New Tunes...

Direct copy&paste from the post I made on the Solid Air Message Board...



Hi folks,

I've uploaded 4 new MP3's to the myspace page of
my side-project 'Computer Comedown'. It's quite a
nice day so I thought I'd share them with you
guys. Most people who come here a open-minded and
either write music or experiment with the
instruments and technology we have available to
us or even just love to listen to and experience
new stuff - so I thought this was a perfect forum
for this to be opened too. (I'll probably stick
this post on BHone's forum too and my blog later).
Anyway, onwards to the music. You can go straight
to the music HERE.
Below is some brief descriptions about what's going
on behind them.

They are...
1. 'Microcosm' ... experimenting with an abnormal time-signature (6/4 I think, correct me if I'm wrong)

2. 'Dark Dubble' ... Was trying out some bit-crushed MIDI percussion sequences and building them up with more MIDI drum tracks to see what I could come up with. Eventually I needed a tune in there so I made something up, it was feeling dark so I finished it off with some 80's synth at the end.

3. 'Name me' ... It's called that cos I couldn't think of a name (I'm sure we've all been there). Blind Voyeurs band mate, Lee, had an acoustic guitar riff he wanted to do something with. So we recorded it lo-fi and had a play around with melodies. It felt like it needed a pretty up-beat drum section so messed about with some tight cuts and delays to bring a break-beat that trips over itself. Added some slide guitar, made it talk back to itself with a ghostly echo.

4. 'The Sun Always Rises' ... I was having this strange dream where I was soundchecking for a gig. When it came to checking the keyboard levels I had to play something. It was pretty weird but it was nothing I'd every played before but I could see my fingers actually playing these notes. I woke up, it was about 4am and couldn't go back to sleep so I got up, went into the lounge and just recorded these chords on the laptop. Listened to it through and put some generic 'out-of-the-packet' drum loops on there and that was that. By now it was 5:30 and the sun was coming up (hence the name) so went back to bed. Don't expect much - it's a bit cheesy but I liked the changes in it. I'll probably never use it in anything but here it is if you wanna check it out.

Have a listen. Comments are always welcome. The
other two tunes have been there a while if you
wanna check those out too.

Steve x

Computer Comedown (MySpace)

Diggnation Live at London FOWA Expo 08

I've just booked my Pass for this year's Future Of Web Applications Expo at the London Excel Arena to see Diggnation recorded live. I missed them last year so I'm really excited about it. We're probably gonna have to get a hotel or something to stay the night cos we'll be going to the after party!

For those that don't know what Diggnation is here's the episode from their last live Diggnation at NVision in San Jose...

End of the month... busy busy busy!!

OK, so it turned out that I'm no longer bored of the internet - just that sometimes it can be a chore going to all my different haunts and checking messages, updates and friends requests. And I know I haven't blogged in a while. Finding time is hard. I could do micro posts, I s'pose, but I kinda do that on facebook: 'Steve is ... doing his chores', 'Steve is ... out with his mates' etc etc.

One thing I thought I was going to blog about was Endorse It In Dorest 2008. It was my first time at this local festival and had planned to edit together a movie. But it turned out that it was taking me forever to do because I'm finding iMovie HD restricing. It's the movie editor that came with my macbook. It's pretty powerful but it's a sequential editor, not a multitrack editor which makes it more difficult to get timings right. It's fine for just stringing stuff together though - I just prefered Sony Vegas. Anyway, all the clips are on Flickr. Check out the slideshow below...



I had a great time at this festival. Although, Saturday had heavy rain throughout the WHOLE day. So me and Lisa decided to come home for that day and go back on the Sunday. It was a wise move!

James Burtn also announced that he'd finally popped the question to Emma. Yep, that's right, they're getting married. So a big congrats to them - such a great couple. They were made for eachother (and Emma has the patients of a saint - not many people would put up with James's ways!) We were in Endorse It when we heard the news via text... they were in France... so we had a drink in their honour.

When they got back we had a massive party at Kai's house. I don't remember much about it thanks to Marianna's homemade Casasha. But I know it was a good one.

Me and Lisa dug deep and scraped together some pennies to buy a shiny new 24" iMac. We had to for several reasons. Mainly because of Lisa's Degree (at least that was my main excuse). My old PC was really started to creak and within the last 2 weeks of it's life it managed to catch a particularly nasty virus. I managed to contain and remove the virus but not before it messed up my OS. I couldn't switch the thing off. Everytime it shut down it would restart itself. And I couldn't browse the internets either. It would load up google but then I couldn't go to any other page! Oh and dodgy pop-ups would appear even when I didn't have a browser open. I ran a virus checker on full deep scan and it managed to detect 27 viruses!! I couldn't trust my machine anymore. I could reformat it but then I'd lose everything I had on it. I'd had it for a long time so it was time for a new piece of hardware. Enter then new 24" iMac with 4GB Ram and 1TB Hard Drive.

After it arrived our bloody washing machine decided to die on us!! Talk about timing! Luckily I'd paid off my credit card some months back and hadn't touched it since so the new washing machine went on the card. So now I'm pretty skint!

The 50 Greatest Arcade Cabinet Designs in Video Game History

Check this out. From After Burner to Tron, this in-depth list covers over 3 decades of arcade games and ranks them based on the artwork and overall quality of the cabinets themselves rather than the actual games. See if your favorite arcade cabinet designs made the cut.

Click me to see the top 50 | digg story

What is NMIndexStoreSvr.exe????

I have a yahoo widget running on my work PC called Informer. What it is is a really hand tool that sits in the background telling me how much RAM and CPU is being used up in realtime. Anyway, I was just working at work (as you do) and for some reason my computer started slowing down for no reason. I took a glace at my Informer and saw that my CPU was maxed out at 100%! I checked task manager and saw that something called NMIndexStoreSvr.exe was basically eating away my CPU, my memory and my hard drive!!

I shut it down immediately (hoping it wasn't an important system resource!)

After a bit of Googling I discovered that it's part of Nero Scout that comes with Nero CD/DVD Burning 7. Nero Scout is a database program that catalogues all of the media files on your computer (music/pics/video) and that makes this database available to other programs in the Nero 7 product package. I also discovered that it's pretty safe to stop it from ever running on my PC, as I know that it's nothing important. Here's how to get rid...

Press Windows+R (Or go to the "Start" menu and click on "Run")
Then when the dialog box appears bottom left type "MsConfig", this will bring up some built in admin controls.
Click the "startup" tab
Look for the NeroCheck and NMBgMonitor and untick the box next to it
Then click Apply/Ok
Then close and select restart
When the computer restarts it will say you have used MSCONFIG to change settings just tick the box to say "Don't inform me again" and click OK and that should be problem sorted.

Friday's Day Off

I took the day off work on the 26th. I just fancied a long weekend and a trek into Southampton with Lisa. We did a bit of Christmas shopping and got a few odds-n-sods for ourselves. Southampton was full of loads of school kids 'hanging out' in the highstreet and the shopping mall on their half-term which was a tad annoying. One of my missions on this journey was to buy an external hard-drive. I had a budget of £100 and wanted to get at least a capacity of 500gb. First stop was the Apple Store - they sold them for about 160 quid!! Couldn't believe it! I came out a bit disheartened but I was spell-bound by the new iMacs. I ended up buying an external hard-drive from Argos for just under 80 quid! Brucey-bonus!
Lisa's mission was to buy a generous sized vanity case. Now I'm no expert but I was surprised to find out how hard it is to get one. Out of all the department stores and other such places like Superdrug and Boots we found just 1 vanity case that was the right size... but the pattern on it was really granny-fied! (Is that a word? Hmmm, it is now!)



I also bought something I've been meaning to get on DVD for a long time - Escape From New York. That film is sooooo flippin' good. And it still stands the test of time. It was on TV a while back but I only caught the end of it. I absolutely LOVE the feel of the film mainly thanks for John Carpenters inventive lighting and excellent soundtrack (which was scored by John Carpenter himself - something he's done quite a few times) I also bought Fisher King and Look Around You series 1.



After a long day shopping we headed back for the car via West Quay. We passed the Apple Store again as it was on the way but this time it had the shutters half shut, staff outside (except for one staff member polishing the surfaces), and queue of about 50 people with their macbooks in their hands. I had to find out what was going on so I asked one of the staff. He explained to me that Apple's new operating system, Leopard was about to be released as of 6pm. As soon as he started to say "Apple's new operating system..." I instantly knew what he was talking about. This was a relief to him cos before I asked him I saw him explaining it in full length to nosey OAP's with glazed looks on their faces. I felt sorry for him. I mean, how do you explain to someone what an operating system is to someone who has never even used a computer?!