gig 1

Had my first go last night operating monitors on the new Yamaha LS9 audio console. Seems a good machine, but with a few traps in the solo/monitoring section that I'll need to be wary of for my own sanity. Digital mixing consoles and in-ear monitoring really clean up the stage physically and in terms of sound spill. Same again tonight...

back in live sound

This week I'm up at Cheltenham on a live sound gig. It's good to be back doing this. Will report more later...

Very stormy weather today.

got a new monitor

I ordered a pair of Dell LCD monitors - my my and Emma's computers - on Saturday and they arrived yesterday (Tuesday), which was quite impressive service. The one for me is a 2007WFP widescreen, which has a 20" screen and a good supply of connections: VGA, DVI, S-Video, Composite plus two USB slave ports (which really means one extra one, once you've connected the uplink cable to your computer).
So...I'm yet to play around with the settings, but I've tried it out with my 12" Powerbook, using the proprietary Powerbook DVI adapter. The Powerbook will run the widescreen display at a good resolution in extended desktop mode, and in mirror mode the widescreen shows the same image as the laptop, albeit stretched to fill out the screen. This mode is not the best looking and as I might use extended and mirrored modes in equal amounts depending on the task at hand, for mirrored mode I plan to experiment a bit with the Dell's settings.
It's for things like Photoshop that I have the extended desktop in mind. But...I think it'll take a while to set it up how I like it. Several questions - does Photoshop have built-in facilities to remember how you like your extended desktop set up? It'll be running from my Powerbook which I'll frequently want to disconnect from the system to take it with me on the road. I've got into trouble in the past with extended desktop on a Windows machine, when I plugged in an external screen to a Dell laptop, slid an application window over to the new workspace, then disconnected the screen without bringing the application back to the home screen. As a result, the computer got `phantom limb' syndrome and thought the application was still there and I couldn't get it back until I'd reset a few things.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year folks! After a nice overnight (well, of course...) new year gathering, we went to Compton Abbas airfield for lunch, and Emma and I went for a spot of flying. The rain was setting in but we saw a bit of nice Dorset countryside before it was time to land.