Band practise this week was without a doubt the most exhilirating, freeing, exhausting and in way, moving, three hours of my entire life so far. 25 years of it, there’s very little in there besides my amazing girlfriend that comes even knee-high to the fun we had in the jam room.

The changes we’ve made to the band, which i was expecting us to have at least one or two teething problems with in one way or another have fully justified themselves. We got in there, we rocked hard, and we’ve never ever, ever sounded like that.

you know when you catch five minutes of an unsigned band’s set, and they sound like real rock stars? it was like that…

so… with a few more practises before our next gig [saturday 15th of december, FREE entry with Idiot3 @ Hampton's Bar in Southampton], there’s no way in hell we can mess this up you’re coming right?

In other news since last blog, I bought indy a really pretty ring for our 2nd anniversary, white gold with a couple of really cute lil diamonds in it it’s a shade on the large side, so we’re gonna see if we can get it changed for a size smaller gotta love that girl.

Work’s been panning out… since term started, imagine the first 45 minutes of saving private ryan, except set in a college, where instead of people getting blown to bits, their computers aren’t working right. Yeah, it’s been like that.

Only now, things are looking up, I was betting that the first few months of the job would be hell, you have to imagine a group of about 30 staff and their many classes full of students who depend on the computers working the way they remembered them working last year. when someone else was running the show. in a different way to me. who had been doing it for nine years. and knew everyone. and everything they wanted. and how they liked their icons arranged on their desktops. how some of them actually FREAK OUT if they can’t see where the ’save’ button is on a window… and how easy it is to upset some members of staff without meaning to.

so yeah, learning curve for both me and my technical dependants at work for the last three or so months, but I like to think that we’re getting there now, finding our feet and all understanding one another. I’ve tried to pass on as much knowledge as I can  to everyone – you know, the little things, shortcuts, what this button does, when you’ve been pressing the one next to it for the last four years, that kinda stuff… and i’m happy to say that some of them have taken it on board, and really flown with it! so, i’m making [a good] difference at least.

It all starts to make sense when you get a pat on the back from one of the better teachers for fixing an already existing problem that’s brought the design department to their knees…

aha – and i got the green light for £4,000 worth of adobe CS3 site license this week … as small and insignificant as it sounds, that alone makes my life 30% easier, saves countless man-hours, upgrades several departments, makes several teachers very happy, and should future proof us for at least the next 2 years or so.

considering the art department have been stuck with adobe photoshop version 7 since 2002.

i like my job, when it’s going right

and when it’s not going right, I see it as an opportunity to make it go right again

i’ll leave it there, i need a slash and it’s late anyway i’m gonna bag’n'tag my latest photies off my camera into iphoto

laters!

Benny -xXx-

I have aquired a copy of Logic Studio 8.

…You may not hear from me for some time!

the cats are sneezing…

i got worried and looked up online about symptoms and illnesses for housecats, i think they’ll be alright. i think mum’s been spraying them with febreeze or something.

anyway, on with the blog…

I fucking love Cinema 4d, i’ve been hard at it for two weeks now. My first exposure to it was when I was asked a few years ago to look into mac/windows friendly 3d software for the kids at my old workplace, after downloaded demos, i decided that I didn’t like it. I didn’t think the kids would like it either and it kinda ground to a halt there.
Fast forward a couple of years, and I gave it another shot. The first hurdle with moving from one piece of software to another is finding the basics… transform tools, basic poly editing,  materials… and that old chestnut – UVW mapping [UVW mapping and me go waaaay back - hope someone out there knows what I'm rattling on about and feels my pain].

So once you’ve gotten your head around how to do simple things in a completely alien interface, you’re laughing. I set about creating random scenes, playing with the plugins, and deconstructing the provided examples with the software to see what other artists have done and how they’ve pieced their work together.

I learned three things…

1. the procedural materials you can make in 4D are AWESOME.
2. the sky presets are proper bo good, no more spending a day just to make a sky look right and
3. BodyPaint 3d is by far the coolest, most productive mapping tool ever written.

It used to be that I’d sketch, make the model, detail the model, and then toil for days trying to map the textures onto it, now the mapping is a part of the workflow right from the start, it’s great very useful if you have a scene that evolves as you piece it together…

So far I’ve rebuilt the outside of the Tarsten environment, the city wall, surrounding ravine, and the landscapes that make up the distant horizons. together with the procedural textures applied to the lanscape and the preset whispy sky, it’s looking great!

Stage two will be to build the city itself, inside the wall – a couple of hundred skyscrapers of varying style and size inside the city wall, along with city slums spreading from the bottom of the city out into the desert.

Stage three will be to model the three or four specific locations, effectively film sets with their own lighting and cameras… a lab, and adjacent space port at the very top of the city wall [complete with a plethora of docked ships], and a couple of areas of the slums at the bottom of the city.

man i waffle on…

anyway, i’ll keeps ya updated as and when renders pop out…

been a lil while!

sorry, just about to head out with lukey and indy, so it’s a case of… get ready, smoke fag faster, and upload picture…

yeah i know… it’s a little late, but it’s a start…. quite literally project name is now ‘Signal’

woop!

heya peeps, been busy, hence lack of bloggings.

first thing’s first – i’m typing up this blog on my lovely new apple keyboard. it’s awesome. for £30 it better be.

at long last, my macbook can rock my external USB hard drive, tv tuner stick, iPod AND mouse, all at the same time! the last year and a bit i’ve hated having to switch between all the time!

I also bought an iPod dock, which, although I don’t use the iPod as much as I should, makes it look really cool, keeps it charged, and also safe – leaving it on tables and floors and surfaces around work and at home has been scratching it up a lil.

I decided to bling up my desktop and make it look like leopard… a cheap way of doing things, but hell, just one of those things that us nerds do.

work’s been cool, but a headache at the same time … as soon as you figure one thing out another will pop up.. it’s not fair! one day i’ll get it all working perfectly, and then i won’t have to touch it again! so far this week i’ve built two new images, and re-imaged a lot of computers due to changes that theteaching staff wanted to make and problems with the images i was left with when I took over the post. it’s all good though – i see it as part of the learning curve. I’m very fortunate to have a boss who has a shitload of faith in the knowledge I have of the role I’ve taken on.

indy and me joined my bro, his girlfriend, my sis, and her boyfriend for a night out on the tiles on saturday night. i got absoloutely BLATTED. i had fun nuff said!

I also put together a short video made up of the strange, hilarious footage lukey and I took [mostly by accident] whn we were recording the armour sessions about a month ago the result is three and a bit minutes of laughter, random words, good solid english rock music and crying…. you can view it here.

anyways, it’s late here, i’m gonna wrap up and get to bed in a min, catch ya soon peeps! xXx

yay

my baby’s back

she’s had an awesome time and we spent ages together this bank holiday weekend I watched a few movies recently too – the number 23, which is simply awesome and refreshing, the new fantastic four movie – why is it that I had to wait like, all of my life to see the silver surfer in a major movie? I figure that this second Fantastic Four movie, although still just popcorn fodder was way better than the first. I also saw the bourne supremacy… ok ok, so the third film’s just come out, but I hadn’t seen the second one yet… awesome movie. Also I watched The Rocketeer, one of the last great effects movies before CGi took over.

Sooooo… what else is new?

Well, had some interest from a couple of peeps about a project I wanna kick off, could be a really good laugh, could go in any one of three different directions I have in my head right now, depending on people actually putting their tuppence in, but it’s all good.

Other than that, been writing a couple of new songs here and there, but nowt that I want to show anyone yet. I found a bunch of old demo’s too that have never seen the light of day, not all of it acoustic or rock, one of them was an orchestral piece i made as title music for a game/comic I was working on about 4 years ago i’m thinking I should deffo re-make it, as the idea’s pretty cool.

anyways that’s me for now, need to talk to indy for a bit before i go to bed

laters!

Ash didn’t like any of the demo material i played him. Well, it’s not even that he didn’t really like it, he just really didn’t seem bothered by it.

Which hurts really. Cause Lukey and me spent a lot of time working on it.

Oh well… there’s more important things to worry about, as JJ’s off to university soon. Must be nice being smart lol. We’re going to need a new drummer I guess. Still got to talk to him about it, as nothing’s actually been said about it by anyone. Threequartersmile really are a bit scattered at the moment… I can’t wait for luke and india to get home.

I have been so lonely, I hadn’t noticed up until today.

I just wanna get out, and gig. I miss the feeling of being one of a bunch of nervous 16 year olds, setting up with the bare minimum on a tiny stage, and playing badly and loving every fucking second of it. Just riding the waves man.

For this reason, I’m gonna start playing acoustic nights again. It scares the shit out of me, cause you never know how you’ll do, I’ve played some corkers and some stinkers – ranging from a stranger shouting from the bar for me to play something with a bit more kick, to another stranger coming up to me and shaking my hand and reciting a line from one of my songs. Facing a group of strangers and belting out the contents of your heart… It scares the shit out of me, and I love it. India doesn’t understand why I don’t like roller coasters and rides, but I’m an adrenaline junkie in my own weird way

Loneliness drives me to do things like that, hehe.  But also, seeing myself in the same way I did at the beginning of the year, when I was all ready to give up on my band and join another – I’ve wasted far too much of my life. Seeing a picture from exactly five years ago drove it home, that not a lot has changed. Sure, the people have, and the skills have grown and branched out, but I haven’t actually done much with it, and if shitty, chords-by-numbers indie acts from all over the country but with the same haircut can receive such high recognition in the music scene, why can’t a few honest songs with a bit of soul?

Some happy news to end on though – I contacted former members of the band, a chosen family from another lifetime, to seek permission to use old recordings online, and everyone replied with a resounding ‘yes’ it seems

So you’ll soon start to see mp3’s up for download from this blog. It’ll be released as a podcast also… so there’s no excuse for missing any Granted, my vocals back when we were starting out was a massive massive let down to the rest of the sound, but it’s interesting to see how the original first EP fits in to the bigger musical picture. A look at the tree’s roots you could say. The Everyone’s Alibi EP will be included, as will Life On Rails EP, interspersed with tracks from Thirdperson and the album we started recording in 2005 when everything fell to shit, there’ll also be the best pick of the live recordings, all manner of acoustic and electric demo’s, and orphaned songs that never made it to a CD.

I think i’ll kick it off with the Apart EP though, to give people an idea of where I was musically as of december last year.

Ben Dlugocecki owes me £50. If he doesn’t give me my 50 CD’s or my money back, then I’ll write a song called ‘Ben Dlugocecki owes me £50′ and release it as a charity single hehe!

anyway, me out of here, catch ya later peeps

Love xXx

I can remember a time, before all this. Back around ‘87/’88.

I woke up this morning and there wasn’t any of the usual adult thoughts of “ah, another early morning”. I simply opened my eyes, saw a beautiful blue sky, and wanted to be out in it, even though it was 7:20am.

I was immediately reminded of when my mum and I used to go christmas shopping [at any time of the year], we’d go down to the bus stop and catch an early morning bus into Southampton. I can distinctly remember how the world looked through those bus windows, bright and inviting.

We’d end up in town, start off the morning with a cup of tea in a small cafe somewhere and then get to work, shopping, mum would buy something nice for herself, usually a new pair of sandals or a new jumper or something, and I’d usually end up with a cool little toy from somewhere… then we’d spend a minimum of three hours just going round different places getting small things for people.

Early morning shopping in town… I haven’t done it in about 15 years. Christ.

But yeah, that’s how I felt this morning, none of the usual “shit, what do I have to worry about today…?”, it was replaced by a content and even childlike feeling as I remembered how easy the days used to be.

Mum can’t really get in to town these days, it’s a bit busy for her and she hates being inside the shopping centre/mall… but I’ve got some time off coming up… I’ll try talk her into going early morning shopping with me and sis for ol’ time’s sake

Hey diddly-ho campers, a day full of new stuff

Came home for lunch today to find that my new phone had been delivered, got upgraded early for being a ‘loyal customer’ [which is weird, i could swear i've missed several bills this last year and a half...] from my D900 to a Samsung U600.

it’s pretty sexy.

it’s also a bit functional too, which is always nice in a mobile phone. let’s hope i don’t leave this one in the washing machine.

I also decided that it’s time to reinstall the macbook, been getting a little choppy now and then – some of these free utilities for spring cleaning permissions and whatnot on the filesystem don’t always seem to come up smelling of roses. Going to knock together a Fedora based webserver tonight too, i don’t want to go pissing about with pad’s server 2k3 box in case he wants it back as-is.

So hopefully I’ll get my new domain www.willrockforfood.com up and running in the next few days.

as for what’s on it, that’s anyone’s guess.

hope you’re all good!

alreet peeps,

just so you know, thanks to the slight decline of myspace’s usefulness thanks to facebook’s awesomeness – i’m gonna stop using my myspace blog, i’ve shifted over to wordpress and re-imorted every post [starting from late 2005]. it took me bloody ages. this is how bored i get when indy goes away hehehe!

so, for those who’re interested [and those of you who used to read my posts back when they were interesting] you can find my new blog on facebook, and also at my site www.benharker.com

whoresome stuff!