More Spaces Than Ever Before

Most people who chat to me via MSN will probably be able to tell you that my keyboard sucks. The space bar tends to be a bit reluctant to do any work so you would quite often have to decipherwhatexactlyiwastyping! However, Mrs-MaFt bought me a shiny new keyboard for Christmas (amongst other things) with, wait for it, a fully functioing space-bar! The possibilities are endless!!

See ya

MaFt

More Daftness

I'm sure that old-age is making me lose my mind. I mean, 26 years old IS pretty old really - I'm probably a third of the way through my whole life...

I did another stupid thing yesterday although not quite as girly as being scared of a spider! I was hoovering up in the lounge (ok, maybe it IS as girly...) and there was a big bit of stuff on the floor. The hoover didn't pick it up first time so I tried reversing over it, you know, just to make sure. It still didn't manage to suck it up into the spiders new abode. So I tried again, both going forward and in reverse. Still no luck.

So what did I do? I bent down to pick up this bit of stuff to make sure that it wasn't stuck in the carpet and after confirming that it wasn't stuck in the carpet I put it back on the floor and tried to hoover it up again. Why I didn't just put it in the bin when I'd picked it up I have no idea... Perhaps it was just to make sure the hoover was really working, perhaps I'm just daft... It can't only be me that does it, surely?!


Her With The Hoover

DaFt (my new name?!)

Spider!

T'other day, while I was tidying the cellar head and generally sorting out a mass of tools and junk that had been dumped there over the last few months or so, I came across one of these:



OK, it wasn't quite as cartoony as that, but artistic license allows me to use such images. I'm not a big fan of anything that creeps and crawls unless I can easily destroy it with a something the size of a BIC Pen - so this one was out of my league as it had a span of about 15mm; far greater than the preferred method of destruction. In my panicy wisdom I resorted to vacuuming the little blighter up. Problem solved, and how easy was that?!

It wasn't until later on that evening that I realised the spider could simply crawl back out of the bag/hose once I had switched it on... So much for my wonderful plan! It's amazing how thick we can be when we panic about something so pathetic as a spider.

MaFt

A Decade Has Passed!

Well, 10 days rather than 10 years... I'm still dead busy hence my complete lack of Blogness! But all is almost done! PW2 went really well and the decorating at the Mother-In-Laws is coming to a close. Once that's done I can get cracking on all the video editing that has been building up since Summer 2005...

That's about it really, nothing of interest has happened! I'll try make the blog a bit more interesting in the near future too!

MaFt

So Much To Do!

Both Mini-MaFt and Mrs-MaFt are ill... great... puke and poo everywhere! Seriously!

It has just dawned on me how much I need to get done this week! Not only have I work to do but I also need to get some decorating done at the In-Laws. Then on top of that, tomorrow night we're off to St Georges Hall in Bradford to see 'Love So Amazing 2' - a collection of modern worship stuff. Mum and Dad are singing so we're off to support them. Ro, Punk Worship bassist, is operating the projector for the night so he's gonna spam it with PW2 adverts so I'll have to get a photo of our massive promo!

I also need to get the laptop's prepared for various events at church this week: Thursday is Brigades Christmas event, Saturday is PW2 and Sunday I'm on the rota to project the normal worship service... Thing is, I can't get hold of the church laptop until Wednesday and I'm STILL waiting for people to send me what they want putting on it!

So, that's about all!

See ya

MaFt

Mini-Mrs-MaFt

Those who are a bit more alert may have noticed that for a while the sub-title for the blog has said "... dad of one (and another one on the way)..."

Well, here's the other one:



She's due May 1st 2007 :) We're well chuffed!

MaFt

Beat The System!

It's December tomorrow and that means Mrs-MaFt will soon be demanding I get the step-ladders out and risk life and limb balancing on them with Mini-MaFt running underneath me getting the Christmas Decorations up.

The Mother-in-Law has been sorting through their lights and all that lot over the last few days and found that most of them don't work - most of which they only bought last year. However, they bought them at the wrong time.

It got me thinking that if you don't mind having your decorations put up a week or so late every other year then you can beat the warranty system and show the big light companies that "you're the man". Well, here's my great money saving idea:

December 20th 2006: buy new Christmas lights with 12-month warranty. Put them up, get drunk and enjoy Christmas.

December 10th 2007: put your decorations up a bit earlier and if they don't work then they are still within their 12-month warranty period and you get them replaced. If they do work, then great, you've not lost out on anything!

For the following years: if you need new decorations then get them as late as possible to ensure you have some time left in your warranty to get them replaced the following year if things go wrong.

Dead simple isn't it? I have far too much time to think...

MaFt

Punk Rock 101

"It's stupid, contagious
To be broke and famous
Can someone please save us from punk rock 101
My Dickies, your sweat bands
My spiked hair, your new Vans
Let's throw up our rock hands for punk rock 101"
'Punk Rock 101' - Bowling For Soup

I had a message via MySpazz yesterday saying how the Punk Workshop I was running sounded like a great idea and this guy was going to try get some of his friends to come along.

Now, hopefully, it was a simple typo that was supposed to read 'Punk Worship' and the poor lad wasn't actually expecting a workshop on how to be punk...

In case I am actually mistaken and he WAS wanting a punk workshop then below is my quick guide on how to be punk depending on your age:


Young Punk:

• ensure your wardrobe consists solely of: atticus, lowlife, vans or black clothing
• deny you are 'emo'
• slag Green Day off for 'selling out' after releasing [insert any Green Day album title here]
• listen only to the latest 'cool' bands
• claim loudly that [insert last week's 'cool' band here] have sold out because they got radio airplay
• only go to see your mates bands and download their cd instead of supporting them
• have a MySpace page with your friends made up of bands you've never seen and your school chums
• explain to everyone that being 'punk' is about not following fashions and thinking for yourself then go around dressing the same as everyone else...
  

Old Punk:

• hate new punk rock groups for at least one of the following reasons: they have good quality recordings, they're in it for the money, they're too young, it's just not '77
• wear an old, tatty leather jacket with some dodgy 70's bands Tipp-Ex-ed onto it
• go on constantly about '77-'79
• show how much you 'hate the system' by working 9-5, 5 days a week, for a multi-national company that exploits cheap labour in China
• explain to everyone you meet that 'punk' is about not following rules or a fashion but then dress the same as every other punk and slag off various groups for not fitting the punk rules that, according to your own beliefs, don't exist anyway...
  
• never shut up about the time you saw [insert any 70's punk band here] at [insert any small pub name here]

OK, so that was slightly tongue-in-cheek, but some people annoy me! Having said that there are 2 'types' of punk person that I respect:

• 1) The young punk who'll go to see old bands and respects the fact that this is where their current 'new' bands got a lot of their inspiration from
• 2) The old punk who accepts that times change and will go to see and support the new punk bands

That's all for now, I feel I may have babbled! Anyway, it's not 'punk' to moan about stuff that's not government (old punk) or fashion (young punk) related...

MaFt

The Separation of Work & Home

It may seem kinda weird but since I've been working on a PC all day long at home I hardly ever seem to have any inclination to use my own PC! While this in itself is no big deal it just means that loads of stuff I need to do keeps getting put off - like the pile of camcorder video's I need to edit and burn to disc, websites I need to make etc etc.

I suppose it's like when I made drugs for a living at Nektar I never wanted to come home and make drugs. Now I work on a computer all day I hardly want to use one in my spare time. But, hey, at least I can make all the drugs I want to now!

MaFt

Damn...

MySpace Quizzes

Bugger...

MaFt

The Greatest Band In The World!

On Saturday night I, once again, witnessed the greatest band in the world playing live.

Scru', Jim and me headed over to Leeds Uni to catch the Rancid gig. Absolutely fantastic stuff! About 30 songs covering all their albums over the last 15 years as well as a couple of Operation Ivy songs thrown in for good measure. You can't beat the best punk band in the world coming back for their encore branding acoustic guitars - how weird it seemed but it sounded awesome.


Rancid

A good night was had by all. And a sober night too, flippin' £2.70 for a can of Carling...

MaFt

Just Warning You...

I've just switched to Blogger Beta where I can now add labels for each post that I make. So, I'm starting to go through all the posts to add the relevant labels to each one. However, if you subscribe to my RSS Feed then you may find that it suddenly seems to repost everything all of a sudden... This is because the posts have to be re-uploaded to add the labels and the feed thinks it's new...

So, sorry if you see lots of posts, but you have been warned!

MaFt

Top 10

According to MediaMonkey these are my top 10 most listened to songs:

Welcome to The Black Parade- My Chemical Romance
Since U Been Gone - Kelly Clarkson
The Darkest Places - MxPx
Blessed Be Your Name (live) - Punk Worship Band
Stars - Dude Fish
Punk Rock Princess - Something Corporate
You're Beautiful- James Blunt
The Story - MxPx
Friendly Fire - 3Dbs Down
Divide, Devoid, Devine - Chucky No Stars

What a mixture eh?! Wonder how different that list will be on my laptop... That's for another day!

MaFt

Izzit Cos I Is Black?

Well, the blog has gone all black n orange! My two favourite colours. Well, not my favourite colours, more my favourite colour scheme! More changes to come, this is just the start for now!

I'm finally gonna get around to updating my site - well, that's a massive over-statement, the plan is actually to just change the main page to make it either a link to the blog (regularly updated) or the main site (badly updated) - at some point I'll actually update the site a bit but since Mini-MaFt has been born I've not had much chance to write any songs so it's a bit pointless so far! Still, it'll get done.

I recorded the vocals for OPEN YOUR EYES last night which sound pretty good. Just a few more finishing touches and we should be able to get some samples up and get them off to the printers too.

Right, break over, back to work!

MaFt

All Up In Smoke

We had a bunch of people round last night for some fireworks. What started off as me, Mrs-MaFt and Mini-MaFt quickly ended up being both our families and a whole bunch of other people too! Still, I'm not complaining - it was fun and Sister-In-Law-H's neighbour made a fantastic corned beef and potato pie.

We'd bought some fireworks from Tesco - just kiddy ones so no big bangs or anything and so had Sister-In-Law-H. I got a text at about 5pm from Brother-T saying 'Got shit loads of big fireworks and rockets see you later'. Well, they were big and there were lots of them, however, they were just bigger versions of the kiddy one's we had bought! Brother-T was gutted that he'd spent forty quids on 'pretty-pretties' of which only two banged. The rockets were good though!

So, it just goes to show that just cos you pay more and they're bigger that that doesn't mean they're gonna be any better! The big-ass fireworks required us to be 25m away from them as opposed to the 5m ones we'd bought originally. So, even though they were bigger they looked the same cos they were 5 times farther away...

MaFt

Almost Recorded

Yo, spent most of the day in the crèche at church recording both the drums and guitars for the Punk Worship CD. We rn out of time for getting the vocals done so I'll be getting those done during the week either on my 8-track or down at Ro's... No doubt you'll be kept updated!

Anyway, I'm off to catch up on Torchwood.

MaFt

Enough To Drive You Mental!

Yesterday, wherever I drove I seemed to get stuck behind either a learner doing 20mph in a 40 zone or a bus that wanted to pull up every 100m at some imaginary bus stop. Why people don't give me priority on the road I have no idea...

Hopefully today will be better as there's no school traffic to get caught up in!

MaFt

Busy-ness

Had a pretty busy week last week! Monday we headed over to Blackpool to see the lights - I'm sure they get slacker each year... I remember the North end used to have loads of big displays at the roadside but there's only about 10 or so now. Maybe it's cos I'm getting older and everything seems much bigger and more fascinating when you're younger! Mini-MaFt enjoyed himself even though it was flipping freezing!

Tuesday was Niece-C's birthday party so that took up the best part of the evening then the day after was her actual birthday - so, again, another afternoon taken out! Working from home is great as it meant I could finish early in the afternoon then just make up the hours later in the evening!

I'm also enjoying Firefox 2 - particularly the in-line spell checker so as I type here it underlines spelling errors! Great stuff!

Then, my free time this week has been spent sorting out the stuff for recording the CD on Saturday and getting music sorted out for PW2... Busy busy busy!


OPEN YOUR EYES

Ta-ra for now, I have to get back to work ;)

MaFt

OPEN YOUR EYES

www.PunkWorship.co.uk will be recording a mini-album on November 4th with the aim of providing fundage for future PW events. And also to add a kick-ass CD to your collection!

It will feature 4 or 5 new recordings (more details later), a live track from Punk Worship earlier in the year; technology permitting, it should also have some special magic enhanced CD content including a video. There might also be a little extra there too....

So, why am I telling you this? Well, we figured that if a handful of people pre-ordered the CD at a special reduced cost of £5 (plus 50p postage) this would help us with the initial funding for getting the CD's duplicated and the artwork printed. Normal price will be £6 (plus postage) and all profits (around £2.50 at full price) will go towards future PW events which, at present, cost us around £300 (hire/purchase of equipment, admin costs etc etc)

I'll post details in the near future about how you can pre-order OPEN YOUR EYES either by cheque or through PayPal - keep checking www.PunkWorship.co.uk too as well as your inbox - what? you mean you're not signed up to the mailing list?! DO IT NOW: PW Mailing List


Open Your Eyes

MaFt

Lo-Fi.. Why??!

Today as I was walking around town for a bit I noticed more and more people walking round with music blasting out from their phones. Well, I say blasting, it's hardly loud - just more of an annoyance.

Back in the day the kids had ghetto blasters perched on their shoulders - they looked like complete tits but at least you could make out what music they were listening to. These phones may be alright as music players when you have headphones attached but through a crappy little speaker it's just pointless.

Maybe I just don't understand, you know, with not being part of the MySpace Generation - I never really got into MySpace and I doubt I'll ever get into listening to music in poor quality either...


Much cooler than hanging a phone around your neck...

MaFt