I realised that Movable Type – the content management system I use for this blog thing – had been updated, so being a good drone I installed the update. Hurrah, I got new features and stuff. I also began messing around with the standard templates that came with MT and settled on this little number. OK – it’s not that visually exciting but it means I can do diddley squat and let the system update itself. No more HTML, hurrah!
For my regular visitor, you will be interested to know that you can now leave comments on this weblog. I never had it activated before (the dummy) but now you can use it, so feel free to hurl your abuse.
Yesterday, I managed to blow-up (not literally) The Missus’ computer. I think the heat got to it and it just stopped working. So today, I took it apart, cleared the CMOS and voila it works again. I was worried something had blown before because it wouldn’t boot at all. A night cooling down and clearing the system memory worked wonders. Gee, I am a real PC expert – shame I’m finding it harder to get magazines to commission me some more. The pond is getting smaller while the fish have nowhere to go. It’s a bit like one of those watering holes in the Serengheti – when the dry season comes the fish die because the water evaporates. That’s a bit like being a freelancer at the moment. Of course, it’s probably because I am a bad writer and no-one likes my work. It’s so hard to tell because you get zero feedback. What I do know is that getting work isn’t about what you know, but who you know…and this sucks big time because the people I know aren’t in a position to commission me. Oh well – mustn’t fucking grumble. 🙂
In the garden, Alex returned from under a bush with a little green gritter on his back. Yes – it was a baby grasshopper/cricket. Look –
In the post: Archer McClean’s Mercury – a puzzle game for my Sony PSP, which involves negotiating a blob of mercury around a course. Clever and addictive stuff.
Category: Diary
The cottage industry that is Darren Lock Incorporated has been busy producing copies of “Sow’s Ears & Silk Purses” for CDBABY. As the title is soooo popular (well, more popular than the rest of my CDs) I’ve pulled out all the stops and sending off 20 copies. That should keep me in stock for six months or so. 😉
Look…loads of Darren boxsets:
Last week, when we were on a mission to buy door handles, a friendly grasshopper hitched a lift all the way from the Homebase in Harlow to our doorstep in Loughton. He remained on the windscreen for the entire journey and was quite a distraction. I grabbed a container and took this picture of him before letting him go. He was such an attractive specimen I had to get a picture of him. I’m going to add him to my amazing rotating random banners at the top of the screen!
It’s funny because I keep hearing cricket/grasshopper sounds when I stand in the front/back garden. Maybe it is my little green chum???
Yesterday, I received an email from the PR lady who is working for Leo Abrahams thanking me for the nice things I have been saying about his album “Honeytrap”. That was nice. I don’t usually get any thanks, nor acknowledgement. It was nothing really. I’ve been planning to write a proper review of the album because it is really something special and people need to hear about it. Then we’ll give them something to thank me for!
Let’s see how people have been finding the site this month:
1 nookie bear
2 ashbory
3 darren lock
4 darren bass
5 export from minidisc
6 hammill blog
7 6 bounder song
8 ashbory bass
9 1ashbory strings
10 ashbory uk
11 copy you music cd.two my pc
12 darren lake coldplay
13 darren lock video
14 darren styles – take off mp3
15 darren’s blog blogspot
16 darren’s stuff furry
17 david tennant erotic ice cream
18 drummer
19 female saxophonists
20 housework buff
As you can see, Nookie Bear is still holding strong but the ashbory bass is also faring well in our top 20. It’s funny how people get here, isn’t it?
The sun came out and we spent the last two days involved in Bacchanalian pursuits. Luckily, the hangovers were slight and the drunkeness minor. Hurrah! It’s good to flex the booze muscle once in a while.
Visited the local Woolworths recently and was impressed by the number of Sony PSP games being released on Thursday. It seems that Sony is making much more of an effort for the European release than it did for the US one and Nintendo did for Europe. Man, I might have to smash open my piggybank. Yes, yes, I know it is sad for a 34 year old to play computer games but I only play for half an hour or so when I am in bed to send me off to sleep. If I’m not reading, I am having a quick game of golf. So that makes it OK, OK? 🙂
Do you ever get a twitchy eye? I do when I’ve been using the PC too much. Got a twitchy right eye at the moment and it is driving me nuts. The booze didn’t manage to cure it. Now I am walking around with my right eye closed to rest it, so I am typing this with my one good eye.
In the post: Scenic – Sage EP & Curb Your Enthusiasm Series 4 on DVD.
The theme of the day: door handles.
With DIY giant “Homebase” offering a 10% discount, me and The Missus decided to grab some cheap brass door handles for the newly-repainted doors I had finished several weeks ago. (Yes, we’ve been living in a house without door handles all this time, which suits Alex the Wonderdog just fine as he doesn’t have to ask us to ease his passage through the house as the handleless doors upstairs are left ajar).
We purchased some handles and brass keyhole covers, but it turns out they were the wrong size. Not a problem, we returned them. However, we’d managed to make a mistake when buying the replacement handles and needed to replace them again. Ho, ho, ho. Back to Homebase again. This is why I don’t do DIY – because I am a moron. The devil is in the detail. Anyway, handles are fitted to doors and I can now have a movement with the door closed – so that’s my fun spoilt!
Keeping with the door theme, a joke.
Q. When’s a door not a door?
A. When it’s ajar!
I love those old jokes.
Also yesterday, we’ve been splashing the cash and bought a new radio for the kitchen. The radio reception in our area is “piss-poor” – trust me, that’s a technical term and in order to enjoy the various broadcasts out there, we decided to finally invest in a new player. So we bought a DAB one. DAB or Digital Audio Broadcast is digital radio and so there’s no hiss, cracks, pops or farts. However, you STILL have to get a good signal for the thing to work so this involved me trailing the wire antenna behind the kitchen shelves. It’s a very nice unit though and I thoroughly recommend it especially for all those “new” stations you would normally need the Internet to access such as BBC Radio 6 and 7. The purchase of this new sound system gave me an excuse to terrorise The Missus with my own music on CD over a cup of tea. Ah…in sickness and in health, for poorer and poorer, with good music and bad…It’s good to have a captive audience.
Talking of audiences…are you a musician and ever wanted to shoot your audience? Well now you can with the MIDI Gun. Those crazy kids…I remember when MIDI devices had black and white keys.
Meanwhile, while out shopping yesterday, I realised that my entire personality is based on TV catchphrases gleaned from watching too much TV. My current favourite TV show is the comedy programmed “The Mighty Boosh”, which can only be described as “The Goodies” on hallucinatory chemicals. And so I have been wandering around saying things like:
“My legs are my best feature. I have the legs of a young antelope.”
“You’re ‘aving a larf. This is an outrage.”
“I’m old Gregg. Wanna drink Baileys from a shoe? Wanna go to a party where people wee on each other? I love you…I wanna hurt you.”
Etc.
I desperately, urgently need to get a life. The past three years of captivity has softened my credentials somewhat.
Anyway, you watch episodes of “The Mighty Boosh” courtesy of the BBC website…you know where to go. Just look in the TV section and you’ll find them there episodes. It’s all part of the BBC’s digital strategy to get TV shows online. Bravo, say I, but ditch the crappy RealMedia and make so we can download them and watch them on our widescreen TVs when we want to. Afterall, we DO actually pay for all those TV shows…so techincally they belong to us. 😉
It’s sunny, then it rains, then it hails, then there’s thunder and lightning and then it is sunny. All in a matter of a couple of hours…this weather is confusing me. I’ve taken off/put on my jumper a couple of times today. Crazy!
Finished a track called “Crash” because it is just that…a car crash. It was based on an older track I didn’t finish last year and sounds like a song I would have recorded in 2001. Oh well, I doubt it will ever make it onto a CD, but here you go:
I actually got a blister on my finger playing the bass to this. Now I’ve been noodling on the bass since I was 17 and now I get a blister. Crazy!
Another wet and windy day. Brrr…
Worky work work work.
Read today that K-9 is returning to Dr Who. For those of you who don’t know, his character is a robot dog. Dogs are cool and robots are cool, so some kind of robot dog is ultra cool. However, K-9 isn’t quite as cool as the Sony AIBO but he was the granddaddy of all mechanical mutts. Unfortunately, time hasn’t been kind to K-9 and he’s all rusty and battered.
Poor old K-9!
Last night, I watched a TV documentary about how a boy orchestrated his own attempted murder on the Internet. It was interesting to me because in 1997 I wrote a novel about the Internet called “Moofed” and one of the story strangs in it features a character that seeks out someone to kill them. I realise that I was ahead of my time. Here’s a review/explanation of the case snipped from the Guardian website:
Oh my God, did you see Kill Me If You Can (Channel 4) last night? That’s how many workplace conversations will be starting this morning, I reckon. Watercooler TV, I think it’s called, though I don’t like the phrase. If you missed it, it went something like this.
Boy goes on internet, meets girl in chatroom. They chat, flirt, do cybersexing, fall in love. They never meet, even though they both live in Manchester (it’s a chatroom for Manchester young people).
New people come into chatroom. A 14-year-old boy (first boy is 16), an evil stalker and Janet Dobinson. Evil stalker kidnaps the first boy’s girlfriend and kills her. The boy is very upset, but new boy is there for him and they become best friends. Soon boy is over his kidnapped, dead girlfriend. Boy and best friend actually meet, hang out together, go to Trafford Centre in their hoodies. Janet Dobinson sounds interesting – at 44, much older, but attractive still. She turns out to be the third most powerful woman in Britain – she works for MI5 as a spy mistress and is in the chatroom to recruit new agents. She recruits boy. Boy is told he will meet the Queen and Tony Blair, earn £80m and have lots of sex with sexy Janet Dobinson. Boy is very excited, especially by the last bit. Kidnapped, dead girlfriend now totally forgotten.
Boy is given a very important job: to protect a VIP called James Bell who’s worth £568bn to Britain. James Bell, happily, turns out to be best friend. So boy protects best friend for good of country, but also because he wants to meet the Queen, earn £80m and have lots of sex with spymistress Janet Dobinson. Then a new order comes in from Janet Dobinson: kill James Bell. Boy has to kill best friend. He buys a kitchen knife and sticks it deep into best friend’s stomach.
Best friend doesn’t die but is very badly injured, in intensive care for a month. Boy is arrested, and tells police he is an agent working for MI5. Police take the boy’s computer, find all the chatroom stuff. Police notice something funny: all the other people make the same spelling mistakes, so they’re all the same person. Only one of them is real: best friend. So best friend is also girlfriend, evil stalker and Janet Dobinson. He took his friend for big whopping ride, but also ordered his own murder…
It’s all a bit far fetched, I know: “Skilled writers of fiction could not have come up with this,” is what the judge at the trial said. That right: the judge, at the trial. Because this wasn’t drama, it was documentary. Those things REALLY HAPPENED to two young boys in Manchester, neither of whom could be named. It’s hard to know what to be more astonished at – the gullibility of the first boy, or the extraordinary plot cooked up by his 14-year-old best friend, a plot that was supposed to culminate in his own murder. I think at his age I was just getting into conkers.
They’re free now, and both doing well, we’re told. More important, they’re not allowed near computers unsupervised, which is good news for everyone really.
This film didn’t have much to make it visual – there were interviews with the boys’ solicitors, a couple of child actors walking around Manchester, shots of the Trafford Centre, a seductive Janet Dobinson, looking sultry on Vauxhall Bridge in front of the MI5 building. But it didn’t really matter, the whole thing was so utterly jaw-dropping, you hardly noticed.
The Internet is a strange place, populated by strange people. How do I know? Because I am one of them. No, seriously. The Internet is a place where you can take risks you wouldn’t normally take in real life, it is a place where you can be anyone you want, it is a place of fact and fiction. I’ve met a few people who aren’t what they seem via the Net and if I had children I certainly wouldn’t let them use it unsupervised. There are many people who want to exploit you on the net, either sexually, financially, emotionally or mentally. Luckily, these people make up on 1% of Webusers, but you still have to be careful.
Meanwhile, there’s some very interesting commentary going on at the Iron Maiden website. Apparently, at a Ozzfest gig at the weekend, the band were pelted on stage with bottles and eggs and had their PA cut off several times. The perpetrators? Well it was old ma Sharon “When they did the surgery they threw away the wrong bits” Osbourne and the Ozzfest stage crew. Read what Iron Maiden’s manager said about the event by clicking here.
Useless fact of the day: I went to the same school as Steve Harris, the bass player with Iron Maiden. Wow…what trivia… 🙂
And before I forget, Goldie Lookin’ Chain have a new single coming out called “Your Missus is a Nutter”. Well it made me laugh.