Christmas etc

Travelling back to Belgium for Christmas and new year,

by eurostar offcourse, they are now trying to clear there backlog, providing service on a first-come first-serve basis. Yesterday thousands of people waited inside and outside of St. Pancras station to get on.

Promises to be a challenging day..

I'm going in. Early
See you all back in Belgium.

It snowed (again), so now traffic is suffering again in London, but at least it's a pretty view.

Visitors

So I was expecting some people to come and enjoy the atmosphere of London in Christmas mode.

But ofcourse:

Eurostar staff was going to go on a strike, luckily they postponed this 'till after Christmas.

You are probably aware of further developments:
- snow/ice-water condensed from the eurostar train onto the electronics when it entered the eurotunnel (where the temperature is at a constant 25 degrees)
- 5 trains broke down inside the tunnel
- hundreds of people where stuck inside the tunnel, some for 16 hours
- water ran out, all electricity was shut down, the train crew didn't do it's job, temperatures raised inside the cabins
- random people in the trains who happened to be police officers set up the evacuation
- the executive manager had a lot of explaining to do http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8422978.stm, but didn't do a very good job.
- no eurostar service has been available since Friday http://www.eurostar.com


Nobody is going to be able to make it to London. Talk about things going wrong on precise timing.

Fingers crossed on getting home for Christmas.



Update on where things went wrong:
- eurostar had absolutely no contact with the trains in the tunnel
- no or little communication with passengers during breakdown
- manager of eurostar tells of passenger witnesses as telling 'anecdotal stories'
- manager of eurostar up untill now still hasn't debriefed with the crew on what really happened in the trains, thus as a result almost knowing less than the passengers
- stranded passengers, still no service

Sure, it is easy to criticize eurostar by just summing up all things that went wrong. But than again, I'm in a bad mood, and this is my blog.

Empty studios no more

One of my current practical assignments is to record and mix a multi-track recording with drums in them. This can be your own music with someone playing drums over it, but I tought the experience would be much more realistic if I brought in a band.

So I posted ads, went to some shows and got me some contacts.
After a lot of mailing I got "the david vegas project" into my practical night-session, they are a two-piece band, so that seemed a nice way to get into it.

We recorded 4 songs in 2 8-hour sessions, this may not seem a lot, but believe me, it is.
(consider having to solve all the technical problems, trying to get them to play in time, dealing with the band in general, doing guitar and vocal overdubs, setting up all mics and channels, setting up headphone mixes, patching everything in, setting up pro tools, etc etc)

There where some minor problems with the headphones due to interference inside the amplifier (not really our fault, the headphone amp is just rubbish), and some channels broke down on the mixing desk itself, but we managed pretty easily (it's all a matter of running down all 10 possible faulty elements in the signal path :) ).

(action picture, a lot on my head)

(miced-up drums)

(guitarplayer/singer's area and inevitable spaghetti of cabling near connection point)

(guitar cabinet in separate booth to avoid spill)

(sontronics helios valve condensor for vocal overdubbing)


(patchbay to send all signals to the desk and headphones)

On another note,
It's very cold in London at the moment.

(personal ice-walk of death at my doorstep)

Steorn

They've been on it for years,
failed demos, massive amounts of gossip, debunking etc.

Wonder whether they will soon be unmasked..
Maybe this time they will actually make something work.

We'll see.
Still fascinating stuff.

http://www.steorn.com/

Americana

Maybe a bit outdated, sometimes a bit manipulated.
But still striking..







via

Touristing

Did another trip through London, this time with flatmate F.
We're the only ones left in flat 26 as B. has already left for the Christmas holiday.


Touched the big egg that's placed in the middle of london's bussines center, had another look at tate modern, did some markets, walked chinatown...

This time there actually was a camera that worked.
Makes quite a difference when trying to blog about it.




This one is for I. Ceulemans :)

Cheers.

(expecting visitors in t minus 7 days!)

From the vaults

A photo I've been meaning to post for quite a while, but I never got to it.
It's from my weekend in Belgium, which dates from November (thank you very much(!), Hulldown).

I've left the Chiro behind, but nevertheless I still feel quite bonded with it, as is has been a part of my life for about 16 years or so..

Anyway, I got to do a bit of a 'guest-appearance', which was a very strange but nice thing to do actually.


So, I told the assembled Chiro from the Hei that nobody in London seems to know what Chiro is, or what it is all about. You could call it scouting, but that's a bit of a different thing. You could call it boy-scouting, but that has got quite a lot of negative meaning to it.
So, I asked to take a picture of Chiro Heikant so I would be able to show Londeners what Chiro is all about.

The result can be seen below.
Too bad my camera lens isn't of the best quality and not everybody that should be on there is on it. But you get the gesture.

Masters of war - Bob Dylan

Couldn't find the live version which is even better, but this will do.

It keeps on surprising me how much hate Dylan was able to put in this song.

TEDxLondon

So I got the chance to go to TEDxLondon!

And so I went, got there Just in time, pouring rain and extended diner times almost interfered.(not my photo)
Very nice organisation, very nice venue.
An inspirational talk by Ben Keene. He started his own 'tribe' on an island without anything to start with but the idea itself.
Chris Williams talked about the use of computers in engineering, and why they aren't always positive for creative thinking.
Rachel Wingfield spoke about how growing food in city environment can be a positive experience.
Michael McGrath talked about micro-loans that help poor women start up there own little businesses in Africa. Not the most sexy talk, but probably about the project with the most practical results.

I could go into depth about there talks, but that probably wouldn't be much fun to read. Here you can find more info if interested.

Anyhow, I felt privileged to be able to attend the evening as it had the whole TED atmosphere going on. That and the fact that the whole TEDx-movement will only keep on growing. Tickets where very hard to get (sold out minutes afte being available), hope I will be able to get hold of some again in the future.



On another topic,
As a lot of people probably have heard of by now, I've recently had the unpleasant experience of been robbed (cell phone, mp3-player, some money). I was somehow able to talk the robbing duo into returning my wallet as my ID (and other cards) where in there. I normally never carry my ID but I needed it the day before.
Anyway, no real harm done. It did leave me a bit shaky though, you don't expect knives to show up, especially as it happened just outside my college-pub. But I do think I'll be alright, it makes you more suspicious about others in public places though. In a strange way I actually feel kind of sorry for the duo. Cheers to all the people who got my mind of things.

I was going to post the whole story on how the pub owner got in touch with the police afterwards and on how it took me several trips down-town to get hold of somebody from the robbery-squad. But that's not really the point so I left it out.
The real point being the fact they (very likely) arrested the robbers (because of the fact robbing girl-boy-duos are very rare). So, thumbs up to the Islington Robbery squad. It doesn't really solve problems, but it surely ain't a bad thing either.


On another note,
I made pizza, there's no such thing as too much cheeze.

On yet another note,
It feels like it's freezing cold these days, walking around London.

On another note,
I'm of for another practical session night-shift.