The Blue Man Group Rock Concert Movements

Well I went to see Blue Man Group at the O2 Arena in London last weekend. I’m sure I’ll write a proper entry about it soon when I get round to it. In the meantime, as a couple of people have asked what the hell I keep going on about, here’s a list of all the Rock Concert Movements that you need to know in order to be a Megastar!

• Rock Concert Movement #1 - The Basic Head Bob
• Rock Concert Movement #2 – The One-Armed Fist Pump
• Rock Concert Movement #3 – The Up and Down Jumping Motion
• Rock Concert Movement #4 – The Behind the Head Leg Stretch
• Rock Concert Movement #6 – Two Armed Upward Thrust with Yell
• Rock Concert Movement #8 – The Black Out
• Rock Concert Movement #10 – Getting a Closer Look at the Audience
• Rock Concert Movement #15 – Bringing a Guest Vocalist Onstage
• Rock Concert Movement #23 – Getting the Audience to Sing Along
• Rock Concert Movement #27 – Saying Hello to the People in the Cheap Seats
• Rock Concert Movement #28 – Getting an Audience Member Onstage to Dance
• Rock Concert Movement #48 – Introducing the Band
• Rock Concert Movement #63 – Bringing out Venus Hum
• Rock Concert Movement #78 – The Fake Ending
• Rock Concert Movement #91 - Enjoying the T-Shirt You Bought at The Complex Rock Tour
• Rock Concert Movement #237 – Taking the audience on a Jungian journey into the collective unconscious by using the shadow as a metaphor for the primal self that gets repressed by the modern persona and also by using an underground setting and labyrinth office design to represent both the depths of the psyche and the dungeon-like isolation of our increasingly mechanistic society which prevents people from finding satisfying work or meaningful connections with others.

Mounting your MobileMe iDisk on Windows

Back in the days when it was still .Mac, there used to be a simple tool for connecting your iDisk called the iDisk Utility for Windows. Whilst performing a Google Search will allow you to find it eventaully, you will probably find that it doesn’t work on Vista correctly.

The MobileMe iDisk is based on WebDAV, a well known internet technology that is supported by all major browsers and has been supported in Windows for some time. WebDAV compliance has been much improved in Windows Vista. In order to retrieve this useful bit of functionality you can follow these simple steps:

Open up My Computer (just called Computer in Windows Vista) and click on Tools -> Map Network Drive…

Select an empty drive letter (I usually use Z) and then in the Folder field enter: http://idisk.me.com/yourusername (replacing yourusername with your MobileMe User Name):

If you want your MobileMe iDisk to be automatically connected when you restart your computer, click on Reconnect at logon. Then, click on Connect using a different user name. In this Connect As dialog box, enter you MobileMe User Name in the User name field and your MobileMe Password in the Password field and click OK:

Click on Finish on the Map Network Drive Wizard.

Your computer will process this for a little while and will then present you with a Windows Explorer window with the contents of your iDisk. You can now also access your iDisk as a drive in the My Computer window:

Tags: Apple, Microsoft

Until the Sun Shines out of your Arse….

Buy an Energy Saving Light Bulb!

This viral video was produced by Greenpeace in an attempt to get “lads” to think more about saving the environment. Not sure if it’ll work but an amusing advert all the same!

Black Marble Technical Update 2009

I really need to get into the habit of finishing writing entries, rather than starting them and leaving them for weeks where they’re not really relevant anymore!

A few weeks, I attended the Black Marble Technical Update for 2009. It was held at the Leeds/Bradford Holiday Inn. The Hotel itself is in a nice setting, outside both Leeds and Bradford surrounded by trees and fields. I think that if I go to the Conference again next year (which I’m hoping to) then I might treat myself to a night there!

A big thumbs up to the Black Marble team and the Holiday Inn who put on a great spread for the Delegates. A large selection of cake, chocolate bars, Seabrooks Crisps and sandwiches. It is also one of the few events that I have been to that actually catered for people who don’t drink tea or coffee with a wide range of soft drinks and fresh fruit juice.

The first part of the event, was mainly for Business Management and the tools Microsoft provide to facilitate this. As me and Mark weren’t really interested in this, we didn’t go in favour of staying at home!

The second half was the bulk of the Technical Update. We got to have a sneak peak of the latest Windows 7 BETA which I was pleased to see was running on a couple of DELL Mini Netbooks. It was great to see it running on generally low powered Hardware that I knew from experience wouldn’t run Vista. As a result of the event, I have installed Windows 7 on my work HP Compaq nx6310 which has also failed to run Vista in the past. I am hoping to finish writing up an entry for that soon. We got to see some of the features that will be included in Windows Server 2008 R2 which gave me and Mark a renewed interest in the Server Operating System after our initial enthusiasm had been wiped out! The Black Marble team walked us through the Road Map for these and other Microsoft Products including a very brief look at Microsoft Office 14. There was also a look at Microsoft Azure, Microsoft’s rival project to Amazon’s EC2.

The evening session was a talk from Microsoft’s Chief Security Advisor for the UK, Ed Gibson. This was by far the highlight of the day. Being an ex-FBI Agent, you’d expect a very serious presentation. However, Ed presents himself in an amusing way but still get’s his point across very well. He presents his information is a story-like fashion and makesman links between different subjects that you would never normally link but leaves the impression behind that makes you wonder why you never did in the first place. The fact that he doesn’t use technical jargon nor any equipment, not even a microphone makes this man even the more interesting when he speaks. He doesn’t hide behind PowerPoint Presentations and booming speakers. Just him and his thoughts. A truly great speaker.

Tags: Black Marble, Microsoft, Office 2010, Windows 7

iPhoto ’09

So my copy of iLife ’09 arrived in the post yesterday and I got it installed and immediately went to play with iPhoto ’09. iPhoto seems to have been given the most attention out of the entire suite of apps so I was looking forward to having a go. The most eagerly anticipated feature in my opinion had to be the Face Detection and Face Recognition closely followed by the Facebook integration. So without further ado, here’s some of my thoughts on the new toys in iPhoto ’09

Face Detection

The first new toy that I was eager to play with was the new Face Recognition feature. But, before any of that, iPhoto has to look through your library and find all of the faces within your photographs. As you can see, iPhoto took about an hour to go through my 3,930 photographs that I had previously loaded into iPhoto and placed them into Events. I left mine overnight, because by the time I’d actually got round to installing iLife and rebooting my iMac, it was already… well… today.

I noticed that as it was going through, it was picking up multiple people in photos and also the faces of people that were in the background of the photos (with other people in the foreground) so I was very impressed with the level of detail in the detection of people’s faces, it even detects the sides of people’s faces! It even managed to find people in some of my not-successful night pictures without a flash where it would be difficult for a human to see a face, let alone an algorithm. It also made light work of my poorly scanned film photos and photos from my first digital camera, back in the day, which had an amazing(!) 640×480 resolution.

It seemed to whizz through photos pretty quickly so I’m confident it won’t take very long at all for iPhoto to handle a ‘normal’ import of photos.

An amusing anomaly was the fact that iPhoto managed to recognise the “face” of a goat produced with flowers for the Hope Valley Well Dressing last year:

Face Detection gone mad!

Face Recognition

This was one feature that I was a bit skeptical of in the Keynote. I thought it would be an idea that would be good in practice but doesn’t really work in reality. I was therefore pleasantly suprised to find that it actually works quite well.

For those who don’t know, you simply select one of your pictures from your Library with some faces on it and you tell iPhoto who the picture is of. iPhoto will then look through your Library and looks for pictures that contains what it thinks is the same person. The more you confirm within iPhoto, the more reliable it becomes:

I was impressed that it iPhoto was able to recongise faces even if they weren’t looking directly at the camera and that it can sometimes recognise people even if they are pulling a funny face. I found that it likes certain people more than others and is therefore able to recognise them more easily. I also found that it seemed to recognise females more accurately than males.

It was also interesting to see that sometimes it me and my sister, Jill, mixed up. I suppose this has something to do with everyone saying we both look like my Dad. Interesting that it didn’t cross reference any photos of me as my Dad, Jill as my Dad or vice-versa.

Places

Unfortunately, I don’t currently have a geo-tagging camera or an iPhone so I can’t really benefit from this new feature. That being, the ability to plot where you’ve taken all of your photographs onto a map.

You can go in manually and tell it where you took each photo, or a general location for an entire event/album. It’s not quite as good, but it gives you the idea. I found that whilst it handles cities and towns very well, it doesn’t recognise many locations (like Museums, etc) outside of London. You therefore have to find them via their postcode, road and town.

Photo Upload

The new version of iPhoto has a wide range of options for you to be able to upload your photographs to other places, particularly on the Internet. Along with the familiar export to e-mail and iWeb (iLife’s Web Authoring Application) you can now upload to MobileMe (Apple’s replacement to .Mac and rival to Microsoft’s Mesh), Facebook and Flickr. I’m really excited about these because it means that I can now use iPhoto to centralise all of my Photographs and what I do with them. It means that I will be able to load my Photographs straight into iPhoto from my camera, rotate/crop them and then upload them straight to the relevant place depending on what the photos are, without having to then re-export them from iPhoto, log into Facebook/Flickr and then make an album and upload them. Now, it’s all just one click!

Slideshows

I’ve always been a big fan of the Slideshow capabilities with iPhoto. It’s one of the reasons I bought a Mac in the first place. As mentioned before, it’s often that I get asked to do slideshows for family and church events.

The best feature in my opinion is infact the most boring one. A complete redesign of the way iPhoto exports the slideshows. The slideshows always look awesome in iPhoto, but sometimes they looked awful after being exported and you often found that the slideshow wouldn’t open in anything, including Apple’s own iTunes and you couldn’t play them back on the Apple TV. Now, Apple have made it possible for, not only for you to play them back on these devices and automatically add them to iTunes, but to be able to choose the size of the exported slideshow file. Previously, when exporting video, videos were 800×600 wether you liked it or not!

Apple have also introduced Themed Slideshows, much like the titles with iMovie. So you can now create a great looking slideshow within seconds along with all the usual music and transitions. I thought rather than rabbiting on about these, I’d just upload one:

So there you are. If you have a Mac, it’s certainly worth buying and if you have friends and/or family with Macs, club together and go for the Family Pack license. If you haven’t got a Mac, why not, go out and buy one now!

Tags: Apple, iLife, iPhoto, Mac OS X

SPAM, SPAM, SPAM

I don’t know if anyone else is having this problem since installing WordPress 2.7…

Every time I reply to a Blog Post Comment using the Reply button in the WordPress Admin Panel, Akismet always marks it as SPAM. It’s getting quite irritating because I often don’t notice for a while because one would assume that it would work properly for a valid logged in user. It’s not even like anything I say in the Replies should trigger any sort of filtering anyway!

Pia-Pia-Piano

Some of you will know that I am a lover of Piano Versions of songs, particularly ones that you wouldn’t normally expect to sound good on a Piano.

After a recent mishap with my Music Collection, I’ve been having a look round at some different music and came across some Piano Collections. A particularly interesting one is a Piano Collection of some Paramore songs.

My personal favourite is the Piano Cover of Decode, from the recent film Twilight:

Original:

Piano:

I think it’s really is wonderful that a song like this can sound so great being played solely on the Piano.

Information about the Piano Collection can be found here.

What's on the cards?…

A friend offered to do me a Tarot Reading. I have always been very skeptical of this but with recent events, thought I might as well give it a shot. I mean, what have I got to lose? I can’t kill me, can it?

Recently, I’ve been having a few second thoughts about work so I asked it a couple of questions. The first being:

Should I apply for another job?

This first time, I drew one card:

Ten of Pentacles

If we could wish for any of the Pentacle cards this would be the one! The 10 of Pentacles represents all the wonderful conditions and material things we can accomplish in this lifetime.

This card shows a stable family with the riches we all dream of. This family has worked hard for long periods of time, maybe even generations, to accomplish this type of security: The grandparents, parents, and children represent several generations of acquiring this financial stability.

This card comes up often when the purchase of a large item, such as a house or car, is in your future. You have the money or the financing to be able to attain your dream with the 10 of Pentacles. If it seems out of your reach, your family may be able to help or a bank loan is on the horizon.

everything is simply wonderful in the world now. Not only do you have money, you have security as well. Your wise investments will last a long time, providing a strong stable foundation for future generations as well as for yourself. Great wealth or great security! We’ll take both!

So, it was looking pretty good for getting a new job perhaps. So I asked another question:

If I stick with Leggott, will I receive a suitable pay rise?

This time, I drew 3 cards to represent the Past, Present and Future:

Past

The Hermit (Reversed)

When The Hermit is reversed, the Lantern of Truth is about to go out. As the light fades, The Hermit feels the cold in the air, and the snow comes down upon him. Then the light goes out, and when this happens you may need to review a few lessons you might have missed. Upside down, no one is listening to The Hermit and he truly feels alone in the darkness; even his walking stick can’t balance him anymore.

In his reversed position, The Hermit suggests that wisdom is disregarded. Perhaps you’re not listening to your own advice, or paying attention to others who have been there before. History can repeat itself, remember, and your refusal to learn from your past can lead to foolish decisions. There’s also a tendency to daydream or wish for something to happen without taking any action when this card appears. The Hermit reversed can mean your head’s in the clouds. so you’re unaware of how dark it really is outside.

Present

Four of Wands (Reversed)

This is a good card either way! The 4 of Wands reversed represents that, while the celebration isn’t as big or spectacular, nonetheless, congratulations are due. When the 4 of Wands is reversed, you’re learning to appreciate the little joys of life, such as the first flower to blossom in sprint, the first step a baby makes, a breath of fresh air, the final payment on the mortgage!

These are the blessings in the life you often see but sometimes don’t notice. The 4 of Wands reversed is thankful for the people and conditions around you and happy that the basics are secured. It’s time to give a little thanks for that you do have, not batter how big or small.

Future

Nine of Swords (Reversed)

In it’s reversed meaning, the 9 of Swords shows the woman getting through the traumatic event or conditions in her life. Time will bring healing as all things heal with time. Tomorrow is a new day.

Patience and prayer can help you pass through the long journey. This card can indicate that the goodness of a loved one is coming, or that the life-threatening surgery was a success. The dark cloud of trauma will pass and you’ll have developed strength of character because of it, along with the awareness that you can surmount a major tragedy.

So, on the face of it, it would seem I should be pretty safe if I stick with JLC. Interesting!

Don’t worry, I’m not going to turn into a crazy person living my life by Tarot Cards, Fate and Fortune Telling, but I just thought that it was interesting. I suppose there’s only one way to find out if the Cards were right, but I’m still no closer to deciding what I should do!

Eugh!

Well, I finally got round to trying Pepsi Raw:

I didn’t choose it out becuase I really fancied it but the delightful Norton didn’t have any Pepsi in the pump so only had a glass bottle of Diet Coke or a 2 Litre Bottle of Diet Pepsi as alternatives as well as the Raw. I thought I might as well give it a whirl. I wish I hadn’t!

I have to say it’s not as bad a Red Bull Cola, but it isn’t much better. To sum up, Asda’s Own Brand Cola tastes better than both Pepsi Raw and Red Bull Cola!

Obamania

I didn’t see any of the Inauguration Ceremony of Barack Obama yesterday.

I really don’t understand the hype. To me, it’s a complete opposite to what’s it’s supposed to represent. People all over the world are hyping it up because having a Black President is a step towards Racial Equality.

But, to me, the fact that they are making a big song and dance about this means exactly the opposite. It there was complete Equality, it wouldn’t matter it Obama was Black, White, Green or Blue. The fact that it does, means that there isn’t.

I don’t want to start any arguments, but let me put it this way. Does anyone actually know what any of Obama’s policies actually are. I imagine that 90% of people don’t. Says it all really.