Jamie R

Well I’ve been rather busy over the last 2 weeks. Firstly, we’ve made a lot of progress with getting Up and Comin’ organised. We had to change the date and time from January 27th starting at 7.30pm to Feb 9th starting at 3:30pm. This now means that the gig would be rather limited in audience terms, because a lot of lower school kids won’t be able to get to upper school in time (note lower school and upper school at 4.5 miles apart at my school.) Pattern against user had to drop out, but we still have the other bands so it should still be pretty sweet.

In technical terms, I bought a Behringer Eurpower 16 channel powered mixing desk and 2 300W Peavey 15″ cabinet club speakers on the sound side. On the lighting side, I bought 2 magic gobos and 2 Acme iSolution iRock scanners (the barrel mirrors not the mirror ones). The pair of iRocks were pretty good for £350. I’m gonna get a pair of the mirror ones (iSolution iRock 7-S) as well because it will allow me to use full pan/tilt etc on a single mirror using a single beam. This will allow me to use the iSolution iRock scanners as follow spots rather than just disco lights

My mate Ricky came round on Sunday and we planned out how we’re gonna have the lighting set out on the stage in my living room. We put our gear together and turned my lounge into a massive disco in effect - looked pretty sweet although it pissed my dad off a bit! Ricky’s doing the lighting for me for my gig, I’m gonna be doing sound as well as audio/visual etc. Will be good, I can’t wait!

In other news, I built my new PC at last. What a ripper:

• AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ Dual core 2.2ghz with HyperTransport (Socket 939)
• 2GB PC3200 DDR 400 RAM - Corsair ValueRAM
• 2 x 250GB Seagate 7200RPM HDD
• 1 x 74GB Western Digital Raptor 10,000 RPM HDD
• Sony Mulitlayer, Multiformat DVD burner
• Ati Radeon 9550 256MB AGP graphics card
• 19″ Samsung SyncMaster LCD
• All inside an Antec Soho edition file server case with 500W Antec TruePower PSU

I decided to go with an AGP graphics card rather than a PCI-E (PCI express) because I don’t need the power of a PCI-E graphics card at the moment. I don’t really play any games other than Microsoft Flight Simulator and stuff like that so I don’t need a very powerful graphics card. The ATI Radeon 9550 does me fine at the moment.

Also seeing as the processor is dual core, it’s bascially the same as having 2 processors in one

I built my new PC using an ABIT AV8-3RD Eye motherboard. Not a bad motherboard overall, although it overclocks the CPU by default - the FSB is 204mhz by default rather than 200mhz so it could cause problems for some people. However, it didn’t cause me any problems. The board itself comes with 2 onboard SATA ports, Firewire, firewire headers and gigabit LAN as well as the usual stuff like USB etc. I didn’t have any problems with it, and it’s running stable and reliable running Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition with Service Pack 1

I turned my new box into a Server 2003 workstation rather than a server. You can do this via several easy steps which I’ve written below. I prefer to run Server 03 on my main PC now because it’s undoubtly more secure and a lot more stable than Windows XP for obvious reasons.

Steps to turn your Windows Server 2003 box into a Workstation:

• Install Direct X 9
• Set Video hardware acceleration to full
• Go into Direct X’s Diagnostics tool (dxidag) and enable Direct 3D Acceleration and DirectDraw Acceleration.
• Put sound acceleration to full
• Enable the Windows Image Accustion acquisition service
• Disable Internet Explorer enhanced security configuration by going to Control Panel > Add and remove programs > Add/Remove Windows Components
• Install Sun’s Java runtime environment
• Disable the Shutdown event tracker - Go to Start > Run > type in gpedit.msc to get the Group Policy editor up, Browse to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System. Look to the right and you’ll see an option that says Display Shutdown event tracker. Double click on it and then select “Disable”. Then click OK.
• Enable the themes service using services.msc as well as Windows Audio. When you’ve set the services to automatic, start them. Also enable the IMAPI CD-Burning Service.

A more detailed version is available here

I haven’t yet gone and benchmarked it, nor have I added a wireless card which I need to do before I take it along to the gig along with my laptop but I’ll get around to it. I’m wondering if I can get a OEM academic x64 copy of Server 03, you never know…
-Jamie.

Well, technically it was last year since I published a blog post, so here I am. Firstly, Happy new year and all that, little bit late but all good - but like my maths coursework

So far my life’s been alright - Did my first *Real* GCSE Examination yesterday - English Literature. I’m not the strongest in English Lit, but I’m not the weakest so I think I’ll get a fair mark of a B which I’m looking for. All good anyway. Now I’m waiting for the rest of them to arise in June - fun! Wish me luck!!
GCSE Exam pressure isn’t one of the nicest things, and I think that schools should make the pressure a little lighter to a certain extent. I know that school and exams are designed to be challenging, which is good because it identifys your weaknesses and strengths so that you know where you need to work on to improve your abilities. Ah well, maybe I’m just writing shit again as usual

On 9th February (was 27th January but school decided there wasn’t enough time to properly organise it - weren’t my fault), I hope to pull off a stunt which I originally dismissed as being something that no one would take note of or be interested in, but much to my suprise this wasn’t the case. I conceived the idea of having the biggest rock gig in the history of Tendring Technology College after I burnt myself on a stage light - nice! I thought that it’d be nice to get most of the school bands together and have a big concert.

After first thinking that no one would take notice of what I thought we’d do, I told a few people and asked bands to play. Interest has been soaring since then - I now have several friends helping me organise what we *hope* to be one of the biggest, if not the biggest gig in the history of my school - which will be AWESOME.

We now have 4 confirmed bands playing, three school bands which rock and a band from Colchester called Pattern Against User who are regarded as one of the best bands in Essex (well they are!..and for all being 15 and 16, they are pretty damn excellent) which is pretty sweet.

I’m damn chuffed at the amount of interest that we’ve had since I got a couple of people together and asked about having a gig. Furtermore, we are making this a charity gig. Our aim is to give about £500 to two charities minus expenses which we have to take into consideration. We are gonna be supporting Diabetes UK and Great Ormond Street childrens hospital. Reason for this wasn’t hard to find - my friend Nick who is one of the organisers and a member of a band who “The Popes main rivals” who are playing is a diabetic, and without GOSH when I was a baby, I wouldn’t be alive to type this blog post now.

At the moment, we have problems which we need to clear. The school still haven’t finalised our date for the gig yet, and I’m having problems accquring sound equipment - PA equip like Sound board, microphones, amplifer, XLR cables, multicore etc. I can’t use the schools equipment (which would be pukka ’cause they have everything I need) so it looks like we’ll have to hire the equipment in and set it up. No biggy apart from it’ll cost me £250 to hire the gear in…
I’m off to Colchester tomorrow to hopefully purchase a few DMX controlled Spinheads/gobos etc which I’ll use for the gig and also other events that I do at my school. Lighting is something I’m very interested in, although I admit my experience isn’t the highest and I can’t work anywhere doing that kinda stuff until I’m either 16 or 18 in some places - depends on the theatre and their health and safety policies. Ah well, 16 in 4 months

Laters,

Jamie.

Update: Sunday 14th January - Got the sound side of things sorted. I purchased a Behringer Eurpower PMX-3000 16 channel mixing desk and 2 Peavey 300W club speakers which I’ve set up in my bedroom to test - WOOH. Can’t wait to get a few more mics and more XLR cable etc and get the rig set up down at TTC when it’s gig time. Brilliant - cost me £500 and I didn’t get any lighting gear but I’m happy with what I did get.