devolute.net

I’ve just returned from a terribly pleasant weekend in Manchester. It’s a city that’s tantalisingly close, yet is just far away enough from me to be inconvenient to visit. A pal of mine, Ste, is a resident and like me is a recent graduate from the University of Hull. He (or perhaps more accurately; his unbelievably accommodating parents) were kind enough to put me up all weekend (or should that be ‘put up with’?). Aside from visiting Ste, the reason for visits to Manchester usually revolve around one thing: seeing bands.

The band in question this time were biro-artists extraordinaire, ‘Marmaduke Jinks‘. They were friends of Stes, but I’d heard very little of them. Still, they turned out to be one of the most delightful bands I’ve seen for quite a while. I always feel somewhat uncomfortable trying to describe bands by comparison and I know I really shouldn’t do it, but hard cheese. I’m going to; It was all rather Belle & Sebastian meets the Divine Comedy… oh, y’know what? I think I had someone else in mind but I’ve completely forgotten. Sod it. There we go, another clumsy comparison. Regardless, they were pretty damn competent musicians and their songs were genuinely funny. Well, I giggled anyway. I wouldn’t completely rule out some real success, they certainly deserve it (doubly so since we ended up at the bassists house, drinking his beer). Being a fiercely anti-Murdoch sort of chap, I’m not planning of making a habit of this, but here is a link to their MySpace page on which you can listen to some of their songs. Do so. Perhaps whilst sipping some red wine and nibbling on a bit of camembert. That’s a serving suggestion by the way.

The rest of the weekend involved meeting some of the lovely, friendly, but perhaps the slightest bit crazy, folk of Bury. I’ve been a bit nomadic recently (Gloucestershire, Derby, Nottingham), where next? I feel the mighty H calling again….

Yeah, here it is. My site just got a complete redesign. Not only does it look different, but it’s running WordPress. There were two main reasons for these changes. (a) I went for a job interview with the people at Pipex and talking to the people there I figured I needed an oppertunity to polish up my XHTML to perhaps a slightly higher standard that yields, I hope, a more bombproof page. (b) I was blogging before using PHPNews. Now this is a great little script, but it’s not really what I need for a fully featured, extendable blog. Comment spam was becoming a giant pain in the face and frankly, I wanted some new toys to play with!  As before, I’m going to promise content for my portfolio page, but it’s not quite there yet!
Anyway, I’m off to Manchester now to see some local bands and visit an old uni pal. I’ll let you know quite how dire they are when I return tommorow.

So yeah, time for an update. I graduated. Which was nice. I’ve since then taken on web work for a couple of charities and am looking for a ‘proper’ job. This website hasn’t had much attention because my phpNews comments system got hit by those pesky spam bots! Rather than fix it, I thought I’d move over to WordPress a much more fully featured CMS/blog. I’m getting enough traffic for it. However, this will only happen after I’ve finished my other web-design commitments. It’s all go. See you in a week!