The Big Issue

The Big Issue is aimed at helping homeless people get back on their feet, by giving them a legitimate means of earning income from sales of this magazine. Each copy of the magazine costs £2.50, and sellers keep £1.25.

Today I met a friendly fellow near where I am taking my piano lessons, and resolved to ask him a bit more about how he finds selling this magazine, and if it helps.

According to this seller, who was once homeless, selling The Big Issue has changed his life from being once homeless to someone who now has a roof over his head.

He sells seemingly 80 to 100 copies a week, and on a good week, perhaps a dozen more.

He says that it was difficult when starting out. New sellers are simply not sure how this would work out for them, and they have no confidence that this would actually really help them. People totally ignoring them is also a major bash against their self esteem. (He also mentions that it would help ALOT even if we were to smile and greet The Big Issue sellers, even if we do not purchase a magazine.)

For this gent I was speaking to, it turned out well for him. Most of his sales are on weekdays, with the working crowd passing to and fro the train stations and their offices. Saturday is a quiet day, and he takes Sunday as his day off.

In the future when I meet more big issue sellers, I'll be sure to spare them a moment to acknowledge them, even if I'd already picked up my weekly copy. I truly hope that after this gets them off the street, that they will be able to build an even better future for themselves.

Sick and depressed, or is it depressed and sick?

Have you ever had one of those stretches where you know you are sick, but well enough to head to work? Well I'm having one of them and it is annoying my toenails off. Ok, maybe not my toenails but I am just. Not. Feeling. Good.

I feel tired and have low energy. Heck, it feels like after a swim session at the gym, whole body aching.

Argh, need some downtime this weekend.

It's also affecting my mood, I think I'm feeling alot of down 'cause of this. The best part is, I'm feeling worst *after* work. Like my fingers are somewhat numb as I type this. I'll bet it'll be as usual - I wake up bright and cheery (I love the early sunshine btw, it's like nice and bright 7-ish), feeling all good, then it all starts to go downhill late afternoon :( Tired tired tired. Ack.

Days like this I wish I can just take off and sleep.

Death

Short piece I arranged for the ocremix FF6: Balance and Ruin compo. This is the piece of music that plays when the party gets KO'd, and I've titled it "Lied für die Toten"("Song For The Dead" in German).

I finished 22nd of 28. Very pleased with my progress over the last half a year. :)

Prometheus

Friggin' awesome effects. Like really friggin awesome. There was nothing not perfect in the entire show. For some reason, this flick reminds me of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. TSW was groundbreaking on many levels, and Prometheus takes cg worlds even further.

It's like FF7, then comparing the original against the FF7's PS3 tech demo.

One thing I'm really glad about this show is that it is more sci-fi than horror. I didn't watch any of the trailers, only knew this was sort of a prequal to Alien or something. Truth be told, I was cowering behind my jacket for many of the scenes, but it was more the gore factor versus the pop-up horror I was expecting.

Whew.

-- spoilers ahead --

Lots of odd things that I want answered though, like the geologist, why was he still alive and kicking butt? And why was there no super friggin' awesome cannon mounted on the prometheus? And why didn't tony stark come to save the day? Ok nevermind.

Congrats to all the artists that worked on it, this is just totally stunning.

New macs drop features, but will we miss them?

New macbooks evidently have been announced, and for us who use our macs for audio work, several things have been dropped from their newer "Retina" macs. I'm not directly affected by it, but computers will be upgraded when time moves on, and there are some features I would miss.

First, there is no firewire port. Many audio interfaces and external drives run off firewire, and whilst there is a thunderbolt -> FW dongle, that's another piece of equipment to keep track of. One also questions any side effects on latency when running FW equipment through thunderbolt.

Next: Lack of a cd drive. I mean, come on, if I buy CDs from a live show, how am I supposed to convert it? And even though I rarely burn disks or watch dvds, I still do. I was also thinking of getting one of those optibays to stuff an extra hdd/sdd into my mac. Can't do that with the new ones. Mainly, I use my DVD drive to install sample libraries. EastWest/Quantum Leap Symphonic Orchestra comes on more than 10 dvds for goodness sake. Just bought some VSL stuff, don't know how many dvds those will come on.

Damn you apple for OSX's Core Audio that works so well :P

Crummy weather

Last week we had pretty awesome weather here in London. Blue skies, nice and warm, perfect T-shirt weather.

And this week. This, feels like Autumn! In the first week of June! It is 12 degrees C outside, I'm thankful I brought out my winter jacket - and the skies are a uniform patch of grey. Boo! What's worst is I'm at work and the sims are taking awhile on the farm. Bwa.