music

Progress!

Working late. I’ve got Club 977 (best 80’s cheese on the ‘net!) playing as loud as this computer goes, slamming out code at a rate more productive than I’ve been all week. Finally got past a bug that’d been troubling me for days. Phew! Just in time for a meeting tomorrow!

I’ve been getting a lot of concerned attention after my post, “Stress!”, earlier (I didn’t think I had so many avid readers). Thanks, all of you; you concern means a lot, but really – I’ll be okay: I land on my feet, remember! Just need to get my head down and get on with some stuff, that’s all, and a little bit of de-stressing onto the web was good, too.

A few more lines of code, methinks, before Claire arrives (she’s kindly giving me lifts to and from work while I’m being a lazy bugger and not sorting out my bike, the star).

Take care, y’all;

What Meatloaf Song Are You?

I’m I’ll Kill You If You Don’t Come Back. Excellent.

“When you fall, you fall hard. Maybe you get a bit obsessive. Maybe you get a bit homicidal, even. But you’ve got a rockin’ melody and a beat you can dance to.”

What Meatloaf Song Are You?

Excellent Article On Music Piracy And CD Sales

A must-read! An excellently-written and concise article in dot.life about the falling sales of CDs being blamed on file-swappers, playing devil’s advocate. Go read it, people!

Dark Side Of The Moon

Spent last night in a dark room with Paul, Kit and Claire, listening to a DTS-encoded 5.1 surround sound version of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side Of The Moon”. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve heard in a long while. The sound quality was unbelievable – the patterns moved and shifted around and through us. Quite stunning. I felt my heart rate change several times to match the beat

Nobody’s updated their web journal in several days except Kit. That makes my work morning a little boring.

We have a new guy working for us – Daniel – a school leaver who’ll be helping us for the summer. Alex and I are trying to get him talking, without any luck yet.

Suppose I’d better get on with some work, now.

Update (20th March 2012) – crosslinks:

Paul’s post about getting to use his DTS system
Kit’s post about the experience of listening to Dark Side of the Moon with us

Back From Lancashire, Continued

Spent the last four days in Lancashire and elsewhere in the North of England, visiting my folks (among other things). Details follow…

Saturday 28th June 2003
Dan’s Mum’s House, Preston
More video games. Yet again I won at Mario Party 4. Claire is starting to get really pissed-off with always coming second-place. I don’t think she’d mind being last or second-to-last all the time, but coming second-place time and time again really seems to annoy her. Particularly when I proceed to dance around the room chanting “I am the Party Star!” at the top of my voice. Ah well.

Horton Tower, Horton
Went with Claire and my family to see the annual symphony orchestra at Horton Tower. It wasn’t as good as last year, but it was still fun. Taught Claire to waltz.

More to follow…

Back From Lancashire

Spent the last four days in Lancashire and elsewhere in the North of England, visiting my folks (among other things). Details follow…

Thursday 26th June 2003
Linux Expo 2003, Birmingham
Sorted out Claire’s bank, packed bags, and set off for Birmingham to the last day of Linux Expo 2003 at the National Exhibition Centre, to meet up with Gareth and some other geeks to talk about a project on which my input could be valuable. Gareth is going to come over to Aberystwyth next weekend and we’ll knock together a prototype of the system we’ve suggested.

Claire got scared by the vast numbers of stereotypical geeks (and the distinct overdose of testosterone in the air – she was one of only three women in the whole place), and by the fact that, unlike normal, she couldn’t understand one in three words spoken. I smiled. She’s got a little way to go to earn her geek stripes, yet.

Bon Jovi, Manchester
Arrived late at Old Trafford – missed the support group, but in time to try to find standing room before Bon Jovi came on-stage. All-in-all, a good concert: Claire was a little short for standing on the pitch to have been a good idea, and the sound quality was a little below-par owing to a lack of adequate repeater speakers, and the only beer available was Budweiser and Boddingtons, but it was still a pretty good gig. Went to a Manchester pub afterwards before catching a really, really late train home. Got to bed sometime after 3am.

More to follow…

Scatman’s World

[this page was originally posted to AvAngel.com but is archived here; the links have been adapted to improve usability]

Introduction

After playing around for some time with Corel Photo-Paint and Adobe Premiere, I decided it was time to make a cool music video that quite blatantly took the piss out of Bagpuss, a friend of mine with whom I used to share lodgings at University. I believe that when he saw it, his exact words were “I’m going to kill him.”

Well, not content with having made a fool out of him, my next project was to make a fool out of myself (what do you mean, I do that all the time anyway!)… and so my next video project was…

Scatman’s World

After my nickname among many folks in Aberystwyth, Scatman Dan (a reference, of course, to the late Scatman John), I made this music video, which made it’s big-screen premiere at the Aberystwyth Arts Centre Cinema on Saturday 4th May 2002 (after a two-week delay caused by numerous technical problems). And now, for your viewing pleasure, it’s available to download here (it’s a DixX-encoded file, so you’ll need an appropriate player). Being, as it is, filled from top to bottom with in-jokes, it’s probably not even remotely funny if you don’t know who I am.

Download The Video

Warning : This file is just under 30MB in size, and will take a considerable amount of time to download, even on a fast connection. You have been warned.

Warning : Owing to explicit content, this video is not suitable for viewing by anybody under the age of 18 years, without parental consent and supervision.

Note : It is recommended that you attempt to save this file to your hard disk, rather than attempting to play it directly from the site, as this corrects a lot of potential download problems with this file. In most browsers, this can be achieved by right-clicking on the link and selecting “Save File As…” or “Save Target As…”.

[the download is no longer hosted here, but you can view the video on YouTube]

Scatman’s World

Back in early 2002, right after a shitty break-up, I moved back in with my dad and spent my nights making an alternative music video to Scatman John’s “Scatman’s World” out of photos of me and my friends and snippets of badly-lipsynched webcam footage. It’s full of in-jokes and if you don’t already know me then, well, it’ll mean nothing to you anyway.

This video is also available (with annotations explaining most of the in-jokes removed by YouTube and lost forever) on YouTube.

Cool Thing Of The Day

Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #55:

In a fit of inspiration, after people keep on coming in to your room, in particular the guy in the room next door, and wiggling the cord of your wind chimes, much to your irratation, threaten that next time they do it, you may well have covered the cord with some unpleasant bodily excretion, and *that’ll* show ’em. Knowing that the greatest culprit is likely to come in and do so at any moment, dip the entire cord into a bottle of baby oil, and watch the shock and horror on their face as they grab hold of it, only to find their hand covered in a sticky, semitransparent white substance. “What is it?” they ask, in terror.
“Guess,” you respond, slyly. Hide your laughter and refrain from telling them what it really was until they’ve spent about half an hour washing their hands… Let’s see them play with your windchimes ever again!

The ‘cool and interesting things’ were originally published to a location at which my “friends back home” could read them, during the first few months of my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which I started in September 1999. It proved to be particularly popular, and so now it is immortalised through the medium of my weblog.

Cool Thing Of The Day

Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #16:

Realise that you’ve got over 970 songs on MP3 format, taking up over 3.25GB of hard drive space. Decide that you need to find a new (cheap) hard drive on which to store them all. Mention this in the “Cool Things” e-mail in case anybody has any suggestions as to where you can get one from.

The ‘cool and interesting things’ were originally published to a location at which my “friends back home” could read them, during the first few months of my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which I started in September 1999. It proved to be particularly popular, and so now it is immortalised through the medium of my weblog.