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Moby's back!! Woo Woo! I'm so happy :D He was a little bit mucky, but alive and well, and that's all I can ask for :) I went out and bought him Eroski "Experience" Tuna and Chicken cat food, and he liked it a lot.

Now I know what it feels like to be a parent that's lost their child. Man, that was totally stressful!

Perdido

Aggh! Not only have I lost my girlfriend, but my cat has gone missing too! Moby Moby Moby, where are you??? The streets of Ghetto D'en Bossa have been ringing with his name as I've been hunting for his little cute features all day. I've got the whole street on Moby alert.

I thought I saw him earlier on the roof outside my flat in the semi-darkness, but no, it was his psychotic mother, taunting me with her stripyness.

Aida (the wee girl who lives in the block next door, who's been teaching me rude Spanish words) told me something in Spanish about him earlier, and pointed towards the hotel behind my house, but the only word I could understand was 'listo' (ready).

Tomorrow I'm going to put some signs up around the place, and have another hunt for him, until then the smallest sound that might or might not be his little miow will continue to send me rushing to the window to see if he's back.

Moby, please come back! I know I told you the other day that that poo you did was quite possibly the stinkiest thing I've ever seen, but I'll let you off next time I promise!

Everywhere you go... there you are.

How does something that on paper seems so right, simultaneously feel so wrong? Having said that, how, given 2 choices, do I always end up choosing the wrong one? Is it just me, or is the whole of mankind fatally doomed to make these same mistakes? Will there ever come a time when I can confidently delete David Gray from my music collection, knowing that I'll never need his services again?

Let me back up a bit. Last week, things seemed to be working out for me. I was finally back home in Ibiza, my flat is in the process of being plastered so it no longer looks like a backdrop for Armageddon, I've got a few gigs leading up to the start of the season, and there's design work flooding in thick and fast. The whole mess with Dad back home has finally been sorted out, with him now legally not allowed back in the house. In fact, the only thing that's not perfect in the world of Fus is that Marisa is 6000 miles away back in LA.

Having a long distance relationship is not easy at the best of times, and when you factor in 9 time zones worth of difference, and the fact that you've seen each other 24/7 for virtually the whole of the previous year, things start to get really hard.

Under these circumstances, I become crap. I mean really crap. Whereas when Marisa was with me, I could have a conversation and keep it up for a bit (I'll not profess to be the best conversationalist in the first place), when faced with astronomical distances, and an unknown time span before we'll next meet, I just seize up. All I can think is "I love you" and "I miss you", and before you know it, I'm avoiding her instant messaging conversations for fear of boring the tits off her.

So.. eventually it came. I had a feeling it would. And yet I did nothing to stop it. WHY??

The email saying that I've been crap at communicating, and that Marisa has no intention of coming back to Ibiza, and where is this relationship going? Is it a relationship if neither of us are prepared to live where the other does? She's right, of course, I have been crap at communicating, and we have barely spoken since she's been back home. For that, I'm sorry.

I end up staring at the email on screen for about 5 hours. I knew it was coming, and yet nothing could have prepared me for each and every word slicing through my heart like a dagger. Practically everything that was in that email, I agreed with, and yet my instinctive reaction was to fight it. Here in front of me, ASCII text was ending a chapter of my life, and all I can do is dumbly hit reply and seal my fate.

So is this it? Over a years relationship over just like that? A million conversations, a thousand "I Love You's", a billion thoughts of the other person culminated and encapsulated by 2Kb of text? And even though I still love her totally and without question, there's not a single thing I can say against it. If she doesn't want to live here in Ibiza, and I can't live there in LA, what are we going to do? What can you do other than the fair thing and let each other get on with their lives? Am I ready to get on with my life?

It's easy, retrospectively, to look back and think how stupid you'd been. I had this dream in my head that I'd get the flat ready before Marisa came back over, and we'd live happily with our wee cat round the corner from the beach. But really, thinking about it realistically, what is there for Marisa here? There's no Marisa music, no Marisa bars, no Marisa people, no Marisa food. No wonder she hated it.

So given the current situation, the only right thing seems to let it go. We helped each other through a lot of shit. We had a lot of good times, and not many bad. Seemingly, the only things stopping us having a perfect relationship are 6,000 miles and my inability to say anything of any remote interest to her ridiculously clever brain.

I can only hope that one day this island releases it's grip on me, and I'm able to function as a normal human being somewhere where she is too. Until then, everything I see and hear seems to continue to remind me of her... fragments of Tegan and Sara songs, every time one of her millions of pictures appears on my desktop, a memory of how I used to look into her eyes and feel her crazily brilliant mind ripping my soul bare... and thinking that's all I ever wanted.

On paper, the list of things in my life I always imagined would make me happy are nearly complete... House by the beach, an island full of free and easy people, house music, our cat, and Marisa. Now none of it means anything because I'm crap and she hates this place. How can you possibly have some kind of resolution from this situation? I never stopped loving her. She's not dead. She wasn't a bitch to me. Suddenly... she's just not there any more, except in a sepia memory of our relationship constantly looping in my head.. taking MDMA at Ben's house... a diagram showing the relationship of hot chocolate and.... something... a mattress on the floor of Moby's. Watching House... Walking to Bora Bora... A 90km taxi ride out of Granada. Chipping paint off the walls... Did I just make all that up? Where did it come from? Where did it go? I can only take heart from the fact that I don't regret a single moment of it, and I loved her for every single second we were together, and that I tried to be the best boyfriend I could be. I'm sorry that turned out to be not enough. I love you Marisa Prietto, x.

Happy New... oh... wait... umm..

So it's been a while since I posted last, and I'm feeling a little guilty about it, because I've been doing so much, but just not had chance to write. I thought I'd start the new year with a quick run-down of some stuff I've been up to since my last post, after that I'll just ad-lib until I get bored. You'll be bored way before that, so by that point it won't matter. I'll litter this post with pictures to help those who can't read good (and maybe want to do other stuff good, too).

In my last post, I was back in Ibiza, and continuing to be an international menace to ugly dogs everywhere. Don't ask me why, these things are important to me. The sad thing was, for the whole 2 and a half months that me and Marisa were there, it pretty much pelted it down, and most of the time the weather was worse than if we'd have stayed in England.

Luckily the rain cleared up a bit while my Mum and Sister visited, which gave us and excuse to rent a car for the week, and get around the island a bit more than what I normally do.

Harriet (Chesty La Spew), Alice (Wee in Wonderland), Marisa (Yellow Pages), and the Mother Fus on Sant. Salinas Beach.


Es Vedra


The Church/Library at Sant. Miguel


The caves at Sant. Miguel

After they went home, it went back to pretty much business as usual, although of course things picked up for Krystle's birthday, which in Ibicencan circles is well known as a poor excuse to go to Ancient People (possibly one of the best curry houses on the face of the Earth, and that's coming from someone who was born in Bradistan) followed by a long bout of getting well and truly fucked up at Sid's new bar, Blu. It's not everyone who get's to have their own private party at an Ibiza club DJ'd by 3 internationally renowned DJ's. And me.

My story is that they warmed up for me, and I'm sticking to it.

"I've got the Key, I've got the Secret, I've got the key to some seriously cheesy old-skool anthems


Professional Argentinian bubble-blower.


Sharon encouraged us all to party responsibly. Presumably so there would be more for her.


Anton cooks up the old-skool, while Jimmy does something involving Glee, Scottishness and Shiftiness (some may argue that those two are much the same thing).


DJ Toga - one half of the Girls Skool dream team.


DJ B Fly. Reeeeeeewind selectah! Bo Bo Bo! And all that Jazz.

After playing at Krystle's party, Sid asked me to play at Blu every week, which has been really fun, and following this, the owner is trying to get me a regular slot on Spanish radio station, Sonica. Hopefully I won't have to speak too much Spanish, as this could make things a little tricky :s.

I also attended my first lesbian wedding reception. Angie and Jo from the Queen Vic (next door to our flat in Ibiza) finally tied the knot, and had a fantastic party near Sant. Antonio. Luckily they chose not to have a DJ (or I think I would have killed someone - I've done far too many wedding receptions in my time), choosing instead to have an amazing singer while everyone got stoned on the roof of the villa.

Cutting the cake.


Scottish people and weed go together like Welsh people and sheep.


Krystle let the rooftop dancing all night, long after all the rest of us had caught pneumonia in the crazy-cold.

For Marisa's birthday at the end of November, Marisa's Dad was nice enough to send us to Granada for some much-needed R+R. He never mentioned that the place he was sending us to was halfway up a mountain 90 miles from anywhere though. Strangely, getting an internet connection halfway up a mountain is no problem compared to trying to get one in Ibiza, go figure. Casa Anna in Pituses (where we were staying) turned out to be absolutely beautiful though, and it was definitely nice to get out of the Moby's flat ;)

A double-decker bus. Just kidding, they're really mountains.


The view outside our window at Casa Ana.


Ana herself. She seemed strangely impressed by our culinary skills. Because of her remote location, little is known as to whether she survived my Chicken Curry.


Pituses. Population: 18.


There were cat-types everywhere, all with nothing better to do than pose for photos.


- See above.


Huge Carpenter Bee-types - I don't know if they stung, but I didn't really feel like sticking around to find out.


The scenery around Granada airport.


The scenery around Manchester airport. Welcome back to the UK.

So... back in Blighty. The only reason for coming back to the UK was really to do some gigs that I'd promised I would over December (all cheesy corporate stuff) - not what I'd really wanted to do, but I'd said I would before I knew any better. Besides, the money was good, and I was good for the money. I finally got my grubby mitts on a Kaoss Pad 3 (I've been working on a website for Maureen, and She wanted to pay me in Kaoss Pad... I tried not to argue too much in case she changed her mind), the only problem was that the power block was rated for US voltage of course, not UK, so as soon as I plugged the KP in, it fried. I nearly stabbed myself with it I was so annoyed with myself. Grrrr. I'm still working out how I can get it replaced without having to shell out too much money (customs already took £50 off me for the privilege of receiving it as a 'gift', bless their hearts, and Korg UK refuse to even let me send it to them, it being a US model).

To console myself, I bought myself a Wacom Bamboo tablet to replace my old Graphire, which lost its stylus many moons ago. The new one feels much nicer, and is twice the size, so I'm very happy about that :)

So... we're into 2008, what's next? Well, tomorrow my Dad will learn of the plot to have him forcibly removed from the family home. Everyone has asked him nicely to leave (for those not in the know, my dad is an alcoholic psychopath with narcissistic personality disorder - seriously, he's a psychiatrist's wet dream), so now Mum's asking for a restraining order from the courts. It's a shame it's come to this, but he won't listen to reason and he's making everyone's life a nightmare, so there's not really any other option any more. When he finds out about it we're predicting temper tantrums, so we're all going to stay with friends for the weekend, until the court hearing on Monday, when he will have to leave the house. We'll be having a huge party on Friday night to celebrate.

Then Saturday will be another weird one for me - I'm going to Scotland for the first time in my life (it's an old school-friend's wedding). The whole weekend is going to be a bit touch-and-go, as on Sunday I fly back home to Ibiza. Of course the wedding had to be not just in Scotland, but pretty much as far North in the UK as you can go without dying of hypothermia in the North Sea (not really my ideal way to die, and yes, I do have one).

Rinse, and repeat ;)

Simple like me...

After my post about the new RSS capabilities in Mozilla Thunderbird, I started looking into the possibility of actually building a podcasting extension for Thunderbird. It turns out that both Thunderbird and Firefox are built on XUL, which is like XML for interfaces, and Javascript, which is pretty amazing, if you think about it.

What this means is that it's pretty easy (once you get your head round the actual programming side) for anyone to put together extensions to the Mozilla programs. Not only that, but using the just-announced Mozilla Prism, it will be very easy to turn any Firefox/Thunderbird extension into a standalone program, and make use of local file storage.

I've been having a play around with the XUL coding, and it seems immensely powerful, and more than enough for most basic data-driven desktop applications - I can't understand why more companies have not used this already to create programs and data-driven websites that act like programs on the users local machine, but from what I can see so far, for my podcasting app it should be more than enough for what I need, for playing MP3s and videos I can use flash, so it should be a pretty good all-round program.

Now to get back to re-learning Javascript!

Thunderbirds are go!

After seeing the Zune software fall a bit short of the mark with podcasting, I've been playing about with the Pre-Alpha version of Thunderbird 3, Mozilla's email client. I respect Mozilla as a software company (if you can call them that, how much money do they actually make from selling software?) because they're innovative, but what they do works, and works well. Probably due to the fact that being an open-software company, each piece of software is like a forum of ideas, unlike Microsoft these days ;)

Even though this is a pre-alpha release, it's been working for me with no problems so far (more than can be said for some companies' final releases, not mentioning any names). One thing that is really looking good, even at this early stage in the game, is the RSS reader capability, which lets you see your RSS feeds alongside your inbox - why has nobody done this before now? (OK, I know you can get extensions for Outlook to do this, but the fact of the matter is that Microsoft should have added this functionality a long time ago). When you click a post, the actual link back to the site hosting the article is opened within a Thunderbird pane, which means no more clicking "read..." links! The really surprising thing though, was how well this all worked with podcasts - the audio/video file in the enclosure just shows up as an attachment to the post, allowing you to just save it where you want on your computer. Elegant, and all you really need from something not designed specifically for podcasting. I'm sure at some point Mozilla will add some basic mp3 player functionality so you can preview episodes and play them back once downloaded, or perhaps automatically generate a playlist within Media Player/iTunes with all the received episodes from a certain podcast. I'm just throwing ideas around. Of course because it's built by Mozilla, it has the Firefox rendering engine built into it, meaning that podcasts can take advantage of full HTML formatting in the description.

Now all somebody needs to do is build a podcast directory that bolts into Thunderbird, and there's the beginnings of some fairly decent podcasting software finally!

Microsoft FINALLY wakes up to podcasting...

I read with interest yesterday that Microsoft have finally got round to adding podcast support to their new Zune players, so I thought I'd have a look into it to see how the support fared against that found in iTunes.

I have a very love/hate relationship with iTunes - it seems to be getting slower and clunkier with every new version (I use it on windows, I understand it works much faster on Macs, but go figure), it looks ugly, and for such a huge company, the visualizations are laughable to say this has come from a huge company with such a huge budget when compared to single-man programmed vis's like Milkdrop (Winamp) or Twisted Pixel (Windows Media Player), which I can watch for hours and not see the same effect twice, and they're silky smooth. On top of that, not only does iTunes act slow, but it also slows your entire system down to a crawl as well (and this is on a 2.4Ghz Dual-Core with 2Gb RAM)! On the other hand, iTunes has pretty much been the one piece of software that has made downloading and listening to podcasts a no-brainer, which is really what it needed. Finding a podcast you want to listen to in iTunes is almost simplicity itself, and the reviewing system is helpful for finding out if a podcast is a waste of time, or other similar podcasts. Whilst making podcasting nice and easy for users though, iTunes is still lacking a lot of developer-end features like the ability to see easily how many people have downloaded and listened to your podcast, as well as basic HTML formatting in the descriptions for the episodes.

For my main media player right now, I've been using Media Player 11, which looks pretty, I can control from my taskbar, has good visualizations (once you've installed Twisted Pixel or something similar), rips super-fast and at decent quality (very important for a DJ), and the search is nice and fast also. I used to like Winamp for all my tunage needs, but even this has got a bit slow on the old search function in recent versions - but I can forgive that with them having a team of developers smaller than Microsoft's cleaning staff. The only downside to Media Player is that it has absolutely no podcast support, which is a real shame, and I'm sure would stop a lot of podcasters/listeners having to rely on iTunes just for this function (and I know a lot that do).


I decided to give the Zune software a try, if only to see how it fared against iTunes and Media Player. Installing it was no problem, and the download was less than half the current size of iTunes. It took about the same time to install as iTunes, but was much quicker to load once all my tracks were loaded into it's library (currently around 20k tracks). Interestingly, there was no feature to just work with Media Player's library, meaning that you have to go through the import process again, and the 2 libraries have to be maintained separately, which was a bit of a bummer.

The interface, whilst a little confusing at first looks beautiful, and you can choose from about 8 themes if you don't like the girly default one. It seems strange to me that the Zune2 players look very masculine, yet the software looks very feminine. It also seems strange to me that Microsoft would not just bolt the Zune syncing, podcasting and picture features into Media Player, which people will probably be using already if they don't have iTunes (which, if they're buying a Zune, they probably won't). All the menus fade in and out smoothly, or slide around, and compared to the grey boredom inducing look of iTunes, it really is quite refreshing to behold. It will not only allow you to organize and play your music, but your videos and pictures as well. The pictures part is especially nice for showing off your pics, as the interface is there over the top of the pictures, but doesn't get in the way, so you can see your pictures take up the full screen (with all the fady wizzy slidy effects you could want, it's all very pretty). Finding how to get to the podcast directory took me a bit of time, as the Zune software separates what's currently on your computer from what's on the internet, so going to your 'collection', then clicking on podcasts only shows you your current subscriptions, and their episodes. To get to the directory you first have to click on the marketplace (which I didn't think I could as Microsoft wouldn't let me create an account because I was born in the wrong part of the world), then on podcasts. This is a little confusing, as the assumption is that anything in the Marketplace is something you have to pay for, which is something which is invariably not the case with podcasts.

Once you've found it, the podcast directory is nice to look at, but quite slow to load, even though it loads the podcast artwork after the page has loaded. At the moment, the directory is pretty sparse compared to Apple's huge directory, but it's early days yet. Apple are very good at keeping up with podcast additions to their directory, I've just submitted Ruforia to the Zune directory, so we'll see how long it takes to show up. Choosing a podcast to subscribe to is very similar to iTunes, although once you're on an individual podcast's page, it seems to take an age before you get a list of the actual episodes within that podcast. Clicking on an episode does show the description in place of the actual series description, which I think is much better in usability terms than the iTunes method of clicking the small grey 'i' next to the episode (which you'd be surprised how few people know how to use). Aside from the general lack of speed accessing the podcast details, the only other downer is that people can not review podcasts like in iTunes. What would have been one better for Microsoft would have been the ability to discuss in a forum-like manner podcasts and individual edpisodes (since they seem so hell bent on creating yet another social network... can't they have one social network that you can bolt extra components onto as you need/want rather than a million different ones... xbox live, MSN messenger, Zune, Live Spaces, it goes on...). Other minor gripes in what would have otherwise been a pretty decent media player:

• Editing Track/Artist information in the library list view is a complete pain, and really slow.
• What's with the girly pink/orange bar along the bottom of the window all about?
• Why can't Microsoft program software that conforms to it's own UI guidelines? Every other program has a drop-shadow under Vista now, except the Zune software :s
• On that note, why could they not have given it a full-size Vista icon?
• Ok, I realize that this is primarily software designed for use if you have a Zune player, but could they not have all the 'device' options hidden until you register a Zune player with the software so that they don't get in the way. iTunes doesn't show any iPod options unless you actually have an iPod connected to it. Much less confusing for newbies.
  
• It's actually harder in the Zune software than in Media Player to add album art to tracks. Can't someone invent a nice easy way to batch add album art to your tracks???
• They've pretty much covered everything (almost) iTunes does in terms of podcasting and nothing more, how unimaginative.
• Why do all the titles have to be in huge capitals? Most podcasts/tracks end up being cropped off the edge of the window. I can read you know, Microsoft.
• No 'Users also liked...' function? Have we not established this is a Good Idea® if you want more business by now?
  
• Only 3 levels of rating?? Every music software that uses the ratings system uses 5 stars! Oh and we've changed it to hearts/broken hearts to rate the tracks? I'm sorry, but just because I don't like a track doesn't mean that I've had my heart broken by it, I don't get all emotional just because a crappy Trance track has wormed it's way into my collection.
  
• No visualizations??
• Not only does it not tell me the title of the track currently playing in the task bar, but it doesn't allow me to control what's going on without maximising the application first. This wouldn't be so bad if it took any notice of the multimedia keys on my keyboard, but it doesn't.
  
• Would it have been so hard to install a little sidebar gadget for Vista along with the software, so that you can see when new podcast episodes are available? It seems like it's just going to be another of those technologies that Microsoft heralds as the feature that will change the world, and then not make use of it in it's own programs.
  

One really thankful thing is that the Zune software actually reads the iTunes tags in the podcast definition file, instead of requiring it's own XML definitions. That could have been a lot more painful for everyone concerned. But apart from all that it could be a really good podcasting alternative to iTunes about 10 years down the line. By which time iTunes will have moved the goalposts again of course!

Moby the cat

Today we welcomed another member to the family in the Moby's apartment, Moby the cat. Krystle found him last night, trying to get to his mum (who had got to that stage where enough was enough, and he was big enough to look after himself now, and couldn't get far enough away from him), and gave him a bowl of food outside the Posiedon hotel. When we went back to look for him today, his mum was around, but he was nowhere to be found. Just as we were about to go home, he jumped over the fence, and could not get enough attention. We took him back home, and he's been asleep on the sofa ever since, apart from when I brought him some kitty litter home, and he used it like a total pro (although he seemed a little disappointed that we had no cat literature for him to read while he went about his musings.

Burn, baby, Burn

Once again, so many people are trying to download the Ruforia XML file that it's exceeded google's bandwidth limitations on my site, meaning that some people will not be able to get the podcast today. I've now moved the XML to another server that has more bandwidth, and set up a redirect in my old XML on Google. It will take a couple of days for everybody's iTunes to update, but I think this will be a lot better in the long run.

If you are having problems getting the new mix on the podcast, you can click advanced>subscribe to podcast... on the iTunes menubar, and copy/paste this address: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Ruforia - this should allow you to get the new episode and any future episodes no problem! (Your iTunes will do this automatically on it's own, but it may take a couple of days, and I know how desperate some people are to get their hands on the new mix!)

For anybody that subscribes to the podcast in any other podcast software, please update your subscriptions to this new address.

Thanks a lot for your patience!

Shiiiiiiiiiiit.....

Well, yesterday came the true evidence of how popular Ruforia is... So many people downloaded the podcast XML file (only a 100Kb file on its own) after releasing 'Unless You Wear a Rucksack' that it maxed out the bandwidth on my Googlepages, stopping many people getting the podcast for most of yesterday. This is great in popularity terms, but not so great for my server. I'm just going to have to find somewhere else to host the xml file that doesn't have these bandwidth restrictions!

Perhaps this would be a good time to start running my podcast through feedburner, so I at least know how many people are downloading it!