Full Circle live at the Hyatt Hotel

Posted by jerry on March 16th, 2007 — Posted in Journal, Music

It’s St Patrick’s Eve and the first of three shows was at the Hyatt hotel in Canberra. The audience was excellent and clearly had a great time – I know we did 🙂

We were using new speakers for the first time, and my newly repaired fiddle was awesome. We hope to get some video footage at tomorrow’s shows at PJ Oreilly’s (Civic) from 1.00pm-4.00pm and then Filthy McFadden’s in Kingston from 5.30-8.30. Watch this space for some YouTube footage in a couple of weeks!

Here’s some pix from tonight’s show

Full Circle at the Hyatt

Full Circle at the Hyatt

Full Circle at the Hyatt

Full Circle at the Hyatt

See you tomorrow!

Cheers
Jerry

Making an electric violin

Posted by jerry on March 16th, 2007 — Posted in Journal, Music

Here’s a great short vid on making an electric violin 🙂

electric violin

Neat eh?

Happy St Pat’s Eve – I’ll be playing down at the Hyatt Hotel in Canberra tonight 🙂

Cheers
Jerry

YouTube sound on a mac

Posted by jerry on March 16th, 2007 — Posted in Journal, Technology

It worked for a while, then one day I logged in and it stopped – no sound from YouTube videos! I tried a diagnostic check with Nortons, still no sound. I tried shutting down and powering down to clear the cache. Still no sound. Well, when all else fails, read the manual. I looked up the Mac forums to see if anyone else had had the same problem with a mac running OS X (10.4). And they had. And there was a solution.

For some reason, macs seem to reset their midi audio output sample rate to 96,000.0 hertz, and that cuts off the sound fro flash movies. Interestingly, iTunes still worked okay and so did the midid player on barfly, but YouTube videos were vision only. The fix is easy.

Open the Applications folder, then the utilities folder and find an app called Audio Midi Setup and double click to open it.

Audio Midi Setup mac OSX

The audio output is on the right hand side –  and you’ll notice a small blue rectangle with a down arrow. Click there and a drop-down selection appears.

Select 44100.0 hertz

Audio Midi Setup mac OSX

And close it all up – now your YouTube videos will have sound again! Yay!!

Just thought I’d share that with you in case you’re having the same ‘issue’.

Cheers
Jerry

The medium is not the message

Posted by jerry on March 15th, 2007 — Posted in Journal, New media

In a classic error of form being conflated with content, it seems there is a proposal in the UK to ban phone masts from church rooftops – because new generation phones can access the internet and the internet might transmit pornographic images!

Church phone masts - the Telegraph

Of course this was relayed in a news medium that references some rather early electronic telecommunication systems – the Telegraph…

I wonder how long it will take the Anglican Church to realise that neither service providers, nor basic infrastructure providers are responsible for content on the internet. It also ignores the valuable service provided by mobile phones – in an era when public phone booths (landline) are fast disappearing from our streets. How then would an emergency phone call be made?

It also ignores the 2006 content analysis that showed that pornography is only a very small part of the web content – about 1%, which is about the same as the amount of Government information online. And do people really search that much for adult content? Actually only about 6% of searches. So the web is quite staid really. The study was conducted by Philip Stark – Professor of Statistics at University of California at Berkeley.

Cheers
Jerry

Slow movement – music to my ears

Posted by jerry on March 14th, 2007 — Posted in Journal, New media

Evelyn Rodrigues has hit the proverbial nail in the right place when talking about slow marketing, slow travel, slow food – you name it. If web 2.0 is about people then it also has to be about taking time for people. It is not a coincidence that modern management is talking increasingly about work/life balance – meaning focus on the important relationships and people will work happier and be more productive. Creative tension is passe – and ineffective.

Technology may be about speed but innovation requires time out, time to recontextualise – remember Archimedes taking time out in the bath…?  Let alone the orchards of Isaac Newton and Viginia Woolf.

Whatever happened to letting an idea marinate – go through a few iterations first before releasing the bug-ridden beta product on the unsuspecting public?

The speed of technology is a great enabler, but that is a means of delivery, not of exploration. We have bread-making machines, but even they have to take time out to let the dough rise. There are times when people just need to talk to each other. And that’s the rich part of web 2.0
Cheers
Jerry