I’ve just had the urge to start typing. So I’ve stuck on Iron Maiden’s Live After Death opened up blogger and I’m going to pound out some thoughts. Going for a list but with more information per point than usual.

– Eve is offline for the evening. A big upgrade going on. I’m pretty close to leaving it. I’m now having any fun within my corp and I’m not sure I want to go the effort of looking for a new one and joining up and starting over. Still, I have paid for this month so it will be end of, if I do decide to leave.

– I’m still way up in the air on what I should be doing. I’ve been strongly encouraged by a number of people to go for both jobs. I finished off my CV this evening and I’m fairly happy with it. It covers nicely the last 5 years of my life while skimming over the previous 19. I’ll decide in the morning I guess. Have to get a couple of people to look over my CV first too.

– Drugs. Been meaning to talk about these for a few days. It was quite a druggy weekend. Nothing major for me, I smoke a few times a year but that’s about it. Did a whole lot of that on Friday night, so much in fact that it made me throw up and loose my voice for the next morning. Not a good idea. Anyway there was a hell of a lot more harder stuff going around and a lot of it being used. I’ve kinda lost my point or at the least it’s not very clear in my mind.

– Finished off Two Sides of the Moon by David Scott and Alexei Leonov, didn’t take it away with me so it took much longer than it should have. Excellent, excellent book. Loved the hell out of it and it’s left me wanting a whole lot more. Need a new book to read now, more than likely going to start off on The DaVinci Code which everyone raves about, but may go for something more highbrow.

– Chatting to Andy on the train going down Friday afternoon and he commented that the best ending to the weekend would be to get home on Monday to find Glastonbury tickets waiting. Of course when I got home on Monday afternoon, not only was my Glastonbury ticket waiting but my Fleadh ticket too.

– I am unsure that I am registered to vote in the elections tomorrow. I have had leaflets addressed to me here but I have not had a polling card. I really should have given them a ring and asked if I was ok to go ahead tomorrow. I guess I’ll just find out where it is and go anyway. I’m organised…as ever.

– I’ve gone and bought a whole fuckload of music since the weekend. Gah, talk about splurge buying. 10 new cds in my hands already and another 3 on order. Still some good stuff in there and alot of them were really cheap. Yay for £4.99 cds!

– Oh yes, I love the friendlock option on LiveJournal. It’s a nice little feature. I’ve locked a couple of things recently (not cross-posted here either) as I didn’t want some of the work stuff to be that public and it’s worked out nicely.

– I can get upwards of 1mb every two seconds in work. I really really want that at home. I would not have to download anything, I could watch or play things in real time. Now that would be awesome. Working on an upgrade for home but it’s taking lots and lots of time.

– Pinhole cameras suck. I guess I saw Venus cross the sun but it was pretty sucky.

– The air conditioning in the office is bust at the moment. It’s made the last couple of days not fun at all. There are some portable coolers but they seem to give off more heat than cold air.

– The Hope of the States album is a real grower. I’ve just switched over to it now. They were excellent live last year the couple of times I saw them as support and I’ve been looking forward to this album. There is some real anger behind this, it’s harsh and hits out from the very start. This is growing on me even more as I listen to it.

– I really need to tidy this table. Everything gets dropped by the computer. Stacks of books, cds, dvds the shit I have in my pockets when I get home and it all adds up. I did manage to do the washing this evening as planned. This coming weekend really needs to be a cleaner.

– I am more and more thinking that I should write something. I have an artist who is a) pretty good and b) happy to try anything I want to write for him. I have no confidence at all in my writing and even less in my mad beautiful ideas. However I do, of course have a Batman story in me. Perhaps something for CS 2. *shrug*

– God, some people are so full of themselves. It really really bothers me at times. I’m sat here, reading a single line and it’s just bollocks. Sometimes I wonder why I bother.

– Oh yes. I was chatting to a friend over email today aboutargumentss with friends. She had a couple and patched them up over the weekend. Don’t know much of the details, I certainly hope they were never big enough to cause the end of a friendship…but lets say you do have anargumentst that does cause the end of a friendship (and a good one at that). It’s not all that easy to extend an olive branch is it? Especially when it’s likely to be coming out of no-where. I’ve thought about it a couple of times but then I go and get bothered by something like what I just read and I don’t want to walk back into that. *sigh*

– Pretty much touched on everything which has been running through my mind tonight. I’m stressed and a feeling a little down. I’m really hoping for good things in work but I’m of course going to spend the next few weeks worrying about them. Just what I wanted of course.

– I’ve been thinking about a holiday recently. Festivals are going to be my big ones for the year I think. Lawrence and I are going to do Leeds and more than likely V too. Bring it to 4 festivals in 3 months, going to cost a bomb. Hoping to do something late in the year. Can always do a cheap holiday back in Dublin but it never really feels like a holiday. I’ll have about 12 days left to take after the festivals, take 2 away for a long weekend in Dublin at some stage and I have two weeks. France is looking good, I am of course SHIT and cannot afford to book the French course I wanted to do and I don’t know how that is going to impact on other plans. I guess I’ll just have to find out.

– Bike is going to happen. Will have to be after Glastonbury when I get paid. I don’t want to max out my credit card now to pick it up. Guess I should have not bothered with the cds… Anyway looks like I can get a decent one for about 110. That’s just about within my budget until payday, I really want to stay on the in credit side this month so I’ll give it another week and see. Not really something I want to order over the net anyway, need to go somewhere and look at em.

– And that’s a couple of hours of thoughts in a few(ish) chunks.

I really like AIM for OS X. It’s got some nice nice features that Windows just doesn’t have. When I set an alert for someone to come online, I have the option to pre-write an IM and have it sent automatically as soon as they sign on. So, not only do I get alerted but they get an IM as soon as they sign on. Very handy for passing along a message or making sure that I get a hold of someone.

I’m still in CV hell this morning. Very grateful for the help flowing through and seen some great examples of CVs. Smart bunch of people around here.

Just had a chat with some friends here about the options and that and I’m feeling a hell of a lot happier about my options than I was 30 minutes ago when I started writing this post.

I’m now off to have a meeting with my manager to talk to him about options.

sex, drugs and rock n’metal

Well, that was an excellent weekend. A quick recap

Thursday/Friday:

Thursday night after a second excellent Pixies gig, I realised I had no sleeping bag. I must have left it behind when I moved flat. So Friday morning was a quick trip to Argos to pick one up and then off out of work at 13.00 Met up with Andy at the train station and got to Darby no problem. The 3 people we were meeting were right outside the station waiting. So we went for a drink and some food. About 3 hours later we stumble out of the pub having started off on Stella’s.

Got to the campsite, again no problems. Then we found the queue to get in. It must have taken about 3 hours to get to the gates to get the wristband and get in. So we drank ourselves pretty silly as there wasn’t really much else to do.

So its dark now, we are all pissed and we have to get 4 tents up. I’m amazed at the great job we did. It took a while but they all got up and stayed up. Met our neighbours, good bunch of lads who we sat around with for the rest of the night drinking and smoking.

Saturday:

Morning…painful. Very very painful. Off to queue again to get into the actual festival. Not too bad here, less than an hour and we went off to see Powder. They were fucking great. A fantastic opening band. Good music and a great stage show. Enjoyed them lots, bought their album on Monday.

The rest of the morning/afternoon was pretty much a non event. Monster Magnet who are highly thought of around the V, were ok nothing special. Ditto with The Distillers. The Hives I enjoyed a good bit and will get their album at some stage. The evening was much much better.

Next up on the main stage was Iggy and the Stooges. Highlight of the weekend. Great set, belting out some top choons. Shortly into the gig, he told the crowd to ignore security and get up onto the stage with him…and so they did. Poor security were completely overwhelmed and a good 100 people made it up onto the stage. We were close for this one but not close enough to get up there. Security got real antsy at this point (unsurprisingly) but seemed to completely miss the point that 100 people got up on the stage when Iggy asked them to…and 100 people got back down off the stage when the song was over.

The Jackass boys were on the second stage and my dear sweet god that looked painful. Steve-o doing a full butterfly on stage was NOT something I ever wanted to see. Electric Six followed them with a stonking set. Much better than I ever expected and far more rock than I thought they were. Finished off with a cover of Radio GaGa which had all the crowd going. Then we dashed over to the Barfly stage and caught Peaches who was again, excellent. Really impressed, just ordered the album.

Stayed around drinking for a while and then got to bed around 3.00

Sunday:

Not so painful, had taken it mainly easy the night before. Off to the main stage to see Ill Nino and TurboNegor both of whom were ok, the openers Breed 77 weren’t half bad at all, good set and got the crowd going no problem. Onto Soulfly who were pretty good but then we got some Damage Plan bumped to the main stage to let Slayer who were late have their second stage late slot. They were excellent, really really excellent. Got their album on order this morning too. Closing with Pantera’s Walk really got the crowd up and going strong. Machine Head followed in after them and they were again excellent (I may be overusing this word a little)…got their album on order this morning too. Slipknot were surprisingly good live, really good set, very crowd pleasing and I was impressed. Not going to spend money on them anytime soon but good stuff. Didn’t get to see Slayer as they were bumped to the second stage due to being late and they clashed with Korn…and more importantly we didn’t want the hassle of getting into an overpacked second stage. It looked just impossible so we stayed put. Great great stuff from Korn, excellent set with a whole load of the crowd right behind them throughout it. I have some of their stuff, I need more after this weekend.

Well, that was quickish. So onto Metallica. We moved a good way up the front for them. Got right in the middle of the bottle fight and we took a few knocks, one of us even getting cut up. Not too bad luckily. Anyway about 90 minutes late, the crowd was very unhappy and were actively booing. James, Rob and walked onto stage to announce there was problems. Lar’s had been hospitalised for a mystery illness and they were going to play with the help of some friends. Dave Lombardo from Slayer was the first up to the plate and the opener was Battery. Suffice it to say the booing ended very quickly. It was a short set, there was curfew and they ain’t got no drummers. Joey Jordison from Slipknot was the hero of the day, stepped up and did 8 songs perfectly. Fucking great drummer. Shorter than I would have liked, and it was all obvious they were missing something but they really did give it their best and do a good job on it. Decent write up of it from behind the scenes here.

Monday:

Relaxed. Got up late, took the tents down slowly and joined the fast moving queue for the bus back to the train. Finished as we had started, in the same pub for some food and cold drinks (with ice!). Train home was all good and it was so nice to get home and get into my shower.

That’s about that for the quick report. There is more to come, later.

Iggy Pop is the fucking king.

I’m off to bed now to get a good night’s sleep in. Will update tomorrow morning about the weekend.

Are all banks cunts or is it just mine?

Ok perhaps this one was partly my fault but if you let me modify my stuff instead of having to cancel it and then start it again, I’d never have had this problem would I?

It’s always a nice surprise when a nice extra amount of money is left in my account. The downside is of course finding it it’s because an order did not go through. Fuck it.

I am going away for the weekend and I’m going to stop worrying about anything. I just wish for once everything in my life would go right for just a month. A whole month with no problems at all.

Damn, that would be nice.

******
The set in full was:
‘La La Love You’
‘Ed Is Dead’
‘Here Comes Your Man’
‘Wave Of Mutilation (UK Surf)’
‘Crackity Jones’
‘Isla De Encanta’
‘Something Against You’
‘Broken Face’
‘Mr Grieves’
‘Hey’
‘Is She Weird?’
‘Gouge Away’
‘Tame’
‘Debaser’
‘Bone Machine’
‘Levitate Me’
‘Monkey Gone To Heaven’
‘Velouria’
‘I Bleed’
‘Gigantic’
‘Nimrod’s Son’
‘Vamos’
‘Where Is My Mind?’

Encore 1:

‘U-Mass’
‘Wave Of Mutilation’

Encore 2:

‘No. 13 Baby’
‘Caribou’

Encore 3:

‘Cactus’
‘Into The White’

Oh also. If you are getting crushed or have not got much space at a gig. Unless you are my height and weight, don’t just dig your elbow into my back and push. I’m bigger than you are and I’m just going to push right back. 20 minutes later when you realised this and tapped me on the shoulder, well that was much better…

And I got a sleeping bag and suncream and I’m now all ready to go. I am sure I’ve forgotten fuckloads of stuff but sure I’ll live.

The set in full was:

‘Winterlong’
‘Nimrod’s Son’
‘The Holiday Song’
‘Here Comes Your Man’
‘Vamos’
‘In Heaven/Wave Of Mutilation (UK Surf)’
‘I Bleed’
‘Monkey Gone To Heaven’
‘Bone Machine’
‘Velouria’
‘Dead’
‘No. 13 Baby’
‘Subbacultcha’
‘Gouge Away’
‘Caribou’
‘Hey’
‘Cactus’
‘River Euphrates’
‘Debaser’
‘Broken Face’
‘Something Against You’
‘Tame’

Encore:

‘Gigantic’
‘Wave Of Mutilation’
‘Into The White’

Less than an hour to go before I can leave the office and get to Brixton. I want to go now. I’ll bet there are queues outside already. Support is The Delays who played our office party a few weeks ago and were not the best thing ever. Still want to get inside and claim some space. This is going to be such a good evening.
I’m hoping that the DiscLive upload is ready within a couple of hours so that I can download the gig overnight and burn it in the morning. So that when the guys I work with who are coming along tomorrow night as how it was, I can just give them copies to listen to. I know that they are going to play all of the good stuff and it’s going to rock hard. The entire place is going to be one giant pit. Seems that support tomorrow night is British Sea Power who I like and enjoyed live a hell of a lot supporting The Strokes last year.

Work took an interesting turn this morning. I knew that a turn was coming up but I thought it was going in the other direction and I’m a bit disappointed by this one. I’m to get a new manager within the next three weeks and all of my team (myself included) have been invited to apply for it and indeed one of us is going to get it. This makes things interesting. At most I was expecting a senior position and that’s what this is in name but it’s a line manager role aswell. I am thinking about it but my first thoughts are that I don’t want it and won’t apply for it. Then again not applying for it limits me a lot.

*sigh*

I only have a week to decide and update my CV if needed and get it in. I’m away with one of the guys on my team this weekend for Download so I suspect it will be a topic of conversation at some stage.

Anyway, enough of that. I’m look for a new phone. I am now able to upgrade and I want a nice new Nokia. Camera would be nice. Just gone through various things and had a look. Seems to be £70 to get a nice Nokia with a camera or nothing just to get a nice Nokia. There are other choices there of course but over the years I’ve had a Motorola, a Siemens, a Sony and a Nokia. The latter being the only one which never gave me any problems. The Sony was just a shit phone and I went back to the Nokia which I am still using now, 2 years later. I’ll go into a shop for my network and tell ’em I’m leaving unless I get it cheaper 🙂

and another list

Other things:
– Hypotheticals was excellent. A good panel all around but completely stolen with Craig McGill spouting off random drivel (pre-planned and practised in the pub that morning). A legend was born and THE DYING BABIES will be a theme for years to come no doubt. PYUR BRILLYANT! (Really nice guy too, good to meet him at last)
– LITG may aswell have been renamed the V Roadshow. It did descend into madness at the end with several lines smudged, danced around or outright jumped by a couple of the V. It was funny and amused me and some of the stuff was interesting.
– Ordered the Pixies gig for tomorrow night from DiscLive and one of the lads here has ordered Thursday night so that should be good. Looking forward to it alot, the excitement here is building with everyone bringing in their Pixies’ albums to get into the mood. Worked through most of them today.
– It has been suggested that a blog could be regarded as self-obsessed. I’m not sure I follow this one, I disagree with it. Of course this is about me, it’s the same as any of my old diaries. Funny how reading this is pretty much just me and my opinions on things 😉 I could read Bridget Jones to understand the complete reference but that’s not going to happen.
– I really need to change this to make it more readable. Still not sure about the running alongside LJ, but will keep on it for a little while longer.
– I like Orkut, it’s really nicely done. Not really used it much yet, just joined a few communities and posted a little. It’s very slow at times
– Gmail on the other hand is fast as fuck and I’m starting to move a lot of things over to there. The threading takes a little to get use to, but it does actually make sense. The archive everything and show by label isn’t bad but it’s a big change from a folder based system like I use for everything else. The speed of it is tempting me into using it a whole lot more. I also like the fact that when you have no email, it suggests you read the news.
– Ah yes, Lawrence has just reminded me. The organisation skills of Mr Wheeler for pizza after we moved to the hotel bar on Sunday night were most excellent. That and that alone (well maybe Tekken 3) kept us going until well past dawn.
– The ADF is trying to name a sci-fi book. I have read it, I know I have read it. It’s not Dune tho it sounds like it. The only navigation through space is done by Dolphins, they are so fine tuned to the universe they can navigate from point to point. None of us can think of it and it’s annoying as hell. I’ve been stuck thinking about it all day. No-one on my buddy list has proven to be helpful yet.
– I hate missing trains. I missed it by about a minute, my train was late arriving. I was hoping to get in around 11 after my appointment this morning, but it was closer to 11.45 when I got in the door. Still no major problems it appears.
– I don’t mind needles anymore. I use to quite a bit. Then again given that my youngest sister has been insulin dependent diabetic since she was 5 or 6 and has had countless numbers of injections over the years, I can’t really complain about the exceptionally rare times they are involved for me.
– I need to buy a bike. I’ve mentioned it before a few times but I really need to do it. Especially now that I live in a flat which has space for a bike. Not much space, but enough to get one in there. I had a decent bike in Dublin for a long time and I used it a lot. I don’t remember the last time I went cycling but I use to love going out along the coast. Couple of parks and some quiet roads around here that I could go on which would be good. I am now actively planning to get it by the end of the month.
– Oh yes more on Bristol. Sam Hart is a name you’ll be hearing more and more over the coming years. If I could draw a tenth as well as he can, I’d be thrilled. On the subject of artwork, I got a peek at something else in the pipeline and it looks pretty damn good!
– Man I slept well last night. Woke up feeling quite refreshed this morning. Still doing fine here, little bored but almost home time. Then a quiet evening reading and playing some Eve.