17 Sunday Sep 2006
Posted in General
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We have been fortunate enough to have won a pair of tickets to see the Scissor Sisters as part of their Red Square concert in Trafalgar Square, London. I got to try my Sony Ericsson K800i phone camera in anger for the first time, and this is one of the results (a complete set is on our Flickr site http://photos.mp3monster.org)
15 Friday Sep 2006
Posted in General
The Guerrilla Artists Banksy is getting a lot of press at the moment, with another article on the BeeB news site. I found it rather amusing that in the BBC article some of the people interviewed couldn’t get their head around some of his simple messages.
If you’d like to see more interesting work, then check out his website here.
07 Thursday Sep 2006
Following on from an earlier blog entry (here) about SpiralFrog providing legal, freedownloads – EMI have now made an agreement to license their music to the service, that puts the catalogues of two of the largest players into the service. In addition to this, EMI have approved the use of lyrics as well on the site. If my recollection is correct about nine months ago EMI was one of the players that spent time trying to shutdown lyric search engines.
07 Thursday Sep 2006
Posted in General
There seems to be a rising number of cases of people trying to do something (illegal) about speed cameras. The cases that I’ve seen have actually resulted in the individual(s) end up being hurt or prosecuted for more serious crimes and receiving greater punchishment as a result. So I’d like to suggest a new form of Darwin award for motorists where nominees end up beig prosecuted for more serious crimes as a result of trying to avoid speeding charges.
Here are my first nominees:
Feel free to post links to more nominees in the blog comments 🙂
06 Wednesday Sep 2006
Well I’ve finally found a little more time to add a bit more to the rest of the website. So now the CV page is up. I only need to update the CV – shouldn’t take more than another couple of months 🙂
04 Monday Sep 2006
Posted in General
01 Tuesday Aug 2006
Posted in General, Technology
As the internet is in the eyes of the legal world is a new thing (relatively speaking, although even for the non-techie people it is rapidly becoming part of normal life and taken for granted), the legal position of actions; particularly those that cross traditional frontiers are having legal presidents established and laws past. It can make things a little bit of a minefield for people; even for people who just browse – by visiting certain sites (even accidentally) could end up having you labelled as a potential terroist; what if I have a blog and express my opinions about a company which they don’t like? Is downloading from AllOfMP3.com legal or not (AllOfMP3 claim to be paying royalties in the US)? Why is that cd-wow has had to setup UK operations to sell into the UK, but BangCD does not?
To understand the legal implications of these things several organisations and associated websites have come about. Perhaps the most famous of these is the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation). Although the EFF provides some guidelines and battle to protect electronic rights, it is at the end of the day an american organisation and therefore looking at American law. for those of us in the UK, we’re probably best looking to Internet Rights organisation http://www.internetrights.org.uk/.
These organisations certainly make it easier to understand how the law effects us web users than trying to follow the establishement of legal presidents, not to mention trying to read papers as they’re read and pass into law.
31 Monday Jul 2006
I’ve been a bit slower with blog posts over the last few days. That’s because the dance company my wife performs with had their annual summer show the weekend just gone. The culmination of months of hard work by the dancers and crew.
Although my view is a touch biased. The Basingstoke Tapper’s shows look very professional (no small achievement for a community organisation); but then that is in part a reflection of the background of Tracey Kinchenton who runs the company and her husband John Deemer who handles the music side of things. Both Tracey & John have and continue to work in the entertainment business professionally.
My involvement is very much behind the scenes, acting as stage manager for the last couple of years. So it falls to me to learn the show and then on the show nights ensure that everything is where it should be and keep the rest of the crew informed of what is going and reminding them of their cues and any sudden other tasks that may need to be dealt with.
Then after the final night – there is the get out, which means helping breaking down all the staging, props, lighting which typically takes the full until 2 and 3 in the morning.
It may not sound very hard but the job is pretty physical before and after the shows. Then during the show it is noisy, hot and very stressful. You’ve got a headphone over one ear and a microphone attached to it (together know as a can) through which you’re trying to listen to questions and information being passed back and forth between the crew – over which the other microphones will be picking up the sound from the main auditorium. On top of that you’re stood a couple of feed from the stage monitors (speakers) for the entire duration of the show 2 or more hours of show. In the other ear you’re listening for the show director (Tracey Kinchenton) – just incase she needs to issue more requests or changes details of the show; plus listening out for the dancers as they prepare, enter and exit the stage beside you (and it can get very busy).
As this year the music was purely from backing tracks with live vocals rather than the usual live band or orchestra, you’re looking one way to watch the timers on the music sources so you know when things have got to end. You’re watching the stage to make sure that nothing is going wrong – straying props, children getting too close to the stage edge, pyrotechnics or lights. Not to mention keep track of all my cue notes.
To be honest – the largest sense of satisfaction comes from the release of pressure after the final night of the show. The feeling of relief is incredible once you’ve called for house lights to come up and you can ‘come off cans’ as they say and the show has run smoothly.
14 Friday Jul 2006
The Make Poverty History organisation are continuing to apply pressure to the G8 to try and keep the commitments made last year at Gleneagles being turned into a reality. The compaign included Travis slapping a nice big postit on 10 Downing Street’s door – more here. If you would like to do you bit – then go to the http://www.live8live.com/postit site here.
10 Monday Jul 2006
Posted in General
Welcome to the nearly revamped MP3Monster website. Things are progressing slowly but surely. This revamp is being created using various tools on the best of breed approach rather than trying to integrate everything into one CMS as we did last time. So Flickr provide the photo functionality, WordPress for the blog and so on. We hope that you find something here you like.
Oh, and if you’re looking to buy anything from Amazon, we’d be grateful if you could use our Sponsors link.
Cheers
Phil (aka MP3Monster)'s Blog 