A nerf-herder in a nest of gundarks...

As I mentioned before, Kling Klang were playing the Sub Club as part of the annual (fantastic) TripTych festival and the big man here had a ticket. Splendid. And so they were. Not loud enough (never loud enough) but they still managed to dig out plenty of high octane, synth powered, sludgy riffage. Which I like, of course. The none-more-cool indie kids posed at the bar and looked generally disinterested as the big man tried hard to resist head banging along (jeez, I do miss the long hair - or, indeed hair full stop - at times like that). The band themselves were an odd looking bunch of scallies. The (excellent) drummer in particular looked like the ginger bastard offspring of Jarvis and Mark E. Smith. Hmmm. Much hirsuteness all round, too. Always did approve of a high beardy weirdy quotient in my favourite bands.

BTW, Paulo if you're lurking, I did get a few kind words about my bright yellow Marvel superheroes t-shirt... tho' sadly not from any of the aforementioned none-more-cool indie ladies present... :-(

Anyway, here are a few other recent observations from the past week...

• Staggered in after the gig, turned on the goggle box and fumbled my way over to Kerrap TV... only to be presented with the ungodly sight of the bleedin' Ordinary Boys gurning through their one and only hit for two insufferable minutes... Yeeeuchh... Just what the fuck is going on with that frigging channel /magazine / emo jizz rag these days ???

• So, tell me, just how long has Will Ferrell been playing HellBoy ??? (Yes, I am continuing to mine the comedy gold of the old Private Eye stylee look-a-like name/picture swap... cheers). Can't accuse this blog of not being environmentally friendly given they way I continually recycle old content...
  

• I have been really enjoying watching Goalissimo of a late evening to catch the ever entertaining South American fitba' among other things... however, it can get a little hairy with the player names after the odd late libation or two. For example, the other day I was 100% sure that Boca Juniors' star striker was actually named Fellatio - yes, naturally, he went down far too easily and his technique really sucked. Ho ho ho. And I was also pretty damn sure that Sao Paulo had a guy named Chewy playing up front for them... Yeah, laugh it up, fuzzball...

Whisky, chess, the good doctor... and even more Kerrap on the telly...

Hey-ho! Uncle Mex here has belatedly realised that he hasn't posted that much in April so here's an update of a few things that have been done, will be done and a few more things the old goat has learned this month... (balls, I'll have to quit this third person stuff, I'm getting a headache... )

• Visited my old mate iKon down in Motherwell who kindly showed me the sh sights of the old place. Naturally, by way of thanks, I handed the silver fox his a$$ on the chessboard (sorry old fella). What can I say ? Nice old man's pubs, some good whisky, a good laugh and a lovely day all round :-)
  

• Out on the lash a few times in Glesga this month with another old mate, Breza, and stumbled over a cracking wee metal club down in a basement at the top of Wellington Street. Still can't remember the name of it but I've always been very drunk every time I got to the place... bloody Glenmorangie. Anyhoo, I knew the place was a winner after seeing their giant Sabs poster on the wall, with Van Halen seemingly always on their jukebox and Anchorman seemingly always being looped on their telly... boy, do I love lamp!
  

• Speaking of which, just how long has Will Ferrell been the drummer for the Chili Peppers ???
  

• Going to see the mighty Kling Klang at the Sub Club this Friday - woo-hoo!
  

• I'm still digging the latest Doctor Who... though I still can't fathom how he could have spent the best part of two series making Bambi eyes at Joker-faced Rose and yet continue giving a rubber ear to wee Martha... frankly, she's fallen out of the gorgeous tree and hit every branch on the way down. Ahem. BTW, yes, she does seem to be molesting an eisbärbaby in that pic... either that or I'm having another one of those dreams again...
  

• Kerrang TV is so remorselessly fucking awful that it makes me want to gouge out both my ear drums with a shit encrusted baseball bat. It's like pouring hydrochloric acid down your third eye. I explicitly sat down one evening and watched it for an hour waiting for one, just one, honest to goodness metal video to put in an appearance... i.e., not their usual relentless diet of generic, whiny, pussy-whipped, kohl-eyed, pseudo-Goth emo My Chemical Valentine bilge. Of course, that lone metal video never came, not once. Occasionally, the channel did change gear every now and then, sometimes excreting a fetid slurry of whiny, pussy-whipped, spiky haired pseudo-punk Bowling for Blink 41 Day effluent instead. Cheers for that guys. Trend pandering bastards. Scuzz is a bit better - I have even spotted Slayer, Sepultura and some Megadeth in the wild on there... and at least the new stuff that they show is generally pretty heavy...

Righty-ho, that's me off for a lie down - I feel some old man back pain coming on :-(

Doctor Knobb's Journal

Howdy kiddywinks! Y'know, despite being a professional (smirk) code monkey for, oh, nearly ten years now (Jesus wept), this blog has been markedly lacking in the area of tech talk. I did (and still do) intend starting another blog for my idle musings on what's going on in the world of my favourite weekday dev tools and suchlike but, in the meantime, I thought that I should take this opportunity to do a wee bit to fill the gap on this blog. Oh, joy untold. Umkay, let's crack on...

Feeling a little demob happy at the prospect of my short Easter hols, I decided to crack open the copy of Delphi for PHP that has been sitting in my in tray for the past few days. One very quick, lightweight install later (no .NET dependency baggage) and I was working up a little database front-end application quicker than I can knock up a chip butty. The work flow is exactly like classic Delphi... design your forms, code your event handlers and press F9 - super quick and super simple. It comes bundled with Apache and an Interbase version so everything is in the box, good to go, for creating your own self contained little web app. And, by crackly, I really do like it! It's just so, well, Delphi...

I'm even warming to the clunky name - Borland confused the whole Delphi naming issue in the first place by renaming their version of the Object Pascal language as the Delphi language and now they've (or rather CodeGear have ) done a complete volte-face and seem to be now branding their whole symbiotic IDE / VCL development model as Delphi... and are consequently now back to referring to the language under its old flamin' moniker. Typical Borprise SNAFU, the big yin thought - people will get mixed up and wonder why this new "Delphi" has nothing to do with Pascal at all and wail about how idiotic the powers that be still are after all these ignominious years... However, now actually having used the PHP tool myself, it makes absolute bleedin' sense - it really feels just like "classic" Delphi... except that this one has PHP sitting underneath it and, of course, it now targets the web. Bloody great I say. Even better, the new PHP VCL that underpins the whole endeavour is essentially a managed open-source project, meaning it can (and should) take on a whole life of its own outwith CodeGear's efforts - definitely the way forward for the Gearheads in the face of the .NET onslaught, IMHO - keep away from the M$ woodchipper, it'll be the death of you guys...

Sadly, AFAICT, the Slashdot crowd haven't (yet) taken to it and have kicked it before even giving it a fair go but frankly they can go hoist themselves - IME, those tossers can be broadly characterized as a plague of relentlessly negative, fundamentally ignorant, dogma driven cock suckers so fuck them. Balls to the naysayers, it is a defo winner for the old school Delphi guy - if Kerrang reviewed development tools, this is a 5K job, no worries.


Anyway, away from the grindstone, I have been working on that Python game project that I mentioned previously. Honestly. It's just that, well, progress has been dog slow... bloody hard work it is, developing games, way above the actual coding process - the design, infrastructure, and support tools all take up as much time as anything else. Coding in a language you've never used before might also just slow things down a tad... :-) I will get something finished within the next month or so, we'll just have to see how it goes from there, stay tuned. BTW, I do love Python, it is so flippin' terse - though getting used to duck typing again is hard after coding mainly with Pascal all these years. Still, one does like a challenge now and again...

BTW, don't worry readers, it's back to prattling on about eisbärbabies next week, okay ???

Made with the help of -

Trouble "Psalm 9" - Bought the re-issues of their first couple of elpees the other day and they are marvellous examples of their eighties doom epoch... I'm going to see 'em at the blessed Wolves Civic at the end of May - yippee! Jeez, Sabbath Heaven & Hell and Trouble in the same year... you're spoiling us, Herr ambassador...

Before I go, my favourite quote of the week on my deities comes from the pages of Metal Hammer : "Part Dio, part Sabbath, all guaranteed to fucking rule" :-)))