On Saturday night I saw The Cat Empire playing at the opening of the Festival of Perth. On the way home we were discussing what genre they fall into. It isn't easy. The Festival website talks about the jazzy, reggafied, cubanist, gypsified, sambarised, hip hopping grooves of The Cat Empire. That just about sums it up. They were playing at the Perth Concert Hall Verandah, the large outdoor balcony on the south side of the Concert Hall. It was the perfect venue for a warm summer evening, with a view of the river and celebratory fireworks.

I thoroughly enjoyed their show. They started around 8:30pm and played for about an hour. After a break of 20 minutes or so, they came back for a second set that finished at 11:30pm. I find some of their songs a bit uninspiring on their CD, but I didn't find that at all during their show. Every track they played was fantastic, with the highlight for me being the 15 minute version of Hello.

An MP3 of their first single Hello is available from The Cat Empire website. If you haven't heard them before, I recommend giving it a listen.

Reception venues

On Sunday we had a drive around looking at reception venues. It was a worthwhile expedition. We visited four potential venues, and there was one that clearly stood out as the favourite for both of us. And the winner is Rosehill Country Club Padbury Stables. There's a small photo on the bottom left of that webpage, I'll post my own (better) photos in a day or two.

We also had a quick look at some churches. I'm not keen on the idea of a church wedding, but my fiancée was considering it. After looking at the Catholic churches in Bassendean and Guildford, she's no longer considering it. They look really poor from the outside. The Anglican church in Guildford looks a bit better, but apparently it's not possible to change religion on a whim. Except sometimes it is. My mum, for example, turned into a Baptist. But I digress. We decided that the ceremony should also be held at Rosehill.

It's amazing how far in advance one has to book a wedding. We're looking for a date in March 2005, and already two of the four Saturdays have bookings.

Gentoo Linux

I've been using Gentoo for a while now. It's going ok, but I'm still discovering the occasional quirk. For example, my harddrive consists of a small root partition and a large partition that holds the majority of the filesystem (namely /usr, /home, /opt/, /var and /tmp). In Debian I had each of these on a separate partition, but I misjudged some of them which led to an uneven distribution of free space. This time I had a single partition, then symlinked /usr, /home, etc to directories on this partition. Gentoo doesn't like that. When installing packages, it sometimes complains of sandbox access violation errors.

Also, I've recently discovered that the emerge program (used to install and update packages) doesn't check for dependencies unless it's used with the -u option. For example, emerge python will quite happily install an updated version of python without the db package that it depends on. Subsequently, Gentoo doesn't like that either.