A Minor Journey dot com.

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I know… I found myself doing it without thinking.

moar funny pictures

I thought that perhaps these two offerings would be a good way to break the silence. I think I must be the worst blogger in the world. There is a reason. I’m just not sure of it. Blame it on the latest gadget to make it into our home. Wait. Not Gadget. Gadgets.

The Saxomophone
_{Below is a music geek bit. If you’re not a music geek you may want to jump the next few paragraphs…}

As some of you may know, I’ve recently joined the fun funky band known as Meet Your Feet as a sort of saxophonist. I don’t view myself as a bone fide saxophonist since the oboe is really my thing. The oboe is the instrument I’ve been playing for nearly twenty of my almost twenty-nine years. It is the instrument I sweated blood and tears over at college. It is part of me. The sax was, until recently, just an instrument I played. The call out of the blue to join the band and pick up the Saxophone was heeded and I’m now really enjoying it. Heck, I’m even improving. As a consequence I spent £316 of my (our) hard-earned cash and purchased a new JP45R Saxophone. Unlike most cheap saxophones this has a beautiful sound and ease of playing and when combined with my Yamaha 6C mouthpiece and a nice hard rubber Rovner ligature and a Van Doren Jumbo Java it all sounds great. Sure, it’s no Yanagisawa but it does make a surprisingly expensive sound for what is a very cheap instrument. It has knocked unbelievably high-quality Chinese spots off the Jupiter 500 series it replaces. And, for the first time in what seems like ever I’m able to play the full range from Bb to High F# without making any horrid squeaks.

And the band love it.

The saxophone itself was made in China. An important turning point for me as I must admit I had really bad prejudice based on past experience of Chinese-made instruments. In the past students would turn up to lessons with £99 instruments made in China and purchased at the local bookstore or supermarket. They would fall apart in a few weeks and sounded horrid. The tone was narrow and the intonation sucked. But these JP instruments are really different. The UK shop, based in Taunton, travels over to China frequently and checks on both the manufacturing process and the workforce’s standard of living etc. The wage they are paid is much higher than any native industry pays. So that makes me happy on my humanitarian concerns.

JP are currently refining a £300 student oboe. Never before has an oboe been so cheap and I’m very keen to try one. Granted, it’s missing some key work that more advanced instruments have but it is a direct competitor for the Howarth Junior, an instrument I’ve watched develop and have played. The JP oboe has to really perform to beat the Junior on tone but it has it squished on price at nearly half the price. So I want a JP081 for my birthday I think, even if it’s just to have an oboe I can take places I don’t want to take my £5,000 professional one.

Talking of oboes I finally uploaded the misfortunate oboe of Dan, one of my students destined to be an undergrad oboist this fall. A local shop, namely Trevor Jones, swore that the oboe was in perfectly good order and wasn’t leaking like a sieve. I had previously tested the oboe and proved it to be certainly un-airtight.

Why?

See if you can spot them. Two nasty little cracks.

One very expensive piece of firewood. Dan is now the proud owner of a beautiful Howarth XL which will be far more use to him this year than the horrid Ward&Winterborne he had.

Anyway. On to gadgets numbers two and three.

We got a Wii

Despite our best resolve and the fact that I lost 20 lbs and then put 15 lbs back on while our scales were broken we purchased a Wii. It was on special super-cheap offer at our local Costco where we now do our once-a-month shop. (I can highly recommend costco for anyone who runs their own business as it’s far cheaper to buy in bulk if you have somewhere to put all those toilet rolls and baked beans.) The Wii has been a welcome addition to the family and although I seem to be using it more than Kate I am enjoying the fact that it’s okay to play on this video game console if you’re up and doing things at the same. Next stop: WiiFit and pushing my weight back down below 175 lbs….

Now I’d like to share a fantastic program with all you Mac People out there. It’s gadget number three.

Delicious Library 2.

While I’m sure Delicious Library was pretty good in the first version I have jumped on the band wagon with version 2. This fantastic little program is only $40 of your earth money and has helped me organise my music at last. When your studio houses over 1,000 discrete manuscripts of every size and instrumentation you really struggle to know where everything is. Not to mention the other 1,000 or so books we have stashed away around the house. If you’re anything like me you end up buying duplicate copies of scores when you forget you already own the piece or the fact you’ve leant it out to a student. Plus friends end up buying you stuff you already own. This program takes care of both.

Using your built-in isight camera on the more snazzy macs of recent years (or if you’re like me and have a Mac Pro without a camera, any video camera attached to your mac), you simply hold up the back of your book to the camera. The program reads the book’s ISBN barcode and almost instantly looks it up using amazon and various other book-searching Api out there. For books without ISBN numbers you can either manually enter the details or search for the title online. In about eight hours I’ve added nearly four-hundred books. The program also keeps track of your video game collection (yes, Chrissy, I know you still have Assassin’s Creed), your iTunes library and any gadgets or apparel you want to add to the database.

Apart from knowing who has what amongst your friends and in my case, students, you can sell any of your library items from this program via Amazon or even keep a running total of your library for insurance purposes. Neat eh?

Anyway. Give it a go. I’ve exported part of my library to my .mac homepage, so you can see how the html export looks.

Before I head off and walk the dogs (I have a lesson in half an hour) I also want to add the following.

Velma now has her first additional battery! It’s not in yet but after a long trip down to deepest darkest Cornwall I have a 201V NiMH battery pack for my PHEV project. Behold!

Not only that, but I have a fuel-filler cap from the same Prius who donated her battery.

Way to go!

There’s the usual Flickerated photographs of the last month. As always, if you want to know what I’ve been up to inbetween posts it’s worth checking my Flickr Homepage or you can always follow my microtweets on Twitter.

Until next time.

X

P.S. If you’ve been following me in Bristol and found this site because of the sign-writing on my car then for the moment I have one thing to say.

Oh! Hai!!!1!