Thursday 29th September 2005
I really, really hate my university. It's 1pm, I've wasted nearly all morning on the phone to them, just trying to sort out my enrolment for this year. Very, very annoyed. I've still not even got a valid ID card.
*anger*
Monday 26th September 2005
Song: Joss Stone - You Had Me
Just to let you all know, I am still alive despite having not been on MSN in a few days. My stupid hand is still screwed up. I'm not sure what to do about work this week. I can't really get away with not using a computer there. I suck.
Wednesday 21st September 2005
Song: Fightstar - Hazy Eyes
I found out today that Sun Microsystems occupied two floors of the south tower, of the famous twin towers once standing in NYC. It put a bit of a damper on my afternoon... I asked a question ("When would you want to use 'halt' to shutdown a sytem, then?"), and then I end up hearing about this. The relevance was that the admin who was in charge of the datacenter there had to run "halt" on all the servers (once the plane had hit the other building) and told all the other staff there to go home. I can't help but think that that admin probably doesn't really care that his disks were sync'ed nicely before shutting down. It wasn't too much longer before the servers were flattened under the whole building and everything above them...
The good news though was that mr admin and all other staff did get out before the building collapsed. Apparently though Sun did lose one employee that day. They were on one of the planes.
Sad. :(
Sunday 18th September 2005
Song: Straylight Run - Dignity And Money
Time for a quick blog...
Sometime around Thursday night and Friday, I had a horribly familiar feeling in my right hand. It was last year's tendonitis. It came as no suprise to me, as once again it was self inflicted, but at least this year I knew what it was early on, and how to deal with it. Sadly this meant on Friday that I had to decline two offers for foosball, but I had to be sensible about it. Saturday, for the first time in a veeery long time, I spent nearly the whole day in front of the TV. It wasn't bad though... top 100 (or was it 50?) dumbass videos on Kerrang, some other weird music chart, Oasis live on E4, and a few interesting programs amongst the educational block of channels. I for some reason got quite hooked on a "Teachers TV", which is basically a channel for key stage 3 and 4 teachers. When I first found it, it was a programme about Maths, which wasn't hugely interesting, but I liked the idea. Luckily, starting on the next hour was a programme about music. In the mean time, I found Top Gear to watch. When this music thing eventually came on, I was amazed by the stuff kids get these days. They were basically in pairs, each pair had a computer, each computer had a MIDI keyboard attached to it. Also on each computer was some software that lets you do mixing of audio tracks, and throws out drum loops etc. They basically then had to all write songs. Pretty neat, and they were all able to do it, regardless of any prior musical experience. I then lost interest as the programme changed slightly to soemthing a bit less interesting, and so I went channel hopping. I had intended on returning though, at quarter to the next hour as this music programme was going to be discussing how to write a pop song. I expected it to be pretty basic, but thought I'd like it none the less. Anyway, I actually forgot about it... but at about five to the next hour, I went back to the channel amongst my hopping and caught the end few minutes of this programme on writing a pop song. I'm shocked to see though, a familiar looking face on my TV.
It was Jim Corr! Much to my suprise, they were actually using a *real* pop song on this programme. At this point I reeeally wished I hadn't missed the first ten minutes. I was hooked immediately. Basically it was him and another producer (The Corrs generally produce or co-produce a lot of their stuff) going through all the tracks on the intro to "Would You Be Happier?". It was sooo interesting though. Despite my interest in The Corrs specifically, it was cool to see how a song that I knew well, was constructed. There was a mix of a live drummer (Caroline Corr) and a synth thing making a few drum loops. So that alone was about five channels used. Then they silenced them, and went to the guitar that does the main intro arpeggio. That sounded kind'a interesting by itself, I thought. Then he (Jim) went on to talk about how they wanted to add to that sound a bit, and so then pressed a button which added in a twelve string guitar on top of the electric one and again played the riff with those two bits. He then went on to add I think it was two Gibson guitars with distortion (they're used later on in the song). Then there was a piano part, and then some keyboards. Theeen, he focused on the backing vocals. Sharon and Caroline (who harmonise nicely all the time) doing the "happier, if you weren't so untogether.... brighter, if you played a bigger part". They sounded a bit weird on its own. But then he added in Andrea's vocals. "Would you be happier, if you weren't so untogether..." on top of the backing vocals and it sounded pretty good (again these were in isolation, with no instruments). Then finally, he played the chorus, adding in all the parts one at a time: Drums, electric guitar doing riff, distorted guitar playing what sound like power chords, keyboards, piano, vocals; and it was really cool to hear all these bits of the song all come together. I really want to play around in a recording studio now.
I was then desperate to see when this programme was repeated to see what I missed. Luckily, it was on today. It turns out I only missed about 5 minutes as before The Corrs was some crappy rap duo with some pathetic drum beat that only used about four channels and took about 10 minutes to make. But the bit of The Corrs I missed was pretty cool. A quick insight to a more important step before the recording and production of a song: The writing! Yes indeed, they had Caroline sat at a Piano (she's the drummer, but all four of them play piano) talking about how she just had like these three chords, and wasn't too sure about it, and then Andrea heard it and hummed a vocal melody over it, and then it went from there. Very cool, I thought. Then it pretty much went to where I'd tuned in the day before. So, uh, that's about it really. :) I just thought it was really cool stuff to see happening, made so much cooler by the fact it was The Corrs (perhaps the most underappreciated two, too!).
Thankfully by now (Sunday night) my hand feels a bit better, so I should be alright for driving to work tomorrow (driving with inflamed tendons makes steering quite awkward and painful). All this week I'm on a training course, so am out of my normal work. Bit of a shame as there's a bit of an important staff meeting which I'm going to miss. But anywho, I'm doing Solaris 9 Administration, intermediate level. Should be kind of cool. I think it's going to get a bit boring after a while though, too intense. Five whole days on Solaris. Hopefully though I'll learn a fair bit.
Oh! Another thing I was going to say, following the excitement of watching Caroline Corr on the piano, was that it made me really want to be able to be a master of the keys... or something. It's tempting to look for piano tuition as learning it by myself has proved to be very hard (much harder than guitar). I have an income now, so I feel like if I don't do it now, I wont be able to until mid 2007 at the earliest. Please leave comments of encouragement to make me do this and not be a tight bastard and keep all my money to myself.
That's all for now kids.
Monday 12th September 2005
I want to add to that previous one actually... I thought it was internal only, but Google knows about it so I figure I can mention it. But anyway, Sun have a thing called "Training Access Network". So what is it, I hear you cry?
SunTAN
*ba-dum-tsch*
I like how IT people have a sense of humour.
Sunday 11th September 2005
Hehe, Apple have made a webcam, and in accordance with their typical naming of things, they've stuck an 'i' at the start. So what is it called, you ask? Well I'll tell you. It is called: iSight.
Very clever, Apple. :)
Tuesday 6th September 2005
Song: Busted - Why
I'm not sure if anyone ever checks my referrals page, if not, I would recommend a glance every now and again. Each section is sorted by order so you only need to check the bottom of each list each time. The current ones that made me laugh are: DIY plans + rocking horse, need to be fucked, sleep fucked, outfits tranvestite, and "friends paper snow a ghost". I think that page goes to show just how much crap I actually write about.
Good news for the neighbours recently has been that for about a month or so I've not really played my guitar much. The bad news for them, is that I'm starting to pick it up again. Recently I've come to realise that I don't really need to focus too much time on strumming chords. I think I can churn out the open chords as good as any James Bourne or Tom Fletcher (the crap ones in Busted and McFly respectively). Subsequently I'm now going to turn my attention to what I should have done a long time ago. It's time to get my fingers moving individually. No I don't plan to be throwing out solos like Slash, but I would like to be able to do a bit more with a guitar than I can at present. If for no other reason than wanting to no longer feel on par with James and Tom.
Incidently (and somewhat ironically) I really want to buy Busted and McFly song books. The reason is that their songs on the whole aren't terribly complicated, and so I should have some hope of being able to play their little melodies and solos. Went through half of Busted's second album earlier looking for tabs online and seeing how I fare. I eventually stopped at "Why", which is by far my favourite song on that album. It's also become the favourite song of anyone who I've forced Busted on to. I think I've mentioned it on here before actually. The significance of it (in relation to this blog's topic) is that the intro (I didn't get any further than that) is finger picked. So this is my chance... a song I like, which can excercise both hands at the same time.
Amazingly, I sort of got the hang of the intro (my finger picking skills were next to none before starting this). So I may move on a bit tomorrow. I stopped as my hands were starting to ache and I didn't want to push my luck. Anyway, I want to go to bed now.