Journal

I just made a first visit to Chicago. It was primarily to attend An Event Apart but I was lucky enough to have a little time to check out the city, too.

Firstly I want to thank all the friends who provided tips for things to do and see in The Windy City – Aleks, Susan, Jenny, Lucy, Alan and Karen, Collette etc – cheers!

Thanks also to Davie for jetting in from NYC to join me and Liam for a couple of days. I doff my cap to your knowledge of beautifully designed restaurants with really expensive menus 😉.

I also got the chance to catch up with old friend Nick Calingaert AKA Common Factor, a lovely guy and talented producer who DJed for me and my friends at a couple of our club nights back in the early 00s.

We only had a few days, but I felt we managed to cram in some good stuff. Here’s a summary of the highlights.

Eating out

• Swift & Sons
• Momataro
• Chicago Athletic Club (with its appropriately posh tag-line “Dine and Libate”…)

Bars

• Danny’s Bar
• Rainbo Bar

Record Shopping

• Gramaphone Records
• Dusty Groove
• Shuga Records, 1272 N. Milwaukee Ave
• Reckless Records

Cool Neighbourhoods

• Wicker Park area

Culture / History

• Architecture Boat Tour
• The Art Institute of Chicago

Things to do

• Millenium Park
• Cloud Gate (AKA The Bean)

And if we’d had more time…

• Go see the Cubs playing baseball at Wrigley Field
• Green Mill Jazz Club

Magical sounds in the mix, from Auld Reekie’s finest.

Other Lands consistently plays amazing records.

He’s also been cultivating a quirky but cuddly radio voice which, combined with the heartfelt electronic sounds, makes for a warm and fuzzy listen.

This two hour show is notable for featuring lots of amazing music from Glasgow and Edinburgh, including tracks by Being, Lord of the Isles, a cut from the Off-World Transmissions LP on Invisible Inc, and a preview of the forthcoming Mac-Talla Nan Creag sequel on Firecracker.

Gav also plays both sides of the new Nuclear Family EP and I'm chuffed for our record to feature in this company.

I’ve heard a couple of people mention that when they buy domain names, they use Namecheap because they are cheap and trustworthy.--- I tend not to have any particular favourites but I’ll maybe give Namecheap a go next time.

When in Chicago, buy #house

Jamie (aka Bud Burroughs of Stirling’s Jelly Roll Soul crew) kindly invited me to DJ with him at Max’s Bar last Saturday night (21st July ‘18).

We played from 9pm–3am. Max’s was rammed to the rafters as usual and it was fun to have six hours to play with, going through the gears and playing different styles and tempos. We also had some friendly faces for company – not only was it Jason Brunton’s birthday but we also had Chris Reid over from Italia and on the birras!

Music-wise, it was cool to mix on the DJR-400 and I particularly enjoyed playing EXU, the new one from Patrick Pulsinger & Irl:

Jamie played lots of tracks I liked, including an upbeat version of Space Jungle Luv by Oneness-Of-Juju that I would post but can’t find anywhere!

Thanks to Jamie for the invite, and if you don’t already know his productions, check out:

• The Mail Art EP by Bud Burroughs on Seventh Sign Recordings
• Jelly Roll Soul record label
• Too Many Voices by Dam-Ru on Temporize Recordings

Rubadub have a new mobile app that delivers the RaD crew’s top vinyl recommendations (the best around) direct to your phone.

At a time when lots of vinyl releases are highly limited, this gets you early access to the latest heat before it disappears. It should also generally save untold hours browsing/searching since in their recommendations Rubadub have already done the job of separating the wheat from the chaff.

The app was developed by me and the team at Greenhill.

It was quite tricky, because aside from developing the mobile app itself there was a lot of API work needed to integrate it with Rubadub’s stock and e-commerce systems. We also built middleware specifically for machine-learning customer tastes.

The current v1 app handles the core feature of letting people listen to, save and buy records but there’s a lot of cool stuff vis-a-vis personalised messaging and taste-based recommendations on the roadmap. I’ve written about this in more detail over on Greenhill’s site.

The long-term idea is that it becomes the app equivalent of the actual record shop experience...i.e. going into Rubadub on Howard St and one of the guys/gals handing you a pile of tunes with a side of witty repartee.

If you’re a vinyl junkie like me or into electronic music in general, I recommend checking it out.

I've just finished reading Stasiland by Anna Funder, having received the recommendation from a friend.

It tells a series of extraordinary and often heart-wrenching stories from the underbelly of the former East Germany. I thought it was fantastic and highly recommend it.

My name is Laurence Hughes and I’m a perfectionist. But I’m working on it.

I’ve suffered from the painful affliction of perfectionism for as long as I can remember (I blame the mother…) and although I’m much better than I used to be, I don’t think it ever fully leaves you.

Good things undoubtedly come from sweating the details, but a perfectionist streak left unchecked can cause creative endeavours to take longer than they otherwise would, sucking out the initial spark and motivation.

A related affliction – and this particularly applies to coding – is spending so long considering the many different ways to tackle a problem that you end up at a temporary standstill… i.e. paralysis by analysis.

At work, developing software for Greenhill, the perfectionist streak is kept in check because we follow the release early, release often philosophy and our development sprints just don’t allow time for it.

Release early, release often works well when we’re building applications for clients because it leads to a tighter feedback loop between the customers, the client and ourselves; and also leads to new features being released more regularly.

On this, my own website, I’m going to take that principle further and hopefully release even earlier and more often.

So – things may look rough and ready or even broken (temporarily) when you visit this site now or in the future. And in this case I’m OK with that. This isn’t a client’s site – it’s mine. The Minimum Viable Product (or baseline before progressive enhancement) is that visitors can read and navigate the content. Right now, at re-launch, it’s as simple as that. There’s no stylesheet as yet. It was more important for me to get the ball rolling than anything else. Hopefully as you read this, if the site in a state of flux (read: looks like a riot) you’ll still be able to enjoy the content! I have plenty of nice features in the pipeline but they’ll happen bit-by-bit, one step at a time.

This site is a work in progress – a bit like myself!

I’m just back from a fantastic couple of days in Brighton attending Ampersand – The Web Typography Conference – and also a Responsive Web Typography workshop with Richard Rutter at Clearleft.

Today I and my brother Martin and two nieces Sophie and Mia, made a first visit to the Mackintosh Church in Maryhill, Glasgow.

We were there to visit Museum of the Moon, a new touring artwork by UK artist Luke Jerram. I’d first heard about this exhibition when watching the BBC documentary Wonders of the Moon.

The installation is a fusion of lunar imagery, moonlight and surround sound composition created by BAFTA and Ivor Novello award winning composer Dan Jones. Measuring seven metres in diameter, the sculpture features 120dpi detailed NASA imagery of the lunar surface. At an approximate scale of 1:500,000, each centimetre represents 5km of the moon’s surface.

We all really enjoyed seeing this striking artwork in such a beautiful setting and learning a little more about the moon, too.