SIXTY.

FUCKING.

QUID.

I couldn’t get the debit card out fast enough.

It’s a bit rough around the edges (pots are a bit scratchy, no whammy bar arm, switch tip is missing off the pickup selector, the low E string is quiet in acoustic mode, needs a restring and a tidy up), but even so…£60. Fu-huck ME.

This can only mean one thing. I’m probably going to get T-boned by an 18-wheeler driving to work some day.

Did I mention it came with a Hiscox hardshell case? Well, it does.

A pic should be attached to this post, if I’ve used the iPhone WordPress app properly.

DAY 1

Supreme Novices’: Dunguib
Arkle Chase: Long Run
Willie Hill Chase: Theatrical Moment
Champion Hurdle: Solwhit
Cross Country: Sizing Australia
Mare’s Hurdle: Quevega

DAY 2

NH Challenge Cup: Synchronised
Neptune Novices’ Hurdle: Reve De Sivola
RSA Chase: Weird Al
Champion Chase: Master Minded
Coral Cup: City Theatre
Fred Winter Hurdle: Doctor Deejay
Champion Bumper: Drumbaloo

DAY 3

Jewson Novices’ Hurdle: Hey Big Spender
Pertemps Final: Triggerman
Ryanair Chase: Barbershop
World Hurdle: Big Buck’s
Byrne Grp Plate: Song Of Songs
Kim Muir: Nostringsattached

DAY 4

Triumph Hurdle: Me Voici
County Hurdle: Rock Noir
Albert Bartlett Hurdle: Possol
Gold Cup: Denman
Foxhunter Chase: Having A Cut
Martin Pipe Hurdle: Shadow Dancer
Grand Annual: Green Belt Elite

There we go. Practically none of these were picked based on form, apart from some of the big guns (Denman, Big Buck’s etc). Just looked at the ante post stuff on the screens at my work and thought “bugger it, let’s do a blog post.” )

Stay tuned to neilmcdougall.com for more in-depth Chelters previews.

I’m even using one of the programs from the bundle to write this post- MacJournal.

Oh yeah, the audition went reasonably well. With any luck I should know whether I’m in the band by about this time next week or earlier. Keep ‘em crossed, folks.

It’ll be a weekend of firsts; the first time I’ve ever auditioned for a band, the first time I’ll have done any serious motorway driving, and the first time I’ve ever driven myself to Glasgow.

I might do some in-progress updates about the whole deal. No doubt I’ll be tweeting, but I might throw some video or audio updates in there too. Wonder if there’s an Audioboo plugin for WordPress?

I was with another hosting company for this here site for quite some time.  They had a pretty sweet deal – a year’s hosting, plus a .com domain for something like £30 a year.  However, it was all run by one guy out of his house using one of those ‘Reseller Hosting’ packages, and I guess he stopped giving a toss about the hosting end of things.  Maybe he was having real life problems.  Maybe he was eyeballs deep in his day job.  Who knows?

As a result, I decided to up sticks and find a better host.  I found a nice company called Vidahost that had a similar deal to my previous host, but is actually run as a business rather than a side project.  Their customer service has been very good, and as a result, I decided to jump on board.  Bit of a pain in the arse getting the neilmcdougall.com domain transferred over, but that’s now well in progress, and should cause no further issues.  Best part is, I’ve paid for my hosting up front for the next three years (on a three years for the price of two deal).  £60.  Wahey!  Bargain get!

Been footering about with themes and whatnot, and settled on this nice chunky effort.  The site’s had a white-on-black vibe since I started it.  Can’t seem to find anything colourful that tickles my fancy.  *shrugs*

At the time of writing, some of the links in ‘My Music’ don’t work yet, need to get files re-uploaded and renamed.

So, onwards into 2010, and hopefully more blog posts from me!  Huzzah!

Edit: Yes, I know the header image is guff.  I knocked it up in 5 minutes.  Any Photoshop wizards are free to submit new ones to neil@neilmcdougall.com

I’m not sure what prompted me to sign up for a ScrewAttack account, but I thought it’d be fun to start writing about my current thoughts on videogames, as many of you are already doing. I probably won’t be writing anything Earth-shatteringly out-of-the-box, but I hope what I do write is a fun read nonetheless.

Before I start harping on about my opinions, I thought it’d be an interesting excersise to think back over my videogaming life for the past 20+ years.

It all began back in the late 80s, when my parents got me a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, which, in the UK, was the king of home computers at the time.  They had originally bought me an Atari 400, or an Atari 800 – one of those old-school 8-bit Atari home computers anyway – but had taken it back on advice that there was hardly any games available for it.  Regardless of the accuracy of that advice, it turned out to be a wise decision due to the massive amount of Speccy stuff out there at the
time. That Christmas I woke up to a (second-hand) 48k Speccy, a big box o’ games and a bunch of issues of Crash!, the premier Speccy mag at the time.

I remember me, my Mum and Dad scratching our heads at how to get stuff loading, but we eventually got it figured out and I rocked stuff like Horace Goes Skiing, Rock Star Ate My Hamster, Manic Miner, Way of the Exploding Fist, all that good stuff.

I learned some programming stuff on the Speccy, using the built-in BASIC to do some daft stuff. I even had the bravery to attempt typing in POKEs from the pages of Crash!. For those too young to remember POKEs, they were LONG chunks of BASIC code that you would type in to your computer, run it, load the game, and voila, you have a cheat. It was basically the predecessor to Action Replay/GameShark code. Needless to say, if you got the code wrong, no cheat, and sometimes your game wouldn’t load. My, that was a pain in the arse if it was a long tape-load.

Eventually, the old rubber-keyed faithful went belly-up, and I got a Spectrum+, which was basically the same guts as the 48k, but with a plastic keyboard and different look.

After THAT died, I got a C64c (the second-gen C64 with the C128-style keyboard and chassis), and that was the machine that I really got stuck into gaming with. My Dad had passed away by then, and I guess gaming and general geekdom was a bit of an escape for me. Commodore Format, ZZap! 64, Target Renegade, the Last Ninja series, Stunt Car Racer, IK+, all the hype surrounding Mayhem in Monsterland…ahh, the memories.

Eventually, the Commie gave up the ghost and I got my first proper console – a NES, with Super Mario Bros. 1 & 3, Track & Field 2, Metal Gear: Snake’s Revenge aaand…I think that was it. I never bought any more games for it, I don’t think – I swapped it for a Gameboy with someone, and, to be honest, I don’t recall what happened to that, so we’ll skip onwards to my next console, and the beginning of my Sega fanboyism.

I bagged a Megadrive for Christmas, must’ve been 1992, as Sonic 2 was relatively new by then. I had started secondary school, was on the verge of puberty, everyone was buzzing about Street Fighter 2 on the SNES, and I had a Megadrive. I didn’t care – Sonic 2 was rocking my face off, I was killing it at Columns, Super Hang On was my bitch and arses were getting beat down at Last Battle and Wrestle War. Yeah, I had a few clunky games, but I snagged a few classics as well. Gunstar
Heroes, to this day, is *still* one of my all-time favourite games, and I defy anyone to tell me that Streets of Rage 2 isn’t the best side-scrolling beat-em-up ever.

I continued down the Sega path, picking up a Mega CD and 32x on the cheap (I had nabbed an Amiga 500 for buttons, and didn’t use it that much, so swapped it for the MCD – maybe not the wisest choice, in hindsight. ), and got busy with Virtua Racing Deluxe, Virtua Fighter, Star Wars Arcade, Doom, Sherlock Holmes, Road Avenger (cock-rock intro music FTW!), et cetera, et cetera. I wish I’d bought Snatcher – a friend of mine had it, and I borrowed it once or twice, but I never had my own copy.

The Saturn and the Playstation were on the horizon, but I stuck with the Mega Tower of Doom for a decent length of time, until such a time I could pick up a Saturn for a decent price with a couple of games. This must’ve been back in about ’96, maybe even ’97. I was late to the 32-bit party, yeah, but I had been keeping an eye on what was going on via the Official Sega Magazine, which turned into Sega Saturn Magazine (and was originally spawned from the legendary Mean Machines), so by
the time I bagged my Saturn, the console was a bit more mature, and games like Virtua Fighter 2 and Sega Rally showed better what the console was capable of. I think I played stuff like Street Fighter Alpha 2 more than most of the 3D stuff, though.

I miss my Saturn. I borrowed it to a ‘friend’ and never got it back. I even had stuff like Burning Rangers, and I basically had it all stolen off me. EPIC FAIL on my part, I know.

PC gaming became a big part of my life in the late 90s – by the time I’d ‘lost’ the Saturn, I’d started college doing an HND in Computing and got my first decent PC with my student loan – a P2 Celeron 300 with 64MB of RAM, Windows 98, a 3DFX Voodoo card and a 4GB hard drive. It’s scary to think my phone has more grunt than that PC now. This new-found
PC power coincided with the Star Wars Special Editions, the buzz for the prequels and all that jazz, and I got right into playing stuff like TIE Fighter, X-Wing Alliance, Jedi Knight and all that. I was also getting into Formula 1, so Microprose’s Grand Prix games were getting a good seeing-to.

I didn’t forget my classic gaming roots either, and as my exposure to the Internet began, I discovered emulation, and I rediscovered all my old Megadrive friends via stuff like Genecyst.

The college course didn’t last – I left after I got offered a job as a website designer, that didn’t last either, due to the ‘company’ being a bunch of cowboys, so I effectively left college for nothing. My last student loan payment got used to buy a guitar on a whim, and that led me down the path I went on a year and a half after the website job went tits-up – a course in Music Performance & Promotion, which has led me to having 11 guitars, producing/engineering friends’ bands’ recordings, being in a band myself, writing music….but I’m side-tracking. And getting ahead of myself.

Even with my trip to PC-land, I kept half an eye on the console world,and I decided to bag a Dreamcast sometime in, I think, 2001, while I was doing my music course. Yeah, the PS2 was already out, the Xbox and Gamecube were around the corner, but the DC was going cheap (sense a pattern yet?) and I was still a Sega fan. I had a PSOne by that point (I’d gotten into wrestling by that point, and really fancied getting Smackdown 2, so I finally got the Playstation bug).

I also got more up to date that year and got a PS2 (an original ‘big’ PS2, with the Firewire port, which I still have, still works, and is sat on my shelving unit to my right. w00t). It was Metal Gear Solid 2 and DVD playback that sealed the deal on the PS2 for me. The DC, PS2 and PC were my main systems until I bagged an Xbox cheap (surprise surprise) back in 2005-ish. That was fun, and I got a 360 in 2007 (late to the party again ).

So, my current roster – PS2, Dreamcast, 360, DS (one of the first-gen silver numbers. Not many games for it), PC and my phone (Nokia N95 8GB – I enjoy the odd game of Tetris or Bejeweled at my work).

(Historical interjection – this was written before I got my iPhone, obviously)

So, that was a little trip through my gaming history. A bit stream-of-consciousness, I know, but hopefully it’ll give a bit of
perspective on any future babbling.

I was using a Nokia N95 8GB before now and that has served me well for the last year and a half, but I never really felt like I was using the phone to it’s absolute fullest potential. I never really used the email functions (writing email on a numeric keypad would royally suck), or the office type stuff, and I had my iPod for music and podcasts, so the multimedia side of the phone kinda went to waste too. It was basically phone calls, texts, calendar, web browsing at work, keeping up with Twitter at work and the odd game of Tetris or Bejeweled at work (yeah, working in a bookies can get dull sometimes, especially in Kilmarnock).

However, things finally came into shape for me to finally jump on the iPhone bandwagon. My iPod went tits up, my phone upgrade was due, and Apple released the iPhone 3GS, which ticked most of the boxes I was waiting to be ticked before I was iPhone-ready- better camera and more storage being the main ones. If a phone was going to be my all-in-one device, I needed it to have at least 32GB on board to replace my 30GB iPod Video. Lo and behold, come WWDC, Apple drop the 32 gig 3GS. And it was good.

So, what am I enjoying so far?

The apps are tremendous. Well, some of ‘em anyway. There’s plenty of shovelware on the App Store, so it’s definitely worth doing a bit of snooping around for app recommendations and community word of mouth. Alternatively there’s often free trial or lite versions of some apps to tickle yer fancy. Check out this Twitter feed for a feed of apps that go from being paid apps to freebies. I’ve got a couple of decent ones out of that. There’s also a podcast called Appslappy that’s available on iTunes and the like. It’s all about iPhone app reviews, but it’s quite entertaining.

Anyway, I reckon that’s enough iPhone blogging for now. I’ll be updating this blog, my twitter feed (link at the bottom of the page) and my audioboo feed (more on that soon) with more stuff in the days to come.

Oh, incidentally, thank for all the great feedback on the Rick Astley/Dream Theater mashups. Glad so many folk enjoyed them

Update: How about it going the other way?  Wither’s vocals over Never Gonna Give You Up’s music?  Here it is!

Update #2: MP3 links on the My Music page.

Nothing majorly noteworthy happening of late, unfortunately.  Get paid on Thursday, though, so shouldn’t be too long before I’m back on the road.

Oh, that’s right, I got shot of my DeArmond Jetstar guitar and replaced it with a nice Ibanez Soundgear bass.  Need to get it set up to remove the pretty chronic fret buzz on the lower frets, but once that’s done it’ll be pure bass sexyness.

Pics of bass and eventual new car will be forthcoming soon.

Not had much chance to get to grips with Logic Pro yet.  Noodled around with some of the virtual instruments and installed Addictive Drums (my favourite source for multisampled drums – they sound terrific with some careful programming.  Just wish there was a couple more cymbal slots, mind you), so I might have a crack at doing some proper recording in the near future.

My next door neighbour died of cancer today, and it looks like my mum’s cousin might not be long for this world either, thanks to it.  Fuck cancer.  Fuck cancer up its tumerous arse.

On a lighter note, my friends/bandmates Toma and Ross produced another comedy music video, based on Biffy Clyro’s song Machines. You can watch it below.