The trip down proved to be easy, to the point where I arrived a couple of hours early, so popped into the beer garden of the White Horse in Silverstone village and enjoyed a couple of pints in the sun with a hundred other early birds. The atmosphere was incredibly laid back and very friendly, reminding me a lot of a free party or festival, and the banter was excellent. My tent got its first airing and Duncan and Sarah hooked up with us for a BBQ on the first night. All very pleasant :)

The next morning was a bit wet, but the most glorious, thunderous noise of the F1 cars on free practice started echoing across the field, which put a massive smile on my face. People had been arriving at the site all night so I wandered up to the track, laughing at the effort some people had put into their pitches. There were flags everywhere, make shift bars, TVs, sofas, you name it someone brought it down (and probably left it when they went home).

Silverstone itself is great and I got really close to the cars on the Friday. Despite (or even, with) the rain it was a complete spectacle, with GP2, GP3 and Porsches all on practice. A total petrol head’s dream. I managed to walk the entire track on the Saturday (to scope out my spot for the actual race) and ended up at Copse for the Race itself.

Admittedly, you get to see a lot more on the telly, but nothing can replace the smell or the sounds of the race itself. You can feel the cars going by, they’re so loud that I had to get ear plugs to take the edge off! And the crowd, the whole weekend, were utterly amazing. A bizarre mix of people from all over the world, merrily drunk and having a good time.

I’ve loads of highlights from the weekend: seeing Mum and Mark again, getting wet and ending up on the slipperiest corner of the track, watching Porsches four wheel drift through Woodcote, the Red Arrows, the fancy dress, the Aussies standing and drunkenly signing the national anthem, the Brazilians who forgot their jackets, hundreds of drunk people singing “Gold” with Tony Hadley on stage, a couple of hours of decent weather, cows closing the M6, people getting arrested for planking on the middle lane of the closed M6 and bumping into people heading back from Silverstone at midnight in a petrol station in Glasgow.

So yeah, definitely going next year. Totally worth the money and I’d love to get a few more mates down there. Although I’m going to buy a bigger tent for next year :D

I need to buy a cooler and loads of BBQ bits and bobs, but the tent is good to go. I’ll probably drive down and see a few places I’ve not been to before on the way and make a proper trip of it. Big smiles of anticipation here :D

I’ve ended up doing a five part mix, that’s just over 10 hours long. The first batch will hit the website while I’m in LA during the first week of June and I’m frantically converting to MP3 and trying to sort out the monster tracklists in time. I’m dead excited, cos it’s not just me in this, I’ve roped in quite a few others to help me: Trevster, DJ Bomb and Frank Marquis are all confirmed, Jono H is coming out of retirement, Kenny Campbell will be guesting and with a bit of luck Tarekith will be pulling something special in as well.

All in all this will be the biggest month ever, so I hope you enjoy it. It’s literally taken days to trawl through the 1000s of songs I’ve bought and mixed with and there’re some reet classics brewing.

If I can upload them in time! :D

I installed Sub Sonic last night and it’s pretty much ideal. It ripped through the 600gig of tunes I threw at it, set itself up without any configuration (except a router tunnel) and basically, Just Worked.

It’ll transcode nearly any format and you can add your own transcoders if there’s something it doesn’t do. The site is theme-able. You can access over the web or through one of their Apps (I’m using the Air desktop app as I write), but the best bit is, the iPhone app will stream over 3G.

I drove into work this morning listening to music from my server at home. That’s all sorts of magic :D

But one thing struck me as potentially easy and a possible start; knocking up a quick app to parse my library, bind to a custom URL service and stream tracks to me in the office. Win! Except this is the age of Spotify, this shit must be everywhere, so I had a look.

pulpTunes The writing on the tin made this look ideal. A webserver interface to your iTunes library, with users and an embedded player. Bing! Except the reality is a bit less than that. It does indeed work, providing you with a fixed width HTML, and basic user support. But the HTML layout is so fucking retarded as to be almost useless. There’s a limit to the number of songs it’ll show you in a search or playlist, but no limit to the number of playlists it’ll display on a page, hence you end up with a fucking massive webpage with next to nothing on, and the track you’re after on table 22 of your search results. Gngngng.

Fortunately, once you look in the application bundle it’s all Java, so I unzipped all the Jar files, edited the template files, hacked the CSS into some sort of sensible shape, put it all back together again into something a little more useable and fired it up. At which point I discovered it won’t play lossless files.

For fuck’s sake.

Kava Tunes launched 3 times, crashed 3 times.

Dot Tunes this sort of looks like it’ll work, but it’s a commercial app and it puts a stinking great big bar across the whole screen every time iTunes is visible. Which looks fucking disgusting and serves no purpose. I also couldn’t test it without it spamming the fuck out of me, so that got binned straight away.

Thinking about it, the tramp solution would be to soft link in my Music folder to a webserver directory, but my music is kept in a flat file hierarchy so that’d leave me scrolling through 1000 directories to get what I’m after. Although, with a bit of PHP it might well do in a pinch.

So I might have a look and see what’s out on Linux, as my Umbongo machine could happily access the iTunes library on the network and serve from there. I’m just a bit surprised that there’s no super easy solution for this.

More googling….!

EDIT: And as soon as I start on the Linux hunt, I find SubSonic. Ooo, I’m all excited, this looks like WIN

So this evening I had a few beers, and shuffled through some of the tunes and mixes that I’ve played over that time. After 3 hours of flicking through stuff I was, well, surprised, at how much my style has changed, how much more technical I am now, and the sheer number of tracks and mixes have flown through the podcast.

So I did a little spreadsheet. In 5 years:

• The podcast has put out ~490 sets from guest DJs
• I’ve personally mixed and pushed out 151 mixes on top of that…
• And since 2005 I’ve bought 3354 tracks – thank you Beatport – or 18.5 days worth of music (according to iTunes)
• I’ve also appeared on 6 different radio stations
• under 3 different residencies (anyone remember School Night Sessions?!)
• which boils down to a shit load of downloads…

Ok, so the last one is a bit fuzzy. Unfortunately I’ve lost nearly all the server logs over that time – or I’d have hacked a Perl script to find out exactly how many downloads I’ve had – but I do know that popular sets on the podcast can get ~15-20,000 hits over the course of a year (I never have anything online for longer that that), so extrapolating out, shit load sounds about right :D

So after all this crate digging I wanted to do something to celebrate. Top of the list was re-styling the website, but it’s a lot of time and I’ve got this weird mental block about doing web-design atm, so I’m putting it off. (Saying that, I actually contacted a web design company this week, but after outlining the work that I wanted they never got back to me, so it seems that I’m not the only person that can’t be arsed to do this :D)

Obviously the next best thing is to do some mixes, so drunkenly, I decided to do a 5 part mega-mix, walking through each of the years since the podcast was born. This evening I’ve just put together the 2005-2006 mix. I had to trawl a shit-tonne of tracks, but the mix itself fell together straight away, which is always a good sign.

So expect a bumper crop of mixes toward the end of May, and possibly a sneak peak of this one, which for now I’m dubbing “before Progressive House turned shit”. There’re some proper bangers in it :D

Happy Birthday RK2!

Anyway, it’s here now, so my mini review:

• HOLY SHIT! IT REALLY IS 3D!
• Oo, that’s actually not a fad, that’s really, really good…
• RIIIIDGE RACER!
• Me eyes have gone a bit funny…
• Cock, the battery’s dead :(

Those are the main points.

But in typical Nintendo style it’s replete with nice things.

Oh, and Street Pass is actually fun, if only I could meet someone tough enough to kill the Blue Ghost so I can get rid of this shit hat…

Here’s hoping Jack doesn’t have a relapse…

Actually, I’m doing you a favour. Kinda. I wanted to blog more about the code stuff I’m doing, but I didn’t want to put it all here. Not sure why, other than the fact that I registered a domain name, so I really need to use it. :D

So, code, homebrew and suitably spoddy posts will now be at http://www.triple-eh.com (Give it a day for the DNS to update ;)