To read the full and illustrated story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, click here.

After I left my first “real” band Road Menace, – real as in we played pubs and club and got paid for it – I teamed up with another ex Road Menace member, Terry Costello, and my brother Duncan (who was going by the name of “Slash” at the time). We formed a joke band called “The Big Red Poppers” and played a few parties. It was funny enough for a while but, like all jokes, I got pretty sick of it early and so Duncan and myself joined up with Baz McQueen (real name Barry McBreity) – who was also an ex Road Menace member – and formed Croc Attack. Baz and Duncan had been jamming for some time on their own stuff at Baz’s house, so I was really a newcomer.

Croc Attack (1986-1991) was very different from Road Menace. For a start the sound was a lot more “raw” and perhaps a little bit angry to boot. Not punk by any stretch, but just a bit angry. Because we were a three piece we decided to “muddy” up the guitar sound with phasers, flangers, distortion and other guitar effects as well as beef up the drumming a bit more. I also tried to be a little more “busy” on the bass and EQ’d it to try and make it sound a bit more like a tinny, treble-y sounding bass. I guess at the time I felt that I would have to try and help flesh out the guitar sound and make the bass a little more melodic. I’m not sure if it worked but my bassplaying got a little bit better anyhow. Not that I felt I was that good, but I was adequate.

It didn’t take that long for us to throw a few songs together and eventually we had enough to start playing live shows. We grabbed “Cutt Back” from Road Menace’s set list as it was originally written by Baz and Duncan in the first place before being “stolen” by Road Menace. In my view Croc Attack did the better version of this song by far.

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I spoke too soon! The websites have been up, down, up, down and up again the past week. At the moment (and for the past couple of days) they’re up, but its becoming quite a pain and if we have too many more interruptions I’l give serious consideration to migrating to a new host — especially now that we’re making a little money from the sites!

Its a shame because we’ve had a good run with the current host and they’ve always been on top of things when there’s been problems in the past. Nice friendly guys too. The past week though the organization has been looking a little shabby. Hopefully it will improve.

As far as other matters are concerned I’ve been busy updating various sites, as well as organizing a few tutorials for Handplane Central. I’ve conducted a bit of a poll there and it appears that most people, by far, want plans and tutorials — so I’ve been digging a few profiles out, sawing some wood and taking a few photographs. I’m part way through making several hand planes and documenting the stages as I go. I had been slowing down on making hand planes in general the past couple of years but I’m on an upward curve again. It happens like that sometimes and I worked out that next year will mark my 15th as an infill plane maker, which is kinda….well weird I suppose. It hardly seems that long ago that I first got into it!

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Spent part of the day trying to work out some database problems with the sites that recently went down. It began when Amy tried to post a comment on her blog and WordPress was having none of it. I was preoccupied with getting a tutorial done for another one of my sites, Handplane Central so I couldn’t get on to Amy’s problem right away but, eventually, I threw myself into it. I kept seeing broken “commands” at the top of all of her pages and thought that the database must have become corrupted in some way. After a bit of screwing around I managed to track the problem down and fix it.

Later on tonight I’m writing the text for said tutorial on hand planes (again using WordPress I might add) when I do a routine “save”. All of a sudden I get a stupid 404 error when everything should’ve been fine. I remembered that I’d had some trouble on this very blog with that sort of thing a while back. Fortunately I was able to hit the back button and all of my newly written paragraphs appeared again. I then spent the next five minutes or so cutting and pasting text to try and ascertain just what it was that was giving me all the hassle. I finally tracked it down to one word and one word only – curl. Yup, I remembered that was the word that had given me all that trouble on a Speckled Band post. Can’t remember what I changed it to back then but I did know that “curl” is a php command (I think) which, obviously, causes some distress to the program. The sucky thing is that I wanted to use the word curl, not “spiral” or “curve” or what have you — curl dammit!

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OK, best laid plans etc. etc…

Ran out of time on Friday to post an entry. Had to drive over to my parents house as Amy and I were staying the night there (Mel’s birthday celebrations the next day et al). Talked with mum and dad for a while — primarily dad in regards to starting up the new planemaking venture (which I’ll get into in another post some time) — but then fell asleep while watching TV at around 10.30pm. I seem to be doing that more and more nowadays over there. It’s just so damn hot there with the heater on that I just kinda lose consciousness or something?

Saturday was pretty good. Not only was Mel there but Adrian and Dan — my two best friends — visited as well. There was some concern earlier that morning with Adrian’s mother (who lived across the road from my parent’s house) being a little disorientated and wandering the streets but Adrian managed to sort things out. By the end of the afternoon Amy and I decided to stay at my parents for another night.

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