Potentially the shittest news this year. Even shittier than the weather forecasters announcing that we’d be in for all this rain.

The future of Southsea Skatepark is looking uncertain. Portsmouth City Council is preparing to close the park in September of this year unless a suitable plan can be made in conjunction with a private party that would need to take over the lease of the facilities. A private party with the full support of current skatepark users has approached the council and their business plan was rejected due to out-dated views expressed by council members as to the usage and potential user groups associated with the park. The users of the park; skateboarders, BMX and inline have united to form a user group that will hopefully convince the Local and National Government that these facilities are a necessary part of the local community and that the park is unique and an investment in the future of all active members of the public young and old. Please add your support if you use the park, have ever used the park or if you value a genuine piece of British skate and sporting heritage and the right to campaign for adequate sporting and recreational facilities for the present and future.

I’ve got so many good memories from this place, and I was looking foward to making the trip there this year depending on weather. Make sure you sign the official petition here.

We’re now 95% live with the new hosting arrangement. Everything is sat on a not-so-shiny IBM x330 which is a dual 1.3GHz P3, 1GB of ECC RAM, 400GB of mirrored storage, and FreeBSD 6. I’ve migrated across pretty much all of the e-mail setup, some people’s websites, and of course my own personal stuff - which includes me using lighttpd instead of Apache httpd within my jail, and it’s a hell of a lot faster. The bandwidth and dedicated server performance helps matters as well though :)

Moving forward I’ll probably set up a mailing list so that people hosted on this new box can be easily notified of any work / outages, and I’ve been threatening to resurrect the old freebsd.cx website as I know you can import old PHPNuke sites into WordPress…

Here’s a worthwhile read while you’re avoiding work this morning. It’s a thread started by Steve Albini on a gambling site’s message board - he’s known for being a pretty hardcore poker player - covering all aspects of his music ‘career’, including working with Nirvana, Pixies, The Jesus Lizard, and so on.

I have traveled in the music scene as a musician and recording engineer for better than 25 years. I have worked on a couple thousand records, some of them with famous rockstars, though most of them you’re probably never heard of. I know a lot about making records, recording technology, touring, being in a rock band and the like. I own Electrical Audio, a 2-studio recording complex in Chicago, Illinois, where I make records every day.

It’s classic Albini - there’s some extremely insightful posts buried in there covering everything from what it’s like engineering records for various bands to commentary on downloading and how the distribution of music is changing, and of course the usual caustic responses to stupid questions such as ‘vinyl or digital’:

Neither. I go straight for the vagina. You find them on women.

There’s even a few posts on poker playing.

Speaking of The Jesus Lizard, I’m half-deaf (and tired as fuck) this morning after seeing David Yow’s new band ‘Qui’ last night. I shot a few photos, I’ll upload tonight if I manage to stay awake long enough.

* Update - here’s a couple of my favourite pics from that show: