This is the website of Neil McDougall, a musician/blogger/podcaster/bookie from Ayrshire.

STRAYA! A preamble ramble type thing

It’s been a while since I properly wrote something on here.  How are you?  I apologise in advance for the general scattyness of this piece, it’s mostly me getting my thoughts down on ‘paper’ and getting a bit of discussion/feedback going from friends/followers who have more travel experience than myself.

So, let’s get to the point.  Next year, I’m going to go to Australia for a month.  Mostly in and around Perth, but I’m also planning to nip across the subcontinent for 4-5 days to see the sights of Sydney.

Here’s the real head trip – it’ll be the first time I’ll have been abroad since 1992 and my first ever air travel experience (the first and previous time I was abroad, I went to France via Holland and Belgium on a ferry).  No better way to acclimatise myself to air travel than to spend 20+ hours in planes, right?  Just as well I don’t have a fear of flying – far from it.  Hell, I used to harbour ambitions of being a fighter pilot as a kid.  Then I discovered that I needed glasses, and as it turns out, I don’t really do well with the whole military discipline thing, so that wouldn’t’ve worked out all that well anyway…

Anyway, I digress.  Australia.
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This entry was written by NeiloMac, posted on May 11, 2015 at 9:01 pm, filed under Uncategorized and tagged , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.



My thoughts on Star Wars Episode VII

Right, been a while since I wrote a blog, but I’ve been thinking about this topic for a while.  I was thinking about shooting a video about it, but I reckon I can do a better job of getting my thoughts across in written form rather than by babbling into a webcam.  Warning, this article contains spoilers for some Expanded Universe stuff.  Most of the stuff I’m spoiling has been around for years, though, so fuck it.

So, friends, join me, as I prattle on for ages about what I think’s going to happen in the new Star Wars films.

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This entry was written by NeiloMac, posted on April 22, 2013 at 11:34 pm, filed under geekery, star wars and tagged , , , . Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.



Grab My Tunes

See the ‘My Music’ link over there?  Yeah, click that shit and listen to the tunes on there.  You might actually enjoy some of them.

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.

This entry was written by NeiloMac, posted on April 26, 2009 at 9:45 pm, filed under music, musings, recording, Site and tagged , , , . Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.



A new face for my site.

If any of you are familiar with the old neilmcdougall.com, and know a thing or two about web design, you’ll know it was distincly last-decade in its execution – laid out with tables, done in a WYSIWYG HTML editor, basic graphics, no Javascript, XML or any of those fancy modern doo-hickeys.

Look-wise, it was fine – nice and clean, no flashing ‘E-Mail Me!’ animated .gifs, ‘UNDER CONSTRUCTION’ banners or scrolling/flashing text, but it was a bit of a pain in the arse to update, frankly, and I wanted to make some use of more up-to-date web stuff.  Seeing as I know next to nowt about CSS, XHTML, Javascript or the like, I decided to do what countless other people have done, and whacked WordPress onto my website.

It’ll be a lot easier to update the site now, seeing as I spend far more time in a web browser than I do in Dreamweaver or the like, and I can use Firefox plugins like Scribefire to update it without having to log in to my site.  I hit the wee icon in the toolbar at the bottom of Firefox, I write a post, and boom, it’s up on the site.  Yaaas.

So. add this here site to yer RSS readers, ’cause you’ll be hearing more from me, on a multitude of subjects, ranging from music, to sports, to whatever other shite I feel like writing about.

This entry was written by NeiloMac, posted on April 1, 2009 at 4:43 pm, filed under design, musings, Site and tagged , , , , , . Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.




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