Sidingsound

I don’t know if you’ve tried Wolfram|Alpha yet, but one example they recommend for a test is to input a date and see what the system sends out the other end.

Well, I tried Wolfram with my birthdate , and amongst the outputs was a nice list of famous personages with whom I share a birthday.

It’s a mixed bag: I was pleased to have been born on the same day as three notable musicians (composer Paul Hindemith and pianists Anton Rubinstein and Diana Krall ) and actor Burgess Meredith , and somewhat less contented to share an anniversary with Oswald Mosley. Most surreally, I learned that I share my exact birthdate (day and year) with the American actress Missi Pyle (Stormbreaker, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory)—would’ve been nice if the lucky individual had been a musician or something, but I can live with that

I suspect that Wolfram|Alpha is capable of rather more than telling you who shares your birthday, but it’s fun nonetheless…

Posted by Wordmobi

This evening, we went along to a friend’s housewarming party, and noticed how they had a lot of family photos around – in frames on the wall, on a digital photo frame on the mantelpiece, in a few albums on the shelf, and so on.

As well as getting me thinking that a digital photo frame might be a good idea, it brought me to realise that we have printed very few of our ’snaps’ in the last few years, tending to keep them on hard drives, CD-Rs, DVD-Rs and online photo services. Whilst this is all very well at the moment, it occurred to me that if our visual memories stay in digital form, our descendants may not end up with much to see, if the digital files degrade, are lost, or end up in a format that can’t be read by the computers of 2050 and beyond.

Occasionally, I’ll take the mobile phone to our local supermarket and run off a couple of prints on the ‘instant digital photo’ machine (e.g. for a photo frame), but these are quite expensive for more than, say, three or four prints. The same supermarket has a “24-hour”-type service which is cheaper for fifty or more photos, but I hardly ever get around to choosing the pictures to print this way, let alone doing the dating, labelling and the sort of thing you ought to do with photos.

It’s all too easy to take large amounts of pictures with digital cameras (as distinct from film-based ones), and this can mean that you don’t always give as much thought to the process as you would with a film camera (where every shot ‘counts’). Also, because you don’t have to print digital photos, as you usually do with a film camera (at least at the ‘consumer’ end), it’s often the case that you just don’t get around to it, or at least we don’t.

A relatively recent development is bespoke-printed “photo-books”, which you can produce yourself via services like Flickr and Apple’s iPhoto. The premise is usually simple: you choose the pictures you want to include, select your desired design/layout of book, and once you’ve paid up, the service will send you a printed and bound tome of your snapshots for all to admire. They tend to be rather more expensive per photo than a “traditional” album/prints, but for something a bit more special, the photo-book is something I’d like to try one day.

So, maybe I should print a few more photos from now on, at least so there’ll be some for our grandchildren to look at…

Posted by Wordmobi

No, nothing to do with reducing the number of Web services I'm using (actually, I finally joined Facebook late last week, so in fact that number is growing).

After a couple of catalysts, I've finally come to the conclusion that I have to start making a determined effort to get my weight down; not that I'm about to get stuck in doors or anything, but I'm definitely flabbier than I really ought to be, and it's only going to get harder from here on to jettison the ballast, as it were.

A friend gave me some good tips, so I'm going to make a concerted effort to follow them and see what happens. Perhaps I should do the same as Mitch Benn, and have a weekly "weigh-in" on the blog?

(written yesterday, but not posted)

Snow came to my home town this morning. A light dusting of slightly soggy ice flakes rested daintily on the car and garden, a gentle parody of the white deluge occurring barely ninety minutes’ train journey away, which gave a good deal of London an unexpected—and occasionally unwanted—day off, or at least a stoic trudge along half-empty streets to office and school.

Snow seems to activate certain memories in me. I recall the heavy falls of early 1981 in England, which left drifts over a foot deep in the middle of urban car parks, and have vaguer recollections of a further snowy period a few winters later, which was sufficient to close the school for at least one day.

After that time, the memories fall largely silent, until I reach the last week of January in 2002. Through large round glasses that Harry Potter would have done his best to ditch (as I myself did a couple of weeks later), I see buildings in Seoul, South Korea, surrounded by frozen patches of snow from falls a few days before. Between them, Chang Sung-a and I walk together from the bus stop through the icy streets to the British Embassy, to put the seals and stamps (literally) on our legal marriage certificate.

Funny how music can be tied so closely to memories. I also remember around then, listening on my MiniDisc player (dates things a bit) to my favourite album of the time—”Moon Safari” by Air—and to this day hearing the tracks again takes me back to an icy but bright winter’s day in Korea, where a whole new chapter of our life together was about to begin.

Happily, seven years and five days since that day, the book is still being written, and I put on “Moon Safari” again for the first time in a while, and think of how far Joy and I have come together.

outside the window
flocks of snow are tumbling
(I made a haiku )

I hope no-one will mind if I indulge myself in a non-musical post for once, to touch on one of my other ‘loves’: gadgets, and a couple of them in particular…

Whilst I have a pretty formidable collection of small electronic devices (or as Joy semi-jokingly refers to them, ‘toys’—the cheek!), if I was pressed to name the one which I really don’t think I could do without for long, it would have to be my Nokia N95. Yes, it’s most well-known for being a mobile phone (and yes, I do happen to use it to talk to people over long distances from time to time ), but for me, my N95 really lives up to Nokia’s description of it as a “multimedia computer”:

• I use it as a digital stills camera, as for most applications the N95 is pretty much the equal of our existing digicam, a Canon IXUS 500 (though the Canon is four years old now, so perhaps it’s not the fairest comparison).
• The N95 can also ‘geotag’ photos (i.e. store the location data for where the photo was taken), using the phone’s built-in GPS receiver, and upload the tagged image(s) directly over the Internet to a photo-sharing service like Flickr.
• I also use the N95 as a tiny camcorder, as its video-recording (640×480 at 30 frames per second) is not far off TV-quality—in fact, I’m experimenting with making DVD home movies with iMovie, using footage shot mostly, if not entirely, on the N95. From time to time, I also use the Qik service, which allows you to ‘broadcast’ live video straight from your compatible mobile phone (e.g. the N95) to the Internet (see some of my experiments with Qik).
• The N95 works brilliantly with Google Mail (via IMAP), and I have been known to post to this very blog directly from the phone.

That’s just a taster of what I do with the N95, but all this functionality comes with a price, which is the N95’s Achilles’ heel: low battery life. If I use the N95’s more advanced features (GPS, WiFi, 3G, camera, etc.)—and especially if I use them in combination—I can count on getting only a few hours’ life out of the battery before it’s beeping plaintively at me for a recharge. (I actually think of the N95 as almost like a tiny laptop that happens to make phone calls as well—it helps me not to get too annoyed at the battery life!)

To deal with this issue: if I’m near a power socket, or in the car, I can usually plug in with no trouble. But what if we’re out somewhere, where this is not an option—for instance, when we visited the Dano Korea Summer festival in Trafalgar Square last month, and spent the afternoon away from handy power sources when there was lots of photoing and videoing to do?

Well, in the event, we just about got by (you can see the video we made at the Festival at our blip.tv page), but it would’ve been nice to have a backup power supply on hand to squeeze some more life out of the N95. As we’re intending to visit Korea next month—where we’ll not only be out and about a lot, away from power outlets, but the sockets are a different type from the UK—it’s a question which raised itself ever more loudly, to the point where for Father’s Day, I indulged in what I hope is going to be a practical solution to the power problem.

The Proporta USB Mobile Device Charger is a small white box (or a small two-tone brown one, if you get the Ted Baker-branded one, which Proporta sent me as they were out of stock of the white ones), about the size of an iPod, with a single button and a green LED on the front. It houses a 3400mAh lithium-ion rechargeable battery, which you can charge up via a USB connection (adapters for USB-12v car ‘cigarette lighter’ and USB-mains are available, and depending on the ‘package’, may be included with the Proporta charger). From there, you can connect the Proporta to your mobile device, and recharge it wherever you happen to be at the time.

I received my Mobile Device Charger a few weeks ago, and am pleased to report it does what it says on the tin, and does it very well. I am hoping as a result that my N95 will become even more useful than it already has been, not least because the battery won’t give out after three hours of intensive photoing, videoing, GPSing and (hopefully) WiFi-ing…

Ironically, when we go to Korea, I’m likely to be using the device as almost everything else apart from as a phone. Whilst my mobile network in the UK (T-Mobile) has a roaming agreement with a partner network over there (SK Telecom), the pricing for most network operations is comparable with most European countries—that is, prohibitive (£7.50 per Mb of data? hope I find some WiFi hotspots over there)—so about the only mobile phone service which doesn’t break the bank is, oddly enough, picture-messaging. In other words, my N95 is likely to be set to ‘offline’ mode for a fortnight, while it turns into a camera / camcorder / navigator / PDA for the duration.

I also have some things in mind to try when we go to Korea, including an experiment to try out a “mashup” between Flickr and Google Maps, so you’ll be able to view geotagged photos I take in Korea, and where they were taken, as I upload them. If I can get everything to work out, I also intend to try editing some video ’shorts’ on the N95, and upload them to our blip.tv account during our visit, with some longer movies to come when I arrive home and get on the Mac. Watch this space for further details nearer the time.)

It’s raining on and off outside. Can I go there this week instead…?

Just to reassure you all (if 'all' is the appropriate word) that I'm still here, and,nominally at least, still running this blog! Sorry for the lengthy silence, which I can only attribute to extreme busy-ness in general, and a few other more specific things (like my daughter's chickenpox). I'll try and post more in detail shortly about how we've been, but I'll just mention in passing that I've been working to finish recording and mixing for a CD of children's songs (as mentioned before around here), and where time (infrequently) allows, laying down tracks towards the solo/"concept" album I've promised I'm going to finish during 2008. Anyway, this has been a post from my mobile phone, so more will appear here as soon as I can write it.

(or “here’s a post while I wait for something worthwhile to happen that I can post about”)!

Well, I sent in the OU assignment a few days ago (one more to go, and if all goes well, I’ll have gained the qualification I’m working towards ), so I allow myself a brief breather before heading back to the books. Well, to be truthful, a more sedentary period was forced on me the last couple of days, by what Robert Fripp in his diary might term a “Devil Bug” (high temperature, coughing up icky stuff, etc.), though I’m pleased to report it seems to have got bored and is probably looking for someone else to move on to.

Perhaps as a result, life feels as if it is taking a pause for breath itself right now—it’s rather on the uneventful side this weekend, but I may as well fill you in on a couple of things while I’m here:

• My ongoing project to produce a set of backing tracks for Joy’s children’s musical educational activity sessions, is… well, ongoing. Joy needed two more songs for this weekend which weren’t among the ones we demoed with my sister-in-law just before Christmas, so when I finished the OU assignment I went to the studio and quickly laid down the tracks. “Old MacDonald Had A Farm” ended up with an apt (albeit somewhat predictable) country-ish vibe, whilst “Cows In The Kitchen” developed a life of its own in the hour or so that I was laying it down—imagine Roger McGuinn jamming with Queen on “‘39″, and you have an idea of the direction it took…
• As you may guess, I have made no progress on any of my own material since writing about my intentions the other week, and it’s probably time I just got the ball rolling. I could make a start by making a demo of the “title” track of the concept album, which has been pretty well complete in the writing sense for some time now (though I may change the final couple of lines to lead into one of my older songs, should I add it to the album sequence—maybe I’ll record both versions and choose the appropriate one at the end). Watch this space.
• Time is also running out to commit to disk the first of my “cover-per-month” project songs, so the first one might need to be a “start of February” song instead of “January”! Unfortunately, for copyright reasons I don’t think I’ll be able to make these recordings generally available, but… well, if you really want to hear them, “where there’s a will, there’s a way”…
  And the first song? It will be “Six String Orchestra”, originally written by Harry Chapin (of “Cat’s In The Cradle” fame), but probably better known for its inclusion in an episode of “The Muppet Show” (sung by Scooter in character as the song’s eager student rock star). The challenge here will be playing the acoustic guitar and singing deliberately poorly (well, the second part should be easier ), as Chapin famously did when he played the song in concert (look on YouTube for video clips of this). Anyway, it’s quite a fun song, and I think I’ll enjoy playing the rest of the “phantom band” in the choruses!