The Soundworks.uk.com space

Well, we're back online with a proper internet connection at home.  I would have posted it earlier, though to be honest I have not had much of an inkling to blog.

It's not that I don't have anything to put, I've just lost interest to an extent.

Still, it's not like it's the first time and probably won't be the last, though I am still updating the main website, which is also more than overdue for a facelift and complete re-vamp.  This is somethinig that for the first time, I am placing in the hands of someone else, though I have outlined and sketched the initial design.  I'm hoping to make the whole thing accessible from mobile phones too, like this bit is, so that the site can be updated and viewed anywhere.

The thing is, with the new site update, I'll have to either change this blog to fit with the new layout, or sever the link between the two.  I'll decide on that later, though if the link is severed, there is a chance that this place may well end up being deserted altogether.

Still. we shall see how it all goes.  I have a new commission to work on and should soon have a space to set up and work in.  It's all falling into place piece by piece.

Until next time, take care out there.

Currently we have no internet at home, as our current internet provider, namely 3, have failed to provide us with the stuff we need to send our faulty modem back to them.  As we can't send the faulty unit back, they will not ship us a replacement.

How's that for customer service.

Spend 30 minutes on the phone to 'Steve' in Bangalor to be cut off by an automated recording telling us what the next step is, then fail to deliver on that next step.  In the meantime as a customer, I still have to pay for a connection I can not use, at least I do until the direct debit is canceled.

Roll on the end of this contract so I can be rid of this shoddy company forever.

My partner Rebecca Ruth Kennedy (Also know to the spaces community as Elf) today gave birth to a beautiful baby girl after a gruelling, painful and at times horrendous 12 hour labour, which only came to an end with the aid of the operating theater and it's staff.  Thankfully this was ot for an emergency C-Section, but for the forceps.

However all appears well now and after a brief spell under observation, mother and baby are now on a main ward.

No name has been decided yet for our new arrival, though we do have some possible idea's.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the staff at Halifax Hospital for their dedication and support througout the difficult birth and the aftercare recieved.

Pictures will be posted soon, though I'm off to bed now as I've only had 90 minuted sleep since yesterday.

As it turns out, they were not used, but do serve as a reminder of times gone by, at least for me.

Rather than post a detailed picture of Diffusion in all it's glory (So to speak) here, that would be better done with Paul's consent as even though it is an older picture (Circa 1995), he may well not want a distinguishable and enlarged picture posting on the internet.  Instead here is a shot of all the material in a smaller more condensed form, where likenesses are not that distinguishable, but will at least show some of the material we had put together for self promotion.

"The path of my life is strewn with cowpats from the devil's own satanic herd"

Sir Edmund Blackadder - Blackader II episode 4

After a longer than expected delay, a new track is now online.  However, one reason for the delay was how to publish this without opening up the whole website to 'Drive-by downloaders' again.  Do I open up a small area or set aside some space with no real restriction?  However if I do that, how do I stop downloading anyhow?

Two options sprang to mind, encode as a Flash object in the same way I do for other tracks or create a plyer page on the site.  I opted for the latter and the new track is available here, and others will be placed there in due course as I start up on some new things soon.

A more technical perspective of the track can be found here.

In the meantime, enjoy.

Yesterday there was sporadic internet access, a few seconds here, a few more there but in the end we had to give up.  This was frustrating as I have a music file to post online for some people to listen to and comment on so I can refine the mix that bit more.

Today it is a little better, a few minutes here and a few more there, but nowhere near what I really need.  So I decided to ring the script readers of doom...

However, they must have anticipated this, as instead of the usual message, there was the voice of a wee scottish maiden, calmly telling us that they are aware that some users are experiencing problems on the internet and they had their engineers working to resolve the problem.

Then it made sense, the reason they had not yet got it fixed was that the engineers were getting instruction from the script readers...

"Well Mr technical engineer man, I have to inform you that there is a problem with your internet"

No shit Sherlock.

Swine flu, it sounds like it could be scary and if you are in Mexico, or Mexican, it is.  No one who is not in Mexico, or from Mexico has died as yet, all other infections detected and treated are like 'Ordinary' flu, which technically this is.  All flu types are given a designation, for example swine flu has been designated as a H[1] variant, which almost every seasonal flu that affects humans is also classified under.  The really scary flu from a few years ago, bird flu, is a H[5] variant (H[5] N[1] to be precise), and should THAT become easy to transmit from human to human in a way that does not require constant and close proximity to infected birds, then we are ALL in trouble.

However, lets look statistically at this, of all the deaths currently, including the one in Texas, all have been from Mexico, so there could be a genetic weakness or a second underlying unknown variant here.  Apart from a small variant from swine, this is a 'Normal' flu virus and like the common cold, the flu virus mutates and changes otherwise as a species we would all have become immune long ago and the virus wiped out.  Now, according to scientists who have tracked the flu genome (Or genetic code), the flu virus originated from animals, so swine flu is nothing more than natural evolution at work.  It spreads like flu, it has symptoms like flu, in fact it IS flu like we have had around us for longer than anyone reading this has been alive.

Ok, swine flu has killed people, but lets get real here, so does any flu virus.  If your weak to a particular strain or it is particularly nasty, or a combination of the two, it is more likely to kill.  I'm not trivialising, just trying to balance out the hyperbole that is surrounding this.  If it was known as 'Common human flu' the current rate of infection would not have made more than 2 paragraphs in some crummy snoozepaper.  For a city like Mexico City, the rate of infection for flu is actually quite normal, what is odd and alarming is the reported death rate, though this is atill below the average 30% death rate of pandemics in the 20th century (Spanish flu had a death rate of about 40% of those infected).  If all deaths currently reported are confirmed as swine flu, then the mortality rate is about 9%, which if you look at the mortality rate for regular flu is about 5%, but were nowhere near the 40% of spanish flu of 1918 or the 20% rate from the 1968 pandemic.

Should we be worried?   Well yes, but not from the hysteria being generated, but more for the elderly and vulnerable who are just as vulnerable to this as they would be to 'normal' flu.  The rest of us should take the same precautions as we would usually when the flu warnings come around and if we do get symptoms of flu, talk to the medical experts (And stay at home).  There are (At the time of typing) 8 known cases of swine flu in the UK, however there are probably hundreds starting or just finishing with 'normal' flu (Millions worldwide probably), but they don't get a mention.

And just to note, bleaching your walls, doors, windows and such like will not make a blind bit of difference, even if you do work in a pharmacy (You know who you are Rachel ).

Well, the last 7 days have at times verged on a technical disaster, and all of it down to mobile phone companies, namely Three and Orange, though Three did redeem themselves today but more on that later on.

So first let's shame Orange for it is them who misled me and told me what I wanted did not exist.  In January it was time to renew the contract and while I had a few reservations due to some coverage issues where I live, I started the process of renewing the contact and tried to haggle a phone I would like.  What I wanted was something like my old SPV650, with a proper keypad and a slide out keyboard, running Windows Mobile (Which considering how much I dislike Windows (Especially Vista) is quite a surprise).  I was told that such a phone did not exist, so settled for the HTC Touch Diamond, which is as close to an iPhone as you can really get without getting a HTC Touch HD or an actual iPhone.

Now, over the last 2 months or so, the signal has become more erratic and more unreliable, indeed I could work around the issues before, but now the signal is inconsistently inconsistent, which is quite an achievement in a way, but VERY annoying when you are trying to make a call and the second you hit call, the signal vanishes as if some mobile signal magician with an evil streak is having a laugh with you.  This has annoyed me to the point of asking how much I need to pay to get out of the contract, but as much as the 'Find the signal' games annoy and anger me now, it's nothing compared to what else I recently discovered.

Walking into the Orange shop on Huddersfield High Street, I saw a phone with a keypad, a slide out qwerty keyboard AND ran Windows mobile, it is the HTC S730, and on inquiring how long this phone had been available on Orange, I was told 'Since November last year'.  Now I could be wrong, but didn't January 2009 come AFTER November 2008?  On asking how much it would cost me to buy, I was told £250, now this is something I could use as a get out of jail free card with orange due to a clause in my contract, so a call to customer relations is in order in the next day or so,

Now on to Three.  The modem has worked well for quite some time, however if the signal is lost (Which it is from time to time), unless the 3Connect software is shut down it crashes the Mac in a pretty spectacular way, not really what you want.

On Sunday 19th April, I missed that the signal had vanished and had iTunes open in the background while looking through photographs in iPhoto when the screen went dark and the error of death appeared.  On restarting the Mac, all hell broke loose.  The iTunes and iPhoto databases were corrupt and the 3Connect software would not start as the modem driver had become corrupt.  In short, everything that was open at the time was in effect useless.

iTunes and iPhoto were fixed with a restore of a previous backup, so that took 5 minutes, but the driver required a re-install of the 3Connect software.  While this worked to the point the modem was accessible, the 3Connect software reported an error code.  So I phoned support, enter the 'Script Readers' of doom...

I got through to Mumbai and spoke to the script reader, who obviously did not listen to a word I was saying as he described uninstalling using add/remove programs.  Erm, that's Windows XP, not Vista or as in my case, OS X.  I explained again that I had already re-installed the software and the crashed ONLY occur using the software, and that I was using a Mac.  As soon as I told him the error code, he smugly said "Mr Ramage, I have to inform you that there is a problem with your computer"...   Erm...  No, no, no, no, no!  It works fine so long as the 3Connect software is not in use and had just discovered that using the modem options direct from OS X allows the system to work AND stay functioning if the signal drops, indeed it even re-connects and no errors!  Surely if the fault was with the computer it would crash and die quite regularly without the aid of the 3Connect software?

I could feel the anger building inside to a point where I wanted to throw something at the script reader on the phone, luckily for him I can't throw things to Mumbai, never mind with any accuracy at that range.  So I hung up and found an email address to send a snotty email to vent my now considerable anger.

To be honest, I expected nothing to come from it, so I was surprised to get a phone call today from Three support asking me to go over the problem again.  I went over it all again and while it was obvious the person on the end was reading from a pre-defined script, it was a better script and when things didn't go according to it, she took the time to check things over and come up with other suggestions.  This did make me feel a little better about it all, but not enough for me to renew the contract in 6 months.  Three like Orange are going out of the door, though Three have somewhat redeemed themselves.

Now I have that out of my system, on with other things (Which I will reveal soon...).