“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!”

Computer recording vs the old days: spent about 4 hours yesterday trying to recover a lost track. Weird stuff with lots of blind alleys trying to rectify.  I’d done all the right things with incremental saves and backup files but it seems many of the saves were corrupted. So how would this play out in the old days? – If a tape became corrupted? I guess we’d have given up sooner and re-recorded rather than trying to recover or rebuild. I guess the lost time might be similar. There’s always the fear of losing some of the magic of the original take but then: magically, the rebuild nearly always turns out to be better!

Steve T

With version 7, in my view, Cubase has finally got it right and I’m referring largely to the mixer. I could never really get to grips with the mixer in all previous versions. It was baffling and the window just floated all over. Now the mixer is much more solid visually and is a full window that you can dock in your second monitor. Lots of other stuff that’s equivalent to real world mixers but I’ve not fully gotten into that yet. This has been the reason I’ve preferred … well “Reason” (Propellerheads) – I really do like music software to look and behave like the real world devices they emulating.

Steve T

I’m developing a new course for seeking employment supported by digital tools and social media. This also gives some consideration to Digital Footprint, sometimes referred to as Net Rep (Reputation).  There are lots of horror stories about potential employers Googling a candidate to find all sorts of really embarrassing and compromising pictures and texts in Facebook etc. The common wisdom is “clean up your social media accounts”.  I’m going a different route entirely and I’m introducing participants to a whole clean slate where all their social media accounts are dedicated to one aim: finding a job. This begins with the email account. Clearly “hotboy@hotmail.com” is not an appropriate address to give potential employers but I don’t actually take anyone seriously that has any kind of hotmail address. My perception may be wrong but other people perceive this too and since getting a job is about making an impression, perceptions are important. Everyone on this new course will get a baycd.net email account (Be All You Can Digital)

Actually, the more I’ve considered this, I’ve begun to realise that if our main purpose online is to land a job, it’s unlikely that our existing social media accounts are of any assistance to this cause. The tendency is for us to grow our “friends” and connections. The social media platforms beseech us to do this. When you set up new account and you fail to add half the universe they pump out messages  like; “are you sure, you might be lonely”.  My advice people setting out on social media platforms will be: in the first instance don’t add any friends, definitely do not let the application trawl through your email address book or other social media platforms, don’t add a profile image and skip every step that you can.  Get as close to a plain vanilla account as you can and THEN start to build your profile and connections.

My own LinkedIn account, for example would be useless for finding a job. I’m connected to colleagues, my bosses and probably half the HR department.  I recently added a new Social Enterprise I’ve set up to my profile and my entire contact list was sent a message “congratulate Steve on his new job” – Huh !  Furthermore my contacts are asked to endorse me for skills I either don’t have or have a very fleeting relationship with. Obviously they this so out of kindness or courtesy but I didn’t ask them do endorse me, Linkedin did!  When I used Linked in to generate a CV from my profile it looked nothing like a CV. First of all it was way too flippant – e.g. “I’m a can do guy and if I say I’m going to do something you can take it to the bank.” – That’s it! That’s my claim to employability.  Would you give that guy a job? Furthermore, my Linkedin generated CV shows way too many skills, some of which I don’t have. Obviously I can edit this but if I really were seeking a job via Linkedin it would be better if the profile were set out properly in the first place.

I think I’d rename all the major social media platforms. Linked in would be spammedin dot com (see above), Twitter would be called info overload dot com and Facebook would be renamed moving goalposts dot com.

What I am going to advocate is that participants develop a lean social media presence with the right kind and quantity of info. They will develop smallish, carefully chosen networks of contacts. All will be with the sole aim of assisting them finding a job. We don’t want to be totally devoid of personality and humour but using these platforms for job hunting is entirely different, in my opinion, to the “social” way we have become accustomed to using social media platforms. Participants still may need to clean up their existing social accounts but we’ll make sure potential employers find the “right” accounts by giving each participant a business card with the URL’s of where all their stuff is.