Good morning

Stayed over with pfy last night. This morning I am borrowing mirrorshard's lightbox, which is an Apollo goLITE p1.

Impressions:
-blue lights! Makes everything else - even outside - look a bit yellow.
-fiddly bugger, had to press lots of buttons to get it to stay at full intensity. I could probably operate it more easily if I read the fine manual, but that smacks of effort. What is wrong with just having an 'on' button?
-doesn't seem as bright; not as suitable for use as, say, a working lamp for doing small fiddly stuff as my LiteBook is.
-seems a little smaller and lighter than the LiteBook, and I do like that the stand doubles as cover.
-very slightly noisy - not a big fan noise like the old LiteBook, but not absolutely silent like the newer (but not newest-model) one that hairyears has. Slight high-pitched whine, most people probably wouldn't notice.

Will it help as much as the LiteBook does? I do not know.

Can I be arsed to link-enable this post? No. Google for the damned things yourself.

(no, the userpic does not depict the lightbox. Or any lightbox. It's something else.)

Mammoth Project tour?

Okay. So. Mammoth Project = big open source music project thing. We want to offer:
-free mp3s, with the option of buying a CD with higher-quality sound (pick-n-mix tracks for CD, blah blah blah)
-free sheet music, with the option of buying a printed copy on high-quality paper

i don't want to offer anything to buy that cannot be downloaded for free in some format from the site; none of this "first 20 seconds of a track" nonsense. I want some of the profits to go to charity once we've got the site up and running. I want the contributing artists to be compensated for anything by them that is bought, and also to receive a share of donations to the site.

The biggest dififculty with this is going to be getting a good stock of material for the site. We need quality and we also need quantity. It won't work if it's just a pile of my own compositions. The other thing we'll need is quite a bit of word-of-mouth publicity.

I'm wondering about doing a tour of Canada in Summer 2007 - I'd take some time out to visit my parents, but basically spend the summer going from place to place, recording independent bands, trying to build popularity for the site, and so on. Most sensible way to do it in terms of flights would be to start on the West coast and work my way East.

If this is going to happen, I'll need:
-local helpers in each city I visit (I need accomodation, and also people who can help organise events like concerts)
-lots of contacts with bands/groups/composers/etc who would like the site and be willing to contribute their work
-funds to pay for travel, food, my rent back in London, and some publicity materials. This is going to be the hardest bit, I think.

We'll also need to start serious work on the project in January, rather than having the idea and sitting around with it as we've been doing so far.

Ideas? Obvious problems? Questions? Volunteers?

Groceries

They arrived very late. I get £10 off for having to wait, though. Also there are two bottles of wine that I did not order. Ho-hum. And it's not like I frittered away the time on the internet or anything, oh, wait.

I do not need to buy tinned tomatoes for quite some time. That is good. I'm not sure how I'll get all this into the cupboards, though. I think when I get back from Brighton a thorough clear-out of the kitchen cupboards is in order.

Now to try and tidy - quickly - and go back to Leytonstone. With gnocchi. Mmmm. Gnocchi.

There must be an Italian knock-knock joke in there somewhere.