The Great Tobias Toby Pro-6 Makeover BEGINS! (3 months late!)

The prologue

Way back in the mists of time (2003), Andy bought a Toby Pro-6 – a fine, very reasonably priced 6 string bass. He used it for many years, on many projects, and many bands – including the epic 15,0000 crowd gig with Janeiro in 2005 – and it’s been in use for 10 years. Over time, it’s picked up a few idiosyncracies – including a GK-3B, bracketed on with the pickup glued in place using the nifty shims Roland supply.

Bless em, the Internet Archive wayback machine even still has the Musicyo site on it!

https://web.archive.org/web/20040210040239/http://www.musicyo.com/product_specs.asp?pf_id=336

It’s got a good sound, but… it’s always been a bit quiet. I cranked it as high as I could get it - I used to use the Bass POD to boost it further, then when I got the GK3B and GR20 I ran it with the output volume turned up, which made a big difference (and told me the pickups had a pretty good intrinsic tone).

Then I got the GR55 – about 3 months ago. That unit is excellent. My eyes were opened to a world of lower latency, and the modelling… I play the toby, and a vintage precision comes out. Now it’s a rickenbacker. Outrageous. But…

the bass is now in need to upgrade. D’oh, it’s G.A.S. (gear aquisition syndrome, if you haven’t heard of it). I thought I was past that… but there it is, the old familiar feeling.

So I decided it was time for a 10 year tune-up. The whole 9 yards – fix the buzz that appeared at the 15th fret… upgrade the electronics (I started thinking about aguilar preamps)… get the GK3B fitted internally.

This was all about 3 months ago – I approached a luthier in Reading, who initially sounded enthusiastic, then went utterly silent – no response! OK… I post a message to BestBassGear on twitter, and they give me the details of… BassGear (no relation) in Twyford! These guys are much more friendly. Much more interested. And they secure the services of Julian Mullen – round about my birthday in October, we get together at BassGear HQ and talk, discussing how to fit an aguilar OBP-3, 18v of battery AND a GK-3B kit into it.

Then Roland take over a month(!) to ship it! And today… I dropped off the Toby with them! Keep tuned for how this goes – I’m truly excited that this bass, which has served me well for a long, long time, is going to get a comprehensive makeover in every department.

Work / Music Balance

While I'm not one of those rabid bloggers who thinks every last aspect of their lives is worthy of scrutiny, there is one thing I've been considering lately which definitely falls into the "mid-life (most would say tediously self-indulgent) metaphysical reassessment" cateogory.

I've recently purchased a GR-55 to go with the GK-3B on the bass, I'd been using the GR-20 on and off for years, with varying success - the tracking on the low B was always pretty suspect, but with a bit of judicious shifting you could play an octave up and get some great bass synth sounds out of it.

The GR-55 is a revelation by comparison - I've only gigged it once, but the fun I had creating sounds on it for that gig was great. The rig emerged as the bass POD and GR-55 as two sides, switched through a boss 2-way channel switcher. I used some synth sounds with modelled bass mixed in, which sounded great, but on some other tracks I wanted the regular sound of the bass - the GR-55 has a live direct feed of the unfettered bass pickup sound.

That last paragraph relates back to the title of this post. I lost myself for nearly 2 hours just... well, *playing* with settings and sounds! It was musical playtime at its' finest: directed, to try to find sounds for the songs we were playing (we did "moves like jagger" and I really wanted something like that inverted "waaaaaahp" on the original recording), but playful, with constant changes, like sculpting or painting, until I was happy enough with the solution.

Pure quality-led concentration: the best kind.

Trouble is, I'm getting that at work as well: this means I have 2 sides to my life, both of which are fulfilling and engaging - I literally have to tear myself away from work at the moment, it's great stuff.

I'm not trying to give myself the big up btw, or encourage trolls, etc. I'm going to have to schedule more playful music work - jams with Tony at PhatTone studios in Reading are a good start, had one week before last, we had a blast - some really cool funky lines, he laid some down on logic pro.

So I guess the moral is: love what you do, love your music: I appreciate I won't make anything like the money I make at work doing music stuff - these days, making money from music is frankly a pipedream unless you're a clinician, teaching, etc - so it becomes a job: enjoy being able to be playful while you can. Maybe work has its uses after all.

Thunderbird == genius

No shit, sherlock… if this was algorithmic, the programmer is drunk!

Why shouldn't lunchtime be musical?

Going to work on some solo pieces for half an hour. Zen out!

Fully filled weekends

It’s been a while since I had a weekend that full. We covered nearly 26 miles on bike on the Thames path, although we did forget to cross the bridge at Sonning so the route to Henley from Reading was… interesting. The route back was great. We have a habit of doing that, we’ll set out thinking signs will tell us what we need to know, then get sort of lost.

Current slang for this between us is “is this the road to Loutro?” which I’m sure some will recognise.

I can recommend the cycling from Reading to Henley: there’s a long stretch in the countryside, it passes by some very pretty locks on the Thames (one of which has it’s own Tea Shop) and the sunbathing potential is HUGE on days like today. I can safely say that the F1 race didn’t even cross my mind.

So Saturday, I spend the morning getting ready for the evening wedding gig (the drummer from Breeze, Steve), including some great tone-hunting on both the bass POD xt and the GR-55 synth pedal I’ve just got – that thing has some serious capabilities, including on-board USB stick music file playing, your own backing tracks? Not a problem. I got back from the gig and was asleep just after 2am after winding down.

Sunday, we get up late (maybe 9am), I sort out the bikes (mechanical checks, brakes, tyres, oil chains etc) we get them on the back of the car, drive to where I work, which happens to be a short ride from the Kennet and Avon canal, which has excellent cycle paths. We then ride to Henley and back! Now utterly exhausted, body humming after the exertion. Loved it.

Roland’s GR-55: It can Save Your Gig

I had a great gig last night, but it could have been so very different. I’ve had a GK-3B pickup on my 6-string bass for a while now, and I’ve used a GR-20 synth a few times for tracks, mainly for small backing sounds and laying down backing while writing tunes. I dipped into the technology again for the first time in years and found out about the GR-55 from some posts on Twitter, mainly about a spectacular fretless bass player in the US who uses a slightly modded one as his main solo gig-machine.

Intrigued with the apparent capabilities, I was lucky enough to be able to buy one – I haven’t bought any new gear for several years now, last thing was the NEO cabs for the stack, and that was probably 7 years ago. So, suppressing GAS, I decided to try one out, properly, with the bass, and see if it was all it was cracked up to be. I was impressed enough to buy it.

My plan was to use the GR-55 on “forget you” (Cee Lo Green) to get the high-pitched glockenspiel-type stuff during the choruses, as it tracks the bass. I got something which just about worked on the GR-20, but it tracked really badly on the low B (the guys in the band pitch the track down a semitone). The GR-55 coped very well, and additionally it let me put a piano underneath as well. The UI is intuitive enough that I worked out how to get the expression pedal to act as a volume control just for the synth bits, leaving the real bass signal untouched.

Then I started to explore the signal modelling capabilities – they take the signal from the GK3B and turn it into other instruments, not MIDI triggering, so no lag. We were doing some tracks which sound great with an old P-bass, so I dialled up and EQd a really nice sounding vintage Precision. Sounded great!

So the gig comes around, and I’ve got this great rig going – I’ve got the GR-55 feeding 2 signals into a 2-way Y switch, with the single feed back to my amp. On one side is the “full” output, which contains all 4 channels (synth 1, synth 2, modelled and real bass pickup) and the other is the bass output, which is just the bass. This is going through the Bass POD XT, which I’ve got patches on for some of the other songs (auto wah, etc).

All went well in the gig, until… the battery in the bass went dead! Cue silence in one of the tracks, my sheets of patch to song are out of the window… and after some confusion about what the hell is going on, I realised I could use the P-bass patch on the GR-55 because it doesn’t use the bass pickups at all!

Bingo – I play the rest of the first set on a vintage P-bass – although without any synth effects on some tracks. The audience do not care, it’s a wedding and they’re having a great time. The guitarist (the excellent Ryan Robinson) doesn’t even notice, but the drummer does because the bass failed at the start of “living on a prayer” – ummm, I think the bass is mandatory on the start of that track…

Moral of the story – complex tech can be complex, but it can give you a great safety net!

The second set went beautifully: Nigel Parsler is an excellent drummer and Ryan Robinson nails more styles than any guitarist I’ve come across, his funk chops are great.

Weather: crap. Diagnosis: studio time.

I've done a lot of cycling recently, thanks to the better weather. Since it's turned wet and crap again, it's time to work on the... Smaller muscles. In my fingers. In the studio. Yay me!

I've always thought having a woodshed in your house was odd. Especially when the axes are all blunt.

Enough punnery!

Bass boogies

I remember years ago reading an interview with Joe Satriani who said he used to just sit and noodle, and end up coming up with what he called Satch Boogies. It's where the song of the same name came from, I think.

I was sitting with the acoustic bass yesterday, which I've enjoyed a lot more since I strung it with electric strings (elite blue labels, very light) than the phosphor bronzes I had on there - the bronze strings always felt sticky, uncomfortable and I didn't like the smell (which I'm guessing is copper). I fiddled around with some shapes as usual, climbing around, but ended up doing some kind of open E boogie thing with high neck register figures in between, which turned out to be loads of fun on a sunny day.

Anyone else do this when they're not trying to overtly write or learn something? Those moments when you're just indulging in the pure playfulness of music? I need to make more time for those moments.

Upcoming wedding gig, for one of the Breeze boys! Setlist reactions…

The drummer for the band I filled in a season with in Andorra in 2007 is getting married. Apart from having a stag do in Vegas (not too shabby), he’s putting the icing on the cake by employing my fingers to put the low end into his wedding band.

I’ll be working with a couple of great guys to form part of the core band – Ryan Robinson on guitar and Nigel Parsler on drums.

Ryan stunned me with his Talkbox on “living on a prayer” when we gigged in Brackley with Steve on drums – suddenly what could be seen as something of a cheesy rock song actually took on a huge amount of energy. He’s a great player, Ryan, we share some music tastes as well.

I’m not sure if I’ve ever gigged with Nigel though, according to his bio he’s done the ACM as well so we’re guaranteed a great night.

I thought it might be interesting to list the setlist I have so far – there’s a lot of personnel changes as you can imagine, Steve has the breeze guys up and down in both sets for a sort of supergroup – and give me reactions to the tracks. A lot of them are Breeze staples. The keys are in the list, as is the persons involved, to a degree…

1st set

crazy little thing called love (jay)(D) – realised I played this first time in about 1989 with Fat Freddy’s Cat in St Andrews. I’m taking the time to go through it again and re-learn the feel, it’s a bouncy bassline and I didn’t appreciate that before. Finding fun!

shine (jay) (Eb) – Never played this, it’s the Take That tune. Thankfully the progressions are simple and the tune spent so much time advertising Morrisons that it’s earwormed enough into my long-term memory and just seems to come out of the fingers on demand. Cool, might even be able to try some vocals on it.

sweet home (jay) (D) – The original feelgood track with the original feelgood frontman, Jay

3 tracks with kelly singing – don’t know what these are yet, I’ll have to wing it on the day!

forget you (neill) (Bb) – learned this a while back for a Brackley red lion gig but we never did play it, have been learning that little funky bass breakdown to get it just so. Definitely a 6 string job, I’ve been considering the synth to give the bass a little more pop (literally)

dont stop me now neill (F) – great track, this one will be one to enjoy

billy jean neill (B) – always enjoy this one, that metronomic beat is infectious to play, always find myself bouncing from foot to foot while I play it.

 

2nd set

mustang sally (steve charlie) (C) – Steve will sing this of course. I reckon his voice is better than the bloke from the commitments

valerie  (michelle) (Eb) – I don’t have the Winehouse version lying about, I’ll just have to work on the original

sex on fire (jay) (E)  - wonder if we’ll do the start properly… I’d better polish it just in case!

moves like jagger (jay neill kelly rich) (A) – Now this one I think I will get synth bass on, I think there’s a patch on the GR somewhere which will do the job.

funky music (rich and caj) (E) – another track I’ve been playing for 20 years, but these guys get the modulations at the end right, it’s a great track when you do it right to the end!

shake your tail feather (neill) (Eb) – I’ll be channelling the Duck himself on this one. Look down on me and wink with a puff of yer pipe Mr Dunn

dont stop believing (neill) (E) – Neil sings this really well, the man’s a star – how to keyboard players do that?

bo rap (breeze) – at last, bohemian rhapsody. Another track I learned ages ago!

let it be hey jude (breeze) – or, as I coined it after seeing McCartney miming at the olympics – “I, look like , your, Nana na-na, Nana na-na, Hey Jude”

eBay tales

I've had an original line6 Bass POD for years - its seen me well for live shows for at least - what - 7 years or something? The floorboard controller for it does a great job, tuner, wah, volume, all in one.
When the PODxt came out I was interested, especially as it didn't have the annoying gap while changing patches, but the cost of a replacement system - bass PODxt plus the FBV short board - always seemed to put me off enough not to bother.
Well, fast forward to now, and there are good deals to be had on eBay! Fortunately, the gear is well built and often spends its life in studios: total cost on eBay (I was amazed to win both first time with a reasonably high max bid) was a very reasonable £170 including P&P.
I even had the chance to fix the FBV a bit - switch replacement. I can recommend Doctor Tweek on the web - fast, great communication and he's got the right parts for the job: after desoldering the old switches, easy job, completely fixed. Satisfying - an irony is that this means I now know how to fix it later, and also how solid it is.

Great new project, built new equipment for it!

New project: I've got hooked up with a truly talented, enthusiastic vocalist - She's had stuff released before.
Great energy in her songs, and a new genre for me: reggae, but with a lot of other styles thrown in. She loves her crossover - she's into loads of styles, and regularly likes to flip between them.
With that in mind, this time around I finally knuckled under and made up the monster live studio PC in a flightcase I've always wondered about... Net result, a machine which runs ableton live, with a behringer MIDI floor controller to kick off the scenes and modify tempo.
We've tested it, and it seems like it'll do the job - the drummer's got great tempo, and the gear is reliable.
All I need now is a better audio interface than the old 2x2 I'm using... Anyone got a MOTU 828 I can have?

Unsolicited Ambulance chaser claim SMS text FAIL

Look what I received:

---

Sent by unregistered version of SMSCaster: FREE MSG: We have now had the £3150 compensation released by the insurer for your accident. To claim this now reply '

---

Now THAT's tragic. Pathetic on sooOooooooOOOOO many levels.

When you're not funkifising

Zen-chill out growing 10ft tall tomatoes.

When you grow your own food, you feed your soul as well.


Just lashed them all up properly. Needed doing.

In other news... Fantastic new musical project starting, big bass and BIG tech.

Chicken Soup Mix 1

Chicken Soup Mix 1

Just wanted to re-share chicken soup. It's in need of some remixing at the end, I think... but I'm pretty happy with it.

Solo bass pieces and meditation.

I've had the itchiest fingers last couple of days... Went to a wedding over the weekend, which was fun, but I didn't take a bass (just a grip exerciser). Managed to tear a calf muscle dancing, which is a minor limp now (healing fast, I think).

The itchiness, though, developed into a sort of dark, sleepless yearning. I've got to play, play new things, write new things. Weird, out of character things. New sounds from research, radio 1, Maybe buy a Novation controller at some point, abandon old band concepts, shrink the personnel, programme a lot: expensive synth strings, horns, drums...

So to calm the beast, tonight was declared "dig out old tap pieces and start learning a new meditative solo piece" night. Other people's work, all, but something to still me before bed.

Satriani's "midnight" and "day at the beach" work surprisingly well on a 4 string, although the warwick's too heavily strung. The rhythm for Midnight took time to come, but the familiar alpha waves hit me and that sense of continuity, stillness, chronological nowness - it came to me, fleetingly, leaving that same beautiful feeling of being "at one" with something, anything, instead of the terrible otherness of day jobs.

New piece to learn is "Jacob's Ladder" from 100 degrees and rising, by Incognito. It's a beautiful piece, with a mainly Latin feel behind some wonderfully articulate gentle slap and fingerstyle, all light, feather-touch and playful. Things I'd rather be!

Overall, a good start, I've got the main A-E part right, along with the higher register piece which breaks it before it heads to F-B flat. It's so fast I think I need the Aria Integra, with the light 30s on it, to get the feel right. Beautiful piece, the strings towards the end are really nicely done. The whole album's got some great moments on it, they rein in the worst excesses of the strained female vocals on nearly all the tracks they appear on.

Keep playing, world. It's important.

Anxiety dreams of a Bassist

Wow, Freud would run screaming from this morning's little oddball moment. I suspect I'd stopped breathing again (last night was pretty rough) and from what I remember the dream had points in it where my left hand had been replaced with a transplant, which kept going numb and powerless until I took time to flex and work on it.

At one point, very lucidly, I was thinking this would stop me playing permanently, and I started remembering how to play Donna Lee in my head. After this, the fingers (previously looking pale and lifeless, and unable to clasp at their tips as if broken halfway down) came back to life and appeared to be fine again.

I woke up gasping, as usual - not a function of the dream, more me not breathing. Yipe.

Creative acts with paint

Horrible, horrible helmet:



Plus Altern-8 style painter:



Equals primed helmet,



Then ORANGE.



And finally, shiny shiny.



Much better.

The benefits of daily metronome practice... strength.

It's weird how quickly you start to get strength and definition into your playing when you're regimented in your practice, even if you can only get 45 minutes of bass aerobics and a quick play along to some Madeon (his stuff's so good i tend to slap all the way through it, trying to embellish the excellent bass that's there already).

My right thumb has that self-guiding feel you get when something is starting to really "work", you know?

Also - found a bunch of guys on Diaspora who are running a collaborative music project, a lot of them are using soundcloud for it, so what the hell, I'll stick some low end noise on there!

Stashing parts for fixing stuff later - planning for the apocalypse

Well, maybe not the apocalypse. I've been stashing some parts for the car, mainly suspension bushes and other "consumables", while they're plentiful and cheap, as I want to keep the car for 8-10 years if possible (it should last that long, I reckon). I've now decided to do the same for my iPhone 3GS: I've got about £70 of spares and tools from http://www.AppleiPodParts.com/ including a complete OEM re-case (including the silver front bezel and internal attached parts) and a new OEM battery. These will now get stashed for use in approx. 2 years to recondition the phone completely when things start to wear out. I'll probably pick up a new digitiser / front button panel at some point as well - about another £30 or so. That should hopefully ensure a long and useful life for the iPhone. I daresay iOS for it will be deadended somewhere in 5.X long before I stop using it ;-) Fix your own stuff: it's the only way!

And at last, BlogPress came back up... google apps account using a virgin email address?

Non-music post - on the iPhone / iPad I've used a tool called BlogPress in the past - pretty good multi-platform blogging tool. Not the cheapest, but it's got reasonable integration of pictures and, more crucially and interestingly, video. It's been unstable under iOS5 and the last straw was when it simply wouldn't log in any more. I stopped using it and have been waiting for an update which Apple were apparently slow to approve. Installed the update yesterday (I'm sneezing and coughing my way through the first - and I hope only - cold of 2012) and couldn't get it to work - logging in seemed impossible... Turns out my google apps account wasn't keen to let me log in with my email address: this may well be an argument with my virgin net account, as they're the same, and Virgin have moved to using google mail. If I log in using an application specific password (google thing to allow one-step auth when your account has 2-step enabled) against the **username** I've associated with the account instead of the email address, everything works! I suspect there are other "clashes" like this out there... anyway, it's all good. I'm back into blog territory. I think I've even got twitter to log in...

New year, old music...

Here's some FunkyBass recorded live in Oxford's Bridge club, circa 2005/2006: from the Janeiro / Tempa Tempa era. Great track, this - Jake Carter wrote it, it's a classic. Jake can now be found online at http://www.jake-carter.com/. Do Your Thing - TempaTempa by Andy Basexperience Watt

A Day in the Studio... with output!

I spent Friday in pleasant creative flow, in the studio. It's been a while, and I had a project I'd started way back which I wanted to complete.

In the process, I wanted to upload some stuff to SoundCloud, where I've had an account for an age and not had any sounds on there at all. I want to start an audio CV with some recent work, something which showcases some bass, I hope.

Aside from the dodgy solo in the outro, I'm fairly happy with the result, as it gave me a great opportunity to learn some new Cubase skills I haven't used before, automating mixdown with the MIDI desk I've got (it's actually a 16 channel live desk that has a MIDI mode, I defined MIDI mapping configs for Cubase control). Great learning experience - effect inserts, panning, automation in general. Weird to watch the desk (it's automated and motorised) fiddling around with its own levels during playback.

If you're interested in the outputs, you can check my soundcloud stuff out here - this was the track I made a first mix of.

It's not bad but it's rough and ready, and that solo section is all over the place.

But I got something finished: that's desperately important.

Working on Chromatic Fantasy again!

I've reached page 3 of the transcription... it's coming together, slowly but surely, like one of those promises you made yourself and never quite managed to follow through on. I intend to be able to play this thing through at least once!

Ski tracks app - sweet

Ski tracks generates some excellent data you can plus straight into google earth. Was just reminded when is started it on the iPhone just now and got this excellent map of the last day's epic trek last march:




That's a fully zoom able and twist able map. A really nice keepsake of an excellent ski holiday.

Oo, that's got my appetite up.

Turning down a gig? Me?

It's true - I got an offer through the excellent Tony of Phat Tone Studios in Reading (his studio's a cracker) of a dep gig in London, expenses paid, hotel, etc. I turned it down after some deliberation.

The bands name is "the Gentlemen of Distorted Sound" (GODS. - look them up on YouTube, they're pretty impressive onstage.

Thing is, this gig was important for them. The chance to support the Quireboys, apparently, rested on it. But their bass player's wife went into labour, so they needed a stand in who could get the songs quick and run with it. I _could_ do that OK.

Thing is, look them up on YouTube, especially live; they're definitely part GnR, part leather-waistcoat-no-shirt-grungeglam. I would simply not fit it, not look right - and these guys have a look as much as a sound and songs.

Simple truth - If I did the gig, they'd sound great, but look hamstrung by the gimp on bass. I can't cause them not to get the gig, it's not fair to them or me. We'd both feel awful.

So I turned it down! Do you think I did the right thing? Let me know with some comments.

Old classics and revisited gems

Dug into bits of "Permanent Waves" by Rush last night: very enjoyable.

I've also been spending time trying to sight read more of jaco pastorious solo pieces, as these may form a great batch of warm-ups instead of using my rather mechanical regime (which I've been using for years).

In amongst all this appreciation for very old stuff, I've got a Moog softsynth for the iPad, which sounds just beautiful! Introductory offer: £0.69. Utter, utter bargain and sounds phenomenal.

My ex-bandmate Terry Collie appears to have had fun last Sunday finding open nights at pubs in London - twickenham / George was apparently very well organised. Rocky styles apparently, but well organised cuts it with me.

Thomann tryouts (again, first for a long time...) - tuning peg frenzy

Been a long time since I ordered anything on Thomann. I've put in an order ( €79.00 including postage ) for no less than 10 tuning pegs. It's time a couple of the beasts got some well deserved care and attention to the mechanicals.

The Tobias really does need new pegs - I replaced several a few years back, but my stocks are out, so I'm swapping all 6 of them out for Warwick ones. Here's hoping they fit.

The other 4 are silver ones to replace all the pegs on the Crafter acoustic bass I have - I was saddened by the quality of the pegs on it, they're out of character with the rest of the bass which has a quality well beyond its price tag. It sounds great, but the tuners have basically just eaten through the cheap metal the gears were made of. Not impressive. So it's warwick ahoy for them as well.

The fitting will be a damn sight simpler than the car seat was yesterday. Found that control knob, finally - another £6 to add to the pile, but the job is complete (bar a damn good leather clean and feed for the seat itself - it'll come up a few shades after that I'm sure!)

Also think I've worked out how to grease the seat. No euphemism intended.

Of cars and mechanics (sort of)

For the first time in a long time, I got the tools out in earnest and completed a much put-off job. My wife has a rather nice diesel estate car which has done us fantastic service zooming around France, but it has one niggling annoyance for her - the drivers seat. The car has leather upholstery, which is nice, but it's the basic model so the seats were only adjustable in a couple of dimensions.

Her previous vehicle had been a top-line company car, custom spec BMW 320d, with full electric seats, and she likes to drive with a lot of support under her legs, slightly pitched backwards. This was impossible with the stock seat.

I found an eBay listing a few weeks back for an 8-way electrically powered version of the same seat, so I secured it (and later, the switches, which the breakers yard had removed, the cheeky bastards - they got another 30 quid out of me for that and I still have to buy one of the switch tops) and it's been with us for about 3 weeks or so.

Last night I got home and decided there was enough light left to go for it, so I did a little investigation, established that the plug under the seat for the supplies had a full set of cables (there were 15 cables and the stock seat only had 3 plugs so I made the assumption that the car has a stock loom which will take all the optional extras), and went for it.

It was great to dig out the tools again, get my hands dirty, and figure out how to remove the seatbelt assembly (another piece the bastards at the breakers yard had taken off and neglected to mention in their listing!!!) and transfer it to the new seat - this went off without a hitch, each element under the seat actually had a physically notched removable plug so they couldn't be inserted into the wrong slot in the plug unit.

Best of all, the seat is in fact the right colour - so, although it needs a good clean and feed, I don't need to remove the upholstery and transfer it across.

The forward-backward motor sounds a little tired, I suspect the tracks need grease, but otherwise it's working fine and she now has the driving position she wanted.

I just have to find that switch knob. Grr.

Possibly the oddest Gig I've been to... Roger Waters does the Wall at the O2

Good gig: huge venue: enthusiastic performer: political content as subtle as a sledgehammer (and bang up to date, including plenty of recent footage from our current war fronts): a spectacular audiovisual experience.

But the audience... weird. Half-dead suits who have dug out an ancient T-shirt (or worse yet, have bought one at the venue): fat, bloated versions of their earlier, more energetic and visionary selves, suddenly half-reanimated like Jackson's backing dancers (and just as jerky in their motions).

Seriously, I sat near a fat bastard who nearly ripped the seat out with his catatonic rocking motions.

And at points, the whole floor audience stood up, and then in the next track realised they were quite tired and really needed to sit down again, but did it very gradually so they didn't look too old.

I spent a good portion of the time laughing at the audience!

Oh - and prostate problems and roving Becks beer sellers create CONSTANT TRIPS TO THE BLOODY LOO!

Gawd, these wispy remains of men...

Great gig though.

Best laid plans of the long weekend...

Well, a combination of things meant I only got a small amount of what I had in mind done. I got the studio set up, but then got myself exhausted moving crap gravel...

On the plus side, I think the project I started a while back is going to arrange itself into a nice trippy piece of 80bpm big-beat bentley rhythm ace / ethereal crossover.

I got experimenting with the GR50 and the 6-string, and started messing with pad13 - a 5ths heavy reverb flute pad affair. After a little low C bass and some heavy big beat, it's morphing nicely.

Today was a 12 hour day in work, so I've been restricted to a half-hour aerobics session on the Warwick. This turned out to be reassuring - fast fingers tonight.

I think the hard work over the weekend paid off - that, and the screwdriver work out I had this morning trying to dismantle a 6th high crate which arrived from Frankfurt... Pulled 8 "screws" out of the marine ply and pine before I realised they were actually a form of nail. Then I used a massive 8mm flatblade screwdriver as a crowbar and split the bastard from stem to stern. Very cathartic.

1st May Practice and musings

Breeze are playing O'neills in Oxford tonight. Get down there and suck up the sticky goodness.

I've got to mind the fort here at home, so it's 6 string practice time this evening.

25 mins of warmups with doubled finger warmups and some additions to the hammeron/pull off exercises.
Today's scale was A - majors, minors and arpeggios with triads and 7th chords.

Use some Jamiroquai to warm up the funk muscles. Decided on a stamina session so played:
- revolution 1993 full-on, all 10 mins 16 seconds of it. This one will work out your left hand, it's got a lot of B work down at the low end. Feeling pretty good at the end, can still pop around the fills.

Now we'll move onto a song for the day - analysis and catching some new vibes. My big list has some good tracks on it, all on the iPod. The idea here is to try to get some new ideas into the playing, maybe some new rhythmic influences.

Today it's "talkin loud" by Incognito. A challenger. That'll see me through to about an hour and a half of work.

Tomorrow should be a good studio day, if things are willing...

Another Nigerian bank scam

But this one is simply hysterical. Have a read. It came through to Nic as a JPG which I presume gets around spam filters.

Anyone know what a "suspense account" is? I don't think Hitchcock had trouble, but this fella has no idea.

The evening's work

All the usual stretch exercises, 15 minutes.
Spiders for 10
Hammeron and pulloff stuff for 5, finger isolation LH
3 octave Arpeggios for 10 across all 6 strings.
Right hand dexterity, all 3 finger workouts: both directions with lead and drag of alternating fingers.

Then some cover band work on 6 tracks, paying attention to the rhythm of the baselines on "smooth" (Santana) and checking the outro in particular.

Should have had a jam this afternoon but the drummer's in Armenia... How random is that?

Great night at the White Horse

Great night last night - White Horse, Emmer Green, Caversham, Reading.

The pub was packed - great atmosphere, like pubs should be, a lot of happy, friendly, chatty people.

The house band is the function band I'm working with - sounded pretty good for a first stab at public playing: lots of funk too. I think these guys could have a go at some original material... Hmm!

18th March is the next one; come on up and get a seat early - the place is jumpin! My last post shows how quirky the stage area is. It's total 80s front room chic!


<<<<<< Posted While Roaming / Gigging >>>>>>

Location:Emmer green

Stop Giving Me Choices

Bless the Hoosiers, they've given me something to think about.

A lot of the best creative work comes from constraint; star wars with physical models and the film print-though matte tech which Lucas and his team perfected still look better than the modern equivalent; they had to create something because they didn't have much choice.

Modern life has created industries who exist only to give choices of approach and tools; apart from the danger of paralysis this creates (which tool? argh)


<<<<<< Posted While Roaming / Gigging >>>>>>

Shot from White Horse

Meant for illustrative purposes. The venue feels like a living room! It's like TFI Friday all over again...

The iPhone's not bad but loud stuff still overloads it totally.

<<<<<< Posted While Roaming / Gigging >>>>>>

18 years and counting

Nic and I have been together 18 years, and romance ain't dead yet. Isn't love grand?

Got to make the effort, so I forewent(?) the customary flowers for a "I live hunting chavs" card and a tomtom satnav.

Yep, an old romantic, me.






Dinner is special though.

Love ya Nix

Best spam ever?

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---

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To browse lists of accounts related to your interests, just look for the "Browse interests" button on your new Twitter homepage.
User research typically is focused on how an individual uses a computer or device.
We already had some great sessions with entrepreneurs in Montreal building a community among small businesses; members of New York City’s art scene sharing a world once confined inside museum walls; and, folks at @WhiteHouse and on Capitol Hill providing a view into the inner workings of government and how they use Twitter to demystify it.
I am most satisfied while pushing product direction. Building things is my passion, and I’ve never been more excited or optimistic about what we have to build.
Follow our adventures @OnTheRoad.

Finally, a little white stuff.

I've been watching the news about the north with a certain amount of jealousy - I know, grass greener (whiter) et cetera, I wouldn't want to be there, etc - but truth is I really want to snowboard in the field opposite again :-)

Now it's come, and it's continuous. Advising to the Met office (those famously accurate* people) this'll keep up until 1700 or so. If so, we'll be well and truly snowed in again in our little valley here in south bucks.

This is good. Quiet, peace, time to think, south east england forced to contemplate its' navel for a while - I believe B&Q withdrawal symptoms will claim several in Slough this weekend, as they are forced to put off choosing a new sofa in a range of ****ing fabrics (ta renton).

A little enlightenment would go a long way around here. Maybe people could wake up and realise we're being crushed by the government and businesses and we need to take the power back. It's happening now - people are rising back up, realising what's actually going on. Our government is not scared of us. They bloody should be.

(*this may be sarcastic)

Android experimental "Trojan" angry birds add-on

http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00002063.html

This was only an exercise in proof on the part of the researcher, but I'm afraid this marks the beginning of the end for android. Note where this story is, and it closes with "buy F-secure's crappy antivirus software for your android handset". All the vendors are pushing hard, just ask Graham Clueley from Sophos, who pops up all the bloody time regarding mobile security issues.

Those nifty 1GHz snapdragons are going to seem pretty crappy when antivirus gets in there. Stick with platforms which don't allow unsigned code to be installed BY DESIGN - why did google leave that backdoor in there? Idiots!!

Btw another rehearsal on the 29th, and the cheese keeps on coming. New strings for the Tobias I think.

Airbus jets - not the A380 oil leaks, something worse... Software?

Something caught my eye yesterday. My day job is in software, mainly in testing. Anyone who will listen to my droning on this subject will know I have huge worries about the reliance we place now, and will in the future, on embedded software systems (e.g. Google's recent trials of a driverless car in California).

It seems airbus has more than mechanical troubles (recent A380 oil fire and the rather journalist friendly shots of bits of engine cowling). Mechanical issues don't worry me enormously as they get fixed (this is a very rare error on Rolls Royce's part), but what is happening to some A320 series airlines worries me enormously.

Now, it could be electrical, but the idea that at any point cockpit systems, including computers, might just "wink out" scares the living daylights out of me. These planes are exclusively fly by wire. Do they have manual backups? And even if they do, do the pilots still have the skills to pilot a plane whose aerodynamic profile is at least partly compensated for by auto stabilization systems? God, I hope so.

If it's software, it would feed into my software engineer tinfoil hat paranoia about software in everyday life; I'm perilously close to choosing the devices I use and rely on by their reliance on embedded software and not upgrading where possible. I'm starting to think I should get a pre-1974 car, a very old washing machine, and extremely cheap TV... Where could it end?

We don't fly often, which is a comfort, and I'm actively considering next summer as an exercise in what can be done without using modern airliners.

Human beings are human, they get bored and lazy. Software project managers are stressed and driven by gantt charts. Software engineers are at the bottom of the heap. Software test engineers are at the end of the project (and usually that gets squeezed so hard the testing is compromised).

All this makes me think that increasingly complex software (and it's usually just enhancements of existing software, they rarely do rewrites, too expensive, so it's patching and extension all the way, baby) will lead to higher failure rates in devices which use software as control systems, and it doesn't get more critical than airliners.

Watch the skies, and wear rollerskates.

First rehearsal in a while... Oh yep.

Well, the function band thing has kicked off. The exploratory operation on 2/11/2010 turned out to be in a surreal location - the main hall area of a preschool in caversham! I was cranking it out surrounded by painted lizard cut outs on the Walls (one of which was labelled "tortoise" - education education education eh?).

Ts been a while since I did any serious live playing so it's fair to say I was worried about levels of preparedness. I didn't do as much work on the tracks as I wanted to, but I figured this was a get together to see what our dynamic would be like.

After about an hour I'd loosened up a lot: things started to flow a little. Then I realised I was dancing while I played and my face was sore. From smiling. Grinning, actually. This is what I was made for: the interplay, the vibe, the groove, the good feeling, the drummer and me tearing the roof off.

It was a little rough at the edges like you'd expect, and I don't have the tones ready on the pod yet, plus I took the synth with me and didn't use it (not sure if I need it yet - I could do the brass into on celebration I guess!), but it was simply glorious.

I lit up like a dusty bulb after the pullcord ping. Can't wait to dig into the tracks properly now, get them bang on so I don't fall into my Jaco habits when overplaying! I tend to bubble a bit.

People, live music is a joy everybody should experience. Go out there, do it now.

Location:Bassland

Bassist: original and covers. And now, cyber political activist

What a weird week.

Before I get kicked off - the music projects are continuing: Tony is recording further material with a click track to get us to work with: he's also got some potentially awesome support slots we might do through a swimming buddy (of all things)... hope that's not a euphemism (I'm sure it isn't...). The Function Band from Hell is having a first get together on the 2nd of November so I'll be working on the first 10 songs double-time from this point onwards. Good tracks too, they've thrown in "this love" by Maroon 5 at the last minute - the baseline is surprisingly well-formed. I'd forgotten how instructive it can be to listen with a musician's ear to chart music sometimes: just because it's popular doesn't mean it isn't well written.

Anyway...the last few days have been a bit... well... odd.

A week ago last sunday the ol' Xantia (142000 and counting) decided to stop starting - a first, it's been bulletproof until now - so I was stranded at home working remotely for the week, something of a busman's holiday.

On thursday lunchtime I read about the Vodafone UK Tax "deal" from the government: a long-standing tax demand for an estimated accrued £6Bn from Vodafone's profits and acquisition of a german company years back, and subsequent profit stashing since then: they have a company called "Vodafone V2" *eyebrows arch* based in Luxembourg, that well-known place of business (for those who wish to escape european taxation), and have been using this to purchase the German company and give a tax-friendly haven for their profits since.

The whole thing has been grinding along for years, but lo and behold with our new Uber-Priviledged government, the negotiations are suddenly taken out of HMRCs hands and given to someone who would apparently take a less hard line approach: net result, Vodafone are eventually billed for only £1.2Bn over 5 years. What a joke.

I got angry. I surveyed twitter and facebook and the web and found an utter lack of interest, apart from Private Eye, who broke the story ages ago.

So I thought "Why is nobody else saying anything?" and I wrote a few tweets. Including this one:

https://twitter.com/basexperience/status/28014835912

and now it looks like this:

http://twitoaster.com/basexperience/important-please-retweet-this-if-you-believe-that-vodafone-uk-should-be-made-to-pay-their-6bn-tax-bill-to-offset-the-cuts-osbourne/

this is the tweet's entry on a site which tracks their popularity. Currently the tweet is number 6 in the world (seriously - in the WORLD) and has reached over 400,000 twitter accounts, being retreated by nearly 2000 people.

Since then, and spurred by the strength of feeling and goodwill I've received by some excellent people, I've turned it into something of a campaign. We're starting to get noticed (guardian unlimited story last friday).

I've started a petition - funnily enough, the e-petitions site at number10.gov is offline! What a coincidence.

Mine is at gopetition: http://www.gopetition.com/petition.40035.html - if you believe as I do that it simply doesn't matter if it's legal, what Vodafone have done is rob food from the mouths of every single one of the 500,000 jobs which will go as a result of the government's cuts. The benefit cuts alone are something like £7Bn - how much would the original £6Bn have offset?

The petition has over 1000 signatures since I started it last thursday, with some comments made by people who are just as angry.

The whole experience has completely changed my mind - I was one of the apathetic, but now I see that through technology I had thought was irrelevant a few months back, public strength of will can be expressed.

Stand up and be counted. Oh - and it turns out George Osborne is a tax avoider as well. Nice. A hypocrite as well as an idiot.

Location:Cyberspace, baby

It's all kicking off...

Excellent. The vocalist Tony found is stunning - simply stunning - her voice is like Alicia keys meets marcella Detroit: soulful, with a range and depth which belies her age.

Meanwhile the function band for gigging fun has first rehearsal 2nd Nov. I've got 10 songs to cram, many of which are quite funky. Excellent.

<<<<<< Posted While Roaming / Gigging >>>>>>

"Discover" - the offline WikiPedia app - VERY useful.

While out in Paris, we visited many many places. Actually, we need to go back for a week to get around the places we missed out on, including going up the eiffel tower (discovered you can book online now, but was all booked up!). I digress.

While using the excellent wifi in the "Secrets de Paris" hotel - an EXCELLENT hotel, very reasonable too - I found "Discover" for iPad, which is a rather nifty reader for Wikipedia. Free, too.

Turns out it's more than nifty, it caches your history - which means you can load it with up to 250MB of info on the places you're seeing, then use it as an offline tour guide! Worked wonderfully for the eiffel tower, we sat with ice creams and read all the stuff a tour guide would tell you!

Good app. Rated highly.


<<<<<< Posted While Roving / Gigging >>>>>>

New project - when the hairs on the back of your neck stand up

Well, tony's given me a CD of the new vocalist he recorded the other weekend. It's a rough cut of 5 single takes of her and an acoustic she was playing (in a pretty simple style too).

This 17 year old has quite simply got the voice of an angel. She's got marcella detroit's range, with a sort of smokiness that maybe Sheryl crow has sometimes. And her lyrics are excellent.

At the moment I keep feeling like I want to put something very massive-attack like on it, but this is a personal thing only. I know we're trying to look at a band for live work only at this stage. I suspect it could be a little like a slower version of maybe some of KT tunstall's work - but much less of the pop.

It's a totally new genre to me, this. It's not fast, furious or funky (although she'd have no issues whatsoever cranking out the attitude of Alanis Morissette and I could go v Flea a la "you oughtta know") and I am well outside of my comfort zone on it.

I must like it though. One tune in particular has the chorus stuck nicely in my head.

Hmmm.


<<<<<< Posted While Roving / Gigging >>>>>>

Filming at Green Park???

I suspect it's only some form of cheesy corporate promo - possibly for a market research company if my ears don't deceive me - but there is something mesmerizing to me about watching a production team and actors going about their business.

They seem to be playing roles associated with working out what consumers want in a mobile phone, I think, and how to market it. An irony given my vociferous rantings in the past about just that topic.

<<<<<< Posted While Roving / Gigging >>>>>>

Location:Green Park in Reading

Simplifying digital life

I got an iPad recently. The purpose was largely a business thing, so I can help out my wife with Black Swan Analysis work - I look after website analytics, etc.

I was well aware of what the apple mobile platform will and won't do, so I considered it a challenge of sorts. Would it do the job? I was pleased not to be an early adopter (it's been out since early 2010 really) as this gave the platform time to get some applications for serious use under it's belt.

I can report that it's coming along very nicely as a serious productivity tool. But the purpose of this little missive is a more general point about increasing complexity, size, and the human frailty of thinking that progress is about making things bigger.

One of the things I don't have on iPad is Microsoft office. Thankfully recent movements mean that the "doc" format is phasing out, and more third party apps exist which will use it; so I spent a whopping £5.99 on "pages" for the iPad to try it out.

Easy to use, word loads the files fine, but the biggest revelation was how little of the bloated, enormous, buggy MSWord I actually use. Pages is tiny. It costs next to nothing. And yet I reckon it handles 95% of day to day word duties I would need it for with effortless ease. Note, I'm no secretary or report writer. I do have a Bluetooth keyboard for the iPad as well, but that's portable and not essential (for instance I've been editing my homepage at www.funkybass.co.uk using "Gusto" this morning using iPad onscreen keyboard work).

We have allowed ourselves to put up with bloated crapware which we pay a fortune for, for backward compatibilty, and made Bill Gates and his ilk very rich. Why on earth did we do this? It's viral junk!

Go openoffice (note, now libreoffice thanks to Oracle being arseholes)! Use that for your PC office needs instead.

Let's simplify our lives and keep using older machines to do the same work, instead of this relentless and destructive upgrade madness.


- Posted on the move

Wow am I out of live practice!

It's been a few months so doubtless it'll take a little time to get back into the live thing again. Bringing the 5 string fretless was a baptism of fire, the guitarist played dropped D and nobody told me so I found out the hard way ;-)

Luckily it's a fretless so you can get away with a few Les Claypool moments heh heh

Tonight at Tilehurst...

... I'll be playing my first live stuff in about 9 months :-)

The function band thing will ramp up soon, I'm told - I've been using Spotify with the free 2 hours service as a way to compile and practise along with set lists. Extremely useful, and helps a lot as I don't have to but a track here and a track there. I'm not a fan of downloading tune by tune from iTunes, I think it's going to kill creativity in any music for commercial release as anyone who has half a hit will have demands placed upon them for "the difficult second single".

How many artists from the golden ages of the last 50 years have had free licence to experiement a little on their albums? This will end completely if the current trend of all music becoming the equivalent of the 99p woolworth's bargain bin continues.

I digress. This subject does press my buttons.

If you want to come and see me sweat with a Warwick Fretless 5 string, come to the Plough in Tilehurst and see some great musicians. Weird pub, this - seems to have a concentration of excellent musos within spitting distance, resulting in a decent jam night nearly every time.

The Plough Inn
78 School Rd
READING
Berkshire
RG31 5AW
United Kingdom

See you there, maybe...

Why people are buying android phones

It's because they're better then symbian. But as this fellow found out, android is still too geeky and windows-like in some aspects:

http://m.zdnet.com/blog/bott/why-i-dumped-my-droid/2487?tag=nl.e550

Plus, the device sounds like a pisspoor hardware platform.



- Posted on the move

Apple GameCentre

Wow. This got pushed onto my iPhone with iOS4.1 - but I hadn't looked at it yet.

What a piece of crap - this software is definitely not up to apple's usual standards. I would wager it didn't come through the same teams as work on iOS proper, and I'm surprised it was approved in the first place, for several reasons:

1. the font is ugly as hell
2. All the text is black on DARK GREEN which renders it hard to read
3. The slider switch controls only seem to respond to tapping (!!)
4. When I registered my usual apple ID email address, I then had to re-authorise it(?)
5. The graphics (stupid bloody banner things on every button) make it hard to work out what is and isn't a control

There are other points, but the overall point is this application is a miserable addition to the iPhone. I've hidden it away in a distant folder in a distant corner so it doesn't offend my eye (even the app icon sucks).

Has anyone used the feature?

A cautionary tale for iPad users!

A friend of mine at work is in the Apple Developer Programme, and also has an iPad. At the moment, the iPad is a little behind the rest of the iOS devices, in that it's still running a v3.x.x version of the operating system. Lots of people would argue that that's fine - and my experience so far has been that it's a wonderful device - but anyone with an iPhone with iOS4 on it knows that there are some very useful features which definitely enhance the user experience.

As part of the developer programme, he gets early releases of upcoming iOS versions and he got v4.2 for the iPad and tried it out. It seems apple quality control is not that applicable to their beta releases - his 3G connection was well and truly borked and the mail application crashed a lot.

"Fair enough" thought he "I'll downgrade back to V3"

unfortunately this proved to be a vain hope - it appears he can't get the baseband to downgrade as well, so he's stuck with the dodgy beta or an iPad which won't power up.

So if you're an iPad user and you're on the dev programme - it would appear you need to consider taking the beta release very carefully. Apparently forum postings indicate that the non-3G iPads may have an easier time of it - which might well indicate a problem with the baseband software as, of course, a non-3G equipped iPad probably doesn't have baseband software at all.

Spofity - late to the party but impressed.

I've recently started using spotify; I had thought you had to be invited but was pleasantly surprised to see I could start an account myself.

I looked again as I've got a function band project starting up, and the playlist, while containing a lot of standards I know well, does contain the odd one I don't have a CD for and haven't played live.

I really enjoy immersing myself in bass lines, working out the style, phrasing, touch, so I really fancied finding the original tracks.

I'm allergic to iTunes' quality and as a musician I hate the buy-one-song philosophy as I believe it stifles artist's potential to experiment in an album format and grow.

So when I realised what you could do with Spotify I was really impressed with it as a resource. Got the whole setlist with original recordings in 10 minutes. And now it's a playlist I can use it on the studio machine, plug the laptop into the headphone amp... Nifty.

I'd recommend it to any muso learning tracks.


- Posted on the move

Corporate stooge? Maybe for a minute.

I've got a couple of things coming through - one is a rather interesting and brand new project with a folk pop feel (not done that before!) and the other is a function band job.

I swore I'd tell everybody the setlist so I could get fingers pointed at me and lots of hoots of "sell out!" so here it is;

Set 2

1) Smooth
2) Moondance
3) There’s Nothing Like This
4) Summer Breeze
5) Ain’t No Sunshine
6) Fly Me To The Moon
7) Delilah
8) Can’t Take My Off Of You
9) Can’t Smile Without You
10) September
11) Celebration
12) Never Too Much
13) Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now
14) High n Dry
15) Creep
16) Sweet Home Alabama
17) Won’t Get Fooled Again


-----------------------------------------------------------

18) Superstition

Luckily lots of these have seen lots of service in my repertoire over the years.

Wish me luck ;-)


- Posted on the move

The insurance saga... I've emailed swiftcover.

I decided I'd do what I did with Direct Line when they did EXACTLY this same stunt: give them a chance to explain and redeem themselves.

While I appreciate than customers are now just dumb cash cows, and that customer relations are more a question of FAQs and automated helpdesks rather than talking to actual people, I want to believe that there is someone at swiftcover who still gives a shit.

Here's the email:

---

"Regarding my upcoming renewal quote: price has ballooned by approx 22% from 377.27 to 461.74 in one year. This does not compare favourably to previous years increase.

Admiral are quoting me 411.80 for identical cover. This represents an increase of just over 9%, which would contribute to a reasonable profit margin for your company and dividends for your shareholders.

If you can match this quote, I'll stay with you. If not, I'll walk.

I'm offering you a chance to impress me. A chance to do better than Direct Line did when they pulled a similar stunt a few years back.

Seriously, explain your quote. Match my figure. Or I walk."

Now it appears the comparison sites are bent as well!

OK, I've done a search on Go Compare. Admiral quote: £445.40

Now I do a search on Confused.com with EXACTLY the same details (and I have checked): £398.15 from ADMIRAL. Same conditions.

Someone want to explain this? Where did that £50 come from?

Not happy. I'll go back to getting individual quotes from individual companies now. I can see that the arc of the comparison websites is on the way down - no doubt either their scraping algorithms are getting too complex, or they don't fill in all the fields correctly, or (frankly) they're on the take from the insurance companies involved. I would wager comparison sites, with their huge advertising campaigns (funny how often we see go compare ads, eh?) are getting large kickbacks from the insurance companies.

I wonder what Direct Line will quote me...

I know insurance companies are bent, but...

This is beyond a joke.

I gotg a renewal notice from Swiftcover, who were pretty reasonable last year. This year... a rise of over 25%.

With this in mind, I logged on to gocompare, and discovered that they archive previous searches from years gone by. All are at the same address here in south buckinghamshire I've got 2007 (£320.22), 2009 (£342.60 - not too bad for a year's increase) and now... 2010... £437.83!!!!

What the hell happened in the last 12 months? Are these bastards trying to claw back losses, or prepping for a crime spree in the next few years? An increase of over 25% in 12 months?

If I change the postcode (speculatively, of course, to check out how much I'm being ripped off for) to Nic's parents place up in Rutland, it drops to £293.95. No kidding. The bastards are charging me an extra THIRD for living around here.

take note people. The south east really REALLY sucks.

Pot repair?

How satisfying! I think the pickup selector stacked rotary pot on the 6 string doesn't need replacing after all!

Thank you, servisol, once again. :-)

Time to get cracking.

Geekery, Democracy, Jiggery-Pokery

This is quite a serious posting for me.

http://bit.ly/dDhevd

this link is to a story about subversion of Digg, a site I hadn't really taken any notice of until now. If the stats in the story are to be believed, there is a growing cabal of right-wing tech-savvy individuals who are manipulating the stories which "bubble up" in Digg's rating mechnism such that right-wing conservative stories make it up, and anything regarded by their close little group as "liberal" is voted down (and indeed out).

What this represents is nothing more than an organised attempt to recreate the conditions which got Hitler into the position of power. And we all know where that ended up.

What's fascinating is that this is happening through a technological medium: these people have organised themselves through a yahoo group, have shadow accounts they keep as backups - the whole thing is very cloak and dagger - but you can see why: they are attempting to influence the thinking of the body public, you and I, through the exposure we have day to day to news stories - you know, the sort that say "crime rife! Crap liberal government to blame" and "castrate paedos now!".

If you've got any enlightment in you, read the article. It's scary reading. I don't know what anyone can actually do about it though: boycott Digg?

iPhone 4 mixed signals

You can't have escaped the hooha about the iPhone 4 and the antenna design / now apparent oversight of apple on every iPhone ever regarding the algorithm used to calculate RSSI (received signal strength indication). I worked in mobile phone comms until 3 years ago when I moved into doing work with tetra radios.

The way the story has been covered has been your typical bad science reporting, with this morning's BBC slot by some fellow from "click" explaining the problem.

Much as I love apple's products, the last 10 years of consumer electronics have persuaded me of one thing; resist the urge and don't be an early adopter. The iPhone 3GS I've got was around for quite a while before I got hold of it, and even then I only went for it because it finally offered the features I'd been enjoying in phones for many years. Kudos to apple for not rushing features out btw, which is one reason why this 3GS is a joy to use.

I've done a lot of apple defending in the past, but the iPhone 4 appears to have been something of a cockup. The antenna design is, I think, a good basic idea - internal antennas are a compromise and will never get as good a signal as a proper or stub antenna. Apple locating the surface of the signal receiver around the edge is a good idea, but the co-locating of the wifi antenna and the close proximity (allowing the 3G/2G antenna to ground through it) were poor design choices.

I had thought, in my admitted admiration for the polished feel of apple products, that this must have been some small software issue but now I think I know how this poor design got through. Secrecy. Pete Stewardson from work takes credit here, it didn't occur to me at all.

See, apple have to field trial phones like the rest of us. They love the slavering anticipation their product cycle produces, and hence they keep a tight lid on things; iPhone 4 was no different. So, to keep the physical design a secret, they had testers using the devices inside a case which gave the phones a 3GS "look".

This, of course, insulated the antenna from the testers' hands. And totally masked the antenna grounding issue. Woops.

What is happening now with apple suggesting that the rssi meter algorithm has "always been wrong" and that they were "astonished" to discover this, this I think is a total damage limitation exercise. If the meter had been wrong all along I simply cannot believe that 3 iterations of the iPhone would not have seen it fixed. Simple field trials would have shown it up.

Sean Cody, where are you matey and can you give me the lowdown!

I'm writing again...

Collaborations are gearing up for the summer.

I've got 4 ideas I'm working on.

Should get a mix from Aussie Rob with my rubber stringed Ashbory bassline soon.

Studio is humming nicely, automated desk is a dream.

Woohoo!

And great jazz band last night at the Wenlock Arms. Regret not seeing Blackmaninoff but there y'go...

Oh and the iPhone FB app sucks.

Good old fashioned acoustic fun.

Over the weekend, we were lucky enough to be invited to one of those impromptu BBQs that spring up amongst friends when the weather improves. Ours will be shortly I suspect.

Anyway, the occasion was firing up the Ozpig (www.ozpig.co.uk) amongst other things - this fantastic little piece of steel ingenuity is the result of Aussie outbackers converting gas bottles into portable wood burning stove/heaters. There is even. Community of OzModders, I understand, who weld further brackets and acoutrements on to utilise more of the heat.

This is by the by though. I brought the trusty Acoustic Bass with me, and had a grand old plonk well into the evening while being warmed by the pig. Some étude style pieces, a little bach, a lot of funk and some two-handed buffoonery. I must perfect the Inspector theme tune, although the full brass section middle 8 is probably a pipe dream without the MIDI driver.

A great night. My first public performance in a few months, so to speak; best compliment was the agreement that people only realised how much they enjoyed what I was playing when they detected the silence as I took a swig of beer or zhivago (Nic, of course, had a full portable kit with her - we have converted further masses to the zhivago cause).

Otherwise the warm weather is, as usual, and in an entirely predictable way, playing merry hell with any practice schedule I try to keep. But it's the best reason to spend more time on he acoustic. I just need some good backing tracks. Hmm...

Ash cloud remnants...

All that recent ash cloud goings-on and the way in which the airlines got back in the air troubled me; it seemed to me that a financial imperative put the planes back in the sky; now it seems the CAA have pointed a finger at aircraft engine manufacturers-this is from the BBC;

CAA chief executive Andrew Haines told Radio 4's The Report: "The critical path for this decision was the time it took for the manufacturers to satisfy themselves on the safe level of contamination. How long does it take for a manufacturer who has declined to determine something for many years to actually say, 'Given the evidence we've now got, we're happy to nail our colours to the mast and say that these are safe levels of contamination that don't present a hazard.' I suspect that manufacturers knew much of this, that they knew there was an acceptable level of safety but what hadn't happened is that they were prepared to underwrite that and validate it. I suspect that a lot of these things come down to a combination of commercial and safety pressures and actually there are levels of contamination which might impact on the life of the engine without impacting on its safety. But that's only a speculation on my part.... I'm just grateful that they came to the table and worked very hard to get it resolved. If we'd had the assurances from manufacturers that we have now at the start of this crisis, the response would have been different."

I see. Buried in there is a tiny little phrase

I suspect that a lot of these things come down to a combination of commercial and safety pressures and actually there are levels of contamination which might impact on the life of the engine without impacting on its safety

I stand by what I said before. I expect at least one plane to suffer from unexpected engine failure in the future due to pisspoor maintenance scheduling which didn't take this into account. The airlines were in trouble before this happened; I simply don't trust a financially driven organisation to be 100% vigilant.

Honest mistakes

I made a cracking mistake this morning; there's a hatch at the back of the boat you grab weeds from where they wrap around the propeller shaft (as part of essential maintenance). During our show-around, we were shown how to remove the retaining bar (which has two screw threaded handles which push down and keep the hatch in place) and a tip for remembering to put the bar back in-if you forget, the boat sinks.

Don't panic, this story isn't calamitous.

The tip was to place the bar across to top of the deck hatch, along the edge of the hatch's hinge edge. This means you can't try to shut the hatch without noticing the bar, at which point you slap your forehead, issue the time-honoured Homer Salute to Mistakes, and put the bar in.

Now, I had followed this to the letter, and the weed hatch cover (which comes out completely) was to the right, on deck, while I froze my hand removing weeds and checking the cotter pin.

As I moved the hatch cover to replace it, I knocked the end of the bar, which promptly fell down the weed hatch, briefly waving at the prop shaft as it headed for the bottom of the canal. Oops.

After a couple of minutes of reflection, I rang the guys hiring out the boats, and a fella with a hve magnet got the bar in less than a minute. He said he'd never had to fish out one of the retainer bars before, which surprised me !

I reflected on my mistake, and realised it was entirely honest; I was half awake but followed he instructions faithfully. The fella with the magnet said he'll make sure it gets fed back into the show-around, so I now feel quite pleased with my novel mistake as it should ensure nobody else panics (we didn't panic btw, it was all very logical).

Have you made any honest mistakes like this recently?

Success: what does it mean to you?

I had a conversation with Nic today which got me thinking, on several levels. It was about "success", and before I move on to my own musings I should give the whole thing a little context.

Nic's brother, it's fair to say, is what you might call a generation X casualty (my words!). He's pretty much opted out of interfacing with modern life, and on several counts I agree with him.

Nic worries about him a lot, which is admirable. I understand why he feels the way he does (and I am assuming I do understand, for the purposes of this piece, as we've talked at length about things in that way people do when they want to work out how to fix the world). There are personal compromises about the way society has decided to work itself out which mean if you didn't keep an eye on your path when you were younger, you find yourself in a situation you know you wouldn't have wanted if you'd thought about it back then.

I understand because I now hate desk jobs where you work in a large organisation. They're now the epitome to me of collective human worthlessness, where those who come up with great ideas and want to implement them have them squashed by accountants, middle managers and bureacracy. The tyranny of the project plan, the awful inevitability of the wash-up meeting, the liturgy of the lessons learned. All of it created by a group think so stifling no new ideas can be quickly brought to being.

This is my opinion: nic's brother has gone straight to opting out, before he ended up behind a desk. Nic believes that you just have to suck it up and put up with spending 1/3 of your time doug stuff you don't want to do so that you can do stuff you wantto do for the other 2/3, but when you pull 41 hour weeks, and add another 1.5 hours 5 days a week in the car, where is the 2/3 coming from?

Nic is right, of course. She's got the brass neck to start her own business, and opt out another, more constructive way. Those of us too timid or too entrenched (an excuse?) to do that can only look on and wonder. Or take to our beds and stop.

What do you do to stay alive? Or am I howling into the void again?

Mobile geek alert... Android's popularity amongst manufacturers could be its' undoing?

First up, in case you didn’t know, I have an iPhone. I’ve been using “smartphones” for many years, the first having been a P910i, then a P990i, both of which I kept using for more than 2 years. They weren’t bad, but the iPhone in my pocket makes them seem pretty slow and primitive, especially with regard to user interface elegance. I spent 7 years in mobile phone software testing (mainly in depth protocol stuff but I did a lot of UI testing as well).

I’ve had a fiddle with an android device and I thought it was pretty good: it was a G1, pre-recent Android 2.1 update (I think that’s what is gradually being rolled out). Smooth, slick, nice interface.

I’ve read a few things recently though, which make me think Android could have a problem…

I think there are several things about android which may result in a gradual slide away from it, and they stem from thinking about Android as a platform for “app” developers rather than as a nice open-sourced attractive operating system with good user interface characteristics.

1. Different hardware vendors produce different devices with different hardware platforms. Primarily, the issue here is screen size. If, as an app developer, you have to code for several devices with different screen sizes, it’s analogous to the awful situation web developers find themselves in trying to cope with rendering and processing differences between IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera… etc. Over time, app developers will grow tired of either having to compensate for small screens and rejigging their application interface to take advantage of larger ones, or only having their app run on one screen size and limiting their audience (and therefore their revenue – nobody’s going to keep doing this for free and produce good content).
2. Different Android handsets are on different software versions with different capabilities. Although there are a variety of methods of updating android firmware (including rather nifty over-the-air) the updates are by no means guaranteed to go out to EVERY android device – some will be on the end of a cable; some will be over the air; this proliferation of different Android versions across the handset population is corrosive to coordinated application development.
3. There’s the issue of no “central point” of Android OS software development as well: Google ain’t providing the firmware for HTC devices, Google are only looking after the overall state of Android, in the same way as Mandrake aren’t going to fix Linux issues in Ubuntu – but if core problems occur, they will find their way back into core Android eventually, but will they percolate out quickly? Another reason why an app might need to be tied to older versions of the OS to keep itself available to as many punters as possible.

There’s a spat going on between Orange customers who have their android app store view knackered by the latest updates, and apparently HTC aren’t interested, saying it’s an orange issue…

Some of this can be overcome using clever coding, and I’ve little doubt a second-tier industry will spring up to create tools to try to design UIs for a range of androids, with a range of OS versions, but it’ll still be compromising at every turn and that means the apps will miss compelling features.

Some of this is actually diplomatic – issues between companies who produce android hardware and networks. This is the really nasty one as large organisations are appalling at coordinating this kind of stuff.

But the overall picture, if it’s not reigned in damn quick, will see android descend into a pile of mush for developers – a great platform ruined by a lack of central control.

Most of the people who complain about the iPhone rant about the restrictive APIs, the lack of multi tasking, and the general feeling that it’s not “your” handset, that Apple retain control all the damn time. That’s why the iPhone keeps getting jailbroken, and there’s a community who have their own jailbroken apps store.

Good for them. But 99% of the population don’t give a shit if the iPhone is locked down, they just enjoy running apps on it, interacting with it and using it: it really isn’t an issue for them. The righteous indignation and anger of the Geek brigade is futile, even if it is justified. And in the current malware-obsessed criminal internet environment, we’re looking at moving towards always-connected mobile devices. Ask yourself, would you prefer a device with some locked-down aspects or an open-source OS with freedom for programmers? (well, Android is sort-of open source)

I decided I wanted a smartphone which wasn’t so “smart”. I’m a programmer during the day, I geek out building stuff from scratch… but I’m seeing that Apple’s approach has many benefits on many levels. Tied down APIs and a single point of delivery for OS updates and applications which is distinct and separate from the network I’m on are definite advantages if you want a popular, populist platform you can really code for and get to the widest possible audience.

Good luck Android, I think you’ll need it.

Total facebook FAIL

Wow. Not impressed this is the only way I can post anything to FB at the moment.

It seems facebook's glorious transition from interpreted PHP to cross-compiled C++ has not gone smoothly. In addition to totally screwing with the look and feel of FB again, they appear to have completely FUBARd the actual guts of the site.

Apparently the idea was to save cash and trouble reatnig ever larger server farms, by making the existing machinery work more efficiently - by running compiled code rather than PHP. They got quite a lot of kudos for this but my guess is that, as usual, not enough testing was done, and it's blown up. Very messily indeed.

Currently my iPhone will get some status updates (not all of them) - I can't log in to FB at all, or reset my password (everything is closed for "maintenance", that lowest of innuendos for "We're screwed right now, try again later")... oh dear.

As Dylan put it the other day - what's this Google Buzz business? Sounds interesting, even if it will always be in Beta, at least the bloody thing might work?

Or does all of this just feed my emerging belief that modern software systems are so huge and complex that we will either have to be connected and spend a lot of time with low-level angst and annoyance (with our Windows installation, our 27 inch iMac screen, our OS in general, OR our social networking sites) - OR - disconnect and go back to the way stuff was a few years back.

I'm getting v. close to closing the FB account for good, I suspect it wasn't doing me any good even when it was working...

Bloody snowy hell! It's like childhood out there!

I've been working from home for 2.5 days now, it's been rather productive. The valley we're in still hasn't had its' road treated, so I'm stuck. In fact, I pushed a Peugeot and a Porsche up both sides last night to rescue the poor idiots.

Today according to the met office things are supposed to get better; the sky looks bloody grey to me, with gathering darker clouds on the horizon. And it's getting colder again.

The view from the kitchen as I type:




I think we'll be walking to the supermarket and laying in a whole shitload of grub very soon. :-)

Merry Xmas to all. Especially the poor humps who abandoned their BMWs in Whitley wood and went to retrieve them only to find them minus alloys an radio. Jeez, that’s low.

Have to post a wintry pic.

I was forced to walk a mile or so today to get some milk, as our road didn't get gritted or cleared (still lethal!). On the way there I got some really picture postcard shots.




Who'd have thought anywhere near Slough could look nice?

New equipment.

Under-keyboard CAT add-in. Complete Audio Triumph.

Killing in the name of... Reality TV

There's a lot of talk about the race for Xmas no 1. I've bought my first online music by purchasing a copy of Killing in the Name Of by Rage against the Machine, as prompted by a facebook group, starte by a couple who got tired of preprocessed pap from Simon Belt-navel Cowell.

I thoroughly endorse their approach, but all the news reports I've seen on this seem to be missing the salient point with the UKs population now so tired of reality TV that they are willing, whenever possible, to subvert them through voting strategies, and now by deliberately pushing a reality TV "winner" (let's face it , long term his outlook isn't great) off the top slot.

Mr cowell's public annoyance will turn into something else a la the Jedward 180, I bet.

So buy a copy of the RATM track and be a rebel; be different; and actually recapture part of the spirit of Christmas by telling the prepackaged hypnosis-fest which is the unholy alliance of TV and music industry to "F@&£ you, I won't do what you tell me"

Breeze at the Flowing Well, Friday night

Good to see them again. Sounding awesome with new keyboard player who can get in there on bass and guitar as well. They do Queen now! And it's getting like the osmonds up there with Steve's nearest and dearest doing drums and vocal guest slots!


- Posted on the move

Last toms of the season

Yay! Before the frost sets in, look what was on the plants... And now rescued! I see lots of salsa. Mmmm!

Now, where's me fretless and the ashbory. Have a rap track to work on.


- Posted on the move

Alan Carr - chatty tw@t

I've never really seen this latest of our great British tradition of camp humourists before, but I just caught a few minutes of his show on BBC1. Bit tragic. I thought mercilessly taking the pee out of that slightly mentally fragile bint off x-factor last year who has "White horses" out on single was last years' tired character assassination based humour?

Seriously though, is this guy actually gay? Gay people are often naturally funny I reckon. The audience sound like they've been beaten around the head with applause cards. It's like listening to a giggling bath tap.

Not funny.

November. And it's tomato harvesting time, still.

Madness. But they are perhaps the hardiest tomatoes we've ever grown. They are just leaning against the house, user the deep eaves we have, and they get a fair amount of sun.

Weather looks okish this week. I reckon well still be cropping next week.



Got to love growing your own. Next year hopefully we'll get our patch up the hill working. Currenty it's all brambles!

Incidentally, anyone want to buy a green Xantia? I just got another one and I think I should at least pare it down to one.

;-)

The tyranny of push

I just turned off nearly all the email stuff facebook sends you, and turned on the SMS notify stuff, but only for messages, not wall posts, etc.

Apart from the annoyance having to look through about a million emails with one damn comment each, it was filling one of my inboxes with utter junk, making it hard to find actual messages.

Why can't facebook do a daily digest with it all in?

It's a bit academic anyway. Since I got this phone I tend to check facebook when I've got a free minute, and the support on it is great, so you soon catch up.

Anyone out here use Twitter? It sounds like a great place to meet up and discuss topics with other near-psychotic disillusioned thirtysomethings.


- Posted on the move