The Review – Academy Manchester Fri 14/1/06
Damn Arms
Strange ozzy band. We liked em. Thrashing guitars with a keyboard player oddly placed in the middle of the stage. He had handlebar mustache and shirt that look a bit Star Trek from a distance. Dave thought possibly a bit ‘one dimensional’ but as they only played a handfull of songs that wasn’t a problem. Good stage chat.
Help She Can’t Swim
We liked em. Band had two singers – guy and girl. Guy was fairly standard indie sound. Girl was more interesting, a bit yelpy in places, and also sometimes reminiscent of X Ray Specs I thought. They didn’t really play to the audience much for first few songs – just got on with it and played. Then they somehow jelled towards the end and came more alive. Fears raised when the female singer was reading book of words were not born out.
Test Icicles
Build up was good – lights – lead in track (might this eclipse them Dave wondered) – and semi hysteria. Were they behaving like superstars without being proven? The sound was manic guitars, with high energy drum machine and shouting. The crowd were jumping. This went on for a few songs then the act seemed to fall apart, the set became shambolic until when the show was stopped to pull out a casualty it was time for Abduls
Prints at : CC imaging (ok), Imageco (not tried), Chromagene (not cheap), Leeches (not brilliant), Guzelian (some good)
Open source CMS ratings list
Typo3 features – huge feature rich extremely complex to learn scary CMS. See this extensions list to see what i mean.
Joomla - successor to Mambo – popular CMS. Features not great yet.
e107 – getting some good reviews, but as the documentation was unreadable in i.e. and no demo on opensourcecms hard to say
Drupal – features looked quite good, admin design a bit basic – might be worth a look
phpwcms – such mixed reviews yet it gets top ranking in the list. It is currently being written by one developer and is ‘unfinished’. Features are ok but not special.
HEAD-ON – crazy but excellent … no Mills and Boon here
Someone check out Lomo or I will have to … are they any good?
Links to 10 ‘rules’ of lomo … waiting for the book with interest
New Year eh? Thats another year done with then harumph! A few options this year … so what do I do? Exactly the same as last year … so there’s some grumpy mates and one happy but unexpectedly hung over one – oh well can’t please everybody all the time. Plenty of time for couples parties (if I become a couple and talk about babies poo), real ale pubs (if I become hairy and regress into 70s rock music), Glaswegian family parties (if I can wangle an invite and talk about kitchen units 
)
Feeling lazy Manchester seemed an easy option – over to Chorlton and slope along to the Horse and Jockey … but somehow the Horse and Jockey wasn’t enough … and a crawl developed from the couple of beers and a pizza plan. Bars only charging a reasonable £2 to get in – so a good selection of Chorltons holes were viewed. From ‘pretencious’ wine bars, through the good bars to the live country music in the locals pub at Chorlton cross roads. Queues were short, bars weren’t too packed and the ladies ….
Arriving back where we started at the Horse and Jockey just before midnight, the door was closed and no one was getting in. Just before midnight a bouncer poked his head out. And amazingly let us in when we waved our tickets at him. Just in time to miss last orders but get the last 5 seconds of the countdown. Clamidia passed us by though for another year, as we were too late to stand next to some nice lady ready for a drunken embrace. Our lot was to have our hands shaken quite properly by some guy … and watch about 10 men filming the abandonment on cheap digital cameras to prove they were having a great time. Very angry at this pillockishness we decided to leave immediately, as if they were having a good time surely they would be wrapped in an interesting embrace not annoying everyone with their stupid cameras …
so last orders was some dead nice toast. Goodbye 2005.
