Rabbit & Pork

It’s only taken 135 seasons - but my home town football club were finally promoted to the english Premiership league on Saturday with six games to spare - for the first time in their history.

After that wait, hopefully they’ll stay more than 1 season - no doubt it’ll be tough playing the deep pockets of Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal and Man Utd.

But how did Reading get there? They have the smallest squad of players in the Championship, have no superstars, and probably one of the lowest running costs. Yet, they’ve only lost two league games all season (so far), broke a 100+ year old record for the longest run without loss, have the leanest defence, and the most potent attacking force (+56 goal difference today). The best form of all leagues. It’s a cliche, but it can only be attributed to the spirit, drive and cohesiveness of the team members - on winning, the same team played the next match - barring injuries of course.

That reminds me of the way we operate at Alfresco - a small efficient development squad who’ve known each other and worked together for many years. We have a single clear objective - to get promoted to the top league and beat the deep pocketed big boys at their own game. Only we won’t take 135 years!

My attempt to purchase tickets for a local John Blackwell clinic failed today. They’re all sold out. Oh well, I was looking foward to it - he’s performed with Prince and The New Power Generation.

If anyone has a spare ticket for the April 5th Drumwright clinic (in Woodley) for any reason, I would be happy to help out Leave a comment below.

Sorry for any inconvenience - this blog has now been upgraded from Wordpress v2.0.1 to v2.0.2.

Some days, however much you try, you can’t seem to flow. This is particularly true for drumming. Yesterday, I tried to record myself, but failed miserably. The result was stiff and uninspiring - it was getting towards the end of the day - I was tired and getting increasingly fustrated. Today, I try again and it just worked - you can hear the result in my previous post.

The difference? Today’s been much more relaxed - a lie in, a walk with the dog and a decent dinner. Just goes to show that state of mind has a major impact on how you play.

Recently, I posted on Colin Woolway’s series of drum lessons published in Rhythm magazine. Attached to that post is a recording of myself performing one of the lessons. Remarkably, Colin himself commented on my work! The power of the internet.

So, I’ve decided to keep track of my progress by recording each lesson and posting here. It’s incredibly revealing listening to yourself - you become your own worst critic. Also, hopefully, I’ll continually be motivated by realising there’s some improvement over time.

All recordings are of myself playing on a Hart Dynamics/Roland TD-8 electronic drum kit - raw and unedited.

It’s been years since I developed software on anything other than a windows box. Now, as Alfresco begins to gain traction and our community grows, it’s obvious that no single platform is a clear leader for either development or deployment. Alfresco source code is 99.9% Java which has obviously helped attraction in all environments. However, as we provide an open source offering, the idea of operating in a completely free stack, from OS to database to application server to application to browser is very appealing. Hence, I shall dip into this idea by first enabling dual boot Windows/Linux on my development laptop. Of course, I shall follow my colleagues lead and learn from his experiences posted here.