Yockham in London!

Yockham arrived for a 10 day long catch up / tourist action / blow out trip after spending a month touring Universities in the US giving seminars on his Asthma research back in NZ.

It's only been a few days but we've managed to cover many a base! Fabric, Mark Rae at Cocoon, BBQ turned top shelf clearing session and also De La Soul at the Jazz Cafe! More to come for sure.

Arsenal v Tottenham Hotspur

Mike and I managed to get some great seats for this second to last ever match at Highbury. Electric atmosphere, loads of chanting and a fantastic game! Thanks Grant at All Tax UK for the tickets!

Easter in Bath

Just got back from a great weekend in Bath with Tanya. Stayed in a weird yet classy establishment, drank wine, ate good food and made a poor attempt at doing the tourist thing....oh and drank wine. Oh! and went to Stonehenge! For the record potential hengers...there ain't nothing you can see for the £5.90 entrance fee that you can't see from over the fence. Damned rockworshippers.

Tararua Photo Websites

I've been to so many events and traveled to so many places with people but often their photos never get to see the light of day. I started Tararua about 2 years ago as part of a crusade to solve this. I realised there are a myriad of websites and companies which offer a place to upload your photos to the web but identified a need for something a little more.

Tararua is all about a personal website with as much support as needed to get it up and running. Every customer chooses their own free domain name (www.yournamehere.com) and then we install the photo website script. Once that is done it's just a case of uploading your photos and placing them into albums.....Something which we will even do for the customer free of charge.

Apart from my own photo website some good example sites are here and here. So much can be done with these sites too, people can post comments, rate photos, send eCards, albums can be made private, we can integrate a blog with the site and we can even integrate the site with paypal to enable customers to sell photos or items directly from their site.

We've now got over 40 great photo websites with us although the crusade needs to continue.....Spread the word!

Weekend in Newcastle

Spent the weekend in Newcastle, originally to see Placebo, whom, despite my having very little pertaining discographic knowledge I nonetheless enjoyed.

Cool place, lots of bridges, crazy weather and an even crazier Roman wall. Ohh and it's the centre of life we're led to believe too. No it is.

4 Years!

Far out.....have just realised that today marks 4 full years of living in London! It's been an extremely fun, interesting and at times trying experience but on the whole life here has rocked.

London is a colossal world city groaning under it's own inertia and as such inherently has it's bad points, but after giving it positive chance, I can firmly say that the good outweighs the bad.

It is true, the winter is insane and lasts for a couple of months longer than it humanely should but by contrast London's summer vibe is unbeatable. Festival season hits and everyone who has been hibernating comes out to party!

The other major benefit of life here, and the major motivating factor for initially coming here, is travel. The pound to tourist mile is extremely favorable and when combined with London's unbeatable international transport links (hehe that's not internal links I'm talking about there) has enabled me to travel to over 25 countries in my time here.

Future plans? Definitely more of the same.

Event Wedge

You know summer has almost hit in London when you get multiple frantic emails concerning tickets for this or that event having almost sold out.

Then follows the blind panic of webpage loading 16 digit expiry date security number punching madness in an attempt to not just max out your poor credit card even further but to secure your attendance to as many events as possible.

This was pretty much Tuesday for me. I've now got summer relatively sorted with tickets to:

- Placebo in Newcastle
- Restaurant Seating for De La Soul at the Jazz Cafe
- Arsenal vs. Tottenham
- Fulham vs Middlesbrough
- Foo Fighters in Hyde Park
- Glade Festival
- Pearl Jam at the Reading Festival

Unbooked but no chance of being missed are Metallica......They are playing at the Rock A.M. Ring in Germany and also the Download Festival in donnington so will definitely catch them somewhere.

Far out....not to mention the Notting Hill Carnival!

Photos!

The job of migrating my photo gallery to this new domain has finally been tackled. There's just over 2600 snappies and movies up on there now, hope you like!