elegant simplicity

For some time now I have had a profile on mySpace, and for some time now I have been coming to the conclusion that it is a total waste of time!

As far as I can tell, it seems to be about numbers: how many friends one can get, and not so much about the music any more. Not that it ever was. In my case, at any rate.

So within the next 24 hours my profile will disappear into the great black hole of profile cyberspace, never to be seen again.

As far I, and many other artists are concerned, it is way better to have one's own domain and a quality shop with free music and what not than it is to try and drive sales through sites like mySpace and Facebook.

Apologies to those of you who are our 'real friends', but you already know where to come for all the latest news and tunes, an ...

Whilst checking out GEMM today, I noticed that someone was offering our 1999 CD The Story of Our Lives for a whopping £53.45 . . . . . USED!

This is crazy when we sell it NEW (including postage) for just £8.99.

I have noticed some more daft prices for our stuff on that site (and other 'collectors' sites) and I do wonder what these sellers are trying to do (aside from making some money). Do they not bother to check if the CDs are available elsewhere? Do they have no idea of the rarity value, or otherwise, of what they are selling?

There is a word for it. The word is exploitation. Some would say market forces, blah, blah, blah . . . . but ...

Over the last few months the volume of spam received through our domains has reached epidemic proportions. Each day, the total runs to in excess of 1000 and over 2000 on some occasions.

My host has excellent spam filters and is very good at avoiding false positives. However, as insurance, I check through all the spam to make sure. Now, however, I have decided to no longer do it: I simply don't have the time anymore. So, anything identified as spam by my host before I download it to my email program, will be deleted using the empty Junk Folder Option.

So, if you have sent me a VALID email and have not had a reply within 24 hours, you have been junked! If this is the case and you have not been replied to within 24 hours, then simply use the contact form - mail will always get through using this method.

The other day, I purchased a Windows Vista Home Premium laptop computer for travelling around with and for web development whilst enjoying an Americano! Anyway, after stripping away the sheer load of rubbish that came pre-installed with it (and by rubbish, we're talking Norton, Works, internet connections, media players etc) I had a rocking and rolling little machine ready for customising.

And that's when my Vista Compatibility troubles started!

First, I installed the trusty AVG anti-virus. No problems there, fully compatible. Next, in went Open Office, Firefox, Thunderbird and various open source or freeware utilities - all of which installed without mishap. After all that, I wanted to take an image of the system to use as my base restore image. Out came True Image 9. Sorry, not compatible with Vista! Grrrr! I then ordered version 10 from Amazon, which will be installed as soon as it arrives. Next, I installed Visual Studio (I have two licenses). This needed a ...