e-tail Therapy

<@Urthworm> The optimal blog title is always a pun. You have a pun, so write an entry ;-)

How very true.

I just ordered an M Audio Ozone. What looks at first like an overpriced little MIDI controller for my sound module, actually doubles as a 24 bit / 96KHz USB audio interface, with a plethora of connections on the back and a microphone pre-amp. And it fits in a rucksack. Cool.

Why is this useful? Well, my laptop's present audio facilities comprise a generic AC97 cheapset (I just coined that) without so much as a line-in. Connected to the Ozone, it will become a viable platform for recording the piano, guitar and sound module, and hopefully, if the Ozone's latency is as low as promised, for experimenting with softsynths as well. And of course, the little keyboard is perfect for controlling the XV-2020 on stage. I need to acquire some rackmounting kit to play that game, though.

If I don't start churning out some decent music with all of this kit, I deserve shooting.

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Remind me again how I was going to make a fortune overnight.

It is done. This afternoon, I filled out and handed in an innocuous peach-coloured A5 form that will consign me to a whole extra year studying the obscure branch of mathematics known as Computer Science. Erk. My revised year of graduation is 2006. Double erk. That's, like, the future, maaan. And all for an MEng instead of a BSc.

Said James, helpfully: "Is a masters in computer science even worth the paper it's printed on? ;-)" Well, I sure hope so. Time will inevitably tell.

Life-changing decisions aside, today was quite uneventful. I spent an uncharacteristic six hours on campus indulging my "core skills" - alternating between writing code in DCS and playing piano in the Music Centre. Specifically, I've been brushing up on sockets programming in Linux, a field I haven't touched in over a year, and as a side effect, refreshing my slightly shaky knowledge of essential terminal tools like vi and screen. Piano-wise, I'm gradually gaining the confidence to just play the damned thing without worrying about other humans wandering past and overhearing. It's strange. Put me on stage at a gig with my digital piano and I'm fine. Put me in a rehearsal room with either of my bands and I'm the same. But put me in an echoey room with an acoustic piano and let a load of fancy classical types maraud around outside with their sheet music and their Diplomas, and I'm too scared to play without the soft pedal depressed. Why? The fact that I'm literally making it up as I go along shouldn't necessitate quite such a furtive attitude in the presence of "proper" musicians, I'm sure.

On that note (ho-ho), I'm going back to the recording studio with The Stolen tomorrow, to finalise a few more of the five tracks that we laid down in a marathon seven day stint last month - an experience that I'm going to get around to writing about here sometime!

Before I go, I should also mention last Saturday's Radiohead experience at the Nottingham (Ice) Arena. I went expecting somewhat lesser greatness than the Shepherd's Bush Empire gig in May, and frankly, my expectations were met. A heavy bias towards their newer electronica tracks and the utter lack of "intimacy" provided by the stadium setting both detracted from my enjoyment of what was otherwise a solid performance. Pretty lights and big screens abounded (abond?) as one might expect at an event of such scale. The "nostril-cam" mounted on the microphone atop Thom's piano was particularly interesting.

Bye for now.

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I've redesigned again. I was thoroughly sick of the old style, and I was looking for something to occupy me to avoid working on my Database Systems coursework. I'm fair pleased with the new look, but I'm sure it'll pass. I give it six weeks. And all I need to do now to make my site vaguely worthwhile again is rewrite dozens of pages of hideously out of date content! Maybe tomorrow.

Link of the hour: GARFIELD. It amuses. It's procedurally generated. It's practically indistinguishable from the real thing.

I've been recording a couple of things with my new sound module, like this short ambient track (Ogg, 1.15Mb). It was only ten minutes work, so it's not exactly groundbreaking, but opinions are most welcome.

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Disconnectivity

That was a good waste of a few hours.

I drove to campus for the 12pm Data Communications and Networks lecture, but hit the becurs'd level crossing just as it was changing from amber to red, and chickened out of running the big metal barrier-flavoured gauntlet. (I would've made it if I'd just gone for it, as well.) So I sat there for fifteen minutes, then progressed to a campus where, thanks to yet another obscure conference type thing, parking was a rare and precious commodity.

All this made me late enough to decide to skip the lecture and "do something productive with the time instead". Equipped with trusty laptop, I headed up to Rootes bar where I thought I might perform much-needed updates to the BandSoc site. Wireless network connected, but no DHCP to speak of. Oh.

So I tried the library, a good ten minutes of busy pathways and staircases away. Same story. I plugged into one of the RJ45 wall sockets. No change.

Another walk, to that last bastion of working networks, DCS. Their "Experimental Laptop Network Connections" were indeed operational, but sadly were only allowing network access to DCS machines.

So I came home again, and here I am. Isn't it nice when things just work?

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Game spaces

In these wacky times where a colossal 120Gb hard drive will cost you less than two PC games, I wonder just how different things are for Joe (PC) Gamer from, say, 1996. Back then, he might have had one hundredth of the disk space he has today - just 1.2Gb, yet each game occupied just a few dozen MB. Today's games demand 1GB, 2GB, or more - the drives may be 100 times larger, but so are the games we install on them. And after allowing room for Joe's tens of gigabytes of MP3s and DivX movies - unheard of seven years ago - he actually has room for far fewer games than he did in 1996.

And while I'm at it, what happened to the practice of installing a game's core files to the hard disk, while leaving level data, music and FMV to be streamed from the CD-ROM? The modern DVD-ROM drive is surely swift enough to cope far better with this kind of task. I guess that "back in the day" it was both an effective anti-piracy measure (CD burners were still >£200 and SCSI-only) and, with the limited size of hard drives, a practical necessity. Nowadays games, if they do use the CD to play, just nudge it on startup for copy protection. Developers see no point in making their own lives more complicated by leaving data on the disc-with-a-"c". For those of us who haven't quite got round to purchasing that second 80GB drive, though, it would be rather convenient.

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Workshy

Just a quick hello entry, as work is eating most of my time and my inclination to use remaining time productively. I wish the office had air-con.

Cool(er) things:

Contiki - A multitasking OS for the C64 (and ported to other prehistoric platforms), complete with TCP/IP stack and web browser.
The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator - An age-old oft-quoted probability truism goes Java chic. Fun for at least a minute or two :-)

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Doublethink

(for Dan) The plot thickens!

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I just got back from Coventry, having driven over on a whim with Si to see Slybob play at The Jailhouse. They played well, as always. I particularly like the song they finish with these days. The sound wasn't as good as it has been on previous visits to the venue - but I'm informed that the old sound guy has left, which is a shame, as he seemed to know his stuff and was great to work with. I remember being on stage there during a soundcheck and asking Henrik to ask the guy for more keyboards through the monitors, and before I finished speaking he'd seen what was going on and made the change. Keyboard players are used to getting ignored, not having their moves anticipated :-)

Speaking of keyboarding, my Ben Folds Five score book arrived in the post this afternoon, so I've been eagerly attempting to learn such great songs as Philosophy, and discovering just how far my sheet music reading skills have slipped since I stopped playing classical piano. It's particularly frustrating for someone who used to scrape through the Associated Board exams on the strength of his sight-reading. Still, this book should get me back into practice. On that note (groan), I'm highly impressed with online sheet music stockist Musicroom.com. They have a huge catalogue, free delivery, and my book came in 36 hours after they quoted me 2-3 days. And yes, I am on commission. You gotta try.

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The Blues

I got bored of green and grey, so I'm experimenting with new colours and layouts and things. Do not adjust your browser.

I've surprised myself this last week or so by working fairly solidly on Millennium 3, the space sim / Frontier clone I started writing back in 1998. Having started again from scratch late last year, and having spent barely any time on it since, it's pretty minimal, but the underlying design is rather more sound than previous versions, and me no longer being a complete novice means progress is a little quicker than it was when I was 15. Plus it's rather portable. There are equal Windows and Linux versions, and even an Amiga version (!) that would work if I could get SDL/OpenGL stuff to run on my emulated Amiga without guru meditating (Amiga owners know what this means). Anyway, I've put some (uninspiring, but nevertheless new) screenshots on the sparsely populated M3 page.

And finally, happy 25th birthday to Dave C.

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Quatre points

Welcome to the first paragraph. This is where I would have felt the need to come up with some excuse for not updating for a month, had I experienced blogger's guilt, which I did not.

In truth, there's no particular reason for the recent blogging hiatus, other than my pathological tendency to procrastinate, and perhaps the lingering doubt that anyone is actually interested in reading how similar week n was to n-1.

So then, the last four weeks, in inverse chronological order:

The weekend just gone took me to the quintessentially something (towns are always quintessentially something - "English", usually) town of Shrewsbury. It was Sarah's birthday, you see. I drove up there with Charles and Rob, but she was still out at an airshow when we arrived, so we parked in the town and had a wander about.

We drank in a pleasant pub called The Wheatsheaf, whose landlord thanked us and told us to "come again" - unlikely due to the distance, but should I ever be at a loose end in Shrewsbury again, I may just consider it.

A high point of the weekend was our discovery of a small music shop that just happened to be closing down the next day, with everything half price. Sadly, the Korg Triton synthesiser on display was the only item in the shop that wasn't half price, but I did acquire four worthy tab books (The Optimist LP, Kid A, Falling Into Infinity and Hullabaloo) for a bargainous £32.

Returning on Saturday evening, Charles and I met up with Mike and spent some time in a depressingly empty Warwick SU before giving up and heading into Earlsdon, where we found the four members of Slybob drowning their Coventry Youth Festival sorrows in alcohol and amusing tales about the poor turnout and organisation. I felt their pain.

The weekend before that, a mediocre The Stolen gig in Brigstock and precious little else. Shortly before that, an Easyworld gig in Birmingham (which followed another in Northampton). I meant to come straight home from that and write lots about my current opinions on Easyworld and their supports Atlas (thanks James) and Delays (no "The", despite the URL), but I didn't, and the moment has, erm, gone. I can summarise as "Easyworld are turning into Elton John and I don't like it" and "I quite like Atlas but I'd probably like them more if they lost the backing tape and bought the drummer a full drumkit." There, wasn't that refreshingly terse and unsubstantiated?

The remaining time comprised two more gigs with The Stolen, a few pub visits, lots of rehearsing and even some recreational programming (shock horror). And a visit to our old school's (my God, another new website!) Open Evening :-)

Useful software of the month award goes to SpamAssassin and its Win32 adaptation SAproxy. 99% of my few hundred spams a day now get auto-diverted into a folder that is routinely purged. I don't think I've had any false positives, but then I never really glance at the thousands of messages flying past as I hold down the delete key, so who knows.

That concludes the results of the Belorussian telephone vote. The immediate future sees my freedom expiring, as I've been rather kindly and conveniently offered a summer programming job at my old workplace, Aqua Pacific. Money > sleep. I start on 1st August.

I feel this place could use a new colour scheme. Suggestions on a postcard, please.

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