The Reverend Jim DiLicious

Good evening.

Actually, it's 1:30am, but as it may not be when you read this, I am prepared to give you some leeway.I am a 5' 11" Caucasian male with long hair. I sometimes tie this back in a squalid attempt at respectability or modesty which rarely works, if ever.

I live in Aberdeen, which is in Scotland. As I'm sure you already knew.

I am a musician and a student of Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, although I'm moving to Holland for a year in September to go to the University of Leiden, which is near Amsterdam (as is everything in Holland). I started learning Dutch today.
You may well be able to go to my website, if I ever get around to recording anything new that might justify designing one. I have a CD from last year that I'll probably put on it, mostly as a curiosity. I have three weeks until I go to Holland in which to do some intensive work, if my new computer ever arrives. Whatever it turns out as, this time it'll be new, and different. Yeah.

I am also considering a career in Government, journalism, applied gonzo philosophy, nightclub ownership or the armaments trade. The music business is notoriously difficult to succeed in.

I'm also writing a novel, on-and-off, but then isn't everybody? I'm about a third of the way through.

I was once offered a place at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, the officer training centre of the British Army. I have also served as a jury foreman in a Criminal Court. So much for the British justice system.

I am currently available for freelance work. I would write "anything legal considered," but legality is such a fluid, fleeting concept that what might be "legally" acceptable one minute is anathema the next, and all this depending upon one's geographical location. It would be foolhardy to confine oneself to such an unstable and frankly dangerous, concept.

People often assume I'm a goth (or g*th, as certain decidedly, definitely not-g*th persons might prefer). I dislike this. Was Johnny Cash a goth? No. Yet he wrote songs about wearing black. He even wore black. Big deal. He also wrote about being, among other things, a highwayman, a dambuilder, a sailor, a starship captain and a raindrop - all in the same song. Go figure. Anyway, enough of that.


Here are some Things That I Like.

- The H2G2 ideal. When I read the first two Guide books at the age of seven or so, I was immediately captivated by the adventure, the humour and most importantly the enthusiastic, laid-back, inventive and intuitive attitude of the characters (except perhaps Arthur, who I would never describe as gung-ho). At the time, and for a long while after, it would have seemed like wild fantasy to claim that anything like the Book was actually possible. And now it is not only possible but in the (wonderfully organic) process of creation. Sure, it covers the Earth only, but it's doing a damn good job at covering it.
Anyway... I have ideas... This is only a starting-point: a base. When WAP technology really gets going, we'll have a real, hand-held Guide. The marketing possibilities are endless, and from there, there are so many possible directions, especially with so many active researchers. It's great to see that the real-world, face-to-face aspect of the enterprise is not being forgotten - it's still where decisions are made, relationships built, discoveries made, risks taken…which is really what the Guide's all about, isn't it?

- Digital Audio. I can't really explain how happy this makes me. Anyone who uses his computer for music almost certainly knows what I mean. He will also know that, like any worthwhile technology, it is absolutely infuriating and more than somewhat confusing. I know barely a tenth of what I want, or ought to.
For those who fail to understand this peculiar passion, here is an example. When I was younger, my father took me to a studio where he was recording at the time. This studio was a fairly large house in its own grounds on the outskirts of a country village in Suffolk, which had been almost entirely given over to this state-of-the-art analogue recording studio. There were rooms full of bulky, expensive electronic equipment, instruments, a new grand piano, sound baffling, mixing desks the size of a war memorial, floor-to-ceiling banks of cassette-tape duplicators, reel-to-reel consoles, and on, and on, and on... Hundreds of thousands of pounds had gone into the building of this thing, and it was also very very good. However, last week for two hundred and fifty pounds I bought a PC on which I will be able (if it ever actually gets delivered) to create tracks virtually indistinguishable and almost certainly better in sound quality than those attainable with the hundreds-of-thousands-of-pounds-and-a-big-house setup.
Instance: CD audio quality is 16-bit. A 64-bit soundcard costs less than £50. Instance: a basic 8-track tape recording deck still costs hundreds. A Pentium 200 can handle 8 tracks of audio, MIDI and effects as well as being a basic workstation. Just. I will be able to exercise far greater creative control through MIDI, samplers, sequencers, soft synths, digital "rack" effects and so on (most of which are freely available from the internet) than would have been thought possible in the majority of studios fifteen, or even ten, years ago.
With keyboard, guitar, amplifier, and a reasonable microphone, one has a system distinguishable from that of a professional only in terms of relative sound quality and number of (physical) instruments, in a space only about fifteen feet square. In my case, in my kitchen (although it is a large kitchen). You can spend hundreds on software, but you can get by perfectly adequately with fifty quid and freeware. The end product might still sound terrible, but that's down to the operator - garbage in, garbage out. To recap: DA brings the means of production within reach of the individual (and no worrying about the studio clock ticking away the precious minutes, either) and is furthermore so vastly useful that it will unlock creative potential and experimentation that would otherwise have remained unused.
OK. Not terribly well argued, but I did say I found it a little difficult to explain...

-Target Shooting. I have an irrational but deep-seated fear and loathing of pieces of paper, and like nothing more than firing live ammunition at them. This is odd, because while books are composed primarily of pieces of paper, I would never shoot one. This may all be something to do with Why Bureaucracy Hates Me which I will write more about soon.

-Ranting.

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