A bit quiet right round here....I know....

Yup, been a bit short of giving you really dull details about formatting and edits and the like recently. Having a small life upheaval at the moment, nothing too serious just something that requires lots of my time and attention....

News from the inside is that everything seems rather good right now, generally. Many of you would have seen bits, if not all, of the "Slash Dot Dash" video on various programmes, including that little bit on Top Of The Pops (not that you could hear it with all the voiceover etc) this last Friday. It was nice to hear my little bit of guitar of playing blasting out of the TV....my girlfriend was all proud and everything. Awwwww.

It's funny how it's actually almost release time already. It seemed so far away just a few weeks ago....and now it's just about to happen, in relative terms.

(just to get back to normal, the CD2 format has changed a little since the announcement, techincal chart-rule issue as far as I remember [been out of the loop a bit recently])

Posted By Simon Thornton @ 11:52:54 PM  trackback []  comment(s) []  

"How To Be Creative"

I really like the basics of this article about the whole concept. It's generally so hard to explain what goes on inside the head of a 'creative type' - normally because they have NO idea what's going on either. It's even harder to actually live with this sort of stuff in your head, but this little bit of brain-dumping actually does a pretty good job of explaining the basic 'rules', if you will...

[via The Obvious]

[p.s. please excuse the really rough "work-in-progress" look of www.mm.com right now, I am totally in the middle of getting all CSS updated which means there's all wierd fonts and stuff going on until it's all finished - will fix it as soon as...]

Posted By Simon Thornton @ 11:38:18 PM  trackback []  comment(s) []  

Soulwax

Their new album "Any Minute Now" is really good. I'm surprised and delighted by it (I only thought they did the dancey remix stuff, I wasn't aware of the band side of the project) and it's always nice to stumble across something new and lovely. Which, I'm sad to say, is more than can be said for their new web site which is unbelievably bad. The ultimate in unuserfriendliness. If you can get to grips with it - which vertical bar does what? reliably? - then well done but, really, it shouldn't be that as much effort as it is to get around the bloody thing....oh my....

Posted By Simon Thornton @ 12:42:11 AM  trackback []  comment(s) []  

I saw the SDD video today...

...and it's quite mad. But very good. Could be seen as controversial in some circles I guess, is bound to get a reaction either way.

An amusing cameo by the artist too, I think.

Posted By Simon Thornton @ 9:50:10 PM  trackback []  comment(s) []  

Comment about comments (and other changes)

[Warning: contains much geekery]

At last. I've finally managed to get around to installing a new commenting system that runs on my server instead of relying on the Userland one, which is frankly slow and rubbish. Hopefully from now on there'll be no long pauses before the whole page appears, it should all turn up quickly in one lump. Has a temporary side-effect of meaning that any comments left before tonight are not visible, but it's something that's fixable when I get the time.

For anyone that happens to need to know (or perhaps sometime in the future might wonder) how to swap a commenting system over from User Radioland to their own server, you need to go here, download the zip file and follow the instructions. It takes about 10 minutes to do if you know what you are doing (hence, it took me 25 minutes, but there we are)

And I remembered to finally get rid of that odd little .gif that used to be next to every new day of posts (where the permalink graphic is now was until I got rid of the ugly thing) because that also lived on a different server. So, one less external site to rely on....

I'm planning an 'about' page as well as a better 'contact' type page, they'll all be done in the next day or two. As well as working on getting a breadcrumb trail going, just for the fun of it.

You might also have noticed the slightly new look etc, it's something I've been meaning to do for ages. It's still work in progress, some things are definitely more broken than they used to be (i.e. how those pictures in the post below line up, or not) but it's getting there.

Posted By Simon Thornton @ 9:17:11 PM  trackback []  comment(s) []  

Belated Brighton Pride 2004 Pictures

As last year, the Brighton Pride procession passed by my window on my birthday weekend, of course I was pretending it was all a party in celebration of my getting older...but., OK, it wasn't quite. Was fun to watch though, as ever:

What Simon Did

Birthday presents, including some great books, such as "On Food And Cooking" (perhaps the ultimate book for someone like me that's really into science and cooking), and Helmut Newton: Work (an awesome big catalogue containing his great pictures of women). A wonderful birthday picnic on a warm summers' day in the park, watching the ducks and swans have fun on the pond. Lots of drinking in the sunshine with friends involving a whole pineapple and a chocolate birthday cake, oh and perhaps occasional bouts of drunkeness. Recovering on the sofa watching lots of the fantastically funny and charismatic Giorgio Locatelli on UK TV Food, with a bit of Top Gear thrown in (we're hoping to get tickets to go be in the audience soon, as we think it's about our favourite thing on TV at the moment). Then, a slightly surreal birthday dinner, the food was lovely and the company top notch - the location and set-up, well, unique perhaps. Then, rather accidently actually, some more drinking of alcoholic beverages and lots of late night hysterical conversations. And perhaps not quite getting enough sleep.

Basically, a birthday that lasted for 4 days. It was really really lovely. Probably best that you only have birthdays once a year though, I guess. For the sake of my liver, if nothing else.

[this post was brought to you by via the "How Many Superlatives Can You Use In One Post?" programme]

Posted By Simon Thornton @ 11:21:03 PM  trackback []  comment(s) []  

As 50 Cent didn't quite say....

"it's my birthday....it's my birthday...."

Older. Again. Grrr.

Posted By Simon Thornton @ 9:59:17 AM  trackback []  comment(s) []  

For those moments when you NEED to know a chart position....

To save the scrambling about for an out-of-date copy of the Book Of Hit Singles, just pop along to www.everyhit.com....all the british charts archived and searchable. Very handy. (It even reminded me of a release I'd totally forgotten about and didn't have on my 'CV' type webpage thinggy)

(p.s. for anyone that hasn't seen the cover of SDD yet, go here)

Posted By Simon Thornton @ 2:03:12 AM  trackback []  comment(s) []  

Slash Dot Dash Dot Update Dot Dash

The video is being shot today. Woo.

I've had test pressings of all of it, the single, the album, the other 12" and 10" things that are going to be floating around. All sounding good and loud now.

I deliver the CD masters of SDD CD1 and CD2 to the office tomorrow, now the tracklisting has finally been nailed down. The last time I looked at the listing on fatboyslim.net it wasn't quite right, it'll be corrected on there as soon as.

Artwork is all done, I have PDFs of it here, all looking nice and colourful.

Radio CD promos are done and being circulated as I type, there's a couple of different edits being sent round, some work better for some people than others, it's one of those strange little things that goes on in radioland (no, not the blogging system I use, silly)

That's about it, I think.

Posted By Simon Thornton @ 5:32:57 PM  trackback []  comment(s) []