April 2005

When i came home and dropped into my Blogline subscriptions i was gifted with the news i have been waiting a few weeks for: Slyck News - Partial Oasis Album Spreads Through BitTorrent.

It did’nt take me long to find it and download it and i can confirm that although the audio quality of the 5 tracks is pretty poor - it is the real thing! The last few Oasis albums have been far too over produced and many of the songs have been pretty forgetable so i hope that the new album will make right the mistakes they made.

First impressions? Not bad. The first track “Mucky Fingers” sounds like a Lou Reed classic he wrote about waiting his man. Track 2, “Meaning of soul” sounds like Jumping Jack Flash by the Stones but track 4 (skipping Track 3 - “Lyla” which i love already) “keeping the dream alive” is a slower floating melodic tune peppered with the rusty Liam vocals we know (and love). Sounds a little but like the Beatles when they went “all Indian” on us. A sitar popping up in the final audio mix would not surprise me. The final track in the torrent is “Let there be love”. This promises to be my fave as it is an acoustic guitar track with minimal piano overlayed. You expect this to have the usual squeezed vocals by Noel but Liam sings the majority of this track aswell as Noel and manages to pull it off very well. Its got nice minor chord changes in there and sounds alot like some more recent Beatles tracks and their other slow Oasis ballads like “Don’t look back in anger” and “Cast no shadow”.

When i saw Oasis on the TV doing their live performance at Glastonbury i feared that the end was nigh. Liam sounded awful. I almost mistook it for Vic Reeves doing his Pub Singer impression on Shooting Stars! Thank god he managed to sober up enough in time to record the album. It totally put me off buying tickets for their gig at the Milton Keynes Bowl later this year. Maybe i was too hasty.

Until Noel produces his solo album and collaborates on tracks with the likes of Paul Weller I will have to make do with these new songs. The album is officially released on May 16th and will be called “Don’t Believe the Truth”.

Bored of reading about my lack of an iPod?
Miffed at my dislike of Dr Who?

Here is some light relief…

[via]

In a quick follow up to the posting below, i found how to add the random Flickr images to make the word TAOSKI in the header image of my blog using the Spell with Flickr code!

You just copy the code given on his site!

Duh..Nice-n-easy.

I thought i would make a posting as i am feeling all chuffed after solving something in Blogger that i have wanted to do for a while now. And it only took me an hour!

On my sister blog - The Music Club - which i share with 5 other friends I wanted to put the picture from the blogger profile against each posting the individual members make. I got this idea from the Blogger comments pages that were changed earlier this year to show the comenters profile pic to the left of the text. Unfortunately there is no tag available to insert into the template (yet) so i had to create the code myself.

Here’s the science bit:

So basically what this little bit of code does is store the value of the BlogItemAuthorNickname tag into a variable called bloggername. Then a series of IF statements decides which person made the post and writes HTML into the page using the document.write statement with the picture from their profile and also a link to said profile. If you want the code then just email me or leave a comment and i will forward it on, or you can grab it from the source code of the Music Blog site. It’s all very basic stuff and is not dynamic, meaning that i will have to put new members in there if and when they join - but it’s a start.

Not bad for someone who has never done Javascript before and has not done any *real* code for about 8 years!

The next task is to generate a dynamic header image from the Spell With Flickr code.
Another late night ahead! Thank god for Google, the holy Coffee and the virginal VoyeurWeb that keeps me awake during these trying times.

Watched the 3rd and 4th episode of the new BBC1 Dr Who Series last night and it still left me feeling rather let down. It was all very entertaining but The Doctor (played by Chris Eccleston on E) is far too “happy cheeky chappie” for my liking. Not too many silly jokes this episode though and there were parts that could really be described as “Contains Mild Peril”.

And now they have announced that after Mr Eccleston has totally ditched the show after this first series and taken the upper-lip with the whole silly affair - they have cast another wet looking british fop in the role for the next series!

Downhill from here then….

After a long slow week at work i crashed on the sofa and watched Doves perform (live) on the Jonathan Ross show.

The fact that the lead singer can sing and play Bass guitar at the same time left me remembering how hard i find it to play normal guitar and sing. I can manage to whistle but i cannot seem to flow any words along with the music at all. Even when others are talking to me whilst i am playing I have to fit my replies in between chord changes.

I have been playing for about 18 years and still have the same guitar.
Does’nt make me any good though. I’m not bad and can string a tune together - as long as it’s Oasis.

Just been up to the local City Center to post my eBay stuff to the nice people who wanted to buy it.

There is a promotional display for HHGTTG outside FatDonalds with some poor sods (students) dressed as Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent - complete with dressing gown! You were also able to sit in a special “Ocular” and watch the trailers for the film.

They looked well pissed off! Especially as both times i walked past they were assisting some grannies who were holding up a map of the shopping center and were wondering the best route to take to the Shopping Mobility area to rent their Turbo-Zimmers.

Would you do anything for money?

In true Taoski prediction stylie.. follow this link: Xbox 360 to come in white?

Also, some extra info via XboxScene:

I’m off to do the lottery.

No mention of the “floating” buttons on my reference design though..

Went and saw the Mac Mini this lunchtime at the local Selfridges in Birmingham.
As the reviews say, it is very small! It looks a little like a stainless steel biscuit tin. Hmm.. I feel a DIY project coming on.

On one of their other iMacs was over 41,000 tracks in iTunes and an AVI DIvX rip of the Incredibles! Real clever guys! Good way to loose your job.

They all deserve to be locked up anyway… for password protecting all the PCs screensavers so you can’t fiddle with them!