Hi all,
For the first time in 3 years am celebrating Christmas at home
Being a bit sluggish today, but better late than never. Below is a link wishing everyone who comes on here a very Merry Christmas:
Christmas Link from stonysleep.com
Category Archives: Personal
Five Things About Me
I’ve been tagged by MHC so that means I’ve got to conjure up 5 things about myself.
1. I was born 26 years ago in the hospital that I now work in – Chase Farm now part of Barnet & Chase Farm Hospitals NHS Trust. I nearly died before I was born because the umbilical cord got wrapped round my neck choking me. The registrar had to be called in to help deliver me using forceps and saved my life.
2. I have run a website for over 10 years. This has become stonysleep.com, but did exist as various names, hosts, guises and mirrors from 1997 to 2002. I’ve owned stonysleep.com since 17th January 2002 after Big Cat Records and then V2 Records didn’t renew the ownership. So it turned 5 years last month at it’s current address. The site is long overdue for an overhaul, but I never seem to have the time to do it. The plan is to run it through wordpress and link it in with the blog.
3. In real life I am an incredibly introverted and shy person. I’m a deep thinker and a continual observer. I sometimes hold grudges and regrets for many years after an event has happened but rarely reveal my true feelings especially if it involves other people. I have convinced at least 2 people that I was insane – this is not true, but I am certainly not what would be considered normal by far.
4. The thing I am most proud of is my music collection. I don’t know how many CDs or days that I own because I haven’t transferred it all onto my iPod yet and it’s increasing all the time. It was over 300 CDs last time I updated the list on my site but it’s continually growing.
5. It was not until I finished University and started working full time that I realised what a good memory I have compared to other people, and in particular what a knack I have for remembering small (and often trivial) details. I think I have a partial photographic memory. Having said that i always seem to forget where I’ve left the most mundane of items when moving from one room to another
This now leaves me with the tough task of who to tag:
Shamik, Ravi, Camilla
There’s a couple of others I know who have blogs, but I don’t know their sites, so will have to add them at a later date
Italian Vacation & iPod
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:
- I always had a scepticism about them
- There was something I liked about actually putting a cd in
- I never wanted to commit the hard disk space to mp3s
- 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
Homeward Bound
It’s 8am EST on Saturday in the New York Amtrak station and am beginning my return trip
By the time I get back it will be 8am GMT on Sunday after a 3 and a half hour train ride to Boston, a transit, checking in time, and flight back to London Heathrow. Add on the 5 hour time difference and you get to about 7am. An hour’s journey home and I won’t know whether it’s morning or night
It’s been a great 10 days which seem to have been non-stop. Think i need a nice beach holiday to recover from it.
The wedding went well, Boston was good fun and New York was great – Empire State Building, Central Park, China Town, Broadway, Times Square, Museum of Modern Art, and everything else that I can’t remember at the moment.
Couldn’t resist a stop to the Apple Store on 5th Avenue, and am now the owner of a shiny new 80Gb iPod Video (but shhhh! Don’t tell customs – they need to believe I had it before I went out) and a nifty app called Popcorn 2 so I can convert some DVDs easily into H.264 (mpeg4). Oh, and I’ll prob convert some of my huge music Video collection too so i can view it on the iPod
Thought I’d make one post on the blog while I had a few minutes to kill in the departure lounge.
Speak to you all tomorrow (I think!) or later on in the week
Seven Deadly Sins
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. |
|
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. |
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) |
Ups and downs of the last 24 hours
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!
Weekend
Am going to be away for a couple of days till Sunday afternoon to celebrate my birthday which is today
Going out with my mates down to West Sussex – have loaded the car with booze and with a bit of luck should be a good trip
Have spent today pottering around on the internet, and stumbled on a couple of interesting links
The first is a site Apple must be annoyed they didn’t register the domain for:
macosx.com
Looks like quite an interesting site, particularly their HowTo section which has the quick way to sleep your mac and hidden dashboard features
I also stumbled on this homepage for yet another OSX maintenance app called mac help mate. It looks nice but it only works on OS X 10.4.x Tiger and is still in beta testing – haven’t tried it yet
Oh, and those who are more observant may have noticed that I’ve added a weather plugin to the sidebar. For a day or so it was showing the weather for somewhere ridiculous because i hadn’t realised that it draws the location from multiple places
Terry the Cat
Come tomorrow it looks like my dad will have to put down our remaining cat. Aged 15 years old – Terry was always the bigger of the two. His brother theo had to be put down 13 months ago after some sort of neurological condition.
Terry has got cancer of the jaw. And an unusual kind that is very fast – i believe it’s called a spiral tumour – i forget the name
It was only really diagnosed in November, and since then it has grown at a progressive rate
We always knew this day would come but always hoped it would not come this soon.
He looks old when he was always so active – he wants to eat but now cannot do so without a struggle. We have had to change his food from regular cat food to fish & fresh meat.
But last week when he even struggled with prawns we knew that time was short
We have many photos of Terry, in fact we have made up 5 albums of photos of the two cats, but over the the next few days i am sure that i will be sadder than usual once we decide that Terry should not suffer anymore
The photos below are quite old and not brilliant quality, but they are the best I have on computer at present
Whether it is tomorrow or tuesday or after that I do not know, but it will be soon, as the cancer will begin to cause him more pain soon, and we cannot put him through that
Thoughts for the day
As some of you may know i’ve had a few days vacation, and naturally while i’m away i tend to slow down, and during that time i often start thinking more
The last real break i had last christmas i had so many thoughts flooding through my mind i couldnt sleep, and that was a concept for a future web page i came up with. But as with all my web page concepts they are both a full time job and require me to learn programming that i dont know enough about.
But anyways, this holiday i was plagued by a concept that i’m sure i’ve heard asked before, and that i think about more while i’m at our holiday destination on the Venetian Lido suburb of Malamocco. And it was:
The water levels are rising as a consequence of global, and physics tells us that as we put objects in water the water is displaced in the ratio of mass/density. So, what would happen if we removed all the boats currently in the oceans and seas? Would the water level drop and by how much?
I wouldnt know where to begin to answer this question, nor whether anyone has attempted it
The second thought i started pondering me was on my way back from the airport yesterday when i got back to the UK. On the train i saw the many roofs that there are. It got me thinking, how many roofs worth of solar panels, combined with other environmentally friendly power such as tidal, wind and HEP would it take to meet the energy requirements of the UK? Are there enough roofs? If not what would be the shortfall? How much would it cost? Could money be saved in the longrun with all the complex taxing for governments who’s countries emit too much CO2?
But there you go, that’s what’s on my mind