Clutch and I made our way to Stourbridge by train yesterday evening. There was a tasting of Springbank Distillery whiskies happening at a specialist shop there called Nickolls and Perks.

I happen to have bought a bottle of Springbank’s 10 Year Old Longrow 100 Proof when last in Edinburgh and had loved it to bits, so I was really looking forward to the evening.

We made it to the town, and then found our way to the shop. There had been talk of food, because we were making good time and thought we’d have a chance to stop somewhere for a bite before things kicked off - but as we got to the store we saw that there were already people with glasses in their hands, and we didn’t want to miss anything.

We were hungry - but there was fine whisky on offer.

Damn.

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My website New Music Strategies is offline. I’ve been getting a lot of email about that. So I’ve put together a stock response, and it gets emailed out to everyone who enquires. Essentially it explains the fact that I’m moving hosts, and the old guys are being generally unpleasant.

I was coming to the end of my contract with the old hosts, and all of my other sites (including this one) are hosted at GoDaddy. The idea was that I would do a seamless move from one to the other. That didn’t happen.

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Tah-dah! It’s a Spore creature

Somehow, alongside a bunch of celebrities and A-list bloggers, I was invited to have a play with the Spore Creature Creator.

Spore is a new game developed by Will Wright - the guy who came up with The Sims and Sim City. Watch this video to get a sense of what it will do - pretty amazing.

I’ve been reading about it for a long time in Jake’s PC Gamer magazine, and it really looks pretty awesome. Essentially, you create creatures and they develop colonies and live their lives.

But the trick (and this is the really clever bit) is that all of the game’s creatures are created by the users.

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We bought some garden furniture last weekend, and this weekend, it decided to be sunny. So I’m right here, on the laptop, sipping a cup of coffee and tapping away at the internet. All going well, this is where I plan to spend as much time as I can over the next few months.

It’s Bobbie’s birthday at the moment. It lasts from the 6th to the 9th due to a bit of confusion about the date of her birthday in her childhood years (she’s the youngest of 12). The real party is tomorrow: a brunch at the Fighting Cocks in Moseley, but the celebration lasts four days solid.

Presents are important when your birthday is closer to a week in duration, and I thought that in keeping with the theme I’d compliment this particular outdoor set with a nicely laid-back Habitat deckchair and a little wooden sidetable for her drink and book.

I also managed to find handmade coconut ice (her favourite) dipped in chocolate (her other favourite), so I definitely had to get that for her as well.

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