Benj’s blog!

As you can see, I’ve decided to give the blog another chance.  I’m currently trying to find a theme that I like. Check back later … that is, if you care …

August 6th 2006, I flew out of England and arrived at JFK.  From JFK I took a flight to Syracuse, where I was greeted by my new landlord.  He had offered to give me a ride to Ithaca, NY, the place I now call home. A few days later, my girlfriend Lala arrived with her life in suitcases.  We spent a few weeks getting to know the area, and then it was time for school year to start.

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I have finished making some tweaks to the blog. For the most part the changes are cosmetic, although I have moved the blog into the root of ijneb.com, mainly because I never had anything of any substance there anyway.

I settled on a Wordpress theme called Freshy, by Julien De Luca. It has a very clean look and feel.

Let’s see how long I can keep it up to date.

I spent this past weekend in NYC and stopped by the Apple Store to see the iPhone for myself. The place was packed with people waiting to have a go, and at one point, an employee made an announcement to try and shift people from playing to making a purchase. When I finally got to play, to be frank, I was underwhelmed:

• The virtual keyboard. The keys are too small and the lack of tactile response was a big problem. Maybe it’s something I could learn to like, but my initial impressions were that it was awkward.
• The screen is too small for browsing. Having the zoom function is nice, and it’s cute that you can render real websites, but again, it’s just a faff. The experience of zooming in to read text is not what I’m used to.
• Browsing was slow. I checked and the device was using the in-store WiFi, but even so, browsing was painful. As I was navigating through pages I frequently saw the checkerboard.

Apple are a clearly an innovative company, constantly pushing the frontiers of technology. However, I fail to believe that iPhone is the revolutionary device they claim. To me it’s just a phone with a few interesting twists (especially visual voicemail, which is a nice idea).

Jon has some different thoughts at his blog.

Music is an important part of my life, initially just listening and for the past six years or so, playing. Sometimes I find myself just whiling away the hours on YouTube finding inspiring performances by some of my favourite artists.This is the first in what I hope will be a weekly post and features John McLaughlin and George Benson.
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Imagine the scene, early 1990s in the Learning Resource Centre (a fancy name for a library with some computers). It’s around 4pm and school had finished for the day. I was messing around and somehow got my floppy disk stuck in the drive of an Archimedes A310 (or 320?). I was a bit panicked and thought, as children tend to do, that I would get in trouble. Thankfully Steve (who I’d known since infants school) and Joe came to my aid with some tweezers(!), and we’ve been friends ever since.

It was Joe who first taught me how to program on those Acorns, I remember he recommended some arcane book on WIMP programming and I dabbled a bit. He stuck with the Acorn stuff and I moved over to PCs (Windows 3.1 was all the rage back then). Eventually he saw the light and moved to PC, and now we’re both Mac users?

Anyway, it seems Joe was inspired my the resurrection of my blog and decided to get his own blog on the go. Go and have a look.

Last week, I committed to a weekly post highlighting the wonders of YouTube, by way of sharing performances by my favourite artists.

First up this week is Bireli Lagrene, a French guitar virtuoso, comfortable playing Django-style gypsy jazz to up-beat bebop! This is a video of him playing Stevie Wonder’s Isn’t she Lovely, enjoy. (If you like this, he has a great acoustic version Sylvain Luc, who is a great guy.)

Second, Carlos Santana, Europa. Santana was one of the first groups I listened to solely for the guitar. The sound and groove they got was great. And whilst to a large extent my tastes have narrowed in on Jazz, I still enjoy Carlos’s playing, and that is almost certainly down to his feel.