Arts festival in Dumfries - May 2011

It's that time of year again, the arts and events brochure for May 2011 has been finalised and made available to patrons of the Arts Festival and the general public via the website. The events are being added to the website and the event calendar is being updated - as with all performance related ventures, there are always details and amendments up until the last minute so everyone involved is kept busy.

The itinerary this year features the Community day in Dumfries (Dock Park) where there will be a range of events over the weekend. As usual there are events throughout the region in the more rural areas, and some more traditional art events for the connoisseurs of drama, music, literature and theatre.

The children's events are also strong this year with poetry, puppetry and dance workshops. It's incredible how many agencies are involved in bringing the festival to life - let's hope it exceeds expectations this year.

Where to download a film...legally

Recent marketing has drawn attention to the film download market as we move away from DVDs to digital storage on our own devices. iLoaded took a benign view of the credit crunch and encouraged users to download feature films for £1.99!

There are also good deals on music videos and games for PC but it's very Windows PC oriented. The film downloads are copyright protected to prevent piracy so you know you're getting the real deal but it's a Windows DRM based security that's in place. Just make sure your windows media player is up to date, that's all I'm saying...

One interesting feature is the OMA DRM format (.DCF) that can be transferred to supporting mobile phones - this is a pretty sweet idea in principle but there are compatibility issues and the market is still settling down to some sort of cross-platform industry standard.

Note: Mac users do have a limited selection of Quicktime titles that are DRM-free :)

Another journey by train

I'm visiting a client in Bristol today where extensive media processing and testing goes on for a music video and film download site. The train journey is a bit horrendous: 5 and a half hours from Dumfries and Galloway with 3 changes.

The first train carriage had plug sockets but no power and a dodgy tannoy. Helpfully the assistant informed me that I could try another carriage as sometimes the power didn't work all the way through the train. Virgin trains keeping standards high!

Crewe is somewhere I only know because of journey transfers; what happens there apart from travelers crossing paths?

Anyway more SEO article writing for gift wishlists this morning as part of the ongoing campaign for mywishwand - the trend of the google analytics should gradually show an increase in traffic but with the proportion on free search engine traffic growing from the current 3%. There are some referrals at the moment but most of the traffic has been as a result of the offline marketing at the launch of the site, e.g. press and media coverage in related magazines and programmes.

The internet connection from the XDA has been fine but the network for o2 is somewhat lacking in the lake district - I guess network coverage is as concentrated as the population for any given region.

The laptop keeps picking up 'Free Public WiFi' on the train and I can connect to it without additional security measures. However it doesn't give me internet access so it may be a feature of the rail service - CrossCountry now.

Making Music

G came visiting today and offered some inspiration for making music again. What I need to do, though, is set up a capture mechanism for recording acoustic sounds to digital tracks in my PC pod. Although this could be an avoidance technique for actually doing the work of writing new music.

I've been thinking about the transience of music making since hearing about the death of Steven Edgar of My Electric Love Affair although I don't know whether I know him from Leith by association with Cestlavie and his Rodney Relax connection.