Where be me eyepatch?! Raise yer grog, an’ sing a shanty with yer old boy Mad Dog Gus…

The problem with ncmpc is that it’s rather a pain to use. It’s not very intuitive, and I often end up inadvertently stopping my tunes halfway through. This annoyed me, so I searched for an alternative.

I found Pitchfork a while back, which is a great Ajax-powered web frontend for mpd. It seems, unfortunately, that their website has fallen into disrepair - if you click the link above then you’ll find a SquirrelMail login. This means that it’s pretty hard to find somewhere to download it.

Fear not, however! I delved into my old ext3 partition backups and found a tarball of version 0.5.4 of Pitchfork. It’s not the most recent one that they managed before the server went bust, but only one beforehand from what I can tell, and it works perfectly. I’m linking it here for download so that anyone who might find this via Google is able to enjoy its power.

http://www.webvictim.net/random/pitchfork-0.5.4.tar.bz2

I’d appreciate a comment if you find this post useful.

During the day, we did laser clay pigeon shooting, a treasure hunt and my personal favourite activity, duck and goose herding with a sheepdog. Fantastically amusing to watch and more fun to do, I felt just like I was in a farm story or something. Shouting “away to me!” and watching a dog make an anti-clockwise circle around a flock of running geese while you usher them through some gateposts is definitely an amusing way to spend some time. Nobody knew that was coming and it was a great surprise.

The evening was the usual sort of affair which started out civilised and degenerated into a massive piss-up, as any good office party should. I danced like a total loon, as I always do at Christmas parties, and drank a decent amount of wine. Myself and a couple of others managed to sneak off with a bucket of booze at the end too and carried the party on back in the hotel bar which was a great laugh. I did feel the consequences in the morning, but had an absolutely fantastic time and wouldn’t change it at all. Even the drive home was a brilliant laugh, discussing all the drunken quotations and dancefloor moments from the night before. You can always tell a party’s been great if you feel completely ruined the next day but don’t regret a moment of it.

I bought “Rock Band” for the 360 on a bit of a whim as a payday present at the end of last month, and it’s properly awesome. There’s something that’s just brilliant about singing and playing the guitar at the same time - makes you feel like a rockstar even if you’re useless at it. Brilliant stuff!

I recently became the owner of this channel as a result of the old owner being inactive, and so I think that gives me the right to start recruiting people to join!

I’m there pretty much all day every day, so stop by and check it out if you fancy it. They really are awesome people, and we promise to make your day more enjoyable :)

I spent Thursday afternoon - Monday evening at i34, a LAN party near Coventry which was hosted by Multiplay UK. I drank lots of beer, played lots of games, didn’t get nearly enough sleep (partly thanks to staying up late, and partly due to sleeping in a tent) and had an amazing time.

I went with what I suppose you could call a clan - we’re known as [CantFitMyN. The reason I say “suppose” is because we’re hardly fantastic gamers - we can hold our own, but we’re definitely not professionals ;-)

That said we did actually win one of our Team Fortress 2 matches over the weekend, although we didn’t qualify for the tournament in the end. The whole point is to play for fun though, and we got many compliments on how sporting we were and how fun it had been to play against us.

The question now is when I get to go and do it all over again! i35 is at the end of October, and it’s rather tempting to try and go, despite the inevitable cold weather.

We’ve put many photos online - unfortunately Facebook has just died when I’ve tried to get links to the albums, so I’ll have to update these at some point in the future…

That is all for the moment. Today is a good day. :)

When I got there, it turned out that the car that hit him had driven off with a broken radiator - my brother’s car was in a pretty bad way, so they must have hit him pretty hard. I just let the police do their job and gave my brother a comforting arm round the shoulders - not a lot else I could do really. I’m unsure if they’ve caught the people who did it yet or whether that’s still in progress.

I watched the European Cup final last night, thought it was a brilliant game - Spain totally deserved to win as they were all over Germany from about 15 minutes in until right at the end of the game. Torres scored a lovely goal, and Spain were unlucky not to get two or three more.

It’s rather hot today. Work is going alright, but it’s a bit loud thanks to the 3 HP DL140s running by my feet. Configuring servers is a noisy process!

I can’t describe how nice it is to be able to leave something on a table when you go out, and then forget about it and have it still there three days later. It sounds bizarre, but it’s such a change from the way things usually are in my house that it’s unbelievably refreshing. Unfortunately it’ll all be over next Tuesday, but I’ve only got to finish work today and then I’ve got four days off. Sweet.

In other news, Today’s XKCD is pretty similar to the way that I think in a lot of situations. Neuroses are fun!