The last four weeks have whizzed by in a blur of washing, catching up on Coffeesh0p and yet more wedding parties (you can never have enough!) but I’ve finally found time to sit down and write about our honeymoon. Now I just have to hope that some of you out there are still interested and that I can remember anything about it!

We went to Bayahibe, a pretty touristy resort on the south east coast of the Dominican Republic. Our hotel was frickin’ sweet, 5* all inclusive and right on the beach, with only one more hotel along the coastline between us and the completely uninhabited south east tip of the island, which is a huge nature reserve.

Just off this coast is the island of Saona, and our visit to there was quite possibly the best day of our lives and the highlight of the holiday. We had heard that the reefs there were the second best in the world (after the Great Barrier reef) so we just had to check it out and we certainly weren’t disappointed. The trip itself was brilliant, the staff were fantastic and we downed rum after rum on the boat while listening to (would you believe it?) the Trentmøller remix of Go by Moby – one of our favourite tracks. John had a good old boogie on the boat before realising he was being filmed and promptly stopping, but we bought a DVD of the trip so it’s now immortalised on film forever, no doubt to resurface for embarrassment purposes at some future birthday party or to show to the kids to prove we were young and cool once. We saw eagle rays and moray eels and other, much prettier sea creatures like enormous starfish, angel fish and sea urchins.

The Wildlife

Lunch was on the breathtaking Saona Island – filming location of the iconic Bounty ads – and was delicious, ate overlooking the Caribbean Sea and covered in butterflies! The afternoon was spent in the amazing ‘natural swimming pool’ – a football pitch sized patch of shallow water, far out from the coast. Ironically, being miles from anywhere, this was probably the busiest place we went during the entire honeymoon! The water was clear and beautiful, about chest height (on me, but I’m a short arse) and the bottom was covered in huge, hard starfish – not like the crap squidgy ones we get in this country. Here, the staff on the boat turned the music up loud and we drank rum and coke and ate fresh coconuts that had been picked on Saona Island earlier. It’s safe to say it couldn’t have got much more Caribbean than that! Later on in this trip we’d break our camera, get incredibly pissed and emotional and a little bit sunburnt, and when we got home I spent an hour sobbing and exclaiming ‘that was the best day of my life!’…but the less said about that part, the better.

Saona Island

There was also some amazing sights to be seen in the sea just off the hotel’s beach – we saw a sting ray about 6 foot out from the beach, followed it round for a bit and made a large and rather obnoxious British family shit their pants and drag their kids back on to dry land when their nosiness got the better of them and they asked what we were looking at. Another amazing experience was feeding the fish just off the beach – turns out they eat bread (who knew?) and wading into the water with a roll or two causes hundreds of beautiful fish to swarm around you, jumping out of the water and stuff, it was absolutely incredible and we even borrowed snorkels so we could get underwater and in on the action.

Another awesome trip was to the capital city, Santo Domingo. We had the most fantastic tour guide called José who referred to his wife as ‘Fidellia Castro’ the entire day and talked about how wives were the bosses of the households in the Dominican Republic just like everywhere else in the world – all in the most good humoured and loving way possible of course! We were embarrassingly clueless about the place before we went on this trip, so here’s the history lesson: Santo Domingo was founded in 1496 by Bartholomew Columbus and was the first place to be settled in the Americas. It boasts the first cathedral, chapel, hotel and just about everything in the New World. The Catedral Santa María La Menor, for example, is older than ANYTHING in the USA. The city’s modern history has been pretty turbulent, and it even had a different name from 1930-61 – “Ciudad Trujillo”, after the country’s dictator. He was eventually assassinated, but not before much bloodshed and 30 years of an oppressive and unpopular regime. To put this guy in a bit of context, there were extravagant gifts in the old mausoleum that had been sent to Trujillo from Hitler and Mussolini…so not a nice dude. That this period is still in living memory seems obvious, as does the rest of their history with links to Christopher Columbus, the slave trade and so on. In our experience, Dominicans are SUPER proud of their country, their heritage and their past, warts and all. It’s a very refreshing attitude and we enjoyed finding out all about it in an open and matter-of-fact way. The ancestors of a lot of the population, for example, arrived as slaves – and whilst we all know that this was a terrible time in history and many abhorrent acts were carried out towards these people, that is how they ended up there and that’s that. That something isn’t pleasant doesn’t make it any less true, and I really liked that quality that we found in so many of the people there. They were also very patriotic but not in the mental, nationalistic way you seem to get in the US and UK – they said things like ‘my capital city’ even if they didn’t live there, and thanked tourists for visiting ‘my beautiful country’. Overall, people were incredibly friendly and welcoming, and often even seemed grateful to the tourists for even going there in the first place. But then, it’s not long ago that Dominican Republic was a third world country, and thanks to the recent earthquake we’ve all seen on the news that it’s neighbour, Haiti, most definitely still is. Tourism has transformed the country and they seem thankful and proud to show it off – as well they should, because it’s so beautiful. It has the typical breathtaking Caribbean beaches as well as jungles, rainforests, coral reefs, bustling cities and Western style shopping precincts for the rich and famous – a bit of everything. I really don’t know why it’s not as popular as some of the other Caribbean Islands which, as far as I can tell, tend to be less diverse in their ecosystems and landscapes.

As well as the cathedral, we visited numerous significant buildings and places, including the first road to be built in the New World, the palace of Christopher Columbus’s son, Diego, and some stunning caves known as ‘the three eyes’ which featured beautiful, turquoise underground lakes (unfortunately this was post-camera-breakage so we don’t have any good photos of these. Boo!) We also bought the tiniest, most expensive piece of rock ever but it was totally worth it – a teardrop shaped chunk of amber (a Dominican specialty) with a 60 million year old bug in it. It set us back nearly £300 but still, there can’t be that many 60 million year old bugs floating around. Other purchases worth noting are of course the ubiquitous rum and cigars, which were so frickin’ cheap we ended up buying about double our customs limit and having to squeeze it all in our cases for the journey back. We had no trouble there, thank goodness, although we did see an hilarious stereotypical indignant American couple arguing with customs. They appeared to be the only people in the whole world who haven’t heard of the ‘no liquid in your hand luggage’ thing and loudly failed to grasp why their litres and litres of rum were being thrown away. Just as an indication of price, some pretty awesome 40-odd % rum was around £5 for a 70cl bottle – bargain! We drank plenty while we were there and also discovered some crazy Dominican aphrodisiac called Mamajuana, which John has since christened as ‘rum-hypnol’ (not because of anything rude, you filthy buggers…but because the only time I drank some was when I was already horribly drunk and I basically lost around 3 hours then passed out. The next day I actually thought I was dying of some tropical disease because the hangover was so bad). Basically mamajuana seems to be a mixture of herbs which are soaked in red wine, then honey and rum, then drained – this leaves you with the sex rum which you then drink. Or something like that. It’s delicious so keep your eyes peeled on Coffeesh0p as we’re hoping to source some of the herbs from somewhere at some point soon as no one sells them in the UK at the moment. Oh and John bought a SINGLE cigar for £20. That had better be one awesome cigar.

Last but not least, our other trip worth mentioning was to go and swim with dolphins! The place itself was a complete rip off and the staff were the most miserable shits we had ever come across – but once we were in the water with the dolphins those feelings just evaporated and it really was all the clichés you can imagine. We’ve never been that interested – as in, we’re not one of the many people to whom swimming with dolphins is the absolute pinnacle of being – so more than anything we got the opportunity to do it and we just wanted to see what all the fuss was about. And would you believe it, Mr and Mrs cynic here just totally “got it”. It was incredible, and I’m now totally a dolphin convert. Do it if you ever get the chance.

Other than that, we spent a fortnight lazing on the beach, drinking so much rum it’s a wonder we’re still alive, eating amazing food, swimming every day in the sea and the huge pool (which happened to have a bar in it), and generally just relaxing. It was the most fantastic two weeks we could have hoped for (apart from the bastard camera breaking) and we’re incredibly glad that our ‘ah, fuck it, it’s our honeymoon’ attitude won out over our tight-fisted, sensible attitude. After all, it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity…although having said that, you are all heartily encouraged to buy plenty from us in order to help us afford to go again

Yep, that’s right. It’s a dolphin on a jetski smoking a doob.

Although many Botham spies didn’t die to bring you this picture, Jo had to take the pic with her phone, text it to my phone which doesn’t have picture messaging set up (I know, I know), so I could then access it through my network’s website, download it and upload it here. Worth it? We think so.

We’re still on honeymoon for a few more days, so look out for a proper update towards the end of next week.

See all y’all soon.

For my stag night me and a few mates sat in a dark smoke-filled room, having ingested a safe amount of legal and unidentifiable chemical, in possession of a shitty keyboard, an awesome synthesizer, an ancient drum machine and some kind of stlyophone, all fed through a very expensive bass amp. There was also an acoustic guitar lying around.

None of us are very good at music, but this is what we somehow came up with. It was recorded with a phone in the middle of the room.

It’s not exactly awesome, but I thought I’d stick it up here anyway for you to laugh at, more than anything.

Right, I’m off on honeymoon in 9 hours. I’ll write something else when I get back! Off in half an hour – see you all in two weeks!

In case you were wondering why I’ve not written anything decent for ages, it’s because we’ve been planning our wedding, which finally happened on Saturday (May 29th, 2010). I thought I’d put a couple of photos on here today because a few of you seem to actually give a shit, and also then there’s less chance of me forgetting any future anniversaries.

If you've ever had a decent night out in Birmingham, you may recognise that as The Custard Factory

During the ceremony

Us in some "arty" doorway

Also, since I’ve still not written a Music On Drugs post, you might like to give some of the music we used in the ceremony a listen. Links to YouTube open in a new tab/window.

Before The Ceremony:

• Zero 7 – Destiny
• Delerium – Silence (the ORIGINAL version!)
• Tori Amos – A Sorta Fairytale
• Nick Drake – Place To Be
• Amillionsons – Need You Tonight (Not on YouTube, but it’s an electro-chillout “rework” of Judy Tzuke – Stay With Me Till Dawn. Here’s Amillionsons – Misti Blu though, to give you an idea what they sound like.)
• Four Tet – Everything Is Alright
• Air – You Make It Easy

Jo Walking Up The Aisle:

Zero 7 – Pop Art Blue

Signing The Register:

• Fleetwood Mac – Songbird
• Frou Frou – It’s Good To Be In Love

Us Walking Out:

Lamb – Gorecki (started at 2:27)

Secular weddings are awesome!

(Image credit: Photos of my Wedding)

First off, you may have noticed distinct a lack of posting these past couple of weeks. I’m not going to apologise, because I’d rather only post when I have something to say, rather than just because I haven’t said anything for a while.  Thankfully, I’ve got some things cookin’ away that should be ready to blog about in the next month or so. As for what I’ve actually been up to, that’s been mainly programming and playing the shit out of Caesar 3 (why is it that the best computer games are always the old ones?) – nothing you guys would be interested in anyway.

We’re always surprised by the lovely emails and comments saying how pleased people are with Coffeesh0p‘s service.  They’re not surprising because we think we do a terrible job, but we just thought what we do was pretty standard. We get orders, we post them, we answer customer emails. That’s pretty much it, so how can we be doing a remarkable job? I suppose because we’re a small company, we can always ship orders on the same day, and the Royal Mail certainly earns the cost of a stamp, since most of our smaller orders get there the next day. But surely there’s more to it than that? Well, we’ve done a bit of shopping on the internet recently, and it turns out everyone else is just shit!

I’m not slagging off this industry in particular, it’s just my online shopping experience as a whole has been a bit terrible recently. Firstly, I bought a copy of Professional Javascript about a month ago from a third party seller on Amazon. I figured that since I’m recoding Coffeesh0p pretty much completely, that the drag ‘n’ drop shopping basket could use a bit of a tweak. Amazon’s delivery estimate came and went with no sign of the book. Thinking it might have gotten lost in the post or something, the misses emailed the seller who told us to “check with the Post Office” because sometimes “the postmen don’t bother to leave a card if the parcel is too big for your letter box“.  Straight off, we thought this was horse shit, but just in case this guy had some secret insider Post Office information, we thought we’d check with the guys at our Post Office, who confirmed our suspicions.  This guy was flat-out lying to people! Further communications ended up with him telling us to wait another couple of weeks. If I don’t have it by next Friday, I’m going to write some Javascript to smack him round the face remotely.

Next up was a Bridesmaid’s dress we bought on Ebay (If you’ve just tuned in, me ‘n’ the misses are getting married). First off, we got a money request from PayPal, because the particular vendor couldn’t just accept normal payment as they’d reached their transfer limit or something. A week or so passed without a dress, then the person got in touch and requested that we get that payment cancelled and send a cheque instead, because apparently their PayPal account had been compromised… A few emails later and we’re still waiting.

Finally, one of our wholesalers has been a complete pain in the arse. When we moved house 3 fucking months ago, we placed an order with them (and paid in advance) and I emailed them to tell them we’ve moved. So a few days later, a package turns up at our old address and I have to go and pick it up. When I got it open, there was half the stuff there we ordered and an invoice with “Rest will follow” scrawled across it. Since then, I’ve emailed a million times and we’ve still not got the rest of this pretty substantial order. Apparently, they’ve been short staffed, had trouble with customs and all sorts of other shit. Truth is, I couldn’t give a crap, since I paid nearly £40 for shipping! The icing on the cake though, is that they’ve apparently sent the rest, but they’ve sent it to our old address despite three separate emails with our new address in to at least two different people! Arrgghh!

So, yeah, I suppose that does make us pretty awesome by comparison.

Mini Competition

I’ve still got three more Bamboo Shotgun Pipes to give away, so I reckon it’s high time we had another competition. To cheer me up, this competition will be to create the best drugs related cat macro.

Here are some examples:

At the end of the month, the best three, as judged by me ‘n’ the misses, will get a pipe. To submit your entry, attach your pictures to my Contact Form. Make sure you actually submit the form, though…

Good luck!

Harry Pothead

I’ve never been the biggest fan of the Harry Potter franchise, but I’ve seen all the films at some point and I’ve read the first book when I was about *this* big. So, this week, me ‘n’ the misses went to see the new Harry Potter film at the IMAX in Birmingham, where the effects were special and there were 150% the usual amount of dimensions (at least for the beginning of the film).

I’m sure we’ve all seen this “Harry Pothead” picture (you should have, it’s about as old as the Internet), but this latest film was jam-packed with drugs references all by itself. Firstly, they all got pissed down the pub, at which point Hermione got frisky and a million parents all cried out at once… and were then suddenly quoted in a New York Times article, but that wasn’t even the best bit. Some time later on, this girl that fancies Harry leaves some chocolates on his bed, but then Harry’s mate Ron (who looks exactly like my brother, I shit you not!) eats them all. Unbeknownst to Ron, these chocolates contain some kind of love potion. When Harry finds Ron later on, Ron is completely off his tits, as though he’d snorted 300 mg of MDMA about half an hour before. He tells everyone how much he loves them, hugs cushions and generally makes an arse of himself. It’s odd that none of the aforementioned parents seemed to mind about this, but a little bit of underage drinking is a moral outrage. If only that mindset transferred over to real life…

Yet another parallel between magic and drugs was drawn when Harry consumed some of his “luck potion”, which magically seemed to make him feel rather coked up – talkative, inappropriate and overly confident.  Perhaps there’s some deeper message here, showing us that everyone gets up to this kind of shit once they’re old enough? Or perhaps, JayKay Rowling was just battered when she wrote it?

The final point worth mentioning is when Harry’s new teacher suspiciously harvests some leaves and mentions their potential black market price, while reminding us all that such topics of discussion are hypothetical. Even if he was talking about their usefulness as a magic reagent, I still like to think he might roll one up at the end of a hard day’s teaching.

Spiritplants Radio

My mix on Spiritplants Radio is now online in their archives in case you missed it the first time round.  You can listen to it right here:

Drugs Forum

Drugs-Forum is currently making a few changes, ranging from the entire structure of the site, to a bit of spring cleaning. Somewhere in there falls the task of designing a new logo, which I’ve had a crack at. It seems a real possibility that it might get used, pending a few minor changes. Here’s the current version:

Unfortunately, it’ll be much smaller if it’s actually used, so a big part of the design process has been taken up by trying to make it look clear at a smaller size. I’ve shown it here bigger because it looks even better.

As usual, comments & criticism welcome!

Tomorrow (Sat 1st Aug), there’ll be an old mix of mine on Spiritplants Radio.

Spiritplants Radio is a great little community-based online radio station that plays a massive range of awesome music. They  feature the best in new and classic psychedelic rock, electronica, jazz, progressive news, psychedelic lectures, literary pieces, comedy, and many shows of home-grown programming. You can check out any of the shows in their archive, or turn on & tune in any time. It makes great listening at work, at home or anywhere else where you might be avoiding being productive. There’s also some forums and chat you can get involved with. I’ll probably be in and out over the weekend if anyone wants to pop by and say Hi.

So this mix of mine was from an new year’s eve party I was at a couple of years ago. The theme is “chunky” and the genre is “many”, but it’s pretty lively and fun. Hopefully everyone will get something out of it!

A quick disclaimer though… remember this was recorded at a party I was obviously at, so any fuckups in the mixing (especially early on) can be scratched up to the “influence” i was “under”.

It’ll be on at 2 PM US Pacific time, which I think is 10 PM here in the UK. It’ll be on twice more over the weekend, so I’ll update this post when I’ve got the details. at 12:30 PM and 7 PM US Pacific time on Sunday which is (dum de dum de dum…) 8:30 PM on Sunday and 3 AM Monday morning if you’re in the UK.

Our station features the best in new and classic psychedelic rock,
electronica, jazz, progressive news, psychedelic lectures, literaryOur station features the best in new and classic sychedelic rock, electronica, jazz, progressive news, psychedelic lectures, literary pieces, comedy, and many shows of homegrown programming.
pieces, comedy, and many shows of homegrown programming.

It’s that time again. I’m coding Coffeesh0p from the ground up for the third time since I started in 2006, only this time, it will look exactly the same. Sounds pointless, right? Well, programming is very much like skinning a cat – there’s more than one way to do it, and currently the programming behind Coffeesh0p resembles an epileptic retard with Huntington’s Chorea trying to skin a cat with a dull pocket knife under a strobe light. Almost.

The reason I’m recoding it this time, and also the reason behind why I recoded it last time is that I’ve gotten a lot better at programming since the previous incarnation. This time, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around taking an Object Orientated approach. That means using code to represent things as an object, such as a product, a news post, a comment, or a basket, which is a great way of looking at things. Before, I might have written some code to pull product information straight out of the database and display it, which works OK, but if the database behind the site changes for some reason, then I’d have to go through every page and update the code to work with the new database. Object orientated code makes anything like this much easier, because all the code to talk to the database is kept in one or two files, which can be modified or swapped for something else really easily. Since each object is kept in a single file, they can also be reused for any other site that requires something similar. For example, Coffeesh0p and Salvia-Trip.net both use the same object to talk to the database – I just borrowed the code from one site and uploaded it to the other.

As Coffeesh0p expands, the existing code has become much harder to maintain and add new bits to, which is also much easier using objects, as the code is far easier to read and understand. Imagine if I wanted to add a comment to something. Without objects, it might look something like this horrible mess:

$sql = "INSERT INTO `comments`(`item_id`,`name`,`email`,`body`,`rating`) ";
$sql .= "VALUES (1, 'Synchronium', 'pretend@email.addr', 'Here\'s my comment!', 5);';
mysql_query( $sql, $database_link );

But with objects, you don’t even have to know any PHP to work out what the following does:

$comment = new Comment();
$comment->item_id = 1;
$comment->name = 'Synchronium';
$comment->email = 'pretend@email.addr';
$comment->body = 'Here\'s my comment!';
$comment->rating = 5;
$comment->save();

As you can imagine, coding like this hardly gives me a headache at all!

Learning to code was probably one of the best things I ever did. Seriously. I’d recommend it to anyone, and there are loads of books out there for beginners.

So, yeah, that’s what I’ve been up to. Nothing interesting or hilarious, but important nonetheless.

As a treat for indulging my geekiness, I bring you the Brass Eye episode on drugs. Brass Eye got a passing mention in my misses’s last post, Can I Get High Legally?, and it occurred to me that a lot of readers from outside the UK probably wouldn’t know what we were talking about. Well, for those that don’t know, it’s one of the funniest TV programs of all time, written by a personal hero of mine and comedy genius Chris Morris.

Click the red play button once, close any adverts that might pop up then click the green play button to watch it. The first 40 seconds or so are blank, so you might want to skip it forward.

Exam Results

Yesterday, me and the misses both got our degree results. We both got a 2:1, which we’re incredibly happy about, especially since we’ve always had Coffeesh0p to look after too. I know you’re probably here to read about drugs related stuff, but I don’t care – this is my blog and I’ll be smug all over it if I want to!

Mini Competition

Since I’m in a good mood and I’m still on the lookout for suggestions about any of the things I mentioned before, I’m going to raise the stakes a little bit. I’ll be giving away five bamboo shotgun pipes to the best five suggestions. If you’re not sure what I mean, please go back and read that post, then comment about any of the points raised in it at the bottom of this post. I’ll pick the five suggestions I like the most and give away a pipe to each person. Couldn’t be simpler, right? Just like Johnny 5, I need your input!

New Stuff

Since my last post, I’ve spent most of my time adding new products to the site. Tonnes of them, in fact – entheogens, smoking mixtures, pipes, grinders. All sorts. Since that’s all I’ve been doing though, I don’t want this to be another post full of links to new stuff, because, let’s be honest, it makes this blog look tacky. This isn’t supposed to be one big advert, blogging (I hate that word!) about what I do is just my hobby.

Hopefully, in the next few weeks then, I’ll be putting a couple of the latest products on the front page of the site, where the “Coffeesh0p Dev Blog Latest Posts” are now. I’ll also make an RSS feed available for anyone that wants to subscribe to that, keeping these blog posts relatively free of links.

Update:
Here’s the Latest Products page and RSS feed.

- Synchronium BMedSc (Pharmacology) & Mrs Synch BA

Since me ‘n’ the misses have finished our degrees (just waiting on the results now…) & almost finished moving house, hopefully we’ll be doing some cool blog & Coffeesh0p stuff soon.

For the blog, firstly I intend to do a couple of interviews with some interesting people. While I like to talk a lot about drugs, medicines, pharmacology, etc, I’m also a bit of a nerd, so I’m looking forward to talking to a few like-minded people who run drugs-related sites. I’ve also got a bong I’d like to give away, but I want to do it in a much more awesome way than the last competition. I’m thinking …joint rolling contest? Would that be something you guys would be interested in? The details (and legality) would need to be worked out, but that sounds like it might be a laugh. I figure before you should be granted bong access, you must first appreciate and master the art of rolling.

Any other suggestions? If you can suggest anything better, I’m all ears. Well… mostly.

Now uni has finished and we’ve moved into a bigger house, we can finally give Coffeesh0p a go full-time, something we’ve been looking forward to for ages. Firstly, now we have more space, we can start buying entheogens (such as Salvia & Kratom) by the kilo directly from their source. That should mean we’ll be able to sell them to you for much cheaper. Also, we’ve got the room to expand our range again, so keep an eye out for loads of new products. If there’s anything we don’t sell that you’d like, leave a comment and I’ll try and hunt it down.

Since I’ll now be making Coffeesh0p (and this blog, of course) my number one priority, I’ll be able to make some interesting changes. I’ve already done a bit of housekeeping stuff, like made the basket page look a little friendlier and put some cooler buttons on all the forms. I also had a go at adding a delivery address option on the checkout, but that’s not working right. (If anyone wants stuff sent to an alternate delivery address, btw, just email me. ) I’ve got a few ideas on what to do next, but I’d also reallllly like your input. In fact, here’s your chance to be a harsh as possible – what looks shit? What’s completely defunct? How could I make it look 110% more awesome? What essential, must-have features are we missing? If you can think of anything at all, please enter a comment below!

In case the idea hasn’t sunk in yet, I’m looking for your opinion on all these things. Leaving a comment couldn’t be simpler – just enter a name & email (don’t worry, no one but me will see your email address, and it doesn’t have to be a real name), and then pour your opinion all over the comment box. Hit submit and you’re done. Even if you’ve never left a comment anywhere in your life and this is the first bit of communicating you’ve done online, please write something!

© Synchronium – stealing other people’s ideas since 2006.