Come on England
Yep! Bad move from Green. They better do some huddling at half time. Great goal from Gerard though.
iPhone 4
Well I’ve had the software on my 3Gs since apple released it to developers.
I must say I’m quite impressed with it.
However it is starting to feel dated. Yes, it’s great for emails… And a bit of Web Browsing whilst on the crapper. The problem is that other phones have caught up and in some ways took over. iPhones haven’t really changed significantly in the previous years.
The new iPhone 4 looks sleeker (although a bit more like other phones and less unique) but I’m not that impressed with the new features. I have 2 or 3 other devices which will record HD video and I don’t plan on using the front facing camera, as nobody else will either. Phones are designed to speak to people without having to see them, if you wanted to see someone… You’d meet them.
If you wanted to see somebody far away, you’d use Skype because it’s free.
I might venture to another handset soon as the iPhone 4 release hasn’t wowed me enough. So the iPhone 4 will not be my 4th smart phone it seems.
It’s a bit of a wet flannel.
Ableton Live – My New DAW
For the past 5 years I’ve been using FL Studio (Fruity Loops) for producing music, I like the way it encourages you to make loops, duplicate them, change them and layer them up. It’s easy to make drum parts and drag and drop different sounds to change the sounds until you are happy with the sound.
I tried Ableton Live 6 and 7 when they were released as I’ve heard lots of hype about them. I wasn’t really happy with the feel of working with it, it felt like it took me 3x longer to do anything than I could do in fruity.
I tried Ableton Live 8 and I have to say it’s much improved. I love the warping engine, it makes auditioning samples over your existing project very simple as it matches the tempo and makes it fit. If it doesn’t sound right on Auditioning, it won’t sound right when you drag it in and it saves a lot of time when trying new sounds.
I’ve been using the drum racks and It’s very powerful, you can send individual drum instruments to FX so you can compress just a kick. When side-chaining you can choose the whole drum part to trigger a ‘pump’ or you can choose individual instrument, e.g. Kick to pump the compressor on another track (for example a bassline) this is something I love about FL studio and a technique I used frequently. Now I’ve discovered the way to do this with Ableton, I am happy to say it’s even more intuitive than FL Studio.
You could probably do these things with previous incarnations of Ableton Live but I have never got that before without sacking it off and going back to Fruity.
The only problem now Is I now have a windows PC and sold my Mac Pro and kind of wish I still had it so I could of use the Mac Version of Ableton Live with that. It supposedly supports VST instruments on Mac, which (if I haven’t misread) means I could of used my favourite VST plugins with the Mac. I could always use my Macbook but my Windows PC is more powerful than this so I guess I’ll stick with Windows.
I have a BCF-2000 and Axiom 49 so I have plenty of Knobs and Faders to experiment with some live playback, who knows I might be able to get a grips with that and do some live stuff instead of just DJing and Studio Production. That could be good Fun.
It’s old news but Orbital have got back together after doing their own side projects and now use Ableton Live for the heart of their live Rigs. It is designed at heart to be a live tool but it’s just so clean and manageable that it’s an extremely powerful DAW for using for production as well, this is what I love about it.
I used Sonar for a bit and I probably still will for somethings but I don’t know If I will go back to Fruity. I just feel the sound I get from Sonar and Ableton is like the difference between a Sportscar and a Supercar. I’m using 192khz/24bit on my Edirol FA-66 interface and It sounds so much warmer than 44.1khz/16bit I used to use with Fruity, I know it will do 192khz/24bit but I never noticed a difference so I didn’t bother.
Ableton is more intuitive than Sonar so I’l stick with this for a bit, learn the software so I can use it as well as I can use FL Studio, that way it’ll be the ultimate tool to sit at the hart of my studio.
From Sisqo to Cisco
Well.. Last Weekend I was DJing for a 30th Birthday at the Town Mill in Mansfield, playing lots of cheese like Scatman, Rythym of the Night, Thong Song. It was good fun.
However this weekend I’ve been recovering broken Cisco Compact Flash Cards, needing new Cisco Activation Keys and having to setup VPN tunnels again with a Monday morning deadline.
On that Note… Sisqo to Cisco in one Week. Awesome observation!
Why Do The Gadget Makers Hate Me?
You can spend as much as you like on new gadgets, gismos, software, hardware, firmware and upgrades. The fact will remain that at some point, usually within a few weeks you will wish you’d waited that bit longer or bought something else instead. It’s obvious that the Technology industry is growing all the time, new technologies are discovered, old technologies become cheaper and then obsolete.
What is the point in continual spending on having the next biggest, best gadget? Or having the fastest computer and the biggest television? It’s just like having a fast car, there is always a faster car. Or if you get a big house, there is always a bigger house.
The problem is, if you have the slowest computer, the oldest phone, the smallest television and a Dial up Modem then you will spontaneously combust. This is what we are conditioned into thinking by the Marketing. What’s more it’s true, If you haven’t got an iPhone or a Blackberry then I would recommend staying away from petrol.
So it’s quite clear i’m a believer in trying to stay current. I must confess my television is a couple of years old, I haven’t upgraded this because I’m very bitter. I bought this 40” Samsung television for about £1200, roughly 1 month later it was £1000, 4 months later it was £600 and obsolete because it’ll only do 720p. Watching 720p is like driving a fast car with cataracts, enjoyable but ultimately life threatening.
So people are popping up around with 1080p 50” TVs they swapped for a Mars Bar and they love to show it. However if somebody comes along with a DLP projector and a 102” projection screen in their front room, 50” TV man is going to feel pretty bad. They’ve always got the excuse of “I don’t need one that big for my front room” which actually means, “I can’t afford or justify one.” I am that person, except I’m worse because I only have a little 40” Television and it’s can’t even do 1080p.
I got a Macbook last year, the one Apple took the Firewire Ports off and replaced a year later with a Unibody plastic one. So on one hand, I feel bad because Apple want me to buy a MacBook pro to use a Firewire device. On the other hand I feel good because they’ve turned the MacBook into more of a freak show now. Mine is a great looking aluminum specimen, if you buy a MacBook now then it’ll be white again, and plastic.
This isn’t me doing this to you or even you doing this to you, this is Apple doing this to you. Apple hate you like Samsung Hate Me. I can at least put my Televisual Bitterness down to advances in technology. Apple took away my Firewire Ports because they hate me, they gave you a plastic Laptop because they hate you.
In the early Naughties, Microsoft gave us Windows XP. After about 4 years it started getting good. Then they brought out Vista and stopped you being able to get a PC with Windows XP. Vista was a mistake, Microsoft were forced to give you a choice again because Vista just wasn’t practical for businesses.
To run Windows Vista smoothly you need a PC with 32 Cores, 4 Billion Terabytes of Ram and an Array of Solid State Hard Disks. To run Windows XP smoothly you needed a Pentium 4, 1GB of Ram and a Mouse. Then there is all the different editions. Microsoft basically make you feel like Oliver Twist if you don’t get Ultimate Edition. You will feel poor and left wanting more. To be fair they’ve done the same with Windows 7 but at least that works.
With Windows Vista there was Poverty Edition, Poor Edition, Business Poor Poverty Edition, Business Poor Edition and Mans Only Option Edition. This is all because Microsoft Hate you. So you keep Microsoft happy by buying Mans Only Option Edition, they then punish you for trying to make them happy by giving you an Operating system that is unusable. They slowly put it right (better) over two years, leaving you feeling like you’ve had a two year bout of PIles.
You might think advances in technology have brought down the prices of Computer hardware. You can get a computer now, with and Microsoft Operating system for less than £250. I don’t believe it’s due to advances in technology, I believe it’s because of Windows Vista. Hardware had to get cheaper to make Personal computers affordable again.
It’s either that or consumers stick with what they’ve got and don’t put any money into the industry. This would in-turn stop money going into the Technology industry and we wouldn’t get any new gadgets to play with. Even that makes me feel like the entire industry hate me, they’ve got me up against a wall, they are telling me that if I don’t spend money with them, they’ll stop making me new toys.
Without a doubt the prize for the manufacturer who hate you the most, has to go to Cisco. Cisco are a manufacturer of Networking hardware for Business. They make routers with bugs. Most routers come with bugs as not every eventuality is covered in testing. This is usually not a problem, you go to the manufacturer’s support website and download a new firmware.
With Cisco, you go to the manufacturer’s support website, add a download to your basket and then are told you need to Pay, in one way or another, for this update. You can’t just buy it either, like an online shop. You need to pay for a Support Contract to get an upgrade.
Imagine if you bought a brand new BMW 5-series, a nice business class car. Imagine if it came with a time bomb and you didn’t know the time it was set to. BMW tell you they know how to deactivate it but you need to pay them.
Imagine if you were doing a sky dive and your shoot didn’t come out, this was an extra you had to pay for. The bag for the parachute was all you got and you had to pay if you wanted your chute to come out.
Both these examples involve certain death and so does not upgrading the firmware on our Cisco. If left in it’s factory state it would stop the internet working randomly, when it wanted. This would certainly cause a similar type of spontaneous combustion I talked about earlier.
I like buying gadgets but moan when I can’t afford better ones and I am a firm believer in Retail Therapy. I groan about certain ‘advancements’ in technology and I hate standing still. So where am on all this? I’m confused like everybody else, I feel loved by the money which buys me the gadgets and hated by the companies who make them.
I’m always left wishing I’d waited a few more months or given somebody else my business.
Consumers are left hating the Technology Industry because, like all industries, they want your money. Consumers having obsolete technology is just collateral damage. If this didn’t happen then the Economy would be in an even worse state and we’d all still be cave men.
Snow Joke
It aint half been snowing!
I went out this morning, all the roads to Nottingham were gridlocked so I decided to go to a Job in Calverton.
I left Calverton at 10:30am and got home to Mansfield at 3:00pm.
On the A614 Police, Gritters and a JCB cleared the left lane and freed some stuck lorries. They did a good job, it’s just unfortunate the backlog had made all the roads gridlocked.
I took a photo just before I embarked up a hill. I had to stop at the top of the hill and almost burned my clutch out to avoid becoming stuck.
I also took a photo of the snow falling on my back Garden.
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