Saturday 28 March 2015

Tonight the cold has fully landed.

Sinus pressure my old friend,
You've come to hurt with me again.
Because of mucous softly seeping
Filled my tubes while I was sleeping
And the pressure, that was planted in my brain,
Still remains
From the cold of springtime.


Funny how feeling crappy should make me poetic, lyrical even.

Thursday 19 March 2015

For the first time in almost a year.

I've walked and prayed round the Heyford Park estate. Can't escape the connection that's there, even though we've moved on and have begun to heal.

But I must say that the last few months have not been kind at all. Roads closed, dust & dirt everywhere, seemingly more empty houses, huge mountains of rubble from all the buildings that have been chewed up and spat out to make way for the new builds. This must be such a difficult time if that's where home is.

Did someone post a comment, then change their mind & delete it?

???

Firefox is doing odd things

Just had some strange behaviour: a refusal to download linked content from a website and a complete failure to use the purchasing system on the Sigma-Aldrich website. Worked fine in Opera, which makes me wonder whether it's not a fault in Firefox so much as people developing for Chrome browser and marginalising FF.

How could you worship more through music and song?

Is a question asked on the lent course we're doing as a church.

The obvious answer is to sing along to worship CDs more often, though I'm not at all convinced that's actually any kind of worship at all. But theology of worship aside, it had me wondering about the sort of music and songs we use in church, and particularly, my part in playing and helping lead worship through what and how I play.

I'd like to let you into a secret - most Christian 'worship' CDs make me feel icky and out of kilter after a while.

Some, usually those recorded at events that are about more than just singing like Stoneleigh bible week etc have the longest legs, possibly because the actual intent is about worshipping together. Others, including albums from some very well known, awarded and feted international 'stars' of CCM much less so. The latest album from a certain Irish group that I really badly wanted to like was so loaded with emotional stress and tension that it felt like a needle being pushed into my mind, and I couldn't even listen all the way through first time round.

Maybe it's my fallen, un-redeemed character that needs a bit of the nasty to feel OK?

Over-production, a common problem when people are seeking 'perfection' or 'excellence', doesn't help either, producing a form with nothing to criticise and nothing to inspire either.

So after listening to 'worship' for a while I might bung on some Thin Lizzy or Joe Bonamassa in the car, just to wash away the cloyingness and emotional pressure that seems to come through. It's not that I don't want the presence of God - far from it - because God's presence doesn't come or go for me with the music I'm surrounded by (provded I don't go filling my head with evil). But there's something, rather like cello music, about music from certain 'worship' artists that presses buttons and makes life harder instead of better. And I appreciate that not everyone feels like this, and will love the stuff I can't bear.

So yes, it makes me wonder what I might do differently, or whether it would be more of the same as I presently do? Would I always be under tension and stress, straining, trying, reaching, stretching to touch God as it so often feels from the way the examples I've given, or would I be at peace, relaxed and happy to be in God's presence? For that matter, is it possible not just to be relaxed, at peace and happy, but to be soaring with and enjoying God, of sometimes feeling joy so strong you want to laugh - and that happens too, sometimes.

Probably a good job I'm not playing this Sunday. ;-)

*edited*

Monday 16 March 2015

Just trimmed out a few more frozen blogs from the blogroll

Kinda sad to see them go, really, but after almost a year of no activity I reckon the 'owner' isn't coming back. C'est la mort I guess.

Saturday 14 March 2015

Playing electricians roulette

I'm tweaking an amp I built back in '06 to change the tone, hopefully to be a bit crisper and less congested in the mids, which means lots of swapping out components, testing the thing with the chassis open to errant fingers with >300V running through.

Fun times. :-)

Well, I survived..... so far, anyway.

It feels good to be doing something technical again, using a different side of my brain & learning.

This amp was based on a Fenderised version of traditional 12AX7 + EL84 designs with a negative feedback loop to give more headroom & help it stay clean for longer. I tried different values of resistor in the NFL (current value about 116K) but reducing to 48K caused a volume drop and increasing to 220K seemed to produce some kind of resonant overtone and reduce the 'singing' quality of the amp. Removing NFL altogether gave very little clean headroom, and it was just flabby & tubby. In the preamp stage I'm using 15K cathode resistors, and had a coupling cap only on the second triode, so popped a 1uF cap on the cathode of the first triode and added a 470pF cap across the 100K resistor coupling the 2 gain stages together.

Between the 2 tweaks it's popped a bit more sparkle into the amp and reduced the mud somewhat while keeping it cleanish at a reasonable volume level. If I could run it through a 12" speaker it would be quite loud, but it's about to go into a dead Marshall MG30 combo that's been laying around (thanks Ben Morris, if you're reading this). Maybe it will even get an outing to church tomorrow. :D

Wednesday 11 March 2015

Windows skype - so good they made it twice.

A few days ago I grumbled about Microsoft trying to get me to sign into skype twice, using a microsoft account, and how annoying that was. Well, smartie-knickers here hadn't realised that there are 2 versions: one that runs from the desktop in a window and one that runs full screen (for tablet users?) from Start.

It's still irritating, that they should impliment things this way, but pleasing that skype does, in fact, work perfectly fine still when launched from the taskbar. How very curious though, to have 2 versions of an application installed which apparently don't share user information with each other. I suspect if one tried to use that as a way of having different users from a single machine then there would be a breakdown and cross-contamination.

In similar vein of odd software behaviour, I and other users have noticed that when processing images in DX Optics pro, then importing images into lightroom, sometimes the images would come across with bizarre colours and tones, bearing no relationship to what we had produced. This would happen unpredictably, and seemed to have no connection with any editing we did in DXOP

The answer was obscure, yet obvious.

When output from DXOP was imported into lightroom, if the same image had already been edited in LR then it imposed any filters to the imported image that had been applied to the  RAW image. It seemed to do this regardless of image format, so DNG, TIF and JPG files were all affected similarly. Moving to the develop module of LR and then hitting the reset button *for each DXOP-processed image* seemed to fix the problem completely without also resetting any edits made to the original RAW file.

 An undocumented feature, to borrow a Microsoft euphemism, that would have been useful to know some time ago, before I deleted a lot of terrible-looking images that were probably perfectly good. At least I know NOW.

Anyway, onward and upward.

Tuesday 10 March 2015

Salisbury Cathedral

A few shots from last week.

Mike 4D - the first image was taken just after we got off the phone.

When I took the early morning pictures it was very cold, and the grass around the building was quite crunchy underfoot. After a while my fingers lost all feeling, and I was glad to get back to the hotel for a hot shower and breakfast.






Monday 9 March 2015

I'd love to use Skype, but.......

This could be a rant, but I'd prefer not to do that, at least not yet.

A while back Skype asked permission for a major update - fine - and now requires me to have a microsoft account before it will give me access to the software. Not so fine. There's usually an escape route with this kind of arrangement, but this particular update doesn't seem to allow it, and rather than dig through trying to find a way to use skype, I'm simply not going to bother. I don't want to use it badly enough to create a microsoft account.

It's sad that, after so long, big tech companies don't get that users don't want to be the product. It's not as if I hadn't needed to sign up for a skype account anyway, so why make me jump through more hoops and sign further license agreements? I'll keep Skype on the Macbook because that still works without the faff (and without upgrading).

Will Frankenstein's monster ride again?

I was pointed toward a blog recently, via a facebook conversation where I wondered whether there was a difference between the meaning of the words 'Disability' and 'Handicap' (I appreciate one is favoured over the other, yet to me they say exactly the same thing). Said blog did not provide an answer, though I confess not to looking terribly hard beyond reading the description and the most recent post. It is a modern fashion to be offended by and sensitive to labels, usually on behalf of others, though not in this situation, and one that I rather think we should reject.

But anyway.

The first article was discussing various artists that had suffered a late onset disability including Goya, and while scanning through I came across the following:

"Nor should we ignore the wider context of Romanticism that saw artists and writers turning away from the rationality of the age in favour of raw nature and emotion.   Goya called a 1799 print “the sleep of reason produces monsters”.  It was in this context that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1816."

Was Goya an Emo? I wonder if this has anything to say about our present age of rationality?

Monday 2 March 2015

Monday evening in Salisbury

So this week I start training at Porton Down for possible deployment to Sierra Leone on the Ebola screening program - dependant (I suspect) on the performance I manage while training. Almost everyone else on the course has experience in health service labs, so I'm the odd one out as far as that is concerned, and naturally the guys running things want to make sure I'm not either a dumbo who will spray everyone around him with Ebola, or a jihadist after a cheap ticket.

The guys seem a nice bunch. Amenable, intelligent, friendly, it takes a certain kind of person to works well in a pressured clinical environment.

So today, after introductions, picking up scrubs (gowns that will be worn) and clogs, we talked about the history and characteristics of Ebola virus, then assessing the risks of handling samples and methods to mitigate them, finishing off with working and living conditions in the various centres to which we might be deployed. None of it is scary, all sensible and practical, pretty much how one would hope things would be worked out by people with experience and knowledge of local conditions.

We're off for dinner shortly, and I've got quite a lot of reading up to do when I get back.

*update*
 My deployment has been declined, and I'm OK with that. Life now goes on, if not exactly like before, then with a little more personal understanding and experience.