Neil

Well he has pled guilty, so...

As posted by @Flash@TMB "Grassroots live music venues are an important aspect of our city's culture. We need to convince the council and its relevant departments to adopt the Agent of Change Principle for Live Music Venues, in order to afford these places protection from the noise complaints that frequently threaten their existence. The UK as a whole has lost some 40% of it's grassroots music venues in the past decade alone. Where someone builds a brand new venue, from scratch, or suddenly starts holding gigs, then any noise complaints are entirely foreseeable, and it should be the operators responsibility to soundproof their premises. Where any new residential accommodation is built in the vicinity of an existing venue, then the developer should be forced to install sufficient soundproofing, and to remedy this should it ever prove insufficient. Existing buildings, which have showcased live music for many years, should be designated as music venues, and afforded a degree of protection. If a significant noise issue arises, then provided the operator can demonstrate that they have taken every reasonable step to remedy and limit the nuisance, the venue should be given cultural dispensation, and the affected resident(s) perhaps offered a grant to add additional soundproofing to their propertie(s). Where the 30dBA threshold could not ultimately be achieved then a pragmatic solution must be found to keep the venue open. While there is a movement to adopt the Agent of Change Principle at both Scottish and UK level, this may come too late (if ever) for some of the city's venues. Furthermore Agent of Change is something that the city council can choose to implement at a local level." Sign the petition: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/302/699/354/adopt-the-agent-of-change-principle-for-live-music-venues-at-a-local-level/

Thanks @ca_gere!

All, A very overdue upgrade has now been made to the web site. Some elements are still a work in progress (e.g. the site still needs a new logo) and no doubt a number of configuration changes and bugs need addressed, but for the most part everything should be working. The forum software is still the same product as before but as you can see this latest version of the software changes the look and feel quite considerably and adds a whole load of new features. If anyone has any problems or questions then please reply here and I'll do my best to address them. Thanks for your patience!

"After almost 10 amazing years at 1 Union St, it is with deep sadness and regret we must announce that Snafu & The Athenaeum look like they will be closing their doors for the final time. Despite our best efforts, the two businesses can no longer sustain themselves in the current economic climate. Things are not to be." Full announcement on their Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/clubsnafu.aberdeen?hc_location=timeline

Needless to say, everyone has to vote for aberdeen-music or they'll be banned.

Just a friendly reminder that registering multiple user accounts in order to make multiple votes is against the rules of the site. All user registrations are manually validated (which can take up to 24 hours I'm afraid) and I have and will continue to delete user accounts registered for this purpose. Please lets keep this vote fair, thank you.

Tempting...

Yup, most of the posts are made by humans in Indonesia. They are presumably paid pennies by this guy to go through the process of registering multiple accounts and making the posts, one-by-one. It's a fairly common problem on a lot of forums. I'm looking into simply blocking users based in specific countries from accessing the web site in order to prevent this from happening. I figure that not many people in Indonesia, China, Pakistan etc. need to be able to post on these forums...

This will come with the next version of the forum software.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1058136871/daemons-fram/posts/596114

It doesn't make mistakes, people adding the events to Songkick (presumably promoters and fans) are making the mistakes. If there is a mistake though, then just report the post and I'll correct it. Unless Songkick start hosting music discussion forums for Aberdeen then I'm not concerned with directing traffic to their site through this. If anything, I hope the additional gig listings originating from Songkick might will spur more discussion. Promoters can still post there own info up there like before, but as you can see not many promoters are doing this hence why there is a considerable number of events being posted from Songkick that haven't been mentioned anywhere on aberdeen-music. I think that's a good thing, not a bad thing (as long as the events are in and around Aberdeen of course!) That said, if people don't want this then I'm happy to remove it. What do other folks think?

I renamed it from Songkick to make it clearer that it isn't actually a user account. Don't really see how affects the quality of the forum. We've had new threads being automatically posted from the events calendar for years now. It's just the feed from Songkick that's new.

Bellahouston Park is in Glasgow, not Paisley.

P.S. I know about the broken HTML in the Songkick events as well - I'm working on a fix for that...

There should at least always be a date as otherwise the event couldn't be added to the calendar and so wouldn't also appear in the forums. Unfortunately, all we're doing is taking a copy of the events added to Songkick for Aberdeen and so if people post an event without the relevant details in Songkick (although I have no idea why people would do this) then that's what will also appear on here. I'll look at making this more intelligent somehow. Maybe filter out events with no venue etc. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

Which ones have no date or venue?

I can only speak for IT and from my own personal experience, but I found it reasonably easy to move away from doing IT in Oil & Gas (which I did for nearly 11 years) to now doing IT in the Public Sector. They are industries out there that aren't a million miles away from Oil & Gas and can offer a good stepping stone to moving into other areas. The first that comes to my mind is working in the Utilities sector and that's what I did for a few years after Oil & Gas and before moving over to the Public Sector. Would I be earning more money if I stayed in Aberdeen and Oil & Gas? Yes, absolutely (probably about 10-20% more), but that's not what motivates me at this moment in time in terms of my career. I think if you were involved more in the traditional engineering disciplines (e.g. mechanical/electrical) and used to working offshore (which I never did) then I imagine it would be considerably more difficult to move industry. That said, remember Oil & Gas is global. If your desire is just to move away from Aberdeen for example, then you would still find your skills in demand in other locations around the world if a change of scenery is all you are after.

They are certainly IT jobs in Aberdeen that pay 35k+ (e.g. .NET developer / MS SQL DBA / other IT technology specialists) You wouldn't start on that though. I think you would need a minimum of 5 - 10 years professional experience in the relevant area of expertise before you could move into roles like these. A degree wouldn't necessarily be a requirement though, although certainly wouldn't harm your chances.

http://www.foobar2000.org/

And my thinking behind this is that it will reduce the need for people to manually add new events to the calendar (which they can still do of course) as well as help publicise gigs in Aberdeen people may have otherwise been unaware of.

It's an automated account I set-up that will automatically import events for Aberdeen from Songkick (http://www.songkick.com/metro_areas/24596-uk-aberdeen) and import them into the Events calendar. As it has been run for the first time then I'm afraid there is a rather large one-off (around 50) import of new events into the system, but from now on it will only import newly added events. It shouldn't post duplicates, but obviously if someone has manually added an event then it may also post the same event from Songkick. I'm going to go through and delete these duplicates when and where I find them.

Not at this time I'm afraid.

There is little point mining bitcoins now unless you have access to hundreds of computer's worth of processing power (or a botnet), as the amount of power you would be paying to keep your computer(s) on "mining" 24/7 will far exceed any bitcoin return. Good guide here though, for anyone interested in giving it a go: http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/08/how-to-mine-bitcoins/

Dave's going to be really upset.