Several weeks ago I was feeling quite down, I then decided that I no longer want to stay indoors and sob so I decided to embark on a crazy mission/project of going to at least one gig per week till the end of the year, mainly to keep my mind busy and entertained. Using the trusty last.fm site I was recommended to loads of small gigs of bands that I like and I promptly booked them all (they were around £10-15 each so that was good), tickets come through the letter box like treacle and now I’ve successfully got myself booked up for the rest of the year, each gig hopefully bringing you loads of lovely photos to enjoy (smuggling is part of the fun!). So yeah, hope you enjoy, this week I’ve doing 4 gigs so that will be fun (and tiring as hell!).
Above is just a sample of tickets to gigs I’ve previously been to or am going to, couldn’t fit them all in and didn’t want to tell you ALL the gigs I’m going to (but you can find out pretty easily if you looked hard enough). This was one of the main reaasons why I bought good old eve and my new lens.
After oogling with the new lens I thought I’d start breaking into it, by going to an instore gig. I already knew about of Montreal playing at Rough Trade East, but was very worried that I wasn’t able to get passes to see them play. Last night I eventually said “sod it, I’ll just go and hope the best”. This meant a slightly early exit at work to queue up for wristbands to see them.
Say hello to my lovely Canon 28mm F1.8 USM lens! A wide prime lens I will be using to shoot wider shots at gigs and whatnot. This is a lovely addition to my camera gear and will hopefully be used quite a lot in future gigs (including this one).
Seriously, I can’t stop giggling at the office! This reminds me of the time when I couldn’t stop giggling when an interviewee said “broadband penetration”. Interviewers should never be giggling when the interviewee is saying something serious. I was also laughing at this images.
Finally I’m able to use the phrase “in biblical proportions” and have it actually making sense (well kinda :p). For those of you who don’t know this Emiliana Torrini chick, she’s the one that did “Gollum Song” in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (where they took the hobbits to isengard gard gard g gard). Of course we want to steer clear of the one piece of soundtrack song she did and more into her actual work. Namely Fishermans Woman and Me and Armini (I suggest you buy them if you like what you see ;)).
The first song I heard was “Sunny Road” and absolutely fell in love with it, then upon purchasing her album I began to really enjoy the other tracks too. They’re very sweet and relaxing, like a tranquillezed Bjork lying on a green grass hill in MORDOR. So yeah, as soon as I heard she was playing in London i immediately jumped the chance and bought tickets to see her (nice and cheap). The thing that struck me was that it was held in a church (see! biblical). I’ve seen a few performances in churches but they were usually orchestral and choir based so seeing this was going to be a first, I can already imagine the amazing acoustics it would produce, the ghostly reverbs swimming around the cool clean air (plus it will be a riot!).
My friend Michelle updated her facebook status asking whether anyone wanted to see CSS tomorrow (tomorrow being the 8th of October). I knew that it was wine tasting evening for me but who could turned down for a free gig? Not much thought was put into deciding whether I could go (that’s the beauty of living in London, impromptu spontaneous gigs you can just leave and go to at any time of the day). So i instantly replied and that was that (thanks Michelle!), the condition however was that I needed to find a girl to go with since the guestlist was under her name and she couldn’t go tonight (I suppose I could of put on a wig and an elegant colourful dress but I doubt I’d be convincing). Her first pick for a female replacement was Silvie so she contacted her but during the interim of it all, I went slightly crazy in terms of contacting everyone I know who was a female living in London in case Silvie wasn’t able to go.
Flickr integration, thanks to the lovely Flickr Photo Album Plugin
Thought I’d update you on some new features here and there on the blog, nothing worth talking about but you know, if I keep talking about gigs you’d think I’m not actually a geek! There’s still lots of backend stuff that I occasionally do out of curiosity and for coding pleasures (mmm code). Today I’ve been doing a bit of plugin shopping and downloaded/installed two useful plugins, a flickr photo album plugin and a google site map plugin. The latter is mainly used for informing google and other search engines of newly updated posts and whatnot, I’m not really seeing any immediate benefit from it but I hear it’s useful *shrugs*, I kinda got bored reading it’s use on wikipedia (and I find it weird how my readers are actually reading this for me if they dare click on the wikipedia article).
A lovely pie chart showing the resolutions used by crazybobbles.org visitors
Haha sorry 800×600, i still love you and everything but I thought this was quite a punchy title for a post and all. Right, more geeky blog changes. Kinda wished I wrote this with the other one but hey. When coding sites and blogs we make sure everyone can read it nicely and easily. If you look at most blogs and sites their width is about 760px or so. Reason being is that this means users with 800×600 resolutions can view the page without too much hasslehoff in terms of horizontally scrolling the page in order to view the content. Most people have stuck with this and that was all fine and dandy. But it also meant that most webmasters are restricted to damn 800px wide websites in order to conform. Content usually should be minimal but sometimes it’s just annoying knowing you can’t benefit from the extra width, so I’ve decided that I’m more or less going to screw the 800×600 users and make a w i d e r site.
Upon more research I’ve also looked at my stats to see what kind of resolutions you guys have and the results are quite interesting, only 1.12% of folks visiting my site have the oldskool 800×600. So really I’m not killing off too many users with prehistoric monitors. So what triggered the decision? Well, one of the biggest examples of sites that are doing this is good old www.facebook.com, notice that the newer site is actually wider now? This is so that they can fit more status/wall update goodness into your page (as well as ads) at the expense of those poor 800×600. Expect the update to happen very soon, I need to create new background images for the header (just wider, not killing off katamari).
