It looks like Facebook ads are about to get much more obnoxious. We're talking huge, bandwidth-sucking full-motion video ads along the side of your page ( Read more... )

It has been a while since I posted one of these.

Below are 10 lyrics from songs. For each one, if you know the artist and song title, post them in your comment.
( The quiz )

Last night, I made a return to putting gigs on. So far, a once-off, though there may well be more gigs in the future.
I put on a gig by Laura Macfarlane (of Ninetynine), as well as Hong Kong In The 60s and Hissing At Swans, at the Betsey Trotwood in Clerkenwell. It went splendidly, despite getting off to an inauspicious start.

We had a sound ( Read more... )

I'm back in London now, having returned this morning from Indie Tracks.

Sunday's weather was, alas, nowhere near as nice as Saturday's. starting ominously grey and proceeding to rain. I slept in a bit, and then went to the site, catching the start of The School's set, but then bailing to see The Marshmallow Kisses. The School are, of course, the ( Read more... )

Yesterday, Colin Clary of The Smittens ran a songwriting workshop. I arrived a bit late, due largely to the train schedule along the line not quite syncing up with the event schedule, but it was good. He took ideas and suggestions from the crowd and started writing various songs with them, playing them on guitar, with people contributing lyric ( Read more... )

I saw what will almost certainly be my last ever Lucksmiths gig last night.* And my second-last-ever one the night before.

They played at the Luminaire on Tuesday night, and the Scala last night. The audience was a mixture of expatriate Australians (not the bogans you find here who consider JJJ to be "alternative", the good ones) and the usual ( Read more... )

I'm currently in beautiful brutalist Birmingham at EuroPython. So far, I have seen a talk on RjDj, a platform for making generative/algorithmic music (which is based on Pure Data), which looked very interesting. And just now, I saw Cory Doctorow's keynote, where he gave a comprehensive overview of metaclass design patterns in Django. Actually, I ( Read more... )

I've recently gotten into the habit of going for evening walks, typically after eating dinner. Which is easy enough to do in the midsummer, when the sun sets shortly before 10, and one often has a glorious sunset, or at least the wistful poignancy of the day's last rays, beckoning one out of one's room and into the streets. Which, I guess, is one ( Read more... )

Whilst travelling through Australia in February, I found, as one does, that the total weight of my baggage kept increasing. As such, I stepped into the post offices in a number of places (Melbourne, Glebe, Narooma (NSW) and Bulimba (Brisbane)), packaged up my surplus belongings and mailed them back to the UK ( Read more... )

This just arrived in the mail:

HELLO BUYER?
WE ARE AMERICAN CLUB BASED IN PHILPPINES,WE ARE EXPOTER OF COCAINE I.E WE SELL COCAINE TO ANY OF OUR INTERESTED CUSTOMERS AROUND THE GLOBE.IF YOU ARE INTRESETED TO ORDER THE PRODUCT PLEASE KINDLY CONTACT OUR SHIPPING AGENT FOR YOUR DELIVERY.WE WANT TO KNOW HOW YOU WANT THE PRODUCT TO BE DELIEVER TO ( Read more... )