before and during my spanish adventure^tm years ago I learnt a load of songs to sing and play on the acoustic guitar, initially just for camp-fire entertainment but ultimately so I had songs to busk. The idea of busking was one of overcoming the confidence barrier I needed to sing in public, rather than to make money, although the latter proved very useful vital as time went on and funds ran out, in fact the trip was probably extended by a couple of months using money earned whilst busking.

I didn't choose the best set of songs for either campfire entertainment or busking as they were mostly fairly slow melancolic songs. The list was something like the following (i'll probably add to this list as I remember others I knew):-

radiohead - high and dry
radiohead - green plastic trees
radiohead - creep
U2 - staring at the sun
Smashing Pumpkins - Disarm
Lemonheads - Into your Arms
Lemonheads - Being Around
Oasis - Wonderwall
Oasis - Champagne supernova
The La's - There she goes
+ a load of my own stuff

Of that list, wonderwall is the only one I can remember how to play from beginning to end (and I play that wrong apparently, according to mrs rick). Apart from being an easy song, the reason I can remember wonderwall is it is the one of the only upbeat songs, and generally got a good reaction.

I want to learn stuff again, so will probably relearn the forgotten/ half forgotten ones (i'm terrible with remembering lyrics) above as "low hanging fruit" but want to increase my repertoire.

I've already half learnt a couple of new ones over the last year or so:-

Verve - Lucky Mann
Aimee Mann - Save me

But have my eye on the following more upbeat stuff (once again i'll likely keep adding to this, so dont be surprised if this post keeps popping back to the top of my RSS feed):-

Britney Spears - Hit me baby one more time (i've heard some fantastic acoustic covers of this)
Green Day - err American Idiot maybe (or is that just the name of the album?) one of the recent upbeat ones anyway
Doves - bounding
Verve - bitter sweet symphony

I'm open to suggestions - what would you like to hear me murder?

The main reason for me learning these is that I still seem to be in a songwriting rutt and having some new and "classic" pop tune stuff to play helps replenish the melody making part of my brain. hopefully :-)

Mainly it's just because I like to sing and play :-)

Ok, seems like a a bit of progress is being made in creating migration scripts for migrating other blogs into quills. Tomster has written something to migrate from coreBlog (zope based blog software) to quills and this has been included in the 0.9 branch of quils.

This got me thinking (always the thinking and never the actually doing eh?). What would be more useful than a blogworks xml to quills migration script would be a (insert very popular blooging software here) to quills migration script. Therefore maybe what I should write is a blogworks xml to (insert very popular blogging software here) script first which would benefit other frustrated blogworks users, then a script from that app to quills, to help people move to quills.

2 birds with one stone. or ... actually 2 birds with 2 stones, but hey who's counting right?Anyway, did a bit of googling and found this, and also elsewhere on that site some stuff about using rss feed of all posts to import into wordpress. There may be other stuff out there too - will keep looking and keep you informed...

UPDATE It certainly is easy to migrate from blogworks xml to wordpress, especially if like me you never got round to enabling comments. I did it last night in about ten minutes - these are the steps:-

1. Install wordpress somewhere (php/mysql required) using the "famous five minute install"
2. In blogworks xml, go to settings and change your "display last x posts" setting to 1000 or some other setting higher than your total number of posts
3. optionally change the file name of your RSS feed to something like export.xml so that you don't cause chaos with people who have subscribed to your existing feed.
4. go to the "publish" dialogue and deselect all but the RSS, and click publish.
5. download the resulting xml file or move it somewhere that php can get at it
6. look at the read-me included with word press - there is a file called import-rss.php - run it and follow the instructions - it will pull in all the posts in the RSS feed and create them as wordpress entries.

I now have a wordpress version of hypothecate running locally ready to attempt a wordpress to quills import script :-)

UPDATE 2 a couple more hurdles crossed - a while back I got Z Mysql adapter working on mac osx but hadn't actually tried connecting, so got this sorted. Plus I also learnt how to create an external method. Then I started butchering Tomsters coreblog2quills script (linked above) to use a simple database query that returns post title, date and text of the posts stored in the wordpress database. I haven't done anything with comments/categories yet, as hypothecate hasn't currently got any.

Anyway, it appears to be working, but still have a couple of issues:-

1. If I import, for example, 10 posts, the first one comes in fine and the rest appear to have their content set to text/plain so that embedded HTML turns up encoded on the resulting page. If I go and resav each of those posts and select text/html in the pull-down, all is fine. but obviously I don't want to do that for 217 posts.

2. The idea of this is that posts are created as drafts and when published, the quills machinery creates them in the appropriate archive, using the effective date set in the script - this seems to work fine if I do them individually, but If I bulk select them and change state state, they all get set to the same date - not sure why...

on top of this I am still using an older version quills from svn so should probably upgrade to the most recent before doing any more investigation.

Actually it doesn't, or at least not my lifestyle or personality. My main objection isn't the way they look, but rather the impracticality and extra effort needed.

Take today. I'm currently on a train to go and work on a clients site (a bit of CSS/ Javascript consulting). I need to be there by 9am, in a suit, preferably not creased and certainly not ripped.

Were it not for the suit this is how the last 12 hours or so might have panned out:-

Last night: normal
This morning: get up slightly earlier than usual and skate to the station. At the other end (Birmingham), skate to the clients office, probably stashing my board in a bag of some description so as not to give the wrong impression.

Because of the suit it has panned out like this:-
Last night, take nearly an hour out of my evening to find and iron a shirt and my suit trousers (I'm not very good at ironing, and I don't see the point in it but that is a whole other rant). Find all the other associated stuff and lay out ready for swift early morning exit.
This morning get up extra early and start using that most primitive of transport - walking. This takes ages and despite allowing 50 minutes I still have to full-on march to get to the station, buy my ticket, queue for the coffee and find my train.

The alternatives would have been:

to cycle to the station, but I'm not coming back by train so would then need to retrieve my bike this evening, plus if it had been raining my suit trousers would have got muddy/soaked without decent waterproofs. Plus getting the bike through the house meant I would have had to let the cats out of the kitchen and they would demand to be fed.

To drive to the station. This is expensive - city centre parking doesn't come cheap, and is usually full. There is an out of town station but would need to get back out there to retrieve the car in the evening.

Taxi to station. Very expensive, a complete rip off too, usually about £6 - £8 for a journey I can skate in 15 minutes.

To somehow skate to the station with suit/shirt/shoes packed in a bag. This means I would need to get changed on the train, plus stash my board, plus walk/taxi at the other end - the whole point is that I need to turn up in a suit, to create the right impression. Hmm maybe I could get changed in a bush near the office or in a phonebox superman style.

Hang on, there's something I haven't explained here - I could skate in the suit. In fact I considered it, because I skated the other day in my boots (Doc Marten) and it worked fine, and if it wasn't for the slight mishap on my skate commute yesterday I may well have travelled to the station in my suit this morning, atop my wooden toy. Unfortunately the risk is too great, suits don't come cheap and are likely to rip at the slightest brush of concrete - how stupid is that? I have to admit I actually quite like the idea of peoples reactions to seeing someone skateboarding in a suit - I like the idea of getting a bowler hat, umbrella and briefcase to complete the look though..

Ah well - I'm on the train, I haven't got a skateboard to lug around with me and this suit is actually quite practical for my current situation - loads of pockets for receipts, tickets, phone etc. and my wife tells me I look quite good in a suit :-)

Hmm, this is quite a lengthy post - probably the combined result of being on a train, reading most of Charles Bukowski's Post Office and too much coffee.

http://www.e-bristol.org/twiki/bin/view

read all about it... and write some too if you want :-)