Happy New Year

That one special day of the year we make promises to ourselves that we probably won't be able to keep instead of the far more common making of promises to other people that we probably won't be able to keep! It's a good job I don't work for a greetings card company with catchy phrases like that for the holiday.

My New Year's Resolution is pretty much always be better, work harder, get fitter... and so on all rolled into one Everest of a challenge. This year I feel it's best summed up by "Stop Procrastinating (you lazy ****)!" which incorporates all of those things for me. In that spirit; today was the first day of applying for uni accomodation, so I got right on the website and filled out the form. It's both scary and exciting. I'm also doing some college work on a mask made out of a pack of playing cards (cutting up playing cards is anathema to me,) so I'll post a picture when it's done.

J-Malk.

The Stereotype Bad Present

Christmas is all done and dusted, people are making plans for new year's eve. Did Santa bring you anything nice? I got what is generally the butt of jokes when it comes to presents - books. I LOVE them. Here they are:

That's 2548 pages of booky goodness!

J-Malk.

The Coffee Table of an Art Student

My dad loves a tidy house. Me on the other hand; well, I've got projects to be doing. This was taken a week or two ago to show the first fraction of a large number of shapes that eventually became a larger piece.

The Grid

Congratulations CERN. As if inventing the internet and making the biggest machine ever wasn't good enough, they've got more tricks up their sleeve, more candy in their pinata... You get the picture.

The grid was designed to meet the data processing needs of the Large Hadron Collider (which, it is estimated, will produce a staggering 15 petabytes - 20 million CDs worth of data-y goodness.) It is a network that makes use of the processing power of computers in 33 countries, and at the moment is reserved for CERN and similarly large projects. But, like all the best science, it will make our day to day lives better in the future when put to wider use. We'll be able to download more than we could ever watch/listen to/touch ourselves to, and we'll all be making video calls as cheaply and easily as "the 1950s" thought we would be by 2000.

So not only do we have a nifty (understatement!) piece of technology, they've given it a great name. Internet was pretty damn good; catchy and instant, yet suitably geeky sounding, and now they present us with "The Grid". It's a perfect example of sci-fi becoming reality.

Two Success Stories (and My Efforts)

Muse have been given honourary degrees by the University of Plymouth! Congratulations Muse, shame on you Plymouth, you publicity-fiends! I'm just jealous because they won't be at my graduation I suppose.

Kings of Leon have (apparently, I haven't verifed this for myself yet) got their respectable back catalogue of four albums into the UK top 50, with Only By The Night taking the number one spot.

Which leads me [tenuous link alert] onto some of what I've been up to. My band are going to be recording another track very soon, called Going Down, so I've been working on the drum beat for that. Nathan Followill has some great bass drum techniques going on in the new tracks, so I got my teacher to show me some similar ideas and some of my own ideas are in Going Down. I've used the floor tom in the chorus to get a (brief) double bass pedal effect.

"Repent"

I recorded a song with my band today, for the first time in a long time. It's certainly the best recording we've done, the guy we were working with really took the time to listen to what we were playing and help us make improvements and adjustments. It was an amazing feeling to hear my drumming polished up and blasted back at me through some nice high quality speakers; normally I'm playing on a cheap kit with practise pads on it to muffle the sound.

On the Value of Handwriting.

I got a note today from my physics teachers saying congratulations on my result. This little display of effort on their part really made my day, it was handwritten, not just bashed off on a computer and sent to everyone. Don't get me wrong, I value communication on the internet just as much as the next blogger, but there is something wonderful about receiving something written in a 'font' unique to that person... Maybe I'm just getting mushy! :P

Recording with The (legendary) Fifty Threes tomorrow.