Please can it be arranged that I spend the majority of my days playing guitar, writing music and drinking coffee? I mean… really?

Thanks, much appreciated,
Clive.

But.

I absolutely fucking detest its tone of voice sometimes. Just as I can’t stand the idea in some agencies that the techies and the designers don’t mix, or that Mac users and PC users should stay out of each other’s way, or any of the other ridiculous stereotypical nonsense that can easily spring up in technical communities, I hate the sneering way that The Register looks down on certain things with a kind of knowing, pally ridicule which implies that everyone reading agrees with them.

Examples? It’s in the lexicon. Twitter is referred to as a “Web2.0rhea outfit“. Second Life is referred to as “Sadville“. The iPhone is the “Jesus Phone“. There are others. In one article the site TechCrunch was referred to as “the Special Olympics of Web2.0″.

It just winds me up – it’s lazy journalism. It’s not just giving me the news, it’s spinning it before it gets to me. As it happens, I have an iPhone and I use Twitter (though not Second Life) but it’s not just about feeling wounded – give me more credit than that.

I just like to make my own mind up, that’s all.
–c.

I’m originally from Eastbourne, down there on the south coast, and it was there and in the neighbouring town of Bexhill that I grew up and got into my first band, aged 17. When that imploded I managed to tag onto a more metal band with the drummer from the previous one, and the bassist from that band on vocals. Damn good fun, that was. Anyway, the bassist for this new band was in fact the drummer’s postman – one Stuart Ranger. We rehearsed in Polegate and played a couple of gigs in Eastbourne, but that was more or less it.

Roughly 14 years later – this coming Sunday in fact – I will return to Eastbourne to rehearse for the first time with a newly-forming covers band that is yet to have a name, by the invite of Stuart’s brother, and long-time cm.com reader, Dan.

Personally, I can’t wait.
–c.

And the covers band has stalled before it even left the rehearsal room due to lack of being bothered from another quarter, and meh. Whatever. And I am getting fucking sick of this fucking attitude across the board.

So. What am I going to do about it? Bitch and moan? Nothing? Call everyone fuckers and complain about my lot?

Fuck that noise. I am going to take the positives from all this and do something new. Something on my fucking own, that no-one can fuck up for me.

The one positive thing that came out of the JackBarrel covers attempt was that I discovered I can sing lead vocals. Not amazingly, and I’m totally inexperienced at it, but I can do it. So I hereby announce that my next recording project is going to be an album or EP of original vocal rock songs written, played and sung by me.

It will be called “If You Want It Done Right” (or similar) because ultimately I have come to realise that this is the only way anything will get done: I have to fucking do it myself.

So. Bollocks to everyone else (Jon, you’re mainly excused from that as the recent collapses weren’t your fault), I’m going solo. It will probably be under my glam stagename Tommi Starr, and it certainly won’t see light of day until at the very earliest middle of next year, but there it is.

So what do you think about that?
–TS

Would you like some Bill Murray while you wait?

Click here to view the embedded video.

I love you all. Never forget that.
–c.

There’s just no getting around that.

–c.

That’s a point actually… people used to go on about secret messages hidden backwards in heavy metal. Well there’s quite a lot of pretty fucking overt Satany going on forwards in some of the deeper darker stuff. What happens if you play that backwards? Does the world implode?

Or does it become a message of peace from the heart of the cosmos?

Mind you… it could potentially be something much much worse… Cliff Richard, the Anti-rock.

DON’T DO IT.
–c.

It seems this is somehow going to cause more misery and woe in this country than any event since the Second World War, according to all the papers this morning.  Well, at the very least, it appears to be the most newsworthy thing to have happened in the last 24 hours.

And that makes me sad.

–c.

It’s not the one with an id of 500, that went long ago, but lots of posts have been deleted or whatever, so the numbering system is out of whack there, and according to WordPress this one right here what you are currently reading of the nowtime, is #500 Fo Real.

Thrilling, huh?

The archive goes right back to March 2003, and covers posts produced by least three blogging engines. Greymatter and Pivot were useful at times when my hosting situation dictated certain constraints, but now with the emergence and dominance of the mighty mighty WordPress, everything is handled by that. EVERYTHING, mark you.

We’ve covered my solo gigs, the joining of Claytown Troupe (and recent discovery that I’m no longer in the band), and the emergence of Little Monkeys through to their transformation into Crashstars and almost immediate shelving. I’ve changed jobs a couple of times, I’ve dyed my hair, broken a tooth, grown a few beards and taches, moved house, got engaged, been on a few holidays, bought a car, sold it, Flickr’d several thousand photos, posted a buttload of YouTube videos, embraced the LOLCat phenomenon, balanced cans, I’ve told you about my books, my CDs, my movies, my friends, my original music, my cat, my code, my inner self, I’ve bought guitars and sold them, I’ve cast pods, I’ve ranted, I’ve raved, I’ve Opened Letters, I’ve kicked faces, I’ve shuddered, I’ve gone NNNNNG and Errrrr…, I have rocked and I have been rocked, London has burned and the sun has set on Camden.

Thank you all for reading, and coming back for more even when I’m being hateful. I’ve had a personal website full of stuff for over 9 years now, since before the word “web” got glued to the word “log”, since the place was wild and free and not driven by advertising revenue and clickthrough rates.

I’m not going anywhere, so settle in for another 500 posts, why don’t you?

Cheers,
–c.

But I’ve now done this so many times that I’m pretty much aware of all the pitfalls. I now use MozBackup to handle my email, addressbook, bookmarks, extensions, and generally everything Mozilla-fied that needs backing up. I keep most of my shit in a separate data partition, and I know to back up the important parts of My Documents just in case. I have it pretty much handled.

One thing I liked about running Litestep was the option to have no desktop icons, as LS provides many different ways to launch processes and programs. Personally I’ve always been a desktop creature of habit. I always have My Computer top left, Recycle Bin bottom right, shortcuts to my drives top right, email and browsing program shortcuts alongside those, and then commonly used program icons flowing down alphabetically from My Computer, and filling up two or three columns on the left of the screen.

Thing is, this inevitably led to Desktop crufting. I’d drop a file or two in the middle of the desktop while doing something “just for now” and in a week there would be 4 or 5 files, then a folder to keep them in “temporarily”, then another, then a whole area of the desktop set aside for such things, plus shortcuts to things I don’t really use cropping up next to my drive icons… you get the picture. (NB: when I ran Litestep, this was still happening – I just didn’t see it.)

Now, however, I have decided to take a leaf out of Litestep thinking and have no shortcuts on my Desktop except ones to my drives. (That’s just plain useful and time-saving.) I now launch absolutely everything – at home and at work – by either using the plain old quicklaunch flyout, or using the wonderful Launchy.

Now my Desktops are 97% clearer, and so is my mind.

Alt+Space FTW!
–c.