Musicalmidget’s Blog

This evening I paid another visit to the Apple shop in Meadowhall. There were three items on the shopping list. Firstly, my brother wanted a MacBook for his schoolwork and was ready to buy it. Also, I wanted to get my hands on some new software for my own iMac. I wanted iWork ‘08 since I was impressed by the trial and OS X 10.5 Leopard.

My brothers new MacBook was a breeze to setup and he’s now getting himself used to it. Once the OS X installation wizard finished I was a little surprised to see Tiger load up when we were told Leopard was in the box. It turned out the Leopard DVD was hidden under some papers. Whilst the new MacBook was updating to Leopard, I opened up my own copy of the update and began to update my own machine. We left the systems to it and went to watch an episode or two of Stargate Atlantis. We returned a little later to see two new installations of Leopard ready to launch.

I’m not going to say too much about Leopard yet until I’ve had a chance to play with it for a while, but my first impressions are quite positive. In the meantime, I thought I’d attach a few screen captures of Leopard running on my own iMac. If you’ve seen any of the publicity images for Leopard then you’ll probably not be seeing anything new here.

Firstly, the brand new desktop complete with 3D reflective dock.

Along with the new desktop comes a brand new Finder. I’m especially fond of how generic file icons have been replaced with thumbnails of each file. This makes it very easy to find exactly the file you’re looking for.

In addition to the existing Icon, List and Column views in the Finder, Leopard introduces Cover Flow view, similar to Cover Flow in iTunes. Again, this is a great way to quickly find exactly the file you’re looking for in a folder.

Quick Look is a new feature which allows you to quickly preview a file directly from the finder without the need to open it up in an application. Just click the spacebar or select the “Quick Look” option to preview the file. It’s also possible to quickly sample documents, presentations, music and video files directly from within Cover Flow.

The new dock isn’t just about looking great, it has a new feature called Stacks, which are essentially folders on the dock which open out to provide more shortcuts. For instance, I have an applications stack on the dock which quickly displays shortcuts to everything in my Applications folder when clicked. Similarly, the new downloads stack displays the files I’ve recently downloaded so as I can access them easily without needing to clutter the desktop. Stacks are displayed either as a fan or a grid depending on the number of files in the stack, or any custom option you may have already set.

I’m thrilled to finally be able to use the new Spaces feature in Leopard. Spaces aren’t a new concept, they’ve been around for a while in other operating systems including numerous Linux distributions, but I’m not really a Linux user. Spaces are essentially just additional desktops that you can easily flick between to keep your applications separate. For example, you could assign a space for general internet related applications such as a browser and email application, whilst loading a document in another. Whilst writing the document in space two, you can quickly switch to space one to look something up on the internet. It’s also easy to drag windows from one space to another and drag spaces around to change their order. I’m already finding the Spaces feature handy for keeping my different running applications grouped and clutter free.

Finally, front row has also changed slightly in Leopard. In fact, it looks rather similar to Apple TV.

I haven’t yet setup Time Machine, but I’m hoping to do so soon once I get a suitable external hard drive. There are no shortage of images of Time Machine dotted around the internet however and the online demonstration is definitely worth a look if you’re not sure what Time Machine is.

So there’s a peek at Leopard. I’m sure there’ll be some more Leopard related postings from me over the coming weeks too.

It’s hard to believe it’s been a month since my last posting here. Where has the last month gone? It’s largely because I’ve just started my third and final year at university. The first few weeks are always a bit hectic, but I’m expecting things to calm down in a couple of weeks and I should be appearing online again more regularly by then.

Over the summer months I blogged about a number of new items I’d bought, including my new sax, piano and iMac. Although they’re all great fun to use, there were some serious reasons behind buying them. I believed they would make my final year at university and indeed my life beyond that, a lot easier. Now that I’m a month into the new academic year, I’m already certain that is the case.

My new sax is wonderful to play and the included mouthpiece is also of better quality than the old one I was using. I’m already noticing a significant improvement in my tone and with more work on that over this final year, I hope to develop it further. Additionally, because it’s so much fun to play, I’ve been playing it more often. Because of that, I’m also making progress with improvisation, and again, I’m still a long way from perfect but I’m really having a great time working on it. The sax was definitely a good buy in my humble opinion.

The piano is also fun to play, but as I mentioned when I first posted about it, I’m not a serious piano player. In fact, I can play very little. The main reasons I bought it were to aid in my work and also to connect to a computer to interact with Sibelius and other music applications. Already, it has fulfilled these purposes. My arranging assignments require a lot of trial and error when it comes to working out which chords to use. With a full range keyboard at my side it’s proved very handy to quickly try a number of possible options on the piano before committing them to paper.

Similarly, the iMac has proved invaluable so far when it comes to university work. Sibelius works perfectly on the iMac, with the piano connected of course. iWork applications such as Pages and Numbers have already proved useful when writing assignments, and the general reliability and ease of use of the iMac on the whole have really impressed me. When my windows PC was struck by a strange virus last week (that Norton decided it could detect sometimes but do nothing about), my important university work was unharmed on my iMac and my assignments were submitted on time and without problem. Again, well worth the money I feel.

With that in mind, I’m eagerly awaiting the release of Mac OS 10.5 “Leopard” this Friday. Unfortunately, I’ll be away over the weekend but hope to get my copy sometime early next week. Watch this space, I intend to show it off.

Summer wouldn’t be summer without a spending spree, and oh boy have I been on one of those this year.

I’ve been hoping to get my hands on a mac machine for some time now. Earlier this year, I decided I’d finally buy one rather than just drooling over them on the internet. I did some thinking and decided to go out and buy a mac mini, but I’d wait until my second year exams were over first. Eventually, I finished my exams and once again visited the apple site for education to see what I might be able to afford. What I found was that the price of a mac mini with the addition of a new keyboard, mouse and monitor, wasn’t all that much cheaper than the 17 inch iMac. I’d seen the iMac in the Apple shop at Meadowhall and they we’re pretty nice.

To cut a long and quite boring story short, I wasn’t able to buy the iMac before going off to the Edinburgh Fringe this summer. It was a shame because I was itching to get my hands on one, but in the long run I’d say the wait paid off. One day whilst I was in Edinburgh, I logged onto CNet when I had a few minutes to spare, just to see what kind of news had been cropping up whilst I was gone. What did I see at the front of the news section? A brand new iMac range! They looked incredible and the specifications were even more impressive. I may have been foaming at the mouth.

For the same price as the 17 inch 2GHz model I nearly bought before going away, I managed to get a whopping 20 inch 2GHz model. Thank goodness I waited or else I’d have been fuming that I missed out on a brand new range.

Despite the fact that this shiny new iMac is easily the most eye catching thing at my desk, there’s a genuine reason for wanting one so badly. Macs are fantastic for musical folk like myself. The included GarageBand application is quite nice, but professional applications such as Sibelius and Cubase are compatible with macs. In fact, many of the top dogs in the industry use macs for musical production/recording/editing and so on. This machine is therefore going to be my development machine. By development, I mean both musical and internet developing.

On the musical side, my new piano connects nicely into the mac with a USB cable. Sibelius then picks up the piano as a MIDI device, allowing me to play music directly into the software. Additionally, Sibelius can use the piano to playback scores on the computer.

As for internet development, I’m finally a TextMate user. What a fantastic application! The only thing it doesn’t seem to have (unless I haven’t managed to find it yet) is an FTP browser similar to the FTP extension I’ve been using in PHPEdit on Windows. Aside from that however, it’s hard to find a fault with the application. I’d previously tried “E Text Editor”, which was a TextMate clone for Windows, but it was still a beta program and it just wasn’t the same. I’ve also found a nifty FTP program for Mac OS X called Cyberduck. Perhaps a strange name for an FTP client, and the duck icon in my dock tends to make people wonder what it’s for. Don’t be fooled though, it’s a very nice program. I love how most pieces of software written for mac have such nice to use interfaces. This is no exception.

Mac OS X has an Apache server included and I’m in the process of setting that up at the moment, as well as PHP and MySQL. Within a few days, I’m hoping the process of moving all development related stuff from my Windows PC onto the Mac will be completed. I haven’t yet found an IRC client for mac that I’m happy with, but I can live with mIRC on the PC for the moment.

As well as the lovely new iMac, I’ve got yet another new toy. Since I got my own sax, I’ve been playing a rather basic Yamaha YTS275. It’s a nice sax, but it’s only a student model. I thought perhaps it was about time to update that in time for my final year at university. I managed to pick up “the deal of my life” on a brand new Yamaha 62. The 62 is a professional level saxophone and it’s really great to play. I’m looking forward to getting back to university so as I can play it more often. For the moment however, the new “Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band Play-Along” book is doing just fine.

I’ve recently returned from my second visit to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, with the Hull University Big Band. Great fun once again. I’ve been home about a week now. Tonight I noticed a film on channel 4 called “Festival”, made in 2005 and set during the Edinburgh Fringe.

I’ll not go into all the details of the story, but towards the end, there’s a comedy awards ceremony. Now, throughout the film I was noticing various Edinburgh locations and landmarks that I’ve seen whilst at the Fringe, such as the Royal Mile, Princes Street Parks, the Hilton Hotel, the meadows and so on. However, there was something quite familiar during the comedy award scenes.

It turns out, the location used for shooting the comedy awards part of the film was City, the nightclub we use as a venue for the big band show. I don’t really have any decent photos of the venue with the “lights on” to put up some comparisons, but the still images from the film below should be enough for anyone that was in or came to see the big band to recognise the surroundings.

All the familiar fringe surroundings made me wish I was still there. Roll on next year I say!

I’ve been working away pretty much all day everyday for the past week on the new MyBB Mods site, which is starting to take shape nicely now. There’s still a few issues to work out but most of the development is now on the admin side of things. I don’t know when it’ll be ready to go live though, so you’ll have to keep an eye out for information on that front.

What originally began as a relatively simple process of adding some new features to the site and perhaps improving the look a little bit, has blown into what is essentially an entire rewrite from the ground up. As I’m sure you can imagine, writing any site from scratch can be a little testing at times. It’s easy to get frustrated when things aren’t working as they should and it sometimes gets a little tedious when you’re at it for long periods of time. But, I’ve got a new “toy”, shall we say, that’s great for when you need ten minutes out from lines and lines of code.

It’s actually a little more than a toy. Enter, the brand spanking new Yamaha DGX-620 (with visible mess and clutter in the background).

A few weeks ago, I thought it would be a good idea to look for a new keyboard. My old one is quite outdated now and doesn’t even have full sized keys. I’m not really a pianist, but I am a budding composer. With both composition and orchestration modules to deal with in my third and final year of university, I thought it would definitely be beneficial to have a keyboard around, particularly if it was the full range and able to connect the computer for MIDI in/out. I had a look around online and went to a number of music shops and quickly realised that the budget I’d set originally, was only really going to get a much newer version of what I already had, in terms of functionality at least. So I upped the budget a bit, and came across the DGX-620.

This thing is absolutely huge. I knew it was a full range piano, but we thought it was going to fit in a specially cleared space. Boy were we wrong! The only place up here where it’ll fit and still connect to the computer, is slap bang in the middle of my floor. So, it gives me much less space for the moment, but each time I turn around from the PC, it’s there. That means, when I’ve been typing and typing lines of code all day and start to feel a short break is needed for my own sanity, what do I see when I turn around? “Well, since it’s there, I may as well play it for ten minutes“. And, ten minutes later, I’m refreshed, in a calm state of mind and ready to get back into it.

There you have it. That’s what’s been keeping me sane recently. It’s also hopefully something that’ll help me pass third year and be worth the trek to find it. It’s certainly something that relieves computer-related stress. I need to learn something other than Bill Bailey’s “BBC News” theme though.

I’ve recently returned home from university after completing my second year. It’s apparently the summer break, but you wouldn’t know it from the weather. It’s rained almost constantly since I got home, and we’re not talking a little rain here, we’re talking torrential downpours that drainage systems across the region are having problems coping with. Numerous places in Doncaster are flooded, as are so many other places across Yorkshire and the north of England in general. I’m fairly sure the house I’ve just left behind in Hull is also flooded, since the news is reporting severe problems on the roads around the area. The news suggests water is knee-deep. It’s not quite that bad in Doncaster, but driving the car to the garage wasn’t fun this morning. Some roads were so waterlogged that the short 20 minute round trip took just short of an hour.

The weather has obviously had an effect on the first day of Wimbledon. A few matches have taken place, but the Henman/Moya match had to be suspended a short while ago. Probably quite frustrating for Tim Henman, since he was essentially only two points away from taking the first set. Wimbledon is really the only major sporting event I follow since I’ve never really been into any other sport. Thus, it’s typical that the tournament by disrupted in this way right from day one.

It’s really shaping up to be a typical “British Summer”. In other words, it’s basically a monsoon.

Updated 27/06/07: Doncaster is now one of the worst affected places in the UK. A large number of houses (particularly in the north of the town) have already been flooded, and it’s feared many more will flood if Ulley Dam bursts. I’ve also seen a number of videos online of Hull, which suggest that the house I’ve just left behind at uni has indeed flooded. Although I’ll not be living there anymore, had this happened a couple of weeks earlier I would probably be going through hell right now, especially since I lived on the ground floor.

Although we’re not in any immediate danger at home (very high above the river), the floods have caused major disruption across town. For that reason, it looks as though I’ll be spending the next few days indoors…still.

It’s been a while since my last posting. Usual reasons, university work, tiredness, etc.

Anyhow, the weather has started taking a turn for the better, but don’t worry, I’m not about to turn this into an “isn’t the weather lovely” post. I’ve been doing a lot of work this past week or so on my next musical compositions which are due in a few weeks, and on the subject of composition this recent change in the weather reminded me of a wind band piece I composed over numerous hot summer days a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, the piece was put to the side for a while and never did see the light of day.

A couple of days ago however, when I remembered about the piece, I decided to make a few finishing touches and publish it as my second score on Sibelius Music. The aptly named Summer Overture was validated earlier and is now available for all to view and listen to.

Summer Overture: http://www.sibeliusmusic.com/cgi-bin/show_score.pl?scoreid=105036

I’m very excited about my latest composition for my degree. Racing Rhythms is a piece for saxophone quartet that is almost complete. Once I’ve submitted the piece for marking, it’ll join my other scores on Sibelius Music and of course I’ll post about it here!

According to my calendar, I don’t appear to have any kind of university exams or deadlines after 31st May. Until then, it’s back to work for now.

Recently, Chris Boulton blogged about Unending, the final ever TV episode of Stargate SG1. Since Stargate has been a part of my TV life for such a long time I thought I should also say something myself.

Although I was sad to hear of the end of the show, I was pleased to hear that for once, the world premier of the final episode would air here in the UK. We often seem to be behind over here, but not this time. Unfortunately, due to a fall out between Sky and newly formed Virgin Media, of whom my family are customers, we lost access to the Sky One channel which was showing the premier, just two weeks before it aired. Thankfully, I was able to see the episode through someone else, and what an episode it was!

I’m not into spoilers, so I wont give any away, but you must see this episode. I was unintentionally exposed to some spoilers about the episode a short while ago (thanks again Gateworld!) and must admit I was worried at first. The concept for the episode didn’t strike me as a fitting way to end such an outstanding ten years. How mistaken I was! It’s a story that ties a few loose ends whilst not completely wrapping up the storyline with the Ori. What’s more, is the nature of the story allows for a fair bit of character interaction, which many will say is what helped the show become so popular in the first place.

The episode had it’s fair share of sacrifice and sadness, but overall, it was a fantastic way to bring the TV series to an end. Also, I think a few things have been setup quite nicely for the upcoming movies and fourth series of Atlantis. If you’ve seen the episode, you probably know what I mean. If not, I’ll not give it away.

Here’s to the end of an era.

I’ve hit the big 20. I’m no longer a teenager. Now that is a strange thought indeed.

This year is the first birthday I’ve spent away from home, and that’s also quite strange. I will be home tomorrow however, so I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to collect any cards and other such goodies which may be waiting. There’s still the possibility of a celebration meal or something with the family tomorrow too, although no plans yet.

Tonight however is set to be a blast. My birthday this year falls on “Tower”, one of the weekly nights at Asylum, our delightful student nightclub. It’s not only the first time I’ve been able to go out on my birthday rather than a day or two before/after, but I’ve also been told I can have free entry to the club and a bottle of champagne. How is that?

It’s certainly been a “different” birthday experience, but great so far.

Hello there! Remember me?

Hasn’t it been a while? One moment I’m sat here typing about Christmas, and the next thing I know it’s February!

Christmas and new year were great. It was good to be home again catching up with people and just enjoying the festive period in general. January was a busy old month though. Exams and deadlines at university and so on. I’m certainly glad that’s over for the moment. There’s still assignments to do even though the exam period is over, but I have a considerable amount more time to get them done, for the most part anyway!

So, we’re in week three of semester two of the second year. That means the halfway mark is now behind us and my degree course is now in it’s second half. Another example of how time is flying by at the moment. It doesn’t seem that long ago I was typing my “Greetings from Hull” thread, announcing my arrival in this fair city.

Today I’m going to post something that I’ve said I would do from day one of this blog, but hadn’t up until this point. My About page has always said that one day I hoped to publish some of my musical compositions online. Well, one of the deadlines I had in the busy weeks of January was for a small scale composition, in my case written for a clarinet choir. I’m still awaiting the results from that one, I think they’re due next week. Nevertheless, the piece is now up on Sibelius Music for all to see. Public proof of me actually doing something!

Anyone that is interested can see the piece online at this page on Sibelius Music. The Sibelius Scorch browser plugin is required however. I’ll attach an MP3 file soon with a synthesised version of the piece created with Kontakt Player. I hope at some point, to get some of my own compositions finished (by that I mean, compositions that are composed freely by me rather than for a uni brief/deadline) and uploaded too. I generally tend to write for larger ensembles such as wind band when it’s a “free” composition. I’ll need time to finish writing them though first!

With the uni workload a little lighter for the moment, I’ve been able to spend a little bit more time online over the last few days. That’s partially how I came to think “wait…don’t I have a blog somewhere?”. That said, I’ll be using this brief gap to get a number of things done and I hope to be able to talk in more detail about them soon. Many of the things on the ever growing list of things to do relate to MyBB Mods. I mentioned previously that there were big things ahead for the site in 2007 and that is still the case. Admittedly, those developments have taken a backseat over the exam period, but they’re by no means forgotten.

Oh, and on a slightly different note, I have 14 days left as a teenager. No doubt you’ll hear more here soon about this strange birthday that is quickly approaching. I don’t feel ready to loose the teenage years. There seems to be some kind of belief that people who are 20 and above have some kind of maturity. Tell me it isn’t so?

Until next time!