Jobs I have done

Here are all the jobs I have had, but only including those for which I received compensation or official designation. Sometimes I even managed a working wage. 

This is why I've had a hard time being middle class. Though my "standing" has supported that label, the amount of labour I've performed merely to survive has me thinking that I am "working". 

l'esprit de l'escalier

Being a collection of nonsense culled from everyday experience.

Fields have eyes but woods have ears.

As metaphors go, it doesn't hold a candle to the light fantastic at the end of the tunnel.

I may not be able to describe the processes in the heart of the sun, but I can still be warmed in its light.

Everything is a cynosure if you look the other way.

Join me on Patreon

You might have noticed that I recently posted three articles after a drought of some months. The fact is, I don't always know what to post and who I am posting for. It's great to get feedback, but this doesn't always happen. Without encouragement, the site stagnates.

I have been wondering for some time how to bring together my supporters. How do I give back more, but in a relevant way? I am committing to Patreon as an answer. Please check out my brand new page.

If you are familiar with Patreon, hop over there now. Otherwise, keep reading and I will explain.

Being professional

Every so often the debate flares up in online communities around a certain audio recorder, microphone, or other piece of equipment. Someone will state that Product A is "not professional". Others will jump to its defence. The debate then focuses on the product and its uses.

All of this is wrong. There is no such thing as professional gear.

A year in photographs (part three)

If you haven't yet done so, now is the time to check out part one and part two of this recap, before continuing with this, the third and final instalment.

From 28-29 August I was in the east of Ireland, at the newly branded Maynooth University for "Audio Fabric: Socio-sonic Textures in the Real World", the annual convocation of the Irish Sound, Science and Technology Association (ISSTA). Every year since its inception I have followed this conference around the country. Indeed, I may be the only person to have presented at every session. My paper was "Field recoding - phonography and the creation of place". The rest of my time was taken up listening to the other contributors, seeking out the best pub in the (rather small) town, chatting with locals about history, recording the quiet corridors of a seminary, and getting trapped on private grounds (I escaped eventually).

A year in photographs (part two)

As I explained in part one, I have decided to recap the year through my photography. Consider this my "open letter" to family and friends, a summary of what the year has meant to me.

2014 was also a significant year for Susannah, who accepted a month's residency in Barcelona to develop her interest in graphic art. She produced an intriguing time-lapse photo series for the group show. I was lucky enough to visit for a week, and captured this view of her studio.

A year in photographs (part one)

It's the New Year, a time for reflection. And this year I have much to be thankful for, because 2014 was truly enjoyable, stimulating, and challenging. I discovered new health ailments (nothing more about those!), travelled to amazing places near and far, heard some fantastic sounds, presented an inordinate number of talks and papers, launched a new career as a film-maker, and made some (personally) significant contributions to research in my field. I also got to watch my wife and daughter enter new creative phases in their lives.

And I took photographs of it all.

So here, in pictures, is a chronology of my 2014.

For Those Who Wonder What I Do

Here's a typical Sunday for yours truly.

Catching Up (notes on photos and backups)

I have to apologise to those of you who follow me through this blog, since Facebook has proven a much easier way of regularly reporting on my happenings and sharing photos as they occur. I do realise that not everyone cares to join that particular social morass, though I find it has its uses. First, I have come into contact with many new creative folk (musicians, sound artists, and so on). Second, I have re-established relationships with friends from my past. And third, as mentioned, it's easy to share my newest Flickr posting or what have you.

I will continue to use this blog for more substantive posts, even if those are like the last article, a simple narrative based around some of my photographs. (But those who are interested can find my Facebook page through the link.)

Website Reboot

Welcome to my 2012 website reboot! It is still the case that I have many different sites, but I've cleaned out the deadwood and kept 15 links on my robinparmar.com hub. This is now nicely decorated with CSS, HTML, Javascript, and a soupcon of amoeboid protozoa.

Theatre of Noise still has pride of place, since this is where I post my activities across all areas of interest. I even post about my website changes, which flirts with recursion. This blog is an easy place for people to get updates, thanks to the handy RSS feed. My most vital activities are as a composer and performer, so Remanence is next, followed by the escalation 746 site since that too is oriented around music production. (I have a new remix to post soon.) Further on, I've chosen to highlight my Vimeo and Facebook pages, but haven't done the same for my many other social networking sites, since they are under-utilised.

Further update details follow, since this is the best place to remind myself of what I've done.

Can Gear Reviews Preserve A Critical Function?

Every time I post a tech article on this blog I wonder whether this is really the place. But then I get so many positive comments back that I feel justified. The hitch for me is that any article about some new piece of gear is at risk of promoting hardware over wetware.

Consider my popular threads on small digital recorders. I get a lot of hits from these, though I'm not selling anything so these only boost the ego. I am happy to point out to you, my readers, which recorders are better value for the money since I want to reward good design, good engineering, attention to detail, and responsiveness to the needs of picky users -- and not just gadget freaks. I have had manufacturers write me and others post comments, so I know some are reading and, hopefully, taking note. So that's some sort of justification.

Backlink Hell

Sorry, readers. Somehow back-links got turned on (I didn't do it) and so every post was followed by hundreds of spammy links back to the current article. I am not sure why I took so long to notice this. I must say that the blogosphere is so swamped with spam sites that searching for anything remotely commercial has become quite pointless. I am sure the tide of spam will once again be pushed back, but in the meantime it's annoying.

Since I'm writing, here's a random photo.

Aided, Inspired, Multiplied x500

"The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd. Here we have made use of everything that came within range, what was closest as well as farthest away. We have assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition. Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecognisable in turn. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think. Also because it's nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it's only a manner of speaking. To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied."
-- G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

New Subscription Options And Other Changes

I have made a few changes to the site once again. As mentioned in my last post, I corrected a template error that had two sets of social networking buttons appear on each post. I have also ditched the subscription buttons in the sidebar, replacing them with simple links that give you a new option.

If you are viewing the entire blog ("all" option on the menu) then you have the option to subscribe to "all posts" or "all comments". But if you are viewing one of the section pages, you also have the choice to subscribe to just the posts in that section. This means that if you visit the Theatre of Noise only to read about photography, you can limit your subscription to photography posts. Of course, this means that you will miss things like this very announcement you are currently reading, so maybe also subscribe to the entire site and give it a lower priority in your reading schedule.

Programming Blog Now Incorporated

My once-separate programming blog, diagrammes modernes has now been folded into this site, as part of the Major Site Reboot. I welcome anyone who has joined us from that website. I took the time to replace each post with a link to the appropriate article here, all 65 of them.

diagrammes modernes was a bit of an orphan site for me. Traffic was low, mostly because my posting was sporadic. The Theatre of Noise already displays schizoid tendencies, so why not add another personality? If you are only interested in development posts, you can access them using the /dev category. And soon there will be separate feeds per category, further streamlining your experience.

In order to make room for that new category I have folded Politics (which included economics) into Media, which has now become something of a catch-all category for arts, culture and so on. Maybe I will rename it.

Major Site Reboot

If you are reading this on my website you have no doubt noticed something new at Theatre of Noise. If instead you are reading this through a news reader, head on over to check out the new look! Things were getting stale and I was getting bored. I also had a number of new goals for the site that only a redesign could accomplish. Read on and I'll let you know what I was thinking. Of course I value your input, so comment with any pros and cons. (Things might be a little unstable for about 24 hours as I tweak.)

Post Number 405: The Envelope Please

A couple of weeks ago I hit post 400 and rambled on about this milestone. Since then there's been another five posts and some slight changes. I have upped the number of posts on the home page to 20 and changed the sidebar so that "This Page's Posts" does just that... links to the posts wherever they might appear on the current page. I had a large backlog of links to add to each of the category pages, but I am now all caught up. Finally, I added a Food category and got rid of two older ones that no-one (including me) seemed to care about.

I previously posted seven reasons why this site exists, so here I'll complete that tally with reason number one.

Post Number 400: Some Sort of a Milestone

Five years ago I retired my previous Theatre of Noise website and started this blog. I am not sure if I thought then that I would reach my four-hundredth article. Maybe I did. But to write 80 posts per year? Likely I did not anticipate that.

To be clear, that figure does not include various book-keeping entries (for example, the category pages), the pages on my many websites, the 66 posts at diagrammes modernes (a blog I spun off from this one, though it is rather moribund these days), nor those on temporary "project" blogs. And of course it cannot incorporate the over 6000 posts I have made in the last two years on the photography forums I frequent. Nor the thousands more on newsgroups and Yahoo Groups and other areas dedicated to specific topics of interest, ranging from audio recording to gaming to music and film. I also do not include MySpace and FaceBook and other social networking sites, some of which I was once quite active on.

So why do I do all this web stuff? At this juncture I figured a pause for self-reflection was in order. So I waited until three a.m. (the best time for introspection), put the last good Wire album on the headphones, poured myself a glass of decent red wine, and started thinking. In not too much time I had eight reasons. Here are the first seven; I'll leave the last one for next time.

Small Site Update

I doubt you've noticed, but I've tweaked the blog a bit. Besides a bolder and perhaps easier-to-read typeface in the main articles, I've had a go at cleaning the sidebar. Nothing major, mind you, just some additional text to explain the Paypal donate button and Oblique Strategies a tad. Plus I've put in a link to my main site, since this was inexplicably missing. And yes, the copyright was a few years out of date as well!

Other than that, I've updated the links area. Previously I had all sorts of links divided by topic, but the truth is it's been some time since I've bothered visiting most of these. And if I don't use them, there's no reason to expect you to. Besides, this isn't the sort of a site to have a big blogroll or anything of the sort.

What I'm left with is a small assortment of links that maybe don't need to be here at all, but I'll keep them for the time being. About half of them are great places to find lost music.

This article is mainly a place holder so you can comment and make further recommendations, should you wish. Otherwise I'll just say a big "thank you" to all my readers and especially to any of you who take the time to comment, whether in agreement or disagreement. I didn't expect to get to 370 articles (over 400 if you consider diagrammes moderne, my rather comatose programming blog spin-off).

Despite FaceBook and other social networking sites, newsgroups, Flickr, web forums and so on, I still find a lot of info that is best conveyed using this vehicle.

Some day I would like to amalgamate all my sites under one roof, but until I have the time to code the mother of all content management systems, I think I'll leave things as they are.

New Features For The New Year

It's my habit to inform you of the little tweaks I make to this blog. I thought I'd clean house for the New Year in order to improve your reading experience. Take a quick look around... see anything different? Didn't think so. ;-)

But there are actually seven little tweaks. Read on for details.