January 19, 2009

Florence is a twenty one year-old art college drop-out from Camberwell, South London, a long pretty pale girl who makes up songs and sings them. The Machine is whoever’s standing nearby playing an instrument at the time. It’s a bit harder to define, the machine part. It’s just not exactly a person. It’s a sort of a machine. She’s been singing since pretty much forever. She was in the school choir, a few dodgy bands, had vocal lessons and such. She has all the necessary paperwork if you want to see it.

If you see her sing live you’ll forget paperwork and forget your name and maybe forget to breathe for a little while. Florence has a voice hewn from the rock and stamped in the gravel and shot out of a cannon into the middle of your chest. It cuts right into you and thrums. She also has almost as much stage presence as Hitler. She’s like a funny sexy popstar Hitler without the despotism and with more beautiful songs and the utmost love and respect for Jews and gays and gypsies.

Eat Your Own Ears email description of Florence and the Machine.

I ♥ Florence. She’s playing a headline show in London in May, you should go see if you can!

Florence & The Machine at Bloomsbury Ballroom, Victoria House, 37–63 Bloomsbury Square, London WC1B, 2009-05-27.

Tickets are on sale tomorrow. Despite being in America, I’m almost tempted to buy some anyway, just in case I can coincide a trip home or a conference or something.

Filed in Florence and the Manchine music concerts events

Tweet 0 Notes

December 6, 2008

Private Venues on Upcoming

Quick how-to on creating a maintaining secure ‘private venue’ on Upcoming.

You can create private venues on Upcoming, such that the address of your home or workplace is hidden from the public, but accessible to friends. However, it appears that as soon as you attach that ‘private’ venue to a public event, the details of it become public on the event’s page.

I regard this exposure as a bug (and will file it as such when I get to work on Monday), but you can work around it, and in many respects this is a far more robust way to manage your sensitive venues in a lightweight privacy implementation anyway:

Create an entry for your abode with the full address. Describe it as you want. Mark is as viewable to your friends only.
Create a second entry for your abode with a name, and ‘Private Venue’ as the street address. Include the correct city name if you’re willing, as that ensures your events will be grouped intothe correct metro, and let people immediately know if they’re going to be in the right town for your shindig. Make this venue public.
Set the URL field of this ‘Private Venue’ venue to point directly to the friends-only, full info version. (so, it points to a /venue/12345678 address).
Make the private venue discription explain that it’s a private listing and that the viewer must be on your friends list to see the full detail. Instruct them to click the venue URL to see the full details.

Only ever use the ‘Private Venue’ version on your events. The event listing will list ‘Ben’s Flat, Private Venue, San Francisco’ as the location. Clicking on it takes you to a venue page, showing a generic map of your city, the instructions you put in the description, and the link to the protected version.

Non-friends clicking the URL will get a sparse non-access page, friends who click it will see the full address and detailed map.

If you set the Private venue as the location of a public event, you will expose the address publicly, so always use the private version. I do think this is a bug in Upcoming, but I also think that keeping public/private versions of your content as discrete resources provides more comprehensible privacy management.

Filed in upcoming events privacy