code meets music

I decided to start a blog, this is it.

This guy writes interesting things about javascript and I noticed a while ago that he’d switched to a new blog system. It’s called Mephisto and runs on Rails which meant finding somewhere to host it was a little tricky, but then I remembered I’d seen a post on this guy’s blog about a voucher to get money off hosting with these guys which includes the domain name,insane amounts of disk-space and bandwidth, and costs me the grand sum of about £1 a month. Thanks.

Setting up mephisto on dreamhost’s servers wasn’t exactly a walk in the park, but with help from here, here and here I finally got it sorted.

For my job, and often in my spare time as well, I work on developing web applications. PHP is the tool of choice on the server but I’ve been spending more and more time recently doing interesting things with javascript. I plan on sharing my discoveries with the world…

While I code, and most of the rest of the time, I listen to music. I like a lot of bands, not focussed on an individual genre but pretty much encompassed by ‘indie’. My introductions to music came mainly from the manic street preachers and nirvana (not the happiest or most optimistic of people…) whereas now I’ve been listening a lot to the wave of ‘electro-funk’ and ‘indietronica’ (other people’s labels, not particularly mine…) that seems to be sweeping through- bands such as Cansei De Ser Sexy, Hot Chip and Clor. I also have a bit of a thing for the powerful, bluesy rock of people like PJ Harvey, The Kills and The Dresden Dolls and for the bordering-on-riot-grrl sounds of Sleater Kinney. My favourite album of this year though is the self-titled debut from Forward, Russia which with its weirdly named tracks (they’re all numbers, though not in sequence) and repetition between songs (it’s definitely an album to listen to uninterrupted, in its entirety) is certainly quirky. The record I’m most looking forward to next year is the second album from Bloc Party (possibly called ‘A Weekend in the City’…though I might have just made that up) which from what I’ve heard so far, could be better than their debut.