A word of advice, there are three things that one should not talk about in polite company; religion, politics, and Twilight.
I took a rather long walk today to sort some stuff out and thought I'd share some of my surroundings with you good people of the internet:
Yeah, so the edits are rather cheesy, but I was having fun alright!
Also, a little earlier a friend of mine sent me something that quite nearly made me wet myself.
If you want a good laugh check THIS out!
The second song on the play-list's an absolute killer.
Ok, Third (and last) post of photos from my awesome little roof top exploration mission. The other two are HERE and HERE.
Here's something really rad that I noticed. I'd always thought the big metal circular things were just (perhaps somewhat unattractive) decorative corner articulation elements, but it turn out they have a pretty interesting functional use...
...lightning conductors. That steel cable goes all the way round the roof of the building before running down to earth.
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I recently went to Pretoria, for the Architecture Students' Congress 2009, and much to my surprise had really loved the city. Its probably mostly to do with the whole atmosphere of the conference, but when I got home it just kind of felt like there was a little something missing, and as cheesy as this sounds, I started writing a bit of a love song for the city.
When I sat down to record this, something pretty strange happened: so far, I've always used my proper vocal mic for recording, its not a great microphone, but its an SM58 clone, and it sounds pretty decent, but this time round I mistakenly forgot to change the audio input setting on my PC and, completely accidentally at first, ended up using the internal mic in my little webcam. I only noticed this was happening when it came to recording the piano bits, because I was getting background noises (my chair creaking, breathing, etc.) in the recording, which was very strange since I'd lined my keyboard directly into the mic-input at the back of my PC.
I ended up recording everything with the webcam though, because it actually has a whole lot less buzz than the microphone was giving me, and gives quite a nice natural reverb. It was also pretty fun to just stand and sing out into the room rather than holding a mic.
I used the same technique on a second song that I'll put up soonish. Comments/crit would be appreciated.
Woohoo! 1st of the month. I have my internet back!
Unfortunately, here in South Africa Broadband internet is something of a luxury, so I've been cappedfor the last few days. But I'm back now.
Sweet!
Even more importantly than this, today marks the start of the glorious month of NovemberMovember. For those of you who haven't heard of it, and can't be bothered to read through the Wikipedia article linked above, Movember is a month long event celebrating that most manly of arts, the growing of facial hair, specifically: Moustaches. The pure awesomeness of moustaches is not the soul purpose of Movember, but rather to raise awareness for mens health issues such as prostate cancer.
Last year I tried rather unsuccessfully to accept the mo-challenge, but found my manliness lacking.
This year however, I started nearly a month in advance so that I could grow out a full beard and shave the reveal the 'stache in all its radiant, Starsky and Hutch, Ron Burgundy glory.
I've been listening to the new Brand New album over the past couple days. Man its awesome! Wow. I'm loving me. Its actually a really heavy album (especially compared to The Devil and God..) which, a little surprisingly at first, got me really amped! Its been a while since I listened to anything in this sort of vein of music, but its rad, 'cos its prompted me to pull out some of my other old post hardcore kind of stuff, so my Brand New play-list has been complemented this week by a bit of mewithoutYou, some Underoath, even some Norma Jean.
Don't think I'm quite ready for Bane or Terror mind you.
Sketch-book scan courtesy of a particularly boring Theory of Structures lecture. I've been sitting in the back row of a lot of lectures lately. Actually I've generally been taking life way too easy these past couple of weeks. I think the apparent nearness of the end of this year has lulled me into some sort of false sense of security, which is a very dangerous place to be when you have a portfolio presentation in just under three weeks time. Most importantly, I really need to pick up my socks and finish this model!
Gosh!
One more thing. If you're reading this on Facebook, welcome!
Yeah, I uploaded the blog to FB today. Its actually really simple, you just enter the RSS/atom feed address, and it does it all for you. Stoked!
I write a fair bit of music in my spare time. I sing and play guitar in a little Indie rock band that was called CMYK, and is now without a name. I also write A LOT of acoustic stuff. Generally whenever I have free time, or I'm taking a break from work I'll pick up my guitar and play, and since I don't know a lot of songs and have pretty much forgotten all of the ones I learn when I first started playing guitar, I mostly just sit and jam. You can find some of my little home recordings via the Myspace "Music" link at the top of the page.
This is just a little clip of something I've been working on for a little bit. It stated out as a little two guitar instrumental thing for a video a friend of mine had to do for his multimedia marketing (or something like that) course, an advert for Redrow Fishpaste. I started playing around with effects and adding some vocal layers and things and it turned into this:
It may turn into a song of some sort, it may not, but it was pretty fun to do..
I used Audacity, an open source sound recorder, to make it (Still gotta do some more fiddling with the settinbg to get rid of the buzz) and Zoopy.com, a South African media hosting service (Local is Lekka!) to stream.
This is a follow up to a previous post, about a precedent study I did for Varsity on mixed use buildings. These are part of a collection of photos I took in Umhlanga:
is currently living and working as a junior architect in Cape Town, South Africa.
Born in Durban, James graduated from the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal in 2010, and now fills all his new-found free time with various pursuits in the fields of design, technology, spirituality and indie rock 'n roll.
