Life of Wiley

By plugging your PC into the blue socket and your monitor, printer, scanner, etc. into the red sockets you can power all the devices off just by turning the PC off thanks to this nifty power strip.

This is a UK version of the same thing.

If you’re looking to be more environmentally friendly and reduce your electricity bill, then perhaps you should consider these products.

As I indicated in this post I had two new mouthpieces for Christmas, a shallow one for playing the trumpet lead in the wind band and a deeper one for the more classical playing that I do in the brass ensemble. The reason for the new mouthpieces was so that they match the rim size (diameter) of the mouthpiece I use on the cornet that I’m comfortable with.

The first time I played with the new mouthpieces was on Tuesday night where I only lasted for about 15 minutes, but this was the first time I’d practiced since before Christmas and I was using a practice mute to keep the noise down.

Last night I rehearsed with the brass ensemble which was the first true test of the new mouthpiece and I managed 40 minutes which was a marked improvement. Everyone else was feeling the strain from lack of practice over the Christmas period too, which was somehow comforting.

It was a great rehearsal as Ken, our lead trumpeter, had written a new piece of music called “No Room” which was written as a Christmas piece for brass quintet depicting the story of Mary and Joseph looking for somewhere to stay in Bethlehem. It was a lovely, and at times, quite haunting piece of music. I hope we get the opportunity to play this in a church setting at Christmas time.

was all I could last when I practised the trumpet last night for the first time since before Christmas! I hope I do better tonight as I have a rehearsal with my friends at the brass ensemble. At least I’ll be able to give my new mouthpiece a proper work out.

Also on a band related note, I got turned away from the JSU Volunteer Band on Monday because they wouldn’t let me through the gate unescorted. It seems I now have to sign the official secrets act to play in the band!

On Sunday I was preaching at Abbots Langley Methodist Church. This Sunday, the first after Epiphany, is usually set up to talk about the baptism of Christ and this was indeed one of the set lessons for the day. However, when I looked at all the lectionary readings together the one characteristic that came through for me and that I chose to preach on was the use of voices. You can read my sermon here (PDF).

Abbots Langley have a different way of having children in the service in that they only come in at the end having spent the rest of the time in their Junior Church classes. They’d only the two children on Sunday and they’d been talking about resolutions in their class and had produced three differently coloured heart shapes on which to write resolutions. On the pink heart they had to write a resolution that they wanted to make for themselves. On the blue heart they had to think of a resolution that they wanted someone else to make that would make their lives better. On the yellow heart they had to make a resolution that they would make that would make the life of someone else better. I thought this was a great take on making resolutions and perhaps it’s something that should be encouraged more often, not just thinking about what we want for ourselves but what others want from us and what we want from others.

Got kids? Here’s a site that may help with some of life’s little bumps when dealing with the little ones.

Happy New Year dear readers!

I hope you all had a good holiday.

Christmas for the Wiley household was had in Watford this year. Although Louise was a bit apprehensive about my volunteering to cook the Christmas dinner in the end it all passed off really well.

We had Louise’s parents down for Christmas itself and on Christmas Eve we all went to St. Luke’s, our local parish church for their Christingle service. The place was packed, Louise and her dad had to stand, but it was really nice and a great way to start the celebration. Euan was even brave enough to go and collect his own Christingle and all the children stood around the church with the candles lit as the rest of the congregation sang a carol.

We spent the rest of the afternoon tracking Santa’s progress across the globe using Norad‘s excellent SantaTrack website. Eaun was in charge in our “command and control centre” as he called out the place names that appeared on the website and then I used an atlas and pawn from my chess set to indicate the location. We let Euan track him as far as Casablanca before sending him off to bed, but not before providing Santa with his traditional mince pie and glass of brandy.

Amazingly Euan got up at his usual time and didn’t rush straight downstairs as he’d told his Nan and Granddad, instead he went into their room and lay with them for a bit before we all got up and went to see what Santa had left. You can see all the pictures in the gallery section.

Christmas Dinner went off without too much problem, except Louise set fire to the oven gloves (I think it was my fault, as I’d left a ring on by mistake) and then Louise’s mum set fire to her paper napkin! The only casualty was a tea towel I used to put out the oven gloves!

My Mum came down on the Wednesday after Christmas with my brother and his three kids following the day after. Euan and Eva had a riot with their cousins, it was a shame the weather wasn’t so good (or so bad that we’d got loads of snow) as it was a challenge to keep their enthusiasm contained within the house. I’m not sure how much they all slept the first night they were all together.

New Year was a relatively quiet affair. The family members had all gone home and we’d got our own bed back. Some friends came round but most had left before the New Year kicked in, either to get kids to bed or to attend a midnight service. Still it was a nice, relaxed way to bring in the New Year with friends.

Now it’s back to work for me today, with Euan, Eva and Louise back in to their respective routines tomorrow.

It looks like the episode of Dr Who to be shown on Christmas Day is going to lead to a sleepless night as I’ve promised Euan he can stay up to watch it!

Recently I decided to end my playing commitment with Watford Band as I felt that I couldn’t play to the best of my ability and to what the band required given my limited ability to practice.

Since leaving I’ve taken up playing with a volunteer military wind band at the NATO Joint Services Unit in Northwood, at the behest of a church friend of mine who plays saxophone with the band. I’ve enjoyed playing with this band as the rehearsals are much less pressured, and although I try to do the best that I can always, I am not left stressed about the amount of practice time I can fit in.

I am the only trumpet/cornet player which has challenges in some pieces as there is little room to rest and it can get quite exposed. But the payoff comes when you get to play some of the more exciting big band numbers or dixieland music that we did at the last two rehearsals.

It was great to use my plunger mute for the first time with my trumpet in the opening, easy solo to a selection from the musical Chicago. Now I just need to learn how to use the plunger properly!

The dixieland piece was good fun too as we had a 4 man dixieland band playing against the rest of the band. It included Copenhagen, Basin Street Blues and When the Saints. It was a bit awkward with Basin Street Blues as Watford Band have a great arrangement of that for trombone by their principal trombonist, Mike Innes, and I kept trying to play what Mike plays instead of what was written.

Thoroughly enjoyable it all was.

It had to happen (well it did a while ago now); the minute I offer to host someone’s website my DSL modem packs up! Unfortunately I am on a BT managed service from Demon. I say unfortunate, not from the Demon experience, but from the BT managed bit, because the modems they supply are/were atrocious. I had an Efficient Networks Flowpoint modem/router/4 port hub. This had been my 3rd, the first two having blown their power supplies. This last one just seemed to get tired and sadly died two weeks ago.

The good thing about a BT managed service though is that I can just phone up Demon support and they get BT to come and bring me a new one. The new modem is in the same shaped box, but is now badged Siemens, it has upgraded firmware, and best of all a 4 port 100Mb/s switch, which has just saved me about £12 as I had been planning to buy one to improve connectivity between my PC and whatever wireless device I put in the living room to stream media to.

So it wasn’t all bad news. So far, there’s been no outages either, other than the odd routing problem at the Demon end.

green LA girl invites folks to take up The Starbucks Challenge where we have to go into a Starbucks coffee shop and simply ask for fair trade coffee and report on the results.

So I was up in Glasgow earlier this week. Glasgow airport has a Starbucks so I thought I’d take up the challenge. For me this was really easy as they were pushing the fair trade coffee as their coffee of the day. So asking for fair trade coffee at the Glasgow Airport resulted in me just getting a coffee with no fuss or questions.

Simple isn’t it? Why not take up the challenge yourself and help Starbucks understand the need to support fair trade.