More photos can be found here. Thanks to marman for the photos!

Last week, Dawn, Chris, Dave, Laura, Emma and myself went to see the afore mentioned band at the Academy. Having heard a couple of their tracks on the radio, I felt it would be wise to buy the album off iTunes Music Store allowing myself to familiarise myself with the album before attending the gig. Having listened to it a couple of times I enjoyed it but it was nothing staggering. Went to the gig and the live performances where good and not shockingingly different from the album (in my opinion this is a good thing – it means the album hasn’t been over-engineered in post-production). So the experience has been ok.

But this is the thing. I keep wanting to listen to the music. The lyrics are brilliant, a sharp witty description of life and the world as we know it, great music with a real nice beat and arrangement of music. The more I listen to it the more I really love this album and I urge people to pick it up and listen to it.

Here is the iTMS link.

… how you’d think it would.

The weekend was interesting. Headed down to Neath near Port Talbot Friday evening. When we got there, marman, Pete, Adam and Sariah where already there and had started on the beers. After a cheeky bit of van transformation, Emma and I joined them. Everyone excited about the prospects of the next day. Role on Saturday. Saturday arrived but the wind didn’t. With a pothole ridden beach, and not enough wind for people to even kitesurf the day was ended fairly early. We headed to the pub, had some food and then drank away the sorrows it a very amusing pub session. The wind forecast had changed and we expected it to be blow a hoolie in the morning and dropping off to nothing.

Upon arriving at the beach in the morning the waves were huge. The wind was blowing a gale and as soon as the tide had gone out enough to warrant going out on the water we were out there. We had about half an hour of really nice and solid wind to play in. Then someone, some where flipped a switch and the wind dropped off by about 10 knots, changed direction and the clouds and rain disappeared leaving a beautiful blue sky to play in. With the wind drop that all but ruled out playing on the water except with huge kites. Most of us transistioned onto the land to play. This is where the fun began, going out on my 16m venom I was clocking up some really nice speed, jumps and grabs and decided to try some foot outs. Managed to crack them and get them nicely fully extended, it was mint and I am so chuffed to pieces about it. I am just waiting on some photos from marman to post

Emma and I left the beach about 4ish and headed up to visit her mum and brother. We then ambled back to hers having dropped a load of kit off.

The weekend was sweet. Great company. Great kiting. Great weather (well on Sunday). I can’t wait for the next one and my enjoyment of land has come back.

For the last god knows how many weeks, the wind has been rubbish. Most of the kiters I know are wound up and gagging for some wind. Well, it looks like we got some wind this weekend. A number of us are heading down to Aberavon (Port Talbot) for a weekend of kiteboarding. The waves are predicted between 1.5 and 2.5metres and the wind is averaging 20mph on the Saturday and 30mph on the Sunday. I. Can’t. Wait. Going to be out on the 11m sonic – I just wish I had a wave board I shall report back on Monday as to how the weekend faired.

So what have I been up to since the last post?

Well the month so far has been fairly hectic. I have started a new job within the same company, whereas before I was a senior developer, I am now the head of development. Moving into the new role is interesting: before when given a task, I had to go away and solve it, now I have a team of people who work with me who can help me solve the problem – so far I have not touched a line of code which is great. It means I can start to return to hacking on code in my spare time again for fun. Which leads me onto my current project, I’ve been working on a parser for C in ferite, this allows me to load up and generate an AST tree from some C code. I have now got it generating C code from the AST, and the next thing to do is add ferite extensions to the language, hopefully I will at some point be able to get it generating itself into C code. Which, if you ask me, ought to be frikken cool.

I went to visit my mum earlier this month for a couple of days just to keep an eye on her and give her some company. She is currently going through chemotherapy for breast cancer (it is going well, just a bit of a shit that she has to be pumped full of really horrid drugs). That was nice and I got to see Fred who is utterly adorable:

I have had a couple of weekends away, one to Westward Ho! with the Sky Pirates, and one to BRS with various friends. There wasn’t much wind either weekends and so tomfoolerly was to be had. Par example, bored kiters and no wind makes for stupidity:

And we didn’t really bury Richy Stone’s buggy:

I’ve had various car troubles including having a replacement drive shaft in my car which has been fun. Especially when driving back from the beach and the car sounds like it is falling apart, getting it back after it has been fixed, only to have it feel like it wants to drive you off the road! However, I’ve done about 40miles in it now and it seems ok. Fortunately Emma’s van has come back from being fixed and so we are going away in that this weekend. For those curious it looks like this:

Anyway. I think that concludes this post, it is time to go check my email

I’ve found my PSP. It was hidden behind some kiting gear.

I have setup a video player, click the splash image below to be taken to the site. This makes viewing the films much more pleasurable due to the wide screen and better quality encoding.