Archive for the ‘ Music ’ Category

Day Off

Monday, March 1st, 2010

Ah yes the wonderful feeling of not having to do anything. Having said that, I am supposed to be playing golf again today. As always no time was set and chances are it will rain. Looking at the weather this morning, it is not looking favorable for what should be a good casual round of golf.

Home alone and enjoying the quiet. No radio going on about crap and single minded opinions from 2GB. Some good news arrived via e-mail this morning, relating to my water damaged speakers. Not sure if I posted that here? Anyway, a few weeks back during the biblical floods brought on by lots of rain here in good old Sydney. The downstairs part of this house, decided to let water in. There were a number of casualties, An old Server and my beloved B&W DM330′s. The base of these speakers is splayed out and absorbed a fair amount of water. Upshot of which, they cannot be used for the purpose they were designed for. Digital Monitors. As the sound from these speakers will differ greatly from what they used to be, that and they will go mouldy.

I managed to find an Audio Shop who specializes in these kind of speakers. So a quick e-mail to them and today I have a quote for 2 pair of speakers. One pair is the optimal replacement and the second pair is there for a second quote option, naturally the second quote will be rejected by me if the insurance won’t go for the first pair. It will be interesting to see if the ‘New for Old’ policy really does do as it says on the tin…..?

Posted in General, Golf, Music, Personal Blog, Weather | No Comments »

stuff

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

It has been a funny start to the year so far. The house build is starting to take shape. I drove by this afternoon after work and took a few snap shots. So far the footings have been laid out and prepared for the concrete, so hopefully sometime in the next few days, it should be poured and left to dry.

Work has been full on with changes and major repairs. I mentioned that the main domain controller died on its ass the other week and left us high and dry. The so called ability to recover data from backups proved extremely hard work and non eventful. You would think that you would be able to recover the data using Windows own version of backing up and restoring, but oh no. Nothing was corrupted, Windows just decided on being an arse hole. So $200.00 or so later and a small but really useful download, I retrieved what data I could. The previous nights backup failed when the server crashed and yes, it was the only time you would wish this had never happened, everyone who needed their latest data…sadly didn’t get it! So off to a Data recovery expert, who worked remotely from the UK of all places to here in Sydney, resolved the problem with our three Raid Drives. Thankfully the amount of money we paid (lets just say it was rather a lot of money), actually worked.

So with that out of the way, a new server was ordered and delivered last Friday. The Server will go into the rack tomorrow and be worked on until such time I have to kick people off the system so that it can become the Main DC. I am also in the process of revamping one of our older servers. Citrix 2 box has been revamped and 2 more Gig or RAM has been added. This quite nicely runs Server 2008. I am just in the final throws of doing updates and organising for Citrix to be put on.

The Mac that has become my new best friend is still charming me into what it can offer. Thus far I am in the first stages of rebuilding my main web site, although for the past 5 years or so, this has been my only creative and active. Hopefully I can rekindle my creative juices in Music and Photography.

The new thing in my life which takes me away from computers and internet is Golf. The two rounds of golf I had this long weekend proved that it isn’t as easy as it looks. No matter how good youget in WII golf, you will never hit 300 metres in real life if you have never played a real game of golf.

Posted in Computers, General, Life Down Under, Mac Project, Music, Personal Blog, Site Updates, Work | No Comments »

XP vs Vista

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

It has been a short while since I last posted on here. I have been busy with Facebook. The reason why I have been busy with facebook is simple. Friendsreunited have gone free, so anyone can register on there and take full advantage of the features. Every now and again I get e-mails telling me that someone new has joined, so I log onto reunited and check out whos who. I managed to find a few more people and drop them a message to say Hi and find out what they are upto these days.

I was told that most of the people I worked with at U-NET/Via Not Works were on facebook, so I edited my profile and added a few people I knew, which led onto a few more and more. I have been so tied up with it, chatting to an Old mate Shaun, whom I used to work Night Shift with, all those years ago. It has been fun stomping down memory lane. So whats this got to do with Vista vs XP or vice versa?

It was easier trying to find these people than it is to find work arounds or do simple things that I could do in XP. I decided that i would try and edit/create my own theme, so I downloaded some server software so i could trial out my ideas and test my own designs on things not relating to my blog. My main site has been dormant for years, I felt it was time to do something about it. Even if its a basic homepage with a few gadgets and gismos, until i can add something worthy of the bandwidth (as if this isn’t).

I tried 2 lots of server apps, Xampp and Wamp Server. Both looking good, easy to install, but windows Vista does like to mess with your head. So having used Xamp before and know it works well, I tried that, no success. Tried installing WordPress and 500 server errors all the time, tried running as Admin, made no difference.

Music Software had serious issues too. Sadly no more as I have deleted them off the system, kinda defeats me having a shiny new fast laptop. So my decision is to replace Vista with XP. I just need to ensure that all the gizzmos work under XP. So tonight I have breathed life back into an old machine, in various states of decay. Currently sitting on a format of 74% so not long to go before Xp begins to install. I used a Maxtor CD to erase the drive and format etc. Now windaz is doing the same. Just to make sure. I really do miss FDISK, such a wonderful tool to have in your arsenal.

Still waiting on Mickey Soft to get back to me, called them 6 days ago, still no response. But hey, i kinda new that would happen. I complained that Vista was the spawn of satan and rather than moving forward, I was taking wacking big leaps backwards. I suppose I didn’t help my cause?

81% and maybe i can do some actual design work and trial it out on a system that will allow me to.

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Posted in Blogz, General, Music, Personal Blog, Site Updates, Web Sites | No Comments »

New Links

Tuesday, June 10th, 2008

I have added new links which I felt worthy of getting listed. i am in the process of looking to add more links in the photographic section, I just need to find like minded peeps for Music. I may also need to look at blogs on Diving too, which will be another interest of mine soon…when the weather picks up,too much rain at the moment I don’t want to get wet :-) :-)

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Posted in Blogz, Music, photography | 1 Comment »

my-tunes

Friday, May 30th, 2008

Yes I did really mean i-tunes. I have been browsing for some of my old favourites on itunes, but sadly not all are on there. Disappointing as some even earlier items were?!?! Anyhow, I managed to quell my disappointment by downloading 2 albums of Chris de Burgh, 1 album from Kraftwerk and a few single items.

I bet you cannot guess the Kraftwerk album…..? Yes indeed, Autobahn was a must, all 24 minutes of the same bass-line and a few transgressions, some whizz bangs, whooshes and car sounds, albeit badly but effective. Howard Jones was one of the single purchases and two from Peter Gabriel. Chris Rea has also proved problematic, as some of his earlier albums are on there whilst others are not. Bizarre. This is one thing that bugs me about itunes, it is not really consistent. Some albums are only part albums, whats the point in that? Some are + whilst others are encoded at the usual just barely CD quality. this is where the iPods come into their own with the + options. The sound is really good, whoa, almost got excited then.

The drive into work has been better, with different music and reliving my younger days when I would have these albums cranked right up. Poor parents. My next task is to copy over music from the Media PC as I have a good selection of music on there. Now that I have a bigger ipod, I can fit almost anything on there.

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Posted in Computers, General, Holden, Media PC, Music, Personal Blog | No Comments »

New iPod

Friday, May 16th, 2008

Monday just gone, Sam bought me a suprise. A shiny new iPod. The Classic 160gb iPod. I had forgotten how heavy these classic pod of I’s were, going back to when they first came out. I remember picking one up and spending 20 minutes trying to wipe my fingerprints off of the thing. Fortunately you can buy all kinds of protective covers for them now. Anyway, getting back to my new toy. I had setup an account when i started playing with Mac’s, as Itunes is standard with the later OS. Do you think I could remember my login details…nope, nor could I remember the uppercase or lowercase. Anyway, after battling my way through the itunes ‘lost your password’ shananigins I was logged in and had a play on itunes. I bought 2 albums. The Concerts in China – guess who? Thats right JMJ, the main man and his wonderful concert in china of which I watched on the TV back in the UK many, many years ago. It was interesting watching a mass of chinese people trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

I also bought Yello – All tied up special edition, with extended mixes and a few new tracks from what I can remember from the orriginal Picture CD I bought – also a long time ago. I am fairly sure these dudes will be on walking frames by now. I also purchased one song of Nickleback, just for the hell of it. I still have some CD’s in my 10 disc changer, which for some reason is not in the boot of the car.

The first thing I noticed about the 160Gb Classic over the 1Gb nano, is the sound quality, then the menu and a few other features. The sound quality is excellent. Even though the sound system in the car is old and the speakers aren’t really upto the job, it performs really well with the new pod connected via the cd input on the dash. Nice feature for a 10 year old car. My next task is to find some of my CD’s and rip them to itunes and load onto the pod. My drive to work has improved, sadly the drive home has turned to shit. Tonight was no exception.

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2 days on

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008

Well, so far so good. i haven’t really had too much time to play with my new toy, however, what time i have spent, has been doing updates…yes Service Pack 1 for Vista. How long has it been out? Well, I only mentioned this a couple of days ago to Sam and sure enough, whilst doing the first batch of updates on this Laptop. Service pack 1 rears its ugly head up. I wonder if when Service pack 2 appears that it tuns Vista Home Premium into Ultimate, similar to what XP service pack 2 did to XP home.

I have managed to transfer most of my crap onto the Hp and have installed some of my favourite, but unused software, Dreamweaver et al. I just need to install some DVD/CD writing software. Sadly it came with bare minimum and a 30 day trial of Orifice.

Now onto the update of the blog. 2.5 has a disliking to IE7. What I hear you say. Well, try uploading an image and adding it into your blog. Unless the skin I am using has issues with WordPress 2.5 I am not sure. I have installed Firefox and have used that to compose my posts, that seems to work without any issues. I have also tried this on two different machines.

Ah well, the only things I need to do now is install my music software and see how it fairs on this little beauty.

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Relaunching an Old Site

Thursday, May 10th, 2007

Its been a while, since I did anything of any importance to this old site, so here goes. www.the-keys.com.au is being relaunched (or depending on how annoying the flash gets, launched through the window), also comments have been made available for people to use…..

Posted in General, Music, Site Updates, Web Sites | 1 Comment »

TÉO and TÉA – new album by JMJ

Wednesday, April 4th, 2007

Yep, the Album is better than I had hoped. Jean Michele Jarre has in my mind created an album worth buying. His early albums were awesome, leading up-to the Concerts in China and his various re-releases and remixes were all good, the latter releases failed to impress, apart from Zoolook, Rendezvous and Revolutions, Albeit he started going weird and commercial as most artists do, catering for the many instead of the ones who stood by from the early days and feeding their need, for what JMJ was best known for. Thats my view. Thankfully this album is more like the JMJ of old with a touch of ‘E’ and a bottle of water and lasers bouncing off the dance floor.

The title track and its extended remix are superb, if you like trancy thumping bass lines and drums, with the clear cut lead synth crying in your beer…sorry ear, then you will love TÉO and TÉA. To get into the mood and understand the concept, visit the website, you will be amazed at the streaming flash video and interactivity you get, just make sure the headphones are plugged in and volume high to get the most from it…trust me. Best viewed with a fast connection to get the streaming and loading times down to a minimum, at best stay on the site awhile for the full effect. Click the link on the right below…..you know the one

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Wednesday, February 7th, 2007

Behringer Compressor

Yet another toy to play with. Not had that much chance to do much, with work and everything elswe that goes on. More on this later

Posted in General, Music | No Comments »

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