DerrenWilson.net

All this Adam and Joe go Tokyo stuff has got me reminiscing about High School.

Why? One of our subjects in Year 8, the first year of High School in Australia, was Japanese (another was Agriculture, but that’s another entry).

In a year we learnt the three Japanese writing systems: Hiragana, the basics, Katakana, for Western words, and a smattering of Kanji, the dead complicated, thousands of characters one. We learned to write our names, tell someone our denwa bungo (telephone number) and other first-chapter-of-the-phrase-book stuff. But I really enjoyed it, as far as I can remember, in that first year.

Then, in the second year, a lax, worn-out teacher unable to keep control of the class for more than five minutes at a time left me bored rigid, making Japanese another addition to the list of languages I tried learning and can’t remember (the list runs: German, Japanese, Latin, Attic Greek & Italian).

Now if Adam and Joe had been the teachers, I would have been fluent in six months…

If you ever go to a Farmer’s Market in the UK, you might come across someone selling Lime Tree Pantry pies.

If you do (and they have any left), my advice is to buy the one that sounds most appealing to you immediately. These are true culinary works of art. The pastry is short. Quality fillings are crammed in.

Lime Tree Pantry deliver, and a 6-inch pie will feed two people. If they aren’t as greedy as we are.

Hello to anyone arriving at this site via a search for something to do with Adam and Joe go Tokyo. I don’t actually have a lot of information here yet, but I have penned the following missive, which is now swilling around the bowels of the BBC:

Hello
I’ve really enjoyed Adam and Joe go Tokyo, but there’s one small problem – the almost non-existent website that goes with the show. I’ve written about this on my blog, and have had a lot of people finding my blog entry through the google results. They seem to be especially after the songs that were played at the end of the show. Would it be possible to have a list (even the top fives?), so I could post them on my site?
Thanks, Derren Wilson

We’ll have to see what happens…

UPDATE from the BBC

Hi Derren,

We hope to get more detailed programme information from the producers today or next week. We’ll add the information to our programme page on Adam and Joe and likely post a message on the board when it’s available.

Hope this helps,

Nicole

Domo Arigato, BBC!

You may be aware of the quiz hanging off the end of this blog’s url at iliveonyourvisits.com/helvetica, a b3ta-quiz inspired comment on the similarity of Arial and Helvetica.

Well, now the people-who-actually-know-what-they’re doing with flash at Engage have added another layer to the debate with their Helvetica vs Arial game. It’s pretty simple – you control helvetica glyphs that can jump on arial letters until… well, until you get bored, really. The game has no definable end-point, unless you have to play it longer than I did, or get bored of both fonts and start using Univers. The animated background and zooming are very cool though.

The Engage site also recommends the Helvetica, Homage to a Typeface book that I borrowed from the library last week. One thing about this book, especially in the library context, is that each page is actually two, joined by perforations. I did tear the pages open to see what was inside, but I felt like a vandal.

PS: My quiz has a referrer log which does sometimes throw up interesting sites, and also shows how many people are searching google for ‘helvetica’

As below, but in grey: Get your band_name.eps t-shirt now. This minute. Why wait?

Apparently a-slightly-less-popular-than-it-was-before television show is ending this evening. While I have no desire to critique the show or its fans – I have watched a fair bit of it myself every year – here’s a little bit of semi-mental arithmetic:

Big Brother’s Little Brother: 30min × 5 days
Big Brother Update show: 30min × 5 days
Saturday Night task: 30min × 1 day
Sunday Big Brother’s Little Brother: 1 hour × 1 day
Sunday Update and ‘Psychology’ show: 1 hour × 1 day

That’s 7 ½ hours a week. Over the nine weeks of the show, you will have watched, if you are diligent, 67 ½ hours, or more horrifically, nearly full three days of television, including a very high number of ads for mobile phones…

Hours of rolling-along-the-runway-taking-off-and-stalling fun with X Plane, for PC and Mac OS X (many years ago, I did get to the point where I could fly circuits from London City Airport in a Cessna with MS Flight Simulator). Apologies to anyone who’s been waiting at Heathrow for their flight out of here for the last three days.

I’ve never been much interested in feats of physical endurance; it’s more the mental challenges that interest me. I remember reading about a gentleman who fed himself nothing but McDonald’s for a week, just to see what happened.
I think he survived, and probably with no lasting ill effects.

Let me now tell you what happened when I tried my own simple mental endurance challenge: to listen to the same song, over and over, for as long as it took to get the train from New Mills Central to Manchester Picadilly.

In song terms, this was 13 repeats of If we can’t get it together from You Am I’s third album (apologies if you’ve no idea who You Am I are: I blame the record company). My reasons for choosing this song is that I hoped it wasn’t going to make me feel depressed or deafen me with feedback solos or similar.

So here are my notes on the challenge, organised by listen number:

1. (on platform) Like the bassline
2. Get onto train, can’t hear song over train noise. Solo sounds a bit trebly
3. False start, hit wrong button on mp3 player
4. Like the intro, and listening to the drum pattern
5. Trying to figure out the lyrics, realise it’s not ‘747 into Circular Quay’ but 47. That make more sense, as you’d not get a Jumbo Jet into Sydney Harbour’s ferry moorings.
6. Listening to the way chords sound because of the different open strings on the guitar. Watching the hills out the window. Descending chord sequence in middle 8
7. Trying to think of a video treatment. Thinking of how some songs are excuses to build up to a moment, or section, whereas others are pretty magnificent all the way through
8. Is anyone else listening to this song right now?
9. This song would be impossible to make a video for: the lyrics are written as a narrative in the third person with the occasional first person quote. It gives the effect of the singer being godlike (Tim Rogers, godlike?). Solo sounding very trebly indeed now
10. Ears going dull
11. You could make a live video. The outro is the same as the middle 8
12. Has the person next to me realised that I seem to be listening to the same song over and over?
13. In the silence before it starts again, thinking of the intro of the next song on the album if it was running in order.

The train came into the station midway through listen 13, so I turned it off (during the solo). I staggered out onto the platform, ears ringing, and headed for the Burger King outlet.

While dreaming of something more elaborate, here are some more t-shirt ideas, set in Univers 45, as tradition dictates.

1. From the just announced Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest results:
   
   The flock of geese flew overhead in a “V” formation – not in an old-fashioned-looking Times New Roman kind of a “V”, branched out slightly at the two opposite arms at the top of the “V”, nor in a more modern-looking, straight and crisp, linear Arial sort of “V” (although since they were flying, Arial might have been appropriate), but in a slightly asymmetric, tilting off-to-one-side sort of italicized Courier New-like “V” – and LaFonte knew that he was just the type of man to know the difference.

2. Does anyone know how to get Homesite to search and replace on things like tab characters and line breaks without using RegEx? Thankyouplease.
3. Does anyone want to buy a slightly second hand Tascam Porta07 four track, with microphone? Please e-mail me if you need to listen to yourself singing and playing the trombone at the same time.