I shared a letter on Zero Hours contracts a few days ago on Facebook thinking my little circle of bolshy friends may have something to say about it. Now I’m astounded to see it’s been shared over 14,000 times and the likes may go over 13,000 anytime soon. This and the 100’s of PM’s I’ve received from some pretty desperate people tell me that this is not just one mans rant. These are big numbers that endorse my belief that there’s a lot if injustice going on. It’s not just abusive “employment” conditions either. There is housing rental injustice as pointed out by my friend Kev Howard who also brought to my attention recently the injustice being perpetrated on people with disabilities by ATOS et all. I’m sure there’s more e.g. the financial injustices: corporate greed, bankers bonuses and tax avoidance that everyone is talking about. The exorbitant cost of life’s necessities such as water, gas and electricity. The mis-labeling of our food products. I was just remarking to my wife yesterday, if we put together the money we’ve clawed back in illegal banking charges and mis-sold PPI over the past few years it amounts to a huge chunk stolen from our income. What the hell is happening? What can we do about it all?
Trying Out Quick Gallery
Hands On Middlesbrough
These pictures are from the Aspirational Digital Stories workshop held in July 2014. All the participants designed their ideal city and then presented their ideas to the group
e group.
He’s Got A Dream
In 1999 Tom Kelly and I wrote and produced a musical “Steel Town”. It tells of a young man’s dream of escaping the Steel Works into the world of music (wonder who that could be?) Tom produced the lyric to the song I’m posting which brilliantly captures how that young man’s parents may have felt (who could they be?) As we now know, those who did not escape Consett steel works saw its demise in 1980. We put the musical on at the Custom House South Shields and then we took it home to the Empire in Consett. Tom and I are now re-developing the musical to become a Teesside story. To help this we’re running some community workshops complete with fantastic archive film from the North East Film Archive. This video shows a lot of Teesside people but only uses minimal clips from the archives so I feel comfortable showing it here. For more you’d have to come to a workshop.
He’s Got A Dream
In 1999 Tom Kelly and I wrote and produced a musical “Steel Town”. It tells of a young man’s dream of escaping the Steel Works into the world of music (wonder who that could be?) Tom produced the lyric to the song I’m posting which brilliantly captures how that young man’s parents may have felt (who could they be?) As we now know, those who did not escape Consett steel works saw its demise in 1980. We put the musical on at the Custom House South Shields and then we took it home to the Empire in Consett. Tom and I are now re-developing the musical to become a Teesside story. To help this we’re running some community workshops complete with fantastic archive film from the North East Film Archive. This video shows a lot of Teesside people but only uses minimal clips from the archives so I feel comfortable showing it here. For more you’d have to come to a workshop.
Windows Movie Maker
After Windows 7, Movie Maker changed drastically. There is no time line. In my opinion the timeline is fundamental to video editing (also to music and audio). The lack of a timeline in my view renders Movie Maker in Windows 7 and beyond useless.
WMM 2.6
Luckily there is a work around. Download Windows Movie Maker 2.6 and install on your Windows 7 or Windows 8 computer. http://on-msn.com/wmm26
HD Format
A couple of other things are worth doing also. Windows Movie Maker does not always support HD formats. To get around this you need to install some plugins (very easy and straight forward) You can find the plugins here www.stmedia.org/dl/hdplugins.zip
The plugins will give you the following resolutions to save your movie to:
- 1280×720
- 1440×1080
- 1920×1080
- 960×720
Look on your drive for your Movie Maker 2.6 which will be in a location something like the following:
C:program filesMovie Maker
OR C:Program Files (x86)Movie Maker 2.6
Copy the prx files to the shared folder as follows…………
C:program filesMovie Makersharedprofiles
OR C:Program Files (x86)Movie Maker 2.6sharedprofiles
If the “profiles” folder does not exist then go ahead and create it.
Remembering Alvin
I was sad to hear this week that Alvin Stardust had died. I spent quite a bit of time with Alvin in the late 80’s producing an albums worth of my songs with him. The tracks never saw the light of day so I’ll attach a compilation of them to this post.
I know Alvin was not his real name but I always called him that and he always referred to himself that way. He called me a while back and we talked about dusting off these recordings and trying to do something with them. Clearly that must have been before he embarked on the album that he planned to release in November but I now realise he was suffering with cancer at the time he called. He never mentioned it of course.
I remember him as quite a gentleman always very polite to everyone and never the pop star. He came to Newcastle several times to work on the recordings and sometimes stayed at my home in Whitley Bay. I didn’t drive in those days so we got the metro to the studio in Newcastle each morning. He didn’t bat an eyelid and nobody recognised him. I did see the pop star side one time however. After one set of sessions he was due to catch an early flight next morning so he was staying in a hotel. I dropped him off there in a taxi and as he went up to reception he said “watch this”. He checked in and on some subterfuge or other asked to see the duty manager. When she arrived he turned on the charm and a glowing pop star smile. The manageress asked if he would mind having his photo taken in front of the hotel and insisted on upgrading him to a suite of rooms at no extra charge. As she went off to make these arrangements he turned and winked at me and said “works every time” !
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Remembering Alvin
I was sad to hear this week that Alvin Stardust had died. I spent quite a bit of time with Alvin in the late 80’s producing an albums worth of my songs with him. The tracks never saw the light of day so I’ll attach a compilation of them to this post. I know Alvin was not his real name but I always called him that and he always referred to himself that way. He called me a while back and we talked about dusting off these recordings and trying to do something with them. Clearly that must have been before he embarked on the album that he planned to release in November but I now realise he was suffering with cancer at the time he called. He never mentioned it of course. I remember him as quite a gentleman always very polite to everyone and never the pop star. He came to Newcastle several times to work on the recordings and sometimes stayed at my home in Whitley Bay. I didn’t drive in those days so we got the metro to the studio in Newcastle each morning. He didn’t bat an eyelid and nobody recognised him. I did see the pop star side one time however. After one set of sessions he was due to catch an early flight next morning so he was staying in a hotel. I dropped him off there in a taxi and as he went up to reception he said “watch this”. He checked in and on some subterfuge or other asked to see the duty manager. When she arrived he turned on the charm and a glowing pop star smile. The manageress asked if he would mind having his photo taken in front of the hotel and insisted on upgrading him to a suite of rooms at no extra charge. As she went off to make these arrangements he turned and winked at me and said “works every time” !
IFTTT
I’ve only scratched the surface with IFTTT https://ifttt.com/ but it looks set to become even more highly regarded with $30M in funding.
IFTTT is pronounced like Gift without the “G”. It means “If This (happens) Then (make) This (happen). It’s kind of a visual programming tool kit for the Internet and social media. It’s pretty easy to use and there are lots of “recipes” you can use to get started. The recipes do things like: send a tweet if a YouTube Video gets commented on, send me an email if it will be raining tomorrow or Monitor a Wikipedia Page. You and edit and refine existing recipes or make your own using the easy toolkit. Now they have announced a set of recipes for outer space http://ift.tt/1sReoqS but what really looks like being the next big thing are the recipes for the Internet of things http://nyti.ms/1tjbb7j
IFTTT
I’ve only scratched the surface with IFTTT https://ifttt.com/ but it looks set to become ever more highly regarded with $30M in funding. IFTTT is pronounced like Gift without the “G”. It means “If This (happens) Then (make) This (happen). It’s kind of a visual programming tool kit for the Internet and social media. It’s pretty easy to use and there are lots of “recipes” you can use to get started. The recipes do things like: send a tweet if a YouTube Video gets commented on, send me an email if it will be raining tomorrow or Monitor a Wikipedia Page. You and edit and refine existing recipes or make your own using the easy toolkit. Now they have announced a set of recipes for outer space http://ift.tt/1sReoqS but what really looks like being the next big thing are the recipes for the Internet of things http://nyti.ms/1tjbb7j
A Test
Trying the Hootsuite app to post to my site.
Stockton – Hamburg
I picked up the following story from Guido Russo on Facebook. It seems just as I was crawling about under the stage, setting up for Stockton Weekender a crowd was “going wild” to one of my songs on another stage in Hamburg, Germany. Was I in the wrong place? The following from Guido.
“I was near Hamburg, Tygers Of Pan Tang were performing their show. I took this picture while the band was playing a beautiful song called Paris By Air. The audience goes crazy but all of a sudden my mind goes to Steve Thompson, the man who wrote this song so many years ago. Many thanks, Steve!”
