But I would never have known about all of these shows or gotten tickets without Songkick. If you are interested in live music AT ALL, you need to do yourself a favor and register with Songkick TODAY. It takes a minute to register, and another couple of minutes to hook Songkick up to your iTunes library, last.fm profile or Pandora profile. Three minutes after starting, you’ll start seeing e-mails from Songkick when the bands that you like are coming to your city… before tickets go on sale.

There are very few sites on the internet I’m truly passionate about, and Songkick is one of them. Otherwise, I would have never been able to see this kick-ass final encore song from The National last night… done completely unplugged in a crowd of 5000 people. Amazing…

Links to specific shows, etc.:
The National last night
Arcade Fire tomorrow night
The New Pornographers next week
Kings of Leon just before Christmas
My profile (you can “track” me to see what concerts I’m going to)
My “gigography”: all the shows I’ve been to since my very first concert in 1994 (Pink Floyd!)

PS - Songkick is a London-based startup, and a Y Combinator startup, so they’ve got a very bright future ahead of them.

Long story, but I had a year-long window in order to apply for my “Indefinite Leave to Remain” (ILR) visa, which grants both Annie and I to officially be “settled” in the UK. We finally got around to applying for it this month, and because of my travel commitments for work we had to apply in person.

This is that story.

(To be honest it’s pretty boring, but something I wish I could have read before I showed up. I’m posting it for anyone that might be interested in the details of the process)

Booking an appointment online is easy, but not at all straightforward. (Annie and I had to register separately, then she had to send me her code so that I could book an appointment for both of us at the same time.) We could get an appointment within a week or two of when I looked for it online, at least at the Public Enquiry Office in Croydon.

Our appointment was for 3pm, and they tell you to show up 30 minutes early. We arrived about 2:20pm, and spent 30 minutes going through security and standing in a queue to speak to the first person in the process.

For anyone that has to do this for themselves, know this: There is a Border Agency agent who does an initial review of your application before you ever get to the point where you have to pay and then do a formal interview. This person checks your application to make sure it’s complete, reviews the documents that you’ve brought as proof, and checks your current visa. In my case he caught a mistake: when I was granted an extension of my HSMP visa the Home Office had mistakenly entered it as a “work visa” instead of “HSMP visa”. Luckily I had my paperwork from when the extension was granted, which showed that it was their screw-up and not mine. (Lesson: bring all of the documents that you’ve received from the Border Agency / Home Office, whether they’ve asked for them or not.)

Only after that review do you have to go and pay. That queue took another 15 minutes or so. You might want to give your bank a heads up that you’ll be making a big charge; I had to do a phone verification with my bank. (At this point you still aren’t guaranteed of getting your visa, as about a hundred signs tell you.)

The next wait was a big one; in our case from 3:15 to 4:20pm. There was just a big room with rather uncomfortable rows of immovable chairs. (It looked/felt a bit like prison furniture, perhaps because of problems with people getting angry in the past?) The other big feature was about a thousand screaming children running around everywhere. It was difficult to concentrate on my book. There are a couple of Coca-Cola vending machines and a very small snack shop available in the building while you wait.

The original 3pm slot that I booked must have been one of the last of the day. We were finally seen my a Border Agent around 4:20pm, and because our application was very straightforward we were all done at 4:40 when she told us that we had been granted our ILR visas!

As you might expect, the final wait was a long one as they actually created the visas and put them in our passports. They quote an hour and a half, but ours were ready by 17:45. (Another wait in the prison furniture room with the screaming children.) We received our passports with our shiny new full-page visa stickers/stamps, and letters detailing our new status and what it means.

Summary

This is just our story; your mileage may vary. Our visa application was very straightforward, and I’m sure they can get pretty complicated pretty quickly. If this is at all helpful or useful to someone that’s about to do the same thing, please let me know by commenting below!

But I’m into the last two weeks of the rowing season now as the biggest event of the year (Henley Royal Regatta) runs from Wednesday, June 30th to Sunday July 4th.

I’ve got a number of draft posts that I’ve started but haven’t finished, so expect to see those starting in July. Until then…

The Rural Alberta Advantage

I first heard of them on Fred Wilson’s blog: AVC.com. (If you haven’t heard of him, Fred is a famous venture capitalist who blogs on startups, venture capital and music.) The band ended up hearing about making his top records of 2008 list, and ended up inviting him to a show in New York, which sounded awesome. Links to his posts here:
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2008/12/top-10-records.html
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/01/the-joys-of-mus.html
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/01/the-avc-music-meetup.html
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/06/kickstarting-a-7.html

So when I heard they were going to be in town, I bought tickets, and put their album into heavy rotation the week or so beforehand to really get a sense of what they were about. The album was really good, but that doesn’t mean they were great live.

Well, it was a tiny club where I saw them, and the band is only three people, but they completely filled up the room with their sound and energy. Each song was different and distinctive, partly because the singer (Nils) explained briefly some of the more obscure Canadian stories and landmarks that are behind the songs. (ie, a tragic landslide that buried Frank, AB; the lyrics then make more sense and the song has a lot more soul.)

I find it tough to explain how awesome it is to see a great band in a small venue. But I did find a few videos on YouTube that have decent sound, so I posted them here so you can check them out.

Frank, AB

Edmonton

Eye of the Tiger

Please, go and buy The Rural Alberta Advantage’s album “Hometowns” NOW. (Click here for Amazon MP3 link.)

Songkick

I’d be remiss in this story if I didn’t tell you about Songkick. I’ve been a member since they were just coming out of beta. If you love seeing live music, don’t walk but RUN to register on Songkick.

Seriously… do it now.

It’s simple, but brutally awesome. You tell it what music you like and listen to (either through connecting it to iTunes or selecting manually), and then Songkick lets you know when those bands are going to be in your city. Most importantly, they only tell you about the bands you’re interested, and they tell you before tickets go on sale.

Before Songkick I had to subscribe to a bunch of mailing lists just so I had a *chance* of hearing about when bands I like were coming to town, let alone getting tickets. Now I just check my e-mail, figure out what I’m going to and when tickets go on sale, and GO.

Plus, for live music nerds like me there’s stuff like setlist archives, photos, videos and a whole bunch of other stuff for each concert that people can upload. You can also learn more about specific venues, specific bands, festivals and more.

If you want to see what I uploaded and wrote about The Rural Alberta Advantage concert above, just check out this link and explore Songkick:

http://www.songkick.com/concerts/4417566-rural-alberta-advantage-at-lexington

I was one of the thousands of people that was impacted by the volcano in Iceland. (It’s safe to say I never thought I’d end up typing that in my lifetime.) Enough people have asked me about it that I thought I’d write my story down.

Thursday, April 15th (in Moscow) -

Reports of the volcano and the ash impacting flights. I check my flights (to London via Dusseldorf) but they’re all listed as “On Schedule.” I’m hopeful but don’t really believe it. Set my alarm clock to wake up a little earlier to check in the morning.

Friday, April 16th (in Moscow) –

I’m scheduled to fly back to London today, and first thing in the morning I check my flights on Lufthansa. A number of the flights to Germany have been cancelled, but mine is still “On Schedule.” At this point I’m feeling pretty lucky and close my computer to start getting ready.

Less than a minute later, I get a text from Lufthansa telling me my flight has been cancelled. I immediately log back into Lufthansa and find out in the two minutes since I last checked the flight has indeed been cancelled. (I’m VERY thankful to Lufthansa for this!)

I figure I need to head south, and to a place where I can start booking train tickets back home. I looked into Italy, but no luck. But I quickly found a flight on Air Berlin from Moscow to Vienna, and book it immediately. From there I figured that I would sort it out.

(The business bit of Friday is a bit of a blur. I had a meeting but spend most of the time worrying about getting home.)

Friday afternoon my colleague and I made it to Moscow’s DME airport. I managed to get there about five minutes before checkin opened for my flight, so even managed to get an exit row seat for the flight! For the next couple of hours I shared a laptop 3G connection with my colleague, and managed to book a train from Vienna to Koln and *tried* to book a Eurostar ticket for the end of the day Saturday, without success.

The flight to Vienna was fine, and found out from my cab driver later that our plane was one of the last to land… the airport closed just a few minutes later!

My biggest worry once I was in Vienna was boredom on Saturday. My train was scheduled to leave at 6:40am, and I didn’t have anything to read for the 10 hour train ride! Despite looking all over Vienna that night, I couldn’t find anything and was a little worried for the morning.

The other VERY lucky thing that happened was that I managed to book a Eurostar ticket for Sunday the 18th! I think that I Eurostar had added extra trains, and I managed to get a ticket on one of them. Needless to say I was pretty happy about that!

Saturday, April 17th (in Vienna) –

I made it to Vienna’s Westbahnhof at around 6am. Got in line at the ticket office to get my tickets.

This was the lowest point in the whole journey… When I got to the ticket agent it turned out that I *didn’t* have a ticket on the 6:40am train, and there were no other tickets available on the 6:40am train.

Or the 8:40 train.

Or the 10:40 train.

Or the 12:40 train.

Luckily, there was a ticket available on the 14:40 train, getting into Koln nearly 10 hours later at 00:05. I bought it, kicking myself. (I hadn’t gotten an e-mail confirmation of my ticket, so I must have f**ked up when I thought I booked the original train while sitting in the Moscow airport.)

Three important things came out of this, however.

1) I was able to find an English language bookstore (literally, the British Bookshop) and buy books for the train.
2) I got some quality time at Starbucks on a WiFi connection to catch up on work e-mails. (And the weather in Vienna was incredible, which helped, too.)
3) The new train meant I wasn’t going to be able to visit my friend in Aachen, Germany. That really sucked, but at least I had a great phone call with him to catch up.

Finally, I made it back to Westbahnhof and got on the train. On this I need to make an important point:

I LOVE DEUTSCHE BAHN. (German national rail system.)

Sure the train was 10 hours long, but it was such a pleasant journey. Seats had plenty of room, the ride was comfortable, and the scenery was gorgeous. There was a bit of delay, but we pulled into Koln around 00:30 that morning and made it to the hotel, which was about a 2 minute walk away.

Sunday, April 18th (in Koln) –

My the time I checked in, got settled, checked e-mail and went to sleep… I didn’t get much sleep. Woke up early to make sure I was able to get breakfast and back to the station in time for my 7:40am Thalys train to Brussels. The train wasn’t as nice as the Deutsche Bahn Inter-City Express (ICE), but it got me there.

As soon as I made it into Brussels I got in the queue to pick up my Eurostar ticket. The Eurostar office was a mess… they only had two electronic machines to check in, and one of those was broken! It was probably a queue of 40-50 people just to print out tickets that we had purchased online. A TV station was there video-ing everyone and interviewing a few passengers.

After managing to find a bar to see the end of the Chinese F1 Grand Prix, I got lunch and then it was time to queue for the train. Again, the station is small so the check-in queue was crowded and a bit of a mess, but moved quickly enough.

Finally, I was on the train and we started moving. Not many memories after that… I was so exhausted I slept nearly the entire way home.

By 3pm on Sunday I was home in London.

Summary

While it was certainly a bit of an adventure, I really came out of this whole thing relatively unscathed. I was lucky to get a flight from Moscow to Vienna, and lucky to get a Eurostar ticket. Between was a very straightforward train ride. It helped that I was on a business trip, so I could use a corporate credit card and sort it all out later. (Not that anyone was really ripping people off, even Eurostar wasn’t ridiculously expensive…)

I do feel bad for people that were caught in much worse situations (sleeping in airports for days, etc.). When stuff like this happens, a WiFi or 3G connection and good communications (from Lufthansa!) are like gold dust.

Total flight time: ~2.5 hours (Russia, Austria)
Total train time: ~14 hours (Austria, Germany, Belgium, France, UK)

Here’s my journey (from Vienna onward) on a map:

View Larger Map

Postscript – My colleague

I was in Moscow with a colleague that was (and still is) trying to get back to Dublin. By the time his flights were officially cancelled there weren’t any others leaving. He managed to catch an overnight sleeper train from Moscow to Helsinki, which I understand was filled with drunken Russians playing dance music all night long. He’s still in Helsinki, but happy to at least be in a city where lots of people speak English and the Euro is the currency! Hopefully he’ll be coming back soon….

As of about six weeks ago I started working full time with Google as a Strategic Partner Manager, in the EMEA Reseller team. It’s been fun, exciting, and a lot of work and material to learn and (hopefully) master in quite a short amount of time.

If you’re curious what “Reseller” means at Google, here are a couple of links:

• The Reseller program description
• A YouTube video pitched at potential new Resellers

Finally, a disclaimer: The views and opinions I post here on my blog are mine, mine alone, and not those of my employer. I don’t (and wouldn’t presume to) speak for Google. (And no, I can’t talk about any cool new stuff that hasn’t been released. Most of the time I only find out about it when it’s released, anyway.)

It’s going to take a while before I get back to posting regularly, but I’ll eventually find the time.

But let’s face it, exercise isn’t easy. If you’re pushing yourself, it’s pretty painful. Rowing, for example, at any sort of serious level involves legs and lungs feeling like they’re on fire. It’s great to win, but it can be a tremendous sacrifice to get there. Because it’s not easy to do, it becomes easy to skip. And once you start skipping exercise, you can pretty rapidly lose fitness.

One solution is either getting involved in exercise classes (anonymous and generally not tailored to your needs) or seeing a personal trainer (expensive). A personal trainer can sometimes be trying to mold you into what they want you to be, and not what you want.

If you’re in London, there’s a new solution. Two friends of mine and LondonAnnie have established a new Personal Training company that’s specifically geared to what YOU want to do in life: Point2Fitness. For older people, that might mean being more active with their grandchildren. With others, it may mean training to become an Olympic athlete or climb Everest.

The two founders, Baz and Carla, are World-class athletes themselves. (They won bronze in the 2007 Rowing World Championships in addition to World Cups, Olympics, and more.) LondonAnnie in particular has seen and experienced them in action, as they are long-time members of Thames Rowing Club, and have been experimenting with new fitness routines at the club recently.

Please check out the Point2Fitness website and look into it! Baz and Carla are both talented athletes themselves but also incredibly down-to-earth and focused on making their customers happy and their business a success. It’s great to see what international-level athletes are able to do with their careers when they choose to stop competing, and I wish them the best of luck!

(I particularly like that all of the photos were taken in/around Thames Rowing Club; it’s a very professionally produced website.)

The best way to describe it is through this short YouTube video:

Now go sign up for Twitter and then follow me.

I was against Twitter at the beginning because of Kathy Sierra’s influence. Her post (circa 2006) pointed out that if you’re trying to achieve “flow” in your work Twitter can be quite detrimental as friends’ updates will always be interrupting you.

But I’ve found that when I need to I can just turn off the Twitter application. When I don’t need to achieve that flow it’s interesting to listen in to what friends and others are discussing. If you’ve got a lot of followers, then they can serve as quite a good group to “crowdsource” questions to! (I’ve seen people asking for advice on office space, restaurants, and more.)

In the end, I highly encourage you at least try it out. If you’re on Facebook you can link any Twitter updates you send to your Facebook status, so you only have to type your “status” once and have it link everywhere. Nice…

We’re just down the road a bit from our old place. For the same rent we’ve got a much bigger flat that even has a view of the river. It’s a 2 bedroom, which means it will be much easier for family and friends to stay with us, too. (Hint!) It’s not for the superstitious… we’re #13 on our road in SW13.

Unfortunately, moving around the holidays means that our internet won’t get hooked up until sometime in January, and none of our neighbors has an unlocked wireless signal. Unless I can get Netshare up and running on my iPhone soon, don’t expect much posting from me until after my exams in January.

But Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year to everyone. I hope 2009 is even better than 2008 for you all.

Last year I rowed for Thames Rowing Club; this year I rowed for my Cambridge college crew (Jesus College Boat Club). The race went okay, but wasn’t spectacular. Our crew had little time to practice together, so the actual race was about our third outing as a boat. A couple of the guys had never experienced the “Tideway” conditions on the Thames, and they were fairly brutal yesterday. (Pouring rain in the last five minutes or so of a 20+ minute race doesn’t make for happy rowers.) But at least we finished without any disasters. It’s a good step toward the real goal of college crews: Lent and May bumps races on the River Cam.

In other rowing news, Cambridge did quite well against Oxford in the Fours Head, winning pennants in both the Elite 4+ and the Senior2 4+ categories. And I’m happy to say that the Thames women won the Women’s Senior2 4+ pennant!

There’s something else I’ve been meaning to mention for a while… it’s a bit of an oddity of our MBA class. In a class of 150 people, there are four couples! (Where both partners are enrolled in the MBA.) The Times did a bit of an article on them titled “Lessons in love for high-flyers.” Note that the Kate and Peter they discuss are not the same as this Katie and Peter.

I forgot to mention that about a week and a half ago Jesus College had a Matriculation Dinner for all of the new graduate students this year. It was quite an affair; black tie with gowns was the dress code. I grabbed a quick picture of the table and table settings. When I saw that each of us had five knives, four forks and a spoon and was a candlelight dinner, it was obvious this was certainly a special Cambridge type of event.