Well i have many gigs/concerts arranged for this summer, so it’ll be pretty great…
Firstly I saw Eric Clapton at the SECC which was immense.

At the end of next month I’m seeing the Eagles at Hamden Park. That’s should hopefully be great, but I’ll have to wait and see…

Right after school’s broken up at the start of july, I’m going to a 2 day music festival, T in the Park which will be immense considering that the Red Hot Chili Peppers and The Who are headlining!

And then again at the end of the Summer, I’ve got tickets for Radiohead and Muse (on separate occasions) at Meadowbank stadium in Edinburgh!

Overall, I can’t believe how lucky I’ve been with the amount of good music coming to Scotland, and especially with all of their new albums coming out aswell (Stadium Arcadium, Black Hole and Revalations)!

Damn, I can’t wait!

Well i’ve heard of playing games using the sudden motion sensor on the MacBooks and most recent Powerbooks, but changing the desktop is a new thing. Have a good look at this…

And if you want the website of where it was created, its right here - Medallia Blog: SmackBook Pro Archives

Generally when you try to show off your new IT product, its best if it works… Not exactly what happened to Intel’s voice controlled remote, and anyway, who the hell needs a voice controlled remote, can they be that lazy?

Check it out here http://news.com.com/1606-2_3-6047401.html?tag=img

Loads of exams have passed (well more like 5 to be honest), but some of the worst ones are over at least. I also have a 10/11 day break to revise, which will be useful, but hopefully I will get more done than just revision…

It also strikes me how boring and monotonous exam papers can be… Quoting directly from a Statistics 1 paper (yes, I know statistics is boring):-

Every day, George attempts the quiz in a national newspaper. The quiz always consists of 7 questions. In the first 25 days of January, the number of questions George answers correctly each day are summarised in the table below.

What a boring person this George is… doing the same quiz every day, he must have such a boring life to attempt doing something along these lines… The exam board could be at least a little bit MORE adventurous, for example:-

During 25 days over the Christmas period, Dr Foster was working in the ER of the general hospital in Ipswitch. The number of patients that died in his care over this period are summarised in the table below.

That immediately make the question seem that little bit more interesting. The normal exam candidate may even think “Whoa there, this is a bit risque…” and so they would be more likely to pay attention for this question and possibly do better. Which is a good thing, right?

Another nasty thing that these examiners do to the papers just to catch you out and make you look like a stupid idiot to the marker is in the wording of the question. For example:-

A nutritionist claims that boys who have been fed on a special organic diet will have a larger mean head circumference than other boys. A random sample of ten 3-year old boys who have been fed on this organic diet is selected. It is found that their mean head circumference is 50.45cm.

And this continues on to ask to carry out a hypothesis test… Aside from the examiners being pushed to use interesting things in the exams, this question is also very annoying when you read through it and try to do it in a hurry. When and if you read through it quickly, the number of the sample that immediately pops out from the text is 3. As it written as 3 as opposed to three, making it easier to spot. When in fact the number that you are looking for is ten, written as ten, not 10 which is more obvious. Well you could say that I’m just being perdantic and not reading the question properly or carefully enough, but when you’re doing this kinda stuff, you’re in a hurry and don’t necessarily have time… Also bear in mind that this is a Statistics exam, part of maths, not a reading exam. So you shouldn’t have to specifically read the question in depth to understand it and be able to solve the problem. Anyway, its over now, so no need to care about what has happened.

Thought I might just add that the best TV drama program(me) around at this time is House… Dr House’s (Hugh Laurie) sarcasm is just brilliant, although the storyline can be just a little repetitive at times, but it is getting better with series two, or should I write 2.

Changed some general stuff on the website like the location of various files and such alike… I also created a proper template that i can use to post pages, you see I screwed up making the last one… and I really should fix it.

I’m also trying out some cool things with CSS trying to get a floating (or fixed as CSS wording goes) navigaton/intro bar at the top or somewhere… I don’t really know if it will be useful, but wait and see shall we…

I might even release the theme I am using now (that I made if you didn’t know) for folks to download. If you wants a copy, email me and I’d be happy to hurry up finishing it and possibly optimising it.

After a bit of a wait (90 days I’m told) the iBook replacement, the MacBook (without the Pro bit as you may have noticed) has been released. 13.3″ Widescreen display which is nice and glossy (and is now on the Pro models too) 1.83Ghz or 2.0Ghz Core Duo Processor, which is nice and zippy and is the same one as on my iMac… There’s also a black one which looks interesting, but very overpriced from what I see. The only difference between the high end white one and the black one is a slightly bigger HD and black casing and its soimething like £300, which is pretty astonishing… But I suppose, when in Rome….

The Pro versions of these were also souped up a bit by Apple to make a difference in them. That’s probably a good thing except if you had forked out the extra however much it is for a new 2.0Ghz over a 1.83Ghz one.

Aside from that, not too much else.

AppleInsider | Creative seeks injunction against Apple

How about you just accept that you’re not as good as Apple. Damn, these cheap Korean companies do not quit!!!!!

Well here comes the major revision… Got some big, big exams coming up the next month, so revision is really needed, not that I’m not doing any… Just at the right time comes Stadium Arcadium, the new album from the Chilis. Not only is it perfectly timed for revision purposes, as it weighs in at almost exactly 2 hours long, being a sizeable block to revision to do, it is actually a very decent album. At first, I was a bit overwhelmed with amount of content (as in songs) on the album. I generally find that with longer albums (I’m thinking of The Wall in particular here) I do not listen to all of the album, instead I just listen to normally the first part of it or selected songs, due to time restrictions and such alike. But this isn’t the way the album is supposed to be listened to… If it were, then it wouldn’t be a concept album (still specifically The Wall here…) and anyway, listening to the album in a one-er makes it sound generally better, though it doesn’t make sense, but technically, this is the way the album is supposed to be listened to…
So back to Stadium Arcadium, yeah, it’s long but who gives a s*@t, its a great album so far… You can really just listen to it starting at any point and it will sound good, mostly because I haven’t heard it enough times to know it any better, aside from perhaps the first few tracks… In general, it has the same kinda feel as the more modern Chili albums, as opposed to the old pre ‘One Hot Minute’ albums which were considerably more funklike and thus less mainstream in the way that things go, noting Blood Sugar Sex Magik as the big obvious exception… It has a more mellow, relaxed and chilled feel to it compared to their recent offerings, some of the songs do sound similar, notably 2 of them that I thought were similar to Californication (the song) and Venice Queen (a bit like the start of ‘Desecration Smile’), but listening closer, its relatively obvious that they’re different… Certain songs on this album are really excellent and stand out from the backdrop (not that it should be called that…). The one that I’m thinking in particular is ‘Strip My Mind,’ a very chilled song that gets better every time you listen, even the preview on iTunes is very listenable albeit 30 seconds long. One other noticeable thing about this album is the more emphasis on guitar solos. Before, the solos wouldn’t be so vibrant and necessarily obvious, but now it has changed. I read somewhere that Frusciante took ideas from Hendrix (or something along those lines) for the guitar for this album. It really makes a nice noticable difference, look out for ‘Hey’, ‘Strip My Mind’ and ‘Readymade’. Some other songs stand out on this album just through something different especially ‘Snow ((Hey Oh))’ with the intricate verse vocal rythym and chorus chord progression and ‘Death Of A Martian’ which has something akin to ‘Paranoid Android’ with the different sections to the song, especially the last minute and a half…

Overall this is a great album, highly listenable. Possibly more difficult to get into than ‘Californication’ or ‘By The Way’ but its up there with them. Will be an immense album just for revision purposes and even better when I see them live this Summer.

The idea of a business is to produce profit. Where this profit comes from, doesn’t matter to some companies. Especially IT and technology companies, certain companies seem to think that if they can’t produce a better effort at making something, then they should just copy their competitors product. Most of all it shows terrible plagerism but it also shows how bad the designers are of the copying company if they can’t seem to come up with their own idea for a product. Bear in mind though, certain features wouldn’t be copied unless they worked well and were profitable in some form or other to the company. So it could even be a compliment…

The two main companies that I am focusing on here are Samsung and Creative, both Korean technology companies that are trying to get a share of the Portable Music player boom, or to put it in better words, ‘Take a bite of the Apple.’ Firstly Samsung, inept at creating its own headphones has gone along and virtually copied Apple’s iPod headphones. Samsung’s headphones (I’d get a pic if I could) which they bundle with various MP3 players look incredibly similar to iPod headphones. First of all, they’re white. Fair enough loads of companies started producing white headphones after the iPod, secondly if not for the small silver protruding bit on the top, they would be identical. That might possibly be why there are no photos on their website, fear of a lawsuit anyone?, but who knows.
On top of Samsung, Creative, through their lines of substandard MP3 players originally began to copy the iPod’s navigation system, through the touch sensitive pad, but that really isn’t that bad as it is hardly similar and hardly works as good when there is a limit to how far your finger can move on the pad and there are no integrated buttons. What was considerably more wrong was copying the iPod’s user interface, which worked very nicely may I add and did put the iPod in a level above the competitors, and then attempted to pull it off as their own interface by trying to license it. How low can you get? Firstly copying part of someone elses product, then trying to claim it as your own by licensing it! Business is a nasty place, and sometimes, people have to do wrong things in order to succeed.

Companies like Creative, Samsung, iRiver (shit, what an original name) and Cowon (with their iAudio series of players, also with an incredibly original name) try their luck at beating Apple’s dominace thru the integration of many features, of which most are useless or substandard but also is terrible considering that they haven’t just made a sucessful music player on its own yet… Understanding this, then reading part of the Apple Human User Interface Guidelines, possibly gives an insight into why the iPod is so sucessful…

The best products aren’t the ones with the most features. The best products are those whose features are tightly integrated with the solutions they provide, making them the most usable.

Strangely enough, it seems to be true.

Have been relatively busy at the moment with my birthday and such…

Got some nice Pentax lenses for my EOS 350d. You’re thinking EOS 350d, that’s Canon and Pentax lenses how do they work… well its called an adaptor, from M42 (old Pentax/Practika) to EF mount. It effectively allows me to use older lenses, which is really great. No autofocus though.

Apple has launched a new campaign aimed at PC owners trying to get them to see the light and switch to Mac. The ads that they have produced are pretty good, whilist being very witty at the same time… Have a look here:- www.apple.com/getamac

Hopefully I should be doing an in depth review of my camera, as I have actually some time to use it in different situations and kinda know how to use it… Also found a nice photography site at www.dpchallenge.com, its really worth checking out aas it has some really immense pics.

Stadium Arcadium, the new Chili Peppers album is out in under a week!!!!! Pre-order it now as it will be damn sweet. And on a sadder note, Radiohead will not be releasing an album this year Just have to wait until 2007!