Montreal: Day One In Review

Had a really exhausting two days; 33 hours to get to Montreal and spent yesterday bustling about apartment hunting and purchasing some essentials. Right now it's 7am and I'm wide awake thanks to falling deeply asleep after a "nap" :P

Singapore To Montreal
I took British Airways flights this time. Wanted to go with SIA, but it seems they don't fly to Montreal. Plus, the company arranging flights for my company appears to favour BA, so went with them. One thing nice about BA's luggage policy at this time of writing is that unlike SIA, have a more liberal hand luggage policy. If it can be lifted by yourself, fits into the onboard luggage size and fitted into the overhead storage (but not above 23kg) - you can bring it along. Unlike SIA where I had be very stingy with what I put into my camera bag.

BA's flight has a 23kg per luggage policy, go above that and you get hit with an overweight luggage policy. Extra baggage counts can be bought online for £34. I had two pieces of luggage, my saxophone and my main luggage, so that worked out very well. Considering my sax only weighed 6kg lol.

With SIA, on my flight from London to Singapore, I had 1 extra piece of luggage (8kg) and I was told it would be £50 per KG (really?!). I had to send that home via excess baggage. Believe me, it was painful.

Flight wise, I managed to snag a window seat on my first leg of the flight; was supposed to be in the middle but the dude in the window seat insisted on having an aisle seat. He found one, I got a window seat woo!

I can't remember the last time I flew BA, or if I ever flew BA at all. Entertainment units were all touch screen now, worked pretty well though I think touchscreen could be calibrated better - on both flights I had to touch the buttons lower than expected for them to register. Managed to watch Cloud Atlas and Wreck It Ralph. Tried watching Twilight, but it's just not my thing, wolves or not.

Arriving in London at 5am after a 12 hour flight is not too bad, but with over 12hours to wait for my connecting flight to Montreal, the camera bag began to weigh me down. Unlike Changi Airport which had these little carts to push your luggage along, Terminal 5 at Heathrow didn't have 'em. To be fair, I think given the layout of heathrow, those luggage carts would hurt the flow of traffic. Still, this means I'm probably going to sell my camera bag - as I don't use it for photography related purposes at all - and just get a roll-on luggage for 'em.

Internet access at Heathrow Terminal 5 is £1 per 9 minutes, Changi has free terminals giving 15 minute slots per use.

Given the extremely long wait, I'd planned to get a shower. However, it was only available in Terminal 4. This wasn't as straightforward as I thought, needing to ask the airport staff to arrange to be brought to a different part of the airport for the transfers to Terminal 4.

After arriving at Terminal 4, after some quizzing around found that the showers were only available after immigration >.> So, I had to go through immigration. Thankfully it was a painless process. Once out (lol), I found that the showers were out of towels for sale!

Bought some thick tissue paper at the convenience store nearby, and that sorted me out. There are two shower rooms in Terminal 4, not particularly big and if you are bringing like full size luggage, good luck, there won't be much space. There is a hot shower, and shower foam, that's about it.

After that, a transit using the heathrow express to Terminal 5, went through security again (I had the luck to be randomly inspected, and had every single piece of gear scrutinized lol.), then prepared for the long wait for my Montreal flight.

The montreal flight was uneventful, I'd slept through most of it, missing one of the meals actually. Got through customs and immigration without a hitch.

Here's where the challenge rating increases. Montreal is part of Quebec, and French is their main language. Wherever I go, I hear french being spoken, though I occasionally hear English and lots of the chinese here speak Mandarin.

Given that I've only been learning it for the last few weeks or so (shoulda started earlier), I can only understand mostly greetings. Some places I went to didn't seem too friendly when I asked "Bonjour, parlez vous Anglais?", although some places like the Fido shop, were perfectly friendly in either language. (I picked up a Nexus 4, but that will be another story).

So, what I did yesterday was visit two apartments, explored downtown montreal, got my Opus card for STM travel, got a new phone - prepaid sims appear to be very expensive so decided to get a contract as the release terms were very friendly, just pay back the cost of the phone. And the longer you've been on the contract, the lower the cost to pay back.

One thing about the prices here is that the tax is not shown on the menu. I was quite surprised the first time I got some food (Burger King, would you believe it) and the bill was higher than expected. New thing learned. Oh, the BK breakfast in Montreal easily trumps the BK in London or Singapore :P

Ok due to sleeping way early yesterday, I woke up at 6am-ish, and am now frantically typing away. Things to do shortly would be to take the trains at rush hour to experience how bad (or good) it is. Yesterday I was on several trains about 5.30pm, and 7.30-ish, and while packed, was not sardine type packed in Singapore. The train cabins here are smaller than Singapore, but I felt larger than the trains used in the Tube.

If the rush hour traffic is bearable, I'll likely get a place close to a metro stop and commute. Else I'll hunt down a nice place near Mile End, probably around the Laurier station.

Day 2, here we go......

DIY Clip On Saxophone Mic

I am currently moving to Montreal for work, and as such have sold of lots of things I bought in the UK, and most of my music gear has been sold, including all my microphones and audio interface etc. What I do have left is my Zoom H1, and the Audio Technical ATR-3350 lapel mic.

This mic is an omni mic and supposedly does not have the proximity effect like the other cardioid mics I've owned in the past. To use it with the sax, I've followed the suggestion by Pete Thomas and built my own kind of holder for the lapel mic. Using cheapo clothes clip, I found some "aluminum wire" that is evidently used by bonsai enthusiats (to shape bonsais as they grow) at Daiso. The wire loops perfectly through the holes in the clip, and it is very flexible and easy to position the mic.

The clothes clip could be improved as it kept slipping - no rubber grip like Pete's - but it worked well enough for my recording purposes. Sadly, as my sample drive is still on a ship to Montreal, I don't have a backing tracked recorded. Will put up samples when I've settled down!

That said, I will be boarding my flight in a few hours. Woo!

Yong Nuo RF-602TX stopped working.....

... and the problem it seems, was just a bad contact! The +ve contact got bent (somehow) during shipping, so there was simply no current flow between the battery and the contact. Just bending it into place helps. Woohoo! And I thought I had to buy a replacement.

I must admit that I thought it would be a good excuse to upgrade to a ttl flash trigger. Thank you google and forums!

Camtasia for Mac & Houdini

I've been testing out Houdini 12.5 and Camtasia on OSX, and here are some things I've found. First, recording at the max speed of 30fps is just not doable. Houdini becomes extremely choppy. Using the "Medium" speed of 15fps allows for  capture at 1280x800 and only slight hint of performance drop.

Next, the thing I noticed is that the loudness of the recorded clips may not be as loud as I hoped when played back on speakers. Many times I need to bump it up to max, and still it isn't too audible. And horrors, when new email arrives......

What I do right now is to set my microphone record levels at a decent level, so that it doesn't clip when speaking normally. Once in Camtasia's editing mode, I apply a Dynamic Processor (under Audio FX) onto the audio tracks that need them. The main control I tune is just the make up gain. At the defaults of 20 (db?), and I tweak that so as not to be too loud... you might want to read about dynamic range compression, and youtube has lots of audio compressor tutorials that will work with camtasia.

Export wise, I have observed that the default Share -> Export produces exports quite fast, but the file sizes tend to be humongous! For example, I had recorded a 4 minute clip, that Export spat out very fast, but at 90mb. Oooook. I then exported a full length clip at over an hour with the advanced export, and it was... 300mb. Eeeeyup.

The settings I used in export include using the H264 export at 15fps, multi-pass, with AAC audio. Oh, this is under "Export to Quicktime Movie".

At the time of this post, my system specs are:
2009 MBP, OSX 10.6.8. 2.4ghz cpu with 8gb ram.
Houdini 12.5.316.22
Camtasia for Mac 2.3.0 (77283)

More Kindle thoughts.

Ever since acquiring the Kindle Fire HD, I've actually not touched my Kindle Keyboard. Ever. Till today. I had errands to run that I knew I would have to wait about. I thought about bringing out the HD, but it is not as easy to carry around without a bag - the regular kindle slips into my jacket's pocket - and as I was going to be doing lots of walking, didn't want to have a weight on me the whole day.

And it was great! The kindle whilst still sizable, is just so light and I'd totally forgotten how good reading a book on it just is. One thing I am very pleased about both of them is content. I'd picked up some books to read, and in seconds, the kindle had it downloaded. The fire had to have the individual books be clicked upon to be downloaded, but not much of an issue.

I see them as very different entertainment devices (I almost put tool... but I think I could live without either of them...) - the kindle really as a damned good ebook reader. Well, within reason, given it's black and white. Also, factor in its light weight, good size, and a battery that lasts for days if not weeks. Worldwide 3G is great too.

The fire OTOH is really more for content consumption and tablet gaming, and ebook reading second. I won't advocate watching movies on there, but snugged up in bed in the dark with music playing and reading a book or enjoying a light time killing game. It is a winner.

I came across the paperwhite kindles at a stationery shop yesterday and whilst it looked interesting, somehow the touch screen did not appeal to be. Perhaps if I actually owned one I'd change my mind. But hopefully my kindle will last a good long while as I really enjoy it!

Unity + Kindle Fire HD

Quick test, took about two hours from purchase to get all the downloads and sdks installed to what you see on the vid. The main issue I encountered was the rigid bodies going to sleep - didn't know about them and took awhile to find out info about that. Else everything else was pretty straightforward; copied the sdk to my home dir, set up paths, and just one hot key to install the game on the kindle.

A few other thoughts on the kindle fire - it's really nice to be able to read a book and listen to mp3s at the same time. The regular kindle can do it via the experimental modes, but it's nowhere as slick. Another aspect about book reading is page turning. The kindle has two big physical buttons on either side of the screen that allows me to page forward and backwards. Very convenient, especially if held one handed. The kindle fire has the left and right "sides" of the virtual page set up for backwards and forward page turning respectively. So if I accidentally turned more pages than I wanted, I'd to touch the left side of the screen.

An hour with the Kindle Fire HD

Got a new Kindle Fire HD in the mail, just to see what practical use I might find for a tablet as well as to explore exporting unity to android.

A bit under the weather so I'll just list out my thoughts:

- Great screen
- Very solid feel, with a matte finish.
- Speakers seem to have pretty good bass.
- Seems pretty responsive
- Kindle's white charger works with the Kindle Fire.

Things I found odd
- Rearward Speakers

For reading purposes in reasonable lighting conditions, I still say the regular kindle has the edge. The Kindle Fire is just more tiring on my eyes, even though the fonts are sooo beautiful. The only advantage I can think of is low light reading - here the kindle fire shines. But on the flip side, it is quite weighty - the kindle I can hold in one hand for extended periods. Not so much with the fire. Oh oh, I can view the covers in full colour, that's nice :3

Another thing I liked about the Kindle Fire is the content I've purchased on Amazon are now available on the tablet (they still need to be downloaded though). It's pretty fast on a wifi connection, and listening to the music I've purchased in the past being streamed in is really damned convenient.

Other things like youtube and soundcloud work, which is great. Browsing on a tablet is a new experience for me though - some sites that require click and drag just don't work. Boo.

To Zanarkand | 2013

Getting rid of my digital piano, so here's one last piece on it. This is To Zanarkand, played in full. Took nearly half a year to be able to play the double speed section.

3 Part Invention | Minor No. 2

Muhahaha after months of work on inventions, my teacher deems me good enough to move on to Fugues :3

Argh Firefox 17

No idea what is wrong with it, it's making my cpu utilization sky high, and it's all extensions disabled on an empty page. I really hate stuff like this when updating linux. Time for opera then.

Star of the County Down

Quick piece, demonstrating my Generation Bb Tin Whistle :3

Side note, some of my brass whistles tarnish;the smell of raw brass is eww-tastic, exactly like handling a raw brass railing. Nickel plated or aluminium whistles for me from now on!

Buster Wings | Playthrough Video

New breath sensors arrived :D

Muahahaha! After months of waiting, the MPX5010GX I've been waiting for have been restocked! YES! On the flip side, even though I also have acquired a low pass filter for use with these babies, I have no way of checking how the low pass filters respond. So, I'll just go ahead with connecting 'em breath sensors to the Teensy directly for now.

I actually am waiting on the delivery of a oscilloscope by Xprotolabs, with that I can finally see what kind of signals I'm receiving.

In other news, london is boringly wet and drab. I have been wanting to go out to the zoo as well as play my whistles out in the park, but with this kind of weather... meh.

Buster Wings | Bullet Hell Prototype

So, I finished this little exploration into Unity3D last night. Next: food. Sleep.

Play the game here!
(Windows and OSX)

Cheetah 3D. Mine.

So, day two of my year end holidays begins with.... a very slow day. A day of debauchery of gaming, food coma-ing and lazing about. It lasted a few hours, and I went back into looking at Unity3D again. Version 4 has been released recently, got it and..... being the utter newb I am, have zero idea what's the diff between that and the earlier 3.5 I had played with earlier. Maybe I should read their marketing blurbs.

In any case, after fooling around inside Unity - it seems like having been bumped around by the hdk and all helped alot with understanding how the OO works in Unity with C#. Of course, I finally hit a bump of trying to import animation in. Because I don't actually have an animation package. Houdini's out as mentioned before; apprentice doesn't have FBX export. Once more, I tread into the open source waters and downloaded blender. Again.

I tried, I really tried, but the basic navigation is really, really just non-intuitive. For me, that is a fact. Heck, even the dude IN the official video tutorial mentions it is not very useful for people coming from other packages.

Enter: Cheetah 3D. (Again :P)

The last time I tried Cheetah was version 5... ish. I tried Version 6 today, and whilst it still isn't the easiest to pick up, out of the box, I could navigate and figure out stuff more or less.

Heck, I was rendering with caustics and AO very soon after that. So you know what, I hit the buy button, because the demo version of Cheetah could not save or export, and I really wanted to get assets into unity.

Shaders are just drag and drop. Lots of options there, and there is sort of a master "Material" with all the parameters available to play with. A separate render manager appears when you hit render, which is nice.

A very nice thing about Cheetah 3D is that the native file format (.jas), is natively supported by Unity. Just by saving the model in the /assets directory, alt-tabbing over to unity will have it show up on the fly. Fbx should do the same thing as well.

Animation also appears to just work. I setup an animation "rig" in Cheetah - a box with bones and skinning basically - and the animated mesh appeared in Unity without a hitch. There are the usual assortment of tools to paint weights per joint and blend shapes, pose tools - didn't get too far though, as what I'm doing doesn't involve skinning.

Can't wait to see how the light maps import into unity :D

Weather and Whistles

It's warmed up over the last few days. So much, that when I went on an errand today, I only wore a light jacket over a t-shirt. Hope it keeps up :) It is still wet (it's drizzling outside as I type) and dreary though, and everything's like grey and dull.

I've been picking up tin whistles lately, and my latest acquisition today is a Generation Bb whistle. It's the biggest one on the left, and costs about the same as the smaller Generation F whistle on the right.

I think the Bb whistle is the one I should have started off on. It's very nicely sized, with no need to switch to the piper's grip. The tone is mellow, and carries itself well without being piercing.

The whistle in the middle, is a Feadog Pro-D. I think it's my favourite whistle of the lot for the moment. It plays really well, and feels really good under the fingers. I'm arranging an irish jig at the moment and I think I'll play it with the Feadog.

Life of Pi

Wow. What can I say. This is storytelling. Something in my heart broke. And yet, I feel that I'm missing *something* about the story. Like some major point that only struck home halfway and I'm left reeling from the blow. What, what what?

Sigh.

Flutes flutes flutes

More details on my music blog :)

Penny for your thoughts?

Bought this little baby off Denmark Street today for the low low price of £5 - it's a Generation Tin Whistle (aka Penny Whistle) in the key of F.

This is a marvelous piece of kit and I would wish that when we were kids in school, to have this replace the soprano recorder instead. Having only 6 tone holes, it's waaay easier to hold them down tight, versus the two tiny holes at the far end of a recorder.

This tin whistle has F as its lowest note and plays the F major diatonic scale right out of the box; starting from the next note up it's G dorian, so improvising over Gm is easy, and unlike choromatic instruments, it's just lifting up one finger for the next note up.

Played it today in my office's back stairwell, and produces a very nice rounded tone. The long reverb tail in the stairwell is just bliss. Notes take seconds to die out and mix in beautifully with the newer notes. Ah, the real thing (tm). I only managed perhaps A above the octave break, and it was very easy to get to the next octave by overblowing.

Unlike my other flutes, this little one has a fairly small air requirement, and I could sustain a note for a fair while - plus putting in extra air means overblowing it.

I also tried vibrato on it, could do but quite difficult. I think it's due to the short length of the body.

Also, as it is a keyless instrument, it is quite critical to cover all the holes properly with your fingers. The F whistle is actually quite small for my paws (for some reason I might have read the key of F was used for titanic, but I'm probably wrong - but that's why I bought it in F) and my fingers are all squished up side by side. Should have got a regular D, or even the larger Bb whistles.

Distant Shores: Recorder Trio

Out of the blue, VSL released a new Recorders library! I'm very glad I didn't pick up recorders from other companies as I have been itching sooo bad to get a set of recorders.

I've played them to my latest 3 part counterpoint practice. Enjoy!