The Books Are Here

This is it for 2013

Just picked up my books for distribution on World Book Night 2013 next week. A slightly different documentation / tracking idea this year means I have to physically sign each one , though luckily there are only 20.

This is the first book I hadn't read before choosing it , but bought myself a copy and read it cover to cover. It's very easy to read an I learned some Chinese charaters as well as quite a bit of other  historical titbits.

It's a wonderful book for parents to read with children to pique their interest in history from the biginiing of the world to modern times.

It's generally jargon free and is very good in pointing people towards other sources for extra detail.




Anyway I need to now get my pen out and start signing the things ready for next weeks distribution.

Living In The Past

It's funny how we have a hankering for old things and things to remain as they were / are, when a lot of the time the new stuff is actually far better than the old stuff. I have a Samsung Galaxy Note phone , but I want an emulator on on it so I can play the games I enjoyed on my Amstrad CPC computer. I downloaded an emulator but it just crashes my phone . C'est la vie.

I bought an alarm clock that emulates Tetris , and believe me you dont snooze with it , that alarm has to be switched OFF.

A lot of the music I have on my players id the stuff of my teenage years such as Hawkwind and Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull. Having said that I am a hige fan of convenience. and use both the ridiculous 48 GB capacity , plus Deezer and Youtube to allow me to play what I want when I want.

There have been recent things about returns to cassette tape even . Cassette was brilliant in its time , but was fragile , didnt last , and I would never dream of using a cassette again except to extract so rare music or something. The good part is that you have to do it in real time , which is a lot more personal that knocking together a Spotify or Grooveshark playlist , but those platforms  enable you to share music and Grooveshark does let you upload stuff that it doesnt have. Any way heres some old Bok Demo's from the mid 70s.

Fighting With My Left Hand #2

Thought I would use my blog to document this. Been to the hospital and confused the experts even more. Everything seems to be OK that should be , but I can't grip laterally with my extended fingers of my left hand. Have an MRI scan being planned just to make sure my brain is still functioning , snd that's about it. Still can't do much with my left little finger either which makes it awkward putting gloves on and the like, but things seem to be slowly improving , although whether that's just me compensating I don't really know. I keep trying things with my left hand and then thinking .. "Could I do that with my left hand before this happened?"

It's probably diabetes related but we shall see how it progresses.

After the unfortunate derby result (well I suppose we have to let the Mackems have a little hope before they get relegated) I have Omid Djalili to look forward to this afternoon at The Stand . Only joking Sunderland folks !!

I shall keep you posted....

Omid Djalili in a Chelsea Top !!

Picture This

A short post this , but a number of people have mentioned that they enjoyed seeing my Instagram posts. I ditched both Instagram and Twitter because of the disposability of the posts on there , but have slowly come round to the thought that as long as you dont OD on the stuff then its OK to use , so I've decided to resurrect my Instagram feed.

My Twitter one is here.  My instgram name will be mikeydred96 so it may be here

So I'm just hoping I don't swamp peaople with pictures , but will try and post interesting things. Also the Samsung Note 2 has a decent camera and processor so should be interesting to see what I can do , maybe I'll limit myself to black and white , but we shall see.

I chose the Blondie video , because it's a great song and I nicked the title for this post . Oh and on May 4th Blondied are on the bill at the "Fake Festival" at Percy Park Rugby Club . Details here

There's video and music samples of them on the link above so you can try before you buy so to speak

Positively Now Street

Not sure what to say this post is about. There's a lot of bad things happening , mostly to people fairly far removed from me. It's therefore easy to write about stuff complaining about the bad , and lets face it it's always easy to find something wrong or to complain about stuff , without having an idea how to fix it. Anyway I always lokk for good stuff , positives , things to make me smile. I love seeing pics of my daughter Juliet and her fiance Paul's cat and the fantastic meals they make  and my daughter Kirsty's music and gaming posts  and her and Mark's dogs' Moll's pictures and videos. There is a lot in life to enjoy.

My Music Boxes - Abba , Roxy , Little Feat etc

Anyway a couple of things I was looking at a small part of my record collection , particularly the Original Album series and other boxes and  realised than the starting with Madness - The Lot and finishing with Little Feat's Original Album series contains around 100 CDs which is approximately 100 hours or four continuous days of (though I say it myself) excellent music. And that's just a single row on a rack. I'm still ripping this lot to hard disc so I can listen through my home network.

This week I was introduced to the attrociously named Deezer , which has an equally attrocious sign up process expecting a Facebook account these days , but once you're on it is effectively a music library service. You never own the music but for a fiver a month you can listen to anything they have , although the excellent Tempest by Bob Dylan is missing from their base , but I have been listening to the new British Sea Power album courtesy of Deezer.

My home studio - now operational

The other thing is that I finally have my home studio working consisting of an iPad with Garageband and a couple of other music software things, plus an Alesis I/O Dock and Q49 Keyboard , all now working after months of trauma getting things to talk to each other.

The I/O Dock lets you plug things into it like guitars and microphones so expect to have something online this week , just a bit of ambient improvisation , but that has made me really happy as well. Just hope the noise that comes out thats good.

I finished EH Gombrich's A Little History Of The World , the book I'll be distributiong for World Book Night 2013 and think I write a piece and put together a video montage of this years books. But we shall see. Any the book is excellent and fantastic for any parents with children under twelve who are open to learning about history. Well written and jargon free. Recommended for anyone.

Finally next week have tickets to see Omid Djalili at The Stand in Newcastle so things are generally good.

Transistor Transformation

In the early sixties youth carried music around in the palm of it's hand in the form of transistor radio, stations playing the latest rock and roll hits to satisfy the "kids" . Phil Spector listenned to each song he produced with his tradmark wall of sound to ensure it sounded good on a transistor radio, because that was his sales window. If it sounded good on radio then the market would buy it.

Radio has progressed through MW to FM to DAB and portables are part of your average phone either i the form on an inbuilt tuner using the headphone wires as an aerial or streaming media , which is effectively data that your supplier will charge you for. So the kids are still listening to music on portable devices that can be held, it's just now they have a little more choice and control and they are paying for it.

Ironic ,fifty years on,that  a phone costing maybe seven or eight hundred pounds is being used for the same purpose as a cheap transistor radio. Though I am well aware that todays phones are actually very powerful computers but it's still quite amusing.

Not Maintaining Standards

Despite the fact I'm impressed with my iPad, Apple continue to flabbergast me with their continual ignorance of standards . Was recently at my mate Mark Tovey's had he showed an excellent Android Media player that I could install on my Samsung Note called BS Player. This works like a dream allowing you to play media from you network drives after connecting to wifi. Would love if it would connect over 4G , but lets not complain. It allows to set a home directory and then has fast negotiation of you network drive to play whatever media you want , video or music.

I thought the iPad is wifi based , but I can only do the sameby installing an Air Play server on my PC and have another Apply lump of bloatware slowing my system down. My big gripe with Apple is that device are not self contained. You need iTunes on your PC that you have to sync with your iPhone or iPad or both often ending up in horrendous autorisation knots. The softare on the device should do the job independently . Yes you can sync between machines but that should not be mandatory.

Oh yes and the iPhone 5 has a different connector to prior iPhones , when other manufacturers are moving towards a standard USB connector. So god forbid that you leave your charger at hone.

So I wont be using my iPad as a streaming player anytime soon , like I can do with my phone.