David Morris – brassedoff.net

Ok, so I’ve got Rosegarden working now and I can play back the music I’ve entered using a soft synthesizer (QSynth) and everything’s working just fine.

I’ve spent a few minutes knocking together a quick two-part arrangement of a Christmas Carol for Dan and myself to play for the Santa  Publicity Day in Retford (there’ll be more, but I have to start somewhere!).

Rosegarden will happily create a multi-line score, but it’s not Dan-friendly. Fortunately, Rosegarden will export Lilypond files. Lilypond is a GNU command-line application for music typesetting and will spit its output out in PDF or postscript format.

So, a few key presses later and this is the result:

O Little Town

Rosegarden should be able to preview and print direct using Lilypond, but for some reason, it isn’t. Not the end of the world because I just exported the file in Lilypond format and processed it on the command line:

david@server:~/Documents/Music> lilypond –pdf Little-Town-1.ly  Little-Town-2.ly

(I had two files to process – one for each part and could combine them on the same command line).

So, concept to hard copy music and not a commercial pay-for bit of software in the loop anywhere.

Ok, it’s been over a month since I last blogged and this is only a quick update, but this article on the BBC Magazine site struck a chord with me. Sorry it’s a bit morbid.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8106747.stm

It was a nice morning, so Daniel, Pebble and myself loaded ourselves in to the car and headed off to Shireoaks for a stroll up the canal. We walked as far as Browns Lock which is the one above Turnerwood Top Double . The short pound is the home of the BW workboat Hare. This picture is looking back down towards Turnerwood, into the sun.

It’s only a couple of months away from the Festival at Kiveton when we’re expecting around 50 boats up this neck of the woods. It will be the busiest it’s been around here for some time. I really hope all the visiting boaters enjoy some of this fantastic scenery and countryside.

One more little gem for my two readers…

I’m writing this on a new laptop. Although I’ve had laptops for years through work, I’ve strangely never had my own. Yesterday I went out to John Lewis’s in Sheffield and splashed out on a Macbook. Only an entry level machine, but I am now the proud owner of a white Mac. I’m stil finding my way around things… what’s the key sequence for forward and backward words in Safari for instance, but I’ll get there.

…just found it – ALT and cursor keys do the job.

I really must get around to fixing the tag cloud for the blog theme as well.

Thanks to my Linux experiences, I’ve managed to put OpenOffice and GIMP on the Mac, so I’ve got familiar office software and graphics manipulation.

Today is also (probably) the last day of the hockey season. The Scims drew against MK Lightning in the first part of a two leg affair last night and travel to MK tonight for the second half. I wasn’t hopeful of a win last night, and we came pretty close to it, so who knows what’s going to happen tonight. If we rumble MK, we could be in the playoff finals in Coventry next weekend.

…so the French have gone on strike. Any excuse eh?! It’s a large number of public sector and transport workers. Fortunately, I’m travelling home tomorrow and by all accounts Eurostar isn’t affected. However, they might at the last minute do a British Rail thing and claim all the trains are at the wrong end of the tunnel!
For some reason, my blog masthead image appears to have resurrected itself (unless it’s just a cached version I’m looking at). I really do want to try and get this theme updated to support Wordpress widgets though. I suppose I’ll get to test it out on mine (and go through the break-fix cycle a few times) before I get let loose on Mrs Woolforbrains’ blog.

It looks like my blog theme also has a problem. I tried to add a tag cloud widget last night and by the looks of it, I’ve broken the masthead image. That’s a little job for tonight. I do like the dashboard though. Much better!

I’ll explain later: http://www.in2guitar.com/minihkreview.html

Doing what I do for a day job brings me in to contact with many non-native English speakers (apart from the Americans!) who fortunately speak English much better than I do their language. We were very worried therefore when one of our German colleagues confided that he would be completely naked unless we could get his Blackberry password sorted out. Was this some sort of protest? “Get my Blackberry password sorted or I’m going to parade naked through the streets of my German home town and embarrass you with the pictures an media coverage”?

There were several tense moments in the office until one of the guys realised that what we had on our hands was in fact an example of phonetic spelling. Instead of saying ‘naked’ how you say it, think of the ‘a’ as in ‘at’ rather than as in ‘hay’ and you’ll see what he meant.

In these days of rising energy prices, someone’s tried to put some science behind the cost of making a cuppa. As someone who drinks a  lot of tea, this clearly is very important to me!

Read this posting for more details

What is black?
Burnt toast is black
Coloured like the black tarmac

What is white?
A white cat is white
With limelight eyesight

What is pink?
A soft drink is pink
Next to the skating rink

What is green?
A leaf is green
Fluttering down to a bowling green

What is blue?
Glue is blue
Left upon the marble statue

What is yellow?
A song is yellow
Its melody played upon a cello

What is red?
Cherrys are red
Off the tree they fall on the head

What is violet?
A highlighter is violet
On the table in the twilight

What is orange?
What oranges are orange
Just orange

By Daniel morris, aged 8.

I decided to take the plung and have a go at writing a Wordpress theme for a new venture Mrs Woolforbrains is working on. I can do the PHP (backend scripting code), but I’m not a designer. However, with the playing about I’ve done recently with the Kiveton 2009 web site, I realised that CSS had come a long way from being an easy way to change a few colours on a page, so perhaps it was time to trawl around a few web sites and see what I could come up with.

So far, it’s not brilliant, but it’s not finished yet. I started with a completely clean sheet, a new theme in a  new subdirectory. I’ve had to create all the graphics from scratch as well.. not many so far, but there are more to do. I fancy having rounded ends on the post headings and I haven’t given much though yet to the sidebars. It’s going to be a bit on the minimalist side, but it’s a start in the right direction.