Sebastian Early Anthony Payne

As my friends have seen, I have never stopped ranting and raving about this new guitar - the Fender American Precision Electric Bass with S1 switching is now mine, after doing a direct swap for my Jazz. The style, shape and body of the Precision seem to suit me much better than the Jazz ever did.I have yet to try it through my Ashdown Engineering combo amp but after exams, I'll be pumping out some great bass moves - that's the idea. If anyone has a good suggestion for an ironic, tasteful or even relevevant name then be sure to let me know.

The Bruce Springsteen ticket is still with me so I will try the various Springsteen forums. I want to avoid eBay as much as possible as the seem to be many scalpers around who are looking for poor saps to take advantage of. The lack of entries has not been empathy but simply exams. Some more interesting things (less pictures, more words) will come when work is flowing less.

It has been three weeks since I last put a post out so, it is time for an update. With my return to Durham, my Facebook usage has increased while my Radio Nowhere postings have decreased. There is a link here - it never surprises me how vital Facebook is to daily life at Durham. My return at the end of April also saw me become the official Station Manager of Purple Radio. The first two weeks of broadcasting have been fantastic, stressful, exciting and worrying all at the same time. Some of the issues have included a broken compressor, a broken swivel chair, a broken studio monitor and an air-con machine blowing out hot air. Continuing to study and run the station is a major task of balance and will take a while for adjustment. Next year when my work load increases for Computer Science will bring extra challenges too.

On the other hand, some things have been excellent. The new exec team have really pulled their weight and everyone has done everything expected of them so far. Our new posters have arrived and feature everywhere in Durham - pubs, student bars, colleges, shops and random university buildings. To accompany these, two 8ft banners were ordered in the first week and arrived just a few days ago. After several emails with Estates and Buildings, they are up at the University Library and Dunelm House.

This Sunday will bring us the biggest thing the station has ever done - the Student Radio Chart Show. Several student stations around the country are taking their turn to host the show and 11th May is the turn of Purple Radio. Both the new and old exec have been working very hard to make this a memorable occasion for the station. If you want to hear the best of student radio and latest music, remember to tune in this Sunday at 3:00pm to www.purpleradio.co.uk. Fingers crossed for no technical problems, or personelle ones for that matter.

Ever since I began fiddling around with Linux and 'all that shizzle' in 2004, I have mainly used WordPress for my site, with a few diversions into RapidWeaver, Tumblr, MovableType and Blogger along the way. I have enjoyed using it but I feel it is time for a change. Some great blogs use WordPress but I felt something simpler, cleaner and slicker was needed to reinvigorate myself. The administration interface needs sprucing up badly (and no, the 2.5 revamp isn't what I was meaning) and I find it dull, boring and not a good writing environment. MovableType was my first choice but it's huge (the codebase is around 5mb compared to that of 1.5mb of WordPress) and requires playing about with Perl and I really enjoy life too much to spend time doing this.

While reading a few articles about MovableType 4.1, I found a link to Habari and I think I've found a match made in heaven. Habari was started over a year ago by a few prominent WordPress contributors (for one reason and another) and it is now in a good enough shape to make a proper blog of it as I already have. Over the past few days, I've been adopting my Tumblr theme and it's now ready for you all to see. The Admin interface is pure bliss - no extra buttons, just a plain box that lets the words blow. Reminds me of WriteRoom in this aspect.

Habari isn't right for everyone - those who want a fancy blogging system that does everything best stick with Ol' WordPress with its millions of plugins but if you want something easy to theme, a growing and well organised community, a clean admin interface and very quick load times then you should take a look at Habari. My coding skills aren't up the point where I would want to fix bugs but documentation, screencasts, bug reporting and general evangelism is somewhere I could actually help and this is something I plan to do, if my contributions will be welcome of course!

This post was brought to you by Actual Miles, Henley's Greatest Hits, in particular The End on Innocence and All She Wants To Do Is Dance.