March On

For those of you following the RPM Challenge at all, and my participation, I completed my album late on February 28th, and had it sent off (after hours of fighting with Nero) at 7PM on the 1st of this month. This involved a furious dash to Battersea to catch the late post, but it was worthwhile. I hope it is enjoyed by the challenge people. In the end, it was nine tracks, just over thirty five minutes, and it's great. I wrote two songs at the last minute, but they still sounded good. And Beth liked the album, so I have my first fan.

I'm going to work on my next album soon, and change the style. I really liked my post-rock soundscape methods, but I need some more experience in traditional music before I attempt it again, with better results.

Natasha is here, and she's staying on my sofa downstairs. It's good to see her again, she is fun. We went to Sarah B's birthday tonight, and it was great. The food was very filling, but quite expensive. But we had a good time. On the way back, I had my first proper drag race (the one with Dan hardly counts, it was a Punto vs. a 106, it's like a toy car race). It was me and an N-reg Escort Estate on the lights on Roehampton Lane, and it wasn't initiated by stares or revving, it was just a case of us both wanting quite badly to be quicker.

Only one of us was. Don't mess with German cars, Henry.

I should do some proper blogging. Here goes:

I'm a Joost beta-tester now, and that comes with a few benefits. For one, I get to test the new Joost software before other people. Actually, it's just the one benefit. But it's a pretty nice one.

Joost is software from the makers of Skype that is P2P video streaming. Video streaming has been around a while, but it's always bandwidth heavy, and not many companies want to stream television to a wide audience. HomeChoice is one, and they have a good service, but it isn't popular. And while P2PTV isn't completely new, Joost brings a nice surprise with what they have offered me. I was happy with it the same way I was happy with Skype when I first saw it. I'm still in love with Skype.

It's not perfect. It didn't like going on to my secondary monitor very much. It caused a lot of skipping, and the program caused my whole computer to slow. But it didn't crash the thing, I just restarted and it was fine. Joost operates on channels, where it shows very short (3-4 minute) programs all centring around a theme. For instance, I was interested in watching the Fifth Gear channel, which reviewd cars in short segments (with Tiff Needle; he's such a good driver).

It skipped every so often. I doubt it's my computer, it's still pretty up to date. Maybe someone was downloading something, or maybe the connection just isn't as good to England yet. What I know of it is that it needs a lot of uploading bandwidth as well as downloading. That could be a limiting factor for many people. For those on a 1GB cap, you use your month's allowance within 10 hours of watching.

But what I saw was good, and I will watch it again soon.

It won't take the place of YouTube yet. That methodology is very client controlled, while Joost is still very much server controlled. Once it matures, I can see a massive market for it.

I had my hair cut today, it looks fantastic. I'm also out of money, so I'm living on a shoe-string budget for a while now. I need a job. Speaking of, I had an interview with Aeon on Sunday and the following Tuesday. I think they liked me, I'm not sure. I find out in 1-5 days.

I'm sleepy, and I need a quick drink. Goodnight blogland.