Morning all. A day off in Sydney today, blissful weather, the perfect day to be inside my hotel room dicking around with CSS code and URL redirects, eh? Ha. The last few days have all been stellar, many new friends made and much whiskey drunk (thank you Ben Nichols). We also played a quick game of 2-Ups, basically a confrontational version of head-or-tails that involves betting and shouting, which is illegal here apart from on Anzac Day. Madness. I think I’m just about on top of what time it is as well. Anyways. I’m making some internet changes round here, and thought I’d explain.

This is the vaguely technical paragraph. Feel free to skip it if you, sensibly, don’t give a toss. I used to publish this site using blogger.com’s FTP tool to publish to my own server. They announced a little while back that they’re not going to run that service any more after May 1st, so I’ve been checking through my options. In the end I went for migrating to a wordpress installation on my server. On the whole I’m very happy with it, although the migration process wasn’t 100% smooth (seriously, open source crusaders, help forums are no substitute for some old-school documentation). But we’re here now. Due to not being arsed to code a CSS theme from scratch, I’ve cannibalized a preset, but that necessarily means that things look a little different.

Back to the real world. So yeah, things look a touch different, but I kinda like it. All the old information can be found to your right, along with some other helpful links. I’m also very pleased that I now finally have a decent and easy to use RSS feed, located top right. Otherwise everything should be working, but if anyone has an issue, spots a broken link or has a suggestion, please do let me know.

In non-geek news, I’m happily confirmed for Osheaga Festival in Montreal, Canada on 1st August. See you there.

Finally, a treat, for me and you both. Ben Dawson, drummer from Million Dead / Kneejerk and old, old friend of mine, got in touch recently to say that he’d unearthed a bunch of footage of some of our old bands. Immediately after leaving school, I moved to London, and a whole group of us formed a melee of bands, none of which lasted very long but all of which were awesome (no really). Out of that melting pot came Million Dead and Palehorse, but prior to that were bands such as Sun Starved Day, Abjure, Kneejerk, Concealed Weapons Of Mass Destruction, and The Record Buying Public. This last featured me on drums, Tom Fowler (later in MD) on guitar, and John Atkins (Palehorse) on bass, playing some kind of instrumental jazz post rock type thing. I guarantee you that I’m more excited about this than anyone else, but this is, for me, a pretty fascinating blast from the past. You can check out videos of us playing The Swan in Tottenham, North London, in 2001 here, here and here. Check out my shit hair and kick-arse Metallica shirt while you’re there. There was a demo floating around of some of these songs, and these videos have prompted me to resume the search for them. Should I find them, I’ll post them here. Oldschool.