I’ve just noticed that in one of the applications I edited this page in all the HTML tags got turned into upper case, how annoying.
What’s happened since the last post? I spent three days in manchester recording a brass band with b+h. I felt quite guilty on the train there because I fell asleep in someone’s reserved seat. I knew that the seat was reserved from Nottingham onwards but I got on at Grantham. Unfortunately by the time we got to Nottingham I’d fallen asleep and when I woke up I noticed that I was still sitting on a seat with a reserved ticket on it :S
The actual client turned out to be Warner Brothers so I knew quite a few of the tunes we were recording which made a nice change 🙂 Think Star Wars and Bob the Builder. The recording was in the Peel Hall at Salford University. I had a full english breakfast all three days to keep me going, very long days. Eating venues varied from a greasy road side cafe full of manchester workmen in fluresant jackets to a posh french restaurant on the quayside in Salford. I ordered my dessert in French… kind of 😉 I tried Mrs Raymond, I tried. The waiter just smiled as if to say “Yes we get your sort in here all the time”.
Another of our meals was a pizza, but we had a whole one each and couldn’t eat them all. My roommate, who was great, had a great idea and hung our half eaten pizzas out of the window at the travel lodge overnight (4 stories up over a street pavement) so that they would be fit to eat in the morning. Right…
It turned out that my roommate was a bit of a computer geek. We got talking about computers somehow (I didn’t start it, honest) and when I mentioned I’d just set up a web server in my bedroom I was quite taken aback when he said “Is it running Apache, PHP?”. He did however have a girlfriend (they were engaged!) so there’s yet another geek who has a girl. Frelling…
Once the van was unloaded and all the mics were rigged and everything plugged in, my job was basically two fold – 1) making drinks and 2) pressing record. Both had their difficulties. Making drinks was difficult simply because the nearest source of water was down a labyrinth of dark corridoors deep inside salford university and the fact I had to get through the room where the recording was taking place holding a tray full of cups and a kettle to get there.
The pressing record part wasn’t difficult because of the 7 buttons that had to be pressed in the correct order and combination for every take, that’s very very easy after a while. It’s the fact that I had to remain perfectly concentrated for hours at a time, that and I had to sit cross legged so that Brian could see the digits on the display in our very cramped control room. Every take I had to write down the time on the tape, the take number and exactly which bar from which piece was being recorded – without the aid of an actual score or any knowledge of the title of the pieces! To make things worse, on the second day someone kindly mentioned that my notes would be sent off to Norway along with the recording so that the Norweigan editors could make sense of the forty eight tracks we had recorded a few bars at a time, not necessarily in the right order. Oh and then they were going to cut 15,000 copies of the CD. No pressure then. Do they KNOW I’ve never done this before?
Since then I’ve been back to school. I’ve started to hate that word. Not in the same way I’ve loathed it for all the years I’ve been at one, but in a whole new way. I’ve started to cringe every time I say it, perhaps I feel embarassed that I’m still at school now that most of my best friends are either at Uni or at work. Kaz’s departure from my physical world is growing ever closer and Norwich seems to get further away by the day. Aren’t I sad?
As part of my drastic change in lifestyle this year in order to do better in my exams (yeah, right) I’ve stopped spending quite as much time in #imen. All I seem to do is irritate people. I’ve started trying to go to bed earlier and getting up earlier, which works sometimes. I’ve even said that I’m quitting stage crew this year to make more time for my studies. I may even go to the games lesson tomorrow to shock Mr C who is responsible for that session this year! I haven’t stopped geeking however. The Linux Lab at school now has 6 working compaq workstations and I’m making plans for the school open day to show off my lab to everyone 😀 I might even invite some ALUG and PLUG members.
School is a bit of a pain at the moment because I’m carrying on doing all five of my subjects which means I have half as many “non-contact study periods” as everyone else and have a lot to do. Maths is hard work, but I’m determined not to let it get on top of me. I’m thinking of dropping Physics for complicated reasons, although I’m a bit upset because I find it really interesting.
Went to my cousin’s wedding yesterday. It was a fantastic day and she looked as gorgeous as I’d expected. It’s unbelievably weird for the girl I pretty much grew up with to be getting married – especially seeing as I hadn’t met the bridegroom until the wedding. I really hope she’ll be happy. I feel very close to her. Hope nobody was embarassed by my family turning up in the VW camper 🙂 !
I’m just going to finish watching this programme on channel 4 about the brilliant french sport of “free running” and I ought to do some work before I go to bed!
