So with this new ability to be able to blog directly from my iPhone I shall be making full and proper use of this facility. This weekend sees the Weird 10 conference at Warminster which I will be attending also be writing a review for the Paranthrpology journal if you’re going along to weird 10 I’ll see you there!
Okay so I know its been ages since I last updated my blog, but I just thought I would let you know about something that happened to me recently lost on holiday in Jersey. We were walking along one of the beaches and I happened to see an object that didn’t look like your average bit of wash up, so I took a photograph of it and later found out that it is an anti-tank mine (tellermine 43) it’s a good job that I didn’t step on it or do anything like that being a good citizen I reported it to the Jersey police who are dealing with it, interesting find and not your average shell!
Well it’s often said that life gets in the way and I guess that’s why it’s been a while since I last posted. I thought I would just promote that there is a new newsletter dealing with matters of the Psi and paranormal / spiritualist research matters. ‘Parathrapology’ is imminently going to be available from this website. I have been lucky enough to contribute regarding my methodologies in approaching research into spiritualism within contemporary British society. Please check it out.
I would just like to post about a really important development for the live and local show on Salisbury’s Spire FM. The show itself has been running for the last nine months and has been an amazing success, featuring the latest in local bands and artists and community events. Matthew Priest and myself have presented the show along with Owen Evans who featured under the name snakes. Last weekend was our last on-air show on Spire FM this season. However the great news is we will now be doing, an hour-long podcast which will be available to download via iTunes every week. The podcast itself will be a mixture of commercially released songs and the best of local talent from across Wiltshire and West Hants. Please subscribe to this podcast and make it the success that I know it can be. If you would like to be featured as a local band or artist on the pod cast please get in contact with me via the contact page on this website, you can subscibe to the podcast here
It was never intensional but this blog has turned into reviews of a lot of varying and very different software. This time it’s the turn of Slide Rocked, not a piece of software as such but an amazing online application for presentations. I used it most recently for a PhD paper at the University of Winchester. It’s an incredible online app, that is just amazing at making your presentations stand out, very like Apples keynote in many ways, particularly the animations that you can add.
One of the great things is that you can have your presentations online and as long as you have the internet can use Slide Rocket. I have used the service on a whole host of defferent browsers including Chrome, IE, firefox and safari, and it works well with all of them.
Well worth checking out www.sliderocket.com
If you’re in radio as a DJ or producer, then if you have’t checked out this software it’s a must that you do so. In it’s 10th year and still breaking ground with the revolutionary ‘Bridge’ software that joins the functionality of Serrato Scratch with Ableton Live, making the perfect DJ-ing package. Before I go off sounding like a salesman, go check out their website at ableton.com, they do a better job at that than me.
I just wanted to let you know that this is one of the fines production pieces of software I have ever used, I use if for production of News / Sport beds and various jingle packages to. The ability to be able to time stretch audio without effecting the pitch has been around a while now, but trust me, the audio engine in Ableton is one of the best. If you plan on making music, or even just a bed for a commercial, this software can do it and a whole lot more…
With all the snow lately, I thought i would take a few photographs and post them here.
The photos were shot on a fuji s9600
One of the main reasons that I started writing this blog was to enable me to collect some of my thoughts that weren’t necessarily of note to the PhD, however would serve some more peripheral purpose certainly in terms of being able to go back over my blog and see what I had written. One of the more common themes that I keep coming across is a non-realist approach to spiritualism, mediumship and notions of the paranormal. Paradoxically we live in a society that has seen paranormal entertainment ballooning in popularity over the last five years. The non-realist approach toward anything that is ” otherworldly” is often strongly held. While asking a taxi driver recently about ghosts and the paranormal he replied quickly “I don’t believe that rubbish” it is attitudes of a negative persuasion that are very interesting to me as a researcher in terms of the understanding the meanings and relationships that there are between a largely sceptical British public and a ever popular, ever-growing genre which deals with discourses of death, afterlife and communication with spirit. I have to say I am glad there are a lot of people who take a non-realist approach to spiritualism and this area in general as this makes my research a great deal more interesting.
Something I’m about to do, is digitised a number of vintage photographs. When I say vintage I mean between the 1950s and 1970s. The main problem I’m having is that they are large and medium format photographs, basically too large to put in any scanner, unless you want to pay vast amounts to have them scanned. To this end I have spoken to a number of people and they believe that I would probably be better off, photographing them and spotting them in a program like Aperture. The thing I’m wondering is which camera to use? Being a massive fan of Fuji cameras I have two including the S9 600 and an S2 pro. I’m fairly sure that I should probably be doing it with the S2 pro. I’ll let you know how this goes!
Really looking forward to checking out the film ‘Paranormal Activity’ in the next couple of days. In terms of my research study it is very interesting to see that the promotional trailer for the film centers around the audience’s reactions to the film. The trailer dedicates very few seconds of actual footage while majoring on film of the audience. Arguably here the makers want to get the message across that the scare factor is the appeal to going and seeing the movie. I will await to see how scary it truly is, or whether as some people have reported already, it’s just a big fictional disappointment.