Author: Giles Bathgate

Rock Concert

Joey and I went to see Nickleback live at Sheffield Arena. We went with Chris, Trish, and Alex.

Set List

  • Animals
  • Woke Up This Morning
  • Photograph
  • Because of You
  • Far Away
  • Saturday Night’s Alight (For Fighting)
  • (Elton John cover)
  • If Everyone Cared
  • Savin’ Me
  • Someday
  • Side of a Bullet
  • How You Remind Me
  • Too Bad

Encore:

  • Rockstar

Conversation with my Dad about "T'Internet"

Dad: “How do I turn off your Internet.”
Giles: “Its a router, you just leave it connected.” (He has an ADSL modem)
Dad: “But how do I close the website down so that its not connected to that website, I don’t want to hog that website.”
Giles: “HTTP is stateless meaning that the website is no longer connected as soon as you have finished loading the page.”
Dad: “Well with some websites you have to log off, like Banks, and they have a lot of problems when too many people are logged in.”
Giles: “The problems that Banks have are very specific to their applications, which is why for example you can’t press the back button on Barclays, because banks try to have stateful sessions built on top of HTTP which is stateless, but the rest of the web works the way I just said.”
Dad: “oh”

Later on my “Technophobic” Dad beat us all at Wii Bowling.

Brazil 2008

(Note: This is a work in progress see Holidays)

Our Holiday started with a Journey by Train to London, followed by a bus Journey to my parents House in Bishops Waltham. We stayed the night there before making our way back to Heathrow. The flight took 18 hours which is no surprise considering its is 5889 miles from england to Brazil. After another 5 hour bus journey we finally arrived at Trish and Joey’s Mums house in Sao Jose do Rio Preto.

Our first day in Brazil was quite relaxed, Joey and Trish went off to be pampered, while Chris Alex and Myself got acquainted with Luis over a few beers at the local Bar. The next day we went to for a walk around the lake while Joey and Trish were at the hairdressers.

Our first day trip was to a place called Olympia where we spent the day at a water park, it was really fun, and the sun was gloriously warm. I really liked that there was a pool with a drinks bar in it.

After spending the next few days relaxing and shopping in Sao Jose do Rio Preto, we head of to Sales to spend some time in a country lodge. We spend one afternoon horse riding, I had a go on the horse and cart. We also played some volleyball, and went for a few trips down the river on the kayaks.

  • Sao Paulo
  • Santos
  • Sao Paulo shopping
  • Rio de Janerio
  • Pão de Açúcar (Sugar Loaf Mountain)
  • Cristo Redentor (Christ the Redeemer)
  • Sunburn
  • Food

One of the best meals we had in Rio was at a sushi restaurant. We ordered a ‘sushi boat’ to share. It was so delicious that we ordered another one. Greedy but worth it 😉

6th

Finding aspnet_regiis.exe

Yet again I am searching the net for aspnet_regiis. I tried various combinations including asp_iisreg and aspiis_reg, both of which return results in google. so it seems that I am not the only one who keeps forgetting how it is called. I decided to put it here for my own personal reference. This tool usually has to be run using the -i parameter if you install IIS after you installed Visual Studio and you want to do web service type things.

Sidechain Reverb

Sidechain compression is not the only effect you can create in Reason using the MClass compressor. Those smart people at propellerheads were insigtful enough to give the MClass compressor a Gain Reduction CV out. Which you can use to control any parameter you like.


Here I am using the compressor to pump an RV7000 Reverb Start by creating a Combinator to host the RV7000 this allows you control parameters that would not otherwise be controllable using CV’s. I’ve put the compressor in the combinator too just to keep things tidy. The Gain Reduction CV output is connected to the Rotarty 1 input on the Combinator. This allows Rotary 1 to be routed to the Dry/Wet parameter of the RV7000.

The overall effect of this setup isn’t that great, but the point is that you can use sidechaining to control any parameter in Reason.

Sidechaining in Reason

Here is how I do sidechain compression in Reason. In this example I am going to use a kick for the sidechain source, which can give the output of the compressor a bouncy catchy effect.

First of all you want to setup a default rack with a 14:1 Mixer, an MClass Compressor and a Redrum, make sure when you add the compressor its auto routed as an effect send to the mixer.

Now flip the rack and connect the Redrum’s Send 1 to the Left(mono) channel of the sidechain input on the compressor. Note that the sends from Redrum are mono outputs.

Program a basic 4/4 kick drum pattern into the Redrum device. You can add claps snares or anything else you like they will not be being sent to the compressor at this time until you turn the send knob for a particular Redrum channel.

Once the Redrum is setup how you like you can now send the kick drum to the sidechain by turning the send knob for the kick channel all the way to the right. Note that this doesn’t stop the kick from being sent to the mixer.

You can lower the compressors Threshold and raise its Ratio until you see the kick drum really pump the VU meter. Now that the compressor is pumping we need to give it something to compress. Add a synth to the rack and make sure its auto routed to the mixer. Turn up the aux send of the channel to which the synth was added.

When you play notes on the synth you will hear it go quieter when the kick drum is playing. This can be a useful way to make synth baselines fit better in the mix.

The advantage of using sends rather than using the single channel output of the Redrum are two fold. Firstly the kick drum is not muted and does not need further splitting using a Spider Audio Merger & Splitter. Secondly other elements of the beat can be sent to the sidechain in varying amounts. The advantage of using the compressor as a effect send is that many instruments can have the same compression added to them by altering the aux send of each channel.

iMindMap

iMindMap Example
I am trying out Tony Buzan’s iMindMap I wanted a piece of software that could capture my thoughts quickly. Mind Maps seem like the best solution for this. iMindMap produces excellent mind maps very quickly, but the best thing is that the maps are visually appealling. This is good for presentations but also helps you to remember things if they are organic and colorful.