You are allowed to enjoy this…

Breaking the law
Breaking the law
Breaking the law…
Or so the immortal rock song goes. Yes, dear reader. I have joined the ranks of the lawbreaker. I am not happy with my wayward ways, but I have decided to come clean and tell you about my brief foray into criminality. So today, I go the chance to be a proper journo again. Whooppeeee! Normally, I do all my interviews via the telephone or the old electronic mail. In fact, email is very popular with lots of the people i have to interview. Anyhoo, I suggested a commission idea of profiling this CD/DVD packaging company and originally I was to just do my regular telephone interview thing. But the editor insisted I travel to deepest, darkest Dartford for the scoop.
I don’t mind a bit of travel, but the thought of a four-hour round trip did make me wince with pain, but I softened the perceived travel agony by upping my fee to make up for it. So I am using this Oyster card thing to pay for my journeys and it is working out well for me. So I travel to Stratford, then head up on the DLR to Greenwich. It was interesting going through the Docklands area again and it seemed ages since my last visit.
In the good old days, me and my schoolmates, Ian and Fahim, used to head up to Canary Wharf and travel on the newly-installed Docklands Light Railway. Back then, there wasn’t much there and the London Development Agency was just regenerating the area and the mighty Canary Wharf building was almost finished. Seeing the old empty redbrick warehouses there was kind of sad, but they have all been replaced by gleaming chrome and smoked glass. Change is inevitable. But I hadn’t been that way in a few years and the dark rain clouds gave the area an air of foreboding.
When I got off at Greenwich to catch my connection to Dartford, it was raining lightly, so I quickened my pace and made my way to the mainline train platform. As I entered, the train to Dartford pulled in and this is where I committed my crime. However, it wasn’t until I actually reached Dartford and presented my Oyster card that I realised I had broken the law, broken the law, broken the law…
You see, the Oyster card isn’t accepted at Dartford. Except it is if you put a pre-pay ticket on it (or something) and despite my apologies of a mistake made and offering to pay the fair, I was presented with a £20 fine. Being a law-abiding citizen, I duly paid, but was upset that there’s never any lee-way for an honest mistake. Anyway, I will try appealing against the fine, if only to ask that the powers that be put effing big signs at mainline stations warning innocent scrotes like me that the Oyster card is nigh-on useless at certain stations. However, some mainline stations accept the card. Of course, I blame Ken Livingstone! 🙂

So the BT Engineer arrived nice and early just after The Missus left for work. We played out the same routine as before with me explaining the fault and I said that I’d had an engineer visit before but he couldn’t find the fault before realising that this was the self-same engineer. My download was close to 400kbps, but Mr Engineer instantly got a connection closer to 6400kbps, which should have been expected. I did a speedtest at my computer upstairs and it still said my IP profile was 125kbps, which is just a smidge faster than a dial-up modem.
I asked him if there was a fault with the line? No, came the reply. Was there a fault with my equipment? No, came the reply. So what was causing the problem and how come it fixed itself? Maybe they changed something at the exchange said the engineer. He was really vague and offered me no advice or explanation as to why my connection is so slow and crappy.
About two hours after the engineer left, my ADSL router started crapping out again and it returned to its previous 400kbps setting. This got me thinking and all of a sudden I realised how the engineer had got the high download rate before. He had connected his modem into the phone socket without using a microfilter. So I tried this myself and emulated his performance. So perhaps it was a fault in the two filters I’ve got? I don’t know. I went online and ordered a super-duper microfilter that is supposed to improve performance. Should be interesting to see if it makes a jot of difference.
Of course, I’ve got to keep my ADSL router connected to the line and maintain a healthy speed of 6400kbps for around three days before my IP profile will reset itself. Should be interesting to see if anything happens. Somehow I’ve got a feeling I am going to be calling BT Total Broadband again.

Outside my window it looks as if the world is about to end. It is 4.15pm and in the distance I can hear the chimes of an ice-cream van. Why on earth anyone would want a 99 with extra nuts and juice on a bleak January afternoon is truly beyond me. Perhaps this is a sign that this really is the end of the world? Who knows?
My Internet connection is as pitiful as an asthmatic octagenarian trying to blow up a balloon. At one point it had reconnected 49 times in almost as many minutes. Trying to do anything using the web is almost impossible. This is very trying when actually have some work to do.
A young lad in an ill-fitting suit ran at the door trying to sell me double glazing.
“Are you trying to sell me something?” I asked
“No,” says he and then tries to sell me double glazing.
It’s hard not to lose your temper. I asked for a brochure and sent him on his way. It was obvious that this was his first job and I wouldn’t wish such an existance on my worst enemy. Good luck to him. He had learnt his spiel by rote and I hope he finds that lucky customer who will earn him some commission.
Meanwhile, learning the delights of playing “UNO” on the Xbox 360. I would love to play this game online, but my crappy Internet connection won’t let me. If and when it is fixed, I can imagine many hours wasted trying to get the better of other UNO players. Funnily enough, they had a pack of the card game for sale in the local newsagents and it caught my eye in an act of weird synchronicity. It cost £4.99.
According to my horoscope, I am going to be dynamic in my career and earn lots of money. Hmmmm… I am beginning to think horoscopes are made up in an attempt to comfort our fragile egos.
In the post: King Crimson – Live in Munich 1982 and ProjeKct Two – Live in Chicago 1998 CDs. I have being trying to tame my King Crimson addiction but decided to purchase these two CDs before Xmas when the dollar value was so low. I listened to the ProjeKct Two CD this morning and while this is still my least favourite of that period, some of the stuff on it still sounds futuristic. Funnily, the recent ProjeKct 6 gigs were cued up directly afterwards and these sounded a little tired and flaccid in comparison. Are we allowed the saving grace that the performers were eight years older?

My album “Textures” is doing very well on the Jamendo website. In fact, it has only been properly available for about two days, but in that time I have received almost glowing reviews from the listeners. The only problem is that both were reviews were written in French and I am hardly a francophiliac, but I gleaned the darkest corners of me nogging for some rudimentary French and I think they enjoyed what they heard. This is what was written:
francois35420 wrote:

A prmeière vue : 49 minutes, ça aurait pu me décourager mais je me suis dit “je vais écouter un morceau” et je verrais bien ! Eh bien, je n’ai pas décroché et j’ai continuer à écouter tout l’album ! C’est, un peu un “tout en un”. C’est-à-dire qu’il y a beaucoup de styles sur une même piste : électro, techno, rock, poprock, hardrock, rocktechno, funk… C’est un savoureux mélange de pkusieurs styles et qui est gravé dans la durée. A noter, il y a de bonnes transitions entre les styles. On peut passer d’un style ytechno dynamique à un style électro doux et moi, je ne m’en suis a peine rendu compte car on est absorbé par la musique ! C’est très bien ! Bon travail !

Meanwhile, David Aubrun could only muster:

Tres bon concept. Merci pour ce voyage

Anyhow, both comments gave my deflated ego a much needed boost. It is good to see that this music is being appreciated. Again, the album is literally being downloaded by the bucketload, but I don’t seem to be getting much feedback. I was kinda expecting the odd email or something, but I guess that is the nature of the beast. The Internet is a cold and cruel place where people take the goodies and run…
Today, I took down the Christmas decorations and packed them away. Two sets of lights gave up the ghost, their fuses blown and the spares already used. It was the bin for them, which was a shame because they were bright and colourful, but at least they gave about five years good service. The house looks empty and sad without the festive decor…the good times have gone…roll on the Spring and the brighter weather.

Sometimes even I get sick of my moaning. Sometimes I just want to weep into my hankerchief on the realisation that I am a whinger first class. At the moment, I am mainly moaning about the quality of my Internet connection. Yes, dear old BT Broadband is misbehaving again and the line speed has dropped to the point where I am literally back using a narrowband modem. I’ve tried everything to fix it, but today I had to call BT support. Of course, they use an Indian call centre and while the first person I spoke to was fine, the second person had such a strong Indian accent I had to ask her to repeat everything. It was embarrassing. By the end of the call I could feel how flushed my cheeks were. I kept thinking of myself as “Marjorie Dawes” from Fat Fighters on Little Britain. Oooooh, the shame… So anyway, I’ve just got to wait ANOTHER TWO DAYS to see if there really is a fault on the line.
There are other things I wish to moan about, but I cannot because the wrong eyes might see. Sometimes I wish that I had started this blog anonymously, but then no-one would know that this was me and how would I flog my awful music? See, it is a Catch 22 situation. Oh what the heck…I’m not going to be rude about anyone. Anyhoo, while I am finding it increasingly difficult to get freelance writing work, the work I am getting is getting less well paid before my eyes. For example, I agreed to do some work for an editor before Xmas but he never sent me a commission or the price of the work. I agreed because I’d worked for him before, but now it turns out he’s dropped the word rate without telling me and I am writing the piece for £50 less than I should be. Ho hum…what can you do about it? This is one of the reasons I have issues with the publishing industry as you really are at the mercy of editors and market forces.
But let’s forget about the whinging and the moaning. This is the place where we give music away for FREE. So if you haven’t already downloaded Textures for free, you can also get it from here in slightly better quality. Enjoy!

So it only seemed like it was 52 weeks ago that I was looking back at 2005, but where the heck did 2006 go? It was the whizziest year ever and frankly it was what I call a “middling year”. Nothing much to crow about really. At least nothing died or fell off, right? So it is 2nd January and The Missus has gone back to work and I am in deepest darkest misery. Why? Well firstly because The Missus has gone back to work and left me on my own with Alex the Wonderdog, the Yellow-Headed Noise Beast and the Aquarium of Fecundity. Also, on the last postal days before Christmas, I was delivered a triple whammy in the form of my credit card bills (Christmas cost how much?) and my tax bill for payment by 31st January. So I spent the morning weeping into my cheque book and settling my debts. I do feel a lesser man, a couple of grand lesser. Yowser.
And so as I pay one tax bill, my mind instantly thinks of the next one due in July and how the heck I am going to raise the money to pay it? Ever since I got shafted for six months cash last year, I have been paying catch up and I just don’t know how I am going to make up my losses. Oh well, I am sure something will come along…it usually does. And so I resolve myself to tidy my workspace and make an effort to find more work as there is zilch on the horizon. Again, I am sure something will come along – it usually does. Gee – ever the flippin’ optimist, ain’t I?
Well the free Textures download went down well over Xmas with the file shifting nearly 6Gb of data in a week. Wowser – I worked out the math and it reckoned that there might have been over 200 downloads of it – if that is true, that’s just under double the amount of CDs I’ve sold in the past three years. So maybe I should just start giving this stuff away in the hope that someone might throw me a bone once in a while?
Meanwhile, for a laugh, I read one of those yearly horoscopes over the Xmas period predicting my next 12 months. Now I am not one to believe in this fairytale mumbo-jumbo, but a couple of details in it really struck a chord – apparently everything is going to change in September. Mmmmm…I predicted that last year at Chez Lock and it came true (a change of job position for The Missus) so maybe it is going to happen again. But then again, I know something you all don’t know…
I haven’t done any proper recording for about a month and I am trying my best to ease myself back in the creative frame. What to do? While doing the vacuuming the other day, the album title “Speed of Sound” came into my head. Great! Now I just need to record the flipping thing. D’oh!