I’m busy downloading the demo of Red Alert 3 to celebrate making progress on my thesis and I thought I would try out BBC iPlayer’s streaming video option to watch Survivors at “high definition”. To my surprise the BBC video is quite close to download quality even while I’m downloading the demo at 400Kbps! I was dismissive of the likelihood that people would bother watching BBC TV live on iPlayer but at this quality it would be quite bearable.

And I’m old enough to remember waiting for plain text web pages to load in Mosaic…

PS I am enjoying Survivors so far even though it is hardly sophisticated entertainment…

Buggy direction ‘affects child’

“Parents in away-facing buggies talked less to the child and the youngster appeared to be more stressed.”

What the article doesn’t mention is that for the first three (?) months babies can’t really see more than a metre or so away and can’t make much sense of what they do see so direction is not much of an issue at that point. I think we switched at six months or so.

You may have my main blog feed in your RSS readers but did you realise that I am now producing seven RSS feeds? (plus a stream of status updates which are hopefully only available to friends on facebook, twitter and jaiku).

Most of the feeds are linked from this blog somewhere – the exceptions being the feed for my academic group weblog and that for my lastfm listening. But if you want all of my public media consumption and both micro and macro-publishing, go to http://friendfeed.com/davidbrake/ and get the One True Feed…

British Telecom has just announced its fibre to the home trial offering (potentially) 40MBits/sec Internet and data connections. One of the two telephone exchanges where it will be trialled is in Muswell Hill, just 2km away – unfortunately, our exchange is Upper Holloway, 1.3km away in the other direction.

I’ve got my theory mojo working – at least erratically – and have a stack of books by or about Erving Goffman by my desk to prove it:

From Things observed

(While I am sharing pictures, also see various London-specific stuff in my other album below):

London discoveries

I’m in the Crouch End Festival Chorus and our upcoming concert – on a Saturday in the evening and repeated on a Sunday at 15:00 in the afternoon – promises to be particularly good. It’s a series of a cappella pieces including the rather tricky Spem in Alium by Tallis which involves splitting the chorus into eight choirs dotted around the church we are performing in.

If you want to hear the kind of singing we are capable of there are several clips of recent performances on the chorus’ MySpace page.
Hope you can make it!

I just realised I have made at least 55 edits on wikipedia since mid-2005 (I don’t always remember to log in so some won’t show up). Recursively enough my last edit was to fix a link to We Think, a new book about online collaboration…

I’ve lost my lovely iPod Nano and can’t find the MP3 player/radio/USB stick I had as a backup either. My phone is so old it doesn’t have an MP3 player in it and I can’t even find my old portable CD player, so I am back to using gasp! a tape player. It felt really ‘old school’ to be putting a tape into a device to listen to music. The upside is that I have stuff on tape I haven’t transferred to anything else and thus haven’t listened to for ages…

And if I tire of tape I can always dig up my minidisc player. But I am hoping that once we have established the iPod is definitely not somewhere around the house (and since my birthday is coming up!) I can justify getting an iPod Touch. The new Skypephone I also hope to get has an MP3 player of course, but now that I have all my playlists and podcasts in iTunes I am kinda trapped by Apple’s ease of use goodness…

It was only 18 months ago that my iBook’s hard disk died last and here we go again! Fortunately, my extended AppleCare is valid until January. However it will apparently take (at least) ten working days to fix (and since it died without warning my backup was older than it should have been). I spoke to one Apple dealer about replacing the internal 80Gb drive with something larger when they repair it and he quoted me £200 (!) for a 120Gb drive (about six times the market price I believe). The dealer said 120Gb is the practical limit because of heat problems with a larger one. Does that seem likely?

I thought I might try working on my machine or another one from my backup but just discovered that PowerPC-based Macs don’t boot from USB. Bah! Well, I don’t have access to a spare Mac anyway…

as my ‘Facebook friends’ will know already, I am going to be singing in a revival of John Foulds’ A War Requiem at the Royal Albert Hall, 81 years after its last performance there. Lots more about the composer and his music is available from the links below. Personally I wouldn’t say it is a masterpiece and there are some odd touches in its 90 minute length but I think it would be worth a listen, particularly live so you would get the full impact of the five (!) choruses plus orchestra.

It is probably not too late to get tickets if you are so inclined but if you can’t or won’t make it, it will be on BBC Radio 3 from 18:30 to 20:00 (local time) and streamed live on the Internet. Chandos is also releasing a two CD concert recording (in SACD format in fact if you have a very fancy CD player).

More links than you probably need or want about Foulds follow:

BBC Radio 3 (to hear the concert live)

Telegraph Foulds profile inc. interview with Patrick Foulds (the composer’s son):

Profile of Foulds and his work in the Independent – it’s more colourful and plays up Foulds’ eccentricities.

The head of Radio 3 on Foulds

Simon Heffer (a Telegraph columnist) on Foulds

BBC news short video item about Foulds inc interview with conductor and a very brief clip of the assembled choruses singing.