Weekly Selection #4

A little overdue, to be sure. Sorry about the delay, I was afflicted with “Sudden Full Time Work”!

This week we have a vantastic rendition of Hall and Oates – I Can’t Go for That, a relaxing instrumental trip with No Clear Mind – Static and a soothing but sombre tale told by Hammock, with Hammock – You Lost the Starlight In Your Eyes. Less talking this time around, the songs can speak for themselves. I don’t know why they make me do all the talking anyway, they’ve clearly got it under control.

No Clear Mind – Static

Hammock – You Lost The Starlight In Your Eyes

Hall and Oates – I Can’t Go For That – Cover by Nicki Bluhm and The Gramblers

Hope you enjoyed!

Weekly Selection #3

Time for number three, so let’s jump right in. Note, you may have to follow the videos to Youtube to watch them, depending on what country you’re in.

Beck – Lost Cause: I’m told that Beck usually has a Synth Pop style, needless to say this isn’t it. A wonderful folk feel guitar track backs up Beck’s melancholy vocals. For a song about a lost cause, the the undertones are strangely hopeful. His voice is somewhat deep but articulate. All of this wraps up into a neat, smooth and easy listening track.

The Tallest Man On Earth – The Wild Hunt: I had a gut reaction of dislike when I heard the first few moments of this man’s voice, but let me tell you: It’s one of the most incredible and interesting singing voices I’ve heard for a long time. It grew on me within moments. Smooth, sharp, gritty, he does it all and it sounds fantastic. Backed by his guitar, his writing is incredible, and English isn’t even his first language. His style may not be for everyone, but it’s certainly for me.

Feist – Lonely, Lonely: From the album ‘Let It Die’, released in 2004. Lonely, Lonely begins sad and slow, gradually building energy as Feist brings out in her powerful vocals, then dipping again, exploring the mood. The dynamics of the song are wonderful, and it’s a dynamic I feel is missing from certain styles of modern music which focus too much on being “Epic”.

The importance of solitude when working at home.

For the longest time I was plagued by the endless stream of distractions from the world around me, whilst working from home.

Things of such high importance as pictures on the internet, Youtube videos, pretending to be a pirate and chatting with friends. I would never get much work done in these conditions but never gave much thought to my environment.

But not too long ago I danced toe to toe with my best side, the part of me that is endlessly productive and focussed. It was a moment of true clarity in thought.

The problem with focus, or a lack there of, is you often don’t realise that you’ve stopped focusing until an hour later. When you’ve completely forgotten about what you were doing and are instead enjoying pictures of cats in comical scenarios or shopping for something you don’t need on eBay. So you stop yourself, get back to work and say right, no more of that. Ten minutes later someone starts chatting to you, and that’s the end of it. Lost once more for an undisclosed period of time.

This prompted a realisation. It was the realisation that maybe, just maybe, I’m bloody terrible at keeping track of myself at home. Even with the strongest ideals and the best of intentions. So I put together some practical limitations to my workspace, and gave myself a way to clear my head.

I closed literally everything on my computer, chat clients, explorer windows, browser windows. Everything went. It gives me a fresh slate, the ability to forget everything I was doing and everything I had on my mind, and just start working.

Isolated, I can do only one thing, and that is work. But all of a sudden, the work is twice as enjoyable. As I complete one task, I don’t look for a distraction, I look for more work. It separates work from free time, and makes each much more enjoyable.

This may not be applicable to those who work 9-5, or those who have already got a good grasp on their work environment. But for me working at home has been a minefield of distractions, and this has been the key to being productive.

Weekly Selection #2

Time for round two.

Aqua Bassino – What To Do: I hadn’t heard much from Aqua Bassino, in fact this was my first introduction to him. I searched for more songs like this by him, but found mainly Deep House tracks. What To Do is an incredibly relaxing soundscape, including thin and airy synths, with what I believe to be a Sitar offering rhythm and melody. With soothing vocals and the thick bassline that slowly wanders it’s way through the track. It’s a wonderful mix of electronic and organic and worth the listen.

Oren Lavie – A Dream within a Dream: Perhaps better know for “Her Morning Elegance”, Oren Lavie is an accomplished musician. It comes across in his often simple but very well refined creations. A Dream within a Dream is a trip led by eloquent lyrics and slowly progressing score. Oren does not shy away from words that might not be in popular circulation, which makes for an interesting listen. A Dream within a Dream; full of modesty and class.

Frank Sinatra – Always: Sinatra, a man not short on character. A lover of hats, and their ability to convey emotion, Frank Sinatra was certainly a man of many moods. If you didn’t admire his work or personality, one could at least admire his style. Always is a charming tale of a man willing to go the mile for his special lady. With a haunting violin introducing the piece, the song stands mostly upon the shoulders of Frank Sinatra’s voice, with backing from an orchestra. The piece is short but sweet.

Weekly Selection #1

I thought I might start putting together a weekly selection of three or more tracks I’m really enjoying at the time, just to give myself a regular entry and to get me writing.

First up is John Hammond – Shore Leave. This track is from the album “Wicked Grin”, which was pretty much Hammond’s take on many of Tom Waits songs. Waits himself was the producer of the album. Wicked Grin has a very mellow feel, to which we can thank Hammond’s voice. In a stark contrast to Mr Wait’s voice, Hammond has a very smooth and soothing tone, and this style is carried through the music production to good effect.

Next we have Sergio Altamura – Mr Art Valnades. Released on candyrat records, Mr Art Valnades is a sombre trip, lead by Sergio’s excellent sense of timing and suspense in his playing. The song has an incredibly full atmosphere and evoking movements. The haunting tonal qualities of the recording come in part from the 12 string acoustic, which Sergio exploits well.

Last up is Morcheeba – Run Honey Run, from the album “Dive Deep”. Released in 2008, Dive Deep featured many guest artists and Run Honey Run was no exception. Featuring vocals from Bradley Burgess, it’s an intriguing mix of styles. The bassline and percussion have a very dub feel to them, but the vocalist and lyrics lend themselves to an almost psychedelic folk cross. It’s a enjoyable but short journey into the story of a man leaving a woman.

Guitar Improvement: Part One, the half assed attempt

For my first guitar I bought a used guitar from eBay. I thought to myself, surely it can’t be that bad. Even if it is, I’ll be able to buy a new one when I get better anyway. Well as it turns out, yes it was, and no I can’t.

On my journey to improve my cheap guitar I came across a rather large lack of information online. Everyone described the problems of cheap guitars; high action, poor materials, fickle tuners and poorly curved necks. But rarely did you find the solutions. Most of the time one would be told to send the guitar to a Luthier, and in the paragraph below they would then tell you it’s not worth sending such a cheap guitar to a Luthier. With such dead end reasoning I decided I’d give it a crack by myself.

I had been playing a lot of fingerstyle guitar, and I came to a point where the instrument I had was beginning to slow me down. The high action made quick chord changes and fast, intuitive hammer ons extremely difficult at the top of the neck, and the neck’s curve created buzzing on one or two frets. I made a list of what I thought I needed to do to rectify the problems and at least make playing the guitar easier. It turns out there are only a few adjustments I could make:

• Straighten the Neck
• Lower the Nut.
• Lower the Saddle

Right. Out come the tools. Or in the case of the saddle, the kitchen knife.

The Neck: Seemingly the most common first step for guitar adjustment, the neck was quite simple to remedy. Although the guitar was cheap, it still had a neck truss rod. A bit of loosening to lower the concave bend of the neck and the buzzing was gone, with the added benefit of a slightly lowered action. Wonderful, almost too easy I thought.

The Nut: The nut was also quite an easy part to remedy. I cut down the edges of where the bottom of the nut and guitar meet, then knocked it out with a screw driver and a hammer. It only needed a light tap. I then took a piece of sandpaper and laid it on a flat, solid surface and ran the bottom of the nut across it until I had taken enough off. I sat the nut back on the guitar every now and then and re-tightened the strings and checked the string height. I sanded the nut seat a touch just to get the old glue off, then attached the nut with a dab of PVA glue. The glue wasn’t a fan of the plastic, so in the end I used super glue. Ah well, strung it up and tested it once more and it felt good, but I didn’t test for long. I was on a high of success and so I moved on to the saddle straight away.

The Saddle: I noticed the saddle was made of a plastic (as is the bridge, for an indication of cheapness). It was one of those two part compensated saddles, where the two high strings sit on a small segment of bridge that’s angled backward, compensating the B string. The saddle had been glued in and much to my dismay, I didn’t have the tools to remove it. So I loosened the strings, sat them to the side and started scraping away at the top of the saddle.

I strung the guitar back up and tightened everything. The sweet feeling of an easily depressed string was new to me, and it was wonderful. Chords were easy to hold down no matter where they were on the neck, I could even barre on the first fret without drawing blood! But for some reason I was having trouble with finger picking patterns. I kept missing strings and bumping into strings I shouldn’t be hitting.

In my fury of scraping I had neglected to take both radius and string position into account and had ruined the saddle. Had I treated the saddle the same way I treated the nut, I wouldn’t have ran in to this problem. Later I partly rectified the spacing issue, but the wonky radius was enough to throw off playing enough to warrant what comes next.

In Part Two, I completely replace the bridge system with a rosewood bridge and a bone saddle, and I replace the nut with a carbon nut. All of which cost me a measily 30 Australian Dollars, including some ebony bridge pins.

Maybe Tomorrow

Procrastinate today, and as the sun sets tonight,
you’ll tell yourself that tomorrow you’ll do it right.

Another day has passed, whether or not you notice,
again you tell yourself, tomorrow I will focus.

Yet another day older, your passions become colder,
your ideas long since faded away, and there’s more weight on your shoulder.

For each passing hour, you feel it’s not a problem,
for you will get your act together, and tomorrow will be golden.

But time has run out, and your friends no longer care,
your fingers grow old, and your mind has gone bare.

If only you had realised,

Time does not care for your good intentions.

CSS3 and Transition, height/width quirks

I have been using the CSS3 Transition property quite a bit lately. Enough to have noticed a few quirks in it’s functionality. What I will be writing about today is transitioning between dynamic DIV widths and heights.

The scenario: Say you have a few DIVs that have a decent amount of content inside of them, and you would like to hide a certain amount of that content until a user hovers over the DIV. Easily done right? Each DIV’s content is going to be dynamic, so you don’t know the exact width and height they’re all going to be.

A typical solution may be to specify the default width of the DIVs in a class, and then use the hover pseudo class to specify the width and height to 100%. That way it doesn’t matter what the size of the content inside the DIV is, it will expose all of it. A little something like this:

.divClass{
    transition: all 0.12s ease-out 0s;
    height:100px;
    width:100px;
}
.divClass:hover{
    transition: all 0.12s ease-out 0s;
    height:100%;
    width:100%;
}

You may already see the problem. Transition does not like dealing with two different value types for the one property. It currently won’t transition smoothly between a value specified in pixels and a value specified in percentage. It will just snap to the new values as if you had not specified the transition property at all. You can’t specify the new width and height in pixels, because you don’t know them as the content is dynamic.

The solution: It’s incredibly easy to work around this limitation for this particular scenario. Instead of specifying the height and width properties, you can use the max-height and max-width properties. Then when you specify the properties on hover, you specify a maximum width and height in pixels that will likely never be surpassed by the content. It’s not ideal but it works.

.divClass{
    transition: all 0.12s ease-out 0s;
    max-height:100px;
    max-width:100px;
}
.divClass:hover{
    transition: all 0.12s ease-out 0s;
    max-height:1000px;
    max-width:1000px;
}

I’m not certain how every browser handles this, but as of writing, this issue is present for the latest versions of both Chrome and Firefox.

-Ben (vastcreative.com.au)

Short Case Study: Positively Negative CMS

Site: Positively Negative

(Some of the content may be inappropriate for work environments, to avoid this just view the images below where offensive words have been blurred out)

For the past few months I have been working on a content management system aimed at web comic sites. I have been using my own web comic as a test site and as such have had myself as the main tester. It’s been insightful and a lot of fun to develop and I feel I’ve come to the point in development where I can write about the work so far.

The aim of the system is to give people wanting to manage their web comic the ability to do so easily and intuitively. The main functions of the system so far are an intuitive management system for adding and managing comics, a user management system for managing users and a security system within the user system which allows each user to be given a certain level of control over the site.

Some of the smaller features/niceties are things such as an automatically updated front and archive page, and an Administrators Tool Bar when logged in as an administrator. There is also an automatically generated embed code so people can embed your comic on their websites.

Features to come are editable headers/footers, various site configuration options (such as site name, background image/color and other common settings), a commenting system and hopefully in the end, a full templating system for complete visual customization.

This is early on and there is a lot more work to be done before it’s anywhere near complete, but I look forward to getting it working. It’s also easily adaptable to other applications and scenarios, so it may end up expanding to a general CMS as opposed to a completely comic focused CMS.

Images:

Home Page

Admin Tool Bar

Manage Comics

Add Comic

Archive

Log-In Page

Manage Users

Signal55 is live!

www.signal55ent.com went live yesterday, and already has an extensive gallery including over 850 photos, which will only continue to grow each week as the weekly events are added.

All the best guys!