Thursday 28 January 2010

Still at my desk with proposals and budgets for later in the year, and occasional breaks to play guitar right hand studies. I've been listening to this, and got most of the way through the album before discovering how the sounds were made: a sort of steampunk home studio. The music reminds me of Hatfield and the North for some reason ...

Thanks to Iain for noticing that I didn't say when the Mary Queen of Scots programme is going out. Best current guess is 28 February on the Early Music Show.

Reading the news of the much-vaunted iPad, it seems to be another device largely for the passive receiving of content. Ho hum. Personally I've still to find a device with half as useful a design as the old Psion 5 (I still miss it). OK, it had a boring LCD display, so you couldn't watch things, but the batteries lasted for weeks rather than hours. And despite being really tiny, its nifty folding design incorporated a keyboard with nearly full-size proper keys, so you could easily input a lot of information and get some work done. Is it really true that as someone who likes to do things where possible, rather than watch other people doing stuff, I'm in a small minority? And does no-one else find that strange or sad? I remember being really shocked when I bought a minidisc recorder a few years ago (Nov 2002) and it had no mic inputs: a recorder that could only record what someone else had already recorded for you. At least the iPad has a microphone ...