# A teenage dream's so hard to beat
Everytime she walks down the street
Another girl in the neighbourhood
Wish she was mine, she looks so good
I wanna hold her wanna hold her tight
Get teenage kicks right through the night
I'm gonna call her on the telephone
Have her over cos I'm all alone
I need excitement, I need it bad
And it's the best I've ever had
I wanna hold her wanna hold her tight
Get teenage kicks right through the night
I wanna hold her wanna hold her tight
Get teenage kicks right through the night
John H [e] said Fitting tribute
[added 27th Oct 2004]
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# Is there anything more irresistable than a big stall full of cheap second-hand books?
Marvin said No. [added 25th Oct 2004]
Pete Ashton said But there is something dispiriting about a shop full of cool second hand books that are really expensive...
[added 25th Oct 2004]
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#[Arabica]Walking XPath Axes
Made some real progress on this in the last couple of days. I've added a new AxisEnumerator class - give it a context node and an axis specifier and it'll enumerate that axis. Well, almost - so far it does child, attribute, following-sibling, preceding-sibling and self. Once I knock up a node test class (some for node name) I can go ahead and implement location step - that's a 'real' XPath. Hurrah.
This AxisEnumerator interface falls somewhere between an STL style iterator and Java enumerator. I'm not entirely happy with it, but it does the job at the moment. I need to look at similar iterator/enumerator classes - there's probably something in boost somewhere. I don't want to bodge this too much, because it'll be useful in its own right outside of the XPath engine.
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#[Arabica]More compliance fixes committed
Fixed and committed some more scoping compliance fixes in DOM/* today. Moving toward a new release soon I think.
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#Slipknot and Slayer at the NIA, 5 October
There was no dead crow sniffing and at no point was the crowd addressed as maggots. Motherfuckers yes, but maggots, no. These minor disappointments didn't, however, detract from what was a jolly fun evening out.
Headliner's Slipknot marched, bashed and crashed their way through the greater part of their current Subliminal Verses album. Curiously, the track I considered the pick of the album, Pulse of the Maggots, seemed quite flat. Hearing the other tracks live has, though, revealed something I was previously missing. Consequently my appreciation of the album has increased markedly. Despite the wearing masks and the same matching black shirts as his numerous band mates, singer (and there's no doubt he really can sing) number 8 cuts a commandingly iconic figure. At the set's conclusion he orders the whole crowd the squat down. "You are gonna jump in the air, but not until I fucking tell you. Not until I fucking tell you." We all obey, even the Dads who only came to keep an eye on junior, even the cybergoth girlfriends who didn't really want to be there and haven't been having a good time, even the mid-forties thinning a bit on top Slayer fans. Everybody.
When I first read about this gig I joked that it was "Slayer for the Dads, Slipknot for the kids". This turned out to be largely true. There was an older, paunchier, greyer contingent of Slayer fans and a more numerous younger, fresher, spottier Slipknot contingent. Slayer frontman Tom Araya picked up on this. "I see a lot of young faces in the crowd," he grinned, "let's see if you can keep up!" before launching into the ridiculously speedy thrash metal that the band are famous for. I can't claim to be overly familiar with the Slayer back catalogue, but do prefer the slower, more operatic numbers. This may sound like a bizarre thing to say, but it shows off their dischordant musicianship to excellent effect. I was pleased then that Seasons in the Abyss and Dead Skin Mask got an outing. They rounded out with some, presumably, newer and speedier material. Slayer might have been doing the rounds for twenty years, but they've still got what it takes.
The special guests (nobody, it seems, has support acts these days), Hatebreed and Mastodon, were new to me but thoroughly acceptable. It must be hard work supporting such well known headliners. Mastodon played to a small but appreciative crowd - "Thanks for showing up early and supporting Mastodon". It's not very cool to see the opening acts, I guess, or perhaps the NIA's central location means that there's no particular imperative to turn up in good time. Unlike the NEC Arena say, if you miss one bus, you won't be waiting an hour for the next. Being the old fashioned type I am, I turned up early, watched it all, nipped down the road for a balti, and went home having had a thoroughly good time. My partner-in-rock Paul ended the evening by driving 90 odd miles to Letchworth to stay with his Gran on his way to a Moody Blues gig the following night. Rock on!
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# Took little Hal out with me, walking dogboy, this afternoon. Crossing the railway bridge, we met another man pushing a baby in a buggy. As we passed, he and I exchanged the secret dads-pushing-babies smile.
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