Singing Day in Aid of Breast Cancer Research Uk (by sarah)

Yesturday I left the house at 7:30 am and got on the 8:03 train to Paddington - all went smoothly and I had one of my normal random conversations with an interesting person on the train - this time a maths examinar.

Of course due to this being something I had had planned for ever and me being me the weekend had been whitteled down so that I was instead of arriving in London Friday night I was arriving just over an hour late at the venue for my choir reunion. I got into London with 20 minutes to get around the circle line and then do the Fenchurch Street Line out into Essex which is of course impossible.

But I had a good run and thanks to a lift from the station got into Cranham at 11:15 only 3 and 3/4 hours after having left erm... Cranham - different counties obviously 😉

I was cheered on the train by hearing the words peg-it and stack-it which told me I was home!

Anyway I was fortunate that they had started a bit late and then done warm up excersises so had only just started on the first song when I arrived.

The itinary of the day was to learn songs in a music workshop with Pete Churchill and then perform them with Sound Company and raise money for Breast Cancer Research UK in doing so!

I was really looking forward to this singing day and was really sad when I thought I would have to cancel at the last minute. Apart from the fact I would get to meet up with old friends and get to sing I was looking forward to the fact it was going to be gospely type music and that there would be now sheets of music handed out - not being able to read music this is joy for me!

I've done several workshops with Pete Churchill now and thourally enjoyed every single one of them and funnily enough they tend to be the songs I remeber - they definatly make up a large portion of those I sang to Jean whilst breast feeding. The first one was when I was like 19 I think and was a residentual at Wiccan House - I was as always on crutches :/ but it is one of my best memories.

The songs he chooses tend to be fun to sing and very what I would term dynamic.

We learnt:

Stevie Wonder - I am Singing, from Songs in the key of life Jimmy Cliff - hard road to travel Ray Charles - little old sun Curtis Mayfield - people get ready

And he sprung another one on us during the performance to show the audience the process of learning. He's got some interesting ideas about memory and retrieval and muscle memory etc...

Sound Company sang the first half of the concert which was stuff like Chattanoogo choochoo and String of Pearls, Sweet Tea etc... Then Pete sang some songs including one of his own called I've Made Up My Mind which was quiet topical for me really!

I also picked up alot on sort of music history as it where - stuff like People Get Ready being one of the songs that let the slaves know about the 'Freedom train' that ran from the south to the north back when America was divided on slavery.

Again due to my current frame of mind this has set me to planning out another painting, a sort of companion for The Strange Fruit of Intolerance.

Pete's little girl sang one of the solos which was very very cute and she did amazingly well considering it was in another language! Oh yeah the first song he taught us was in 3 languages!

The day was full of dynamic energy and enthusiasm and without music I was on the same footing as everybody else - possibly better off actually as it is how I tend to learn songs anyway. I however was saddened to find just how out of practice I am with the singing - I have lost my coordination ie clapping, moving feet and singing at same time was completely out! This was a skill it took four years of Havering Youth Choir to get and its gone 🙁 though I was starting to get it back by the end of the day!

I was also quiet chuffed to be mistaken for being 10yrs younger than I am by a teenager! and to bump into a friend from Sixth Form College who has just joined Sound Company. Also had a good ole catch up with people.

I really miss singing but I don't want to join the village choir as they don't do a wide enough variety of music - I was asked to join a local 'gospel' choir but they only meet like once a month and they give you music to take away and learn the songs - which is absolutely useless to me - plus they only sing in churches for services which is far to restrictive for me.

I've sort of given up with the guitar becuase I just can't work out how to tune it anymore - I've lost the skill - I can tell its out but not how and therefore what to do with it to get it back in :/ Looks like music is going to have wait until I'm in my 30's :/ twitch

Designing a Hardware Abstraction Layer: A VM for an operating system (by alaric)

It's now quite commonplace to define virtual machines for "userland" code - the Java VM, the CLR, the Parrot virtual machine and 'hidden' VMs that underlie various programming language implementations such as CPython and Scheme 48.

However, it's more unusual to define a virtual machine for running an operating system kernel upon. Which is exactly what I set out to do with HYDROGEN, a kernel-level virtual machine for the ARGON project.

Read more »

CHAOS and IRIDIUM (by alaric)

I came accross a copy of AI Memo 628, which describes the MIT CHAOS network. I love reading about old computer technology, since they come from a time where creativity was unbridled; nowadays, suggesting a new technology that isn't intimately compatible with The Legacy Systems is unwise, so we carry their mistakes onwards for ever more.

Read more »

Cloud Computing (by sarah)

Being surrounded by geeks and therefore zooming in on key words when on trains or in coffee shops I began to be puzzeled by the term Cloud Computing - it seemed to me that people ment different things when they used this term and recently it has become a buzz word.

I detected three distinct meaning that where never the less interconnected and to some extent nods of how people and businesses now use computers and the internet.

So I painted this picture to represent it.

All three 'cloud computing' meanings banded to and distinct from each other.

I'll be writing a post on what the three definitions are over on Web-Empire at some point too.

Baby Brains (by sarah)

Jean is always coming out with funny phrasings and one of the things she said was, 'Baby Brain's at Pre-School!' she ment teaching the babies but it was just so funny escpecially when Alaric started doing zoombie impressions!

She still doesn't get why everyone laughs when she says baby brains though!

On a similar vain she has said her first swear word. It was the f one, she heard it in the park (teenage boys where playing football) so we had a discuession about the fact it was a rude word that can upset people and if she says it around adults they will tell her off. Then she wanted to know if she had been naughty and it was 'no becuase you didn't know did you? But now you do' she nodded sagely and asked if there were other words that upset people.

From here I ended up in a disguession about societies and different ethical systems. It is so interesting now she is at the why stage.