Tomorrow I'm going to see Sparklehorse, at the Fez Club in Reading. I'm really looking forward to this gig, as their new album, Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain is a superb disc - a very worthy follow-up to It's A Wonderful Life.

I've never seen Sparklehorse as a band before, but Mark Linkous was one of the guests at what is one of my favourite gigs: Beyond Nashville at the Barbican in 2001. That gig was hosted by Howe Gelb of Giant Sand, and in addition to Giant Sand and Mark Linkous, it included appearances by Kurt Wagner of Lambchop, P J Harvey, Evan Dando, Vic Chesnutt, and the John Parrish Big Band. A full set list can be found on the Giant Sand website, here. That show somehow went on to be voted the best live show of the year for 2001 by "Time Out" magazine.

Tomorrow is my last day at HP: so long, and thanks for all the eZilla issues...

101 cover versions of Led Zep's "Stairway To Heaven"!

I thought I'd try a blog again.  This time, it's DasBlog, an open source blog engine, written in .Net.  I've ended up with it as a separate application to the main website (which is run by DotNetNuke), rather than having it integrated as a page on the portal, so the look and feel is slightly different.  I've played around with the themes and stylesheers until I've got something fairly similar, though.