Observer on Third

Enthusiastic piece on Portishead in today's Observer. The article kicks off with a rhapsodic take on the new album:

It's stunning stuff. And this is just the opening number. Later on, once Third (for that is the title: it is, after all, Portishead's third album - well, if you don't count the live one) is properly up and running, it features a run of five or six songs which are not just worthy of the records this band were making 10 or even 14 years ago, but feel like the sonic destination which they were always meant to arrive at.

Sounds promising.

Slowly moving iTunes

In a pathetic attempt to free up some space on my internal disc, I decided to move my iTunes library off on to a NAS disc. It seemed like simplicity itself: simply tell iTunes to organise the files for me, set a new library directory and run a consolidate. But there was a wrinkle: the less than stellar performance of NFS.

According to my calculations, based on actual IO rates rather than hopelessly over-optimistic guesstimates, the move is going to require 16 hours to complete. Shocking. I think I need to spend some time with a benchmarking program tuning the NFS buffer sizes. Or maybe I'll just overnight it.