Dom Barnes’s Blog

I’m an Apple fan. Thats no secret. I like the products, I like the design, the interfaces, the simplicity and yet ability to be powerfully complex. I like the whole shebang (sp?). I also liked the new “Get A Mac” adverts they started a while ago.

My problem with these, however, is only a recent event. Up until about 6 ads back, they were more focussed on features that the Mac could offer over Vista, such as MS Office native, iWork, Time Machine, Boot Camp, the version simplicity. But recently, the ads seem to have dropped into the realm of Vista-bashing.

That being said, I’m not a massive fan of Vista, or Windows at all. But I use it, and I admit that Vista does have some advantages over XP. I recommended it to my mum in fact (largely on the basis that XP support will dwindle so best to jump on board sooner). 

Surely Apple can come up with better ads, and features to push, like Photobooth, Garageband, iChat, Screen Sharing, all of which are great features to plug, rather than spending time and money on ads going on about unhappy Vista customers and Vista bugs.

Perhaps we can band together and make them come up with some engaging adverts instead?

Recently I’ve found use in Upcoming.org as a method of finding cool events in Birmingham to go to, such as the Birmingham Flickrmeet, Blogger Meetups, and gigs. I’ve also been adding stuff myself, such as Douglas Furs gigs and Midland MUG meetings in hopes of getting word out and getting more interest.

Well listings are limited currecntly. So big thanks and good luck to LiveBrum - the “comprehensive what’s on event listings for the City of Birmingham, UK”. Its a beautiful new website just launched recently where you can get all the info you want on concerts, shows, comedy, and any other public events in the Birmingham area, all nicely broken down into specific categories. So if you have a penchant for Jazz or Folk, you can get your fill here.

Its only just on its first legs (what is that referencing? do things have a second set of legs?) but there are some good features coming soon from what I hear.

I’ll be trying to get the Douglas Furs gigs on there too, but how happy was I to see our Bar Academy gig on there already!

So if you find yourself looking for a nice night out, or just want to go see a band or some theatre on a sunday afternoon, then this has to be your first stop. So go check it out, sign up and get live!

Today marks the final day of my working life in Financial Services. Today I had a trip to Manchester to demo a database, little knowing that I would probably not see most of my colleagues again. So Tuesday seems to be the last day for that. As of 15th May I’ll be unemployed (well 16th really). Its (hopefull) the end of an era.

I’ve been working in FS for about 5 years now, starting originally at Norwich Union in 2003 and working there until 2006, when I moved up to Birmingham, and then went into FS again just as a temporary job. As often happens I settled and put a new job on the back burner, and then over the past year, I have been slowly working toward my IT qualifications, hoping to move over.

Well that time came upon me quicker than I planned, and I also got a little pay out to go with it. Without mentioning the company name, we have been going through some changes, and found out a few months back our office was going to close. After hearing that it just became an issue of when.

Today on my train journey I was listening to Leo Laporte talk on TWiT about the Yahoo/Microsoft business and in particular, some of the comments about Yahoo sounded all to familiar. Jerry Yang and other Yahoo bods made comments about now that the Microsoft deal deadline passed, they can move on and focus on being  more efficient business. And that is literally what the bosses at my work were saying.

My worry is for the company that they are already too far down that path, and that for years they have been hiding failure behind small successes, and of course that means for the current employees, a tough time, uncertainty and risk of redundancy too.

But I’ve been through it now and have to look foward to a new job. I’m looking at starting off as some sort of technician, doing installation and repairs or hardware and network stuff, hopefully in a full time position, but I’m also looking at contract work so we’ll see how we get on.

Either way, I’ve got some time to myself which I will spend making music, tidying the house and seeing a variety of films, and probably blog a fair bit too!

Today I picked up my new bass amp - an Ashdown MAG300 C210 Combo. What does that mean? Its a 307W combo amp (amplifier and speaker cabinet) with 2 x 10″ speakers. And its lovely.

When I was looking at new amps, I had a few choices. First, do I get a split setup, i.e. a seperate amplifier head unit and speaker cabinets (cabs), or a combo, with the amp and cabs built into the same unit. There were really two differences. Firstly, with split setups, you have more flexibility to mix amps with cabs, so if you already have some, or prefer a particular brand of cabs, you can mix and match your units. The other difference is price. You’ll probably pay about another 20-30% more for split setups depending on what you choose.

For me, price was a big issue, so I went with the combo setup. I saw the Ashdown amps in PMT in Birmingham and after some reading online, decided that this was my choice of amp. So I went over there on wednesday last week and picked up this bad boy.

Of course this was not the best idea as I had a gig on Thursday at the Hare and Hounds so I had about 10 minutes to give it a try out the night before.

Anyway, the gig went well, the amp is lovely. I hope to get more time soon (see Redundancy) to play around with it. I can say that the compression and Sub-Harmonics settings do some damn good work on the sound.

If you wanna see this lush thing, check out my Unboxing photos on Flickr.