Graham Holland (archived site)

I went to Bar Camp Liverpool on Friday 18th November, and for a couple of hours on Saturday morning 19th November. For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, a Bar Camp is an un-conference – that is, a conference without a pre-set schedule. The talks are given by the people who turn up. They add the name of their talk to a post-it and stick it in a free space on the schedule on the wall.

How To Podcast For Free

I was determined to get to this Bar Camp having missed the first one back in 2008(?). I was also determined to do a talk, so (hastily) prepared How To Podcast For Free. The number attending the event where low on Friday and there were only three people in for my talk. I did the same talk on Saturday morning and had a lot more there, which was encouraging.

I was asked by a number of people if I could make the slide available, so here they are. Just click on the image below to download it. I’ve added a few extra lines just so the slides without words actually make sense.

Has it really been 10 years since O Brother, Where Art Thou? was released?

Based loosely on Homer’s Odyssey, the Coen Brothers’ film, set in rural Mississippi during the Great Depression and starring George Clooney, became something of a cult hit.

The soundtrack, however, took on a life of its own and became a multi-platinum selling album, itself spawning a stage concert Down from the Mountain, which was subsequently turned into a movie and GRAMMY-winning album before taking to the road for a sell-out US tour. I bet Joel and Ethan didn’t expect all that when they came up with the original idea for the movie! This album was responsible for introducing millions of people around the world to old-time bluegrass and country music, and its effects are still being felt to this day.

To celebrate the 10th anniversary the surprise smash hit soundtrack album has been re-released with a second disc containing 14 extra tracks, 12 of which were recorded at the time but never made it into the movie or onto the soundtrack. Award-winning producer T-Bone Burnett was responsible for picking the tracks for the extra disc, choosing from the wealth of songs recorded in the original sessions for the movie and soundtrack.

It’s clear from the track listing that some songs were recorded by a number of different artists, leaving the producers to decide which to use in the film and which to ditch. This second disc is an opportunity to hear some of those tracks that didn’t make the cut. So we have Alan O’Bryant’s version of You Are My Sunshine, Van Dyke Park’s piano-only Big Rock Candy Mountain, I’ll Fly Away by The Kossoy Sisters with Erik Darling, The Cox Family singing Keep On The Sunny Side, In The Highways by The Cox Family, Norman Blake’s version of Big Rock Candy Mountain, and In The Jailhouse Now by Harley Allen, a song famously performed in the movie by The Soggy Bottom Boys.

Mixed between these alternate versions of tracks from the original soundtrack are songs that didn’t appear on the soundtrack or in the movie. Tishamingo Blues, an instrumental track by John Hartford featuring just fiddle and banjo, the wonderful unaccompanied chain gang-style Tom Devil, by Ed Lewis & prisoners (!), Norman Blake with a song Little Sadie, and the a-capella four-part harmony of The Fairfield Four singing the gospel song The Lord Will Make A Way.

The quality of performances on the new disc quickly dispels any thoughts that it might just be full of rejects, and none of them would have been out of place in the movie. The fact that some were picked over others can only be down to artistic reasons – with the producers choosing those they felt fitted better. Given those tough decisions were made over 10 years ago, I’m glad that we finally get to hear the fine alternatives.

The 10th Anniversary Deluxe Edition is available to buy from Amazon as a physical CD and and a digital download.

(c) Graham Hollland 2011

There’s a first time for everything, I suppose.

I’ve had one of my social media accounts hacked for the first time ever, and I’m a little annoyed that I got caught out. But with this phishing scam using twitter, it just shows how easy it is for the scammers to set it up and how easy it is for us mugs to fall for it.

This is how the current scam works.

You receive a Direct Message (DM) or a status update along the lines of this one.

You’re curious, so you click on the link and it takes you to this website.

You think it’s just twitter playing up again so you add your user name and password and try to sign in.

What you didn’t notice, however, is that the website you’ve just given your username and password to IS NOT TWITTER!

Have a look at the web address to see.

Did you spot that it wasn’t twitter when you first went to this site? No, neither did I. The website looks exactly like the twitter sign-in page, and the address ltwltter.com is close enough to twitter.com for most people not to notice.

And the first thing you’ll know about it is when you start receiving lots of messages from other people to tell you that your account has been hacked!

So, the lesson is…

If you click on a link and it takes you to a website (any website) that asks you for your user name and password, ALWAYS check the URL web address. 

I bought the grahamholland.co.uk domain name as soon as it became available back in 1998. Previously it had been owned by a Ferguson Tractor enthusiast in Norfolk who ended up moving his website to something more appropriate (I think it has the words ‘ferguson’ and ‘tractor’ in the name).

After getting my hands on the domain I set it up as a rather static site based around my podcasting, with links to my itsafrogslife.net homepage, and a list of other Graham Holland’s around the world. It wasn’t very interesting…

However, now that I have to make my own way in the world (redundancy does that to you) I’ve decided to use it as my main website, with information about all the things I’m really good at and enjoy doing, and links to my various outposts online. The hope is that someone might see it and decide to pay me to (a) do some e-learning stuff in their school, (b) build and run their website, (c) run their music event or handle the PR, or (d) produce podcasts for them.

I’ve started using LinkedIn a lot more of late, and have taken some of the recommendations that people have left for me and added them to this site. In this I take Captain Edmund Blackadder (from Blackadder Goes Forth) as my inspiration.

Lieutenant George: I don’t like blowing my own trumpet.

Captain Blackadder: You might have at least told us you had a trumpet.

I’m using WordPress as the platform and Wise Business as the theme. I’ve just about got it up and running, although I need to do a bit of php editing (yawn) to get the home page looking right, and have to work out how some of the other features work. I have to work out how to change things like “Clients that love us” to “Clients that love me” (or something a little less pretentious) [done], and how to add a LinkedIn logo and link next to the twitter and facebook logos at the bottom [done, with facebook link removed].

I’m also going to try to blog on a regular basis. I used to have a regular blog during the time when I was living and working in Taiwan back in 2004/5, with some of the content making its way onto the It’s A Frog’s Life In Taiwan site. I blogged about the culture, the food, our trips, and enjoyed writing reviews of the many books I read. I had every intention of continuing it when I came back to the UK by changing it first into a blog about Liverpool, then into an extra shownotes page for my new podcast. Neither worked out in the end.

So that’s where I’m up to at the moment. The website is a work in progress, but at least I’ve got one that looks (or will look) pretty good and is easy for me to update.