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I'm back in London after a week up north doing Christmas things with the family (pictures up on flickr). My excellent Christmas haul includes three new scarves, so the scarf crisis of 2005 is now over! Hurrah! It also features new trousers, pants, socks, t-shirts and jumpers. Oh, yeah, and enough books to keep me reading til the summer. Yay!

Discovering a well-established band for the first time is like discovering an author that's been around for a while; there's plenty of material to get your teeth stuck into. Over the past couple of weeks I've increased my mp3 collection by half again, and although a fair bit of that is ripping old cds, much of that is "new" music discovered through rooting around "similar to" tags on last.fm.
Below is a list of these bands, but first: The concert of Anthony and the Johnsons featuring Marc Almond that we saw a few weeks back is finally being shown on television, BBC4 at 9pm. The chances of seeing me are nil but I'm sure Anthony is fun too. It's definitely worth tuning in to see a couple of songs in any case, as their "musical palette is fairly limited" so a couple of songs is all you'll need to get a good idea of what they do, as well as appreciate the fact they have several tons worth of giant glitterballs hanging precariously over their heads.
Oh, also, new pic on Arty.
Bands I'm newly loving:
The Decemberist - Possibly my new favourite Band!
My Chemical Romance
Fallout Boy
LCD Soundsystem
Yo La Tengo
Arcade Fire
Four Tet
The Go! Team
The New Pornographers
Bedouin Soundclash (NB, they're Ska)
The Cure
Magnet
The Thermals
Bands I'm not sure of yet:
Cursive
Bright Eyes
Bands that got deleted after one listen:
The Transplants
Cocteau Twins
Most of the ELO stuff (Mr Blue Sky is amazing though)
Lit's first album (they were very very loud back then)
Haven't listened yet:
Funeral for a Friend
Erlend Oye
Kid Koala
Wolf Parade
Neutral Milk Hotel
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
Stars

Dear Apple User. Every page validates now so it should all work. Hurrah!

So! After getting into bed on Sunday morning after a long journey home from Darren's excellent house party we heard an rather improbable explosion. After looking at the news the next day to find out what it was, I have to say that although I'm sure it's very sad for the insurance companies, the people injured and local asthmatics; it has resulted in some truly awesome pictures.
The random thought thingy is is up and running btw. Top-right of the front page. Also the arty and the psuedo-archive pages are done. So in essence, Mochaholic is finished. Hurrah! Some of the pages don't work on safari though, which will have to be sorted some time, though not having access to an Apple myself might make that difficult…
Some pointless things I've discovered recently:

=>Barcelona is named after Hamilcar Barca, who was Hannibal's father. As in Elephants-over-the-Alps Hannibal Barca, not I'm-going-to-eat-your-liver Hannibal Lector.

=>Boards of Canada are two Scottish Brothers. And nothing to do with Canada. Apparently they're named after a film. I'm not sure if the film is affiliated with Canada.

=>Taylor Hanson (The Middle One) currently has two children, by his wife. He's 22 now btw.
Final note: How good is this?!?! Yay!!!!

I have way too much to blog again. Dammit. I'll start with the boring stuff I was going to blog on thursday:

I've been getting a whole load of games recently. A lot of them don't work on my out-dated graphics card, but even given that, there have been more than I have the time or patience to play properly.

Dungeon Keeper 2 is quite cool. Doesn't quite get on with my drivers though.

Civ 3 is insanely booooring. For my style of play anyway. I should try it
on different settings I guess, but I definitely preferred Alpha Centuri.

Battle Mages seems an excellent idea, but it's insanely hard, and the interface
is kinda broken. I'd almost think that you were /supposed/ to get all your troops
mercilessly slaughtered, even on easy level.

Homeworld looks way cool, but seems fairly limited. Plus the copy I have
is broken, seemingly by design.

Meh. Games just aren't doing it for me atm.

I, Robot is really, really good though, way better than I expected. Best
vision of the future I've seen yet in these high budget Sci-Fi films. And The Incredibles
was really excellent too :-)

Another page is done! Apologies in advance for the giant picture of me. Here's the new one (link also on the left there) and here's the old one. Three down, two to go! I've done the graphics for the other two, though the coding them up will need me to become more intimately acquainted with the MT archiving systems….
Also, for your perusal this evening, a couple of "Logos" I've knocked together for Mikey. What do you think? I'm going to leave it there, so as not to colour your opinions :-) Comments, please, preferably on these thingies, but if you want to rant about the fuglyness of the bio page then that's welcome too ;-)

Hokay, this is all redundant now. Please change your bookmarks (hah!) to point at Mochaholic, and I promise I'll make an
effort to blog lots of exciting stuff. Well, stuff anyway. The place is still a work in progress, but then so it should be says I!

Mynciboi 3.0 is dead, long live Mochaholic 1.0!

Welcome! Take a look around. It wont take you long, there's not much here yet. To your right are the 10 latest pictures I've posted on flickr, via their nifty "badge" thing. Does anyone know how to get a space between the photos? I'm sure there's a way, but I haven't found it. The space to the left of the blog area may or may not fill up eventually, but it's low priority, and probably quite complicated. Plus taking away the only space might not look good… The vertical bar further to the left will fill up with more stuff soon, including links to yer standard Bio page, an archives page, and an "arty" page, which will be purely for displaying photos in a larger format than Flickr can.

Speaking of archives, click on the permalink for this entry. Look! A pretty single-entry page! Every version of mynciboi had fugly archive pages that looked (and were, if I recall correctly) accidental.

"Random thoughts" will be making an unobtrusive server-side comeback shortly, though spamming refresh on this front page will probably piss flickr off… Hmm…

What more can I say? Stay tooned you lovely people.

So! The groundwork is all here now. Everything else to come are peripherals, bolt-ons and feature-tastic goodness. About half of which I'll actually implement!