Neil Hopcroft

Searching for geotagged on livejournal.com yields around 8 entries. Seems like it isn’t quite the great new trend I thought it was. This is good and bad, it means that I’m not very far behind the curve but also means that theres quite limited test data available for my LJ & Multimap mashup (work in progress).

Maybe 400 horses is a little much for me, but I’m still looking for something a bit more interesting than my current Laguna. Its been a great car and has lasted way longer than I had expected when I bought it but its now getting to the point where its more crazy than anything else. But….

…I need some ideas of what to look for in another car. I keep looking around and can’t find anything exciting enough to make it worth buying. My budget isn’t extensive, 4k max at the moment (which will involve a bit of borrowing, so I’d prefer to keep it below that if I sensibly can). Theres plenty of choice in that price range if you’re for a family car or a sensible little runabout. I’m not.

So, give me some ideas.

Quite a freeform weekend this week, it started nicely with an unexpected gig – Red Light Company playing at Proud Gallery in Camden Stables Market. They are quite jangly indie with a nice wall of noise guitar thing going on behind the jangle, the myspace songs are fairly representative of their general style. Sadly the mix was doing some really poor things to the vocals but apart from that it was a top gig. The venue is a little odd, being what appears to be a photo or art gallery at the top of one of the buildings in the market, so the stage was relegated to a corner while the main bar and seating area didn’t afford any kind of view of the bands. I saw only one of the other bands before heading off, they seemed to be wanting to be the Jam and a really beautiful guitar sound without any inspiration to go with it. Disposable in a live setting, probably fantastic when recorded and properly produced. If there was ever a band that needed to take more drugs it was these guys – and I’m not generally a supporter of such things.

Then friday I had a day off to get on the case with sorting my accounts out. I decided that if I didn’t physically take the papers to Cambridge myself it was never going to happen so I headed north, leaving it a bit late because I wanted to finish unblocking my sink first, straight into traffic on the M25.

Into town and the coffee shop in Borders is full so I head down to Carringtons over the way, which is remarkably empty considering the busyness of the street above, to plan the rest of my weekend and try to figure out which car to buy next (more in a later post).

It seems that my vague plan of heading to Norwich is falling apart because nobody else is going….so I head up to Kings Lynn instead, where I end up (trying to avoid) playing a FPS (sadly god mode deactivated). (I feel a bit bad about this because poor Matt has put some effort into setting up the game arena – but I’m not very good with the first person shooter format, it makes me a bit travel sick because of the lag, ref the ginger incident last year, which was, I think, actually caused by playing GTA)

Hunstanton for a breezy walk by the sea on Saturday, with donuts and tack shops and a nearly closed funfair. Then south to toadshamens party where there were a number of people reliving earlier days and falling over rather more than expected. Ho hum, I kept a cautious distance.

Then today, driving south back to home there was something of a temperature gradient from 12C in Huntingdon to 2C twenty miles later, and the hail was settling (and unsettling at the same time). Thankfully there was a similar gradient the other way and the sun was back soon.

Thanks to all who’ve been downloading my eyemag – wrecked exotics is now featured on the site.

Chelsea fail to disguise their work on cyborg fan control.

Devilish Presley in Winchester last night, Matti let me drive his shiny new car down there which has reminded me what its like to get a new car, back to the fun and excitment of fresh new driving experience. Its remarkably large inside considering how small it seems from outside. Nice car, but I didn’t get much of a chance to throw it around properly, too many corners without enough visibility for that sort of thing. Feels quite competant on corners and off the lights, just needs a driver who knows where the clutch bites. A little more practice needed for that….but I also think I need get my own new toy of a car, now that I’ve had a reminder of quite how much shine car rub off over five years.

We met with Holly and the Doc for some food before the gig itself. Nice food but I had a weird experience, I found my heart beating really fast afterwards…this is something I’ve experienced before, it passes fairly quickly but is followed by a day or two of indigestion. I had previously put it down to hot food and have been deliberately careful about things going through an amateur exclusion diet cutting out all things people often associate with bad digestion, re-introducing them slowly and discovering that none of them were causing particular problems. So it seems that it might some kind of reaction to an ingredient in indian cooking, but not the peppers or tomatoes I had expected to be problematic. I’m sure that part of the original problems were stress related rather than directly food related, but hot food seemed to be a trigger. Oh well, I’m getting to understand it all a little more.

Then on to the gig, which was quite a walk across town in the back room of the Railway Inn, theres something great about weaving your way through the corridors of a pub to find a hidden room full of music. Nothing had really kicked off by the time we got there because one of the bands had failed to operate their satnav and landed somewhere else.

First up was the Torpedoes(?) who were fairly energetic rock and roll with grungy guitars and vocals lost somewhere in the mix. Too many lefthanders for their own good – guitar necks interfering with each other whichever way around they stood. I liked these guys, they weren’t breaking new ground but I’m quite happy with that as long as they keep the guitars turned up that loud.

Then it was time for Devilish Presley themselves. They have picked up a drummer somewhere on their travels, he adds nicely to the sound and dynamic of the band. Theres many things you could criticise about these guys, but I don’t care, I love the sound, I love the attitude, I love way Jacquis voice isn’t perfect, I love the way the guitars don’t have any respect for anything they are just going to chainsaw their way in the direction they want to go.

For the whole evening there were a couple of scary Norwegians on the verge of starting a fight with each other, it was a slightly odd dynamic, and a bit scary when they started getting offended that noone had heard of the festival they were trying to promote back home, but I think they were more drunk than problematic…and despite the tension they did seem to be having a good time.

4&25 vict cap 42

Pleased to see Citizen Fish are still going…and playing Leicester in July (though its not mentioned on their site), I hope theres a few more dates.