It has been decided – Opium Toad March 26, 2008
Posted by Sharny in : Music, Opium Toad, Scraps , add a commentYes, Opium Toad is the name of our band. This post is kinda to see if google will finally index myspace.com/opiumtoad and opiumtoad.com but it acts as an announcement.
We have one song complete, a few covers we can play solidly and a lot more of our own material in the works. I’m pretty confident that we can get somewhere as I really like some of the stuff that we’ve got so far. Our completed song has been received well by everyone that has heard it (and no, it wasn’t just our family members). We may well have a couple of gigs lined up for the coming months, we’re gonna approach them with a sort of try our best but if it fails we don’t care very much if it fails as it is early days.
The Sword at Rock City – 25/03/08
Posted by Sharny in : Entertainment, Fun, Music , add a commentLast night me and three friends went to see The Sword live at rock city. We grabbed a the nearest bus to all of us and got there at about 7.30pm and waited a few minutes to be let in. There wasn’t a huge gathering of people outside and although I didn’t know before hand this confirmed my suspicion that it would be in the basement. This isn’t hugely surprising but at the same time Freya is on guitar hero 2 so there was always the possibility of a larger turnout.
Anyways, we headed in and into the basement (if you’ve never been there it’s not really a basement but its got a low ceiling and is quite compact and is primarily used for metal so I guess that is how it got it’s name, don’t really know) and the band merchandise was to the right as we went in, something I haven’t seen before. We just hung around for a while waiting for the first band, Black Cobra, to come on. When they did, we were a bit surprised to find out they were only a two man band. Musically, they were OK, not the worst support band I’ve seen but not particularly good either. Essentially we all agreed that they should just leave out vocals and be instrumental because the lyrics are totally inaudible over the screechy vocal style, which is pretty horrible within itself. Maybe those vocals are part of the sludge genre, I don’t really know because it’s not something I listen to generally.
When they went off we took the opportunity to move forward a bit and waited again for Saviours to get ready. Having listening to Saviours a bit more before coming to the gig I was expecting better of them than Black Cobra and aside from a few technical difficulties (which meant we heard the first two riffs of their first song three times) they didn’t dissapoint. Again, after they left the stage we moved forward a bit more to be nearer the action for The Sword.
It didn’t take long for them to set up and they started with a song I didn’t recognize, which was kind of the trend for the night. They played a lot of stuff I hadn’t heard before, which is kinda surprising given that I thought I owned their only album. As it happens, it’s all from their new album, apparently released at the beginning of April (even though it seems to be available for buy and download on iTunes right now) which I intend to buy on CD when I can.
In all honesty, I would have liked to hear more stuff I recognized as I can get into it a lot easier and really feel the groove but they did play a few goodies such as Barael’s Blade and Iron Swan. Freya was saved for the encore, which started with a cover song that neither me nor my friends knew. They got a bit of heckling for that choice which is understandable. I did like how Freya was introduced: “Now for a song by the other greatest band from Texas” which confused me for a few seconds before they started off into the first riff.
Overall it was a pretty good night, my only real complaint being that I would have liked to see more of The Sword and less of the other bands (although I did enjoy some of Saviours). There were also some weird issues where the guitars didn’t quite have the oomph that I would expect, the sound just seemed to fall apart at some bits and it sounded a bit odd. I don’t think it was the fault of the band or a lack of skill on their part I think it was a pure technical thing, whatever they used to obtain the sound on the record probably couldn’t be done live for whatever reason. I picked up a t-shirt on the way out which I’m wearing as I type and I’d definitely go and see them live again, hopefully at a point where they don’t have much new material and I’ve managed to soak the new album into my brain.
Will I ever encounter a computer that just works? March 17, 2008
Posted by Sharny in : Life, Rants, Technology , add a commentComputers. Wonderful things. The main issue however, is that they never seem to actually work. I have never encountered a single computer that didn’t have something wrong with it, some weird behavior, something it did that made no sense or something that just didn’t work. A few times I’ve been able to quite happily put this down to the age of the machine or the fact that it’s components just weren’t that good. But that has stopped working.
I got my current computer for the Christmas before last, it was a very exciting moment for me, the first time I had ever gotten a computer all for myself and one that was good enough to play the games I wanted to play and do the things I wanted to do. Things didn’t exactly start off well when the video card that came with it was faulty, oh well, back to the shop with that. They replaced it free of charge and I also bought and had them install another 512MB stick of RAM as it only had the one at the time. Things were lovely for quite some time after that, everything seemed to be working fine. I started playing World of Warcraft and it could handle that no problem.
Then things start going wrong. I have honestly no idea what caused it but WoW just started crashing the computer all the time, just causing it to instantly restart. It would only happen when playing WoW (save for I think one time) and almost always when loading a new zone. Windows had about as much idea of what was going on as I did, giving a range of complete crap as to what has caused it, none of which made much sense and sounded very vague and unhelpful. I cut down a bit on my at home WoW playing as it just got too irritating having it just crash all the time. Originally I thought over heating could be to blame (as according to a temperature monitor I installed things were running pretty hot in there) and thought maybe cleaning inside could help but it didn’t, this weren’t actually very dusty in there at all in fact. I came up with a sort of semi-fix for when it restarted the computer, this was essentially to unplug it before it started up and then plug back in and start up properly. Once started I would close all the situational processes I never use and open very little else on the computer. This seemed to work.
More recently an even stranger thing started happening. Something in my computer started rattling. The first time I turned my computer on to hear this I freaked out, since rattling inside the case is generally not a good sign. I did discover, however, that this noise didn’t seem to have any effect on the actual operation of the computer, which led me to turn the computer off and open it up to see if I could find the cause. Once I got in there everything just looked completely normal but upon turning the computer on again the rattling started once more, seemingly coming from the power supply. Over the next few days I worked out that it probably rattles according to the heat, when the computer is cold (eg when turned on after being off during the night) it is really loud and as the computer warms up it gets quieter until it becomes silent. A quick Google search reveals other people with similar problems generally getting told to replace their fans, at the moment I’m not sure what I’m going to do, if it were rattling all the time it would make sense to me but the heat dependency thing is just really weird…
Just to make things worse my computer is being crashed by WoW even more now, even with all excess process closed, iTunes not running (or any program for that matter) it crashed 3 times whilst zoning so far today. It basically makes the game unplayable and given that my friends are away home is the only place I can get my WoW hit during this first week of the easter holidays. At the moment it is kinda working but I can’t really guarantee anything at the moment which is pretty annoying.
To return to my title a bit, a few other examples of computer failings include my friend’s new Dell which is only a few months old but is already suffering from a failing hard drive and intermittent blue screens, their older one which has a good few error messages upon start up (but otherwise works alright-ish) and their oldest which, following a recent format and clean inside the case, cannot be relied upon to do anything more than browse the internet.
In essence, this point is pretty pointless as I don’t imagine that computers will ever stop failing on me or anyone else. Ever. Ultimately, I’m just going to have to put up with not having a computer for a few days whilst presumably some parts get replaced and hopefully sort out my problems without a format and really get used to it (although it’s not really like I’m not used to it already, given the number of formats our previous computer had).
It would just be nice if, for once, something worked…
Finally resurrected March 14, 2008
Posted by Sharny in : Scraps , add a commentYes, it has taken me a LONG time since the host switch to get this place back online, I don’t think it really matters that much though given that no one really read this blog anyway. I was probably going to just keep it dead forever but recently I’ve gotten a bit of a writing bug again. I think this time around I will try to be more organized, my posts will generally focus on the world around me, the music I’m into, world of warcraft stuff and also bits about my life.
I’ve just backed up what posts I could from an sql dump I had but its not really worked properly so I’m not really sure what I’m going to do about that, especially since what I thought of as some of my better posts have been lost in the process somewhere. If I can’t get it to work out I’ll just start again afresh. Edit – I do seem to have most posts back now although none of them have a category and some make no real sense now, I think I’ll have a bit of a sort through and just keep the still relevant ones.
Anyways, hopefully with a bit more focus I can conjure something of use out of this blog again – we’ll see how it goes.
