Life of Wiley

Yesterday’s recording session was excellent. It took a while to get going whilst the gear was set up and adjustments made to mic positioning. They had to get the trombones to sit quite apart from the rest of the band as they were being picked up on all the mics and they had to shield the drum kit as the cymbals were also being picked up on all the mics.

We managed to lay down all the tracks we intended to do on the day, these were:

Goldcrest - a march
Misty - Flugel Horn solo
Born Free - theme to the film
Barnard Castle - a march
La Mourisque - a fanfare
Floreat Watfordia - a march

Everyone really enjoyed the recording session, it was nice to do something where the pressure was off and everyone was relaxed. I took my video camera with me to record some of what went on and hope to create a short video (a “rockumentary”!) to put up on the band’s website soon. There’s also a few pictures that I’ll upload sooner.

• ABCs & LSD : The Sneeze - Half zine. Half blog. Half not good with fractions.: ABCs & LSD : The Sneeze - Half zine. Half blog. Half not good with fractions.

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Argh! BST = Bl**dy Summer Time!

I appear to have got up an hour early (even after compensating for the BST switch). The reason? I went to bed last night after Louise but unbeknown to me she’d already adjusted the bedside clock, so I went ahead and moved it on another hour!

Oh well, it gives me time to write something here, and have a cup of tea, and prepare for the band’s CD recording.

Last week Lou and I went to Berkhamsted’s Pink Orchid, a Thai restaurant, with our friends who are expecting their first child soon after we have our second. Naturally this was the main topic of conversation, in particular choosing names. I don’t know if everyone has the same experience but here are some things we have to take into account when choosing a new name for a baby:

• Is it a girl or a boy?
• Does the choosen name go well with the baby’s surname? (E.g. Wendy wouldn’t be a good name if we have a baby girl!)
• Will anyone be offended by a choosen name. E.g. If you’ve chosen John as a middle name after the baby’s paternal great granddad, woe betide you if you don’t choose another middle name from the maternal side!
• Do you want a name that can’t be shortened? We choose Euan partly on this basis, bet despite that his nursery still called him Euie (yewee)!
• Do you want a name that’s not “common”? E.g. 15 years ago everyone was calling their little girls Kylie after Kylie Minogue from Neighbours.
• Be careful what the child’s initials might spell out. My brother Eddie (full name Edward Philip Andrew) was very nearly Andrew Philip Edward!

So far, for our new baby we’ve come up with Eva Mai if she’s a girl and Matthew if he’s a boy. Mai comes from Lou’s Nan, but that’s the only deference we’ve made to family names. Eva can’t be shortened, but Matthew could. Haven’t come to any conclusions on a boy’s middle name yet, though I’m not sure why we need to have one as they’re useless anyway.

Euan really impressed me the other day. For his birthday he’d received some tablets that you put into the bath and it changes the colour of the water. I put one in for him and made the water pink, so while he was having his bath I asked him what things he could think of that were pink. Whilst he was thinking about it I found myself struggling to come up with anything other than flowers when out of the blue Euan announced that flamingoes were pink! It completely bowled me over, it amazes me just what he retains. It wasn’t anything we’ve taught him so he must have picked it up at school.

On a completely unrelated note, we’re off out to a Thai restaurant tonight with a friend and old colleague of mine from my SCO days. I’m really looking forward to it because we haven’t seen each other for a while and his wife is going to be giving birth to their first baby around the time we’re having our second, and also because I haven’t had Thai for ages.

Were there any post contest blues at our first rehearsal since the contest on Sunday? Well if there were I didn’t notice them. We had a good rehearsal with all but one turning up (and he didn’t turn up because he’d injured his foot and couldn’t drive!). Usually after a contest the first rehearsal is a bit light on players as they often feel the need for a break. However, we couldn’t afford any breaks this week as we’ve got the first of two recording sessions on Sunday for our upcoming CD (no title yet).

It’s a light playing order for the CD with tracks like Barnard Castle, but we’ve got some great solos going on like Basin Street Blues arranged featuring our fantastic, pro tombonist Mike Innes, and Misty featuring our flugel horn player, Dave Thomas. We’ll not be doing any of Partita but we will be playing La Mourisque which we performed at the Milton Keynes Entertainment contest in February.

All in all I’m really looking forward to it and it should be a good tonic for the band after the disappointment of the Areas on Sunday.

The big day (band wise) came and went on Sunday. We were in the first half of the 4th section draw, drawn 7th and played at around midday.

Organisationally, it went off smoothly enough everyone turned up with their instruments and music. Everyone got tickets and registration cards; no problems there.

Big problem was nerves. Not me personally, I’d expended all my nerves on getting everyone registered and there. But people have told me that they felt the band was a bit on edge when we took to the stage. And so it would seem as we certainly didn’t do ourselves justice on Sunday. I don’t know how many times we’ve played Partita in rehearsals, sometimes badly but sometimes very well; so it was very disappointing to put in a bad performance on the day. It wasn’t bad because people didn’t know their parts or were playing wrong notes, it was bad because people were nervous, so they weren’t confident, so entries were a bit ragged, bits weren’t together. The adjudicator summed it up in his comments as being untidy.

Overall we came 19^th out of 21. Disappointing as I said, because if we’d played it as well as we could I think we may have been capable of a top 10 finish. But that’s the nature of contesting, and why I don’t like them. They are not a measure of how good a band is, only a measure of how good a band is on a particular piece on a particular day.

However, it’s not all doom and gloom. In fact, there are a number of positive aspects to be taken from the experience. First of all, the fact that we got a band there and made up almost entirely of the band’s own members (the only “ringer” being the 2^nd horn player transferred from a band not contesting), is a testament to the recovery of the band over the last 15 months. Secondly, we know we can play the piece 100x better than we did on the day, so the fact that we came 19^th is not a reflection of how good the band can be. Thirdly, by the nature of the contest environment, the adjudicator can only really write up negative criticism, so when he makes no mention of dynamics that must mean that they were spot on and this is something that Martyn, our MD, has been drilling into us leading up to the contest, so all that hard work paid off and the band has improved through the experience of the contest.

People will always tend to make mistakes when they are nervous and there’s little that can be done about it except putting it behind us, moving on to the next event (a CD recording for us) and hopefully through more experience and exposure nervousness can be overcome. And next year we’ll try and organise a rehearsal room for the morning of the contest to blow any pre-contest nerves away.

Not had a very good weekend for broadband connectivity this last weekend. On Thursday and Friday I took a couple of days off work so that I could redo some wiring in the spare bedroom where the computer equipment is located along with the DSL point; this involved moving the light switch, adding a new double socket and replacing a single socket with a double. To do this I obviously had to turn all the equipment off.

The rewiring went fine (makes a big difference when you’ve got the right tools, like a wall chaser!), but we needed to let the plaster dry so the electricity had to stay off. What I’d forgotten was that I’d volunteered to trial some new software for my Effecient Networks DSL router some weeks earlier and BT chose this day to be the day to phone me up and ask if I could let them install the new software.

So we let the plaster dry off a bit more and after lunch turned on the power and all was fine. I turned on the equipment and all was fine (fortunately the router’s power supply didn’t go pop this time!), and after a few minutes I saw that the router was being rebooted. All went well and was fine.

On Saturday I noticed that the router had been disconnected from BT’s ATM network and couldn’t reconnect. I spent a few minutes on the phone to Demon Support and as we were trying to diagnose where the fault might be it managed to reconnect!

Seemed to work okay on Sunday, though I was out most of the day. Then today at around lunchtime I noticed I could no longer see my mail server from work. Unfortunately Louise was ill and wasn’t answering the phone so I couldn’t find out what was going on. But when I got home Louise told me that BT had been installing new telegraph poles down the road and had reconnected our line (in fact they’ve taken a line away that wasn’t being used). So that explained the outage this afternoon. But then this evening the router lost it’s connectivity again. Logging in using the BT test login didn’t work but rebooting the router did, so I’m beginning to suspect that the new software on the router may be a bit buggy. I shall tackle BT about this tomorrow so watch this space.

In case anyone reads this that is using an Effecient Networks Flowpoint DSL Router, the new software revision is 5.3.175 (which you’ll see on the connection page by pointing the browser at the IP address/name of the router).

I was shocked to learn on Sunday of the death, on Saturday, of Steve Freckleton, bass trombone and chairman of Langley Band. Steve had been playing for his band and then Enderby Band before retiring to a pub for a drink and well earned break, whereupon Steve collapsed and, despite paramedic attention, later died in hospital.

I don’t know Steve or his family at all but would like to offer my sincere condolences and prayers to his family, friends and members of Langley Band.

It has come as a great shock to the whole of the brass banding community and a “book” of condolences has been opened up at the MouthPiece for people to leave their own messages of sympathy.

So, on a couple of recommendations from friends, I thought I’d give OpenOffice a try. So far I’m very impressed; it’s able to open and correctly display a presentation I did with PowerPoint 2003 complete with animations and sound effects, and it has no problems with the Word or Excel files I’ve thrown at it. User interface still doesn’t seem as user friendly as MS Office, but perhaps that’s something I need to get used to.

I’ll give it a bit more air time before I install it for the other users on the PC; Louise’s needs are fairly basic word processing so she should find it okay, she might not even tell the difference. Euan doesn’t know how to type his name yet so he’ll take whatever he’s given without knowing any better (or worse).

Must get my own swimming pool! We all went down to South London for a birthday party at one of Euan’s friends granddad’s house. The reason was because they’ve got their own indoor swimming pool, and very nice it is too. The pool was massive by private indoor pool standards (we had 4 adults and about 6 childen) and it had a diving platform and slide as well as a hot tub and sauna alongside it.

The scary thing was that, although we don’t take him swimming very often, Euan’s very very comfortable in a pool. So much so that he had absolutely no hesitation in using the slide and jumping off the diving platform (2m above the pool) At one point I thought he was actually going to dive in! Makes me wonder just what he wouldn’t jump off. The funny thing was he was egging one of the adults to jump off it and the man was making a play (or so I thought) of being scared, but it turned out he was, but he wasn’t going to be up staged by a three year old!

It was definitely a great party and well worth the drive down to south London for the privilege.