close but no cigar

Posted on June 30, 2008

Ignore the second and third lines and repunctuate the first and the world would make a lot more sense :)

End of an era.

Posted on June 30, 2008

This is a really hard post to write. Leaving Lugradio was easy because sticking with it was making my life harder than it needed to be but writing about the whole of lugradio seizing to exist is harder.

For those of you that don’t know lugradio (and I presume that’s a significant number of my current readership) it is/was/(will be forever) a very fine podcast that started before the term podcast was coined. I ’starred’ in all the first series (apart from an election special) then we took a break and during the recording of the first couple of episodes (recorded on a single night due to other commitments) I decided the break wasn’t long enough for me and I wanted to make it permanent. Which upset a few people but in hindsight was a good move for me and the show.

The reasons I left have been relegated to the bottom because they aren’t important to the majority of people reading this what is important are the following things. Everyday I came across a mention of lugradio or any of the cool things that sprung out of the team and fans over the years I burst with pride.

What started as four people behaving as they do normally in each others company and talking about some of the things they find important in software became so, so much more than the sum of it’s parts and I never lost that feeling I was there at the start of something important. I’m not the sort of person who could have stuck it out until the end but two of the guys in that first episode remained regulars until the very last episode and all the other main presenters have made the show what is today.

But (yeah, I can start a sentence with but what of it! :p ) what is more important are the fans. It scared the shit out of me having fans (I left bands for less) because it meant I had responsibilities I didn’t ask for but every single on of the guys from the early days I consider friends even if I don’t keep in touch as well as I should. They really made something out of the very little the presenters offered in those early days.

So every single fan should give themselves a round of applause after listening to that final episode because you helped create something.

After I left I stopped listening to the show on a regular basis because I found it almost impossible to be a passive fan of the show. I wanted to jump in and accuse the presenters of being up their own arses on more than one occasion and every time they said Open Source when they meant Free Software or vice versa or worse said FOSS so I missed lots of the classic moments but whenever I heard them discussed in the wider world I’d grab a copy of that episode and hunt down the bits I’d heard about. It’s hard being a fan of something you used to be a part of, I bet Ecclestone wasn’t glued to his tv on Saturday night :)

For those that want to reminisce and remember me as a presenter of Lugradio may I suggest you listen to season 2 episode 3 because it’s the first one I’m not in as a presenter and features my ‘best bits’ as picked by jono. I honestly cried when I heard it and am touched every time jono relays how he had tears in his eyes (of laughter) when he was editing it. The best episode I’m in is the one I didn’t present and the best episodes overall are to be found my working backwards through the series. I hope in it’s death lugradio finds a whole new set of listeners.

There is one good thing about the end of lugradio I don’t have to terrify people into thinking they have really upset me when they ask if I’m ever going to join the crew for a special only to see me shake my head and walk away with tears in my eyes :) To those dozen or so people who I did this too I appologise and just for you below the fold is an explanation.

Now everybody else raise a toast to lugradio and the community it spawned. You are all fucking awesome guys.

Read more

Hello world! (reprised)

Posted on June 29, 2008

I got a little pissed off with my hosts flaky database server and deleted by old wordpress site only to later fix the problems and upgrade to php5 etc myself.

I do things like that :)

Loads happening recently I’ll tell everybody about it in time.  Stay tuned.

© Copyright Where Sparkes Used to Fly • Powered by Wordpress •
Theme based on Detour created by Brian Gardner.