Poison Reviews

Reviews, tasting notes and information:

Whisky - Whisky Magazine : Whiskies of the World, The Scotch Blog
Bourbon - Straightbourbon.com
Rum - Ministry of Rum
Beer - The Oxford Bottled Beer Database
Cigars - Top 25 Cigar

Forest

Thursday night is apparently live music night at the Forest Café, this week's event being billed as "electronica with Hill & Johnson." I went along not knowing what to expect—after all, "electronica" can mean anything from Dune through to Passenger of Shit. As it turns out, Messers Hill and Johnson take a pretty broad view of the term too, as their work spanned a range of styles, encompassing dreamy ambient, akin to Boards of Canada and uplifting beat heavy IDM, with a little breakbeat thrown in for a good measure. While they set up their equipment, the support act, a solo guitarist, played a nice set of pleasingly warm accoustic; a welcome opening after the chilly gale blowing outside.

I enjoyed the evening, and the Forest makes a welcome change from the kind of music venues I normally frequent. Lounging on a sofa to chilled out aural wallpaper is something I'll have to do again some time. The bring your own bottle policy doesn't extend to whisky, but I snarfed some bottles of ale from the Vicky Wines round the corner on a four for £5 deal.

martling also happened to be there, working on an event for the Science Festival that he is involved in. He gave me a quick and rather impressive demonstration of his work. The event concerns the use of speckled computing (Martin's research subject at Uni) for motion capture. In this case, the motion capture of break dancers. Specks are single chip computers that communicate over a multicast wireless network to perform tasks that require samples from or provide output across an expansive environment. The specks here are fitted with accelerometers and magnetometers (digital compasses), and are being used to measure rotational velocity. In other words, how quickly the dancers can spin on their heads.

Sounds like fun.

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Note to self: The Filmhouse box office opens at noon.