Piano II

As regular readers (Hi Mom) know, I bought a piano.

It’s an old piano. It has an awful tone. It has sticky keys. It hasn’t been tuned since before The Turn of the Century.

As pianos go, it’s pretty average.

I love it. It’s my piano. I own a piano. I have a piano in my lounge. There’s no room for it, and we don’t have a stool, and currently it’s no more than piece of furniture. But it’s my piano. I can see it … if I crane my neck a little.

I feel better having a piano. I can’t explain it but I do.

Oh, I can’t play it, but that doesn’t matter. I can pick out tunes, one handed. What I want to do, however, is play this:

It’s one of the finest Jazz pieces I know and look, it’s so easy you can play it in splints!

But wait, as they say, there’s more.

For the beauty that is the You Tubes has given me: piano lessons by video. Hence:

and that leads me on to other simple pieces of music with which to wow and boggle my family.

So, thanks You Tube, hat tip Shawn Cheek Easy and thank you my piano.

You know where all this is leading, right?

Holidays

It’s been a while. Sorry about that. Had body painted girls to cover up, corporate ships of state to maneuver into laying along side, possible outbreaks of swine flu (she had a cold) to consider and general lethergy to take into account.

Meh. It’s a blog. What are you gonna do?

On that note, the holidays.

School holidays, to be precise.

They’re upon us.

A colleague of mine (and occasional correspondent) says he’s been informed that Her Indoors is taking the kids to the In laws for a couple of days during the holidays.

Cunningly, Mr X (for that is his birth name) has booked a day off work without making mention of this to his wife.

Is he conducting an illicit affair? Will he spend the night out with The Boys?

No, he’s after one thing and one thing only:

a lie in.

That’s right, he has to book time off work so he can luxuriate in that experience we call “sleeping until you wake”.

I can only agree, it’s a gorgeous idea and quite a tempting one. The downside is that Someone will find out he’s got a day off and hasn’t:

mown the lawn;
sorted out the dripping shower head;
painted the ceiling in the lounge;
updated his blog;
journeyed to the in-laws to partake of the family cheer, etc,

and he’ll be in a world of hurt.

So Very Tempting.

I do get a lie-in each week. On the Saturday morning I get to stay in bed while Mrs Audent gets up and tries to coral the children. Sadly our house has the main bedroom off the lounge, so despite all best endeavours all I can hear is children scrapping, whining, fighting, moaning, watching TV, not watching TV, eating breakfast, making a mess, refusing to eat breakfast, getting told off and, occasionally, standing in the corner.

I love them to bits but a lie in… mmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Modern Warfare 2

November.

Modern Warfare 2.

Must have.

World War II is all well and good but I’ve stormed the beaches, I’ve taken the pill boxes, I’ve pushed on through the rain in France, I’ve shivered in the snow in Moscow and I’ve flame thrown bunkers. That wasn’t much fun, the last bit. It was grim, it was (get this) too realistic.

I’ve enjoyed it all but there’s nothing like the kinetic madness that is Modern Warfare, whether it’s storming the boat in the opening sequence or crawling through radiation in Chernobyl to take out an arms trafficker… the whole thing was gloriously cool (including the special after-the-titles sequence which was ace).

And now it looks like it got a bit better still.

Windows 7

Wammo tells me he’s installed the pre-release version of Windows 7 and it’s like being born again. His computer (get this) actually does what he wants it to do! ZOMG! Revolutionary.

I’m reminded of my old boss at IDG Communications, Pat McGovern, and a story he tells of the first time he saw Steve Jobs demonstrate the Mac OS.

Steve had invited Pat and some other assorted luminaries to check out his new product and was, the way Pat tells it, quite anxious that they be impressed. He ran them through the demo, showed off the “mouse” and the “graphical user interface” and some other bits and pieces and stood back.

“Well, Pat. What do you think?”

Pat McGovern, for those that don’t know him, is well over six foot tall and has been kicking around the IT publishing industry since before there was an IT publishing industry. He set up IDC Research to monitor this growing market but couldn’t find any publication that wanted to take his research. So he founded IDG Communications and set up Computerworld and the rest is history. Pat was a big cheese and if you could get Pat on side, you were made.

“What do you think?” asked Steve, with (I like to think) a tremor in his voice.

Pat stood up, looked around the room at the assembled journos and said, “If this catches on, we’re all out of a job. It just works”. Thankfully, it never did, and so countless millions of pages of reviews, tips, tricks, support and help were able to be written and re-hashed over and over …

Windows 7 is best summed up, however, by XKCD and if I can make it fit, the comic is below. You should, however, go visit XKCD and look at all the comics and let your mouse hover over each one as there’s a secret message for those In The Know.

It’s mostly a fail until such time as I can move the post down below my sidebar. Hmmm. Any WordPress gurus who know what they’re doing out there?

V: Not just an energy drink

And for those of us born in the Old Country, V was never a drink, it was that awful TV series about alien invaders.

It wasn’t that bad I suppose… Great premise, just so very earnest and well, American.

Now they’re remaking it.

If you’ve ever wondered why journalists aren’t paid enough, this clip shows off the power balance of modern PR versus Media quite nicely I think. The expectation is that you’ll write/produce fluff and that that’s what the readers/watchers want. It’s not, which is why laying off journalists and reducing the already pitiful amount freelancers are paid is not going to work as a cost-saving measure.

Bonus points if you can tell me who that is and why they’ll never take the skies from me.

Welcome to the Twitterati

Yes, it’s true. I’ve been keeping a blog all this time. Blog, meet @paulbrislen.

Twitter, meet my blog.

Be kind – it’s all a work in progress, sound and fury signifying SFA really.

Not another Star Trek review

although if it were I’d give it five stars, phasers set to kill, warp drive overload etc…. boffo a good one.

Instead, I’d like to review the ad I saw at the theatre.

This one.

Cadbury, I think your ad department is imbibing something stronger than cocoa beans. I like it, but just watch them…

More interestingly, I’m stunned boring old Cadbury (remember their last lot of ads?) actually has the stomach to approve these ads. Well done indeed.

As for Village cinemas in Auckland, at St Luke’s mall to be precise, can I just say encouraging customers to pre-book is a good thing: making them stand in line for ages while one pimply-faced youth processes their transactions while a dozen zit-fests work on the paltry few who DIDN’T pre-book is stupid, pointless and dare I say it, illogical.

Tampa Bay Mugshots: my new favourite site

Tired of working? Got a few minutes to kill?

Looking for some … entertainment?

Thanks to Tampa Bay’s top newspaper, now you can have hours of fun playing Guess the Crime!

First, log on to Tampa Bay Mugshots and take a look at today’s line up of not-yet-criminals (although we have arrested them).

Then, look deep into the eyes of the folk arraigned before you (see what I did there?).

Finally, guess what they’re in for and click on the pic to see why they’re in the list.

(For extra fun and entertainment, a drinking game version is available on request).

Bonus points: surf through the backlog and go by category – height is a good’un. Pick the under 5 footers to see some real villains. Like Deborah Ann “Mad Dog” Huffman. She’s my favourite (although you wouldn’t want to meet her in a dark alley, no sir).

Woohoo!

A new Yale study shows wine drinkers suffering from Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma are much less likely to die or relapse than their teetotaller counterparts.

Stories like that are quite welcome. Wine shields against cancer.

It seems like a dog’s age since I wrote ‘Usually Fatal‘ for Russell ‘Public Address‘ Brown, and that would be because it is. Three years.

I’m getting old. Must be the wine.

PS – Yale University was founded by a grant from the Yale family who are from North Wales. Elihu is buried in St Giles church in Wrexham where I grew up, although I have no memory of St Giles church at all. Shame really.

Disney: one hit wonder?

I have nearly all the Disney films (well, the ones they’ve deemed acceptable to release, and no I’m not talking about the six hundred remakes masquerading as sequels, I’m looking at you Lion King II, III, IV, V, VI, VII (not VIII), IX and X).

However I’ve always been struck by, well, the similarities.. Baloo is a knock off of Little John and so on. Sure, the voices are double ups, but some of the scenes seemed altogether too… familiar.

Apparently, I’m not alone.

And I can’t embed it. What is with that? So, link here to Disney made one movie.

It’s actually quite hard in places to identify which movie the clip is from because it could be from just about any!

On the one hand you’ve got to congratulate them for making the most out of their resources (some say “sweating the assets” but I like to think of the buffalo herds when I consider making the most of what’s available) but on the other… this seems quite extreme.

I remember reading about the early Star Trek films and how they reused the same chunks of footage over and over. Oh how proud they were of their cleverness, oh how tired and dull some of the scenes looked.