When I was doing Computer Studies at school (remember the BBC Micro anyone?) one of my teacher’s pet concepts was the “paperless office”, that great day in the future when all information would be held on computers and people would no longer communicate by letter but by something called “electronic mail” (sounds ridiculous doesn’t it?), removing the need for paper in our lives. Read the rest of Paperless Office? Yeah right
I recently posted this on the SibeliusMusic chat page in response to a request for information about the Wagner Tuba, an instrument which is unsurprisingly overlooked by most orchestration textbooks. I thought I’d put it up here for the benefit of other SibMus users (and anyone else!) in the future. At some point I’ll do a few more articles on other aspects of writing for the horn, like hand-stopping and so forth. In my experience, published information on this subject tends to be very sketchy and gives composers an incomplete understanding of what’s really possible and what’s not. Feel free to comment if you feel I’ve missed anything out or got anything wrong. Read the rest of Wagner Tubas - a crib sheet for composers
Well, summer’s over, England have won the Ashes and I’m having to face up to a few hard realities; namely, I will never again hear the dulcet tones of Richie Benaud on these shores, furthermore, if I want to see any cricket on telly again I will finally be forced to get Sky (but only if they have Geoff Boycott), and lastly I now have to find something constructive to do with my time. I’ll be back to teaching next week, Open University starts again at the beginning of October, and the ominous outline of the ESO Beethoven symphony cycle is already looming on the distant horizon.
I’m going to try and post more often here as well, hopefully with something more interesting than the minutiae of my life. I’m thinking of a series of design articles to try and clarify my own ideas on the subject, so watch out.
Yet another means of distraction has presented itself to me. It’s called Google Earth and will no doubt become the next big thing on the net, until the next big thing after that comes along.
If you haven’t discovered this yet, basically it’s like a virtual globe, which uses keyhole satellite pictures of varying magnification to build up images on the screen. The detail is just staggering. The Golden Gate Bridge, Grand Canyon, White House, Everest… all like you’re flying over in a plane, right down to about 500 feet. Even my house in Blackheath. I have had the utterly surreal experience of zooming around above Sydney, being given directions by my uncle via MSN to find his apartment in North Bondi! ” see the swimming pool at the end of the beach?”… “yes”… “follow road up to roundabout and take second exit”… “there are some trees on the left?” Unbelievable.
I’m thinking now what I need is my own personal spy satellite to hook up to it with live feeds, and I can go looking for nuclear weapons and stuff. Maybe the Russians will sell me one.
Between those clever buggers at Google, and Messrs. Flintoff and co, I probably won’t get much work done this weekend.
Ok it’s now definitely finished. Two acknowledgements must here be made:
Firstly Andy who helped me out with a CSS problem which was totally spooning up my pages in IE/Win.
Secondly, Bruce Lawson’s personal site has a couple of very useful articles on WordPress and accessibility, many suggestions from which I have incorporated into my design. Bruce makes some useful points about accessibility issues beyond the WAI checklist, for instance in the over-use of characters such as « and » in navigation links, which can be annoying if you’re using a screenreader.
BTW Bruce’s blog contains some really funny stuff - the spam letters literally reduced me to tears.
Here, after a couple of hours’ wrestling with a recalcitrant FTP client, is my new-look, renamed, WordPress-powered, complete-with-go-faster stripes blog. You may have noticed the URL has changed (you were automatically redirected here). This is in preparation for the launch of the rest of my personal site at a later date, so I would suggest you update your bookmarks.
Those of you using my RSS feeds will also hopefully be redirected. I now have RSS2 entries and comments feeds as well as Atom, so you may want to update the feed subscription as well.
I’m still playing around with the layout, and will shortly have gravatar support as well as XFN, and I also have to edit all my posts to strip out some truly horrible markup left over from the Blogger import, but I welcome any comments or suggestions about how the site looks. So far, though, I have to say I’m pretty pleased with it.
His Saxophone Is Silent, His Life Is in the Balance
Michael Brecker, one of jazz’s most influential tenor saxophonists over the last quarter-century, has been forced to stop performing by blood and bone marrow disease and is searching for a stranger to save his life.
Mr. Brecker, 56, was recently found to have myelodysplastic syndrome, a form of cancer in which the bone marrow stops producing enough healthy blood cells. His doctors say he needs a blood stem cell and bone marrow transplant, a harrowing procedure that will be possible only if Mr. Brecker finds a stem cell donor with a specific enough genetic match for his tissue type. So far, they have been unable to find one from the millions of people on an international registry for bone marrow donors.
Another example of the callous and random way in which cancer chooses its victims. When hearing people denounce the kind of cutting-edge medicine which will hopefully keep Mr Brecker alive as “playing God”, I can’t help thinking that there are times when the scientists could probably do a better job.
If any of you are unfamiliar with Michael Brecker, his playing is not to be missed, especially his work with Steps Ahead.
Get well soon.
I’m currently having fun with WordPress, which is a truly fantastic piece of blogging software. Once I’ve got to grips with the nuts and bolts (and there are many of them) I’ll be relaunching this blog on it, with lots of shiny new things.
I have the TV on in the background, and have just learned to my dismay that the wet-nosed bunch of chinless f**king wonders McFly have had the audacity and sheer lack of reverence for great rock demi-gods to do a cover of Pinball Wizard!
AAAARRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!!
HOW DARE THEY???!!!????
I thought nothing could be any worse than the insipid rendition of “My Generation” offered by Oasis last year, but no - this pathetic excuse for a band have plumbed new depths. I feel unclean.
Normally, I would purge this filth by playing my Who albums at nuclear-holocaust volume, but it’s 2 in the morning and I don’t think my flatmates would be too thrilled. I’ll just have to seethe quietly over my stylesheet.
I’m working on an arrangement of the Siegfried-Idyll by Richard Wagner, a work I don’t know as well as I probably should, but has me mesmerised, in much the same way as the sort of book you can’t help but read from beginning to end in a day. The introduction has an almost continually unfolding harmonic progression, like a kaleidoscope, which I keep expecting to fall on a suitably stable resting point allowing me to go to bed. However I’m compelled to keep working. It’s a bit like the Prelude to his opera Tristan und Isolde in that respect - a lecturer of mine once remarked, half-seriously, that Tristan is essentially a chord that takes 4½ hours to resolve.
Anyway, a quick cup of tea and back to it. I’m going to Lucerne on Sunday, where the Siegfried-Idyll was first performed, so I’ll have to dump it onto my laptop and take it with me to see if I can imbue it with the same Swiss inspiration Wagner had.
Only a year ago, we and the United States were part of a coalition against terrorism that was wider and more diverse than I would ever have imagined possible. History will be astonished at the diplomatic miscalculations that led so quickly to the disintegration of that powerful coalition. The US can afford to go it alone, but Britain is not a superpower. Our interests are best protected not by unilateral action but by multilateral agreement and a world order governed by rules…
… I welcome the strong personal commitment that the prime minister has given to middle east peace, but Britain’s positive role in the middle east does not redress the strong sense of injustice throughout the Muslim world at what it sees as one rule for the allies of the US and another rule for the rest.
This is part of Robin Cook’s resignation speech in the Commons in March 2003. Given recent events in London and the uncertainty of what lies ahead, I hope that these words are remembered.
Britain has lost a man of principle and a great mind. I wish there were a few more like him in power.
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