Neil Hopcroft

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.

It’s not like i actually wanted to go home tonight anyway. With thanks to southwest trains for their utterly unflapable inability to run anything resembling a service. Just as i thought things were going well this week because yesterday mornings train ran on time, which already put them ahead on last week. Not to mention that it took three tube trains to travel the six stations from fulham to wimbledon.

If anyone needs me i’ll be whimpering in a corner or shouting at the public face of swt, who don’t deserve more hassle but the poster saying you can email their boss doesn’t have his email address on.

Its been a hard week….I’ve finally gotten a release out (its still got a few hoops to go through before it hits the live service, maybe more later if I’m still feeling excited enough about it by the time it hits the air), with a rejection on the final stage of testing because the test house don’t yet have the device its targetting. So much for pushing it through for sales start. Ho hum.

As ever, its something of an anticlimax. I’m feeling like there should be something new, fresh, exciting that I should be moving on to. Really its just more of the same. More raising defects to be ignored until someone else spots them. More wrestling with the project manager to describe the plan to him (I can’t help feeling this should be the other way around). More getting people who have no idea how to describe release contents to describe them.

And I keep looking and looking and looking (nice idea, shame their database is powered by hamsters). And I can’t help feeling I’m stuck in a 1.0 world where “We are going to target bloggers, because they are early adopters” is no longer an adequate answer.

I need to get out, play, do something useful (well, not really useful, but its a window onto what is possible without any knowlege of either perl or sql).

Meanwhile, it looks like there might be some changes afoot regarding my flat…my landlord is probably going to sell the place, which means I’m going to have to make a decision about what to do next. Theres a few conversations I need to have before I can figure out the answer to that.

Playing with eyemags beta, I made: Wrecked exotics and Theatre decay

(install on your java enabled mobile phone for broken cars ‘on the road’)

Flickr timegraphs

Need a warehouse in state of considerable dereliction?

Ate oponents brains and invented cocaine George Washington

I am the mighty finder, I can find anything

Steampunk keyboard