Richard's Blog

All over again

Dickie — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 01:03:56 +0000

Well hopefully this post will not reside on my blog like a bad smell. (the last Journal post was there for 2 and a half years, all on its lonesome) So anyway We have finally completed the 2009 Journal… a bit late I know, but life got in the way (these things happen)

We just have to wait for the printers (M R Printers of Horsham) to run off the 300 or so copies that we need, so I can then post off the members’ copies to them.

It’s been an “interesting” experience, but one that I have enjoyed. I really quite like playing around with design tools. There are so many ways you can do it, and you could spend years tweeking things trying to get them just right, but at the end of the day you need to stop and hand the darn thing over.

Well… I don’t think I will be doing next year’s but I do hope you all enjoy looking at this edition… Happy reading.

GBUK Journal 2009

Dickie — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 17:40:58 +0000

After rather a long time in the blogging wilderness I though I ought to update everyone on the state of the 2009 GBUK Journal.

Well all the pictures were in during December 2009 and I started on the main layout… All was going well, then Christmas hit! and January was a complete washout from an ability to work on the Journal point of view (for various reasons). So the upshot is, I have just started working on it again.

There is probably about 3-4 days more work to do, and then it can be handed over to the printers. Woo hoo

To whet your appetite, this edition has 80 (yes eight zero) artists’ work this time with some 230 pictures of beads and will be a 52 page A4 book. Please bear with me on this, but you will get your copies, they will be mailed out to you all as soon as I get them back from the printers.

Stay tuned !!

It’s all over…

Dickie — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 18:50:38 +0000

It’s done at last, the GBUK Journal (which I have been working on for the last 3 weeks) will be released at the GBUK beadfair on Sunday 26th August.

Rather useful photo search

Dickie — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 22:37:59 +0000

I have just found something while having browse about, and thought it was worthy of my first blog post in a long time.

Have you every tried in vain to find a photo that matches your new layout theme… or just needed to find a picture in a particular colour?

Well now you can with Yotophoto

Yotophoto is the first internet search engine for finding free-to-use photographs and images.

To use the colour search just type in a hex colour value into the advanced search page and voilà…

So for example, to match the colour of my company’s logo… a delightful shade of orange, I can search for #FF6600

I can think of some really good uses for this, plus the images are all royalty free…even better.

JavaScript Windows

Dickie — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 00:11:47 +0000

While browsing around looking for AJAX examples I found a rather interesting JavaScript class to show embedded windows within a browser.

http://blogus.xilinus.com/pages/javawin

Now this might come in useful for something I’m working on at work !!!

Also Found this one moofx from mad4milk

Plus some help here

Web 2.0

Dickie — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 09:16:21 +0000

Want to make you site look like Web 2.0 (do we even know what that is yet?)
This might be interesting to you

Listamatic

Dickie — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 09:07:00 +0000

Stuck on how to style your lists…?
Can’t seem to work out how to style a list to make it into a nice menu…?
Well help is at hand…

Enter Listamatic.

Basically it’s a really nice site that gives a whole load of examples (HTML and CSS) for many list styles and designs. Go have a look.

Glass beadmakers is live

Dickie — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 17:36:57 +0000

Well that’s it… it’s finally up and running, slightly later than intended, but the new GBUK website is finally up and running.

The final push was to sort out some discrepancies in the look and feel. (I’m sure there are some more), and also to make the site a bit easier to navigate.

More Pages will be added in the next few weeks, for starters we need a “How to do it” page, and a “What is Lampworking” page, so that should keep us busy for the next few weeks.

Mastering the Art

Dickie — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 13:26:50 +0000

Well it’s done… A bit late in blogging about it, but I was so tired yesterday.

The mastering took the grand total of 10 hours (or there abouts). Amazing when you consider that the CD we were mastering was only 45 minutes long.

We are very pleased with the result. I was very nervous before we went along, that the quality of our mix, and the general EQ was not workable, but I was pleasantly surprised and in fact I am very pleased with the result. It is far better than I could have possibly imagined. This makes it sound like we were working with rubbish, but I think that I am being hard on myself really. Listening to the CD objectively it really does sound rather good.
Loads of thanks goes to Graham Semark of Cyclone Music Productions again, for a stirling job, including carrying on till 20:00 so that we could finish off. Hat’s off to you mate. I also have to thank Sarah because without her the mix would not have been as good as it is !!

For some more pictures see Sarah’s post on her beadlog

Well I suppose it’s on with the rest of my jobs now… must get the GBUK web site up…!!!

Mixing it up

Dickie — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 20:28:10 +0000

Well… it’s almost done. The mixing of the CD we are working on has been completed. The whole thing was mixed in Sonar in fact it was also recorded entirely in Sonar… I must admit that I had a very nice experience with Sonar recording it… the PC was booted up in the morning, Sonar was opened and was used to record 17 tracks over about 10 hours with no crashes.. no resets or restarts needed !! It just did it’s stuff.
The mixing was equally non-problematic. It’s been a dream. Hard work (about 16 hours worth) but a dream none the less. (in fact if you add in all the tweeking I have been doing over the last year to the recording, then that time would probably go up to more like 50 hours !!)
As far as the quality of the mix is concerned, we will see when we turn up at Grahams to do the mastering, I’m sure there will be plenty of things that we notice on the day.

Because of that I am concidering bringing a laptop with Sonar installed, so that if there are any that are obviously wrong we can remix quickly then export again while he works on another song.

Well I think I need a rest now… the last two days have been manic… our daughter has been a star.. just happily playing on her own while we got on with the task in hand. (extra pocket money and Daddy time due !!)