Britta and I met Eddy and Jacob and went to see Roby Lakatos at Jerwood
Hall just off Old Street. It was very good. I have seen him once before
at the Albert Hall. Brilliant Hungarian gypsy style violinist with a
band including a cambalom!   Visit  his Website

I have a nice shiny new install of Ubuntu on my lappy. In order to listen to John Peel day from the BBC website, I wanted the Firefox Real Player plugin to actually work!

Definitely starting to get a bit colder! Well, what have I been up to? Working mostly. Dad came over to England and was here for a couple of weeks. We went off up to Yorkshire to stay with the the Kendall’s and I managed to take a few photos between pints 😉 I promise to upload them soon (Mum…) Also had my birthday and so there will be a few photos going up from that hopefully. I’m dead sure I must have been doing more than that but I can’t think of anything at the moment…

Well, I figured it all out and now my website is hosted on our main shared server at work 🙂 This means I can keep an eye on it!

Well, in summary, I’ve passed my probationary period at work which means that I’m a permanent member of staff now. First time I’ve had this status in over a year now! So now I have a work laptop. It’s very shiny and new! Plus a bit more pay and stuff.
What else? Well, Britta shifted house at the weekend and is now in Harrow. Swapped 3+ hours a day on the train to work for a 15 minute walk each way. What a relief!
The NZSO are in town and I’ve already spent quite a bit of the weekend catching up with a fair number of them. They are here for the proms.
Looking forward to a good concert on Thursday!

Well, I got back from holiday and launched in to two hell weeks of work combined from Italy withdrawal. Had a brilliant time in Montepulciano! Met some really cool people, drank a bit too much red wine and ate loads of really nice food. I’ve taken a load of photos that you can see in the  Gallery.

Well it’s sort of a holiday. I am rehearsing and playing in 2 performances of a Henze Opera (Don Quichotte) here isn Montepulciano in the Tuscan hills. If I can persuade these ridiculous Internet Cafe PC’s to do what I tell them, I may even be able to upload some photos! More soon…

It’s been a bit quiet lately. Sorry about that. The cool thing about being unemployed for a while (apart from not commuting) is that you get to set up fancy looking websites… Oh heck I think my dinner’s burning!

That was close! Anyway, so I set up this website with all good intentions of keeping you all up to date with the goss and that was fine for a couple of months but then I got a job and suddenly my time was not my own any more. So here is an update which is just a temporary fix and a promise for a real update that may or may not come soon…

Been a bit of a delay in updates lately. Vasically, pulled my finger out and got a job and now I’m working as a support engineer at Positive Internet. So I started last Monday and it’s all going well so far!
Otherwise, not a lot has been happening ‘cos I’ve been a bit skint really 🙁
Last week, I was playing the Doom 3 Demo on my computer and it crashed and when I rebooted, my whole C: drive was buggered. It’s taken me a week of faffing around but last night I managed to recover all my music, movies and documents off it which is a relief as I didn’t have all of it backed up! I found this excellent utility called PC Inspector File Recovery which managed to search the drive for lost clusters and find my Documents directory. Looks like I had a stuffed FAT table. Learnt my lesson. Keep all my stuff in a more stable environment. Linux for example 🙂

Found out on yesterday that Pierre Moerlen died earlier in the week in his sleep. For those that don’t know who he is, he was a percussionist and drummer from Strasbourg who played in "Gong" and also played on a number of Mike Oldfield albums and live concerts.
It was primarily his drumming that inspired me to be more serious about percussion and drums so it is very sad for me. His drum solo at the end of Ommadawn in the "Essential" Live from Knebworth Mike Oldfield video remains my favourite bit of drumming ever. RIP Pierre…