05.24.07
Posted in Health, Humour, Music at 4:05 pm by emerym
I had another consultation with Dr Phil Johnson yesterday. We talked among other things about how others perceive my illness. He put it as “You’re neither terminaly ill nor terminaly well.” which made me laugh. It’s always nice having a chat with him. 
We also talked about how lots of money gets pumped into cancer research.. see below for something that helps in a small way with cancer care.
I’ve got a medical certificate for a further month from my own GP, which is making the wife worried about my return date. To get back in the swing of things I’ve got my work VPN access fixed (Thanks Jim!) and have started doing some reading of internal docs.
It was also nice to see the guys at the office in our new location. Sorry I didn’t sort lunch out. Marc being off sick with a fever through me. Hope you’re feeling better! It’s a nice quiet desk we’ve got, what a result! (James, Wei Li and I have had BIG problems with noise levels in the past).
A good while ago my sister, Dr Karen Lowton introduced me to the music of Adam Kay and Suman Biswas aka The Amateur Transplants – “two junior doctors who practice medicine with varying degrees of success.” The track was “Mr Burton” from their album “Fitness to Practice”. If you like Derek and Clive you’ll love these guys. 
I had wanted to play it to Dr J while we compared gadgets, but a software update had knocked out my phones ability to access the storage card properly.
10% of all proceeds go straight to Macmillan Cancer Relief.
BTW Karen, did you know searching for “Dr Karen Lowton” in Google results in a #1 match “Dr. Karen Lowton: Gerontology: King’s College London”. Searching for “Mark Emery” results in a hit for a substance I’ve no interest in whatsoever – I’ll stick to my Ibuprofen and Paracetamol.
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04.28.07
Posted in Health, Music at 5:48 pm by emerym
Having put together my party play list or “Soundtrack to a Recovery” together, I stumbled upon a video with the music “Dare you to move” by Switchfoot on YouTube. I’ve never heard of them before now, but will hunt down their CDs. This has got to be my “Title track”. I just love how it sounds and with the fatigue back in anger today the lyrics strike a cord..
The tension is here
Between who you are and who you could be
Between how it is and how it should be
I dare you to move
The tracks been used as the music to a fan made Star Trek Enterprise video about T’Pol and Trip. Yes, I’m a Treky, and love the video too. Shame they canned the show.
The lyrics are here and YouTube video here.
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03.21.07
Posted in Music at 8:41 am by emerym
When listening to my music on my PDA phone one thing that kept annoying me was the different volume levels between tracks from old and new albums. On the newer albums the sound engineers generally push the volume to the limit. This can make for uncomfortable listening when you’ve adjusted the volume for an older, quieter track moments before.
The answer was Replay Gain, WinAmp, and a DSP plugin for my player.
WinAMP lets you right click on a track and select “Send To: / Calculate Replay Gain”. It then stores the gain in the file and adds tags with the data.
Note: Before you do this yourself with WinAMP 5.33 and Ogg Vorbis files, ensure you have a backup. A few people have had this version zap their files when writing the new tags. So far it’s zapped 1 in 44 tracks for me. 5.34 is in Beta at the moment. I don’t think mp3 files have the same problem.
I use Conduits Technologies, Inc. http://www.conduits.com/ Pocket Player on my WM5 HTC TyYN. The DSP plug-in reads the Replay Gain headers and adjusts the tracks volume when decoding.
No more reaching for the external volume control!
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03.15.07
Posted in Music at 2:19 pm by emerym
I’ve been listening to a lot of music while off sick. The family CD collection would take 21×24x7 to listen to in full. Playing around with WinAmp I realised I could use its media library to rate tracks and start building a play list. Initially it was just to skip some downbeat tracks I didn’t want to listen to. “Dirge Music” as my friend Jason would put it.
After the news that I didn’t have lymphoma I started thinking about having a party in October. It will be my 42nd “Meaning of Life” party. Maybe even fancy dress as I know some people have got some costumes they’re just dying to show off 
I’ve been slowly working through my CD collection, picking out the more upbeat tracks. I’ve just stopped at the T’s. The The, Infected is an album that reflects Britain around 1986. None of the tracks made my party list, but the album name and opening lines of the title track brought a wry smile to my face, with Matt Johnson’s great lyrics and vocals.
I’ve got too much energy to switch off my mind
But not enough to get myself organized
My heart is heavy–my head is confused
And my aching little soul–has started burning blue!
A couple of Artists later in the list we have Twenty 4 Seven and their track “You can make me feel good“. Their backup singer Nance Coolen was the best part of the band, but I prefer brunettes these days
As my play list would run for 15 hours already, without anything from U to Z, I’ll have to do one or more of the following:
- Have tracks play at random from the list
- Put the list on the web and let some of my buddies rate the tracks
- Make the party last much longer! Long weekend anyone? 12th-14th October 2007
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