David Morris – brassedoff.net

I think I’m destined to become a Saturday morning music school father. Dan’s half way through his first visit to Chesterfield Music Services’ Saturday morning “school”. It’s a bit too far for me to go home in between, so it’s a good job there’s somewhere for abandoned parents to sit themselves and plenty of cheap coffee on tap. Mains outlets for the laptop are in short supply, but the new Huawei 3G dongle gets me an Internet connect so it’s not too bad! Funnily enough I bumped in to old friend and fellow Chapeltown Band member Chris Davies and his son Jonathon. Jonathon’s part way through a music degree and is teaching the beginner band here, so it was nice to see at least one familiar face.

Ah well, only 15 minutes to kill now…

I was looking for information from one of the services offered by the council, but by the looks of it, they’ve had some unauthorised bod playing in their database.

Needless to say, I’ve reported this to the Council. One of their people has seen the problem now and hopefully it’s going to get passed off to their internal IT services team to sort out.

…well, almost :)

You may recall that Dan and I provided the seasonal entertainment for the Seth Ellis Santa Special publicity trips last Saturday? It was Dan’s first public outing playing and it went very well indeed. I was indeed the proud Dad.

I’d passed my camera to James, another crew member to get some suitable shots for publicity purposes and he managed to come up with this one as well. Well done James, and well done Daniel!

It should be second nature to most people working with web sites that they need to be easy to navigate around, but there are some very bad examples out in Internet-land. This video from the BBC explains how we view web sites and offers some quick design tips for making sites better for the user. For what it’s worth, Richard did a cracking job in my opinion on the Scimitars site, especially if you compare it with the mess that is the Steelers web site. I think the latter is a good example of “just because you can doesn’t mean you should”.

I wrote a couple of posts back about my famous poker-playing mate. He mentioned he’d been written up nicely on blondepoker.com. After a bit of digging around, I found the post concerned with a rather nice picture here. I’ll freely admit to not understanding the technicalities of the posting; I’m clearly better off sticking to J2EE, WiFi, interrupts and the like. Next time I see him, I must remember to ask for his autograph!

I’m set to become the proudest Dad in the whole world tomorrow…

Tomorrow, we’re doing the pre-Christmas publicity trip on the Seth Ellis to drum up support for the Santa specials on the boat over the festive period. These represent a great money-spinner for us, netting a significant sum which goes to help the Trust and the boat running costs throughout the forthcoming year.This year, there’s something a bit special happening. Daniel and I are providing the on-board entertainment in the form of a selection of festive brass duets, me on cornet, Daniel on euphonium. This will be Dan’s first public performance. He’s worked really hard over the last few weeks on getting these pieces up to scratch. Obviously, it means a lot to me because of the boat involvement, but also it means a lot to me as a Dad proud of what Daniel’s achieved over the past 12 or so months with his euphonium playing, and it’ss also a credit to what his teacher Kathryn’s achieved with him. Hopefully we’ll have some pictures for you, dear reader, tomorrow.

Also, I’ve had a lovely PM on the Scimitars forum tonight from a Peterborough fan. The Scims are away at Peterborough on Sunday and Paul wanted to know if I’d be taking my cornet and would be prepared to play the National Anthem at Planet Ice on Sunday. In my book, it’s an honour to be asked to play the National Anthem anywhere, and it’s enough of an honour playing it at IceSheffield, let alone playing it at an opponents venue. Sadly, I won’t be able to oblige this time as I’m planning on spending the evening at home, but hopefully there’ll be another opportunity, but in the mean time, “thanks, Peterborough!”.

Finally, Mark didn’t make it to the second stage of the poker tourney, but he’s done extremely well in getting as far as he did, getting knocked out just before midnight last night. Well done mate. Better luck next time.

I’m sure it’s given him enough ammunition to keep him going for weeks… :)

My good friend Mark is famous. He’s currently in blackpool playing in a National poker tournament and he’s managed to get his mug on the tournament web site. Mark’s the one to the right of the cool looking dude in the shades. He doesn’t look to have an awful lot of chips in front of him. I’ve already offered my best advice; wait until you see a couple of matching numbers and shout SNAP as soon as you do. You have to be in there quickly though before someone else shouts.

Wrong game? Shoorley not!

Seriously though, we’re keeping our fingers crossed for him. Whatever happens, I reckon we’ll be hearing about his exploits for a few months to come. Good luck, mate!

I was reading ars technica this lunchtime and came across this absolutely fantastic, innovating Nintendo DS application. There’s a demo on the web site, but that’s nothing compared to this demo from YouTube uploader Denkitribe.

I can imagine hours and hours of fun with that application on long flights.

I’ve done a couple of road trips recently to see the Scimitars play away. I’ve been taking my young partner in crime with me for the ride as well. he’s happy with the journey if he’s plugged in to his Nintendo DS! Last night was a drag though. Milton Keynes, home of the concrete cows and rectangular road grids. Off the motorway, straight on at 96 roundabouts (or that’s what it feels like). The game was dire – we lost 6-1 and were lucky to get that many, and the drive home was worse.

Torrential rain. At one bit, I had to slow down to around 25-30 mph just so I could see the road. And why in those sorts of conditions do pillocks insist on driving with their read fog lights on? It might give them a false sense of safety, but it blinds everyone else behind them. TURN THEM OFF! THEY DON’T WORK IN THE RAIN!

Hopefully tonight’s game will be a bit more fun (Telford at home) but I somehow doubt it. It’s unusual for me to be so publicly negative about my team, but I’m struggling at the moment to find anything positive to say.

You’ve got to take the bad with the good though, so I suppose I’d better shut up and get on with it. When heads are down, they’re difficult to bring up, and they clearly need all the support they can get.