Asgrim

After several days of stress, tiredness, anger, fustration and all sorts, we’ve moved into the new house and everything is done (for the mean time anyway…).

Firstly, the servers. I took them to a friend’s house to stay there temporarily until I could get my new internet line set up. Unfortunately after a day or two of waiting for DNS updates to propogate through the world, it looked like it just wouldn’t work. I didn’t have time to fiddle around making it work, I just needed the sites up as I have a couple of important clients. I’ve had to shell out at my own cost, temporary hosting at Newnet. So far so good except for the fact I cannot get any PHP error logs, which is fustrating as the Frosthold site does not work properly at the moment. I managed to get this blog back up and running after finding that my Feedburner Stats plug-in doesn’t work on the Newnet servers, so that’s disabled for now (coding fail perhaps?). I’m still waiting for their online support service to give me some sort of response (24 hours later, and not even a “we have acknowledged your ticket”… Unfortunately due to the temporary migration to newnet, Tom’s blog and Hannah’s blog won’t be working as I stupidly set them to use the same DB prefix (wp_), and I can only afford one MySQL database. Sorry chap and chapette…

The actual house move went fairly smoothly, albeit loads of heavy lifting and Hannah and I cursing at each other when boxes were dropped on each other (and no, thats not some kind of kinky game..). The new house is absolutely gorgeous, and we’re having a few people over tonight to celebrate our engagement as well as the house warming. Now I know that the blog is working, I’ll take a few pictures to show everyone what it’s like.

Firstly, I’m not a huge fan of gays really, I don’t like watching them kiss etc., but I’m quite happy to socialise with them. If you think that makes me homophobic, I think you’re wrong, but you’re entitiled to your opinion. However, this BBC article annoyed me. Those people at The World Centre For Banning Stuff have now decided to ban this advert for Heinz Deli Mayo, which depicts two men kissing. I mean really… who cares? And don’t even get me started on all those comments about religion… According to this American guy, SpiritandTruth7, I’m going to turn into a pillar of salt for sympathising with gays! Can you believe that?! I’m dreading being turned into a pillar of salt…

Anyway, I don’t see anything wrong with the advert, but kudos go to Heinz for making it so controversial. I probably wouldn’t have heard of it until I found it in the supermarket, but I’m sorely tempted to get some Heinz Deli May now!

Image credit goes to David Firth.

In the wake of Hellfest and the build-up to house-moving, I’ll take this moment to review all the bands and my general festival experience. Tom was saying how unorganised previous years were, but I kept an open mind. Thankfully, on 99% of fronts, the festival was excellently organised. Toilets were cleaned every day which was more than most festivals. The weather was spectacularly hot (and sometimes too hot for Hannah who gets sunstroke very easily!), and it was ace. Not enough shade I think, I think the benches should’ve had umbrellas for shade as well. Managed to pick up a few new T-Shirts (Venom, Dimmu Borgir, Hellfest), as did Han. Read on for my review of most of the bands I saw…

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Posted by mobile phone:

The engines are going and we’ve started moving!

If you’ve been following my Twitters/blog for a few days you should notice I’m getting hyped for Hellfest. Well this is my last regular blog post until at least next Monday. I’ll try and keep this up to date with Twitter updates, and I’ll try and post a blog if I’m not too passed out. Anyway, the ferry is at 11:30pm tonight, we’ve gotta be there at 9:30pm (silly, I know!) so I’d better get a move on!

Farewell to thee all, fair readers, temporarily anyway.

Oh, and get some tickets for Frosthold!

Hannah says:
my armpit smells like garlic

I’m really looking forward to Hellfest, which begins this Friday (although we leave Portsmouth on Wednesday evening for the overnight ferry to Le Havre). In fact, it’s nearly rivaling Wacken in my “festival opinion”. It actually has more bands I like than Wacken this year, it’s nearer, the journey is easier, and it’s less “sold out”. Wacken has started disappointing me more and more over the last couple of years, booking bands I’m not so keen on such as Bullet for my Valentine, Avenged Sevenfold and Killswitch Engage. Yeah, they’re metal, but not my kind of metal. I’m starting to think about abandoning the organisation behemoth that is getting to Wacken for a much simpler task of booking a ferry + 2/3 hour car journey to Clisson, France. We’ll see what the festival is like soon and I’ll have a much more educated opinion.

So here’s the line-up, I’m excited!

Venom, In Flames, Dimmu Borgir, Carcass, Testament, Sick of it All, Paradise Lost, Katatonia, Mayhem, Madball, Death Angel, Marduk, Septic Flesh, Danko Jones, Baroness, Krisiun, Job for a Cowboy, Alchemist, Born From Pain, Bleeding Through, Rotting Christ, Throwdown, Eluveitie, Evile, Ultra Vomit, Ava Inferi, Kruger, Raintime, Red Mourning, Helloween, Gamma Ray, Cavalery Conspiracy, Apocalyptica, Iced Earth, Ministry, Porcupine Tree, Candlemass, Sonata Arctica, Satyricon, Anathema, Sodom, Punish Yourself, Treponem Pal, Airbourne, Disfear, Nightmare, Legion of the Damned, Anaal Nathrakh, Haemorrhage, Impaled Nazarene, Black Tide, Belphegor, The Old Dead Tree, Shining, Watain, Today is the Day, Benighted, Blazing War Machine, Slayer, Motorhead, Nofx, Opeth, Morbid Angel, Meshuggah, At the Gates, My Dying Bride, Obituary, Rose Tattoo, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Envy, Eths, Forbidden, Cult of Luna, Dying Fetus, Misanthrope, Comeback Kid, Neecrophagist, Primordial, Municipal Waste, Shai Hulud, The Ocean, Rotten Sound, Arkhon Infaustus, Origin, Between the Buried and Me, Ghost Brigade, Year of No Light

No sooner after I had started packing away the 360, Blu-Ray player, PS2 etc., Mike, a member of Pompey Music forum brought round the Nintendo Wii that Hannah wanted to buy. So unfortunately, the entire afternoon which was meant to be spent packing up for the new house was in fact spent playing on the Wii. We’ve set up our Mii’s, and have been playing a little Wii Sports and Mario Party 8. She’s still playing, but someone has to cook the dinner, so while the oven is warming up I thought I’d mention what we’re up to.

Things are getting pretty hectic around here now. Packing the house up for moving to Whiteley, as well as preparing for the imminent Hellfest (yay!). We managed to get down town today for a bit and pick up some bits (baby wipes, Euros and the like) ready for that. We’re on a really tight budget this year, and it’s made even tighter by the fact we have to save a shed load of money for the wedding, and more importantly, Hannah’s engagement ring! The new house’s rent is £170 more a month between us as well, so that’s another kick in the budget’s teeth.

Another headache I’ve been trying to figure out is what I’m going to do with the servers during the move. I can’t get internet at the new place until the BT line is activated which is on the day we move in (and not a minute sooner!). This means that I probably won’t have internet at all from 1st July for about 10-15 days, providing the new ISP doesn’t mess anything up. I spoke to Kelvin briefly, and understandably, he said no to letting me put the servers in the work’s server cabinet (security risks and all that), so ideally I need to find a home for them at a friend’s house. I’ll try and chat up a few friends who I know have good internet connections, but if any of you are my clients reading this, I will try and keep downtime to a minimum, but there will be a bit of disruption, so be warned!

Anyway, off to cook dinner, ta ta for now!

Bit of a wierd one last night, Tom and I were packing several cars for Wacken or Hellfest or something outside the house I grew up in in Lee-on-Solent. I had packed an awful lot of stuff, and just started driving down the road when I realised I’d forgotten a load of stuff, so I drove back, and put in Joss’ PA in. I was just about to drive off again when I realised I’d forgotten the TV. Tom asked, “Why do you need a TV for a festival?”, I replied “So we can watch telly and the PA can be the speakers for it”… There were other bits, but they’re a bit hazy.

Hannah told me this morning about a phone call she’d made to Parcelforce to get her parcel sent to the depot to collect. The thing that bugged me is that she told an automated machine to do it. I really dislike those automated systems where they say “Please say your name now…”, “Please say your telephone number now…” or “Please say yes or no if you are gay…” and so on.

In my opinion, these automated systems, for example for Portsmouth City Council, and now Parcelforce as well, really show the respective companies’ total lack of care for their customers. It’s one thing having an appaulingly bad call centre in India where they just read from a script, it’s another to have a machine do the job. There’s just nothing quite like calling a real person and speaking to them. More often than not, they’re friendly and I sometimes digress and talk about the weather or something lame, but it’s just really nice, and shows that someone cares about your problem/issue/enquiry.

Portsmouth City Council clearly don’t give a damn, and neither do Parcelforce.

Ten outta ten guys, you have achieved:

Credits: Caption by: www.asgrim.com | Picture by: blogger.com/profile/8750466