Some band gear up against the wall in our lounge

Wool woop! The wordpress app on here is pretty good

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