Wednesday, March 28, 2007

adobe cs3

Off to see a preview of Adobe CS3 tonight. Still angry at them for binning Freehand.
It will be shaking hands with the devil...
this is more of a tweet than a blog, sorry.

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Pies and Prejudice


Enjoying C4 talking head and sometime Radio 2 dj Stuart Maconie's latest 'Pies and Prejudice'. A vague travelogue of the north of England (with some fairly gratuitius south-bashing for good measure). Being Scottish i'm not sure where I stand on the old north-south divide. I'm veering towards being an honorary Southerner but only because I worked in Liverpool for a while (Stuart berates cockneys for their 'thumbs in lapels cheerie-ness' but equally a pain in the arse is how everyone in Liverpool thinks they are a comedian or have stepped out of some black humour Carla Lane sitcom (howzat for sweeping generalisation!)
Heres a snippet on Hampshire (my current residence) that made me Lol on the train.
' ..I remember defence secretary Geoff Hoon using Hampshire as a reference during the early days of the invasion of Iraq when British soldiers were patrolling the city of Umm Qasr. 'Umm Quasr is a city similar to Southampton' he informed the Commons, prompting one British squaddie to reply to an interviewer, 'He's either never been to Southampton, or he's never been to Umm Quasr. Theres no beer, no prostitutes and people are shooting at us. It's more like Portsmouth'.

Friday, March 23, 2007

Spitalfields market


Nearly pee-ed myself with exitement at coming across 7inch God save the Queen ON a&m
just now in Spitalfields market, it's thursday - antiques day.
There are supposedly only around 100 of these in existence and go for around £5k.
I couldn't believe my luck when I saw this one for fifteen nicker!
Suspicions were aroused however when i noticed the pink vinyl...and another 10 copies in the same box...
Decent business idea though, press up your own batch of ultra rare records and sell them on for ten times the price of a regular 7inch. I cant remember manufacturing costs but i think a batch of a thousand would cost you a couple of hundred. not a bad return...
Spitalfield is Londons best market by far, changes everyday and not overrun by tourists like Camden, Borough nd Portobello.

Friday, March 09, 2007

another Punk book


Just finished this one, Babylons Burning by Clinton Haylin.
He's the guy who wrote Velvets to the Void Oids, another one of my favourites.
The first 3 quarters of this is one of the best books about punk ive come across - up there with Englands Dreaming etc for detail and analytical but the final quarter veers off at a tangent towards the largely insignificant so called paisley underground of the mid 80s then seems to crowbar in large sections on dull american college rock to somehow teniously link up to Nirvana and grunge. shame.

HEROES


loving this on sci-fi channel. missed it first time round but they are re-running them just now
and ive just cottoned on to downloading tv via bit-torrent so ive got the first 17 episodes queued up (although its going to take about 3 days to dowload...)
for younger readers this is an example of artist generated content. this is where people go to college and learn how to pretend to be other people (known as acting) and say words that have been written by a writer (also known as a script). This type of content was popular back in the early days of tv and is currently having a bit of a revival.