Merry Christmas 2011
…
Lots of love,
Oh my god, they got me …
No, of course not really, but I got this nice little picture with an order to pay thirty Euro as a punishment for driving to fast. I drove a slight turn with 50 kmh and that should be 30 kmh only, while riding past a stationary speed trap. No, the “wanted”-label is of course my own supplement.
Shit happens, but it was for a good cause, maybe.
Actually, I was on a kind of “rescue misson”, this moment.
I fetched two girls (I had to say “little girls”, maybe, but what if they read this? Their english isn’t so bad, maybe?) from school, after they have been injured by another pupil. They both had some headache after another — of course masculine — pupil beaten the head of one girl to the ground and the others at a third girls head. I have to say, that there was no visible wounds — no blood, not too much tears — fortunatly.
That is of course the reason for that severe look on my face and not the much too loud and obviously emotional music in the car!
Lordy, is that a three-day beard at my chin? Embarassing! And that infra-red-flash maybe lets my complexion look a bit odd, or?
Lots of love,
Surprisingly (a) story
I met a girl on the street today. She was at the age of twelve or thirteen, maybe and had her eyes fixed on something, she held with both hands somewhere right before her eyes as she took her way up the street.
“It’s a smartphone, I bet”, I grinned softly to myself. And really: It seemed she was one of these ever-SMS-writing teenagers and was maybe writing short messages with a friend.
Pondering about a long diskussion regarding the newest fashion-trends or a nice little talk about ‘who with whom’, I continued my way down the street smiling to myself.
As I got closer, the grin fell suddenly out of my face, while recognizing that the thing in her hands was nothing else than … a book — a novel as it seemed. A story, written on paper!
The smile finally returned after a short time of amused disbelief and it was much bigger than before. A reading girl; a young, slim, friendly human being with interest in literature; an alien maybe, an impossible encounter … — suddenly I felt like whistling …
… and thats of course exactly what I did…
Lots of love,
„The species …“ — a very short story
Met a girl with a dog — a teenager — while walking through the neighborhood this day. I threw her a friendly glance, but she stared back very angry. „Yes that’s the age“, I smiled to myself.
Seconds later a woman in a car gave me the same sinister eye! Getting unsure and after assuring that everything was right with my clothes and I wasn’t maybe naked, or so, I thought, „Could be the gender!“, musing.
Just a few seconds later again, a man looked nearly through me, as if I wasn’t there and was obviously so bad-tempered, that I thought, „Ok! Copy that! If there isn’t any evil-bird in a few seconds, that chirps some really bad things to my ears, it has to be the species!“ and gave up thinking about it, finally.
Of course there wasn’t any evil-bird doing so!
Lots of love,
Waiting for my real life to begin — Colin Hay
Seemed I had to do this after the video I played guitar with that injured finger and that was the same title.
You may ask, why there is only one verse, I recorded. The answer is as simple as the song is part of my life. I don’t like the second verse because of the line “suddenly nothing happened …” — don’t play around with such severe things — and the third verse is too much like the first, so: There is only one verse in my cover!
Why this song is part of my life? You could say, that I’m currently in a kind of “wait state”. After a few personal desasters — twinkle — I’m now working on a “new beginning”. And even if this new start is almost done, there are some missing parts, that now have to be found and being integrated.
Yes, I know, this song is maybe much more about people who are looking back to their lives and find out there wasn’t any.
Don’t worry: I had much life before and I will have much in the future. Actually, I’m maybe living my life — right now — much more than all those “permanent-activity” fanatics out there.
If you ask me, those people are acting like little children: On the one hand they fear to miss something, on the other, they are repressing the real missing parts of their lives. What parts? Don’t know really! But when they ever come to rest — “and suddenly nothing happened” — they know! Could be to have some children or maybe just this real-love-thing that all these people try to get around by getting together with the first one, who isn’t up in the trees fast enough.
But activity makes you happy? Your job makes you feel good? Travelling around the world gets you up? Hope you find a way out. That is just like being addicted to a drug: You have to act all the time, or you get really sad, or?
Happiness can not be found in rushing activity, but in tranquility.
But — thank godness, twinkle — nobody asks me!
Hope you apologize, that the song isn’t very accurate! Please remember, that I’m no real musician, and that I recorded that song under very poor conditions — at my home computer. And I’m not making ten takes for a instrumental or singing part, laugh. There could be two times of recording maybe, a third time of singing this voice, but …
There are two Versions actually: The newer one, that is shown above, is a bit fuller, it has an additional, deep third voice and a second, much higher tuned guitar. You can find the other one on my Youtube-channel
Lots of love,
Photo-study
Creativity goes on.
Had a nice little photo-session a few days ago. However, … I don’t know why or when, I draped that scarf to a bra around that cloaked ‘points of interest’ and took some pictures. The original picture — that master photo that leaded to the series, you see on the right — was a bit boring maybe, but I loved that smooth light-play on the skin, that I only found on this picture.
So, I decided to play a bit with masking and colors to get a bit more excitement to the image.
At first I had to do a little bit of touch up work, before masking out that improvised bra. After long time of working with a masking-brush and the magic-wand-tool, I had those two parts: That wonderful skin as a background and the scarf as foreground.
Decided to darken the background a bit, to lay more weight on the foreground and as if I was forced to, I spontaneously altered the background to grayscale colors. A bit more of contrast and a little playing with the color-temperature later, I had my first result and was really happy with it.
And so I tried a bit here and a little there and created this lovely series of pictures casually.
Now, … here it is and I hope you enjoy it. Just click on it to get that image bigger! And please leave a comment afterwards.
Lots of love,
Tags: art, bra, foto, foto-serie, fotografie, halb-akt, kunst, photo, photo-series, photography, scarf, scarfbra, serie, series
2nd Update: Application — Calculate Bpm to seconds — new version with echo time-values — download online
New day, new application.
I needed a program for calculating the beats per minute of a song to seconds and frames for a specified count of cadences (how many centiseconds or a hundreth seconds are one frame) for a karaoke video-clip you maybe find here later on.
A web research told me what I should calculate to get that values, so I hadn’t to think too much by myself (calculating hundreth seconds to frames was really hard time thinking, good god — grin), but as there is a need for that more often, I made a little vb.net application, that calculates all those values, by just giving the program the Bpm (There are some good Bpm-counters for Mp3s, Wavs, … to be found on the internet) and the time-signature (normally 4/4) of the song, the count of cadences you want to know the lenght of (normally one, of course) and the rest is just to hit that calculate button. If you need the value for video editing, you have to specify the frames per second, of course.
If you want to, you can copy the seconds value (seconds and two digits of centiseconds) or the second and frames value to the clipboard to paste it somewhere.
Haven’t done too much testing, so don’t be surprised too much, when something unexpected happens. The code is clean, but make sure to not download the application of any other website than this one here! Those one-click Apps, you can produce with MS Visualstudio aren’t very safe against being tricked.
The download can be found here, or in the download-section, of course.
Have fun and
lots of love,
Edit:
You see, my head contains some confusing things. How could somebody write this program without thinking at all this musicians out there, who maybe are in the need of some note values for programming an echo, maybe.
So, as you can see on the right, there is a little button in a new version of the program, that you can click, to display the table, that is shown in the picture below.
This table shows the duration of all normal note values (T is the equivalent of a triplet) in milliseconds. I forgot maybe again, that there could be a need for a whole note in a triplet mode, but that’s no problem, because I have currently no access to the program — I installed a new harddrive and was in need of a SATA-cable, so my very private programming and most of the “totally unnecessary” private documents had to stand back a bit (grin).
But, just be patient for downloading the new version: The new cable is ordered and will come next days, then the new version can be compiled with a click-once application-profile, to make it updateable for you.
Stand by and look back for the new download! Thx, allot!
2nd EDIT:
So here is the new Version! As already mentioned, there is a “1T” echo-time for a full note as a triplet, what means, that you take the time-value in seconds for one cadence and multiply it with two thirts … é voilà!
Lots of love,
Tags: App, Application, Bpm, Calculate, echo time-values, editing, editor, engineering, music, musician, new, seconds, software, sound, sound engineering, Updated, Version, video, Windows
Php-media-player
A very simple media player in php was the goal of my last two days.
I wanted to get all the mediafiles of one single directory automaticly listed to a downloadable table. To realize, I list the files of that directory to an array and read the information to use it for download and view in the media player.
I choose the ActiveX-Mediacontrol from Microsoft in Version 12, for it is very simple and even if the control is a bit difficult in use — there are some bugs and missing parts also — everybody can actually get it or has it allready.
So here is the result:
You can click on that picture to get the whole screenshot.
The simple list of media-files can be found a little bigger at the bottom of this post, just like the view to the media-folder and the main server-folder.
The list of the mediafiles. The player starts playing the regarding file by clicking its name. It autostarts with the first title of the folder.
The main-folder. Yes you’re right, there are only three files in that main folder, so it could be implemented everywhere, of course! The css-directory holds the complete css, so you can edit colors, backgrounds and so on.
The media-folder holds all files to be played. There is an easy to use download-safe to prevent guest from misusing the download.php for downloading sources or other files as those who you really want them to download — the files of this directory.
Maybe try it with some of my songs as seen on the images above: media.hochstrate.be.
You can write a mail or comment if you are interested in the source or the whole thing. Be ashured, that this player is just a study of my normal work, so you should maybe use it on your own risk — blink (works fine, I think — smile) .
Lots of love,
Tags: php, media-player, play folder, windows media player, directx, simple, easy, just upload, play, fulls css support, css, support
Just brand new
… is this english speaking part of my site …
stay connected, there is some content allready and must be copied only
Lots of love,