thanks to my old mate @kosso i found this iographica.com. Basically it tracks all your mouse movements in a graphical way.
IOGraph — is an application that turns mouse movements into a modern art. The idea is that you just run it and do your usual day stuff at the computer. Go back to IOGraph after a while and grab a nice picture of what you’ve done!
yesterday after nearly 1.6 hours:
and todays after about 3.2 hours with “ignore mouse stops” off:
UPDATE: My fish pie recipe was featured on the folk & roots show on amazing radio – chuffed : http://amazingradio.co.uk/folk-roots/the-amazing-folk-roots-show-fish-pie
i get asked this after everytime i make one so i’m putting it on here so i can just send a link next time 
this is how i’ve described it today:
about a kilo of fish (incl some smoked if you can get any)
3/4 eggs
good handful of prawns
good handful of peas
chedder or 3 cheese packet sauce (powdered stuff)
garlic, pepper etc, a couple of bay leaves
defrost peas, fish & prawns
in a decent size pot put a couple of cloves of crushed garlic, a couple of bay leaves, some knobs of butter, the fish and about 2/3rd litre of milk
low simmer for about 15min or so
hard boil the eggs
strain out the mixture and keep the milk mixture and let the fish cool (half an hour or so until you can break it up with your fingers)
chop up the hardboiled eggs sort of roughly
in the mixture put the cheese sauce packet, prawns, peas (take out bay leaves), pepper & eggs – stir it up so the sauce mix mixes in
once the fish is easy to handle, take off any skin, bones (i just get pre-filleted frozen fish) and break up into chunks and put in the mixture
put into reasonably large baking type pyrex ish dish
boil loads of potatoes well, so there will be enough to cover the mixture in the dish – 5 or 6 or 7 large ones – if you have too much freeze it obv (rough guess is probably around 2 and a bit kilos)
mash the potatoes up – i dont mash them really well like i would do for proper mash – i use a fork to break them up
scoop the mash so it lays over the top of the mixture in the dish
oven at about 180 or so for about 40 mins or so – i normally do it until underneath is not too liquidy or potatoe on top is crispy – if its crispy but still liquidy i leave it in the oven with heat turned off for 20-30 mins – its all a bit ish – depends on how you like your potatoe….
thats about it – its easy to play around with the mixtures, quantities etc
had a reasonably good night down at vaughans monkey bar watching the utd game – fairly happy to walk away with a 0-0 draw but nothing prepared me for the news when i logged in when i got home
had a facebook wall post “have you heard about nickie?”
“no”
shackles were up so i immediately went to nickie’s page – she went into hospital on 21st jan with a brain tumour and it was unsuccesful
i’d only just hooked up with her after 20 odd years on the 12th jan – she was a golf pro had a husband and stuff and was looking forward to finding out more..
i can honestly say nickie was the first girl i fell in love with – nothing happened of course i think we were about 14/15 (she was in the year above) but we went through all the crap of high school – she had a no nonsense, knew what she wanted attitude
gutted
so i go into the tabac for my usual cutters choice baccy and a rather nice attractive woman asks me what i smoke – normally an easy one to deflect as i say i’m buying rolling tobacco (€6.30 50g pack & 3 packs of rizla verde – ive got the change all sorted)
but they are offering a free lighter and a pen or something and two pens if you buy two packs or whatever – fine, whatever, buy a pack of camel baccy & 3 green rizlas and its only €3.75 (+ usual x3 €0.70 for rizlas)
since i was planning on spending €9.40 & the camel was only €3.75 instead of €6.30 i thought heck i’ll get another pouch of camel not realising that the camel was 30g instead of 50g…
i had a couple of rolly’s when i got home and to be honest wasnt that impressed as its much drier than cutters choice – the camel pack was only a 30g pack so then i went maths on it to work out whether it was worth it..
i did the maths – camel rolling baccy was €0.125 a gram & cutters choice was €0.126 a gram, which meant on my normal 50g pack of cutters choice i would save €0.05 on every 50gms if i bought camel
suffice to say, sorry camel, i will go back to buying cutters choice baccy – even thougn it is the grand total of 5 cents more per 50 gms
problem is i still have that second 30gm pack of camel to get through…
i’ve told this many times but haven’t actually written it down – so here it is – another chapter in the history of mr l k and his lifelong pursuit of pissing off his employers….. (ps i did a cursory spell check – this is typed as a stream of conciousness and only a minimal edit where i added double words etc)
—————
as ive stated before i used to work for sony music europe – we were in charge (unsurprisingly) of all the sony offices around europe but we were situated on the top 2 floors at gt marlborough st opposite carnaby st in the west end that sony uk were based in. (a 24 hour building, brilliant cafe, tons of fun – most of the time)
at the time though i was getting heavily into the net and was basically the only person in the building who had any idea of the “world wide web”. one of the vp’s had been made redundant and a pc suddenly turned up that was hooked up to the internet via a dial-up script and 18.8k modem along with a pathetic 20 page “manual” about the internet. how it came about i’ll never know but it was sat at this empty desk doing sod all and i soon spent most of my time on it at lunchtimes and for hours after work. no-one had a clue what was gong on. (at the same time they also put a similar pc in columbia’s press dept office on the 5th floor and to this day i dont think anyone in there ever touched it while i was there)
after about a month or so i had engineered the pc to be opposite my desk – and was on the net every second i could possibly be
this was 1995
sony’s IT dept on the ground floor would ask me (asst to the vp of finance) about the net, i started playing with the lotus notes system we had and creating custom-built designed lotus notes email templates, anyone who had a leaving do i would create a custom designed email to send around the building etc – i’d get asked about pc problems, software shit etc – nothing whatsoever to do with my actual job
sony u.s. (who were our bosses) created a “new media” division with one german who had obviously been brought over from the german co. because he was the only tech savvy there and had sold it to them.
thanks to a friend kosso, i gave them the idea of covering bands for the new sony europe website – ie, use a sony dat recorder to interview the artist before the gig, take photos and record some audio and do a review that could get put up on their website for the next day – “great idea – could you do it?” – er – pfffh – yeah i think so… dur…. of course i can, why i suggested it you divs – i get to go to gigs, get a photo pass, do the after show etc and i get my mate to do the interview and do the review – double win…
i did this for about 4 months and then they advertised a job as his assistant and webmaster for a the website
i had so many phone calls when the job was advertised it was silly – it had my name written all over – i obviously applied
i didnt get an informal interview – i resigned – it wasnt accepted
oh well – idiots – whatever. i continued to spend all my time on the net and at the time really got into leftfield (columbia records) and noticed that the domain leftfield.co.uk was available and that this “new media” division (who were doing the sony europe website) hadnt registered it. i suggested this to them at least half a dozen times over about a 2 month period – fuck all.
i decided that rather than let the domain name get picked up by someone else and squat it (this was a time when domain squatting to make money was rife) i decided to buy it myself and then give it to sony. i told my boss and he agreed.
at the same time i was playing around with website design so i thought i’d kill two birds with one stone and come up with a neat website for leftism. i spent about 6 weeks on it and put it online on leftfield.co.uk but under a subfolder that unless you knew the url you couldnt find it – there was no linking & it had a robot.txt file so it couldnt accidentally be picked up by google etc (this is now 1997)
i then presented this to the md of columbia via his secretary who i knew
that night i got a phone call on my answer machine demanding that the website be taken down and to report to personnel immediately the following morning
i was accused of stealing Columbia’s intellectual property and god knows what else – i spent so much time trying to explain what was going on that i ended up after about 3 weeks of this crap of saying fuck it – i’d rather actually now resign than give them the pleasure of having the bloody domain name etc that i’d offered them FOR FREE
my boss and the president of sme backed me and refused to force me to give them the domain name which left the md of columbia and their personnel dept right hacked off – however my boss presented me with a cheque for the amount of the domain name saying that sony would fairly pay me for the cost of the registration – i was about to accept it when i noticed it was written on his own bank account – sorry – if i’m going to be paid for this it has to be drawn on a sony account not my boss’ personal account
so i declined the cheque and decided at the point i’d had enough as it wasnt fun anymore, the days of enjoying my job had gone, i’d seen friends being sacked so that someones friend could get their job – and it was all getting non-music
i kept the domain name and created the website for the anti-capital radio takeover of xfm on leftfield.co.uk – when i left to go to ibiza later that year i couldnt be arsed to keep the name up so i let it lapse
the nice ending was that my boss had saved the original cheque he’d written a month or so earlier and gave it to me as part of a leaving present – i had no problem cashing the cheque then – he then resigned later the same year
i could get into the conversations about mp3, the net, blah blah blah i had but i dont need to – they didnt listen to anyone – they, polygram (universal), emi and warners are paying the price for trying to ignore it – sorry, no sympathy
this is the view today (xmas day in ibiza 2010 – arf….)
through a long convoluted story i planned a trip back to the uk at the beginning of december to see leftfield play at brixton academy and also to go up to manchester the following tuesday to see utd’s last champions league group stage game against valencia.
plan was ibiza to palma at 1.20pm on the thursday then palma to gatwick early evening and stay at my mates in reading. that week it started snowing…. gatwick was closed weds but they said it would open thursday morning. i got up early thursday morning to be greeted with the fact that gatwick was again closed… oh shit. finally got through to monarch airlines to be told at 10.30am that my flight from palma later that day was cancelled – shit.
they said the first flight out of palma was on sunday – no good to me as the leftfield gig was on saturday night. mad panic to try and get another flight from palma to somewhere in the uk. i decided to risk it and flew to palma while the kind boss guy at the office tried to book a flight from palma. i arrived in palma to find that the next flight i could get was the next day and was going to hannover with a 2 hour stopever and then finally onto to stansted.
thankfully my brother lives in hemel so he met me in stansted on the friday night – unfortunately my phone had died by the time i got to stansted so iwaited outside at the pick up point for 45 mins in the hope that he’d take a punt and turn up. no luck – he’d gone to the macdonalds to wait for my phone call. in the end i went back into the termnal and talked the very nice lady on the foreign echange desk if i couuld borrow a paper clip to take the sim out of my iphone and then er.. can i put this sim in your mobile please?
while we were trying to grab my brothers number from the sms on the sim – her moby rang – it was my brother wondering where i was. i’ll never forget the expression on her face when i thanked her, she turned to her friend and said “aww, isnt that nice”
anyway, stayed at brothers instead of my mate dave’s and then saturday afternoon we went into the west end to meet dave and then onto brixton for the gig.
neil (barnes) from leftfield had very kindly put me and my brother and dave on the guestlist. an unbelievable gig – extremely loud but one of the cleanest sounding sound system i’ve ever heard. went to the aftershow and had a chat with neil. after that we ended up at a bar round the corner with a brother and sister couple we met outside the academy after the aftershow. we ended up in the bar till 6 ish and then went to macdonalds to wait for the tubes to start. (btw i’d had to take my rucksack to the gig as i was supposed to be staying at dave’s in reading). in the end he copped off with the sister so i ended up back at my brothers again – we walked through his door at 8.30am that morning – a very long day.
monday, me and dave drove up to manc land and stayed at his friends whose boiler had broken down the day before – when we arrived in manc land that evening it was -7 degrees – fuckin cold
next evening we walked the 20 min walk to old trafford in minus god knows what weather – a dissapointing 1 all draw but great to go back to old trafford again
came back weds but again stayed at my brothers with dave who then drove me to reading station to get the train to gatwick as i had already prebooked the train – so instead of spending the week at dave’s i didnt set foot in reading until i got to reading station on the last day…
journey home went without a hitch
btw both palma and hannover airports had a smoking area – very civilised.
some photos and video:
thanks neil ! :
me being very cold in front of old trafford
Best, Law & Charlton statue:
Man utd warming up
Utd just scored:
back in palma wtg for flight home to ibiza
the old adage that a picture speaks a thousand words has never been more true:
(how many photographers?….)
i found out late last week that the world cup trophy was going to be on display in ibiza town today – no brainer
it was only going to be on display for about 5 hours in ibiza before it went off to mallorca and elsewhere
i queued for about 15 minutes and then got my mitts on the actual trophy – i cant imagine i’ll ever be able to touch the world cup trophy ever again – not unless for some reason i become chief exec of fifa or something – once in a lifetime thing 
oh, and i got on steve lamacqs “good day/bad day” segment yesterday – i had chosen the stuffies: hot love now for the good day and the manics: this is yesterday for the bad day track. i really thought it would be the manics as it was a monday etc – but it was a gorgeous sunny day, we won the ryder cup and i was going to see the world cup trophy the next day so i had no choice but to pick the good day track
to say i’m looking forward to this would be the understatement of the year..
this year has seen biffy clyro, ian brown, the prodigy, leftfield, DJ Shadow and faithless to name but a few..
The Orb will be holding an exclusive album launch of the new album “Metallic Spheres” at Cafe Mambo this Friday 24th September 2010.
Apparently there will only be three album launches: Ibiza, New York and Los Angeles.
From 7pm, the launch will be complete with (*didnt happen: a live set by the Orb performing Metallic Spheres*), followed by legendary Alex Paterson DJ set.
It’s pretty safe to say you’ll know where i’ll be on Friday.
(edit – interviewed Alex P who bloody brilliant – emma b and everyone were great down at mambos and alex signed a load of my orb stuff for me)
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