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I’ve Been Remixed!
Old friend Anthony Brand has taken one of my AudioBoos and remixed it into this. Groovy! Has a sort of Word Jazz vibe to it. I might add to it myself one day…
Quantum Jumping
Star Wars Meets Dallas – “Dallas Wars”? “Stallas”?

It probably only works for people my age or older, but this YouTube video of the opening credits for Star Wars done in the style of the TV series Dallas made me smile. I particularly like the way the creator used a shot of Tarkin turning around for his credit – Old School! The whole thing was inspired by this Star Trek one.
Building an IKEA Studio
I’m currently building a small recording booth in my study using mostly IKEA furniture, so this article on MusicRadar How to Build Your Own Studio in 11 Easy Steps was a well-timed read for me (even if not all of their eleven steps seem that easy to me!). I like their idea of plonking a whole new pre-built building down and fitting it out from scratch, but that’s not an option for me right now, so I’m using one side of my study/granny flat, some large IKEA cupboards, and some padding from IKEA and Clarke Rubber. I’ll post photos of my progress as I go.
It’s not designed for music production, with sound proofing strong enough to acoustically isolate a drum kit. I just need the ability to record voice and Foley performances without the sound of my PC fan and hard drives chattering coming through onto the recordings.
It’s coming along, but it’s taking longer than I expected (of course) and the booth door is still going to be a challenge.
I’m Not Dead Yet!
Despite appearances, this website is not dead. Behind the scenes I use my web server all the time for sending files to fellow filmmakers and clients, but I haven’t updated the actual pages for years (only two updates in almost three years). So today I loaded up a new theme (Atahualpa Theme by BytesForAll), tweaked it a bit with my own images, and added a Twitter widget to the side panels.
Time will tell if I update it regularly.
Snake Season

Maisy
We’ve seen a couple of snakes on the property in the last few weeks, but today I heard the dogs (Jed and Maisy) barking and went out to discover their latest kill – a green snake. Combined with the large brown snake Kareena saw yesterday, and it’s definitely snake season here…
Back To Writing
I have not updated this website for over a year now, partly because I spend less time online than I used to, and partly because I’m writing a lot less than I used to. Despite no updates in over a year (and the website being offline for abour six months), my website still gets a healthy number of hits – proof of the power of Google.
But my very late (or very early) New Year’s resolution is to write every single day, even if it’s only a “blog post”. I have never considered myself a “blogger”, even though I’ve used blogging sytems to run the MavArt site for I think over six years (first Greymatter, then MovableType, now WordPress). I use these blogging systems because they allow me to change the look of the site without changing its content, and visaversa. But being a “blogger” implies a certain dedication to regular updates and posts – a dedication I’ve never had.
But, my New Year’s resolution is to write every day, so I’m going to write every day, even if it’s just a little blog post or review on my website – like this one.
This post, as well as qualifying as my writing for today, is also a test of the idea of using my Palm Treo 650 phone to type and upload blog posts. I’ve owned several Palm handheld computers and loved all of them, even the crappy plastic one that fell apart, but when I first got the Palm Treo I disliked the weeny little keyboard it had. I ‘d gotten quite good at the stylus-based Graffiti system for entering text on my other Palms, and clicking on the tiny little qwerty keyboard on the Treo seemed a lot slower.
But I recently discovered that I’d been pressing the keys the wrong way – using the tips of my index fingers, fingernails, or even the stylus pen in an effort to only press one key at a time. Now I realise that by pressing the keys with the end of my whole finger/thumbs, it may press more than one key, sometimes as many as four, but the PalmOS almost always guesses correctly which key I meant.
And if you’re reading this then I guess I figured out a way to upload it…
Magnetic Poetry 001
Ninderry Manor
We spent the weekend at Ninderry Manor for Kareena’s birthday. Had a great time, the hosts were wonderful, the food was amazingly good. We did a bit of Japanese calligraphy, a bit of reading, even a bit of watercolour painting. And I took a few snapshots.
(click for a larger version)
Digital Photos
Candles, I’m Sick of Candles
Brown Outs, Talk Back, and The BBC
Farewell Singapore
MavArt v7 is Live
Well, this, the seventh version of the MavArt web page is finally up and running. There’s no gallery yet, but most of my old articles are now transferred over, and the rest can be added as I go. So I’m calling it done. Thanks to those that gave me feedback – it still amazes me how strangers stumble across my site and say nice things to me about my articles. Maybe I should write some new articles.
I took a look at the first version of the MavArt page the other day, dated 28 August 1996 (yes, I backup just about everything!), and man, was it lame! Hard to believe how much the internet has grown (and commercialised) since those days. Now that my vanity page is based on the moveabletype system, I have officially run out of reasons for not updating it more often. Time will tell…
Here Come the Nutbags
New York World Trade Center is Gone
Introducing the MavLog
I have now set up a “weblog” on Mavart – after much twiddling with the weblog software Grey Matter (mostly playing with appearances, the software itself installed without a hitch).
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