I bought a new bike on Saturday (I’m starting a new job later this week for which it will be far more efficient both in time and money to cycle to the office rather than drive), so yesterday Kyla and I decided to go for a ride. Being a bit over-confident, we chose Ely as a destination, using this route from the Cambridge Cycling Campaign’s website. 40km there, and we beat the guide time of three hours by an hour. Hardcore. The downside of our outward-bound enthusiasm was that our route back via Witchford, Wilburton, Histon, which the map tells me is about 10km shorter, also took two hours and nearly resulted in me throwing my toys out of the pram somewhere on Grunty Fen Road. All this goes to show that I’m not as fit as I think as I am.

Ow.

Don’t adjust your sets, it’s just a theme switch; I noticed that the old Warped theme wasn’t compatible with Wordpress 2.1, so I’ve gone over to the Freshy theme.

Look at that beast. My Dad gave us this squash, which is one of the many he grew down on his farm. It’s big enough to get about 20 portions out of it, so it’ll be a bit of a feature in our kitchen for the coming week (or however long it takes before it grows a fur coat). At the minute I can think of the following things to do with squash:

• Smear it with harissa and maybe crushed garlic too, then roast it for about 30 mins at gas mark 7.
• Boil it ’til tender then mash it with a bit of grated nutmeg.
• Substitute it for chicken in one of those fajita kits you can buy in supermarkets.

I don’t think that’s going to get through it all. Anyone else have any ideas?

Just found these lessons on the Guitar-X site. There’s a nice couple of articles on alternating your picking or plucking, confirming that this is something I should do some more work on. The Guitar Techniques mag video from John Wheatcroft is really what got me reaching for a guitar though, I shall definitely be working out those examples.

Now this is a serious plus in favour of getting an iPod. And it can act as an external USB soundcard! Nice. Of course, I guess I could buy a Behringer Xenyx 1204 and use my old MiniDisc walkman as the recorder, though that will curse the recordings with the MiniDisc format’s inherent data compression foibles. The TuneStudio records in 16 bit, 44 kHz stereo, which is definitely better than the MD, though for the type of application I’d use it for (recording band practices), is crystal clear sound necessary? Probably not. (Spotted via Music Thing.)

OK, here’s a crap web 2.0 idea that I haven’t seen yet - a community dream archive. Create an account and type your dreams in, then read other people’s at random or via contact lists, or browse via keyword searching or some sort of tag cloud. You could run text analysis software to try and match people with similar dreams into groups. I can’t think of any handy merchandise that could be bundled with it, but hey, the marketing guys can come up with that later if it’s a success. Cheese might be a good one, get sponsorship from Yarg or someone like that.
This only popped into my head after a really weird dream I had that involved wanting to use the shower in the shared accomodation I was living in, but it always being occupied by a Japanese person whenever I checked. I’m not sure I want to meet people who have similar dreams to this, they’d have to be crazy.

Hmmm, I think I need to find some solution to displaying TAB on this site, because the WYSIWYG editor in wordpress doesn’t include a <pre> button and has lost the old “code” button. Actually, swapping to the old skool editor brings the code button again, but then I like the image and link editing options in the WYSIWYG editor so don’t particularly want to change. I’m considering using Power TAB, but then I’d end up with a directory full of little images, which I’d probably accidentally delete in a fit of tidiness. I guess there are a few code display plugins for wordpress, so perhaps I’ll have a play with them.

I was out playing with Casa yesterday at our guitarist’s wedding.  I’d noticed that I could play things when practicing by myself that I couldn’t when in the band, and I started to wonder whether it was because I was playing harder, and so tensing up.  I thought I’d take a bit of advice I’d read somewhere and turn the amp up above where it normally needs to be and just play softer, and lo and behold I nailed all sorts of things that I previously hadn’t managed in gigs.  Obviously it’s all about staying relaxed!  Still can’t play the “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now” bassline properly, but hey, I can’t expect miracles.

Before we get into this post, I’d like to say that most discussions about the technical side of guitar playing are liable to set off the Finbarr Saunders within you. If you find yourself unable to read the phrase “right hand technique” without sniggering, I suggest you skip this article.

I read this post about alternate picking with interest; I use economy picking a lot, particularly if the passage is too fast for me to play “properly” (whatever that means). I noticed that I also do a similar thing when playing bass, for example using the standard guitarist’s warm-up exercise:
...1.&.2.&.3.&.4.&.1
G -8765-------------
D -----8765---------
A ---------8765-----
E -------------8765-
...imimmimiimimmimi
Rather than strictly alternating index and middle fingers, I’m raking the notes when changing string. The advantage of this is speed, but I have found that this is at the expense of accuracy, because I’ll usually slightly rush the second note if it’s played by the same finger. I decided to experiment and forced myself to play with strict alternation, even to the extent that if a groove started on an “ee” or “ah” I’d begin with my middle finger, effectively never breaking the alternating pattern. For example, in “Reuben’s In”, an instrumental tune taken from the Ocean’s 11 soundtrack that Casa play:
...1.&.2.&.3.&.4.&.1
G ------------------
D ------------------
A -----5--7-5-5-5---
E -0--7------7----70
...i..mi..m.mim.m.mi
I find that I’m a lot more accurate on the semi-quavers using this pattern than if I begin each group of notes with my index finger. (Don’t even ask why I’ve chosen to finger it this way; I found it a stretch to play in first position, so accepted the string skip in the third beat in favour of rent tendons.) I guess it’s all about generating some sort of internal metronome, and if I imagine my fingers are constantly playing semi-quavers even if they aren’t, it helps to keep my timing more even. The first really tricky thing I’ve found while using this technique is skipping strings, e.g. a pattern from the bassline of “There’s Only So Much Oil In The Ground”:
...1.&.2.&.3.&.4.&.1
G ---55--55--55--55-
D ------------------
A -3~--3~--3~--3~---
E ------------------
...i.imi.imi.imi.im.
For some reason my fingers just don’t like playing this, though I think it might simply be a matter of practice. However, after this experimenting with my technique, I checked out this video of Simon Merrick playing Space Cowboy. I think I can see rakes and on-beat notes played with his middle finger, so the kind of rigid pattern I’ve been using isn’t the be-all and end-all (not that I thought it would be).

I’m considering doing a similar exercise on guitar, forcing myself into relearning a few pieces adhering to strict alternate picking; potentially it’ll clean up my often sloppy timing. At the very least it’ll make me think about what I’m playing again, which is always a good thing!

Tom pointed Wolfgang’s vault out to me a while back, but I didn’t get around to checking it out until recently.  As he recommended, check out the Tower of Power recordings for some seriously funky stuff (and what seems to me like a classic telecaster sound).  Well worth the free registration.

I read an article in the Guardian titled Scientists find way to slash cost of drugs with some interest; one of the opening parts,

Improvements they devise to the molecular structure of an existing, expensive drug turn it technically into a new medicine which is no longer under a 20-year patent to a multinational drug company and can be made and sold cheaply.

sounds pretty much like the well-known and often cheeky practice of busting drug patents by trying to find a gap in what’s covered, or using a bioisosteric replacement to move outside the patented area, and then developing and patenting a compound of your own in that gap.  Essentially you get to leapfrog over the work done by the first group, hopefully arriving at a working compound without having to go through the expense of a full research project.  In the article’s case this doesn’t seem to be the method under discussion; a quick google around for the scientists involved turns up their company (I’m surprised that it wasn’t actually named in the article), which seems to be based on sticking PEG on proteins (which I would guess is done to improve their bioavailability).  Fair play to them with their technology, but comments like this:

Professor Shaunak says it is time that the monopoly on drug invention and production by multinational corporations - which charge high prices because they need to make big profits for their shareholders - was broken.

Are just plain wrong.  Developing drugs costs a lot of money because, frankly, we’re shit at it: we start with tens of thousands of chemicals and gradually narrow it down to one that enters clinical trials (i.e. actually makes it as far as being given to a person).  Given that only one in five drugs makes it through this stage, the price of which can run into hundreds of millions of dollars, there are a lot of expensive failures along the way.  (I got that one-in-five stat from this article, which is admittedly someone from the pharma industry saying that intellectual property is a good thing.)  This failure rate has sometimes led to a rather risk-averse stance where companies only spend a money on a particular disease/target once someone else has shown that it is possible to produce a drug in the area; the follow-on drugs are often called “Me too” drugs.  The final price of a drug incorporates the cost of research performed by the company, so using other people’s work to jump-start your own is an obvious way of saving money.

Putting this together with the article’s topic, I take the article to say that the company will be putting PEG on existing compounds, thus moving them outside the original compound’s patent and allowing them to produce the final compound at a lower price.  But someone still has to come up with the original compound for them to use, and they’re going to be annoyed if they lose all their profits and so will come after infringers with rabid patent lawers, which will cost a lot to defend against.  Plus I wonder how friendly the FDA will be to this approach; any significant change to a compound usually triggers a new clinical trial, so you still have to go through that huge expense.  That’s alluded to in the article:

Once the drugs have passed through clinical trials and have been licensed in India, the same data could be used to obtain a European licence so that they could be sold to the NHS as well.

No mention of America, so I infer that they’re avoiding the FDA.  I wonder if they’re saving money by doing the trials in India; out-sourcing is certainly a model that’s getting a lot of attention in the pharma industry.

To be honest, I think the main thing that rankles is their claim of being “ethical.”  It’s no more ethical than any other industry where cloning and reverse-engineering exists; Behringer effects pedals are an example that spring to mind, and there was at least one law suit flying around when they came out.  As ever, it’ll be in the hands of the patent lawers as to whether or not this idea will bear fruit.