Not much to report right now. The conversion to CORBA is entering its fourth ridiculous week - its driving me mad - all I've been doing is trying out different combinations of things. I've abandoned the commercial CORBA route and am now trying an open source one. At least if it doesn't work I can hack the source code. Its frustrating though - I feel stuck. I am sure this is a contributing factor to the sore throat I have right now. Being "stuck" is one of the things that seems to have a negative effect on my imune system. Bleh.
Some music stuff over the weekend but being ill wasn't really up for it. Got some great string ensemble samples and I have an idea for a more classical type piece to attempt. I also built myself a soundscaping rig in the pulsar. I need to learn to play with it properly now. Its a great tool for realtime performance though. Its good doing lots of music again - everything I learn though makes me realise how far I have to go before I even feel competent - I like the stuff I do (which lets face it is the most important thing) but there are lots of things I can hear in my head that I can't even begin to realize for other people to hear.
Quiet weekend apart from that. Caught up with some of A.'s family. Got cable internet access (at long last - its so nice to have decent access again) installed. Went to Ikea. Went down to the lake to feed the swans on sunday. Pleasant, relaxing and not in the least bit exciting.
Book of the moment is How the dead live by Will Self. Its exellent so far - the narrator is an old woman talking about the events leading up to (and following on from) her death. She has a dark and pointy humour and the writing is excellent. Music of the moment is the latest Electric Ladyland compilation from Mille Plateaux. The digital glitch brigade take hip hop and r'n'b on to produce work that is both funky and intellectually interesting. It also has the distinction of being one by my cd's that A. doesn't instantly complain about. (A. is not a great fan of the stuff I listen to).
Its scary - these updates are getting almost regular. I'm sure it won't last though....
Still stuck on the stupid conversion to CORBA at work. I will be glad to get it sorted out and out of the way.
Excellent weekend as ever - did some shopping on Saturday (even bought some new clothes). Then we went for a walk up behind West Linton in the Pentland Hills. Got lots of reading done as well - caught up with this months magazines and finished The Dumas Club. An excellent tale of litarary intrigue. Its hard to imagine that a tale of a spannish bookseller investigating the authenticity of a manuscript from the three muskateers could be so hard to put down but it was. I am sure that if you spoke other languages (french and Latin come to mind) you would get even more out of it but even as it stands its a damm fine read. I am currently reading Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett - which despite being marketed as a childrens book is classic Pratchett and rather entertaining.
My friend Rick has a new short story available for free When The Stars Threw Down Their Spears (go to the page and click on the story title). I haven't had a chance to read it yet but if you can't plug your friends on your own website where can you do it eh?
Also as Mr Steve points out below if you are unfortunate (*evil grin*) enough to own a Mac you might want to use iTunes rather than WinAmp to listen to Mp3's.
I had not intention whatsoever of doing any music this weekend - the idea was to give my creative batteries a rest and let them recharge. However I got to messing about with the Modular Synth that I have for the pulsar and ended up writing the track below. Its mostly the modular (a single patch with several parts) although there is a deep bass part added via the sampler. This mp3 is rendered at 64kbs rather than 128 to keep the download size down. If you want a higher resolution version feel free to email me.
Marinus ( mp3 , 5,257KB , 11:12)
I have been giving some thought to doing a compilation of my recent music for Christmas. If you would be interested in receiving a copy please email me. This will be CDR format (although there will be artwork). If numbers are high there may be a small charge.
Here are some pictures: my car,a dock,a tree,a cat.
And here are pictures I made with the timelapse feature on my camera when I was bored in a traffic jam in the rain.
A lovely relaxing weekend - I would have done this update then but still doomed to treacle slow dial up at present.
On friday night A. and I went to see The Others - the new Nicole Kidman film. I was lucky enough to go and see it knowing absolutely nothing about it except that Kidman was in it. It is in my opinion an excellent film - it is a classic ghost story, it relies on good story telling rather than gory special effects. The old house, the mist, the muted colours. The use of music is sparse (something that they could have pushed further I felt - we are so used to music dictating the mood in films). The twists and turns are nothing you won't have read elsewhere if you like this kind of thing but it is the telling that is done well. Although it works well in the cinema - this would be a great film to watch on DVD late at night on your own for best effect.
On saturday we went to see the Rachel Whiteread exhibition at Edinburgh Gallery of Modern art. Having read a lot about her work it was intriguing to see it in real life. Art very rarely works refracted through magazines, television and books - even classic things like Dali, Picasso or Renaissace work has a stunning presence in real life that you can not even imagine even if you have see reproductions every day of your life.
Whitereads work is very minimal - casts of familiar everyday objects: bookcases, beds, or the spaces around them. The center piece is the cast of the entire stair space of a house. Despite their similarity some of the works I found very engaging - the book shelf pieces and the cast of the space under a table and its chair done in some translucent material. Other pieces didn't really effect me at all. The work has a haunting lost quality that I like though.
Spent some time over the weekend exploring the pulsar at the heart of my studio and making sounds for the two projects I am working on right now: The album I started last year - Out amongst the Beacons and the Storytellers project. Both are comming along well. I also made the track below.
Shallow Breath (mp3, 3,997KB, 4:15 )
This is a sketch of a track that may well appear on "out amongst the beacons". The title comes from a Rachel Whiteread sculpture. The track is based around two samples (the breath sample being run through the Reverse Reverb preset on my MPX1 - now connected into my studio completely digitally) and some chords played on the pulsars UNKNOW 007 (a very accurate Juno 106 emulation).
NOTE: to play the mp3's that appear on these pages I would recomend the use of WinAmp if you use windows. In order to read the PDF files (see below) you will need Acrobat
I'm stuck so I thought I'd post an entry. Bloody classloaders thats all I can say. I had been planning an entry on the nature of family but I'm not really in the mood for that now so you will have to put up with a random thought:
What is it with all these people who write in the weblogs or diaries or whatever - oh its hard to do anything 'cos everything seems so trivial after september 11th. What?? - so somehow you thought what you where doing WAS of some great significance before that. On a global scale of things very few of us get to make a major difference (unless you are a world leader or the like). The important things is that we all add to the sum total of humanity. Each little thing we do is a contribution - if its good/postive/interesting/etc. we add to the world and maybe make peoples lives a little better - if its bad/destructive/etc. we make the world a worse place. Its not difficult. Of course different people will see things in different lights - for example the band Black Lace make my world a worse place - on the other hand they are easy to avoid and (somewhat bizzarely) they seem to make some people happy.
On an entirely unrelated issue - Don't look at pictures if you are of a weak disposition.
