me with Jonti

Due to both being shy we had to work as a team to actually go up and chat to them - so glad we did 🙂

Static Typing (by alaric)

I read this fine blog post

And this is precisely what is wrong with dynamically typed languages: rather than affording the freedom to ignore types, they instead impose the bondage of restricting attention to a single [sum] type!

Ah, bless. The author means well, but is confusing matters. They're kind of right that the distinction between so-called "dynamically typed languages" and so-called "statically typed languages" isn't what people think it is, but I think they've still not quite grasped it, either.

Certainly, almost all languages have types of some kind (the only real exceptions are ones that directly operate on memory as an array of bits, and expect the user to request the interpretation of any given region of memory in each operation, such as assembly language). So-called "dynamically typed languages" (let's call them SCDTLs from now on, and SCSTLs for so-called "statically typed languages") usually have numbers, and strings, and so on as separate types. What is missing in them compared to SCSTLs is the ability to say "This variable will only ever hold variables of a given type"; and the argument of the author is that, therefore, SCDTLs force every variable to be of a single "could be anything" type, while SCSTLs let you be more expressive. And in an SCSTL you could indeed create a big sum type of everything and use that for all your variables and, pow, it'd be just like a SCDTL, once you'd written all the clunky wrappers around stuff like addition to throw a run-time error if the arguments aren't all numeric, and unbox them from the sum type, and box the result up. Oh, and you need to maintin your giant Anything Sum Type, adding any user-defined types to it

That's what the author omits to mention. SCDTLs have all this automatic machinery to do that for you, while in SCSTLs you need to do it by hand! Eugh!

Working with sum types is useful. It's handy for writing programming tools such as generic container data structures. SCSTLs tend to have tools such as parametric types to act as a short-cut around the difficulties of doing that stuff with explicit sum types, but it boils down to the same kind of thing under the hood.

Now, a lot of the rhetoric around SCSTLs via SCDTLs comes from a rather blinkered viewpoint, comparing something like PHP (almost everything fails at run time!) to something like C (sum types are like pulling teeth!) - both sides have come together a long way.

Haskell is perhaps the shining example of a SCSTL nowadays, with its polymorphism and parametric typeclasses offering advanced ways to express huge sum types without having to spell them out.

And from the SCDTLs side, Common Lisp lets you declare the types of variables when you want, meaning that they are assigned the "Anything" sum type by default, but you can narrow them down when required. That gives you the convenience of an automatically-specified and automatically-unboxed Anything sum type when you want it, plus the static checkability (and efficient compilation) of finer-grained types when you want them. (And Chicken Scheme's new scrutinizer and specialisation system is a rapidly-developing example of a similiar model for Scheme, too).

And there's no reason why the SCSTLs can't come further, with an inbuilt Anything type and automatic boxing and unboxing of sum types, and more flexible type systems that can express more subtle distinctions, reducing the cases where "it's just too complex and we need to go dynamic".

Then we'll meet in the middle, and the only difference will be that SCDTLs have a syntax where type declarations are optional and default to Anything, while SCSTLs have a syntax that makes you declare types, even if they're Anything. They'll largely become interchangeable, and instead, we'll compare languages' type systems on a different scale: how complicated they are.

You see, Haskelll's type system can be hard to understand. It's quite complicated, in an attempt to be able to statically describe all the sorts of cases where people might wish they had a SCDTL instead. The development of type systems has largely been one of dealing with this; starting with things like generic container classes, then getting into complex stuff about being able to make the types of parts of a product type dependent on the values of other other members and whatnot, fine-grained types such as "odd integer", and so on. As SCDTLs gain the ability to declare types, they tend to start off with quite simple type systems, as it's easy to "just go dynamic"; they're initially happy to put in a bit of typing to speed up inner loops of numerical code and to tighten up error checking on interfaces. While languages without easy access to an Anything type rely on having a type system that can express lots of things, because it's a real pain when they have to escape it. But if they meet in the middle, the tradeoff will, instead, be one of a more complete type system that lets you check for more at compile time and gain more efficient code generation - versus the mental burden of understanding it.

I suspect that Haskell is, perhaps, a bit too far in the "complex" direction, while the support for parametric containers in Chicken Scheme is weak (why can't I define my own complex type if I create a "set" or "dict" container implementation, for example?) - we'll meet somewhere in the middle!

[Edited: Clarified the initial paragraphs a bit]

And Now You can Sponsor Our Noveling Madness (by sarah)

As the whole family is taken part in this and I am actually aiming for a nutty 90, 000 words in one month and have actually broken the 20 K mark today which means I've written more than 20, 000 words in a week, we thought we would put a page where people can sponsor us. The money is for the charity that organising the NaNoWriMo event every November but they do far more than keeping the servers and the likes going for insane writers like us. They put in a lot of work for classrooms and libraries and community efforts both on a local and global scale.

So it is there and waiting 🙂 No pressure.

An Inconvenient Word (by sarah)

Mary is learning to talk - she is doing a combination of English and Lojban often taking just the common sounds from both words and she is emulating Jean's singing etc....

This has led to an unfortunate word that she is happily chanting - it begins with s and ends in t and means poo though obviously that is not what she means - we think she is trying to copy some of the lyrics of Down By the River Side but it is embarrassing! And halarious.

We are ignoring it in the hope she stops doing it as if we make a fuss she'll think its a game and do it more!