Found these videos on YouTube, Planet Claire was their third encore. Whoever filmed that one must have been stood just in front of us.

Went to see the B-52s last night at Birmingham Academy. We learned several things; GPS hardware doesn’t like those underpass road bits they like in Brum and that maybe it would make more sense to go on the train - if they weren’t so shite that is.

We got to the place at 7pm and joined the line outside. As there was no supporting act there was a bit of a wait till the B’s hit the stage at 9.15ish. They played a good mix of old and new songs, plus Love Shack and an encore of Rock Lobster. It was awesome :) Well worth enduring the headache inducing lights, particularly during Strobe Light, a good test of my migraine reflecting green glasses of power.

Last weekend I happened to be watching 100 greatest movie songs on one of the freeview music channels and to my shock I saw my guitar. Nothing odd there, if it was a Strat or a Les Paul. However I built my guitar, I designed it myself, I spent considerable time deciding on the shape of the body. I thought it was an original. Essentially it’s a merge of the top half of an Explorer and the bottom half of a Randy Rhoads.

The image on the left is a still from a Starship video, on the right is a photo of my as yet unpainted guitar. I really would like to finish it someday, before I can get it painted I need to sort out the stupid recessed tremelo that’s actually deeper than the body. I should have stuck with a £10 fixed bridge.

I don’t live in London, or Birmingham, or any other city with lots of shops. I live in a little town, we have lots of trees. This being the case online shopping is really important to me. I buy all my games, DVDs, music and any electronic goods I need online.

On the whole my online shopping experience has been positive. The only thing that I find lacking is the delivery of the goods I buy. If I order a CD from Amazon I know that the postman will cram the resulting package through the letterbox, but if I buy something bigger, say a DVD box set I need to be in to receive it, or it may get left outside, not ideal. These days I play the online game of trying to second guess when my parcel will be delivered and syncronising that to my next work at home day.

Both Tesco’s and John Lewis have good delivery systems, you get to choose what day you wish to receive your stuff. I can’t be the only one who’s been put of buying something online because there’s simply no way to know when I’ll need to be in to receive it. Clearly it’s not just the online shops who need to work on this, it needs the delivery services to overhaul their delivery methods. What I would like to see is:

• The option to pay for guaranteed next day, then let me choose whether I want AM or PM.
• The option to have an out of hours delivery, either before 8am or after 6pm.

It snowed on Sunday (18th Nov) night, I can’t honestly remember it ever snowing so early. Hopefully this bodes well for having some decent snow this winter.

Not long started snowing.

The view from my study.

Earlier in the year I signed up with koodos, an online shop. They were going to have a sale on iPods and I wanted to be notified when this sale began. I’m very protective of my email address, I never give out my personal address to any old company. I use the format of company name at my domain that way when I receive spam I have a fairly good idea where its come from.

Gradually I started to get spam sent to the address I’d given to koodos. I logged back in to their site to see if I’d missed anything, according to my details I was set to receive email from koodos. I then checked their privacy policy which states:

We will never pass on your email address on to a 3rd party for marketing purposes unless you have chosen ‘3rd party opt-in’ as one of your communication preferences within My Account. We will, however send your details to merchants for whom you have indicated interest by purchasing products offered by them on koodos.

I emailed them and was told that they currently did not pass on any details to third parties, it seems that bit is in their privacy statement possibly for future use. Today, as of 16:35 I have received 20 spam to that address. I’m not sure what’s more worrying; that they possibly play to sell their customers details to whatever company when you buy one of the products listed on koodos or that they are insisting that they have not sold my details yet clearly an email address that has been used once at one site is now being bombarded with spam. It has certainly put me off the idea of using their website and trusting them with any more personal information.

The O.H. and I went to the Big Chill this weekend. We pitched our tent on Thursday so as to bag a spot in quiet camping. Unfortunately when we went back the next day there was no room left in quiet camping parking so we ended up in general parking, that meant a good 25 minute walk to our tent. Each morning we drove home for a shower and some breakfast, this probably worked out quicker (and cheaper) than waiting in line for a shower on-site. When we returned from breakfast on Sunday we managed to park in family parking which shaved a good 15 minutes off our walk.

This was my first festival and just about my first time camping so I wasn’t sure what I’d make of either. The atmosphere was great, everyone was friendly and surprisingly it didn’t rain the whole weekend.

Bands/acts we saw

Friday

• Kate Rogers - fantastic, her Seconds album gets heavy play on my iPod so this was an awesome way to kick off the festival for me.
• The Bad Plus - their Aphex Twin cover was so cool.
• Richie Havens - his slot seemed to get moved when Mika didn’t show. The man is a legend. He played at Woodstock.
• Chilled By Nature - really nice listening to this up on the highest stage at night.

Saturday

• Cortney Tidwell - pretty good but I’m having trouble remembering this one to be honest.
• Piney Gir - really good country type stuff, I downloaded the album from eMusic as soone as I got home.
• Mr. Scruff - a standard Big Chill staple. Really good plus had his own cool little animation on the big screens.
• Ulrich Schnauss - I was really disappointed with his set. It sounded like some crap indie band, it was basically a dirge. We left half way through.

Sunday

• Hafdis Huld - amazing, featured the pink flying-V ukelele
• Shlomo and the Vocal Orchestra - this one was really popular, couldn’t even see the screens let alone the stage. Did a beatbox cover of Paul Simon’s Call Me Al that was genius.
• Isaac Hayes - what can I say about this guy, huge star, truely excelent.
• Biosphere - this was the last stage show of the festival, it was the one I really wanted to see. We sat in effectively the front row.

I learned some useful stuff one my first festival:

• Take something padded to sit on, the ground gets very hard at one in the morning.
• Wear lots of sunblock.
• Wear a hat.
• Wear good walking shoes.
• Camp fairly near the toilets (but not too near), it’s a long walk at four in the morning.
• Try not to camp on a hill.

Thankfully my boss told me to go home at lunchtime. I set out at just gone 1pm and arrived home at 3:30ish, compared to most I got off easy. It took the O.H. over five hours to drive back from Gloucester. Our office did not fare well, it was under a couple of feet of water for nearly 24 hours so currently I’m working from home.

Photos

Unfortunately I didn’t manage to take an photos myself but here are some relevant ones from the BBC website.

• The end of the road where I work
• I usually drive through here on my way to work

We got some new fish today to replace the ones that died earlier in the year. To add a bit of colour to the tank we bought two Platies and one Angel Fish.

The photos are a tad blurry due to fish not grasping the posing for pictures concept. Here’s an overall shot of the aquarium.

As I sit on the couch and import the photos from my digital camera the fish are now posing perfectly for photos. Damn.

Our male Gourami died today, he wasn’t very old. He kept chasing around the Mollies so they in turn started to peck at him.

Needless to say we gave him the usual send off.