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18/04/07 : Best. Albums. Ever.

Sarah always thinks it a bit odd on the rare occasions I buy or download something current, like I'm having an early mid-life crisis or something and am trying to get down with da kidz. But out of all the music I own, there are about 20-30 albums I listen to regularly - and they are all rock and all at least 15 years old.

The exact contents of my top ten will vary, but these are the most likely candidates.

The three best Iron Maiden albums - The number of the beast, Piece of mind and Powerslave.
Classic British metal at its finest.

Van Halen - 1984
This album manages to sound like classic rock, modern rock and 80s rock all at the same time, is well produced yet sounds live, and is structured but with an improvised feel. Perfect for playing loudly in the car on a hot day.

Little Angels - Jam
Great songs, great sounding band. This was a number one album, yet no one now seems to have heard of them. This bothers me to the point where I feel the need to provide a sample [UPDATE: original file removed, find song on Youtube]

Yes - Close to the edge
Perfect prog rock. The title track is of symphonic proportions, yet it never sounds overblown.

Queen - A day at the races
Yes, I like this better than A night at the opera. It's just fun and jolly and a little bit silly. Look, I don't have to explain myself to you anyway, so just shut up, right?

Vai - Sex and religion
I'm not a guitarist - I'm not even overly fond of Steve's playing (a bit over the top and not heavy enough). But, if you skip past the filler, there are some fantastic songs on this album.

Bon Jovi - New Jersey
80s heavy but melodic rock at its best.

Guns 'n' Roses - Appetite for destruction
Attitude fuelled rock (from a time that needed it).

I actually had to redesign the blog template to get this post to work. I did have the sidebar set to float:left so that the main column flowed around it, but it was too problematic with other floating elements (like the pics on this post) and couldn't line up lists properly. Sometimes this web design malarkey can be a real pain in the arse.

UPDATE (some time later) - how did I manage to miss off Images and Words by Dream Theater? Or other early prog (Genesis, ELP)?

08/04/07 : Blogger - ditched!

When I first started writing a blog (this one) I used blogger. It did the job and was easy to set up and use. It always had flaws though. The commenting system which they eventually introduced sucked (I've always used other methods). They've only just got round to allowing you to categorise posts - and that sucks too. And if you edit an old post your feed gets screwed up.

I thought about writing my own blogging platform using PHP to prove how clever I was. Unfortunately it turned out that I wasn't that clever after all. [UPDATE: I become clever at a later date].

I looked at Wordpress and Movable Type but they seemed a bit complicated. Quite by chance I found Thingamablog - and I'm amazed it's not more popular. It runs on your PC, allowing to write posts and edit setting offline. You can write different templates for posts, archives and categories. There are no inbuilt comments, but the template tags are similar to blogger's so Blogkomm works with just a few alterations to the code.

A highly recommended bit of software. There's even a slight chance that it will encourage me to write more often.