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Yalini&Robert and I went to see a concert at the Harbour Light over in Lyttelton tonight. The main act was Don McGlashan (of The Mutton Birds and Front Lawn fame) backed by The Seven Sisters (of whom there were four, three male, as you’d expect).

The opening act was a woman whose name I initially heard as “Red Mountain”, but who in fact turned out to be called Reb Fountain. She was terrific. She was a tiny little woman, but crikey she could belt out songs. After the gig I bought her CD, and she was so delighted that she gave me a big hug.

The Harbour Light was absolutely jam-packed. Fortunately Yalini&Robert had had the presence of mind to book us a table, so at least we had seats, even if it was crowded. As might be expected, the crowd consisted mostly of people in their 40s and 50s.

McGlashan sang songs ranging from the old classics (such as Dominion Road and Anchor Me) through to more recent songs (“several radio stations are thinking seriously about playing this song”) to songs so new they hadn’t been recorded yet.

I was a big fan of Front Lawn back in the day, so I was hoping for lots of those songs. They did three. In the middle of the set the Seven Sisters left the stage, and McGlashan was about to do a solo piece, when clearly he changed his mind about which one at the last minute. The Harbour Light is decorated on the interior walls with painted versions of famous movie scenes. McGlashan had spotted the one from Casablanca and so played the Front Lawn song Claude Raines.

The venue was packed, the music was borderline painfully loud, but I had a terrific time and thought it was a superb concert.

The May 2009 issue of Locus reports that, for the first quarter of 2009, 16% of all book sales were of books by Stephanie Meyer. Holy shagging vampires! The article doesn’t say whether this is world-wide or in the US or something else, but it’s mind-boggling any way you bite it.

I’m very much looking forward to the latest series by astoundingly prolific writer Kevin J Anderson, Terra Incognita. The latest issue of his newsletter arrived today, and it reports that the first volume in the series, The Edge of the World, is due out in June.

It came as something of a surprise though to hear that a CD will be jointly released with the book, containing “Epic Rock” songs with lyrics written by KJA and his wife Rebecca Moesta, retelling one of the story-lines from the book.

The last time I can remember anything like this happening was when dear old Battlefield Earth was released more than 20 years ago. It was accompanied by a double album of songs and dialogue. I bought both the book and the album, and somewhat to my shame, I liked them both very much. I still remember being impressed with hearing a Psychlo talk. I still have the book, but the album alas has gone the way of all vinyl.

So, I’ll be very intrigued to see how this CD works out. I’ll certainly be getting the book, and – let’s face it – I’ll be buying the CD as well.

After talking about it for a while, we finally upgraded to MySky HDi. Things didn’t go smoothly at first: the first box they gave us didn’t work properly, although it did work in an annoying kind-of way that made me waste a couple of hours trying to figure out if it was broken or whether I just wasn’t understanding something. Two days after I reported the problem over the phone a techie turned up and fixed the problem (eventually) by replacing the whole unit.

However, now that I’ve had a few days to play with a working box, I have to say it’s pretty freaking amazing. The unit combines a 360-gig hard disk with four tuners, all decoding the same signal from the satellite dish. (Interestingly, there are four sat-dish connectors on the back of the box, but only the first one has the cable plugged into to, so there must be some kind of internal splitter feeding the one signal to all four tuners.) One of the tuners is given over to extracting the Guide information (names, descriptions, and screening times of the shows coming up in the next week), leaving three general-purpose tuners. This means that you can be watching one channel while simultaneously recording two others.

Integrating the decoder and the recorder into one device certainly makes recording things very easy. If you are watching a show and you want to record it, just hit a button. If you are looking at something in the guide and you want to record it, hit a button. There is never any need to set start and stop times – it gets all that info from the listing information. Things still aren’t quite as good as they should be: clearly there are no start/stop markers in the signal to indicate when programs begin and end, it’s all done via timings. So even if the Guide has a to-the-second idea of when a program is to start, there’s no guarantee that it will actually start at that time. The box solves this problem in what is probably the best way until start/stop information is actually embedded in the signal. When you request a program be recorded, it actually starts recording a couple of minutes before the nominal start time, and keeps recording until a few minutes after the nominal end time. But then when you go to watch a recorded show, the default position it starts playback at is the nominal start time. So far this has never been exactly the actual start time, but it’s always been close. Also there is no automatic way to skip ads. One would assume that this would be technologically feasible, but presumably the broadcasters wouldn’t license their content to a system that offered that ability.

The recording process doesn’t just record the show, but also its name and description and the date and time it was recorded.

I haven’t seen this in action yet, but the documentation claims that the box will notice a change in the screening time for a show you’ve requested a recording of, and update itself to record the new slot rather than the old.

In addition to just recording a specific program, you can also set “Series Link” on a show, which means that all future episodes of the show will be recorded. This is very, very handy. For example I have the nightly news on series link, so it doesn’t matter what time I get home from work – the news is always waiting for me.

In addition to recording programs you’ve explicitly asked it to, the box also keeps a cache of up to 60 minutes of stuff you’ve been watching. I think this cache is reset to empty whenever you switch channels. One consequence of this is is that if you decide half-way through a show that you want to record it, then your recording will start from the beginning of the show, not the point you hit the record button (provided that the start of the show is in the cache). It also means that you can rewind through a show that is being broadcast. You can also pause a live broadcast. When you resume, the system will keep recording the actual broadcast while showing you the point you are up to. If you want you can even fast forward through a “live” program, or just hit a button to catch up with where the show is at. I haven’t tried it yet, but it should be possible to watch a live program say 15 minutes behind the broadcast, catching up a little at each ad break as you fast forward through the ads.

If you have a show set to record, it will be recorded even if the unit is in standby! Clearly standby doesn’t mean much more than turning off the feed to the screen.

Despite the “HD” in the title, only one channel (TV3) actually broadcasts in HD. You can get an “HD ticket” (for an additional $10/month) which gets you a sports channel and a movie channel in HD, but it doesn’t seem right to me that a product with HD prominently in the title doesn’t supply HD as a matter of course.

Although I think Sky is wayyyy overpriced for what you get, this is certainly a very cool box of tricks, and I’m having terrific fun with it.

After a bit of a hiatus, I finally got around to finishing the latest installment of Lara Croft’s adventures:  Tomb Raider: Underworld. On balance it’s very good: tremendous good fun, with all the locations wonderfully detailed and packed full of interesting stuff. On my flash new 101cm TV with the xbox outputting at 1080p it just looks gorgeous.

Many of the things I disliked about the previous versions – most notably the unfun boss fights – are gone entirely. (You do get attacked by giant spiders, tigers, zombie Vikings and whatnot, but there’s nothing like the regular boss fights present in the other games).

Lara has some new moves, such as being able to climb walls with suitable handholds, rather than being restricted to ledges as previously. She can also shoot one-handed while hanging from ledges. The best new move is the chimney climb: with two walls sufficiently close together she can work her way upwards by leaping from wall to wall.

The story is pretty lame, and entirely ignorable: basically it boils down to a series of McGuffins that leads you from temple to temple and continent to continent in search of Lara’s long-vanished mother. But the weak-to-nonexistent story-line is not really a criticism. Tomb Raider isn’t about the story, but about the way cool environments she gets to explore. And that’s as it should be.

As much as I enjoyed this game – and it is very fun indeed – there were still many minor annoyances. The Tomb Raider series is now more than a decade old and has eight major and many minor games, and yet there are still basic, basic aspects of control and camera that aren’t right. Tomb Raider is famous for having these problems: is this really an unsolvable problem?

Whenever Lara is in the open she moves smoothly, control is great, and the camera works well. But as soon as she gets close to walls, rocks, trees and so forth, the camera is frequently hard to position correctly, the game often thinks it knows what the camera should be doing better than you, and rendering and positioning errors abound.

One of the big new things in this version of the game is that all Lara’s motions are mocapped. To my surprise I found that Lara’s moves looked awkward and clunky compared to her motion in the previous non-mocapped games! Basing her moves on a real gymnast sounds like a grand idea, but in practice it just doesn’t work for some reason.

But these are minor quibbles. The game is terrific, and I can’t wait to see where they send Lara next.