Corey Mwamba

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Software and shadows

The urge to update has been taken over by travel and computers... today is the last day of the Pass The Source exhibition in Cotmanhay.

It's been an intense but great process, and the participants have really shown a huge amount of effort in producing the films and music, and highlighted the power of free and open source software to enable and empower. I have to say though that Ubuntu was a nightmare in terms package age—it's based on Debian so it only seems to use the latest stable version: and that's usually from over a year ago so it's very much outdated—and management, and it made me glad to get back to openSUSE [which is what I use and seems more customisable]. But at least I get the choice!

The last few weeks saw a sudden surge in activity as the exhibition deadline drew closer, and with the film-makers realising they might need some sound, so my day filled up nicely! It's just one of those things that it happened to get busier as I was preparing for Arun Ghosh's film score, for which you can read a nicely balanced review. With something as big as what Arun was trying to achieve, there's always going to be lots of work! But he'd assembled a crack team with Liran Donin from Led Bib, Shabaka Huthcings [who's quite rightly doing great things now, but I knew from the days of Symbiosis Ensemble], Jenny Adejayan on 'cello, and Adriano Adewale on percussion. We worked intensely for the rehearsals, but were able to cut back a bit towards the end. The place was packed out and the show was hot! The audience gave Arun much-deserved applause and cheering, but I didn't see him afterwards before I got my train back home... he'd probably found a nice warm corner to finally relax in!

So, what else? Well, I've been listening to the recordings of the trio from the tour [and you would have heard one of them if you're a podcast subscriber or even more if you were on the mailing list!] and I think they pretty darn good. And generally, I'm absolutely fine, settling into the new office which you'll be happy to hear is 2000 time tidier than all the other offices I've had. Well, except for the desk.

And the floor. And the...

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