Typing

Due to the cable on my gaming mouse dying, I am currently using an ambidextrous mouse that isn't nearly as comfortable. Combined with the bizarre way in which I type, I am now putting an awful lot of strain on my right index finger. While touch typing involves using all of your fingers to cover the entire keyboard, I use my right index finger to cover just over half the keyboard, leaving my left hand to add in letters that are just too far for my right hand to reach. I also type at around 80wpm, going up to 100wpm at full speed. Given that my poor finger is doing most of the work, my joints are not too happy with me at the moment.

To take some of the load off, I decided to learn to touch type properly. This is currently not working too well, as I am now typing at around 15wpm. It is also incredibly frustrating to be forced to type at a much slower speed than I am used to, so I keep finding myself reverting to my old method, but switching in my middle finger. This isn't ideal either, as I will just end up putting too much strain on a different joint. It seems that I have muscle memory in my whole right hand, enabling me to type with any one of my fingers in addition to using my left hand. I've been typing like this for over 10 years now, so this is a pretty difficult habit to break.

I am going to keep on practising touch typing and hopefully I can get up to at least half of my original typing speed by the end of next week...and then in May I will be sent a replacement for my mouse so I will have significantly reduced the stress on my finger. I am fairly sure it's the combination of using this old mouse and my unusual typing style that has led to the joint pain, so eliminating at least one of the factors will hopefully be enough. I don't really want to do myself any permanent damage, especially as I play guitar and piano, so if I can get my touch typing speed up (to speed...heh) I'll be a lot happier.

In other news, I've been quiet since I was away visiting family in NYC and Kansas. It was good fun and really great to meet some cousins closer to my age. Since I've returned to Bristol I have played many board games and I am getting through my list of tasks to do.

Today I Learned: Walking Edition

Today I went for a walk. Not just any walk though, a "brisk walk"! Under doctor's orders, I will be doing more exercise, so after dismissing the idea of sneezing into the UBU swimming pool for an hour, I took my doctor's suggestion of going for a walk.

Now, I regularly walk around Bristol, but I was told it had to be 30 minutes of "brisk" walking to bring my heart rate up. I wondered to myself, since I already walk much faster than the average person, does that not count? I suppose not, as it doesn't make me break out into a sweat, which is what Dr G said should happen. So...I plotted a vague route, taking in the popular joggers' spot of Durdham Downs, checked the temperature outside and set off.

It was awful. Truly, truly awful. The one thing I didn't account for was wind chill. Looking at a couple of websites, three layers were recommended for walking, but I'd only gone for two, which definitely didn't help. Walking across the flat downs with gusts of wind attacking me was pretty bad, so I detoured down some residential roads. In addition to the other ailments that plague me, I have asthma triggered by cold (among other things), so that just amped up the pain factor. Luckily, I had the good sense to take my inhaler, so it wasn't too bad.

Aside from being uncomfortable, it was rather dull. I took to jogging for a few minutes to break the monotony. As pleasant as the streets in the Syned Park area are, walking down them just isn't that interesting.


So, what did I learn?
1. Check the wind chill factor before going outdoors.
2. Three layers!
3. Residential roads are less painful than the Downs.
4. As soon as I shake off this everlasting cold, it's time to start swimming again.

Watercolours

Right, I've been suffering from some sort of dreaful lurgy on-and-off over the last month, hence the delay in updating. I am currently tucked up in bed reading the entire internet and feeling rubbishy, unfortunately.

A few weeks ago, I started a painting class at Bristol Folk House to fill up my time. The main focus is botanical watercolours, so we started off drawing flowers and went on to painting flowers and leaves. I've mainly used acrylics before, so this is fairly different, plus the delicate nature of watercolours is somewhat at odds with my scribble-madly-all-over-the-place style. That said, it's good fun and I am enjoying being in a classroom, makes a nice change from the impersonal lectures I've had for the last few years.

This is the first painting I did, of a closed-up rose. I took my rose home in the hope it would open up a bit so I could practise...it sort of did, but the centre remained steadfastly closed, which was a shame.

The second painting is of the same rose, after the outer petals fell away a bit. Posted it to mum for mothers' day; she was pleased with it!

Not final year!

Hello Internet! It's definitely time for an update...I've left my course for various reasons, which means I will be graduating in July with a BSc in Computer Science (oh my, I actually have a degree now). I haven't written anything for a while, but I'm currently working on the latest edition of Rebellious Jukebox for Intuition, so that will be out in a couple of weeks.

So, what am I actually doing with my life? At the moment I'm volunteering at an Oxfam bookshop in Bristol and I'll be starting a watercolour painting class next week. I also need to get some driving lessons, which I'm sure will be terrifying on the ridiculous hills of Bristol. I'm treating this as a gap year of sorts, with the intention of starting a different masters course in September or going into the scary world of work and becoming a real person.

I've done a little bit of drawing to break in my new sketchbook but it hasn't made it onto my computer yet, so that will appear online eventually. In the meantime, have a digital drawing of a quetzal. I have a small backlog of photographs from Christmas to sort through as well. My 40D is currently still in London due to me being far too small to carry things on trains so I haven't taken many photos since my A700 is slowly dying. I'm plodding through a roll of film but the awful weather recently has made me shy away from using up colour exposures on drab photos taken out of my window.

Right, now I'm going to wallow in my dressing gown and play Pokemon Pinball (yes, I got my old Gameboy Colour out of storage) as I have a terrible cold so I can't bear the though of going outdoors today.

Final year!

O hai all, I've been mega-busy over summer working at Nokia in Bristol, as a member of their web team and I've just started the final year of my undergrad MEng in Computer Science.

I have been writing sporadically; my latest article for Intuition is the singles roundup for October, Rebellious Jukebox. If you go to UoB, I've reviewed the newest Rolo Tomassi album in the latest issue of Epigram, so check that out. I'll put the words up on here soon. I also edited the Science section of the first Epigram of the year, although I've unfortunately had to step down from my position as deupty Science & Tech editor due to course commitments. So much reading! I am now way more knowledgeable about copyright and patent law than I used to be. Now I'm not on the UBU Photosoc committee, I hope to have more time to make photos, so stay tuned for updates.

(Oh, I also updated my personal website in a < 24h rush job, which I'm quite pleased with. Yay for learning skills over summer.)

"Recent" words

Realised I haven't been updating this with actual words, so here are a few links to some writing I've done:

Enter Shikari - A Flash Flood of Colour
City and Colour - Little Hell
Saves the Day - Daybreak

I've been co-hosting a weekly technology news show since October; you can catch up with the podcast if you are so inclined.

In terms of gigs, February is looking pretty good. Tomorrow, I'm seeing Brand New, which should be amazing and wonderful. Then next week I've got Errors and Pulled Apart By Horses lined up...and it's not just music as I'm seeing Chris Addison on Friday!

Oh yes, photos have been happening as well, so I'll post some longer entries soon with some pictures, or you can check out my Flickr in the meantime.

Mail-order "music"

See the title of this blog? Yeah, that's what my answer to the following question is going to be from now on:

Would you like to listen to some post-dubstep?

Right, this morning I noticed the phrase "post-dubstep" crop up in the list of eligible albums for XFM'x New Music Award 2012. Intrigued, I sought out some to find out what on earth justified the ridiculous moniker.

First up, a James Blake track entitled Limit To Your Love. This rather stripped-down song starts off with jaunty piano reminiscent of Aretha Franklin backing soulful pop vocals. Then the piano disappears, replaced by some lazy percussion. Then the percussion vanishes and piano comes back. THEN THERE'S PERCUSSION AND PIANO AT THE SAME TIME. Wait, no, that was just one chord. Got my hopes up there.

At this point I was thinking, "perhaps I've simply selected the wrong song as this has no elements of dubstep whatsoever", so I tried another: The Wilhelm Scream, also by James Blake. This was just as devoid of dubstep elements, and quite frankly, very dull indeed. As far as instrumentation goes, jazzing up the sound of a metronome doesn't really work.

Still unconvinced, I went for a different artist associated with the "genre", SBTRKT. Having suffered from a debilating impediment which causes suffers to ignore the existence of vowels, I expected Aaron Jones to plague my soul with winsome, melancholy music full of atmosphere and feelings.

(No, not really.)

Wildfire turned out to be significantly more dubsteppy than either of the James Blake tracks, yet also very lacking of...well, music. Some basic percussion accompanied with the wob-wobbing of electronics made a very dull background for some decent vocals provided by Little Dragon (apparently they're a Swedish electronic band). Not impressed, really.

I'm not one to judge something without adequate evidence, so I figured I'd check out one last track. SBTRKT again, with Pharaohs. Right, this is more like it. It's also what I'd call "electro-pop".

Perhaps there is a reason for connecting the "dubstep" genre to certain musicians, but a silly genre name is not the way to do it.

Conclusion: post-dubstep, if it even exists, is definitely not my thing. If you enjoy it, well...make yourself a nice cup of tea and have a civilized rave to it. On the other hand, post-hardcore makes my ears happy.

Google +1, competition 0

Earlier this week, Google's new social networking project, Google+, launched in a limited public beta. With the intention of making it easier for users to share content on the web, Google has made a small number of Google+ features available to testers. As expected, the main focus is a stream of content shared by people you have added to your network. Posts are ordered in terms of recent activity, so if someone makes a new comment on a post you made last Tuesday, it'll go to the top of the stream. This is handy, yet it could lead to newer posts without replies simply getting buried and going entirely unnoticed.

Google+ is built around Circles, which are lists of contacts. You can choose to share content with specific people, one or more of your circles, or just make it totally public. A lot of praise has been heaped upon this feature, yet many have overlooked the fact that customisable friend lists have been a part of Facebook for a good few years. Nevertheless, the transparency of privacy controls that the Circles concept perpetuates is likely to garner a lot of support for Google+.

Instead of being able to "Like" posts, you can "+1" them. This feature is available for content on both Google+ and other websites. While Google's interesting grammatical choices may upset some people, the feature in its current form is hardly groundbreaking. As well as this, the search giant has managed to incorporate a glorified search engine into Google+, Sparks, which allows users to look for things they are interested in and returns a chronologically ordered collection of results.

One of the more novel features is the ability to create a Hangout. This is Google's term for video conference calling, which can be limited to specific Circles. Multiple people can participate in a video call, a clear advantage over Skype, which only provides one-to-one video chat for free. Text-based conversations via Google Chat are integrated into the Hangout. Text chat is also available on its own, but is nowhere near as exciting. In addition, Youtube integration allowing users to select a video to be played to everyone in the hangout has been implemented. On the surface, this may seem somewhat frivolous, yet it adds a more natural dimension to conversations and really does make it seem like you're just hanging out with your friends, despite not being in the same geographical location. While testing out a Hangout, we did experience a few technical issues, but even those with slower Internet connections were able to participate without too much disruption. Refinements such as allowing a queue of videos to be made and providing an option for voice to be transmitted continuously while watching videos ought to be put into place, but there is still a strong case for people moving over to Google+ simply for the group video chat.


Hanging out like a pro

At this stage, it is difficult to say whether or not Google has a chance of overtaking its rivals in the social networking market; Google+ currently lacks a number of features and it is not clear if these will be accounted for in later releases. For a beta, this is a compelling service and the potential for integration with other Google services will probably give Google an edge over the competition.

Try it out, if you have a Google account.

Eclecticity

Lack of updates is due to coursework deadlines, gotta love being a CS student. More fun stuff will appear here in the near future. For now:
- Check out my review of Young Knives' new album on Intuition
- I went to see Saves The Day in London and I have a couple of phone photos that weren't too bad, so I'll fix them up and put them online soon.
- ...and finally, here is a silly last.fm thing I found.

Take your top 50 artists. For each of these artists, collect the top 20 similar artists (where the artist itself is the #1 most similar). The resulting number of unique artists is your super-eclectic score. You can compute your own score at http://anthony.liekens.net/pub/scripts/last.fm/supereclectic.php

My super-eclectic score is currently

708/1000

The most similar artists for my profile are Funeral for a Friend (7), Finch (6), Kasabian (6), Yourcodenameis:milo (5), The Early November (5), The Futureheads (5), Taking Back Sunday (5), The Starting Line (5), Glassjaw (5), Franz Ferdinand (4)

I don't actually listen to about four of those bands, so it's interesting that I have multiple artists that are similar to them!

Ragfest 2011

On 26th March, Bristol LiveSoc and Bristol RAG co-hosted the second annual Ragfest, a night of live music in aid of charity. I was there with UBU Photosoc Events Team getting the whole thing captured on camera. There were two stages across the main Anson Room and Ar2 in the University of Bristol Students' Union, so I was flitting back and forth trying to make sure I got enough pictures of each act. Rather than rambling on, I'll cut straight to the pictures! Many more here.


LAD NTL


The End Effect


Pieman


Max Parker


Kill Cassidy


Jim Horne, Publicity Stunt


Greg Walton, Publicity Stunt


Calm Down Caesar


The Goodness


The Lasting Days


The Phoenix and the Turtle


Mary Spender


Indigo Lights

Publicity Stunt

It's been a while since my last photo post, mostly because I haven't uploaded anything to Flickr for some time. So here, have a massive update!

Some friends of mine are in a ska band, Publicity Stunt. They played their first couple of shows at The Hill recently and I was there taking photos.













I took more on both nights. Publicity Stunt will be playing more gigs in the near future, so I'll keep you updated on that.

Coming up in the next week or so, photos from Ragfest!

Does It Offend You, Yeah? – Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You

The second album from electronic quintet Does It Offend You, Yeah? is a bizarre experimental affair that doesn’t quite hit the mark. Lead single ‘We are the Dead’ is promising, yet the abstract tribal vocals don’t add anything to the pulsing synth melody. The acoustic intro feels forced, completely at odds to the rest of the song. The chaotic ‘John Hurt’ includes an entirely out of place sample, which is a real shame as the song is otherwise one of the best tracks on the album.

It becomes increasingly clear throughout the record that DIOYY have simply tried to do too much; instead of subtly pushing boundaries, the band have run riot and caused a fair amount of musical destruction. ‘Yeah!’ is an incredibly out-of-tune sounding Pendulum-esque mess. There are a couple of more alt-rock tracks, ‘Pull Out My Insides’ and ‘Wrong Time Wrong Planet’ which aren’t bad at all, but just fail to fit in with the rest of the album. ‘Wrestler’ is a slap in the face vocally and would have worked much better as an instrumental track.

A guest appearance from Trip on ‘Wondering’ is very different to what one would expect from DIOYY but works well with the blistering electronic bass. The chorus is a bit of a let-down due to the cutesy vocals though. The album closes with ‘Broken Arms’, a curious melange of acoustic and electronic that doesn’t meld well, leaving the listener with a distinctly unsettled impression. ‘Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You’ is a mash-up of too many genres; the variety is simply strained rather than welcoming. This is just too weird to get into even after multiple listens, but it has some interesting moments.