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Oasis still knock out some awesome tracks, and have long been one of my favourite bands. Noel Gallagher, especially, has been a major influence in my own guitar stuff. Live stuff from Noel is always top quality, and even though it’s hosted by AOL they’ve just brought out The Interface podcast with him doing three acoustic tracks and an interview – ‘It’s Good (To Be Free)’, ‘Whatever’ and ‘Slide Away’ in what they call a “Live and Un-Liamed” performance! Grab the enhanced version if you’re running iTunes to check out some of the photos as well. His interview is cool too and worth listening to.

Alongside Radiohead live in 2003, best gig I’ve been to was Oasis back in 2002 – plastered against the barriers right at the front of the arena in front of Noel and his stack of amps, regularly getting soaked by the hoses the arena staff + security kept rolling out since it was middle of the summer and just a tad warm! One of the loudest gigs I’ve been to, as it happens…

Am I a happy boy today or what?! Those that can dredge the memories will remember I met up with Ewan Spence in Edinburgh at the end of June at The Des Moines Riot’s gig, and finally we can reveal what’s been going on behind the scenes!

The Unsigned Rock Podcast has been going strong with 43 shows now, and TPN Rock, produced by Ewan, has long been a favourite podcast I listen to. Not only that, it’s one of the best rock podcasts out there! Realising that two heads are better than one, and twice the music can’t really go wrong, I’ve moved across to host TPN Rock alongside Ewan! My part stays pretty much the same – two shows a week of the best in new, independent and unsigned rock music, and Ewan continues producing a further two shows on a Tuesday + Friday. That’s 4 (count em!) shows a week of the best rock music on the Internet!

The Podcast Network deliver over 60 top-quality podcasts, quite a few of which I regularly listen to, and to be working on one of the major podcast networks out there is pretty cool! It also gives the bands + artists I get played on the podcast a lot more exposure than producing the show on my own, and that’s only going to benefit them more!

So, go check out TPN Rock: Rock the Week In and let me know what you think!

For those that follow the Unsigned Rock Podcast, you’ll know there might just be something new + exciting happening next week. I’m certainly pretty excited about it as has been a while coming, but is shaping up to be really good!

It’s getting a bit of attention elsewhere with Ewan Spence mentioning it, so you’ll have to check out the podcast on Monday (such as grabbing the shows via iTunes) to see what the all the fun is

Although I’ve ran CentOS on servers in the past (Open-Xchange, for example), I’ve never used Fedora much myself. Still pay attention to what they’re up to with Fedora though, as although Red Hat may be a tad slow + immobile at times due to their size, they do sometimes bring out cool tools. Their latest release of Fedora Core 6 drew me to Virtual Machine Manager, a GUI for Xen virtual machine management. I still have my Xen server sat by my feet (am kicking it now, for no particular reason!) and keep meaning to mess around with it again, and although I wouldn’t use virt-manager much with only a handful of VM’s, it looks very cool if you were running multiple VM’s, such as for web hosting. Although remote management, i.e. connecting to remote hypervisor isn’t quite up + running yet, it looks very promising.

SpotDJ was something that appeared in my GMail account for the Unsigned Rock Podcast a good few weeks ago, and seemed like a good idea. When you have your music playing via iTunes, SpotDJ kicks in before each track and plays a radio DJ-like bumper about the track to introduce it, maybe a bit of trivia about the song, how it did in the charts, etc. It was still in testing, but was invited in, and offered $1 for every spot I recorded. Recorded 20 spots, then heard nothing more about it, so wasn’t all that bothered. Could have recorded up to 100, but wasn’t going to spend the time doing it without getting anything in return. To be honest, I felt the spots being played just didn’t work – the quality was sometimes poor, didn’t add much I didn’t already know about my music collection, and on some albums, simply didn’t sound right where the tracks fade in to each other.

But, am sure there’s plenty of folk that will like it, and a few days ago I got $20 zipped through via PayPal, so can’t grumble too much I suppose! Only took a few minutes to record them in the first place, so wish I’d done more now! Haven’t used SpotDJ since as it just wasn’t for me, but if you’re into a bit of commentary alongside your tracks, give SpotDJ a go and load up some Oasis, Radiohead or Stereophonics tracks (can’t remember which tracks I did!).

Well, just got back home from London half an hour ago and am pretty tired now. The train rides were okay – had a table seat both ways, and my Archos AV500 movie player held up to watch Lord of War and Lucky Number Slevin, then moved onto the iPod so had plenty to keep me entertained!

Medical went fine, just seemed such a waste going all that way for 20 minutes. Had a chest x-ray, immunisation record check, a tetanus shot (needed a booster) and MMR (which I didn’t get as a kid), then basic medical examine such as checking weight, eyes, mobility, blood pressure, etc. and that was it. Appointment was 2.30p.m and was signed off, paid and out the door down the street by 3p.m.

But, wandered along Oxford Street, onto Regent’s Street to Piccadilly Circus, down to Trafalgar Square and onto The Strand (taking in a Subways and then a Starbucks….) before grabbing a taxi back to Kings Cross station. The taxi was neat – had some Cabvision system (crappy camera photo from Flickr shown on the left) which let you control some in-taxi shows to watch! Was pretty cool – watched some Little Britain and The Office. Probably a ploy to charge you more by driving around whilst you’re not paying attention!

So, hopefully the doctors will sign me off as ‘fit as a 23 year old’ and now just wait 6 weeks for PC Plod to tell me I don’t have a criminal record before I can request the final interview from the US Embassy.

Picked up a Wacom Graphire 3 tablet yesterday which is a pretty cool piece of kit. Had quite a few of these running when working at Greencroft in the art department, and was impressed by them. With a new hush hush project being worked on (apart from those that have had sneak peeks…), it’s ideal, as is so much easier doing graphics work with a pen + tablet rather than a mouse.

Running off the desktop rather than the MacBook, as even with 2Ghz RAM, it doesn’t like manipulating 600-700Mb graphics files, so back to trusty Kubuntu and the GIMP (no jokes please!). Works like a charm, and sod the 2 CD’s of tablet drivers and associated software to allow it to work properly. Most modern kernels will have wacom support compiled as a module, so it works as a regular hotplug USB device straight out the box. Did add the following into the xorg.conf though (thanks to http://www.shallowsky.com/linux/wacom.html) to ensure it used the full size of the tablet and the eraser:

# Wacom graphics tablet
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "stylus"
Driver "wacom"
Option "Type" "stylus"
Option "Mode" "Absolute"
Option "USB" "on"
Option "Threshold" "10"
Option "Device" "/dev/wacom"
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
[ ... ]
InputDevice "stylus" "SendCoreEvents"
InputDevice "cursor" "SendCoreEvents"
InputDevice "eraser" "SendCoreEvents"
[ ... ]

Definatley recommend a graphics tablet to others now I’ve spent a bit of time using one rather than simply seeing them in action elsewhere, and even when I’m skipping between apps or browsing the net, I’ll quite happily use the stylus. Helps combat the old RSI too I guess!

And no, you’ll have to wait to see what I’m working on

Having sent off a load of forms back to the embassy earlier and started things moving on the police check, I got the medical examine booked for this Thursday afternoon. Bit of a bugger on the train times coming back as the earliest return without heading home at 3p.m when the appointment isn’t until 2.30p.m was 7p.m, meaning a good 3/4 hours sat in London after the medical. Hopefully it won’t be too bad – can either sit in Regent’s park afterwards if the weather is canny, or failing that, setup shop in a pub near Kings Cross.

Either’s fine with me

Well, has taken about 2 hours but I’ve now filled in all the forms I received from the embassy this morning for the visa application, which gives them exactly the same information as they already have. Actually, there’s two supplementary forms to one section which in fact ask you to repeat the same information (again). I do find it wonderfully ironic at the bottom of each form there’s a ‘Paperwork Reduction Act Statement’…

Off to the police station on Monday to start another background check, send off all these forms, and book a medical examine. That’s fun in itself – 6 hour round-trip on the train to London and then pay £160 for the pleasure of having a chest x-ray and blood sample taken, then wait until the results are sent to the embassy and 6 weeks for the police to say I’ve got no criminal record before I get another 6 hour round-trip on the train to London for an interview at the embassy!

Fun, eh?

Bugger, just realised after that last post was published it’s Friday 13th! Tempting fate to move domain, web + e-mail server today? Hope not