I finally got around to tidying up the Acuphuncture site, and as you can see, I have found the “rounded rectangle” option in the GIMP.  Bastard HTML doesn’t validate properly though, bangs on about a missing character encoding, which is something that I thought was only necessary for XML documents.  Hey ho, at least it’s vaguely passed, which beats the last site I made for a couple of friends who’d set up their own company, where they ended up going live with the version I made before I checked for validation errors.  Oops.  Next on the list is a new Casa del Funk site… maybe I’ll bother to learn how to use Flash for that.  Unlikely, but possible.

Tom made it onto Radio 1, and even got a namecheck from Kirk Degiorgio!  (Who actually turns out to sound like a friend of mine called Steve, who’s from Romford; not what I’d imagined at all!)  It’s all part of Kirk’s Beauty Room project, and you can hear the band’s session here until next Sunday night, beginning at about 1 hour 15 minutes.  If you now happen to spot Tom on the street, the correct etiquette is to say, “Hey, aren’t you that famous guy from the radio?”

They’re multiplying. And I may (or may not) be losing control. For all I know about garden amphibians, these little suckers could be some endangered species. They’re not very endangered in our pond, however, due to the supply of tadpoles that some unfortunate frog has helpfully provided for them.

Cambridge beer fest on its way!

Mad Japanese arcade piano game - Google Video - you know, I’ve never thought about the similarity between video games and the technical side of playing musical instruments before.  I can see many parallels!

So, this is the Squible theme.  Yes, it’s back, but I’ve disabled AJAX comments, so people should actually be able to reply to the crap I write here.  In some ways I like this theme: you see a couple of posts, then below that a general index-type area showing my Flickr photos and last.fm stuff, along with recent comments and posts.  And I like the idea of asides, though perhaps having them waaaaay down there at the bottom on the right means that people won’t see that bit updating seperately from the main blog entries.  And where are my links, eh?  Maybe I’ll change back to something more like the standard two-column lay-out after the shineyness wears off, who knows?

Update: OK, I found the links page.  Panic over.

Apparently this has already been on b3ta, but hey: it’s (another) site re-captioning old cartoons!  Damn funny though.  Monkey Fluids: As Seen on the History Channel

Michael Kelly on climate change:

A world that persistently and willfully uses the word ‘challenge’ is not worth saving. The biggest ‘challenge’ of the 21st Century is the compulsory sterilisation of those who use the word ‘challenge’. If you expect to be taken seriously, do not say ‘challenge’ when you mean ‘problem’ or ‘threat’ or ‘disaster’ or ‘potential cataclysm’ or ‘I want my mother.’ Learning a foreign language is a challenge; trying to keep an entire packet of Maltesers in your mouth until they melt is a challenge; the possible end of life as we know it requires a different term.

I’d buy a newspaper full of invective-filled partisan rants; it’s a far more entertaining way of presenting current affairs.

Hot on the heels of his recent victory at the Cambridge Bands Competition, Alex Harris is putting his moves on Channel 4. Vote for him here and maybe the boys will end up playing on Popworld! Eeee, and I knew him when he wasn’t famous.

I saw the James Taylor Quartet at the Soul Tree on Saturday.  A good gig, nice to hear a professional band play similar tunes to what I play in bands, and particularly nice to see that even the professionals are reduced to wildly gesticulating at the sound guy trying to get the levels right.  There was even a JTQ vs. Casa section when they covered Bring Down The Birds (as sampled by Dee-Lite for Groove Is In The Heart) and the Starsky and Hutch theme.  Yet another similarity became apparent when the sax player took his shirt off to reveal a brown T-shirt with “Funkster” emblazoned across it.  I’ve got that shirt as well, so I know where he bought it: Top Man.  How reassuringly down-to-earth.

More clinical trial name-based “hilarity”: The effect of cannabis on urge incontinence in patients with multiple sclerosis: a multicentre, randomised placebo-controlled trial (CAMS-LUTS). Cam sluts. Riiiight.

Tom and I both bought Electro Harmonix Small Stone phasers towards the end of last year, and both of us came to the same conclusion: it’s a great-sounding pedal, but the volume drop that happens when you turn the pedal on is a royal pain in the arse.  I could work around it when using my Trace Elliot amp because that has configurable input and output gain on the effects loop.  However, my Session amp doesn’t have that facility, so when I used the Small Stone with it I added an overdrive pedal to boost the level back up.  This, of course, results in a bit of a tap-dance session prior to using the phaser, which is distinctly non-ideal.  I’d heard that it was possible to get the pedal modified by Analogman, so dropped it off at Panic Music when I sent my amp in for repair assuming they could do a similar job.  They surprised me by quoting me about fifty quid for the modification, which seemed way too expensive.

Fast forward to this year and the idea of getting the pedal modified popped back into my head again (read: I was bored at work).  Hunting around on the net, I spotted in the uk.music.guitar archives that someone had sold a Small Stone pedal modified to have unity gain, and that the person who had done the work had recently started Tipton Amplification.  I dropped Tipton a line, who quoted me a far lower price than Panic had, and so within a week I had the modded pedal back in my sticky mitts.  It’s fantastic; unity gain whether on or off, and better signal-to-noise ratio than before.  So to celebrate my entry into unihibited phasing heaven, I recorded a little tune; check it out here.