Apparently this is my 500th entry to this weblog. I am not sure if I have any loyal readers anymore. Scouring the stats, it seems I might have scared them all away. Good. Anyway, for anyone who remains, here’s some crazy playing that will, I guarantee, send you mad if you watch it to the end. Enjoy!
http://xyzwebdesign.com/sanbass/sanbass.swf
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Alex the Wonderdog has no respect for the expensive devices in his master’s home studio
Yup – that heavyweight hound is using a Roland V-Bass unit as a custom doggy pillow and a Korg Pandora PX4A acoustic processor as a canine back support.
Or visit my YouTube page.
At the end of last month, I had a good old fashioned whinge about our new, scummy next-door neighbours. Yes, I am sure that under the layers of dirt and grease that they are really nice blokes, but I predicted that it wouldn’t be long before there would be a car engine in the front garden. Well what do I see this lunchtime???
Is that an engine I see before me?
I’m sorry, but this is all getting so fucking boring now. Why does life have to be so blooming-well predictable? Thanks to the local council, our future will be a mixture of car parts and spilt oil and I thank them for it from the bottom of my heart. Why can’t these people make the effort and keep their council-given property in a decent condition?
I know that a lot of money has been spent on the house next door putting in new double glazing and a new roof, all this work subsidised by the council tax I pay, so why can’t these ingrates meet us halfway and keep their property in a decent condition? Why? Because they don’t care. Because to them, the car is king. To them it is more important to have an oily engine in their front garden than to bother to put their rubbish out or mow the lawn or have a wash.
Oh god, I feel about 75 years old now, waving my walking stick and shaking my fist at the world in impotent fury. Why did they have to move in next door and scum up the place so quickly? Why couldn’t we have had a nice family who actually deserved the property? Because nice families go out to work and break their balls trying to make ends meet instead of riding the gravy train.
I give up, I really do give up.
At the weekend, the Missus and I endeavoured to clear out the cupboard under the stairs. It was a job that needed doing and one chore we’d put off for a long, long time. At the back of this cupboard was a large box and several full plastic carrier bags, the contents of which were the combined written output of us both. Sunday was spent making cuttings from the various magazines and today I finally finished the job. It is quite odd looking back and seeing all the various reviews and features you’ve written over the years – it’s like a flicker book of your professional life. Now I am thinking that I might start scanning these items and putting them on the site to create the ultimate shrine to my talents. 😉
Of course, I jest. Putting them on the site isn’t a chance to flex my ego but to show any potential employers that I have the necessary credentials and experience to write. It was never my idea to keep the mags in the first place, that was all The Missus’s idea – she likes the idea of keeping hold of that kind of stuff. So maybe I’ll start scanning and uploading pics in the near future. It’s going to be a quite a job.
This evening, I am gripped by a stomach cramp. Not had an attack for a while and can’t think why I am in so much pain. I’ve been eating well, not drinking and getting enough sleep. I am hoping that this is just a minor cramp and not one that lasts a couple of days, otherwise I might just stay in bed tomorrow. The pain truly is excrutiating.
In the post: Fat Boy Slim – Why Try Harder (LTD Edition with Bonus DVD). I only bought this because the video “Weapon of Choice” features the Marriott Downtown in LA, which I stayed at for my 30th birthday and the video was shot just a couple of months before. So it is kind of a nice memory of exploring that hotel. The music ain’t bad either and sometimes I have to indulge my dance itch. Right here, RIght now, indeed…
My dream life seems to be growing ever more vivid and I awoke this morning remember yet another persecution dream. In it, I was me but reality was all skewed and places and people were all mixed up, as dreams usually are. This turned out to be a recurring dream, or at least a continuation of a dream I had started in January. In it, an old man had been murdered. He was the husband of a fictitious neighbour and the murder had been some kind of mistake, a practical joke gone wrong. I was with the other two guys who had been respsonsible for his death and I was given the job of disposing of the body. And so I had dragged the corpse to some open ground, set it alight and buried the remains. I had done a good job of hiding the body and I had thought it was the perfect crime.
But that was in January, in my dream at least, or maybe I had dreamt that last night or dreamt some kind of flashback? I don’t know for sure. But the dream re-started with a knock on the door and a policeman entering the house, which was similar but different to my grandparent’s home. They were still alive and I was there with them. The policemen spoke about the disappearance of the man and then left.
I broke down and confessed to my grandparents as to what I had done and my level of involvement in the disappearance of the man. They looked on at me disapprovingly and said that they were digusted with me and that I was a disgrace. There was only one thing I could, they said, and that was to confess, to come clean to the cops. I spent the rest of the dream avoiding the interest of the police and then a letters came through the letterbox, a number of different letters, all with a different letter printed on them that spelt the word “CONFESS”. A free newspaper punctated the flood of envelopes and on the front page was an interview with the wife of the man who said how much she had missed him.
Then I realised what I needed to do. I picked up the phone and called the police. I said I would be there within the hour. I walked to the police station and sobbed all the way there, crying for the fact that I would lose my home, my wife and my liberty. Despite this sadness, I knew what I was doing was the right thing.
Then I woke up…and for the first time ever in the history of my dreaming I said quite loudly: “Thank god, it was just a dream” and I laughed. I spoke so loud that it woke the Missus and then I spent the next fifteen minutes describing the dream to her.
Today, at just after 2pm, I spoke to my sister on the phone. Her contact made me feel very special. She is a clever, sensitive and witty young lady. I like her a lot already. She is super-cool! My only regret was that we couldn’t talk longer. We only had 30 minutes, but that was enough for now, I guess. I don’t want to rush things although my heart says “Come on, stop beating around the bush, you big sissy!”. Sister, if you are reading this, you are great.
Tomorrow is the 25th anniversary of the Personal Computer or “PC”. Indeed, it was IBM that introduced the concept of the personal computer at the cheapest versions then would set you back $1,565, which is probably about the same amount of money it cost to send the first Space Shuttle into orbit. Of course, I jest. I remember my first experience of a PC. It was 1981 and I was at school. The class fell silent as the computer was wheeled into the room and, in pairs, we were allowed some private time with the new machine. The screen was green on black and the type a bit difficult to read. We played some kind of maths game with robots, it was pretty basic.
But I was hooked and a couple of years later, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum was launched in this country. OK – it wasn’t a personal computer as we know it, but it created a lot of computer geeks. I loved my ZX Spectrum and spent numerous hours typing computer games into the computer using the impossible rubber keyboard – I think this is what helped me develop my 60-words a minute typing speed. My touch typing has always been a skill of mine, but then I did have an electronic typewriter as a birthday present once. Typing out computer games from magazines, which always ended up as either being crap or didn’t work, seems incredible now. I can’t imagine the youth of today having the patience or intelligence to do it, but we did in those days because none of my peers had the disposable income to buy new games every week. Ooooh, the good old days, I am indeed becoming misty-eyed. My early teenage years was filled with computer games such as JetPac, Jet Set Willy and Sabre Wulf.
I used my Spectrum for everything and even wrote one of my first novels on it. I had a little Brother 9-pin printer that I’d use to print out my text and I even used it to create the centre spread of the College magazine using a primitive DTP application. That was the first co-production between myself and The Missus all those years ago. Cripes, I feel really old now.
Fast forward a couple of years and The Missus managed to convince her folks to give her the cash for our first proper PC to celebrate her 21st birthday. We trekked down to Morgan Computers off Tottenham Court Road and secured one of the job lot Wang computers they were flogging. Wang (don’t laugh at the back) had gone into liquidation and so their stock was being flogged at discount prices. I think it cost a few notes under £500, which was an impossible amount of money for us. We got an expensive cab home with all these large boxes and I spent hours setting the thing up.
In those days, PCs weren’t as much fun or useable as they are now. There were no CD-ROMs or DVDs or CD writers or fancy video card or even sound cards. You effectively had an expensive, silent computer and if you wanted it to do anything clever, you had to add bits on like accessories. So over time, I bought a sound card and upgraded bits of it and often spent hours when the Operating System went down. Windows 3.1 was useable to a level, but if memory serves correctly, if something went wrong you very often had to reiinstall the whole operating system from scratch. Oh what fun.
Over the years, the Wang got superseded and bits were salvaged to go on to create my subsequent machines. I’ve built my own PCs ever since because it is always been cheaper to upgrade. I’ve bought the odd cheap base unit, but often ripped out the guts and bastardised the thing to create my own model.
It’s funny how PCs would be integral to home life. When I was a kid I always knew that computers would be in every home, but I didn’t expect the Internet to be the catalyst to draw them in. Again, I was kind of there at the beginning when the Internet started to gain popularity in the UK in the mid-90s and I started using the net from about 1996 – so I have been online for a decade, cripes! I’ve been there and done it all. In the early days it was like the Wild West and the trick really was to avoid all the child and animal porn. Yes, one wrong click on the newsgroups and you’d find yourself looking at an image that would disturb your entire day. Thankfully, that’s all gone now.
I remember learning HTML from a big book, so that I could program my first own webpage. That’s what it was like – you had to buy books to learn how to use it. It was very difficult to find stuff on the net and Google was years away. Altavista was the search engine of choice and Mosaic was the browser. I remember being amazed by the early MSN webchat pages and made some online pals, but when I got my first stalker I have never really let myself get involved with out online entities.
The Internet is a scary place populated by weirdos like me – be warned! 😉