From Mirrorshades:
Okay. My connection has been absolutely awful recently - haven't been able to stay online for more than a couple of minutes at a time - so I really haven't been doing a lot site-wise. I've released another fully produced song - Overload - that I really like... finally found a vocal style where my voice doesn't sound *that* bad. I finished it about a week ago, but hadn't uploaded it until now because of the connectivity issue.
I also have a small pile of photos of fuzzie and I that I need to get around to uploading. I have album pages and captions and even thumbnails for them all... but the thumbnails are way too small, so I need to re-do them sometime.
I'm currently working on a slightly more lightweight project, remixing a song from Sonic 2 on a friend's request. Dunno if that'll get uploaded.
The final (ish) word on my connection: I phoned BT a week ago, and cancelled my phone service, so this second line will be disconnected at mid-day today (it's 5:30am right now) - although I'll still have the main house phone line to tide me over until I go to Malaysia, on Saturday. Another item on my to-do list is to phone NTL to get a cable connection installed, because I'm sick of this shitty phone line.
I'll be in Malaysia for... umm... *finds phone and accesses scheduler* twelve days - from Sat 13th to Tue 25th - then after that I'll be jetting off to Bristol on the 9th, to meet with fuzzie and some other random noders. This should be fun (especially the meeting-fuzzie part =) )
Watched Minority Report today. Pretty good. Not exactly a must-must-see film, but pretty nice. Its main problem is that it's not really action-y enough to be an action movie, but the plot isn't well-worked-out enough to be a more solid film. Pity. Some day I'll try and check out the short story it's based on, by Philip K Dick. I suspect it'll be about as different from the film as Blade Runner was from Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? - ie, almost like chalk and cheese. Personally, I preferred the latter; Blade Runner had atmosphere in spades but not an awful lot else (although the soundtrack is cool...)
I've finally gotten around to reading Dad's old copy of The Count Of Monte Cristo that he's been trying to persuade me to read for ages. I'm on page 30-something, having started earlier tonight but having been too tired to read much.
Anything else... well, I sent fuzzie a CD-R down a week or so ago with a copy of all my music stuff on it, and he dug up a demo of a soft synth - Probe, by Synoptic, whose site appears to be down at the moment - which I'd downloaded ages ago and forgotten about. It's actually pretty cool; when I'd downloaded I'd discarded it because it's quite complex and I hadn't managed to make anything good with it, but this time round I found a help file, managed to activate polyphonic mode so I can actually play chords now, plus I've got a keyboard hooked up via MIDI so things are much more convenient now. It sounds good. Another addition to my (small) arsenal, along with SimSynth. I've also been playing around with Fruity Loops, which I'd downloaded hoping I'd be able to use it as a basic MIDI sequencer/VSTi+DXi host. However, it looks like it's really designed more as a sampler/beat creator - neither of which I need, since I've got ModPlug, which already does almost everything I want it to do. Oh well.
In totally seperate (but not really) news, I'm trying to get Alistair addicted to IRC =P Hopefully we'll be doing some more recording sometime soon, after he buys a new guitar pedal with money we won at a recent Battle Of The Bands contest. We've recorded parts of several songs off his proposed album already, and completed a couple of songs. I like some of them - the darker ones, of course - but some of the material I'm slightly dubious about. It's going to be a pretty weird album - boy-band balladry, punk, dark rap-rock, reggae...
I'm actually trying to put together a demo of my own work at the moment - probably containing the abovementioned Overload, Running Away and a third song that's yet to be composed. My main problem is that I want to get a consistent (ish) style going, and I have a habit of just composing whatever I feel like at the time, rather than any particular style of music. I'm aiming for a sort of dark synth/guitar-based rock style, which is the kind of stuff I'd like to listen to, although I also have a couple of electronic songs I could use as a seperate demo. As for who the demo's actually going out to... *shrug* I have no idea =P
Oh yeah. And as a final coda to this ultra-long news post: I finally got rid of the (uck) frames on the site and replaced with with (ack) tables. At 6am. Best time to do HTML editing =P Go me.
Oh yeah... and in a final final coda, I got the photo album up! Akasha saw my bitching about WS_FTP (my old, and not particularly capable, FTP client) in #e and gave me a link to LeechFTP, which is possibly the best FTP client I've ever seen.
Okay, and as the encore... I present: Overload. I'll add it to the music page tommorow - it's 8am and I really can't be bothered thinking up a description for it right now =P