Category Archives: Music

Music Stuff

Italian Vacation & iPod

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Hi all,

It’s that time of the year again when I like to head off away from everyone in the UK for a bit of peace and quiet in Italy where we have a modest size appartment. We say it’s in Venice, and while technically it is, it’s not the place you’d stay if you were coming to Venice for a holiday. The block of appartments is on a natural island in the Venice lagoon called The Lido or more correctly Lido di Venezia.

It is technically larger than Venice itself and is home to approximately 20,000 people. The region we live in is called Malamocco. It is where the locals of the lido live, and parts of it are very rural. All the others in our block are italians, and while the majority of people speak english it isn’t brilliant, so one day we will need to speak italian decently. Travel to the main part of venice is a 20 minute bike ride/10 minute bus ride/a long walk followed by a half boat ride from the vaporetto station Santa Maria Elisabetta.

Anyway, that’s the background to the place.
On arriving here I’ve been listening to all the songs I’ve put on the ipod i bought in september. I now have about 7 days or 3000 songs on there and having spent a good few hours travelling by taxi, coach, plane, boat and car to get here along with plenty of time hanging around in the airport I’ve had a lot of time to come up with opinions on the ipod.

As you have no doubt realised, I’m a late commer to iPods for a number of reasons:

  1. I always had a scepticism about them
  2. There was something I liked about actually putting a cd in
  3. I never wanted to commit the hard disk space to mp3s
  4. Until recently there was something very irritating about iTunes, and I still secretly pine for Cassady & Greene’s SoundJam to return

I finally gave in when it became impractical to carry 300 cds (well, I used to bring 100 of them with me on holiday) around with me. And the price and size of the iPods just got too tempting to resist and I got the 80Gb 5th gen iPod Video.

As I said, I’ve got quite a lot of my music on there, but I’ve decided there are still a few things I would find really useful in an iPod:

  • Viewing Song/Video Details on the iPod – currently you can only see the song name, artist and album. Other details such as year, genre, bitrate, track number etc are not visible. This is particularly useful for a TV series as the iPod simply orders everything alphabetically. If the name does not contain the episode number you’re stuffed!
  • I’ve been playing with the rating system and gradually rating all my songs on the 1-5 scale. This will no doubt take as long or longer than it will take to import the remainder of my songs. But, it would be nice to view all songs that have not been rated to make this easier
  • It would be good to be able to create playlists and modify ID3 tags of the tracks. The iPod can clearly do that as it can do the ratings. I do not have my mac with me on holiday, and would like to customise some of my smart playlists but cannot do that except through iTunes. If I plug my iPod into the computer I am writing this on it will more than likely wipe the contents of my iPod as it has tracks for my dad’s iPod. On the subject of customising the tags this is useful because CDDB/Gracenote can often get things wrong, especially with the more obscure albums and cover discs which are not often used. I could not find a way to submit a change to gracenote so when I do notice a mistake I have corrected it on iTunes but don’t always spot this
  • I thought of a feature which I would find useful when in shuffle mode: to switch to the album/artist that has come up in shuffle mode
  • Finally, an option to switch on/off the backlight at will and also to make it switch on at the start of each track. This would be particularly useful in shuffle mode.

I’ve also found a glitch which I guess isn’t too much of a glitch, but all the same isn’t quite right in the logic:

If you are playing a song in shuffle mode then browse for that same song through the artist/album/genre/search and choose it from there while the song is playing it will restart it from the beginning. This is not how iTunes works so should not be how the iPod works. It should not affect the songs playing and simply bring the song up as if you chose “now playing”.

Apart from that, I think this iPod is great. I’m going to struggle to fill the 80Gb with music alone at the moment, the battery life is good, and it makes transporting music much easier. I’ve been a latecomer to the iPod but I do like it and know what I want.

To all those who I don’t get a chance to see before the new year: Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

Coke iTunes offer

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I remember this from ages ago that it was coming to the UK but saw it for the first time today
Really mundanely in the canteen at lunch I was hastily buying some lunch I noticed the offer on a bottle of Diet Coke
I’ve never bought a song on iTMS and since I now own an iPod & was in need of some liquid refreshment thought i’d give it a shot

So, I now have a barely legible Song Code to claim my free song – it appears that every bottle redeems a song as opposed to one of the US offers where it was only selected ones.
Here is the outside of the label lazily taken with my 1 megapixel mobile phone camera (so the quality is rubbish):
Free Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.us

What to buy will be a difficult one as it’s only one song. Would have to be something that I would want to have on my iPod.
I notice in the small print it says 1 code=1 song
but also says Offer limited to 5 free songs per person
Meaning if I do find myself buying more bottles of diet coke to redeem songs I can only get five
Also, being DRM’d AAC I will be pretty stuck with it on digital media

Time for a bit of iTunes browsing I think

Seven Deadly Sins

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I haven’t posted anything for a while for various reasons – it’s not that i haven’t got anything to say. I’ve been plotting a few good things that i could combine together particularly about music sampling. But largely it’s been due to laziness, so thought this link was fairly appropriate:

Your Deadly Sins
Sloth: 80%
Envy: 40%
Pride: 40%
Lust: 20%
Wrath: 20%
Gluttony: 0%
Greed: 0%
Chance You’ll Go to Hell: 29%
You will die with your hand down your underwear, watching Star Trek.

I also took the liberty of doing a few others on the same site:

You Are 40% Happy

You’re not miserable, but you could stand to be a lot happier.
Focus on what’s right in the world, and you’ll be happier than you ever thought possible.

How Happy Are You?


You Are 76% Cynical


You’re a full blown cynic… and probably even skeptical of these results.
You have your optimistic moments, but most likely you keep them to yourself.

How Cynical Are You?

Apparently i share a similar music taste with Dale Earnhardt Jr whoever he is – though it’d prob be a pretty tenuous similarity as it was largely the best of a bad batch of artists. Looking at his playlist on iTunes and i definitely wouldn’t listen to many of those tracks, though it’s prob the closest they could match me with


Your Musical Tastes Match: Dale Earnhardt Jr.



See his whole playlist here (iTunes required)

What Celebrity Matches Your Taste in Music?

Whatever Happened to…

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I don’t know what provoked me to start thinking about this sometime but it all started with me making a mental note of things that were going to be huge (particularly in the 1990’s) and then died a death. It started with a couple of things, and I sat down today and wrote a list. I also took the liberty of doing a google search for “whatever happened to” which has over 12 million matches.

Enough with the preamble
1. The first one that got me thinking was computer Voice Recognition
speech recognition
It sounds like a great idea to alleviate RSI and by telling the computer what you want to do as opposed to typing it or using a mouse seems much more userfriendly. Apple Computer developed a technology in the early 90’s as an extension to System 7 called plaintalk. It is now part of the system preferences of OSX and simply called Speech Recognition. It enables you to use a hotkey to talk into a microphone with certain key phrases and it will follow your instructions. I had mixed results when trying it, mainly due to the fact that it assumes you speak with an American accent. My impressions aren’t very good and it doesn’t like British English too much. IBM developed a program called ViaVoice which was supposed to be very good but expensive. I think the big reason why the whole thing never worked was it looks like you’re mad talking to yourself and doesn’t work well in an office environment. Just my 2 english pence!
Having said that you still get glimpses of it used in telephones for speed dials and I always think of the Odeon cinema hotline that asks you to say the name of the Odeon that you want to book tickets for.

2. Next up we have the paperless office!
paperless office
Having worked for the UK health service for 3 years I can categorically say this is nowhere near to even being a possibility, in fact the opposite has happened thanks to email allowing people the ability to forward pdfs and other attachments eg. this article. The internet now has more information out there than ever before and expectations are high on how much of that information we have at our finger tips. Net result, my desk looks like a pig sty and i never get to the bottom of any of my piles. So much for fax software and handheld scanners for electronically storing any letter or other piece of paper received by non electronic means. I am yet to meet anyone who seriously uses fax software, you can’t buy handheld scanners, those paper port scanners never scan things in straight and if you decide to use OCR you can get some unexpected results sometimes.
office flyer

3. Removable storage (Data, Music and Video) – what on earth happened with this! I originally had them all separate but they’re kind of related.
removable media
Let me list a few:
Floppy Disk replacements such as the SuperDisk (LS120) and Zip disk
Sony’s “SACD – Super Audio CD
Laserdisc
Mini Disc
Just to name a few! I’ll start with the floppy disk replacements because i was so close to yelling at my co-workers when he burnt two files to cd which totalled 1mb onto a CD-R when the computer was a wintel box and had a floppy drive. But i restrained myself and said nothing. My point is that since Apple released the iMac Rev A which was the first commercial computer not to have a floppy disk drive (and others have followed suit though in more limited numbers often having an interchangeable floppy & CD drive) people are more confident that a computer will have a CD drive than a floppy drive. It is ridiculous to waste 99.9% of a CD’s capacity, and there are now more variations than is needed. Iomega came close with the zip drive until they hit a snag with the click of death problem, and Imation tried to market the LS-120 but it was horribly slow. I tend to email/ftp files these days and tend to bank on being able to get an internet connection as everywhere there’s a computer there seems to be broadband internet! Occasionally i’ll burn a CD or for larger files i’ve got my Firewire/USB external drive that i should use for backup but don’t as I haven’t had the time to use any backup software (whoops!)

SACD – what the heck is that you are probably asking. Basically it was meant to be higher quality than a CD and instead of an album taking up 500-700mb it would be 4.7Gb – so a DVD. Thought up in 1999 by Sony & Phillips. I have never seen one in the shops and doubt I ever will – it was a complete disaster as it came out just before a program called napster appeared. There’s also a format rivalry with DVD-Audio and like all Sony Products it uses some copy protection which I wouldn’t want to touch with a bargepole – oh, and i’d hazard a guess that i wouldn’t be able to notice any difference since i can’t tell the difference between a 192kbps mp3 and the original CD!

Laserdisc – this was originally patented in 1958 but didn’t appear till the 1970’s but you could still buy them when I was young. I don’t know anyone who owns any or even the player. The nearest I’ve got is a DVD that was made by being copied off a Laserdisc of Star Wars Episode IV with Chinese subtitles. Haven’t seen anything laserdisc related for about 20 years.

Another audio format the minidisc – you still see them around for recording purposes but record companies did try and sell albums on mini disc. It must’ve lasted about 2 years at most, and I haven’t seen them since. I like to record gigs from time to time but record on tape as that’s all i’ve got. I thought about minidisc but they’re expensive and it’s still a pain to transfer to mp3 because sony never made it easy to do so as they are incompatible with Magneto Optical drives and vice versa which use the same technology

4. My final one comes from one i saw on the google search above… Virtual Reality
virtual reality
William Gibson predicted it in his book Neuromancer in 1984 though the credit on wikipedia seems to go to Damien Broderick for his 1982 book The Judas Mandala. Pure and simple – what happened to it? It died a death somewhere in the mid-90s and hasn’t been heard of since

Last Couple of weeks

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I haven’t posted anything new on here for a couple of weeks cos it’s been a little bit hectic both socially and workwise. It was a long weekend two weekends ago and I ended up doing four days drinking in 10 pubs with a few mates.
Then the next weekend was the first day this summer where it’s actually been nice so I took advantage of it with a trip to see a bloody shakespeare play Titus Andronicus at the London Globe Theatre – it’s an almost exact replica of the original from Shakespeare’s time in nearly the same location

Afterwards I ended up in a party till 4am full of Greeks, Spanish, French and Dutch

Which reminds me a blog update: I’ve installed another wordpress plugin a while back but thought i’d mention it, to keep the spam out. It’s called Spam Karma 2 and seems to be doing a good job.

Monday afternoon saw Sri Lanka win the second test against England levelling the 3 match test series 1-1 where the first match was a draw. This will give the Sri Lankans huge confidence as England are currently number 2 in the test rankings. England on the other hand have a tough few months with the one day series coming up where they have not done so well and a test series against Pakistan.

Monday night was the first gig for French Car and the Bulimic Wizards who have been around in some shape or form for 10 years but have never played live. They have now made 4 albums as an unsigned band. It was a good gig with a strange combination of people there

I heard this morning that Mars Chocolate bars sold in the UK are going to be renamed “Believe” for the duration of the world cup to encourage fans to believe that England can win the 2006 Football World Cup which starts next week. In other world cup related news, I drew Ukraine in our office world cup sweepstake – somehow i don’t think i’m going to win the grand prize of £100 (Ukraine are 40-1 outsiders!)

And finally, I’ve been receiving a lot of invitations this week for people on myspace wanting to be my friend. Of the 10-15 who have invited me, I have known only one

Eurovision Song Contest 2006

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The Eurovision Song Contest 2006 takes place this year in a bit of controversy mainly due to this year’s entry from Finland which is the first ever time that a death metal band has represented a country in the competition.
Before we get into that, let me explain a bit about Eurovision… if you knew nothing about Euro-pop, Eurovision is the epitome of it. The entrants by and large are more concerned with looks, clothes and appearances than musical ability. Technically speaking, the countries entering aren’t all in Europe, and the most famous artist to come out of it are:
ABBA
Cliff Richard
Bucks Fizz
and… erm that Israeli artist who everyone thought was a woman but was actually a transexual man!

You can read more about it on Wikipedia’s entry on the Eurovision Contest

The UK, which probably has the best quality of music tends to pander to the competition’s style entering artists who are more likely to score well than those that will perform “good” music.
Which brings me onto the voting, a languishing affair broadcast in it’s entirety on tv and i’m convinced is fixed by the powers that be in that Russia always votes for the Slavic countries, Turkey and Greece never gave each other a vote until 2003 (because of Cyprus), Cyprus and Greece mostly give each other maximum points, Poland always gives the UK a point (because of World War 2), and all the Scandinavian countries vote for each other!

I kid you not, that is what happens

This year’s contest is taking place in Athens, Greece on 20th May whoops it’s the semi finals on the 18th sorry!
Which brings me back to the story that has filled the newspapers. Finnish Death Metal band Lordi spectacularly won the finals to represent Finland in the competition, fighting off competition from 11 other bands which included an opera singer.

This is Lordi:
Lordi 1
Lordi 2

And here’s a big picture of Lordi
Yes, they dress up in monster outfits and have released 4 albums
Of their 5 singles, it is their most recent 2006 hit Hard Rock Hallelujah that is their entry song in the competition

What spurred all this on then?

Lordi is a melodic theatrical heavy-rock band, mostly known for their unusual monster costumes and lyrical themes…The members have never shown in public without their masks. Lordi itself says the band doesn’t exist without the masks. The selection of such an unusual style of music and stage theatrics has caused a small controversy in Finland and there have been calls for a reconsideration of the choice.

Finland have never won the competition, and have scored the infamous “nul points” 3 times
The last two years they didn’t even qualify for the competition
So radical measures were called for – so Lordi it is then!

UK (available in London, Scotland and Manchester) rock radio station XFM thinks it’s about time that some rock/metal was played in the competition and has pledged to support Finland in the build up and has encouraged their listeners to email or mail the UK host for the contest, Sir Terry Wogan showing their appreciation for the band. The station has been playing clips of their track but has yet to play it in full.

Could this be the biggest revolution in Eurovision history or will it just end up being a bit of a stunt that nobody pays any attention to?

Here are a couple of links that are asking the people of Finland and Greece to stop Lordi from performing at the competition:
President of the Greek Consumers union , Mrs. Niki Kostantinidou’s public plea
Monster band has Finland fretting over face it shows
Greek religious fanaticism rears its ugly head once more – Lord Stay out of Hellas!

Make up your own mind – personally, i think they should play and the people should vote

Ups and downs of the last 24 hours

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I don’t really know what to call this entry because it’s really just a summary of the past 24 hours – i’ll come up with a title at the end
Saw my fave band last night Serafin for their first gig in about 2 years. They’re struggling with the mixing of their second album at the moment, as well as having problems with label since Warner Music bought Taste Media.
But it was really good to see them live again, even with all the problems and they’re great guys – if i hadn’t been working would probably have gone out late with them

Fast forward to this morning a little bit tired having not got to sleep till 1am and running late, despite knowing that I was low on petrol. On my route to work I’m driving along and see the most humongous mile long traffic jam on the dual carriageway. Fortunately it turned out to be just a van that had broken down in an inconvenient place. The petrol gauge was pretty much on the zero line, and i kept debating whether or not to stop for petrol since i was going to be late anyway. I decided i would risk it and fill up on the way back. I thought that that would be that but five minutes away from work a cyclist jumped the lights and i have to slam on my brakes stopping inches away from them brakes squealing. At that point i really felt maybe i should just turn around, go home and go back to sleep. Surprisingly was only 15 mins late and no one noticed cos my manager wasn’t working and everyone else was in meetings! Decided i needed a lazy day at the office and spent much of the day messing around on the internet chatting about yesterday’s gig and trying to find loopholes in the computer system at work’s network for no particular reason!

But back to last night, the drummer from Serafin wants me to design a website for their side project French Car and the Bulimic Wizards. Currently, I am hosting their three albums on my webspace but it’s just there to let people know about the band’s stuff. It’s not a proper site or anything. Designing web pages is something i’ve done for a long time, but i have mostly done sites for me except for a couple i did years ago one for a friend of a friend’s business which isn’t there anymore cos i think he forgot to renew his web host or something. The other was for a company my dad was working for. That design has also gone after they contracted it out to a professional company (rather than me doing it in my spare time in between exams at uni!). But my point is that it feels really weird to do this as a project for a friend aswell as for money and I haven’t got the foggiest what to charge even ignoring the fact that it’s for a friend. I’ll have to do some research on hosting & domain name companies as to which are the best to go with and then i’ll have to see whether or not i have the software to make what he’ll ask me to create. My sites are simple clean, reasonably W3C compliant and easy to maintain. But maybe that’s what he’s looking for – we’ll have to wait and see!

I’m Back!

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I’ve been on holiday in Italy for christmas, and back today so that I can spend new year at home
Since i haven’t been updating my blog you’re in for a bit of a special as is always the case after i get back from a holiday

I’ll start with Desert Island Discs which is a radio show in the UK. We got talking about a variation on the theme where you get to choose 4 tracks, 3 films, 3 books and a luxury.
We came to the conclusion that this is very difficult for younger people as I said I would probably choose 4 different tracks for every day of the week. Fairly sensibly, it was suggested that perhaps the best books would be ones along the lines of “How to survive on a desert island in 200 easy steps”, and I added one though i couldn’t remember the name at the time, but it’s The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook. It includes things like how to get out of quicksand, and wrestle an alligator with just a stout pole
Suggestions for the music and films varied from ones that you enjoy the most already to ones that you’ve never had the time to watch/listen to and would get the most out of.
But the general consensus was that the most interesting choices were those that had a good reasoning and reminded the person of something in the past.
Being under 30, I don’t think I’m old enough to have had that many moments to reflect on

Onward we go – I was thinking about animals that have become extinct and how often they are ones that don’t appear to be missed that much by the layman. But i thought i’d turn it around into what animals would you be more than happy to have extinct which really would make a difference to the layman. My first suggestion was the Mosquito – they’re ugly, a pest, suck blood and some species carry malaria and dengue fever, yellow fever, west nile virus (amongst others). I am not an ecologist, but as far as i’m concerned the mosquito is better to me dead than alive – the World Health Organisation did declare war on the mosquito and largely failed when trying to rid the world of Malaria. I can’t think of any other suggestions i came up with, but would be interesting to hear a few more.

Last but not least, in the in-flight magazine coming back I saw an advert for a piece of software called OnSpeed. It makes some pretty amazing claims for a piece of software and is charged at £24.99 or €39.99 in Euros per year.
It must be more than just an internet optimiser since you have to renew the subscription annually, whereas an optimiser would do the changes and that would be it. It’s won lots of awards, and has mac support (except for email optimisation). It doesnt seem to make a lot of sense though, and it’d be interesting to see if it actually works.

Till next time…

French Car and the Bulimic Wizards

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The other day (namely monday) i finally put up the 3rd French Car and the Bulimic Wizards album onto my site
It’s kinda been a bit unofficial that i’m hosting it, though if you do a Google Search for the band it comes up top of the list
I haven’t really listened to the most recent offering much, but the first two albums are worth having a listen to if you get a chance
If I havent mentioned anything about it to you before, it was a side project set up by some of the original members of the band Stony Sleep, and included some of their friends in various guises. It started back in 1996, went on hold for a while and got reborn a year or so ago.

On another google note, it’s good to see my blog is getting indexed already, and it appears the RSS feed got set up automatically. Will have to stick the an RSS button in the sidebar or something.

Wasted at Xmas

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I should be heading off to the Mean Fiddler’s Wasted at Xmas punk festival sometime this afternoon. The first bands will be on in about an hour but they’re not worth seeing.

Wasted At Xmas:
The Dickies + The Rezillos + The Saints (2) + The Angelic Upstarts + UK Subs + TV Smith + The Pork Dukes + 999 + The Straps + Menace + Arthur Kitchener (acoustic) + The Grit
With comedy, can can dancers, merch and CD stalls, DJ’s e.t.c. Tickets from tickets@wastedfestivals.com. See www.wastedfestivals.com for more information.