Back at last

OK, so my good intentions of updating on a pseudo-regular basis were thwarted by the
complete disintegration of my computer. Luckily it's now back in one piece and things can start happening again. The bad news is that my nice post lady turned up this morning with copies of the new Zelda and Metroid games, fresh from the importer's best friend. These two additions to my life may significantly reduce my already sketchy
productivity.

The Geek Hierarchy

Never attempt to apply thermal compound to a CPU fan after a couple of glasses of wine. Half of my body now conducts heat exquisitely.

A guilty pleasure.

I consider myself to have quite decent music taste. For example, I regularly read Pitchfork, wear t-shirts that proclaim the greatness of Superchunk and Cinerama, and am always willing to offer a lofty and cynical opinion on the latest band-hibernating reality tv show.

So why is it that I've spent the day listening to Sound of the Underground by the forged in the public eye Girls Aloud? I honestly think it's a great song. It's got style and energy where a lot of other music performed by "manufactured" bands is just bland and dry.

I think I'd now better try and expose myself to as much early 80s indie as possible. It will cleanse my musical soul.

Pointless manifesto...

Motivation is a strange thing. I started this blog because I was taken with the idea of writing about things that interested me and maybe the odd bit of social commentary. Now I have got the thing up and coded, I am at a loss for opinions on things (well not everything, I still love Penny Arcade) and can't seem to recall all the great ideas I was originally inspired by.

I put this down to 2 reasons. Firstly, I think the technical challenge of hacking around with PHP and MySQL was so alluring that I managed to convince myself of my desire to blog, when really I could've kept a very small notebook of my thoughts. I'm pretty sure I'm not the first to develop this fallacy. Secondly, I am suffering from a strange strain of performance anxiety. On one hand I'm a little nervous about people reading my words, and on the other I feel ridiculous because no-one is probably going to read them anyway. I'm sure I'll get over it.

In an attempt to dispel my unease, I will share with you (my currently imaginary reader) a glimpse of my new hobby. After getting a taste for free mp3s from the the likes of Napster and AudioGalaxy, I continually long for new sounds without handing over old money. I don't do this just to be cheap, I genuinely buy albums if I like the tracks I've heard from it (although this can go horribly wrong, shhh....). Recently I've found that record label websites can be a tremendous source of free music, and have begun building a collection of links to such sites. For example, look at the wealth of songs available on the polyvinyl site. I can heartily recommend the tasty morsels by Rainer Maria (try the marvellous Breakfast of Champions), and Sunday's Best.