Joel's Mundane Life

It's just occurred to me that I've not blogged for over a month - lots of things have happened (although none of them involving a holiday, for reasons I'll expand on in a tic - which makes the title of this post a little meaningless). So, hum, er, 20th July onwards, let me try and remember what's happened since then...

First on the list was taking the kids to see Pet Shop Boys at Newcastle Arena. Both Ben and Ellie have loved the live DVD and the showmanship, so didn't really see a problem with taking them to their first stadium gig. With my first ever stadium gig in mind (Bob Dylan at Birmingham NEC supported by Tom Petty, can't remember the year but they were rubbish seats) I booked seats where we were unlikely to have a problem with the view - stage left, about 18ft from the front. Brilliant, the kids could see everything and once Ellie had got used to the harshness of the support act (Sophie Ellis-Bextor, badly mixed) they had a fantastic time. Proper family outing!

During July we got involved with Wakefield Music Collective, the body which organises the annual Clarence Park Music Festival in Wakefield among other events. It sorta started with being asked to do a poster design, then both myself and Nicky volunteered to do stewarding duties and had a whale of a time walking around in hi-viz jackets. I'd also not anticipated the steepness of that hill in front of Clarence bandstand, although I sneakily managed to avoid walking up and down it too much clearing litter (thank you for taking your litter home!). A lot of good acts on but the highlights for me were Ruby Macintosh Retrospective and Jiezuberband who bill themselves as 'Scottish prog-rock' (they brought their own Hammond and a proper hardware Leslie unit, woo!). Ben particularly enjoyed rockers The Jokers, getting a CD with his pocket money and even managing to blag a signed poster of the band which once we decorate his bedroom will occupy pride of place on the wall! Photos from Clarence here and here.

In the midst of preparing for Clarence I took a little bit of time to help the Fotopic.net chaps close the Wakefield office down. It's been a long time coming and with the move to a virtual headquarters there was really no need for the overheads involved. Still a bit of a sad day but we got it all cleared out, and the furniture went to a local children's charity. I ended up with a pile of Agfa d.Lab-2 paper cassettes which I listed on eBay... if anyone wants an 8" or 12" paper cassette then drop me a line and make me an offer! In clearing the place out I found plenty of memories of times past, but I'm not looking at it as a closure - more of a 'new stuff around the corner, watch this space'... :)

After Clarence, the next thing that happened was Ben being a mascot at Sheffield Wednesday in the first game of the season versus Dagenham & Redbridge. My brother Tim took him (after all, he's a bigger Wednesday fan than all of us lot put together) and they met all the players, Ben got changed in the official changing rooms, then came out and played football followed by high-fiving all the players and generally being ace. There's an official pic of him on the SWFC website over here, but for the proper experience you need to watch the video. He really was a superstar, Tim took quite a few pics which are here, and after all that Owls won 2-0. Hurrah!

Then came Pride Wakefield, and a few days of total carnage involving Jaegerbombs and stuff. A small affair, the local Pride march was ridiculously short and I'm not sure organising it on Sunday evening was such a good idea - those who could walk the circuit from the Rainbow round past The New Union and the Harewood Arms were few and far between. I took some photos of course but certainly nothing on the scale of the London event. It got a bit debauched and apparently (!) I was dancing with Hx in Zeus Bar to Kylie and Scissor Sisters remixes... probably should mumble something regarding XX chromosomes here.

In the middle of all of this I had to do some work - I'd finished at Pace Networks at the end of July which left me without a contract for August (this also contributed to our holiday cancellation - I can't really be on-hand for contract interviews and pitches if I'm miles away) and through a bizarre series of circumstances ended up doing bits and bobs for Ripe Design in Leeds again. The place has changed quite substantially but there's no shortage of work and I'm hoping it'll be quite a long and flexible contract this time. I'm still doing stuff for the Met which is gearing up for launch, plus there's a few other private projects I'm working on including something called Pikfu... but more about that in the future.

Then there's the back bathroom. Folks who follow what I do on Facebook and Twitter will have noticed that there's been a near-constant stream of DIY-related whinges, photographs and invective over the past week or so, but the story is this: on 22nd August I had a rush of blood to the head and decided to rip out the back bathroom. We've been in this house for 8 years now and that back bathroom has been used once, instead being used as a dumping ground for anything and everything from spare lightbulbs to wine (visitors to the house will know it as 'the wine storeroom'). So anyway, I was sick of it stinking of piss and generally being icky so pulled out the bath which took down half the plaster on the wall. Then I realised the skirting wasn't done behind the bath, the tiles had torn away more plaster, and there was a big hole in the floorboards where the bath water-trap had been installed. Great. To compound the felony I decided to move the washbasin. End result is that I've spent last week plastering, doing the skirting, replacing the light, filling the floorboard holes, plumbing, removing waste pipes, tiling, carpeting, and finally putting up the new mirror. Nicky for her part has wallpapered and painted, and it looks completely different now (see photos here, plus a pic of what it looked like when we first moved in). Just need a dresser in there for more storage and jobsagoodun.

I think that's it. True to form I'll probably post this and find a zillion more things I've forgotten to mention...

(You might have noticed I haven't mentioned Obvious Pseudonym - well, that's undergoing a bit of a change and we have to wait for a band meeting before we can make any announcements. Keep an eye on the website, it'll all be public soon enough.)

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GAAAAAAAH! I hate not getting any feedback! I'm increasingly finding myself in situations where I'm working my arse off day in day out, sometimes struggling valiantly to meet deadlines imposed on me, and then the meeting doesn't happen or there's a deafening silence.

This is irritating for a number of reasons:

• It may mean I can't continue to the next stage of a project without risking wasting time.
• A lack of affirmation of 'what the client wants' invariably leads to greater misunderstanding later on.
• It causes diary issues when the client eventually does come out of the woodwork demanding action right now (and of course something else is blocked in so I either have to play Tetris with timesheets or disappoint the client).
• There will be less testing time resulting in the real risk of major issues being discovered post-deployment.
• The project slips and slips and slips...

...And of course if I'm not doing work, I can hardly do a billing run so my own income suffers.

I realise clients pay the bills and call the shots, but if you employ contractors to carry out work at least spare them the time they need to do their job and give you value-for-money. If you don't, you'll lose cash, your contractor will go elsewhere come renewal time, and your project will die on its arse.

(Note: This is not aimed at any individual or organisation in particular, it's industry-wide. Of course this is a hazard of the job, but it seems to be getting worse. Gah.)

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In brief:

• The Obvious Pseudonym Escobar gig on 6th February went OK - I tried to record it but forgot to flip the switch to 'Line In' on the recorder so it's a bit of a crap recording complete with another band ('Marmalade Sun') heckling us. Too bad, I've sampled their jibes and they'll be on the album. If you're really wanting to listen (and I don't recommend it) you can pick up an MP3 from my MP3 dump. Still, lovely to see friends we've not seen in years and if you didn't make it across then shame on you.
• I've started the process of cutting down my work at Pace, and will be taking more work on in London because it's more exciting and pays more. Yay capitalism. Also means I'm back to working at home a couple of days a week.
• Ellie had a lovely birthday last weekend and now has a bike without stabilisers, although Nicky had the patience of an angel trying to get her to ride it... will take some getting used to I guess, and plenty of scuffed knees.
• With my ill-gotten gains from the Calumet Canon roadshow I bought a 15mm f/2.8 fish-eye lens. It's quite good fun - I did my first gig shoot using it last Friday at Escobar, but not something I should use all the time as the effect can be quite overpowering.
• Very pleased to see The Buggles have finally got round to releasing a remastered version of Adventures In Modern Recording. W00t.

C'est ca.

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What the hell happened to January? It seems to have flown by!

We started out with Ben's birthday - his main present was a 3/4 size Stratocaster and an amplifier, and I've told him that if he can play three chords I'll let him plug it into my Line6 Spyder amp for a bit of a thrash. His party was at Soccer City in Leeds, involving a couple of games of football and some soft play. The date clashed with the only footie game not cancelled by snow and (being by Elland Road) the place was chock full of Leeds fans! I found myself thanking goodness that Ben hadn't insisted on wearing his Sheffield Wednesday top as we cut a phalanx through the hundreds of fans at the venue.

Then it was Nicky's birthday the other week (I bought her a pushbike); we had a house-ful of friends and the night involved much dancing, Singstar, and general fun. I did manage to do something bad to my chest: it started off feeling like a cracked rib but I think I've probably just pulled a muscle, leaving me low on sleep and scrabbling for the coproxamol a couple of times a day. Going slow has been the order of the past week amidst the 'reminders' from my mother to take it easy.

More recently, last weekend was lovely. It started on Friday with drinks in Leeds to see our friend Colin off before he emigrates to Canada at the end of this week! More than a few pints of Peroni in Leeds' Sandinista bar, meeting up with friends we've not seen in a while.

Saturday brought a reunion of staff who worked at Painthorpe Country Club in the 90s. The club itself was razed to the ground for new a housing estate (the company went bust, building work stalled and consequently the area is now full of derelict partially-constructed housing). However, about 7 of us showed up at The Hop travelling from the sunny climes of Bristol, Chesterfield, Leeds and Wrenthorpe to chew the fat over the years since the club was around. It was really quite lovely to see coworkers I had a lot of respect for, and find out what they'd done with their lives - needless to say we all ended up the worse for wear and I fell into bed at around 2:30am. Consequently most of Sunday morning and afternoon was written off to a hangover.

The band is getting its groove on - just in case you've managed to avoid my incessant marketing and PR I'll mention (again) that we've got a gig coming up at Escobar on 6th February. This is a Saturday night one where we're supporting two other bands who are much more 'our' sort of thing - it'll be fabulous and I can't stress how much I'm looking forward to it. We'll go through most of the card including Westgate Run, Disco Sauce and probably Keith Chegwin For A Day in a chock-full venue. Eeeeeeeeeeeeee I'm so bloody excited!

I recently acquired some new kit at home to augment the sound - among them Korg Electribe ER-1 and EA-1 units, and a Korg Prophecy (one of the few synths I regretted selling years ago). Those are starting to make their way into the recordings as well as inspiring Simon and I to do a little electro side-project without any songs per-se but more along an 'evolutionary soundscape' type thing.

That said, I spent last night in the studio remixing Disco Sauce for the Saturday gig and started working on a new song which has a working title of Bond. We have two band rehearsals this week which will be tiring, but ultimately incredibly satisfying I'm sure!

My PSO work in London is starting to take more of a front seat again - all this e-learning stuff and statistical analysis. It's quite good fun but very hard work (and led to me doing some multi-agency observation towards the end of last year), and although technically it doesn't involve as much learning experience as my work in Saltaire it's fascinating to see how it all works. Everyone seems happy with progress and with the mornings getting lighter again I'm feeling quite optimistic (it's all been a bit too much like this recently).

So, February, you ain't allowed to go as fast...!

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Bet this one's pissing a few people off this morning - just got an email from Amazon regarding their affiliate scheme:

After careful review of our Associates programme, we have made the decision that as of February 1, 2010, we will no longer pay referral fees to Associates who send users to www.amazon.co.uk, http://astore.amazon.co.uk or www.javari.co.uk through keyword bidding or other paid search on Google, Bing, Yahoo!, or any other search engine, or their extended search networks. In connection with this change, as of February 1, 2010, we will no longer provide Associates who engage in such paid search activities with access to our Product Advertising API or datafeeds.

Or to put it in laymans' terms, those Google adwords which direct you to Amazon aren't usually paid for by Amazon, it's someone doing a man-in-the-middle type thing. One can only really presume that it was causing untold levels of fraudulent activity if they're going to stop paying out on it.

More obviously as I read it ('extended search networks') this is probably going to slap cybersquatters (sorry, 'domainers') from putting links to Amazon on unused domains. I could be wrong on that though.

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Almost three weeks since I last blogged any sort of 'what's going on' thing, I'd intended to catch up sometime over the Christmas period so you'll just have to deal with a bit of a redux. Anyway, that was Christmas and New Year, a very homely affair where we didn't go out with anyone really apart from our friends Lee and Jem, and everyone came round to our house instead. That's the short version. The longer version comprises a few significant events...

Given I'd been promising Ellie that I'd take her to France and Belgium, we managed to book a 'mini-cruise' in Christmas week to do a bit of shopping. Even discounting my idiocy in filling the diesel Picasso with unleaded petrol it was touch-and-go if we'd get there owing to a rather arduous and dangerous drive through the back streets of Hull to get to the ferry port (thanks to major issues caused by the weather). In case you didn't know, both myself and Nicky went to university in Hull and consequently I knew enough of the back-roads to get us to the port without too much hassle although the ferry was delayed anyway. Ellie and I spent a lovely morning in Lille followed by an afternoon in Bruges where we noshed moules-frites and did some Christmas prezzie shopping.

I wandered round Leeds on Christmas Eve - because of the snow it was quite deserted and I had no problem getting the best out of the markets. I accidentally (!) treated myself to a Ted Baker flowery shirt (and will have to watch the Ted Baker shop in Victoria Quarter doesn't become something of an addiction); never mind, my reward for managing to get everything sorted. Mind, this year was a bit different with Christmas - Nicky had taken the reins and wrapped everything so as a consequence we actually got to bed before midnight on Christmas Eve. The following day saw the usual Nigella turkey, an attempt at Christmas cake ice-cream (which didn't quite work so got replaced by lemon sorbet) all preceded by a Thai prawn salad. Mum and Lawrence and Tim over for Christmas dinner, with Nicky's sister Sarah in residence. Good fun. Much brandy. Ow my head.

Santa brought me some cool stuff - a few DVDs, a pair of glitter silver Converse boots (proper glittery disco boots woohoo!), and things like that.

Boxing Day heralded the Sheffield Wednesday/Newcastle game which Tim and Ben disappeared to spectate upon, leaving myself and Nicky to cater for the Rowbottoms. I managed to escape in the evening to see Bez's band Chat Noir (I took a few photos).

Following all that I ended up working in Saltaire in the few working days - well, to be fair I only showed up in the office for one day but did bits from home in the interim. A band practice featured as well, although that was more just getting drunk and waving our hands vaguely at instruments. I also blew a substantial amount of savings on synthesisers and other bits and bobs such as flightcases... and a pre-amp for my turntable so I can listen to my vinyl in the office (well, since I'm working from home a lot more in January).

Where was I? Ah yeah, then came New Year's Eve where we did our usual "if you have nothing better to do..." party. In previous years it's varied from one person showing up to an entire rabble, but this year we had many new friends join us - from my primary school pal Lisa and her son through to friends who'd joined us more recently it was quite a bash. I lasted until 5am, something I'm not really used to doing nowadays... it's taken a day or so to recover from that one.

In the interim my Gaggia sprung a leak (in the solenoid) and owing to the whole Gaggia-going-titsup thing last year it's going to cost a small fortune to fix. Oh well, time to look for a bean-to-cup system maybe.

And so to now, where I'm contemplating work tomorrow, looking at my #LDNnudetech calendar and wittering at you lot. Tons to do and I've no idea where to start, I'm sure it'll all make sense eventually. Happy 2010 anyway.

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Several things happening this weekend and into next week...

Tonight I'm off to The Red Shed in Wakefield to photograph some bands - most notably our friend Bez's band Chat Noir, a 4-piece from Horbury who describe themselves as "somewhere between folk, electro and post riot grrrl pop". It's part of a compilation launch by local label Geek Pie Records and should be a fun night.

Tomorrow I'm at Ellie's primary school to photograph kids on Santa's knee. We did this last year, and I'm intending to improve on the process by using my colour laser printer with gloss paper compatibility rather than dashing to and from the Fotopic office. It means we can run everything locally without network messing around too, I'll post a report after the event on how it all went!

We're aiming to put the Christmas decorations up on Sunday. Ordinarily I'd wait another week but the only day free is the Sunday and it's just before our next Escobar gig so we will probably be rehearsing. Really, I'm hoping to have finished the unfinished Christmas song by then (hey, at least I found the sleighbell patch): you should really buy a ticket from us and come along... Paypal's great for that sort of thing.

...if you're around at any point, feel free to buy me a pint; after this week I could do with it.

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I can't really deny it, I've been up to my ears in work recently so had precious little time to write any blog entries for which I apologise. I'm still working up in Saltaire for Pace and it's resulted in 9-hour days, so much that it feels like I'm living in Salts Mill - good job we have a decent coffee bar here. Still, contract's been extended and lots of work is better than no work at all!

I took a small break from the world of digital TV last week and went to observe a training exercise in St Neots for one of my other clients: fascinating stuff with various groups doing role-play using audio and video triggered from a central control room. I'm hoping I can write more about it at some point because it really is exciting stuff, and I'm going to be doing a lot more on it from mid-December! The course took place at Robinson Executive Centre, a bizarre self-contained residential facility which had damn good connectivity, reasonable facilities and a bizarre mobile cell which only identified itself as '0000 TEST' - someone using a femtocell perhaps? Naughty naughty.

Music! With over 23,000 downloads of Westgate Run the band's going well (despite a little roadbump last week) although I'm still not allowed to come clean on what we've been entered for and even got my wrist slapped for alluding to it a little too clearly in a previous blog entry. Exciting though - we got some promotional postcards through and have been told we need to practice signing things as our stage personas! There's a new song called Baby Baby which is a bit JTQ with some added Robbie and a dash of Stevie Wonder; lashings of Hammond B3 with a really really filthy fuzz-bass and a house beat... we rock, and we'll prove that tonight when we gatecrash The Hop in Wakefield once more (Facebook event here). Unemployed Oxfam mecca satellite telly channel Dave showed the Cheggers episode of HIGNFY again last night, another reminder of our notoriety I guess.

I've not been doing any photography for a while because on top of all the music and work I've not had time, but this weekend I'll be ensconced in a Santa's Grotto at the local school fair taking pics of Ellie's contemporaries sat on Santa's knee. Last year I just had a single on-body flash, but this year I'll be using the advice gained from Leeds Strobist Group to use off-body and gel flash. Should get some good shots although because they're kids we don't know most of them won't make it online. I'll post a few anyway. Come to think of it, I've got an Open Mic Monday shoot which I haven't sorted yet, I'll crowbar a couple of hours' peace at some point and get those done (sorry if you were waiting on them).

On top of that, Christmas is coming and we've not shopped at all yet. That'll be fun - I think we know who's joining us now and I need to work out an ice-cream recipe plus the starters (which are traditionally something I've invented and trialled a few weeks before). Best get me skates on!

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I've not commented much on my social and work life recently - this in part because I spent last week getting incredibly stressed with work. I was pitching for some new work, training some new colleagues who didn't have a great grasp of English, and having a large amount of stuff dumped on top of me at my primary contract meant it all came to head again (a recurring theme). By Friday I was absolutely frazzled and ready to slay, but let's backtrack a bit to an earlier event.

The work I had to do left me zero time to socialise or even have the distraction of the Internet so I did something I thought I could never do - I deactivated my Facebook and Twitter accounts. Some of it was a spur-of-the-moment 'I can't be arsed with this' sort of thing brought about by the proliferation of acquaintances who only ever get in touch when they want something, but then there was the dawning realisation that it was just lingering like some little devil saying "come out and play!" preventing me from working. Social network addiction is well-documented nowadays.

The reactions were interesting: a few folks got in touch by other means and that was nice. I heard along the grapevine enquiries were made such as 'why doesn't Joel like me any more' and stuff - it's easy to get the wrong impression because the first your 'friends' know about the deactivation is when you don't appear in search results - you quietly disappear in other words. Some people were borderline abusive, a sad occurrence. On Friday I finally cracked and reactivated Facebook - it was as though I'd never left (an acquaintance compared it to 'a cheap sugar rush'). Come back lad into the fold, here have a cigar, the first hit's always free.

I also spent some fun time during the week writing code for Amino set-top boxes using the ANT Fresco browser. Last time I did anything with STBs was back in 1998 in the course of my OpenTV R&D and the return was welcome; I'm not bound by any NDAs since it was self-researched work and there's no official SDK stuff (all inferred through many Google searches) so I may jot something down at some point, don't hold your breath tho.

On Friday night I took the decision that I wasn't going to do any work whatsoever for the whole weekend - stuff it all, I'm sure the world can do without me.

Since I'd been paid Ellie and I took the train to Leeds to find some nice shirts; we traipsed around some of the vintage shops only to be disappointed, then up to Harvey Nick's where I was doubly disappointed that the only funky shirt concession was Paul Smith - rubbish! We found a nice Rocha John Rocha one in Debenhams and for good measure I picked up a Jasper Conran one too. Ooh get me, all trendy an' shit!

That night we went to see Eddie Izzard at the MEN Arena in Manchester on the Stripped tour. Mr Izzard had his Twitter feed appearing up on the screen and if you tweeted his name then it appeared: the messages started out with stuff like 'please wish XXX a happy birthday' but rapidly got silly with such gems as 'sorry to the folks in block 108, I just farted', 'ooh i can say ARSE in four foot high letters' and 'my wife says if this message is shown on the big screens she'll do anal tonight'. Classy.

Eddie was ace, plenty of insanity but unfortunately the second half was interrupted by a protestor at the back of the arena yelling something about freeing someone - goodness knows what. Still it didn't spoil the vibe too much and Eddie took it in his stride.

Sunday was largely taken up with rehearsals for the Obvious Pseudonym gig at Escobar, and a curry. Mmm, lovely curry, almost made up for dropping the keyboard stand on my foot.

(Actually, thinking about it I spent a lot of the weekend sleeping - maybe driving myself so hard last week wasn't such a good idea. Got the work I was pitching for though!)

So another week and I'm sorting out my schedule of work - or at least procrastinating doing so while I write this blog entry. OP gig tonight (do come!) and then I think I shall book an evening to go to the pub and just relax... and start worrying about Christmas.

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So what's goin' on then? Usual story, I'm overworked and doing far too much. The candle has finished burning at both ends, met in the middle, dripped wax on the carpet and set fire to the curtains; in short, "gah".

Aside from the band stuff which has been documented to death (so I won't go into it here), I've been working with the House Sale UK chaps on a new project using Home Information Packs (HIPs): government legislation nightmares and bureaucratic silliness. Apparently a Tory government would put the kibosh on them but I can't see that happening in a hurry, not without some sort of replacement proposal. Still, PDFs are all fun and it's taught me to steer clear of Worldpay.

I'm still up in Saltaire working on digital TV platforms and have taken the opportunity to learn some IPTV fun, streaming digital channels across a LAN and fiddling with the VLC browser plugin. I keep meaning to write a full blog entry on my adventures with that but don't quite get round to it. Still, having 36 TV channels running in a single browser window certainly gives my little Intel core2duo desktop something to think about (as well as making the CPU fans spin up like a 747 taking off). I should be in contract almost until Christmas, and there's a company trip to Bangalore in the offing.

Weekends are a bit busy, at least it feels that way. I indulged myself this past few days with a haircut and watching the Grand Prix with Nicky (getting up at 5am to do so). I don't think I've ever got up early for a sporting event but it was a nice experience sitting in bed drinking coffee and watching it (if you know me, you'll also know I don't do 'relaxation' very well). As a sidenote I'm glad the Rosberg incident didn't affect the result, I'm a Button supporter but it would have been unfortunate to see the constructor's championship decided in the stewards' room.

Plus: I've been fiddling with DMX interfaces (there'll be a proper blog entry about that RSN); finally taken the plunge and ordered Snow Leopard for the Macbook given most of my key apps now seem to have been ported OK; have developed a fetish for Lush bath-bombs; my neck still aches...

So in short, business as usual.

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I'm doing two talks in the next month or so:

• Wakefield RISC OS Computer Club have asked me to do a talk on 'Teaching Old Micros New Tricks' and the resurgence in new projects for the 8-bit Acorn BBC Micro from 1982. I'll be demo'ing (hopefully) the 64MB ARM7 TDMI coprocessor, Sprow's new 100M Ethernet interface, and some of the storage devices available on the market. That happens on Wednesday 7th October at West Yorkshire Sports & Social Club, there's a small door charge for non-members.
• Unconfirmed but probably happening, I'll be doing a talk in Leeds on gig photography, techniques which have worked for me, how I got into it and some of the common gotchas. Probably happening beginning of November, I'll post more when it's confirmed. This will probably go hand-in-hand with an article I'm writing on the topic.

Hope to see you at one or both of them.

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Come on Facebook, what the hell are you up to?

Social networking site Facebook has become fairly ingrained in some peoples' lives. Finding old flames, keeping in touch with coworkers, it's facilitated social networking becoming "acceptable" to all ages from schoolmates all the way up to the 'silver surfers'. Our local park-care society in Wakefield is on it, my family use it, most bands I photograph use it, we've organised parties and gigs with it, and finally the company seemed to have sorted its advertising stream and professed to being cashflow-positive (a rare thing right now).

Except it's completely shagged. Over the past few weeks Facebook's over-engineered interface suffered from glitches and annoyances: internal database errors and 'endpoint faults' (brought on by AJAX calls failing) are the norm. Bizarre artefacts are strewn around such as missing comments or missing messages, and frequently your account is 'temporarily unavailable'. Old stories and feed items are resurrected like peeling zombies in a Hammer film and the poor end-user is left thinking 'what the heck...?'. The issues affect every platform including the mobile phone version, 'Facebook Lite' variant and the API. Bugger.

Of course there are growing pains with any web service (goodness knows we had our fair share of them at Fotopic.net) but with a workforce of 900+ employees which founder Mark Zuckerberg claims to command surely there are resources to ensure it stops online? Or is this part of the 'agile development' cult? Rumour has it any Facebook employee can push code to production within an hour. Go go QA.

Alright, you're going to say "We'll give you a full refund!" If you've not paid anything for Facebook that's fine, and that covers most of the userbase. However the micro-advertising and targeted-advertising means it's not all clear cut: I have in the past tried Facebook advertising, it's worked for me and made us some dosh. I wouldn't try it now though: the problems, lost data, strange occurrences all contribute to absence of confidence in the product. After all, how do I know whether those click-throughs are real?

Zuckerberg's obsession with micro-blogging site Twitter has led to a rash of copycat attempts to duplicate that site's functionality within Facebook. Whether you agree with that approach or not, it's pretty much obvious that the reliability of the site is suffering as a result. When reliability suffers people walk (FB's been comparatively quiet over the past week). When people walk, the social aspect suffers and advertising revenue falls: view the downfall of MySpace, Faceparty, Orkut...

So, I've been going through my Facebook 'friends' and jotting down any contact details which fall outside the remit of Facebook. I'd suggest you do the same: it's taken a long time to link up with some of these people and if Zuckerberg succeeds in killing the goose it'll be everyone who gets hit by the fallout.

...just a thought, like.

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It's been quite a funky bank holiday weekend all told: I ended last week at another Sticky Shoes gig at The Hop, an all-dayer with lots of students in attendance who hadn't got tickets for Leeds Fest. I bimbled along with the camera and took a few pics. Bit odd really, lots of folks sat on the floor (there's no seats at The Hop's upstairs venue), the last time I did that was in 1996! The bands were mostly local Philophobia-signed acts and included the Piskie Sits who Radio 1 have been taking an interest in recently.

Saturday brought a bit of relaxation and preparation for Sunday lunch. Our greengrocer on Wakefield Market ("Venables' Vegetables") has been doing deals with local allotment holders and consequently most of the fare is sourced within a 5 mile radius of Wakefield itself: beans, carrots and broccoli were all local plus we had spuds from my mother's garden at Netherton. Yum. New Yorkshire Pudding tins and a few other bits and bobs made for a good shopping experience.

During the evening Nicky was out with Clare, so I reorganised and hooked up the studio to more closely resemble the live setup. I retired the old XV-3080, the Fat Procoder, two MIDI patch keyboards, and the 19" rack to give me back the desk-space. End of another era really - that rack was in the first ever Cheese Factory in Fulham although as time has marched it's become more sparse. The new layout is a bit easier to control, and doesn't have equipment all over the place which I won't use - I'll let you know when stuff gets listed on eBay.

Sunday was largely spent eating, drinking, and watching the Belgian GP. We commiserated Jenson's crunch by knocking back an entire 1L bottle of port. Glug glug.

Finally Monday, and with raging insomnia I ended up in the studio again at 6am with the Sennheiser headphones on. Wading through the 300-page manual for the XV-88 keyboard I eventually managed to get it to do my bidding and it's now a firm part of the Obvious Pseudonym stage setup. By mid-morning I was trying to write new music and getting nowhere fast - that is, until I broke out a disco beat. Oh yeah baby, mid-life crisis in full swing, I'm the king of disco doncherknow! By about 2pm I'd got the basics of yet another OP song, Dan showed up at 4ish, Si at 6, and we hammered through it until pubtime at 8. You can see a few pics of the creative process here.

Groovy, baby.

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This is a side-note: If you're reading this on Facebook then you're getting a syndicated version - the original version is always at blog.joel.co.uk. Quite a lot of people read this via RSS as well.

What does this mean? Well, there will be comments made by Facebook friends on the syndicated 'notes', and there will be other comments left on the blog itself. It may also mean that any edits to articles (to correct spelling mistakes, slight factual errors such as dates and so forth) may not make it onto those sites.

I'm not saying the way you read my blog is 'wrong', just be aware you may miss content such as the lovely person who left such a nice comment about the trip to see U2, or odds and ends of tech info.

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I am aiming to get the following done by mid-August:

• Write at least three new songs for Obvious Pseudonym.
• Fix up the more innovative bits of EasyHIP.
• Learn Adobe Flash and Actionscript 3.0 - or at least read the manuals.
• Go through one of my photography coursebooks and learn photogropery stuff I've not yet got my head around.
• Sleep.
• Build sandcastles with the kids.
• Eat piles of low-fat stuff (especially seafood).
• Swim in the Med far too much and do lots of walking, getting a bit fitter in the process.
• Come home with plenty of Domaine De La Grangette and Filles De Septembre rosé wine.
• Recharge my batteries ready for some new projects come September.

Hmm. Need to buy Speedos. Wonder if anywhere in Saltaire sells 'em...

(On reflection, perhaps this should be 'Things I Plan To Do On Holiday But Will Forget About Once I Relax'.)

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