richard vodden’s blog

I noticed on a thread the other day the following list of trumpet crimes and associated fines. I agree with these wholeheartedly:

MUSICAL OFFENCE AND FINE
Playing highest note possible in warm- up £100
Sound-checking mic with obnoxious jazz licks £15
Raising hand after mistake £15
Practicing multiple tonguing not called for on gig £15
Blacking out after high note £20
Obnoxiously show-offy warm-up £25
Taking tuning note up an octave £25
Vibrato on unison passage £50
Failure to use 3rd valve slide £50
Playing B-flat when band tunes to A £75
Being told by conductor to play louder £400
Failure to swing £1000

LEAD PLAYERS
Changing mouthpieces mid-song £10
Faking section into early entrance £20
Faking self into early entrances £25
Missing high lick, then mentioning previous gig(s) £25
Asking conductor if it’s ok to take a lick up £25
Asking conductor if it’s ok to take a lick down £400
Taking a lick down that you took up in rehearsal £100
Missing last note of “In the Mood” £200

SECTION/NON-LEAD PLAYERS
Missing entrance when lead drops out £15
Pointing out to the lead that guy on the record took that last lick up £20
Attempting unassigned lick biffed by lead £50
Asking lead what mouthpiece he uses £75
Hanging over past lead on last chord £100
Attempting to out-screech lead on last chord £100
Successfully out-screeching lead at any time £500

EQUIPMENT VIOLATIONS
Playing with screw on rim £10
Polishing horn on stage £15
Dropping mute £10
Dropping horn: Repairs + £20
Dropping dead: Warning
Forgetting pencil £20
Forgetting mute(s) £50 each
Forgetting bowtie or socks £30
Forgetting mouthpiece £30
Forgetting magazine £100
Blaming mistake on sticky valves £25
Getting marble or similar object stuck down bell £75

CRIMINAL BAD TASTE
Having nicest gig-bag in section £10
Talking about the great deal you got on a new horn £10
Hawking old horn on bandstand £10
Quoting Herb Alpert or Mangione Song £25
Farting on bandstand £25
Defecating on bandstand £75
Practicing legit style on swing gig £35
Discussing how plentiful gigs were in the old days £50
Beginning a sentence with “When I played for Kenton…” £50
Casually mentioning to Musical Director of cheap theatre that you also play keyboards £100

BASIC STUPIDITY
Playing on a Jet-tone mouthpiece £25
Continually asking “where are we? £25
Drunkenness on stage £50
Stoned on stage £50
Pretending to be friends with a trombone player £200
Actually being friends with a trombone player £750
Dating a trombone player £3000
Loaning money to bone player £4x amount loaned
Sitting next to conductor at meals £100

And I think that its worth paying 10 quids to be allowed to play with a screw rim

Once again I feel it necessary to have a rave about how amazing the rehearsal orchestra are to play with. This weekend I have had the delight of playing 4^th trumpet under the guidance of Levon Parikian. Playing in a section of 5 trumpets (4+bump), 5 trombones (again 5+bump) and 8 horns is an awesome feeling in itself, but when those players are extremely experienced and supportive it transforms the game into a sport.

We played Richard Stauss’ Alpine Symphony, which is a tone poem of gargantuan proprotions – well worth a listen. I recommend listening to it a few times as, whilst its mostly tonal, its not the most approachable of pieces. Once you’ve approached it however, you appreciate that it really is genius.

One of the most exciting pieces I have listened to in quite a while is Karl Jenkins “The Armed Man : A Requiem for Peace”. Karl Jenkins is best known as a Jazz Musician and plays (amongst other things) Piano, Oboe, Soprano and Baritone Sax.
The Armed Man definately reflects this is its syncopated themes, but its its juxtaposition of traditional choral tonality against a more modern sound in the orchestral accompaniment which really interests me. Throughout the piece Jenkins uses techniques reminiscent of John Williams to the point that, listening to the Sanctus, a collegue of mine commented “It sounds like the kind of thing you might hear while Indiana Jones is doing something quite exciting, not very exciting, but quite exciting”. The brass writing is nothing short of magic and combined with his gorgeous use of choral harmony the piece stands as one of the most original compositions of the last decade – definately worth a listen.

Much as I dislike posts which simply exist to inform people that I’m still posting, I feel it is necessary, as I’ve not posted for ages!

Several things have happened in the gap. One of the more interesting was a Christmas party held by a clarinet player called Sharon, at which I met a fella who is the brother of a ‘Cellist called Sophie. He write a webpage called Toilet Scroll which is rather amusing – go and have a look!

Or maybe depraved – I’m not sure. Very much in the style of Edward Monkton A Beautiful Revolution is very dark and in places incredibly deep and clever web “comic”. I recommend having a look – don’t do it when you’re down though!

I’ve further improved the “Google User Interface Enhancements” Grease Monkey script. Version 0.13 allows you to:

• navigate to the “Cached” and “Similar Pages” links with the ‘c’ and ‘r’ keys respectively.
• move forward and back through the results pages with the ‘,’ and ‘.’ keys. Finally
• if you haven’t yet selected a search result, ‘enter’ will take you to the “did you mean?” link if it exists.
• pressing ’s’ will bring the cursor to the search box.

Google User Interface Enhancements v0.13

Yesterday, my flat mate asked me if I’d ever written a search engine plugin for Firefox. The answer was no – so I asked him why he wanted one. It turns out he wanted to be able to search the P and H website from the little box. The solution is here.

Not content with adding mousewheel support for 30 Boxes, I have since written a GreaseMonkey script which provides keyboard and mouse support to Google. Several people have tried this in the past, but I couldn’t get any of their scripts to work – mostly due to simple mistakes in the XPath queries. My script, hopefully, uses XPath generically enough that google will have to make radical changes to their layout code for it to break. It has the following functionality:

• Number Keys 0-9 – Jump straight to the link with that number (0 jumps to result 10)
• Letter Keys J and K – Move up and down through the results
• Enter or F keys – Follow the currently highlighted link.
• Mousewheel – Scroll through the selections and the page (try it – it works).

I’m happy to add more functionality as I think of it. If anyone has any suggestions then post them in the comments section and I’ll see what I can do.

Follow this link to download the Google User Interface Enhancements

UPDATE

No sooner had I posted this than a bug report arrived stating that I had hardcoded the number of result to 10. The following link fixes that and makes the link numbers slightly less obtrusive.

Click here to download the Google User Interface Enhancements v0.11

I’ve also been told that the links don’t install – I need to log into my webserver to fix that. In the mean time please change the extension to “.user.js” and then dragging the script into a firefox window should install it.

Last weekend I went to visit the sweet little baby mention on this blog previously. Whilst there I, amongst other things, pinched some productivity ideas from its father. One specific thing is the use of 30 Boxes for calendar management. It is very good web application, but lacks many features one would normally associate with a modern Web2 application, so armed with a copy of Mozilla Firefox with the Grease Monkey extension I modified a pre-existing script to provide both keyboard short cuts (press H to see them once the script is installed) and mouse wheel support. This makes the application much more usable. Download 30 Boxes Mouse Wheel Support here.