PaulBM

We had a great night out on Saturday. Hollow Earth played an open air concert at the Railway Tavern in Coltishall. A summers evening with classic prog rock… mmmm bliss.

Their version of Fifth of Fifth is great, and yes they do perform the full version, wonderful piano intro et al. Have a listen. Sorry about the shoddy camera work, but the videos aren’t that bad considering they’re from my Canon IXUS 960 IS digital camera and handheld. Not easy when the songs are 9 minutes long.

Here are the links to the videos that I’ve uploaded to YouTube at the request of Merv, their marketing guy.

Hollow Earth – Comfortably Numb

Hollow Earth – Locomotive Breath

Hollow Earth – Fifth of Fifth

Sometimes things just go against you. Today Steven and David had band practise at our place. For some reason, David decided to wire things differently and put his pedals and cables in front of his beloved AVT50X Marshall valve amp.

During the session somehow a cymbal stand was knocked over, it fell in front of Dave’s amp and sliced into the mains cable. The result was a bang and flash as the cymbal cut into the cable and shorted live to earth.

The up shot is Dave’s amp now makes a lot of horrible noise and very little guitar sound. We fear the short circuit has damaged a valve.

Black Clouds & Silver Linings has just dropped through the door! Time to listen to it in full, although with 3 discs it’ll take a while. Only £12!

• Disc 1 – the album (only 6 tracks)
• Disc 2 – 6 covers

1. Stargazer
2. Tenement Funster/Flick Of The Wrist/Lily Of The Valley
3. Odyssey
4. Take Your Fingers From My Hair
5. Larks Tongues In Aspic (Part 2)
6. To Tame A Land

• Disc 3 – the album’s instrumental mixes

F1 qualifying is on the Beeb in a couple of hours too, we’ll never make it.

On a friends advice, I ordered a Lightscribe DVD writer and 50 blank Lightscribe disks on Saturday morning. The bundle was a snip at £30 including postage. They arrived yesterday and I began work on making many demo CDs for Steven’s band, Cuttin’ Edge.

Nero worked perfectly, it detected the Lightscribe drive and enabled the options in the Cover Designer. To be fair, I did download and install the Lightscribe Control Panel before running Nero, so perhaps that gave Nero the information it required.

Below is a scan of the final disk. It features the Cuttin’ Edge logo that was drawn by Jon Haward, which is perfect for CDs. To ‘print’ the label side of the Lightscribe CD, takes about 15 minutes, by the way.

We’re very pleased how the disk has turned out and is an improvement over the first drafts of paper labels. Now Mike has to distribute them to local pubs, which hopefully lead to some more gigs appearing at the Cuttin’ Edge website.

Oh and thanks Ant, I’d forgotten all about Lightscribe.

This morning we finally got time to listen to Big Whiskey and the Groogrux King. The Dave Matthews Band are back on course, after a serious hiccup with Stand Up. Having said that You Might Die Trying was featured in the second episode of the new season of House the other night. Initially I was convinced the song was from Some Devil because it sounded so good, but I was surprised to find it was from Stand Up.

The main thing I noticed on first listen is that electric guitars pop up all over the place… a good addition. Secondly, no fade outs on any track. It feels like the tracks are written and performed by the band so natural endings are the norm. And those drums… Carter is really high in the mix and sounding great.

And best of all, this CD is not a victim of the Loudness War.. look at the extract of the Audacity sample picture… peaks and troughs, dynamic range. At last these bands are waking up to the fact that less is more and we all have a volume control.

Listening through again as I write this confirms my initial thoughts. It’s going to be a fine CD. Like most of my favourite CDs, the songs are coming through over time. Lying In the Hands Of God (with a burst of one of my favourite sounds, acoustic slide guitar), Why I Am, Squirm and You & Me have leapt forward so far. I’m sure others will follow.

Oh and Steven informs me Seven is actually in 7/4 time. I’ll take his word for that, my technical music knowledge is limited to say the least.

Isn’t it typical, new CDs are turning up like number nine buses now, Chickenfoot arrived this morning. It’s going to have to wait a bit.

Yesterday an email informed me the new Dave Matthews Band CD has been posted… fingers crossed it’ll be with us tomorrow.

Every now and again there are new CDs that arrive in our household that demand a proper sit down and listen in their entirety on our 5.1 system, instead of via iTunes on our computers. Fear Of A Blank Planet was one that springs to mind (a true classic, especially in 5.1) and Experiments in Mass Appeal was probably the last one. Big Whiskey And The GrooGrux King is going to be the next one… my first opinions will follow in a few days.

This week I rewrote the SQL to calculate the win loss averages for the Snooker players. The old version using the old database design ran to 40 lines of case and if statements. It was severely limited by my database knowledge several years ago.
The new version is a dozen lines, that has a nested query to calculate the percentages from aliases that count the scores. It delivers all the information ready to be output to the screen by the HTML class. Tidy.

Last night (before midnight, I’ll have you know ) I managed to implement a jQuery slider widget for selecting the different seasons that I have data for over the years. Out goes the old menu page leading to each section of the site, in comes a stylish, when I do  the graphics, slider which I want to look like the classic snooker hall wood and brass scoreboards.

jQuery makes it so easy, an amazing free javascript library.

Also in the order with the new graphics card was our long awaited replacement for our MP3 server, an Eee Box from Asus. They’re great little machines with an Intel Atom processor so their power consumption is very low and they’re almost silent. Oh and it has blue LEDs! The old out going Pentium 3 server machine, running Fedora, was getting noisy, not good for Steven’s room and his music recording.

I upgraded the XP Home to Pro and copied the 80gb of MP3s to it, so we’re almost ready to swap it out and remap our network drives to it’s MP3 share.
The first attempt to copy the MP3s failed, out of space. Out of the box, the Eee Box is setup with three partitions, C: OS, D: Data and E: Restore. I quick Partition Magic session dumped the D partition and extended C to 150gb or so. That’s better.

I installed a shiny new nVidia 9600 GT today. Luckily I had a new PSU in the order. We try to keep a spare power supply at home, they seem to be the most likely part of a PC to fail. I had to fit the new PSU though, because the new card needed an extra power connection and my existing PSU didn’t have that type of connector on it. So really I need to get another PSU for our stock now.
So my PC is up and running again, working off my old laptop wasn’t too good. Although on the plus side I did install the latest version of Eclipse, that I didn’t know existed. Now I wonder how easy it’ll be to upgrade from 3.1 to Ganymede on my PC.