Well, I already had a rant about USB stuff, so I can't really continue on all of that.

I got one up on those guys, though. My card reader came through today, so I don't have to worry about USB cords any more.... for the two cameras I have, at least. Who knows, it might come up as a party pleaser, given that I have several weddings to attend in the next few months.

I'm not up to Wade's standards with photography, but I've been awake very early in the morning over here for the past few weeks and that's the best time to catch spiders in action. So here's one. Sorry, it's not the greatest of shots, but it's not too bad. Looks like that bad boy knew what his dinner was, cocooned it and went in for the kill.

I can't be the only person on the planet who's as pissed off as I am with USB devices (or, more specifically cables.)

I have a PS3, with a USB cable. I have a flash drive, with a USB cable. I have a camera, with a cable. I have a cell phone, with a cable. - All of which, could work from the same cable.

I have another camera, with a totally different cable. What the...

My lounge looks like there's black spaghetti all over the place. Fucking cables.

What I'm really annoyed about, though, is the connection to the devices... That's usually pretty much the same for EVERYTHING USB related I have, but not the newer camera. I have to have a DIFFERENT USB cable for all of that.

Of course, with my luck, I lost that cable. I'll be damned if I'm going to pay Fuji for another cable (which I'm sure is their ploy), so I ordered a card reader.

I'd take pictures, but there'd be some irony in all of that. Given that I can't get pictures transferred to the PC.

Years ago, in my student days, I used to be really into music and was in a band. We did our fair share of gigs and a few recordings, the latter of which you can listen to here.

I was never unhappy with the tracks we recorded there, but never entirely happy, either. We were students when we recorded the tracks, and so had limited money to throw away. Even budget studios clock up costs relatively quickly, so we had to take a few shortcuts that we'd have probably not done had we had more money and time to dedicate to the recordings.

A few weeks ago, Coz, who was in the band with me and played guitar, and I were out on a night out up in Newcastle. We got to talking about how good it would be to hear the individual tracks from the recordings again.

A couple of weeks went by and, after another night out, I decided to see whether I could find any cheap ADAT machines on eBay.

ADAT machines became a reasonably cheap digital alternative method of recording to analog spool machines. The machines themselves were expensive, but the tapes, which are sVHS tapes and look more or less identical to a regular VHS tape, were very cheap.

You'd have three machines all synced up together, each recording 8 tracks to give you a combined total of 24 tracks. I kept the tapes from the recordings, which is why I started my hunt for an ADAT machine of my own.

I managed to find one that was surprisingly cheap, put in a low bid, and won it - which surprised me, because I only put in a small price, given that I was just doing all of this on a whim.

Coz has kept up with recording stuff and has Nuendo. He also has a decent sound card and a small mixing desk, so I took the machine and tapes around to his place a week last Sunday. We got to rigging everything up, but it took longer to get the sound card and wiring figured out than I thought - about an hour. Neither of us have much time these days, so once we'd done that, we just had a quick play around with getting a couple of tracks over onto Nuendo and then I went home.

He copied a couple of the audio tracks for me and put them onto a portable harddrive and I went and collected them last Sunday. When I got them onto my computer and into sound forge, it became apparent that they needed a bit of tidying up.

Any half decent technician will immediately do a couple of things (amongst others) when recording instruments:-

- Apply Compression. Most instruments have quite a dynamic range. If you tap a drum, for example, it'll be a lot quieter than if you give it a good whack. This is a good thing, it's the nature of the instrument.

However, you need to limit the range, so that instruments don't drown each other out in the mix. You can overdo it, too - if you over compress, the instrument literally gets a sound like it's getting the life sucked out of it.

Although most instruments are recorded with a degree of compression on them, it's sometimes necessary to add some compression on the mixdown, given that you don't want to overdo things as you're recording the track and find out you have to re-record it.

- Noise Reduction to get rid of unwanted sound. I'm thinking of the vocals, here, though it applies to other instruments. Those who're familiar with recording will know all too well that sound that's sent to the musicians earphones can spill over into the mix.

So, when I got these tracks into Sound Forge, the first thing I did was to see if the tracks could do with any further compression. They didn't, but there was quite a lot of background noise that I needed to eliminate.

The result is pretty clean vocal tracks. Coz and I are going to have a go at creating different arrangements when we get a chance, though if any budding musicians want to give it a go, let me know and I'll get the tracks to you. I only currently have the two lead vocal tracks for Patchwork Sky and Song for Someone, the latter of which was recorded to a click track, so shouldn't require any time stretching. Not sure about the other track, it's been 10 years since we recorded them.

Prior reading on terminology I use here.

The headphones that come as default with many products (mainly mp3 players) these days (the small ones that sit inside your ears) hurt mine after wearing them for any length of time.

Back in 2000 or so, I bought a pair of Sennheiser (I'd link to their site(s), but I've been unable to access the sites for the past two days running) headphones. They were canned headphones, that cupped the ears, which were comfortable and of reasonable quality.

There tend to be lots of cables laying around on the floor near where I work (in my living room, in the UK - NOT in the office in PA). I can never be bothered with moving these cables prior to hoovering, so like the idiot I am, I managed to pass the hoover over the cable for those old headphones. This destroyed the cable (which was ridiculously long for my needs (about 6 feet (2+ metres))).

I tried to get a replacement cable, without having the old cable with me as I got it. From memory, I was sure the old cable was a mini-jack to mini-jack cable, so bought one of those...

Got the new cable home, tried to plug it into the old headphones.. The plug was too big. Turns out that it was a mini-mini-jack plug to mini-jack. Both ears of the headphones had a little crackle to them, since I'd mistakenly overpowered them a while ago, with a full volume blast and they were 8 years old, so I figured I'd buy a new set.

Happy (other than issues above) with Sennheiser before, I thought I'd give them another try. The new headphones I ordered came with another gigantic cable, but I was happy to see that the shorter cable I'd bought for the old headphones should fit, because it had the right connections.

WRONG. It wasn't a case of the plugs being the wrong size this time, rather that the plastic casing AROUND the plug was the problem.

I could, if the Sennheiser websites actually worked, check out if they stock shorter cables there, I guess... But for something as inexpensive as a budget cable, why should I even have go to that trouble? I'm close to shearing a few millimetres from the base of the headphone that holds the socket. Grr.

I know that many males dream of their male plugs getting tightly squeezed into a female's socket, but come on.

I've been dwelling on the fact that I've been getting old lately. It's not enough that I realise this for myself, some people even feel the need to point it out to me (WolfBlitz2's comment).

I read a lot of threads in the forums, many of which no longer make sense (from my current perspective - they might have done at one point in time) to me. Some of the posts in these threads I read are on completely unrelated matters to thread subject, but they all relate to the same kind of thing; "My parents don't understand me", "I'm being controlled by my parents", blah de blah.

When I check out the profiles of the people posting these comments, they're all between 13 - 18 years of age. And believe me, I felt the same sort of thing when I was in that age range... However, if you're in that situation and unless you're getting some sort of physical/mental abuse, getting lectures off your parents, or feeling that you're being controlled by them, is completely natural.

It takes becoming an adult (yeah, I know - long time to wait for those of you still in that age bracket, but it'll come around sooner than you think) to realise that your parents are just bigger versions of you. They're just big kids, who went through similar situations to you young ones, way back when. Circumstances might have changed a little - you got busted for something you might have been looking at on the internet or on your computer, they got busted for something they managed to get on video or in print.

All of this is very difficult to accept from a teenager's point of view, given that it's stereotypically uncool to agree with anything anyone over the age of 20 says or writes, so I'm probably wasting my time in writing all of this and am probably just wasting space here....

But, to give those young guys an idea of where I'm coming from, many of my friends have started families recently. My best friend, who I was Best Man for back in September 2006, had his first son last June. My friend and his wife are still the same people they were before, and I've known both of them since I was in my teens.

All I'm trying to say if you're young, like it or not, believe it or not, is that we're all big kids at heart and all have similar goals in mind. Even (and in particular) the people who bring you up.

So, the Russians are blasting some gerbils off into space to simulate the effects that humans might experience on a flight to Mars. I couldn't help but think that this article would have been a good April Fool's joke. It's something that Borat might come up with, and funnily enough, the flight left from Kazakhstan.

Nothing good will come of it for the Gerbils, though - even if they survive the flight, they're to be butchered on their return. Here's a choice quote from the article:

"Day and night will be simulated and special machines will clean their excrement in the weightless conditions."

If only they could come up with something similar for land-based pets.

I already posted this on the forums, but I love this too much to not stick on here as well.

I had the TV on as I was finishing up tonight and thought that the show I was watching had finished, since I caught a glimpse of a gorilla out of the corner of my eye, and I'd been reading a thread on animals reaching the point of extinction. Gorillas seemed to be topping that bill and I thought what I was seeing might have been the start of a documentary. I was wrong.

Clicky Clicky.

I had no intention of writing anything here until I was significantly annoyed about something, or had something reasonable or informative to write. I suppose I could say I'm significantly annoyed about telephony services at the moment, so here goes.

I'm not sure how telephone listings work outside of the UK, but here, you can choose to have your number unlisted - meaning that it shouldn't appear in phone books or listings anywhere, including the internet (and even if you are listed, there are laws about cold-calling from telephone directories in the UK (which some small companies tend to ignore)).

I moved into this house in March 2006 - it was a new house, so I figured, a new telephone line - a number that had never been used before. I was wrong there. It didn't take too long for me to figure out that this number had been in use before, to someone I'll refer to from now on as "random guy" (someone I'd never heard of before).

In the first few months I was here, I got a number of cold calls from companies, asking for random guy. Pissed off, I just told them most of them that I'd never heard of the guy and that would be the end of it. For the most part.

Some lingerers would respond with, "Well, you can help me anyway! We're offering X deal on X mobile (cell) phone contracts!" At that point, I would politely point out that I was not the person that they had wanted to contact and that I was perfectly happy (which I am, though more on that in a minute) with my current mobile phone contract. If they dragged it out past that, I'd just apologise again, then hang up.

Having been in tele-sales during my student years to earn some extra money, I know just how nasty people can be when you call them - even if they've somehow invited the call through signing up for, "I agree to receiving more information over telephone or e-mail on this product" type forms. So I'm never, EVER rude to these people, but honestly, some of them just don't give up, even after being told "No" several times.

I still get the occasional call asking for random guy, despite the fact I live alone - one such call was from his son, months after the telephone line had been set up... Figure that one out, random guy didn't even forward on his new number to his own son.

I really shouldn't have been surprised with all of this, given that I'd had problems with the service provider in the past, BT. I won't get into all of that, since I don't have the documents to substantiate what I'm saying any more, and it would just infuriate me even more to write about it now anyway. BUT - the number I have now had obviously been listed somewhere before and used somewhere before. What the hell is the point in opting out of listings if the number you're given is already in circulation?! Bah.

Moving on, I have a new grievance, this time with my mobile service (which I've said I'm happy with already - and I am - apart from this). The other day I received a text message with images - and it was an ADVERTISEMENT. For Myspace mobile. But it hadn't come from myspace, it had come from Vodafone, my mobile service provider. I've NEVER opted into ads on my mobile (cell), so what gives them the right to start sending me this crap?

All of this irritates me greatly - I keep people who can contact me instantly at arm's length. I use my mobile phone and landline (BT) phone regularly, but only for making calls to those who are nearest and dearest to me. I use AIM pretty much all day (I tend to spend a couple of hours checking e-mail and private messages before signing in) and use Skype reasonably regularly to stay in touch with friends (and work colleagues) overseas. Occasionally, I'll use one of my phones to call the guys over in the States about work issues, but only in urgent matters.

Why do these telephone companies insist on sending my information, or giving me a number that's been used before in a public environment, when I don't want them to, nor have I asked them to? I consider phone calls from people I don't know or care about a complete intrusion on my privacy, since it means leaving the computer to answer those calls - often when I'm in the middle of coding something. Grrrrrrrr.

That is all, bye.