I know, I'm a disgrace. I updated this page (below) and didn't even get around to posting it online. Some dedicated blogger I am!

Still not a whole lot to report. I know I've been saying this since August, but it's still true - my manager went off for a 2-week secondment to New York at the beginning of August and hasn't come back yet. The buzz at the moment is that he'll be back around the middle of next week... believe it when I see it. So I'm still doing his job plus my job on a part-time day :-) Fun fun fun. Is it any wonder I don't have anything to report?!

On a more positive note, my Pyrmont Flash assignment (see previous post) got a tick of approval from my lecturer, and we're now onto the brave new world of Director, which is rather exciting and I'm very much looking forward to getting stuck into it.

I've been forcing myself to get back into listening to new and exciting things, and my favourite at the moment is Martinu's string quartets 2 & 3 which I picked up on LP at the 2MBS-FM Book & Record Bazaar in July. No. 2 really is superbly joyful (and a little frivolous in places). Martinu's been one of my favourite composers for a number of years now & I can't work out why people don't play him more often. So if you're a performer reading this & you've never heard anything by Bohuslav Martinu - get out there and listen! My other recommendations include his symphonies, La Revue de Cuisine and the ballet suite Spalicek (there are supposed to be all sorts of accents and typographical frivolities on this title, but I can't find my big list of HTML typographical symbols & Windows doesn't see fit to provide this level of typographical frivolity. Similarly, Martinu is supposed to have an o over the u...). My apologies for the exceptionally dull preponderance of Amazon links - but at least it's somewhere you can have a bit of a listen!

Enough ranting. Must go off and do other people's work now.

# posted by minim @ 2:58 PM 0 Comments

It's been a pretty good month for me this year - well, fun at any rate. I went ever so slightly insane & coughed up for the Adobe Creative Suite (student edition - I guess that's not that much coughing, all things considered) which I've been having a marvellous time with. In particular I've been playing round with Photoshop CS in preparation for my first uni assignment of the semester. Cool assignment - how often does one get to roam about Sydney clutching a near-pro-level digital camera and pretending to be a real photographer? I based my assignment around decaying buildings in Pyrmont, so got to take photos of a couple of my very favourite buildings - the old CSR site and the Edwin Davey & Sons flour mill.

I've also been teaching myself Illustrator and exploring the wonderful world of Acrobat 6 (Save As Word - yee-ha! This feature alone is going to save me 3 hours' work for every publication I need to put online for work).

Work's pretty much taken over my life for the past six weeks, while my manager's been living it up in New York on secondment, so musical activity has been rather curtailed. However, my fiancé's taking his eldest son to New Zealand for two weeks on Monday, so I have the house to myself & am hoping to get back to the solo flute piece I abandoned in mid-August & have it all finished by the time he gets back.

The harp piece I finished in July, (en)twine, should also be published in the next few weeks, when I'll post it - and hopefully some sort of recording - in the scores section of the site.

So that's it for the moment - a bit dull I fear - I'll try to do better next time!

# posted by minim @ 2:59 PM 0 Comments