Minimal

On the ball

There’s a good reason why nufc.com is widely considered the best Newcastle United website, independent or otherwise. The quality of its reporting is worthy of any national newspaper. Take, for instance, their report of the recent defeat to Inter Milan. In a few perfect sentences, they manage to put into words what 50000 people (and more) have been feeling for months:

There’s a trait that is probably common amongst football fans but seems to have a particular resonance at St.James’ Park, and it’s probably best called righteous indignation.

Yes, goals can be scored and handsome victories recorded, to a background of general happiness but it’s only when something goes wrong and there’s collective sense of grievance over a perceived injustice that the crowd really shift into gear and genuine backing from the stands emerges.

Dodgy goals, dismissals, whatever. If we see our heroes getting shabbily treated it’s a great motivating factor to get behind them. Folks who barely raise a mutter suddenly become filled with anger, while others get swept along with the heightened emotion.

Songs sweep round the ground, chants spring up out of nowhere and there’s a sense that the supporters are trying to push the team bodily upfield to get back at the “enemy”. We’re not talking pigs heads and empty whisky bottles here though, just pure intense support. Bloody marvellous.

To be able to connect with your readership in this way isn’t easy, even if you do share the same emotions. Nufc.com, however, seem to have mastered it. Essential reading for any Mag. :)

Tricky disco

Ever tried to categorise your music collection? It’s not as easy as you might think. Well, not if you’re a genre ignoramus like me — I know what I like, but I don’t know what to call it.

Things started off well enough, pigeon-holing The Orb, Prism, Yokota, and various KLF CDs into an ambience section. Even trip-hop wasn’t too hard (Massive Attack, Morcheeba, Portishead) and my limited collection of acid jazz titles was easy to define. After that it got a bit harder. Into what category should I put Air? How about St Germain and The Avalanches? I thought about lounge for a couple of them, but is that right?

Anyone know of a decent site with genre listings i.e. one that doesn’t just suggest ‘dance’ or ‘electronica’?

C for Crap?

Is it just me, or are XML CDATA sections the ugliest bit of any markup language ever? They’re soooo 1976, man. Very poor, Vic.

Weblong

Can someone give Matt an award for the longest blog entry in history, please? Wow, my head hurts.

Rant!

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: CSS doesn’t hold a candle to the humble <table> tag when it comes to page layout. I’ve read page after page of gushing instruction on how to replace my tables with divs and spans, but not one article has produced satisfactory results for my desired layout.

The latest silver bullet comes from alistapart.com. Flexible layouts with CSS positioning talks a lot of sense and in terms that I like, but it just doesn’t deliver the results. Or rather, current web browsers don’t deliver the results.

BLAH BLAH BLAH

Wot no jeans?

I wore trousers to work today. But, wait! That’s not the best bit — not only did I wear trousers, I wore shoes too. Shoes, for crying out loud! Me! Shoes! :)

No, I didn’t think you’d understand...

empty’s minimal lines

Ok, right, so the domain registration did eventually expire. And the renewal didn’t exactly get it right with the whole pointing-to-my-server thing. Still, it’s interesting to see that my somewhat-dead, blogspot-hosted version of minimal still hasn’t been expunged from their databases.

Anyway, on with the show...

Gigs a-plenty

Aqualung: 3.5 out of 5
A very good performance with effortlessly beautiful vocals from Matt Hales, but there wasn’t a great enough contrast in the material for my liking. Good, but just lacking that something that would make it great. Support from Gordon McIntyre(?) was very good.

Foo Fighters: 4.5 out of 5
The Foo Fighters ROCKED! :) From the word go, they were absolutely on the button, starting with All My Life, arguably the best track from their latest album. They went on to play around 15 tracks in all, some of them seriously extended. Balance on vocals vs instruments was generally quite impressive, though there were a couple of tracks where the vocals got a bit lost in the melee. Overall though, they left a truly appreciative 10000 in the arena at the end of the 3-track encore. Support from Cave In was mediocre.

Coming this Wednesday: Because We Can vs. Midasuno at The Cluny.

Mal Ross O.B.N.

I should be nominated for a Private Eye Order of the Brown Nose award. Hell, I even got a more prominent quotation than the legendary Don Schenck on 37 signals’ buzz page. ;)

Oh, and for the record, there are two l’s in my name (‘Malcolm’) and I’m not a designer. But then you can’t win them all. In fact, I didn’t even win a t-shirt. Bah!

Let there be light

And, at Kielder on Sunday, there was. And it was good.

Hmmm...

So when does this thing disappear? Shouldn’t someone have turned the lights out by now?