The crisis in Burma

Sarah and I have a special interest in Burma - see the Hand in Hand link in the right hand bar. I thought I'd collect some of the clips I've put up on YouTube over the last year.

Musicians play for Burma relief

Maureen Lipman will introduce a concert at the Royal College of Music, South Kensington, London on Thursday 1st February at 7.30pm.

The military junta in Burma continues to commit numerous atrocities: forced labour, suppression of democracy, ethnic cleansing, rape as an instrument of policy, burning of villages, conscription of child soldiers, laying of landmines, torture of political prisoners. Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel Peace Laureate, has spent eleven of the past 17 years under house arrest. Over a million Burmese have been forced into exile, and over a million are internally displaced within Burma.

On February 1st a dazzling line-up of classical musicians will play to raise funds to support Burmese refugees and the internally displaced people (IDP’s). Pianists Martin Cousin and Simon Crawford-Phillips; violinists Andrew Haveron and Ruth Rogers; Lawrence Power (viola), Katherine Jenkinson (cello), Thomas Hull (clarinet) and Morgan Szymanski(guitar) are all giving their talent for this important cause. The programme includes Sibelius Malinconia Opus 20 and Shostakovich Two Preludes for viola and piano; Sofia Gubaidulina “Dance on a Tightrope” for violin and piano; Shostakovich “Allegretto” from Piano Trio No2 in E Minor, opus 67; Piazzolla “History of the Tango” for violin and guitar; Mozart “Larghetto” from Clarinet Quintet K581 and Mendelssohn “Allegro moderato ma con fuoco” from Octet opus 20. Maureen Lipman will perform a monologue and will introduce a Karen and a Karenni (ethnic minorities
in Burma).
Tickets £15 unreserved from the Royal College of Music Box Office on 020 7591 4314

Ruth Rogers is a real talent - she has supported Hand in Hand for Asia in the past and is worth seeing.

BBC and the problems in Burma

www.handinhandforasia.org.uk is the charity my Sarah works for - flail on over to the site and check it out.
Anyhow - the Beeb are the only people who keep the hideous situation in Burma on the agenda. The consistently run articles on their site, carry reports on the radio and packages on the news when there are developments. The most recent clip from the ten o'clock news in on the Hand in Hand site at reasonable resolution, but I thought I'd post it here in the transcode I use on my 'phone.
In the same way that we all know the electronic media is inherently more trustworthy than print media I think the Beeb is inherently more trustworthy than commercial news outlets - definitely ones owned by Fox/Sky/Murdoch.
The WeMedia conference had a lot about this.
There are numerous examples of democracy activists saying how important the BBC is, here is a bit from Hansard in 1996, the quote is by Robin Cook;

President Mandela said of his years in prison: "what we really wanted was the BBC World Service".
Would not the week of President Mandela's state visit be a good time to tell John Birt to drop the proposals that threaten the distinctive ethos of the BBC World Service that has given comfort to supporters of democracy around the world and brought respect for Britain from the world?

How technology is helping out charity efforts

Sarah and I did a little presentation at church last night for our friends who are away living in Thailand and working on the Burma boarder with refugees and orphans. Hand in Hand For Asia is the charity that Sarah works for (see the link in the right-hand side bar) and supports their efforts and I'd really encourage you to check out that site and consider if there is any help you can offer.
Anyhow - I was going over in my mind how much we make use of the internet in that area - we do all our communication over Skype (what a cost-saver!) and then there's the website. We get photos and video back from them and we're about to turn the (modest) merchandise section of the website (see here) into a full e-commerce venture. It's even turned Sarah into a web designer!

Why do people have to have their say?

Last weekend was Sarah's fund-raiser for our medic friends who work for Hand in Hand for Asia and it was a great night - brilliant music and comedy and we raised a good sum. I was doing the PA - and if I say so myself it sounded very good! Outboard compressors and feedback killers as well as me riding the parametrics to find the sweet spot on every instrument! It's that old BBC training! Anyhow - one of the bands manager's kept sidling up to me to say things like "his guitar could be a bit brighter" and the like. On each occasion I'd just touch the knob and say something like "is that what you're after" and he'd say "yes, much better" even though no adjustment had been made.

It reminded me of when I used to spend a lot of time racking studio cameras. I'd make a point of making sure they were all colour-matched consistently and it used to annoy me when the director or the lighting guy would say something like "camera two looks a bit blue in the blacks" - I'd stare at the monitor, flick between the cameras - touch the OCP (making NO adjustment) and they'd say "ah, much better"! Talk to any racks engineer and they'll report the same.

All this put me in mind of an occasion when I worked at a facility where they had a studio and an audio department. I used to work a split shift across maintenance and studio operations and I got on quite well with the studio sound guy. One day during a coffee break I was in the studio's sound control room chewing the fat and one of us knocked a cup of coffee into the mixer - panic! It was one of those Soundcraft Venue models with the removable channel modules and so we quickly removed the three or four modules that the coffee had spilt into. While we were mopping out I noticed that the half-dozen op-amps on the channels were TL071s - I mentioned to the sound supervisor that there was a low-noise Mil-spec version of the chip, a TL061 which might buy us eight or ten dBs of better noise performance (which in the days of analogue recording was worth having). "Tell you what" he said, "buy a bag of them and whenever I'm quiet I replace a channel's worth and when I'm done you can put the Lindos on the mixer and see how better it sounds".

After a couple of months he'd finished and when I did squeak the signal path I reckoned we did have an extra eight dBs in hand - very nice. Later that week the dubbing mixer (who worked in the audio department) came to me and said "I heard what you did with the studio mixer - I've booked you in for maintenance this weekend and you're going to do the same with mine" - he had a similar model of desk. I was less than keen to sacrifice another weekend and so on the Friday evening when he'd left I went up to his suite and burred up a few screws on the removable modules and left a couple of the old TL071s out of the studio mixing desk littered about.

On the Monday morning he came to me and said that the mixer sounded so much better - in fact "night and day" was the expression he used! By the end of the week several of his client had come to congratulate me on how much better the suite sounded.

So, I concluded that some of the most senior people really have a limited grasp of technical quality and Lord Kelvin's quote (see the right-hand column) is as ever, very relevant.