Monday 30th October 2006
I'm in Amsterdam, woo!
(Rob made me write that)
Yes, so I am indeed in Amsterdam, with Tor, Daniel and Rob. After hours of moaning from Anthony, we actually arrived here early via Easyjet. The flight was so amazingly quick that I didn't actually have time to get bored. It was all rather exciting for takeoff and all that, got to be amused by how small the cars are below us, and we saw a plane flying sideways below us. Oh, and we saw the end of the country! Then it only seemed like a matter of minutes before we were beginning our descent.
So yes, we get off at Amsterdam airport, find our luggage quite easily, and then met Tor who took us to get our train ticket for the bus. Welcome to Amsterdam.
To be honest, it's not that different from England, just with bikes everywhere. The weather especially, is no different to that of England.
Rob says I've written enough now, so I'm going to stop. I'm probably going to takee my camera out with me today, so if you like pictures of bicycles, check back tomorrow!
Saturday 14th October 2006
Song: Pink - Dear Mr. President
So yesterday I went to uni for the day, and once that was done I went to James' house and started learning some things. First, I learnt that Linda Perry is a lesbian. Secondly, I learnt how to play the intro riff for Girls Aloud's "Love Machine" on guitar. Quite a productive day indeed.
Then evening saw Rob and me heading off to the good ol' Astoria to see Lacuna Coil. All the goths had come out of their caves to see their Italian heroes. There were sadly a few 13 y/old girls with short skirts and fishnets, but there was also plenty of velvet blouses to make up for it. The actual show was as good as I'd have expected from Lacuna Coil. The only problem was that it was *too* loud. I don't know if I'm just getting old or not, but it was uncomfortably loud. Because of this it felt a lot of the time that Cristina's vocals were sort of getting lost behind the guitars, which is a shame as she's a nice singer. Even Andrea (who is a male... I don't think he's confused, just foreign) who has the obligatory metal growl wasn't coming through too clearly as everything was just so loud. Aside from one twat during their last song, the crowd were mostly quite well behaved, which was nice.
Oh, one thing I did notice though, is that they were playing over some prerecorded bits. I'm always a bit weary of bands who do this. There was a couple of places where there's keyboard or piano in their songs which I could hear, but couldn't see any keyboard on stage. Bit of a shame I thought. Couldn't they get a session musician for touring or something to do this? I remember hearing about Evanescence once, where Amy was playing the intro to some song on her piano, and as the song picked up she got up and stepped away from the piano, yet the piano could still be heard. It kind'a ruins it for me as it then makes me wonder, well what else here is recorded? In theory everything else would be live and the drummer will just have a clicker thing in his ear to keep it all in time. But I'd rather just not have to doubt it.
Oh, and finally I really love Lacuna Coil's cover of "Enjoy The Silence". Having heard it before the original makes my view perhaps a bit biased... But I just find Depeche Mode's version so dull and uhm... well 80s. I more recently heard Easyworld's cover, and although the guitaring was very typically David Ford, I still thought it was a bit too slow. If you're curious about Lacuna Coil's cover, head over to Lacuna Coil's MySpace page and have a listen. Mainstream-ish goth/metal at it's finest.
Wednesday 11th October 2006
Song: Catatonia - Godspeed
I have a bit of a problem.... Here's a picture:
I'm trying to work out how I can tidy up my room, which involves getting rid of this bookcase I have, to free up guitar space. However, on this bookcase I have a fair number of DVDs, and a ton of CDs. What does everyone else do for CD storage? I was tempted to buy some of those narrow floor standing jobbies, but was pretty sure I'd knock them over one day. I need a bigger room. :\
I need to confirm dates and things with Tor, but it looks like I could be going to visit Holland at the end of the month. Could be rather exciting. My understanding of it, is it's a place of open sexual deviants and marijuana. Therefore it was no surprise for me to learn that the people there are generally much happier and friendlier than us Brits.
While in my Java lecture today, I had a piece of sheet music up on my screen, and at one point was using the guitar chord boxes to work out the notes in a particular chord, and the guy next to me went, "You play guitar too?". Winner. It's someone I knew, but never really got to know well. But he's Portugese, and was saying about how Latin music doesn't use the same note naming convention as we do. They apparently use solely do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti; which I seemed to know the as the C major scale (no accidentals). I feel I learnt quite a bit from that lecture in the end, and also seemed to have shared some of my knowledge with this guy. I don't think either of us picked up any new Java though.
I've hit another guitar learning block, which is annoying. There's a technique which of everyone I know, David Ford seems to be best at, of picking notes around a chord shape. But I think to make it sound good you need to get the left hand moving away from the initial chord shape a bit. What I really need is someone who is good at it to explain it to me, and show me little examples and such. So while not making much progress with guitar, I'm trying to put more effort into learning piano. I don't really know what it is that I'm struggling with there to be honest. I'm quite bored of being stuck in C major, just holding three note chords with my left hand and playing a vocal melody with my right hand. However pretty much anything else I've tried normally seems too hard. I'm currently trying (for the second time) to learn, "A Whole New World". I have this problem though of not being able to remember it. I've learnt the little four bar intro, and up until (and not including) the "Tell me princess, now when you did you last let your heart decide" bit. The right hand part of that is just a series of double stops, but I can't seem to remember it. Perhaps I should try that look, cover, try, look again or whatever it was that they make you do in school to try and learn something by heart. Meanwhile, I've got the hang of the chord progression for Daivd Ford's, "Nobody". So that's keeping me quite entertained, as a nice upbeat piano song which I like. :)
Tuesday 10th October 2006
Oh dear... There were rumours the other day, but it is now true that Google have boughht YouTube for $1.65, all stock. Overlooking that last bit for a second, I think this is a pretty bad decision. I don't like how Google have got so big so quick. Whatever happened to the fun, friendly search company? Now they're squirting out new, pointless products every few months, and buying up lots of small startups. The assumption here would be that Google will start banging their adverts all over YouTube to make money off it. They've said that they are going to keep YouTube as it's own brand, and keep it seperate from video.google.com, which is slightly reassuring.
The big issue though is the overwhelming legal issues which YouTube carries. There's so much copyrighted content on there. Despite YouTube not feasibly being able to verify every single video on there, I do believe they're not protected by the common carrier laws. It could go two ways now though, I think. One, Google have an absolute wealth of money and so can pay their way through any legal troubles they've now got. Alternatively though, copyright holders who previously couldn't justify challenging YouTube now might as they know there's a lot of money potentially available. I do believe YouTube had pretty much no money behind them before this.
The thing I overlooked at the start though was that it was an all-stock transaction. My understanding of this stuff isn't too advanced, but I am under the impression they've not actually lost a cent in money through doing this. They've just handed out 1.5% of the company. However, there was an interesting comment on Slashdot...
"Although I disagree with this long term, what most people haven't realized is that Google got YouTube for free. On news they might buy last week, their stock rose ~2%. It rose even more today with more news and will probably raise a bit more tomorrow. So, 1.65 billion in stock was given away which is something like 1.5% of the company. If they just increased the companies worth by 5%, did they not just make a profit buy "buying" this company?"
An interesting thought, though we'll have to see how this turns out in more time. To be honest I'd more expect Google's stock drop a bit from this buy, but we'll see in time.
Monday 9th October 2006
Song: The Vincent Black Shadow - This Road Is Going Nowhere
So, I decided to have a stab at parsing XML with Javascript tonight. And so I made this masterpeice. Click the links on the left to see some news!
It seems to work fine in Firefox, a bit hit and miss in Safari, and no idea at all about Internet Explorer (but I'm not feeling hopeful tbh). Pretty useless really, but was just something for me to make to teach myself the stuff.
That's all for now, not really in the mood to write much... I feel this blog is dying :(
*edit* I've now tested it with Explorer and it works fine. Apparently the problem with Safari is a problem with Apple's DOM thinger. Something I can't be bothered to work around. As for Opera, I don't have it here to test.
I'm not too worried though, I didn't make this thing to have the best RSS reader in the world. Far from it. The actual reason I made this was so I could not feel bad about skipping a lecture this morning. :)
Thursday 5th October 2006
Song: Placebo - Nancy Boy
Today's been a good day. :)
When the uni makes up our timetables, it seems that every year there is an obligatory three hour gap which must be put in. This year, I have a 11-1 lecture, followed by a 4-6 workshop every Thursday. Today though, purely by chance, I bumped into Richard in a corridor. So while getting in everyone's way and exchanging pleasantries I said I have this three hour gap, so he invited me back to his, and so we went. What did we do when we got there? We rocked! Oh yes we did.
I've never really properly sat down with another guitarist of similar ability to uhm, "jam", before... So I really enjoyed it. Things just sound so much better with two guitars playing at the same time, can't be explained until you hear it. Even if both guitars are playing exactly the same thing. I particularly liked (as I've wanted to do it for a while) Easyworld's "A Stain To Never Fade", with me doing the picking, and him strumming the chords over it. It sounded really lovely. :D If only I had Dav's voice. I think if I ever stumble upon a genie in a lamp, that will be my first wish...
Sunday 1st October 2006
Well I'm bored, and decided I'd not written anything here for a while, so maybe it's time for an update.
So over the past few days, I've been trying to learn to play "Drive" on guitar... Yet another delightful Easyworld song. So, once I got the general hang of it, I decided to start recording. The result can be found...
Here!
It's not without flaw, but frankly I can't be bothered to fix it now. For the sake of getting a slightly brighter sound I played all the chords in the verses as barre chords, and one of the D chords didn't come out too well. I wonder though if it only sounds really bad to me 'cause I know it's there. Not sure how obvious it will be to everyone else. First chorus is a bit quiet and things like that, but on the whole I don't think it came out too badly. I need someone brave enough to sing for me. :)
Aside from this, other recent events in life have included uni restarting. Third and final year, and first week hasn't overly pleased me really. We've had a lecturer on the wrong side of the planet, me not being able to get into rooms, and a lecture with a broken projector and missing microphone. I went to talk to my supervisor person about my final year project last week, and the first little task he set me is appearing to be absolutely impossible. So that's a bit frustrating, as I was quite looking forward to it. Need to have a word with him about that next week. Anyway... maybe next week will go better on the whole.
Sadly, I can't think of much else to write. I'm sure I've done quite a few things since I last updated this thing. Oh well...