Categories
Gay

My name is John and I am a Groupie

There, I’ve confessed. Last night I went to see the London Gay Men’s Chorus “Small Group” perform at the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden. This was the third time I’ve seen them this year, and I’m likely to see them at least once more – for the Christmas show. Together with my own lack of musical talent, I think that qualifies me as a groupie!

I’d never been to the venue before, and you enter through a museum gallery with artefacts from London’s theatre scene. If I go again, I’ll plan on arriving a bit before the performance, and stop to read a few of the display cases. That being said, nothing jumped out and said ‘Read Me Now’.

Every time I plan to see the LGMC I’m a little nervous that I’ve seen them before, and well, isn’t it never quite the same as the first time? Every time, they blow me away. Go see them perform!

There is an obvious passion behind the performances, and quality touches throughout. Whether they sell out or respectably fill their chosen venue seems to be a bit of a lottery, which I don’t understand, as the shows are consistently good.

Last night was the “Small Group”, which must be about 15 strong (The full chorus puts around 100 men on stage), performing with a pianist to accompany them. There are quite a few solos and duets, and they always seem incredibly accomplished. I liked, in no particular order, All Girl Band, Rhythm of Life (the chorus has taught me different words for that, and they’re much more fun), Marry me a Little and Natural Woman. Seasons of Love is another favourite of mine that they perform well.

Thanks to Liam and Brett for suggesting the evening – I would probably not have seen the small group until later in the year otherwise. The rest of the audience certainly seemed to enjoy it – the group next to me started laughing at one of the jokes, and then couldn’t stifle ongoing giggles for several pieces afterward. A great atmosphere!

Categories
McAleely.com Miscellanea

Comments are off…

I think it’s a lesson I should have learned already. Provide zero-cost access to a public space, and zero-cost commercial junk – spam – will dominate its content.So comments are now off by default on this blog. If you have something you want to say about a post, I can recommend you put it on your own blog. That’s what links are for. Feel free to email me to let me know to read your blog. I’ll probably open up discussion-worthy posts for comment from time to time as well.I’m tired of ‘moderating’ spam. It’s time in my life I no longer want to spend.

Categories
Computing

Why not Lisp?

Ok, so I’ve made it up to chapter 18 of my book, and I’m still enjoying the read. There was a brief diversion while the book chased the illusion of an OS/filesystem independent file naming library, but it’s keeping me entertained.

Perhaps by working for another OS company, the dream of unifying the various Unix & Win32 filesystems seems less important to me. Better really to give in, and recognise that the file namespace is the domain of the OS/filesystem/user, and there are too many leaks in abstractions above them.

Anyway, the title of this post is why not Lisp – putting aside my reservations of yesterday – why isn’t it more popular? There are the many reasons noted by Paul Graham, but there is a more prosaic one that hit me when I started.

There is no implementation that seems reasonable to use!

On my chosen OS (Mac OS X at the moment) I have the grand choice of three commercial implementations, and four open source implementations. All seem to have a significant gotcha.

Only one of the commercial implementations appears to have a ‘free redistribution’ model, the other two want some percentage or down payment from the sales of any product I create. Yuk.

Of the open source implementations, none are complete enough to host all of the examples from the book I’m using to learn the language. Some lack threads (hello – this is 2006), and others lack Unicode (hello – wave if you don’t speak ASCII English).

Whether the royalty free commercial implementation supports the features needed by the book is not clear (great sales pitch!). The book’s author recommends a vendor without a price list, which I assume to mean they’re in the we-want-a-percentage camp.

For any more popular language there is usually a bit more choice and competition among the tools vendors. As I see it, on Mac OS X, there isn’t a clear ‘one stop shop’ implementation I can choose to: learn the language with a popular text, and then distribute my first few applications ‘for free’. The situation on Win32 doesn’t look much rosier, although I’ve not looked at the details.

No wonder no-one is using Lisp.