28-Jan-08: E-mail

I don't want to sound like Family Guy's Peter Griffin but one issue that really, and I mean really, pisses me off these days is e-mail.

You see, for me, e-mail sounds like such a fantastically good idea on paper and I honestly believe that it really could be a brilliant idea that could really change the way the human race thinks and works. But, for e-mail to really work, I feel that the human race has to evolve before it is mentally and emotionally capable of using such a powerful tool.

For me, this thing with E-Mail goes back a long, long way.

Many, many years ago - 1984 I think - two of my University friends, Phil Jamieson and Nick Scripps, demonstrated a neat little utility for transmitting messages from one computer to another. Okay, it wasn't a true e-Mail program - I'd seen a full blown E-mail system on the University's computer but it seemed big and clunky and hard to use. In contrast, this small utility was the first time I'd seen something like e-Mail running on a small and affordable platform like the BBC Micro.

Nick and Phil pressed the Send button on one BBC and, a few seconds later, a small flag appeared on the screen of a second Beeb, which indicated the arrival of a message. "Wow!", I thought. "Just imagine being able to keep in touch with your whole family, business partners, friends etc... right around the world, at the touch of a button. Brilliant!!!"

On paper, that sounds like a good idea, right?

Let's skip forward a couple of years to 1989. Around this time, Sound on Sound Magazine had the idea of setting up a dedicated network so that their contributors and readers alike could share information via something called the Internet. This was long before HTML and the World Wide Web and the internet consisted of a fairly small number of die-hard enthusiasts, one or two newsgroups and a large collection of academic clusters. Hence, it wasn't particularly active and, "Praise the Lord Above", there was no such thing as spam. Bakc then, there was a real, tangible thrill whenever an e-mail arrived in our In-box. This was science and magic combined. Something truly wonderful. Sometimes it was a message from the magazine's editor or a test message from a work collegue experimenting with his or her new modem. Sometimes it was from a fellow musician, someone else dipping their metaphorical big toe into this brave new interconnected future though more often that not it was usually just a reminder to pay my network subscription. Alas, that system didn't last long. It never paid for itself and very few of my messages were ever answered, I suspect because the whole system was just plain flakey.

It wasn't until 1991 that I was given a proper e-mail account on the company's corporate system. In those days, only one or two companies had an e-mail system and accounts were restricted to just a small number of key staff. Worst still, for the first few weeks, everything I wrote was checked by my manager before being sent just to make sure that my message conformed to the company's rules about e-mail usage i.e. no bad language, no sexual references, no insults and absolutely no private messages.

These restrictions meant that I was desperate to install e-mail at home though that didn't happen until 1995 when the internet, quite literally, exploded overnight. That, to me, was when the world changed completely. Instead of spending hours working in the studio in lonely isolation, I was suddenly connected to the world via a dial-up line and the possibilties were endless. And so were the e-mails.

So many people all talking, thinking, learning - talking about music, thinking about art and science, learning about subjects as diverse as religion and UFO's and.... the list was endless.

But the conversations were fascinating. It was possible to log on and listen to a collection of very knowledgeable, very passionate individuals discussing whether or not a UFO sighting was real or imaginary, whether Edgar Froese of Tangerine Dream developed their trademark sound or was it, in fact, Chris Franke or whether Elvis was really still alive and living in Paris under the assumed name of Pepe Le Pew.

Like I said, fascinating. Yeah. Really. Sort of.

E-mail put me in touch with a lot of musicians, designers, engineers and producers. However, talking to so many musicians, designers, engineers and producers essentially stopped me working on my own music. E-mail meant that I could expand and develop my graphics business but also meant that I was working on someone else's artwork instead of my own. E-mail meant that I was able to share ideas and thoughts with an army of technically literate, intellectually driven movers and shakers around the world but this also meant that my day-job was able to contact me 24/7, even when we'd unplugged the phone and gone to bed.

In short, e-mail became very, very intrusive.

Very quickly, in an attempt to keep a lid on this modern day Pandora's box, we established rules about e-mail usage and e-mail activity. We cut back on newsgroups, learned to ignore spam, installed basic mail filters and did as much as we could to limit the amount of e-mail coming into the house. It didn't work. My addiction to e-mail cut into everything. I would dare to suggest that e-mail was, in part, responsible for our Annus Horriblis in 2001 because I was spending more and more time 'working' and less and less time with my family.

Ever since we first installed e-mail, we've looked for ways to reduce its impact on our daily lives. When I say "we", it's actually "I" because this is my problem. Jules just doesn't seem to be all that bothered with e-mail.

This weekend, I decided that I was not going to check e-mail at all. I would have a weekend free from e-mail.

And it was a horrible experience.

I am an E-Mail Junkie.

Every time I looked at the iMac I thought "I'll just check e-mail!" and then I remembered that I'd placed an embargo on the whole bloody system. I resisted. I found something else to do. But still it called to me, nagged at me and demanded my attention.

The problem is that I have allowed my day job with Infection Music to bleed into my family life. It has done so completely. To the outside world, David Hughes, Family Guy, is indistinguishable from David Hughes, Sequencer Designer and David Hughes, Musician.

This means that family members attempting to keep up to speed with the latest goings-on around Hughes Manor share the same connection with certain users who are, let's put this as politely as possible, just plain unpleasant. They don't have a problem with dumping their trash on your lawn. If they're having a crappy day then they don't see why you too shouldn't have a crappy day. Some of them are so intense, so isolated from humanity, that they've forgotten that the guy reading their nasty and abusive e-mail has just gotten out of bed after having slept for only 3 hours because of the 70 mph winds going over the house the previous night or because the dog just puked up on the carpet or because the system he'd spent all week testing went tits-up for no apparent reason the night before.

That sort of thing is easy to forget when you're pumped up on your own self-important ego trip.

This morning, I've set up a second e-mail account on Google Mail and I've mailed a whole bunch of friends and family with instructions to use my new 'Family' address instead of my old 'Work Address'. I'm going to keep this address private, just for friends and family. I'll still use the BT/Yahoo account but only during business hours.

I should have done this years ago. The reason I didn't was because so many of my friends and family have been using the BT/Yahoo account and most won't know how to use the new one. Or that's the crappy reason I've used as an excuse to aviod changing over.

E-mail, like so much technology, is both a blessing and a curse. Of course, e-mail is just the messenger, the medium through which messages are sent. Like the revolutions in telephone and television that came before it, advances in technology can and do intrude on your life but only to the degree that you, personally, are willing to allow them into your life. In short, you can't blame e-mail itself for the effect it has on your life, as I have been doing.

We'll see how this new regime works. The separation of Corporate Dave from Family Dave has been a long time coming.

  23-Jan-08: Atem and Captain Kirk

I said below that we'd now shipped more sequencers than we have on the books as outstanding orders. Well, strangely, there was a sudden burst of activity on a whole bunch of newsgroups yesterday centered on our Atem sequencer. Atem is a cut-down version of ZEIT, which we launched a couple of months ago although the launch was fairly low-key. It didn't attract much attention, which I thought was unfortunate. However, all that seems to be changing. I'm optimistic that Atem will fill the gap in the market for a quality sequencer that's fun and easy to use.

Most of you will probably have realised that I am a Star Trek fan. Not one of the raving nutters with a uniform and plastic phaser pistol - just your average, every-day, ho-hum sort of Star Trek fan. Today brought the not-so-great-news that William Shatner probably won't be able to reprise his role as my hero, Captain James T. Kirk. Director J.J. Abrams blames the long-running writer's strike - apparently they haven't been able to come up with a way to get Kirk into the film that doesn't suck and with only 3 weeks left to shoot, time is running out. This decision is annoying and, frankly, a wasted opportunity. Kirk's demise in the movie Generations was sloppy and harmed the franchise. Legions of Kirk fans want to see the character resurrected and given a decent, dignified send off. Or at least see him retire gracefully.

Still, this is science fiction and anything can happen. The good news is that there will be many more movies based around that era of Star Trek so maybe we'll see Shatner back in the saddle one small day.

  21-Jan-08: Future Forever, sequencers and the giant re-org...

We shipped yet another ZEIT Sequencer last week and, for the first time ever, we've now shipped more sequencers than we have waiting as pending orders. So, at last, we're over the proverbial hill. For a time, I began to think that this day would never come. The last instrument shipped with a few software screw-ups that I should have caught but, attentive readers will perhaps note that I was not a happy bunny when the last one went out the door in that I was suffering from one of those bloody aweful rotovirus infections that are doing the rounds right now.

If this one goes into the field without any major problems then I will be a happy bunny again.

A few weeks agoJules and I decided to change the way the company operates. I had noticed that we were both starting to hate our weekly progress meetings. They went on too long, were too technical and centred around reporting problems. This whole adventure was centered around the notion that the work should be, first and foremost, fun. And there wasn't any fun in these meetings. None at all.

Hence, we decided to change the emphasis of the meetings from reporting problems to fixing problems. The difference is subtle and this approach harks back to the days when I was at Caterpillar and the formation of so-called QIT/QAT groups. Essentially, a small number of employees would form a Quality Improvement Team and their job was to identify all of the ways in which their jobs sucked. A Quality Action team would then look at each of the issues raised and then prioritise each issue with a weighting based on cost versus benefit. It's a simple and yet extremely effective tool for resolving problems. And, speaking from experience, we know it works.

We started with a list of all of the issues that we really felt sucked, prioritsed them based on the afore-mentioned cost bersus benefit metric and then picked a few that might, in certain management circles, be termed low hanging fruit. Top of the Jules' list was the lack of storage for important company information. Top of my list was the crappy desk I built a year ago. It sags in the middle, can't take much weight and hasn't got any storage facilities.

Hence, we jumped into the car, skipped down to Ikea and came away with a load of flat-pack furniture, which yours truly has just finished building. They look rather good. Better still, they fix both of the afore-mentioned problems.

"Big deal", you might say and I would perhaps agree. But it's these little issues which I feel make the difference between a company that is struggling to survive and one that is doing the business, one that is pro-active as opposed to reactive, a company that is prepared to work hard to improve rather than one that is just grinding along, going through the motions.

I received word this morning that Ion's Future Forever has been voted one of the best downloadable albums of 2007 over on the ElectroAmbient Space web site. "Good Electronics! Great melodies!" was their conclusion and I was seriously pleased. I called Jules who replied "Great! Wonderful! Now get on with the second one!"

No pressure, Dave. No pressure.

  15-Jan-08: VST's

I had planned to put the blog on hold for a couple of weeks whilst I sorted out the enormous backlog of orders for our ZEIT Sequencer but I figured that a brief entry describing Sunday's adventure would be okay.

This adventure began last week with a spam message to the Crystal Software Synthesiser mailing list. It was from a non-English speaker who had a problem with a package called SynthEdit and, well, he was getting kind of feudal with the guys who write Crystal. He had assumed that Crystal was a SynthEdit application, which it isn't but I saw the link and wondered what SynthEdit was. Simply put, it's an application for writing VST instruments.

What's a VST? Well, VST stands for Virtual Studio Technology, which was a standard developed by Steinberg back in the 1990's. VST's are usually plug-in software instruments that sit inside your computer and perform all manner of musical functions. For instance, you can have VST synths, VST drum machines, VST post-processors etc. There's a better explaination over here on Wikipedia.

Starting from scratch, VST's are pretty fiendish to develop. First, you have to buy the development tools and then there's the steep learning curve involved when you try to get to grips with programming in the language C++. I've long wanted to get into making my own VST's but I don't have the time at the moment to learn another programming language for something that might not deliver a tangible product in the long run.

But then I discovered SynthEdit.

There are two aspects of SynthEdit that I find incredibly interesting. Firstly, the interface is almost entirely graphical i.e click, drag and drop. No maths, no programming, no compilers, no linkers etc. This makes development a breeze. Secondly, the basic version is free. Yeah, free. Gratis.

Alas, SynthEdit only runs on Windows XP and Vista but, after just a couple of hours, I had my first VST synth up and running.

Wow.

It's just a very basic synthesiser at the moment - just a two-oscillator polysynth with a nice Moog-style filter and two ADSR's but that's about it. I plan to develop this until it's a bit more useful, add LFO's, a pitch envelope, an effects unit, some memory and a couple of multiple outputs.

You can download the first public release here.

This all took place on a wet and windy Sunday afternoon. I was thrilled. It's Tuesday morning and I am still thrilled. A whole new wonderful world has opened up.

  08-Jan-08: A brief holiday

I'll be taking a holiday from the blog for a couple of weeks, possibly as long as a month or more, whilst I concentrate 100% on sorting out the problems with the business.

Bye for now.

  03-Jan-08: Year Zero

It is currently snowing outside and a heavy fall - 8 inches or more - has been forecast for later today. The Weather Service has just issued its customary Severe Weather Warning but then they issue much the same warning if they think that it's going to rain just a little before tea time on Sunday and there's a risk that Aunt Mimsy's Croquet Match will be rained off.

We passed through the winter solstice a couple of weeks ago and I can already feel the days getting steadily longer. 2007 is now behind us and I really do want to forget 2007. 2007 was not particularly successfull. 2007 was much like the proverbial curate's egg in that parts of it were very good but, equally, parts of it were very bad indeed.

From a business point of view, we solved a large number of very difficult, very demanding technical problems but then utterly failed to deliver on our promises to manufacture more instruments. From a musical point of view, I produced a couple of wonderful little albums including Ion's Future Forever, which received more airplay around the world than all of my previous albums put together and yet sales of Future Forever were very, very poor.

From a personal point of view, we said goodbye to a number of good people (and good riddance to one or two others who will remain nameless to save their blushes). In particular, the passing of Helen Sinden just before Christmas felt like the end of an era in that my last tangible link to those happy days has now departed the party. That makes me sad.

But this is Year Zero, where we start again, start afresh and put the past behind us as we stride confidentally into a bright, new shiney future.

I hope.

I used to feel that odd-numbered years were, like odd-numbered Star Trek films, a bit crap, a little unlucky. I no longer feel that this is true. You make your own luck and good things happen and so do bad things, usually in equal measure. The good stuff keeps you going through the bad stuff. If you work hard and stay true to yourself then bad luck will still come your way but you'll be better equipped to handle it.

I've started a number of new projects, some of which were outlined in December's entry whilst others were not. We're embarking on a major renovation of Hughes Manor, which will doubtless eat up most of my time and energy this year though this comes at a time when I want to move on to other things, other scenes, other adventures essentially before I am too bloody old and decrepit to get out of bed in the mornings.

Alas, for the moment, I am DIY Man, paintbrush in one hand, toolbox in the other.

"Onward and upward", as they say.

 

Copyright 2008 David J. Hughes and Thinking Metal Music