http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2007/09/28/half-workers-snooze-job

(I’m not referring to the snoozing bit, just fyi)

I’ve been looking for a Winamp plugin that actually did compression / limiting etc PROPERLY for a LONG time… and on checking out winamp.com recently, I finally found it.

It’s rather humbly called “STEREO TOOL”, rather than “FECKING GREAT PLUGIN WOT CAN MAKE YOUR OUTPUT SOUND ALL TASTY, LIKE” and if (like me) you’re a bit of a saddo and like to have your songs sounding as though they’re playing on a radio station, you really should go here and download it.

Couple it with Sqrsoft’s very tasty Advanced Crossfading Output plugin and you’ll be laffing all the way to the bank (where you’ll take out some money in order to buy that £100 boxed set of old Radio Caroline Jingles…)!

Pat

P.S. I’m actually interested in this for some podcast / online radio ideas I’ve got, not because I’m a sad case. Well, not only because I’m a sad case…

The old one was doing my nut in. I’ve also changed the root of squage.com. Look, I was bored this evening, ok?

It’s not a permanent look… there’s a rebrand happening at some point or other, now that I’ve got “CSS the Missing Manual” and “The Principles of Beautiful Web Design” in my possession…

Toodles,

Pat

P.S. Facebookers, you might want to look at where this post came from in order to it to make any sense :-)

On Saturday, I DJed a wedding reception.

As per my usual “hmm, I’ve not DJed in a while, I’d better check what to play and that I’ve got everything” pre-DJing tasks were performed throughout the day, which went pretty well. After a quick trip into Brentwood to grab the lights and PA that I’d hired, I headed off to the wedding reception venue, about 15 minutes from home.

All was going well - I’d got there with ample time to spare (I wanted to do that on the off-chance that I’d forgotten something (perish the thought…)) - so much so that, as the post-wedding proceedings were running late (that’s pretty standard in my experience), I was invited in to have some food with my mates (one of whom’s mum was the bride). This was really lovely of them - and had me in a nice happy mood ready to get going with the set.

Once dinner was finally over, it was getting rather late so I needed to get set up asap so that there’d actually be an evening’s partying to be had!

Alas on finally getting the equipment set up, I realised I’d left my laptop at home.

Not too much of an issue, you’d think. After all, I’d got the CD players, my CDs, the amp+speakers and lighting. Why need the laptop anyway, right? Well, imagine this scenario: you have your entire playlist worked out and in an Excel Spreadsheet. You’ve got a list of ALL your songs, with the CDs they’re on in a handy Excel Spreadsheet. Oh and you’ve managed to download a copy of the First Dance, which you didn’t own on CD, and by the way decided not to bother actually burning it onto a CDR.

Now imagine that this is on the laptop that’s at your home, rather than at the gig.

Yeah.

That was luckily the worst part of the evening, although it remained a bit stressy after that: once I’d rushed home and back, I had the laptop ready to plug in - but of course people saw I was back so expected tunes immediately, so I had to find and select songs inbetween plugging the laptop in, getting it all set up nicely to use - oh and rigging the lighting.

At least it was worth it. I’d managed to keep people… er… close to the dance floor all night. Bit of a tricky audience, but hey - that’s what happens sometimes. It did mean that I spent a fair amount of the evening stressing, thinking “Shit, my playlist I spent hours on isn’t working… and neither are these tried and tested classics… what the HELL do I play next?”, though.

Needless to say by the end of the night I was ker-nackered… but bloody glad I was DJing a wedding reception at a nearby town and not, say, 90 minutes drive away. Now THAT would’ve been interesting…

Pat

Hey there!

A couple of weeks have gone by and Pat’s not been writing any blogs.

Is it because he’s really busy? No!
Is it because he’s had nothing to report? No!
Is it because he’s lazy? But of course! (Oi, it’s been my first few weeks back at work, I’ve been tired! - Pat) So are you saying you’re not lazy? (Well… - Pat) Thought not.

Anyway, I thought it was about time a blog was done, so allow me to fill you in on the highlights of Pat’s past few weeks:

• Being at Work
  After the initial shock to the system, Pat seems to have got back into the swing of things - getting to know his job role properly and remembering all the company processes etc, etc.

  He’s also managed to slip back into the old habits, with such things as the regular “lunch in the canteen, at the same table as ever, then a walk around the building” routine seems to still be very much in fashion! Still, he’s been mixing things up by doing such outrageous things as “getting a jacket potato from the shop across the road” and, even more crazily, “”lunch in the canteen, at the same table as ever, then a walk around the building on a SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT ROUTE”. He’s living the dream.

  Amusingly, as he’s a “new starter”, he was also taken through health and safety stuff and the fire evacuation procedure with HR today. It appears this featured such classics as “if you need to get your monitor moved, you should get technical servic-oh, right, yes, that’s you. You’ll need to do heavy lifting trai-oh, you did, 3 years ago. Oh, right…”. Hooray for beaurocracy!

• Going to the gym
  Amazingly, given it’s Pat we’re talking about, he’s been able to keep up the “go to the gym three times a week” thing for a full three weeks now. It’s not really started to show, yet, but that’s a) because it’s early on (Pat’s reason) and b) because Pat keeps eating crap and drinking beer (the real reason)… still, he’s not gaining weight, so that’s something!.

• Getting early nights
  Mainly due to the “having to get used to actually doing work again” thing, Pat’s been surprisingly good at getting to bed in good time for a decent night’s sleep on most evenings… well, apart from a few that are listed below:

• Going to see FAITHLESS!
  Something Pat had been wanting to do for YEARS was see Faithless. He’d actually given up on the idea, assuming that, well, they’ve pretty much had their day now and will probably never tour again.

  How wrong he was. And how damned happy he was too. He and Lucy (sister of Vanessa from Uni) had a rather amazing evening at Brixton Academy listening to the most fecking awesome concert ever, raising their hands in the air and dancing around like a fool for such a long period of time that they couldn’t actually walk following sitting on the tube for 20 minutes afterwards (ok, so that might’ve just been Pat)…

  In short: Faithless were f***ing amazing. Unfortunately, due to not wanting to destroy yet another camera, Pat decided not to bring his - but luckily he was able to capture the full scale of the amazing light show (lasers and all) with his BRILLIANT camera phone:

  

• Going to Wemb-er-ley
  Despite not being the world’s biggest football fan, Pat fancied seeing the new Wembley -sorry, Wemb-er-ley - staduim in all its glory, so he went to watch England play Russia. Bizzarely, Pat appears to transform from a “Person who really couldn’t give two stuffs about football” to a “chanting, shouting, clapping, cheering football fan” when placed in a large, fooball fan-filled bowl with some grass in the middle of it. Luckily he wasn’t out of place, unlike a bloke a row and a few seats away, who spent most of the night not watching the match, shouting at the crowd for not standing up all the time - and almost falling over in a drunken stupor on multiple occasions. Hooray!

  Pat enjoyed the match (helped by the fact that it was actually a game played by England that didn’t end miserably) - and the sheer size of Wembley stadium.

  He also forgot his proper camera. As before, THERE IS NO WAY YOU CAN TELL:

  

• Partying Like It’s 1999
  Yep, drinking snakebite, going to Warwick University Student’s Union and wondering if the phrase “Party like it’s 1999″ will become really dated and sound stupid in a few years’ time. Pat’s been out “on the lash” a couple of times since being back at work, the highlights being:

  Paul’s wedding reception
  Set in the lovely surroundings of rural North Essex, Paul-from-work’s wedding reception was had inside a large white marquee, with an excellent live band, a bar with lots of beer and, well, a fair amount of drinking from various people:

  
  

  Obviously Pat remained sober throughout, and definitely didn’t end up chasing Elaine around the dance floor with a very frightening, drunk version of the walk from the “Amarilo” video. Definitely not.

  Elaine’s leaving do
  Pat assures me that Elaine leaving work was nothing to do with him chasing her around a dance floor (Not that that happened! - Pat) Oh, er, indeed. Elaine’s moving on to pastures new, and so fellow work mates celebrated / commiserated by having a lovely evening chatting, eating a delicious meal and, er, drinking. A lot. There are photos… but

  
  

• DJing
  Only the once - a couple of days ago, in fact. Pat wants to have a special rant about some of the “fun” that this entailed, so I’ll leave that to him in a future post.

That should just about cover it. Oh, also, he and his friends from home managed to come first in the pop quiz at his local pub last night. Live the dream.

Toodles,

Pat

On Wednesday I signed up across the road from work. Yesterday I went for an hour long induction. Today I had my first session.

Yep. I’ve joined the gym.

No, before you scoff at me and point out that I’ve tried the gym regime a number of times in the past, with varying levels of failure, allow me to point out a few differences:

• I’ve got a couple of gym-legend workmates giving me advice and encouragement through each session
• I’m paying for it now, so there’s an obligation to get value for money
• I’m going before work starts. All it requires is getting a reasonably early night and then the early wake up isn’t actually too bad - and even if it is, after 30 minutes in the gym I’m already feeling much, much more awake and ready for the day. Also, it means I can go out in the evening without having to worry about arriving late/skipping an after-work gym session to accommodate it. Oh and finally, it means I don’t spend the whole of my working day thinking of excuses why I shouldn’t go to the gym, as in previous “after work” gym attempts…

If I’ve (just about) convinced you that this will work this time then that’s good.

Let’s just hope it’s actually true. :-)

Toodles,

Pat a.k.a. “Fruit Cake”
(Apparently “Beef Cake” wasn’t appropriate for a veggie…)

This may come as a surprise to those of you who I’ve not spoken to for a while. I’ve gone back to my former employer.

But wait! Before you say “Hey, what the hell?”, allow me to explain a few things.

Firstly, it’s a good place to work.

One of the things I found through talking to the myriad of people I met on my travels, plus also through speaking to long time friends about their experiences, was that there are plenty of things that my former-sorry, current employer provides and does that exceed many other companies. I’ll not go into details, but I heard plenty of stories from people about their employers that made me think “Jeez, how do they get away with treating their employees like that?”.

Essentially, I’ve been able to get some perspective on it all.

Secondly, I’m viewing this as a positive thing for me.

It’s going to provide me with the funds I need to have a good lifestyle outside work, spend my free time on things I enjoy doing (such as the cartoon bits and pieces, radio stuff etc) with no financial pressures on them, plus save up money for any future plans I might have.

It also means I can start going down the gym with James and Andreas from work. Having people to go with, keep you motivated and help you plan your goals etc is invaluable when it comes to things you don’t necessarily enjoy doing – e.g. running until you think you’re going to die, lifting weights until you think you’re going to die… you get the idea :-)

But, anyway, there we go. I’m back. To a clean desk:

So far it’s been an easy few days, mainly because I’m still waiting on most of my IDs to get sorted out so I can actually start doing anything… but hey, it’s good to see everyone again and I’m looking forward to getting my teeth stuck into the projects I’ve got lined up.

I’m also looking forward to the 28th of September. A.k.a. Payday

Toodles,

Pat

I went to SW4 on Saturday, with Dirty Si, Clara and Dave TG.

“SW4? Hang on, isn’t that a post code? Why’s that exciting?”

Well, my friend, it is exciting because SW4 happens to be the post code for (a part of) Clapham Common!

“Yes, but that’s just a park. You could’ve just as well gone to, say, Hylands Park in Chelmsford and saved yourself the need to go into London!”

Ah yes, but on Saturday the aforementioned Common was host to the rather cool South West Four!

“What? Host to a post co-”-Look, just shut up a second.

South West Four is a day-long dance music festival, with such DJs as Paul Van Dyk, Judge Jules, Pete Tong and Matt Hardwick banging out the Phat Beats from 12pm to 9pm.

“Oh. Cool.”

Yes indeed. It was. There was an awful lot of dancing going on and a fair bit of beverage consumption - mostly all done under the hot summer sun that we’d all forgotten about. Without further ado, here’s a Good, Bad and Ugly review of SW4:

The Good

• Weather - Gorgeous sunshine all day, meaning that there was a great feel good vibe to the place… and apparently it meant that there were lots of rather, erm, pleasant sights. I didn’t notice, of course. (*cough*Bollocks*cough* - Squage)
  
• Matt Hardwick - A true trance legend, he played an extended set due to the next DJ turning up late, meaning we an extra 40 minutes of pure unadulterated trance classics. In the words of Dirty Si: what year is it? 1999! (cue cheers and mental dancing)
  
• Paul Van Dyk - Loads of classic Van Dyk anthems - and, oh, the new tune from Filo & Peri called, appropriately, Anthem. It’s fecking amazing.
  
• R ‘n’ B - Following on from an in joke between Dave and Dirty Si at a previous dance festival, which surrounded doing impressions of RNB fans (”Where is the RNB tents, man? I is needing me RNB innit!” and so on), we… er… did impressions of RNB fans. And sang some RNB tunes along to the classic dance tunes that, for example, Paul Van Dyk was playing out. It might’ve slightly annoyed some of the folks around us, but we didn’t really notice through laughing too loud…
• People - Lots of cool people we ended up dancing and chatting with throughout the day helped keep the mood high even when the volume might not have been…

The Bad

• Volume - For some reason, despite the fact that it was the MIDDLE OF THE AFTERNOON, the powers that be decided to turn the sound in the trance tent down to levels that, frankly, were not good to dance to. This happened half way through Matt Hardwick’s set, which was particularly annoying - although interesting to see what Matt Hardwick looks like when fully fuming! Geniusly, a few minutes after the sound was turned down Hardwick decided to counter the effect by whacking the volume up to 11 (eh? eh?) on his mixer and allowing us to enjoy loud (albeit a little distorted) dance tunes to the end of his set. Alas, on returning to see the Judge later, it was a little quiet and there was feck all bass. Very, very poor for a FECKING DANCE FESTIVAL. Talking to a couple of punters, it seems that it happened last year too and was to respect the residents around the park. I would understand this if, say, kids needed to get to sleep, but given that the whole bloody festival wrapped up at 9pm for that purpose I was left a) confused and b) a bit pissed off
• Weather - Due to the heat it was bloody boiling whilst dancing, which left me needing a bit of a rest after a couple of hours and meant I missed a fair bit of Ferry Corsten’s set.
• Bars - Under staffed, under skilled and under equipped. It took me 30 minutes to get served at one point.

The Ugly

We really should’ve just worn shorts.

On the whole, despite my gripes, it was a really good day - we had a lot of fun and a lot of drink, rounded off nicely by some late-night Dominos pizza.

I really am never going to lose weight, am I?

Toodles,

Pat

Minesweeper The Movie

“WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE CLOCK REACHES 999?”
“Nothing… you just suck.”

Pat

So, the Quiz Dating thing was actually good fun. Quite a few nice ladies there and with just my mate Mark and I on our “team” of blokes it made things more entertaining. And I tell you what, going abroad for a year is a great thing to talk about :-)

Anyway, alas I was not really making proper notes and so when it came to the day after I only remembered 2 of the girls who I’d liked, so just said “Yes” (via the Quiz Dating website’s “Yes/No”-atron) to them and “No” to t’others. Annoying, as I then received a “Yes” from someone I’d said “No” to… but because I said “No”, I can’t find out who it was.

The two “Yes”s received nothing. I never liked them anyway :-)

Next time I’ll just tick “Yes” for everyone. Or, say, make notes on who the hell the names related to on my sheet.

Pat