TrumpetBoy
Trumpets, Music, Gadgets, Web Dev. and any other nonsense I feel like mentioning…
Archive for September, 2004
Aarghh!!! iPod disaster….
Sep 21st
This morning finds me with my hair well and truly torn out! Last night, I plugged in my iPod to the computer to add an album I’d just purchased from iTunes. Before I knew what had happened, the entire contents of my iPod had been deleted and was replaced with the few albums I had stored locally – from 1742 songs to just 169 in one fail swoop!!!
Obviously this isn’t really that bad in the grand scheme of things but severely irritating as I won’t be back home to my CD collection until December! Luckily I’d backed up some of "My Music" onto the iPod itself in hard-drive mode so I’ve been able to replace up to 450 songs in total now. Also, my Dad shares a similar musical taste to me and has computers coming out of his ears so he is kindly going to send me some data CDs of some of the stuff I’m missing. So all is not lost…
I think this came about as a result of one of my colleagues downloading an iPod utility in my hotel room the other week and then plugging in my iPod to his computer before I could stop him in order to test it. Let this be a lesson to any other iPod users out there – make sure yours is set to Manual Update before you disconnect it from your system. As far as I can reason, this would have prevented the problem.
I do hope that anyone reading this has had a less frustrating morning than me….
And as if by magic…
Sep 17th
No sooner had I finished the last post than I headed over to Eric Meyer’s site and found this latest post bitching about Internet Explorer!!
You see, it’s not just me!
Firefox 1.0PR released
Sep 17th
I was pleased to find the other day that the fine folks over at Mozilla have put out a Preview Release of the Firefox 1.0 web browser. This is good news as it means that very shortly there will be a fully-featured and stable version of this great software available to the world at large. I started using Firefox back in May 2004 while building AWFulMusic.net for my friend, and former College tutor, Tony Faulkner. Tony told me about this great browser he’d found and although sceptical at first, I went off and discovered it for myself. More about that shortly, but first to clarify…
Many people (or indeed both of you who may actually read this) will be asking why I would need a new browser in the first place? After all, what’s wrong with Microsoft Internet Explorer? That question in itself would be worthy of a lengthy post here but enough people have already delivered their diatribes on the subject elsewhere on the web. Try visiting the Browse Happy website and see what they have to say about it.
My main hangup with IE is it’s dodgy interpretation of CSS code. For the uninitiated, that controls the way modern web pages look in terms of layout and text styles etc. Most of the languages of the web have specifications set out by the W3C and while many browsers adhere to these rules, Microsoft often chooses to take it’s own "easy way out" rather than making IE follow the rules correctly. That makes the job of the Web coder more difficult because we have to employ various workarounds to get pages to look right in IE as well as everything else (Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, Safari etc). This is made more irritating by the fact that it’s a necessary evil because about half of web users today, surf with Internet Explorer. Aside from the technical side of things, there are also so many security issues that go along with using IE that it really is advisable to avoid it.
Anyway, back to Firefox….
I had previously been dissatisfied with other Gecko-based browsers like Netscape 7 and Mozilla for various reasons which mainly boiled down to how used I was to using IE. Suddenly here was a revelation – a browser that rendered code in the same correct way as those browsers but retained more of the feel of IE as well as adding some really useful extensions to generally improve the computing experience as a whole. A favourite is the function to import all of your IE bookmarks!! I started with version 0.8 of Firefox and have religiously upgraded my way through the ensuing months until the current 1.0PR version. I would heartily recommend that everyone tries this great program out. To do so couldn’t be simpler – visit GetFirefox.com and download the setup file. It’s only 4.6MB which shouldn’t take more than about 10mins on a 56K dial-up connection. It may be the best computer decision you ever make – particularly since this website will work slightly better in it!!
Recent CD Shopping
Sep 9th
While on a recent holiday in New York, I picked up several great additions to my CD collection. Needless to say, they are now in pride of place in the "Most Recently Played" playlist in my iPod. The CDs in question are:
- Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band – "Swingin’ For The Fences"
- Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band – "XXL"
- Terence Blanchard – "Bounce"
- Rob Schneiderman – "Dancing In The Dark"
- Joe Farnsworth – "It’s Prime Time"
- Conrad Herwig – "Another Kind Of Blue – The Latin Side of Miles Davis"
- Jim Rotondi – "The Pleasure Dome"
- Jim Rotondi – "New Vistas"
I’ll get round to reviewing some of these recordings when I have time (and at that point will edit this post to reference the reviews). So far, I’m particularly enjoying the Gordon Goodwin band – it’s some of the most exciting music I’ve heard in a while and features one of my (new) favourite Lead Trumpet players; Wayne Bergeron.
Also, sometime soon, I must extol the virtues of the iPod itself, which are many. It’s definitely the best gadget a touring musician could own!!
A New Beginning….
Sep 5th
Welcome to Life of Bryan – as part of the redesign of my site, I’ve decided to do the fashionable thing and start a blog. Anyone who’s visited my site before will realise that this is actually a replacement for the previous Bryan’s Corner – the difference being that I may actually remember to post something here occasionally.
Several things spurred me on to redesign the site in the first place but most revolve around a wish to try and improve the standards compliance of it. I’ve tried to write in valid (X)HTML for a couple of years but even though I’d been using CSS for presentation and layout for that period also, I’d never really got to grips with making that valid too. The previous design relied on some proprietory IE elements and behaviours for it’s layout with some dodgy JavaScript to approximate the same effect in other browsers – all in all, not very clever….
Of course, the last year and a half have been something of a learning curve for me. Back in March 2003, I took on the task of (re)designing and being Webmaster for The Cat Pack. This was principally as a distraction to keep me out of the pub while on tour in Germany as well as keeping me involved with the band so I had a gig to return to. This lead to my starting TrumpetBoy.com – my web design for musicians site. Since starting that in January 2004, I’ve designed 3 sites for various friends and colleagues as well as redesigning the Cat Pack site (again!). A couple of other sites are also in the pipeline. More details can be found at the aforementioned TrumpetBoy.com.
Anyway, this redesign is pretty much done – just finishing up transferring some of the old relevant pages to the new template. It’s proving a welcome diversion from the current show I’m working on – "The Rat Pack – Live From Las Vegas". We’re back over in Germany at the moment, specifically in Mannheim. After another week here we make a welcome return to Vienna but I won’t bore you here with the forthcoming tour itinerary after that as you can find it in my Schedule. I’m sure I’ll be posting some touring tales in due course. Suffice to say that it’s a great show with a great bunch of guys and best of all, it’s a 15-piece big band!!!