WOW! - Nik Turner's reformed them, and they're playing a gig in Slough in mid-November .... I quite fancy going, but Slough's a bit of a trek ... I guess I'll have to decide soon, I'm sure it'll sell out pretty quick.
I've just visited the official Download forums for the first time in several years and they're hilarious.
First up was me noticing the forums becoming unusable for a while with a "server busy" message ... which happened to coincide with school's morning break time. At a guess - because i've seen it year on year on the eFestivals forums - a large number of the people posting there are not attending the festival and know they're not; they're posting just to pretend to be 'cool'.
Anyway, t
I've just had a PM on here from an old mate, who recognised the name of another old mate in a post I'd made (tho he doesn't remember me, the bastard ).
edit: a few PMs later with some reminders, and he now knows who I am.
Geek alert - Fedora is a version of linux.
Why does anyone buy Windows? Having just downloaded and installed Fedora, it's bloody brilliant! It's got everything a 'normal' computer user might need included - including an excellent fully featured 'office' suite (word processor, spreadsheet, etc) - and it's dead easy to install!
The fun comes when you start to try and set it up anyway from a 'standard' install. So far I've managed to break apache (the webserver that comes with it) several tim
The second lot of passes for V Fest have turned up today, for the efests reviewer and photographer that are attending.
Somehow, the press office seem to have lost the first line off the efestivals address on these passes (the set that turned up yesterday for the other site were fine), and they only contain the company name, town and postcode.
Luckily I seem to have a smart postie, who worked out where they should go - thanks Mr Postie.
God knows what would have happened if they'd have
Lee, the guitarist/manager of The Blockheads has posted a few comments in the Summer Sundae forum, saying just how much they all enjoyed playing there at the weekend. He also dropped me a mail, asking if eFestivals had managed to photo their second performance at Summer Sundae (nope), and I took the opportunity to say thanks...
A couple of years ago my son (then aged about seven) went to Plymouth Festival with his mum, and afterwards he phoned me all excited, to tell me that he'd somehow (I n
I have - apparently - a wonderful secretary, who calls festival organisers to arrange access for eFestivals staff. This is the latest scam being tried by some to blag their way into festivals.
Are people really so stupid to think that something like this will work? The answer of course is yes . Does it work? Nope - and these people aren't even clever enough to cover their tracks. Scammers are always a few sandwiches short of the full hamper.
I'm pleased to say that eFestivals is now a carbon neutral website.
We're working with The CarbonNeutral Company to offset the emissions created by our business, as well as doing all we can to reduce our energy usage and emissions creation.
Climate change is happening - just look around you. We can wait for governments and businesses to stop pointing the finger at anyone but themselves, or we can take responsibility for our own actions and the consequences of those actions.
The amount o
yep, it's true, there's now this thing called free money, here's how it works.
What you do is set up or have a business. Then when you have some work to do, don't be a fool ... don't go doing it yourself! Do what Rupert Murdoch has his staff doing at the publisher Harper Collins (which he owns).
They come up with a book idea, an idea they know zilch about. Rather than waste their own time doing their job and researching it all, they try to find a few suckers - today I've been their target.
I woke up this morning and turned on a tap, to have only a trickle of water come out - luckily enough for the kettle. When I went to the shop over the road, I discovered that a main has burst nearby, and this whole area is without water.
It's not like I can't cope without water - I bought a litre of bottled for brewing up, but it's bugging me that I can't flush the loo, do the washing up or put some clothes washing on, even tho I know that there's guys out there working to sort the problem an
This was the first time I've sat thru a licence hearing under the new licencing act, but the procedure was much the same as under the old one. The only noticeable difference is that "interested parties" who are members of the licencing board are no longer allowed to be involved with making the decision.
This meant that a certain Pilton councillor (I won't name him, this isn't meant to be personal) who has been a member of the board in the past was excluded this time around, tho he was still f
Well, almost
eFestivals now also has the domain eFestivals.com ... it was on sale from a 'domain broker' (that's a domain tout to you and me) for very very VERY silly money - $35,000. But I'm pleased to say that nothing anywhere near as stupid was paid for it.
It was bought mainly to protect the efestivals.co.uk brand. If someone else had bought and used it to start a festivals site then I'm sure it would eventually have impacted on (this) efestivals.
At the moment, I'm not sure how i
I always get scam emails with false rumours - I've become rather good at spotting them i think (tho a few always get thru) - but one I got last night is just brilliant.
Surely he didn't really expect me to fall for that?
To help people get started, there's some step-by-step instructions on how to set-up your own blog here:-
http://www.efestivals.co.uk/forums/index.php?showtopic=66794.
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Well, the install of the blog software all went smoothly ... the difficulty came with sussing out a few bits and pieces of the configuration, and I had to ask for a quick bit of support from the makers to get a few things sorted out.
They were on the ball with getting the bits fixed, but what t
god, I needed that sleep.
What can I say? I don't think I've enjoyed a festival that much in ages.
But next time, they need to book Steel Pulse for a 3 hour set.
So this year the bubble has well and truly burst. Alongside the new festivals that failed to get off the ground there were also some established names that failed completely or suffered from lower sales. Meanwhile, the better festivals held their own or grew as they were hoping to do.
So what happens when Mean Fiddler's Festival Republic's Melvin Benn gets asked about the trends this summer? He doesn't pick on the festivals that suffered, but instead comments that he's heard that sales were d
Well, it seems as tho some people think that eFestivals are the people that hand out passes for festivals, and some people will go to extraordinary lengths to try and blag a freebie.
Yesterday I had someone telling me how they're a director of a couple of music biz related companies, and he suggests I check at Companies House. So for the fun of it I check, and it turns out one is dissolved and the other is dormant.
He also told me how he knew one of the directors of eFestivals, so I asked
Following the problems of last Monday night (when the Reading/Leeds announcement was made) with accessing the forums - they were incredibly busy - I've been looking at how things might be improved before Glasto ticket day.
Some changes have already been made that should see a small improvement of around 5%, and a number of other issues have been identified that should improve things a fair bit more.
Rather than just go ahead and make the changes and then discover that too late that it's ma
Another upgrade was made to the eFestivals servers last night, after a week of false starts, technical failures and cock-ups in trying to put things in place.
Anyway, the new set-up really is the dogs (as is being proved right now with the traffic for V tickets), and come Glasto ticket day I expect things to cope extremely well - the capability of the new servers is massively greater than what was in place two years ago for the last Glastonbury (and even back then eFestivals was the only maj
It's always a real pain when a computer dies, but thankfully my most recent computer deaths have been about as kind as they could possibly be.
Prior to this one today, I last had a computer die on boxing day last year. That was my own 'work' computer - the one I run eFestivals from - so it really couldn't have died at a better time. Nothing happens in the festival world between Xmas and new year, so that gave me the chance to get another built and configured before everyone started back at wo
