Got the CSS3 rounded corners happening! plus a few additions. I think I need to streamline the jQuery a bit and the whole design may yet change, but I’m quite pleased with progress, overall.
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It’s been a while since I’ve done any but it felt like time, so back I went. I knitted 15 rows, then realised I’d made a mistake and unravelled 16 rows and reknitted 3 rows. A good night’s toil… erm.
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OK, barely anything, but it was a start! Djeli and I have been considering getting one of the Rosetta Stone language courses (French, Italian, German or Greek, we’re not sure yet!) but it’s a big investment, so djeli ordered in their trial DVD which turned up in the post a couple of days ago. It gave the option to go through a demo first lesson in one of the languages on the disc, so I thought it best to pick one I knew nothing about, and preferably one which didn’t use a Latin alphabet, to really put the system through its paces. So that wiped out French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, and sort of only left Arabic or Russian, so I picked Russian. What I learnt is already ebbing away, but I can see how after a few lessons it would really start to stick. Now for djeli to test-drive it and see what he thinks.
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It’s a bit rambly, of course, but I thought the community at NetNewMusic might find it interesting, plus I think it was good for me to talk about everything I’ve learned and thought about in the past week.
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which has now been sent to the director – hope he likes it! Overall, I’m pleased with it – I think it’s hanging together pretty well, so I just hope he hasn’t decided to make any drastic timing changes to anything…
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Half the Chandos box is done now – and in only about 2 1/2 hours too! Yep, 15 CDs! I ended up running them on both the laptop and the new Mac Mini so as to get through them faster and even though I had to type in the track listings on about half of those, and edit all the others to get them correct (librarian-brain at work – composers do NOT go in the artist field!), it all just shot through. The Mac Mini’s 4Gb of RAM makes a huge difference.
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… on a bunch of sound file formats. Interesting results… not least of which is that my ear obviously isn’t as finely tuned as I’d like to imagine 
Really quite hard to spot differences between AIFF, Apple Lossless, 320kbps MP3 and AAC, so we’re sticking with MP3 because of the 500-odd albums we’ve already got in that format! The good news is that I discovered that the nasty blurriness I noticed the other day was due to iTunes having automatically switched on its equaliser. Grrrr. Switching it off has made an astronomical difference to the sound quality – huzzah!
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Didn’t get through as much as I’d have liked – I’ve been going at it pretty solidly with tech work and composing for about 5 days now, got halfway through today and just felt totally burned out. So I stopped, but I managed to finish the section I was working on first, and bounced down a new video version so I can get a good overview when I come back to it tomorrow. Nice to be able to focus on the composing and not so much on getting the tools to function!
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A nice chap on the Garritan forums helped me out and told me about an update for Pro Tools which it seems Digidesign had hidden away in the depths of their site and not linked from the Check for Updates feature. So this has fixed the freezing problem I was having with GPO! And now everything’s running brilliantly (so far – expecting a CPU overload error any minute now). I got keyswitching working last night, which is genius, and have been messing about with percussion today. I worked out how to make a blank region so I could just write in notes, and discovered that there’s a whole channel for mod wheel control, so I can just draw in the mod-wheel data needed to control my drum rolls! Wheeee!
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is that Pro Tools 8 is a fantastic upgrade, and Garritan Personal Orchestra sounds pretty gosh-darned good. AND I found out how to patch multiple MIDI channels through a single instance of the instrument.
The bad news: Serious CPU-overload messages and wierd freezing thing going on with GPO. Really not sure what’s causing all this, but I’m sure it could be fixed by chucking a few thousand pounds at a new machine. Shame, that 
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