teh bigbro blog(tm)
Bigbro's foray into the scary world of blogging
01 2006

Mon, 30 Jan 2006

...makes my cooking look good.
posted at: 11:40 | path: /observations | permanent link to this entry

For the record, I wish you all to observe that I fly to the US later today, and I have already completely packed my bags.

(This may, of course, be considered cheating by some, since I flew in from the UK a couple of days ago and have just not unpacked since then.)
posted at: 02:02 | path: /observations | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 25 Jan 2006

My friends are excellent at keeping me in a continual state of worry:

* artemis does not like sybase
* dredg does not like monkeys
<dredg> that's a total lie

<moonbeam> cd wow resending my dvds
<moonbeam> they went missing in the most:(
* dredg curses the most

<atlas> i've now taken the right ear of my headphones apart and i can't figure out why it won't work
<dredg> probably cos it's been dismantled
<dredg> that usually makes most things stop working

Tue, 24 Jan 2006

I've set up a schedule for keeping track of the tunes I learn throughout the year on the tin whistle. By the end of the year, I should have at least 26 tunes added to my repertoire. I've started by adding notation and a rough recording of each tune, a practice which I mean to continue. I'll also (as time permits) add playing notes, accompaniment notes and suggestions, and anything else I can think of that's appropriate. Hopefully, by this time next year it should have built up into a reasonably good teaching / research resource for some small amount of Irish music. Also, I'll be able to play at least 26 tunes on the whistle.
posted at: 12:48 | path: /music | permanent link to this entry

Sun, 22 Jan 2006

For the record, despite my lack of postings here, I have been practicing a new piece, "Ballydesmond, No. 3" in order to keep to my quota of a new piece every two weeks. I've just not managed to find the time to write it up yet.
I tried to record it - along with a later, more practiced, version of "Shoe The Donkey" but I've been having a series of problems with the drivers for the M-Audio Firewire 410 interface I use. Without going into too much detail, it first managed to corrupt the operating system's MIDI subsystem: so CoreAudio would crash when anything tried to initialise the MIDI drivers. Installation of the latest driver, v1.5.3 corrected this but I've been completely unable to get a pop/click/drop-out free recording since. A quick google revealed that pretty much anyone trying to use the Firewire 410 under OS X has had similar problems.
I'll be switching back to my Edirol FA-101 for future recordings, I think.
posted at: 11:54 | path: /music | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 19 Jan 2006

Only a few short days after putting in my order for a pair of Sennheiser HD-590s and a pair of Beyerdynamic DT-100s, they have arrived. I've not yet had a chance to test them yet, or even plug them into anything for that matter - that shall be my task for this evening (after the tech team meeting at the Priestley, of course.)
Thanks Thomann - you're stars! :-)
posted at: 16:27 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 16 Jan 2006

I put in the order for my headphones late last night and today received an e-mail from Thomann confirming price and delivery instructions. Nothing too out of the ordinary with that you might say...
What impresed me was the text message I received shortly after, confirming that my order had been despatched and giving me the name of the representative responsible for my order. Now that's service Well done Thomann, keep up the good work!
I'll post reviews and my opinions of the headphones when I've received them and tried them out a bit. Should be very soon now :-)
posted at: 18:47 | path: | permanent link to this entry

For those of you who were following my headphone breakage saga (2 pairs of headphones that have both lasted me about 10 years, broke within a month of each other) - I have now purchased a set of Sennheiser HD-590 for general listening and piano/keyboard playing - and a set of Beyerdynamic DT-100s for tracking and as a reference pair.
Hopefully they'll be delivered soon and I can start putting them through their paces.
posted at: 11:36 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Sun, 15 Jan 2006

Some google videos that other people found on the internet and thought they should share with me...

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1329362959167995041

Tripod performing at some Comedy Festival, bringing to life the reality of interpersonal intimate relationships and computer gaming... ;-)

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1581867722104021421

A lesson in how to really play the drums, from a 12 year old.

It's always nice to see friends continuing traditions that I've had the privilege to be involved in. When the Boat Race was up and running there used to be an Irish Traditional Session each and every Monday night. The Earl Of Beaconsfield in Cambridge has played host to the session since then and some photos have finally emerged.
Great to see the music and tradition carrying on. Perhaps I'll join you some Monday evening and try and remember some of my 'Jazz Chords'... ;-)
Keep on playing.
posted at: 19:50 | path: /music | permanent link to this entry

Fri, 13 Jan 2006

It being Friday the 13^th I thought I'd be quite cunning and bail out of work early. I'd been working since 8:15am anyway and intended to do another hour's work on the bus home, so I felt not one twinge of guilt.
Well, one thing led to another (as it often does) and I ended up highlighting some GBLX routing issue to heanet, spending 45 minutes running tests from there and an alternate site to verify and isolate the fault and ended up getting the 4:52pm bus. This, of course, didn't turn up until shortly after 5:00pm with the net result that I've travelled about 500m in 20 minutes, still have not left Leeds city centre and have a great view of multiple lines of red brake lights stretching out into the visible distance in front of me.
Commuting sucks.

5:40pm Update: It's now 48 minutes from the scheduled bus time and I should be almost home now. I've just passed the Leeds Evening Post building. Inappropriate Yay!
posted at: 17:41 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 12 Jan 2006

I've managed to practice every evening since I started with "Shoe The Donkey" last week and I think I'm slowly getting to grips with the instrument. Sinéad gives out to me for putting in ornamentations and has pointed out to me (quite rightly) that I should practice the basic melody first, until I get it right. Just as a doctor makes a bad patient, I think I'm going to continue to be a bad music student. Oh well.
I'm painfully aware that it's the 12^th today, which means I need to start a new tune in two days. This is one New Year's resolution I'm going to try and stick to, so I'll post some more music shortly.
posted at: 09:18 | path: /music | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 11 Jan 2006

I have just completed "Fire Marshall" training with my employer. While this has been valuable for work, of course, it also made me think about fire safety in my home. We do have smoke detectors in every room which I regularly test and replace the batteries in. We have a CO₂ (I run a few computers at home) and a couple of water fire extinguishers there and the obligatory fire blanket in the kitchen. But what about exiting the house in a fire situation? I'm not entirely sure how I'd get out from an upstairs room if the stairs was blocked or at risk.
We've been looking at houses lately and one with a converted attic has appealed to us - but now I've started thinking about how I'd escape from there if one of the stairs were compromised.
While I don't think anyone should lose any sleep worrying about such things, I do recommend you have a brief think about such things yourself. Think about planned escape routes, how you'd navigate them in the dark or through smoke. Think about where you keep accelerants in your house: the liquor cabinet, petrol for the lawn-mower, paints and solvents for DIY, etc.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think I've eschewed safety in the home, nor do I think that my home is at risk in the case of fire (more than any other comparable dwelling, at least) but I'll certainly be looking for simple things that can be changed to maybe make it a little bit safer. Given the average time for a dropped match in a living room to turn into an inferno is 3 minutes, every second counts.
Be safe.
posted at: 13:50 | path: /observations | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 09 Jan 2006

Those of you who access my blog through blog.signal2noise.co.uk might notice that I completely rewrote the menu system to allow previous months of blog entries to be accessed. An initial rewrite failed the diamond test (asking diamond whether he liked it or not) and after he quite rightly pointed out that I shouldn't be a lazy coder, I genericised the system to give the current offering. It's still text only, implemented in perl rather than javascript so it's any-browser(tm) compatible - and most importantly, it doesn't require me to do anything next year to add another year to the calendar. Next step is to start automating the addition of months. Perhaps I'll get a chance to code that tomorrow evening.
posted at: 02:34 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry

I let Sinéad pick my first piece to learn in the new year and she suggested one I already play regularly on piano and guitar for céilís, Shoe The Donkey. I've written up some notation (see below) without ornamentation and even managed to make a VERY rough recording of me playing it. I'll post my trials and tribulations of trying to get a glitch-free recording under Mac OS-X and an M-Audio Firewire 410 some other day.
Please forgive the quality of the recorded audio - it was recorded on an ibook in my living room and is intended purely as a reference for myself to see how much (and if) I improve during the year.

• Shoe The Donkey (Finale Notepad 2005a format)
• Shoe The Donkey (PDF Format)
• Shoe The Donkey (Ogg Vorbis Format)

Sun, 08 Jan 2006

• My PlayStation 2 somehow manages to prevent the audio from my DVD player from reaching my telly.
• Bill Bailey without sound is slightly less comedy than when you can hear what he's ranting about.

Sat, 07 Jan 2006

I originally started this blog in February 2005 so that I could post useful musical information and track my progress as I learn to play the tin whistle with some degree of competence. What with learning the mandolin, playing about with various recording and post-production hardware and software and spending inordinate amounts of time doing my day-job, this has clearly fallen by the wayside.
So: 2006! I resolve to learn a new tune on my whistle every 2 weeks, write up some notes and the notation for it and post here. If I get some other stuff sorted I'll even start posting recordings.
Tomorrow I shall post my first tune, "Shoe The Donkey" and I'll try to keep posting regularly after that.
posted at: 23:21 | path: /music | permanent link to this entry

Yarrr! here be the Jolly Roger of all links...

http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/ten-commandments.html

The 10 commandments for C programmers - truly a ruleset of biblical import for good programming practice in C.

http://www.weebls-stuff.com/images/toyadfinalsmaller.gif

Brought to my attention by minus1 - I really do worry about that lad. What WAS he searching for on the internet when he came across this gem? ;-)

Tue, 03 Jan 2006

The Nokia 770 is an internet tablet, with the software being based on a Linux platform. It supports 802.11b/g Wireless, Bluetooth and wired USB.
Thanks to Niall, I've been able to have a reasonably extensive play with one.

• There's a standard 3.5mm stereo jack plug for audio out - this is good and means I can use headphones of my choice. I didn't check the output impedance, but I'll assume it's reasonable.
• The screen is excellent. For the purposes of taking notes, it would be great if it were a little larger, but you can't have everything :-)
• Where's the IrDA / Infra-Red. This device could be great as a multi-purpose programmable remote control.
• The Sketch application doesn't appear to have a method of putting text into the picture. Please add this.
• The system seems to drain battery overnight, even though it's turned off. I'm not sure why it's doing this. (It appears the problem is with battery calibration and the battery meter, rather than with it using power. Turning the unit off off for a few hours resulted in the 770 deciding it was half charged rather than low battery.)
• I was unable to find a method of putting the system to sleep and waking it up rapidly. Powering it off and having to reboot it before use is suboptimal. (Further disussion with users suggests that they just let the screen turn off and that it will last several days this way.)
• The MMC card appears to be a completely different form factor to the MMC cards I have for my 6230 and 9500. This meant I couldn't easily transfer data between them. Please, once you pick a standard - stick to it.
• Despite the battery being the same model number as my 9500 battery, the mAh rating is different (1500mAh in the 770 Vs 1300mAh in the 9500) and the power input is different. Why can I not use all my spare Nokia phone chargers to charge the 770?
• Being able to teach it my style of handwriting is good. But why can I not add multiple forms of script per letter. The letter 'f' is causing me particular problems because of the crossover between the way I write it and the 770's idea of how 't' is written. The ability to 'unteach' the 770 certain styles of letter scripting would solve this.
• Why not full bluetooth support? Perhaps a future model could support VoIP and I could use it to make VoIP calls with my b/t headset.
• I was unable (out of the box) to use b/t OBEX to transfer data from any of my laptop/6230/9500 to the 770. Apparently the OBEX server and client can be installed on the 770, but it's not there out of the box.

copyright © 2005-2011, Gareth Eason