I don't normally plug the music I love on this blog, but one of my pet bands (a band which is relatively obscure and I am quite fond of) has just released their old album for free online, so I feel this would be a good opportunity to plug them.

The band is "The Prayers and Tears of Arthur Digby Sellers", which makes them hard to mention in passing. And as I said above, you can now download their album, Psalterie for free.
My favourite song off this album is track #2 - Eterna (concerning the end of the world), so if you want to sample just one track, I would suggest this one.

You can also stream a listen to their new album (which I think is a better album than Psalterie) here: The Mother of Love Emulates the Shapes of Cynthia. They just love the long names, don't they?

Oh one more thing, if you scour their music page, you can find even more free songs for downloading. Wonderful.

...and while we're on the subject of music, I just updated my Links page to include a whole heap of great bands whom you may not have heard of. So if you're looking for some decent music, my reccomendations are all there.

I took a few (42 to be precise) photos last week out in the garden. Five of them turned out rather well, so I've composited them all into one poster-like-image and put them up here. How's that for service?

In other news, I finally reverted this site back to the PHP version (instead of HTML). I should have done this about 10 months ago, but I kept putting it off. It wasn't too hard, and now everything is much nicer on the back-end again.

Oh and there are some features which have made valiant returns too:

• There is now a "search this site" box on all the pages
• The main page has a calendar of blog posts over the last two months
• The contact page is all spiffy again

I guess this is kinda like the exact opposite of when kids say "Look Mummy - no hands!".
They're my hands, by the way, and they're juggling Rubenstein's Revenge. It's far from perfect, my excuse is that I couldn't see too well :P

Note: If you're not using Firefox, this may look stupidly slow. The nifty play/pause thing won't work either. Sorry folks (unless you're using IE by choice, in which case it's your own damn fault :P)

Below you can see a couple of incomplete versions, which look pretty amusing:

1. Original Image (740kb) - stop laughing, it worked didn't it?
2. Halfway there (640kb) - using a chroma key (a fancy video filter) I was able to eliminate most of my body
3. Finally, I had to manually edit the alpha channels of each and every frame to get the final version you see here. That part was not much fun :/

It would seem this site has somehow been hijacked with horribly intrusive javascript popups and other advertisements. Turns out the people who run the statistics tool I use are fucktards, and see no problem with flooding their users' pages with uninvited popups and other advertising. I've now removed any possibility of them pulling this trick again, so the site should be popup-free once again.

In other news, I'm back from a week-long holiday in Phillip Island. Because this is a public blog I'm not going to talk about that much, but it does explain my lack of posting. I'm going away again next week (to Tasmania, with a different group of friends) so the site will remain fairly quiet then as well...

in more other news, I got an impossible wheel for my birthday (my real birthday is christmas day, but I had my fake family birthday last night ;)). It's pretty awesome, and also pretty impossible. I think my next step ought to be to find some X-TREME^TM safety gear ;)