oh my god. i forgot i had a blog.

._.

guess i better start doing some interesting shit so that i can write in it again eh!

THREEQUARTERSMILE ARE RECORDING AN ALBUM. FINALLY.

after years of band members walking out, false starts & frustration, we’ve got a stable line-up and some songs we’d like you to hear. we’ll most likely post up a taster of the newly recorded material in the near future, with the album / EP being released later this summer as an online, independant release.

Hopefully as we get closer to giving you the finished collection of songs, we’ll play a few gigs over the summer and also produce a music video or two. we’re all about the creativity. SO… there may be room for a few people to help us out by being in a video… i’ll hit you guys up with some details about that nearer the time.

hope you’re all good, and we’ll shunt you more info as it comes in, in the meantime if you’re eager for threequartersmile news, become a fan of us on facebook to keep track of where we’re at with the album!

much loves,

Benny x

phewwww

i am shattered.

band = new material, something that NEVER happens in threequartersmile land. it’s shaping up to be a great new sound, and we’re all back and thinking on the same level again.

i cannot wait to gig again.

speaking of which, playing a gig on wednesday night, drumming for a kick-around band that me and some mates from work have put together. we’re playing a few covers at a battle of the bands night the college is putting on, it should be a good laugh.

i love ruth. she bought me a robot arm, it’s wicked.

I had the best birthday ever. as in, it’s actually the best birthday i’ve ever had, ever. over the course of the day, everyone i hold dear to me was whispering behind my back and plotting a surprise party in the evening, and i had NO idea.

walking into a pub thinking your girlfriend’s brought you out for a meal and being faced with a beer garden full of your closest friends is amazing, i was lost for words. specially when I saw my mum sat there, fag in one hand, glass of wine in the other.

Loui’s inspired me to get back into doing artwork again, when i get some time out from the music, i don’t know when that’ll be, but i’ll make sure that it happens soon.

I now have my osx 10.5.6 server running flawlessly at home, blog/wiki server, open directory, network logins and mobile user accounts. I’ve worked ith this stuff for years, but this is the first time that I have it in my own house, where i can play with it, try different things, and break it if i absoloutely have to. You can’t learn a great deal from a system that’s so critical you can’t really take it offline until half term.

Work is good, few niggly problems here or there, but the bread and butter of my project at barton is up, running, and in constant use. I’ve put together a portal page for the mac-centric intranet, strings together a few links that art and photography students or teachers would find useful, as well as direct links to existing intranet pages and areas, plus the wiki’s and blogs that run from their own user and group credentials. that side of things is really interesting to me… group collaboration suites can either be the one thing that ties together a project for a bunch of people, or a black hole that eats your time and makes you far less productive.

luckily it’s the former so far

anyway, will keep it short. threequartersmile will be gigging before the summer, ready to try and hit a few decent gigs with local bands over the summer, and i’m more proud than ever of the people in this band and the music that we’re making. I’ll let you know when gigs are on the horizon!

hope you’re all well peeps!

benny

Hello all.

Had a pretty good day today actually. Work was cool, nailled a few more things down. I miss my ruth though.

Had a band practise tonight that was out of this world! Was awesome. A plan was devised so that we could approach re-learning material in a pretty different way, and it paid off big time. I’m hoping we can keep this mindset, because we’ve got some mountains to move…

That’s the third night in a row this week that I’ve been jamming. Rock and roll is starting to become a bit of a habit…

Anyway, me tired, night night facebook. X

Whoah, you know it’s 2009 when you can write blogs from your phone…

One of my new years resolutions is to keep up the blogging… And I guess I can now anywhere, anytime! (as long as there’s wireless or cell data coverage)

How’s things with me?

Threequartersmile is a messy, whirling, mash up of riffage, soul, screams, and five guys beating the shit out of their instruments in unison. It’s exactly what it always should have been … Therapy for the jilted

Work is cool, despite the odd hiccup now and then, 2009 started reasonably well, and the new networked mac system I’ve put in place is doing it’s job pretty damn well. It’s always nice when something goes to plan!

The flat me and ash are living in is deathly cold … But we’re looking forward to the spring and the summer, last summer in this place was freaking awesome! I can’t wait for those sunny skies again.

I am rediscovering the gamer in me, and I’ve bought an xbox 360 elite, and totally enjoying farcry 2 online team deathmatch

I have a new lady friend, ruthie, who I’m sure you’ve either met already or will in the future. She’s fucking awesome. Seriously it makes my head ache. We’re off to London to see a bill bailey show later in the month, it’s gonna rule!

Anyway, right me gonna sign off… I hope to update the blog a little more regularly now that I can just write little
Bloglets on my phone

Sleep tight all!

Hello world.

i’ve been on a bit of a self-imposed hiatus lately, sorry for the lack of blogs. It’s been a really long time hasn’t it?

i haven’t checked, but i think the last time i wrote anything, i was yammering on about two things: writing a second solo EP, and some cute girl. one of those things will definitely happen, one of them won’t.

Ash and me are making a break for the real world once more; we’re moving into our new home, a flat above our local cafe, in the next couple of weeks… it’s going to be great to have our own space again, it’s been a long time since we’ve had our own space to call home, i’m really looking forward to it. even if we don’t have most of the shit we’ll need in order to live there just yet.

I’m singing again, i feel free. As much as I love drumming, and pouring everything I can into a beat to drive a song forward, to be at the very heart of something, after fourteen years of doing that both on the kit, and in my head, you feel a little trapped by it.

What’s more, i’m writing again, in a one-thing-at-a-time, baby steps way. The last time i was hearing prototype songs and could-be band material in my head was august 2006, a lifetime ago. There was a period between then and now when i didn’t pick up a guitar, at least with any meaningful intent, for about a year… and now i can again.

Threequartersmile, as always, hidden from the world, is sounding great these days.

Even though we’d love to sound perfect [and believe you me we've had some rough sounding practises], gears have shifted, people have changed and it’s reflected in our sound every time we play. Even if we can’t stay focussed 50% of the time, from where i’m standing at least, the pieces are all in the right place on the board.

I should wrap it up here… it’s boiling hot tonight, and this shiny, sexy, nippy as fuck Macbook Pro lappie isn’t helping… it’s actually cooking my legs. Barbeque anyone?

My final thought is this; I used to be pre-occupied, sometimes obsessed, with wiping the slate clean, and starting again when things got too messy. I’ve spent the last few months taking stock of everything… it’s given me the perspective to look beyond the things that i thought were most important to me last year. I’ve been wandering the wilderness and the waste for a while, and though it’s been lonely, I’ve seen some beautiful things.

Friendships i thought long-dead have burst into action again, a brother i’d thought i’d lost is now closer than ever before.

The moment I stopped thinking twenty-four-seven, about how someone could cut me out of their life, and I had a chance to look around unhindered, *bam* … more people, people that i wouldn’t change, walked into my life.

I’m done with washing my hands and starting again, it only ever put me back in the same place… this summer’s going to be about building bridges.

right. to bed!

night all x

Recently at work i’ve finally gotten around to sorting out a backup scheme.

This make sense, as we have 200+ macs each with anything from 500mb~80gb of data on that need to be backed up, usually in classes of fifteen or so… it’s been hard for me to believe that there hasn’t been a backup solution in place. Up until now it’s been down to the students and the staff to make sure that they back up their own work which is [1] good, because this teaches the kids to look after their work and [2] bad, because in a production environment, this will be taken care of for them, and they don’t really understand how to, or why.

First I looked at upgrading a [high priority] class from Tiger to Leopard, and Time Machine, to allow them all to have a completely un-manned backup, something that takes care of itself. Later I found that Time Machine doesn’t handle backups over AFP/SMB too well, even with hacks running. And buying 500gb external drives for each machine is out of the question.

Enter Rsync, I’d tried a couple of different approaches, one being Psyncx, which doesn’t like leopard much at all, and Rsyncx, which started shitting all over the place at random intervals. Instead I tried a front end wrapper to Rsync which makes things very easy, and after setting up a few backup schemes at home over AFP shares; it works perfectly!

This my friends, is the night i’ve finally bashed down a demon that’s been haunting me for a few months.

In all of this I’m aiming to solve the backup solution, but at the same time, my own objective is to educate the staff involved, and in turn the students themselves in how to handle things like this, and in a limited way, how they work. The solution will pass through from end user, all the way up to myself and then up onto the main cluster’s backup – but along the way, the teaching and support staff involved will have access to be able to use the backup solution on a day-to-day basis should they need it.

So, the current layout is, fifteen-to-twenty macs per room, in each room is a teacher’s machine, that isn’t anything special, same spec as the student machines. We have some spare G4 gigabit Powermacs laying around that i’m going to turn into staging servers in each room – truth be told, anything from a stock ATX windows or linux server can be used, but the G4’s have enough network grunt and a pretty face too, it’ll be good to put them to use, as there’s not much they can handle in the classrooms these days.

at 4pm the students leave, and the machines log out the current user ten minutes later

at 4:30 the student macs [depending on network load and amount of data to shift] will singly, in pairs, groups, or all at once, start copying designated folders and their contents over to the staging server in their room. Running off their own gigabit switches, the different departments shouldn’t slow each other down.

This will happen each evening before lights out at 6pm~9pm depending on the evening’s activities on site.

On friday evenings, the staging servers will copy all the backups that they’ve received during the evenings up onto the cluster, at first this is going to sting and take a really, really long time, but after the first sync, the backups will only copy up new files and folders that have been created.

The bit I have to work out now, is how i’m going to set quotas, per-machine, and per-room/department.

of course, i could just get a Terrabyte worth of Time Capsule for each department – the trade off would likely be control over ease of use, plus a big safety net in the shape of a warranty! maybe i should talk the boss into letting me buy one of the 500gb models for a test run…

we shall see how it goes

holy crap, it’s the 21st of January and I’m posting my first blog of the year?

well, here’s an update.

I’m feeling amazing. I apologise for being a massively emo shit lately after a rocky end to 2007, things are SO much better now. I’d like to take this chance to thank everyone who’s listened to me moaning and pining and howling like a sick puppy these last couple of months. You know exactly who you are. The last weeks have seen me making friends with people I’d never have spoken to, I feel like i’ve made some friends i’d like to keep in my life forever.

The band’s going great, we have a bunch of songs ready for recording, and we’re currently scratching a few new ones around that NOBODY HAS EVER HEARD BEFORE… EVER! I literally can’t wait to get these babies laid down ready for people to hear.  It’s that shiny sparkle you get from making something  totally new,  it’s brilliant.

on that same note, writing, and some recording has indeed started on my new solo EP – the current working title for which is “Broken hearts & baited breath”.

This might change depending on what kind of beast it turns into. I’m going to take my time, and haven’t given myself a strict release date to adhere to, but i’d like to get it out, for free again, sometime before summer.

So far, it’s already sounding a lot heavier than my last one did, I’d like to push myself as far as I can go, musically and vocally, and have already set about securing a young lady to provide vocals for one of the new tracks too. I’ll give you more news on that once things start happening a whole lot faster!

I’m finding as always, that drumming my heart out at band practise is leaving me completely knackered, but have noticed at the same time, I’m feeling fitter – just from drumming! score!

hmm anyway, what else is new?

I put some blinds up today, that’s right, DIY benny, and they look GOOD. I decided I quite like blinds.

right, i just realised the time, i gotta shoot. hope you’re all well and stuff, lotsa loooooove,

tehbenneh xxx

there comes a time when you wake up, after weeks of thinking about it every fifteen and a half seconds.

and you want to take those pictures down, because, whilst they remind you of a far happier time in your life that feels like [and pretty much was] yesterday, ultimately they lead to one cold and dead feeling.

there comes a time when you wonder why you held on to the receipt for that ring, and for some fucking reason, you’re still putting it somewhere safe.

…why?

you meet with an ex at the weekend, someone that this never happened with, someone who you’ve always considered a friend from years back, an old war buddy from battles past. it’s amazing how the world’s changed this person, and that after all those drugs and all this time, they’re still really, really fucking cute.

No agenda, no threat, and no target, just an empty, level playing field, someone who knows what you were, and what you’ve become.

the ounce of comfort found here, helps more than you’ll ever know.

so you get the box out, both physically and mentally, and stuff as many things as you can into it, the tickets from the zoo, the receipt from the sweet, friendly little cafe on snowdon, the photo you had taken in a booth together eighteen months ago, the anniversary card that’s been stood on your bedside table for six weeks, did it all happen that fast?

You fully realise that you’re a walking, talking contradiction, but you can’t help how you feel, and for some reason, probably because you’re drunk, you think it’s a great idea to start writing about it, because maybe there’s someone out there who’s felt like this.

you told her that you understood, and that you would always be here, and you know deep down that you don’t hate her, only what’s happened.

The demons come flying out of the baggage, the ones that made you cheat on that other girl in 2005, the same ones that told you it was all your fault the band fell apart in the first place, that your parents split up, and despite all your efforts, you’ll never be able to redeem yourself and amount to anything.

And most importantly, that you will never, ever play onstage at the joiners, because you’re nobody, and you’re going nowhere, fast.

You know it’s all untrue, but the kind of mood you’re in tonight, you just dig it and go with the flow.

There comes a time when you realise that packing everything away, and hiding everything that reminds you of her, leaves you with an empty room, and robs you of the last two years of your life. you can’t win this game against insanity, but you try anyway.

you slowly realise as she tells you that there’s now someone else in her life, even though it stings like a motherfucker, that you’ve met someone that you find world-stoppingly beautiful and bewitchingly interesting,  but you’re completely unarmed and have no idea what to do about it.

You think, “this is all payback, for who I was a couple of years back, this is the universe leveling the score on me”.

Having no option, you enjoy the pain … you deserve it in a way, but at least you were in love, you know that you gave your heart to someone completely and without question, and that you didn’t slip up once.

They can never, ever, take that away from you.

You light a cigarette, and smile up at the sky, extend one arm fully, and wave your middle finger at the night sky.

There comes a time when you realise that, you’ve been asleep for two years, having a crazy mixed bag of amazing dreams that recently twisted themselves into nightmares.
You notice that it’s very very nearly 2008, and that you have an album to release, a solo EP to record, a graphic novel to write, a car to buy, a family to love, friends to cherish, and more to make.

There comes a time when you feel like you’ve been born again, to be all you can be.

I started off this year quite depressed.

I can actually remember at one point, seriously considering getting some form of professional help

lol… feels weird to admit that.
Living in the house with the guys was going totally shits up after January, as much as I was free, and as much as I loved my housemates to bits, the usual stuff was getting to me. I was already retaliating in a textbook passive-agressive way, if no-one else was tidying the place, neither was I, that sort of stuff. The next few months saw me thinking long and hard about whether or not to jump ship and head home for a while to plan the next arc of my life story. It took a lot of soul searching but I did it, and in doing so threw everyone else into disarray, which i’ll always be sorry for, but I had to do something for myself for once.

My mum was practically destitute since we’d moved out 18 months before, and it was utterly heartbreaking to see how lonely she was whenever I’d swing by on my lunch break. One memory will always stick with me, making a sandwich in the kitchen, sitting down to eat it at the table, and then stopping after realising i’d practically eaten everything in her fridge, inbetween these two slices of bread.

She still made me eat it, i seem to remember her remarking at how i should put on some weight hehe. It was pretty much there and then that I realised I had to come home for a bit. I needed some time out, and she needed a paying lodger.

In the blink of an eye, it’s 7 months later.

It’s weird how shit changes, isn’t it? Living my life day-to-day these last months, working my ass off at my job, I’d all but forgotten about the last 18 months of my life previous to me getting here. My focus was in the wrong place. It used to be Play first, work after. These days it’s just work, play drums on a wednesday night, maybe meet the guys for a drink on a monday night, and if possible, try and do something with girlfriend.

And just as I was starting to realise that my sights were misaligned, my whole world changed. They say these things come in threes, you know. First finding out about Keith’s death, for someone who prides himself on being hard to shock, that was a biggie. Second was getting a scare and a half, after a close friend of mine of some ten years or so / ex boss / ex band producer keeled over with a heart attack upon moving into his new place with his wonderful other half. He’s fine though, after booking an emergency day off last friday i went up to see him, he’s up and about and farting like a trooper again. I love that guy.

Threes?

Indy dropped a bombshell. We’d had a rough couple of weeks, that’s no secret. I gave her a week of practically no contact at all, just so she could think about what she wanted without me messing any of it up.

Once we met up, after a few tears, she asked if we could call it quits, end on a good note.

My mind’s a pretty busy place most of the time, but every now and then, i get a moment where everything just stops. Nothing but sheer white. no shadows, no movement. you realise something in these moments.

It made sense.

after two great years, a million laughs together and what is quite literally the rollercoaster romance that nobody on earth could have predicted, i can’t blame her. we’ve grown apart as a couple, and i’ve had my head in too many other places to really actually see it happening. and while i regret that, i am for the first time, man enough to stand up and accept it and take it on the chin.

I saw a new side to her, when she told me, while it hurt to hear it, I saw a great friend being honest with me, and it’s something i’ll take to the grave. Things have been completely crazy the last few days for me, falling apart one minute and actually smiling about it the next. but it’s human nature that things like these change. in fact it’s not even human, it’s just nature.

So, I plod on, work hard at work, enjoy the time i get to spend with my sis and ma, and love the time that i spend with my friends, i hadn’t realised how much i’d neglected these people, and while it’ll be a chopsy few weeks, I know that i’ll be back to… a new kind of normal soon enough.

you’ve probably heard it in at least four different movies in the last two years, but it’s never been this true – sometimes loving someone is letting them go. to do anything else would prove otherwise, and leads to insanity.

indy, you have a friend for life, you can call me whenever you need me.

So, if you see me around, i’m probably untidy, unshaven, dreary looking, my shirts have all kinds of creases in, and generally a bit of a mess. there’s light at the end of the tunnel though, in fact good things come in threes also, didn’t you know?

for one, i met with, talked for hours with, and got on with, an ex-bandmate, someone who i haven’t talked to for five years. it felt good to claw back a little part of my old life. i feel like i uncovered one of my roots in all of this mess.

next, i bought an iPod touch to cheer myself up. Nothing like blowing £270 quid on yourself to cheer you up, i’ll fill you in on that, but it’s best left to another blog.

and last, a workmate gave me a small slab of bluetack at work today, with a smiley face sculpted into it. it sounds completely stupid, but after the two weeks i’ve had, the fact that someone spent a few seconds doing that for me [however random!], meant the world hehe.

That smiley face is actually the first thing that’s made me smile in days. I smiled right back at it. I bet i looked stupid.

right, got work in a few hours, i should wrap up here. thanks for reading, if you got down this far. here’s to the winds of change and whatever bounty they bring.

Benny xXx

When I was working as an AV technician for Taunton’s College, I took on an extra role as an IT Tech too, and I joined an interesting mix of well… we were hardly young, professional, go-getters, but we knew what we were doing.

Starting at roughly the same time as me was one Keith Gordon. A towering, massive, scary looking guy. The sort of guy the students would all move away from when he went out to the smoking area.

When i figured out that I had someone in my team to go out for a fag break with, we soon got to know each other.

Turned out Keith was living in my hometown of eastleigh, in a flat on his own. He’d been through uni studying programming and always said how he’d lost contact with his old classmates and wanted to get back in touch with them. Keith had a mechanical mind, the mind of an inventor, an engineer, just one that’s used to working with different tools… he ached and toiled all day long with theories of how to make a certain task easier, the same things that all the great minds worry about.

Keith really was a talented programmer, kept his own website, and had contributed quite a few very useful applications and utilities both to the open source community and to our team, helping us keep track of which users were taking up the most space on the network, and providing us with a few utilities that showed users what resources were being raped by windows XP etc etc… nerdy stuff. Nerdy stuff that he was really good at… so good at in fact, he even got his programs put on a PC consumer magazine’s cover disc… a bit like a local band getting their new song on a Kerrang! cover CD. Incedentally, he was also a musical bloke, loved his trance and house, and still made music from time to time, I think I’ve still got a few mp3’s he sent me.

Most of all Keith was a good laugh, and his heart was in the right place… he gave me more lifts home than I can remember on a rainy november evening after work, and we’d shared a good few drinks together at the pub in our lunch hours.

As the months dragged on at work, it was pretty apparent that he had some demons, baggage, whatever you want to call it. For someone who appeared to have a very simple life on the outside, as you got to know him you could tell he was a somewhat troubled guy.

I can remember being quite concerned about him a couple of times while we worked together, and after [unsuccessfully] trying to use a budding friendship as leverage to get him to share a problem or two, I made it known to our personnel officer that he was having some problems. They just didn’t seem interested in helping, or maybe they didn’t see what I saw?

In the weeks following that, Keith just kind of faded out at work, I was never really told what happened, all I know is he stopped coming in to work, and left his car in the car park next to the music department. Which is strange when you figure he lived on the other side of the city.

Months went on and I moved on to pastures new, closer to home, and living in the same town, I ran into him in the high street from time to time. We almost always stopped and chatted for a while [not working together doesn't mean you stop having fag breaks together], he was always working on some new application. Every few weeks or so, it was cool to know he was kicking around and that I’d bump into a familiar face.

Then I got a call from Alan, an ex-workmate of ours from a couple of years back, garbled due to poor reception, all I could make out was ‘they found Keith’ and ‘keith’s dead mate’. I’m still in the process of trying to figure out what happened, where and when – all I know right now is that Keith’s gone and it happened in the last few days or so?

It took a little while to sink in, it still is really. What shocked me most was that I never got to see him that one last time, to say Hi, to ask that he was alright. I guess though, with these things, you never do.

So, Keith mate, I don’t particularly believe in ‘what comes after…’, but if you’re anywhere, in any form right now, I would imagine you as having passed into the net, another spirit that’s shaken off it’s carbon and wriggled into the great network, ready to pop up somewhere else in history as a great idea, a split second of inspiration in someone else’s life.

R.I.P. mate, you are already sorely missed.

Benny