>I’m greatly encouraged by some of the cool little programs coming out for the Mac (specifically for OS X) at the moment. NetNewsWire Lite is keeping track of all those news sites and blogs (the daily “if there’s anything that grabs my attention” reads) to save me having to work through them from my browser’s ‘Favourites’ menu. And the weekend’s big discovery was TuneCam which takes artist, title and album information from whatever’s playing in iTunes, enters it into a template and uploads it to your webserver. The results can be seen in the grey box over on the left hand side of this page…
Saddam I am
Major issues transcend all concepts of ‘on-topic’ or ‘off-topic’. A sizeable discussion about the possible war against Iraq has broken out among the usual pro studio talk on the rec.audio.pro newsgroup this week. I reckon New Zealander Geoff Wood has come up with the most worthwhile contribution to the entire War/NotWar debate.
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.audio.pro/msg/23712f5467953f63?hl=en
Posted in Politics
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G7 guitar notation software announced
Introducing myself to people and going through the old conversational motions of hometown/job/etc, I always use the convenient shorthand of “oh, I work for a guitar magazine”. That’s true, but my Guitarist work covers a range of stuff. At heart, I’m still a transcriber, and as such, word of the new G7 guitar tablature software from Sibelius excited me a lot.
One of my recent aims has been to get back into full-on transcribing a bit more, and I’d like to start providing printed, rather than hand-written, transcriptions. However, the price of decent software packages has always put me off (due to workload and other stuff, I probably wouldn’t be using the software regularly enough) until now. A retail price of $149 is going to be very sweet…
Posted in Music, Technology
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John Le Carré on US/Iraq war
It’s happened again – another excellent article in the Times Online. This time it’s by John Le Carré, talking about the stupidity that is the Bush government and its itching desire to wage war on Iraq.
Posted in Journalism, Politics
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Libby Purves on internet child porn
Despite being a guitarist and occasional Who fan, I’m keeping fairly quiet about the whole Pete Townshend thing. I don’t know the facts any more than the tabloid press do, and while I hope Townshend is innocent, it’s perfectly possibly that he isn’t.
That said, though, I was most impressed by the article Libby Purves wrote in the online edition of The Times. I mean… The Times in “good, balanced writing” shock!
Posted in Journalism
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The world’s weekly trip to Sainsbury’s
Last week the Guardian ran an article in its Weekend magazine about the weekly food consumption of families in different parts of the world. For each of the families featured (in Mongolia, Mali, Turkey, USA, Japan, Bhutan, Cuba and Bosnia) they listed an average week’s worth of groceries.
Most striking was not the vast difference in quantity between Euro/American and African/Asian countries. In terms of bulk consumption, the Mongolian and (admittedly much larger) Malian families far surpassed the Americans. Rather, the distinction was in the *variety*. Where the Malians got by on huge sacks of grain and pulses and the Cubans ate a fairly standard diet of meat, fruit and veg, the notable feature of the US and Japanese diets was the number of different ingredients, brands and processed substitutes they had access to.
Oddly, there was no British (or any northern European) family, which, I’m guessing, would have shown a fairly moderate midpoint between traditional warm’n'filling nourishment and modern brand obsession. As it was, the Bosnian diet seemed closest to how I imagine the average British family would be.
Back to the Americans, though, any family of four which gets through 340g of INSTANT coffee in a week is just plain worrying.
Posted in Food/Drink
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Unusual productivity for the new year
I don’t know whether it’s the new year feeling, the unseasonably (for London) snowfall or just some freak alignment between Mercury, Jupiter and my anus (obChildishJoke for astronomers there) but I seem to be starting 2003 in a froth of productivity.
Yesterday I made a bird table. Out of wood. No, really. Haven’t yet persuaded the birds to eat from it… what are they expecting, silver service? I’ve also done this redesign of the Spaghetti Factory (cunningly renamed “View from the…” to distinguish the website from the recording studio). Now I just need to remember how to play the guitar…
Posted in Drivel
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A new chapter…
Activity here should get a little more regular from now on.
I started this site (or rather, its predecessor) back in 1998, but it was really just the standard “My Home Page” type of thing with the added novelty of “please buy my book“. I gradually added a few music- and guitar-related things, but then started adding more “journal-like” posts a couple of years back.
Running a traditional type of website doesn’t really suit blogging, and I’ve been manually updating the site until now, uploading each post individually. At the end of last year, I decided it was time to remove the pointless obstacles and automate that stuff, so that’s what you see here.
I considered a few options… Blogger or LiveJournal are the obvious choices for convenience, but I didn’t want to run a weblog on another site and then have to either embed the stuff here or rely on people following links. Of the self-hosted blog software, Movable Type seems to be the most highly considered, but I downloaded it, read the installation instructions and then spent an hour cowering behind the settee.
In the end, I settled on Noah Grey’s Greymatter for reasons of simplicity and convenience. There’s no scary fiddling with PHP and MySQL, so I can just drop it onto the server, customise the templates and we’re ready to go…
Posted in Admin
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Malta
Been out of the online loop, so to speak, for a while… including a week and a half’s holiday in Malta. Now, I might write a proper entry at some point, but the brief summary is…
Fascinating history
Cheerful, friendly people
Good, cheap food and drink
Hot sunny weather (yes, in mid November)
Posted in Travel
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Christmas on Mars
Whoo! From the Flaming Lips website, the news of Wayne Coyne’s debut as a film director, Christmas on Mars, which he describes as…
Maybe ‘Eraserhead’ or ‘Dead Man’ crossed with some kind of fantasy and space aspects, like ‘The Wizard of Oz’ and maybe ’2001: A Space Odyssey,’ except done without real actors or money, and set at Christmas-time.
Posted in Music
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