OK, this may sound a little strange but I’ve given myself a nice little challenge for this edition of New New Life 2.0. I am determined to complete this entire post within the space of one track that I’m at the moment listening to on Spotify (ah good a old free spotify, something many won’t get a chance to relish now ha!). Admittedly the track is quite long, the 22 minute version of Autobahn by Kraftwerk. I swoon in aural delight.
So this week, well it’s certainly been quite up and down. Lets get the moans and groans out of the way first... Parcel delivery companies I now officially disdain. Now understandably people knock Royal Mail, it’s expensive, sometimes slow and has been subject to a lot of undercover investigations by various TV programs such as Dispatches. At least they get the parcels to you!
A couple of companies of whom I shall not name have been a right pain. Both of the packages I was meant to receive were quite important in many ways, one being my now fully repaired audio interface. The company that was delivering that got told by the repair company to deliver back to my home address, not the parcel company’s fault and was corrected. But, I’ve used them before and they have a nasty tendency to delivery to the next door neighbour back in Suffolk, which is very frustrating when they then post on their tracking service “customer not present”. YES I WAS, just you CAN’T READ AN ADDRESS!
The other package company also told me that I was out, however this was after I had phoned up to see when my expected parcel was due. It was due the day before and there was going to be a wait in shipping it out again. Fine, but next time leave a calling card so I bloody well know that you came. The ironically amusing thing was then an email calling card arrived in my email box about an hour AFTER I’d phoned in the first place. Tut.
Enough about parcels now, you’d be pleased to know. Though the rant continues, again at film. If getting that ridiculous excuse for an assignment last Friday came the Monday tutorial session. There about 50 or so computers in this room, by the time the tutorial started there were over 110 students. Brilliant logistics there. And unsurprisingly there were grumbles going around. The solution is quite simple, have some of the people go to the later 3pm - 5pm tutorial. It would’ve been very easy for the lecturers to draw up two groups of about 50 students, with those who can’t do the later slot having the priority for the earlier one (like me). Simple no? Or is that too much work. Let me tell you it’s bloody hard work to try and follow what your trying to say when your computer happens to be one of the few that turns out doesn’t have the dongle to make the program work. Oh and as an almost as comical as sitting at a broken computer you then send around 5 separate DVDs to load on the computer that turned out to take up the whole two hours of the tutorial. An easier solution would’ve been to have 3 - 5 computers with the data already on board, then have group members with external hard-drives to collect the data and bring back to their stations. The whole tutorial was a complete farce and totally reinforced my analogy of film being like art lessons. Bah!
Well I’ve fail in my little goal for this blog, Autobahn just ended. Drat. So I’ve gone from aural bliss to a poxy advert with Robbie Williams plugging his greatest hits. Double drat. So now it’s Brian Eno’s Apollo album. So onwards and upwards to the positives of this week. The studio sessions learning about the new equipment was nice and easy to grasp, though the maths conversions for different desks by different manufactures is going to be a pain. The other logarithms that I’ve to look at are also fairly easy to understand now, and the calculations made SO much simpler after building an excel spreadsheet to calculate all the various units I could need. So one peak voltage readout can be converted to; peak-to-peak, rms, dBu and dBv read outs with just one click. Handy.
The other projects are coming along nicely, the Live stuff is now starting to come together as now I’ve finally got my audio interface back. All weekend slaving away to try break down classic into their individual riffs and structures. I have to say that my first attempts were crap, but now got a proper little system going. I’ve also discovered how incredibly useful the label feature in Mac OS X Finder is. It’s easy to get the ‘one’ riff that recorded nicely lost in a vast array of similarly named files, so that’s good. I haven’t stopped smiling since I linked my newly acquired Octapad (god I’m such a Roland gear slut) and started bashing out vocal samples of a song from my live set. Again you idea pirates ain’t going to know what that is until I perform at the end of the semester.
Outside of university, the scuba diving is coming along nicely and now working my way through my Ocean Diver course. Hopefully be able to do some open water dives by the time I hit 20. Sigh. I already hate the thought of birthdays... Um... I’m starting to run out of things to say, thing is that I’d be doing more things at the weekend but I’ve been so engrossed with starting to compile music material for later that I haven’t really left my room. Hmm... doesn’t sound good, but I’m doing something that’ll pay off later. Suppose that’s the thing about me, I don’t live in the present as such. I live for the future, sacrificing the now for the then, hopefully a successful and prosperous then. However I look into the past and see what I can learn from personal and other sources to help me achieve the future I want. Sounds bit like that phrase from ‘1984’, “he who controls the past controls the future...”. Admittedly that was used in a slightly different context, but you get my point. Basically that was a long way round to saying that I’m very driven. And due to my drive I’ve lost out on a perfectly fine and sunny weekend. Hey ho. I don’t care, I’ve got lots of goodies that I’ve ordered to play with and keep me occupied for a little while.
I’ll leave you now for this week with my first little weekly addition to this blog. Song of the week! Basically this accolade will go to the song that, once you’ve heard it stays with you for AGES. So the first Song of the week! title goes to Enola Gay by OMD.
There we are, right it’s bloody late for me so now I’m off to bed. Ta ta.
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