Cinderford Music Festival fundraising gig

This afternoon, I did my first solo gig. Up till now, I’ve done a few gigs as a part of combos (including as a jazz singer, bizarrely) and plenty of short solo spots at folk clubs, but this was the first time I’d done a complete set, with just my guitar and voice.

It takes a certain amount of courage.

Some insurers just can’t take a hint

Don’t you get it, Direct Line? I’m through insuring my car with you.

Desert island albums #1: Joni Mitchell — Hejira (1976)

In BBC Radio 4’s venerable programme Desert Island Discs, a guest is invited to imagine themselves cast away on a desert island, and allowed to choose eight pieces of music to take with them. (The quaint “discs” in the title of course refers to gramophone records; I for one welcome the BBC’s refusal to retitle the programme Desert Island Digital Audio Files.)

I think this is a fascinating exercise, and one that I’ve often toyed with doing myself.

New free software for drawing diagrams of vertebral columns

I already blogged about this over on Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week, but since it’s a software release, I figure I ought to mention it on my programming blog, too!

Matt Wedel’s and my 2013 paper on bifurcation in the neural spines of sauropods included the figure above, which shows in schematic form what we know about split spines in the vertebral columns of various specimens. Rather than draw this by hand, I wrote a program to generate it from a simple textual description.