James Muir

Winding down for holidays

2009-09-08T05:30:00.000-07:00

The wife and I are off for holidays on Friday, so this is going to be, hopefully, a fairly uneventful week. I'm at home today making a start rebuilding the Make More Noise website. In the background is the enchanting Man On Wire.

For anyone who hasn't seen it I can thoroughly recommend it. It's one of those fantastic documentaries about those joyful mavericks and dreamers that make you proud to be a member of the same species. Admittedly a fatter lazier iteration of the same species but connected nonetheless.

As for holidays we're going to Paris for a few days and then on to Chateau De Mazan which is near Avignon.

Sonikmatter tutorials now live

2009-05-13T02:18:00.000-07:00

So it begins, the first video tutorials are now live on Sonikmatter, they are only available to subscribers but subscription is cheap and has additional benefits. You read more about the available packages here. We've get a few more screencasts scheduled for later in the year and Sonikmatter have a some more episodes in the can, ready to be rolled out.

Sonikmatter tutorials now in beta

2009-04-02T02:11:00.000-07:00

I've mentioned before that I've been doing some video tutorials for Sonikmatter, well they've been sorting out the back end delivery system and at an ungodly hour this morning the first test went live.
Here's hoping it all works as planned and I'll post again when the they're ready to launch.

Backups

2009-03-31T11:43:00.000-07:00

It's been a weird week, enough hard drives failed that if I was a conspiracy theorist, I'd be wanting a word with the Chinese. No one was spared, friends, colleagues, clients and even Clif from Sonikmatter suffered. For those of you lucky enough to be spared, it's bad, really bad, it's not the kind of thing you'd wish on a racist taxi driver, it's that bad.
It's one of those despair in the pit of your stomach moments, you'll be angry, tearful, frustrated and then angry again. The bad news is you're on your own, there's not a hard drive manufacturer I've come across that will cover the data. If your drive is under warranty you may get a new drive or a repair but you won't get your precious data back.
The good news is hard drives are cheap, there's good free back up software and once you've set it running your back up can proceed unsupervised. There's no excuse, go and back up now.

Launch

2009-03-08T11:46:00.000-07:00

Rather than indulge in some self congratulatory, celebrity endorsed ribbon cutting event I've gone for the soft opening. Lets be clear, they'll be mistakes but hopefully no one will get hurt. Grammar has been abused, punctuation ignored and spelling mistakes have escaped into the wild. What really concerns me though is the human damage. Have I spelt your name wrong ? Have I not given credit where it's due ? Do any of my links take you to German animal porn sites ? Please let me know ? You can email me by clicking here.
If you're reading this on Blogger you can exercise your pedantry here.

New website

2009-02-13T06:22:00.000-08:00

After a year or so, I’ve decided it’s time to give my website a wash and brush up. It’s been an interesting twelve months and I’ve found myself in a whole new and completely unexpected line of work, Screencasts. For those of you not familiar these are online videos, like this. I’ve done a few tutorials for my MakeMoreNoise site, which have focused on Apple’s Logic Pro and in December ’08 I was approached by Sonikmatter, who commissioned me to create tutorials for them. After a lot of discussion and many experiments, we’ve settled on a format and these videos should start appearing online soon. I’ll post again when they’re officially launched. I’m also in discussion with a couple of other clients to provide similar products. More news as it happens.