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You may have surmised from my lack of band blogging that D-FEX is no more :-(

But, from the ashes, a new band has arisen! “Ill Will” has more or less the same line up, but for the drummer: Rog has moved to Coventry to run a recording studio, so the stix in Ill Will are now handled by Dr. Mac. (with midi sequencing courtesy of John and myself). We changed the name because we wanted to break out of the Heavy Metal cliche, and make something new and different. Our new sound has a Dance/Rave/Techno inspired groove, while still retaining the crunchy down-tuned distorted guitar driven riffage backbone. In short: It’s pretty damn cool!

In preparation for our first CD, we’ve set up a Cafe Press store, Ill Will Gear with original artwork from Jam emblazoned on shirts, hoodies and mugs. We’ll continue to add a new product most weeks, and when the mix on our new songs goes gold, you’ll be able to buy the CD from Ill Will Gear too.

The limited Pure Evil mug is a must-have for all our fans! Buy one now before we replace it with a new design…

Great News folks! And I quote:

‘We were very surprised one drink of beer or stout contributed an equal amount of antioxidant benefit as wine, especially since red wine contains about 20 times the amount of polyphenols as beer.’

So, as I see it, the more Guinness I can drink, the longer I will live (giving me extra drinking time). Right, I’ve no idea what polyphenols do, but I’m off down the pub…

As happens occasionally, my ssh link into http://tkd.kicks-ass.net was mysteriously dropped on Monday afternoon, and my browser started timing out for the website. Normally when that happens, I just have to wait for my ADSL modem to notice and dial out again. Very occasionally, my Airport basestation needs rebooting, but this time I realised I still couldn’t connect from outside the firewall the next day.

I finally had some time to look at it this morning, and at first glance it looked as though the main drive on the server had failed. I figured I should try and recover as much data as possible, but the BIOS wouldn’t even recognise the drive geometry. The wierdest thing was, if I detached the DVD reader that had been successfully sharing an IDE channel for the last few months, I could mount partitions, although the boot record had been corrupted.

Anyway I swapped the second disc onto the 80-core IDE cable, and put the errant DVD player back on the other 40-core IDE cable, but still couldn’t boot. I managed to reinstall the OS from DVD, and some missing files from backup, and as soon as I booted the new installation it ran a bunch of uncommitted journal entries in a couple of partitions, and I didn’t even need to reconfigure. I have no idea why it worked in the original hardware configuration for a while, then stopped, and then started again when I switched a couple of IDE devices. The DVD drive was one of the (expensive!) first ones available, so I can only guess that it is not fully ATAPI compliant… odd. Very odd.

Once again, I apologise for the down time, and sincerely hope that barring the continuing occassional ADSL dropouts for half an hour here and there, things should operate normally again now. Whatever that means!

Bit of an odd day really. This year’s Midlands Open was displaced by the first GTI Elite Team Tournament in June, which I didn’t enter leaving a huge 3 month hole in the middle of my competition season. I’ve also been rather busy of late, and since Val was umpiring I went down after lunch. No sooner had I arrived and changed, than the Black Belt patterns were called. We had 5 judges this year, with the highest and lowest scores discounted — so even though the AMA judge gave almost everyone 8.8, his mark wasn’t counted. Despite that, I wasn’t really in the zone and put in a low average performance to my mind: 8.9, 8.9, 9.0. Probably better than I deserved.

Men’s black belt heavy was the last category of the day as usual, although the competitors seemed to have been assigned to the wrong divisions in a few cases. Mr. Francis Miller was in Heavy by mistake, but took Gold soundly in spite of that. My opponent eliminated me in the first round, by 3 judges to 1, and was himself eliminated by Mr. Miller in round 2.

Simon Wachon took gold in the Middle Weight division against some tricky young competition, making it a double gold on the day for Evolution Tae Kwon-Do. Congratulations guys!