Too much to do

Concerned at how I'm beginning to struggle to get things done, with a little too much falling by wayside I recently had a chat with a friend of mine who's into the whole personal development time management side of things. Turns out I'm just trying to do too much. So it's less my inability to manage time effectively and more that I just don't have enough of it, or more accurately that I'm trying to do too much with it.

With spring now here I think the first thing I'm going to do is make sure that I take more time out to really do nothing, or at least relax and read.

The whole sabbath thing is probably the key to this. I haven't been observing it particularly carefully. Ok I haven't been observing it at all. I subscribe to the idea that the day isn't all that important. What matters is there's a day, a whole day that's devoted to resting, to spiritual matters, to God.

That I haven't been sticking to this eminently sensible idea is daft and I'm really beginning to feel it now. So as of this week, Sunday (for that is the day that fits best in my week) will be that little bit more special. Let's see if that helps.

Any economists out there?

For as long as I can remember whenever I've heard talk of national debt I've found myself wondering who a nation can be indebted to. I always figured it was a richer country (which it is in the case of many) or banks, or some really rich guy who had a few spare dollars he found down the back of the sofa.

But right now, as far as I can tell, every country is hugely indebted by sums of money that are completely mindblowing. When the richest country in the world is in debt, all the banks and indeed some previously well off countries are broke and the economy is seemingly falling apart... From who are we borrowing money?

Twittering Archbishop

It seems Archbishop of York John Sentamu has joined the twittering masses so you too can keep abreast of his latest thoughts, even as he's having them.

Though he's new to Tweeting, or so it seems, it's slightly disappointing how few people he's following. One thing that's often struck me about Sentamu is his disconnectedness with people in the church. He just doesn't seem interested.

I like his focus on international injustice and on making the church relevant to modern culture. However I do wonder if he isn't doing enough to take people already in the church with him... Just a thought.

is modern paint rubbish?

I've been decorating a small room for what feels like 900 years. Interestingly all domestic wood/metal paint now seems to be water based. This is good for the environment, and doesn't have the same tendency to give you a headache.

The downside seems to be that it just isn't very good. I've been painting something that was white a subtle off white colour and it's taken four coats.

I'm really bored with painting.

Good room, good mics, what more do you need?

Just got back from recording two live band sessions for BBC Introducing. Sounding pretty good considering... Considering that is the whole evening takes four hours and in that time me and my colleague take all the gear to the venue we use (a church building) setup record two bands and then pack up and put it all away.

We're getting pretty good results too. Often as good as those from much higher profile and better equipped studio facilities on big bucks network radio. Partly that's down to our extreme skill (we're modest too) but mainly it's about the space.

Half decent instruments in a good space with some reasonable mics are going to sound good. Get the space wrong and you spend an age messing about trying polish that particular turd.

We're lucky in that the mics we have are good ones. So even though the mixing desk is cheap and the compressors are Behringer (shudder) the results are still pretty good.

Roland Digital Snake - a thing of wonder

Anyone who's done a significant amount of live sound or location recording will be familiar with the joys of lugging around huge heavy multicore cables. This is the way of getting the signals from the stage to the mixing desk. Good quality cable is expensive and cable of any quality is heavy. Then you have the interference and loss problems of long cable runs, especially when lighting's involved.

Bring on the (relatively) affordable Roland Digital Snake. It uses gigabit ethernet to link the stage and front of house boxes. The stage box contains mic preamps, so low level mic signals don't have very far to go. Then it's all converted to digital at 96k 24-bit. Nice.

At the other end there's a front of house box that brings it back out in analogue. There's a simple controller that lets you set the channel gain, pad and switch phantom power. The base system is 16 channels with eight returns. At approaching £2000 it's considerably more expensive than a long piece of cable, but far more flexible.

For example if you're working in a building with structured cabling installed, you can run the digital snake through that (although don't plug it into a network or you'll upset people as it all stops working). You can have the boxes 100m apart, but if you fancy going further, just stick a gigabit ethernet switch in the middle and go another 100m.

Having played with one of these for a few jobs it just works. Roland have kept it simple and done a great job of building something that's really as easy as it could be.

The only criticisms I have are: the controller isn't always as reponsive as I'd like. When you switch channels it takes about a second before you can change the gain. Not a problem really, but slightly irritating. I'd really like the FOH box to have ADAT outputs. Digital desks are very common these days so by breaking out in analogue there's another unneccessary digital conversion.

These are small gripes however, it works, it's light, and... well, that's enough.

Won't somebody PLEASE think of the children

I am against all forms of child abuse. I am against imposed internet filtering/censorship.

"What, you don't support internet filtering? Why do you support terrorists and paedophiles?"

I think the first two statements I made can sit happily together. Unfortunately a coalition of children's charities don't agree and seem to believe the only way to stamp out the evil of child porn is to ensure all internet providers are blocking it.

There are lots of problems with this approach and key among them are that I, and many others far more expert than me, don't believe it makes the slightest difference.

The other day I was standing outside a railway station. Across the road a family stood at a bus stop. The mother (I presume) was screaming abuse at a young boy. He must have been 10 or 11 and was being told he'd ruined the weekend, she and everyone else hated him and he was stupid. It was a foul mouthed tirade, a horrible thing to see and I really felt for the poor kid. But what did I actually do? I simply turned up my iPod so I couldn't hear and read my magazine so I couldn't see.

Internet technology has made it more likely that child porn will be seen by someone who finds it as abhorrent and upsetting as indeed they should. A number of these people have made the mistake of blaming the internet technology for this arguing since the technology brought this into our home, technology can stop that from happening.

Well that's true, it can. But unfortunately, and this is what really matters, it can't stop abuse from taking place, from having taken place or counsel the individuals concerned.

It's the internet equivalent of turning a deaf ear and a blind eye to child abuse in the street. Has internet technology made child porn more prevalent? I don't know, but really nasty stuff has been around for a long time before affordable broadband internet access and the kind of people this appeals to will seek it out in whatever form it takes.

So not only is it a waste of everybody's time and money (and it is very expensive), it's also potentially doing some serious societal damage. Once a government controlled internet censorship system is firmly in place how long before it's seriously misused? It may start with preventing access to known child porn sites. Then it's employed to help prevent terrorism... after all you don't want the terrorists being able to find bomb making recipes online do you? Then it's used to help 'keep the peace' and ultimately to 'quell dissent'.

That may sound like paranoid rantings, but it is a very slippery slope and one best avoided no matter how well intentioned at the start.

Nobody is going to campaign in favour of child porn and access to it. However I will campaign against internet censorship, and that doesn't amount to the same thing. Because the protection of children is important and emotive many are scared of accusation that they either don't care or much worse and that gives a very weak argument far more power and political weight.

What I would add is there are lots of ways individuals can choose to effectively restrict access to unsavoury and illegal material online. There are personal internet filters available but my favourite is to use openDNS. It's a free service that will work with pretty much any computer/network and does a really good job of controlling the blocking of content based on categories. I use it on the networks I maintain.

The key to this is choice. I will choose what I want to block. I do not want that choice made for me by someone else who thinks they know best because how do I know I can trust them?