I’ve been meaning to do this for a while since I recorded Music of the Night at Christmas for my Grandma. The sound was terrible because I didn’t have a good mic at the time. This time I’ve plugged my keyboard straight into the computer, so it sounds pretty good.
Hope you enjoy it.
It’s been far too long since I’ve written on this and I know some of you out there are interested in what I’ve been up to.
Music
I’ve started playing classical tunes again, which has been a lot of fun. I hadn’t really touched much classical repertoire since leaving high-school, so the return to it has been long overdue. I’m really surprised at how enjoyable it has been and it’s pleasing to see I haven’t lost my ability to play notes quickly! At the moment, I’ve relearned some old Rachmaninoff and added Flight of the Bumblebee and the Chopin Etude in C Major to the repertoire. I’ll try and get some videos back up shortly.
Business
Has been going great… FuseMail has had a pretty good year despite the economic climate. We exhibited at HostingCon about a month ago in Washington DC and the feedback from that has been very good. While I can’t mention names here, we have leads now with quite a few big fish. At the show, I gave a presentation on the past, present and future of the email industry (more focused on the email hosted industry) which had great attendance… around 100 people.
You can also read the followup article by William Toll here.
I also had an interview posted with theWhir. You can watch that below:
Sport / Taekwondo, etc.
I’ve been trying to get back into a good workout routine each week. This week I’ve tested for my high brown belt at Taekwondo (www.kckarate.com). All is going well there with the aim still to test for my Black Belt in October next year. I’ve been playing a lot of golf as well (usually twice a week) as well as some Tennis – all good stuff!
Love life
I’m dating a great girl – Laura. She is awesome and we are get along great!
That’s it for now… I promise for more regular updates…
Henry
Music of the Night by Andrew Lloyd Webber
I was trudging through some old MP3 files today when I came across some compositions that I made around 8 years ago. They’re a little cheesy, but I thought some of you may enjoy having a listen!
These were all composed on my XV-88 Roland synthesizer.
This one is called “Downtown”. It’s the piece I composed for my grade 12 music exam:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
This one is called “Kids Talk”… it sounds childish, hence the name, but I like it!
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
This one is called “Revive”. I think it might have been the first time I had composed a piece using my keyboard, so some parts just sound weird. Still, there is some decent harmony here:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Let me know what you think by leaving a comment.
Hey all,
Those of you who know me well know that I’ve had a bit of a stressful week. Thanks to everyone for your support!
This weekend I have my next Taekwondo grading. I’ll be promoting to a high blue. For those who don’t know our belt ranking orders, it goes… white, yellow, orange, green, purple, blue, high blue, red, high red, brown, high brown, bow belt, black. It takes about 3 years to get to black belt.
For those who have never tried martial arts before, I can’t recommend it enough to you. It sounds silly to someone who hasn’t been involved in it before, but it is much more than just kicks & punches… if you ask anyone who has been doing some sort of martial arts for a while, you’ll find they have a unique answer on what it has given them.
For me, it keeps my life in good balance and harmony. No situation seems overbearing and I find that my outlook on life and people is much more positive.
Aside from martial arts though, I’m off to see Ralphie May on Saturday night at the Improv theatre. Ralphie is awesome! If you haven’t seen his comedy before, here are some Youtube clips…
Enjoy!
FuseMail is doing really well. We’re looking to hit our yearly sales goal by about October. I was promoted to “Senior VP” last week, which doesn’t mean a lot since we are still a small company, but as the company grows, it will mean taking on a bit more responsibility.
Take care.
Here are a few YouTube videos you might want to check out of me playing piano at Knuckleheads in Kansas City:
Enjoy.
Like most blog sites out there, mine is suffering from a lack of time…
I’m going to test out Twitter so that I can post more frequent updates on what I’m doing. I have imported that RSS feed into the right column of this weblog. I will also incorporate it into my Facebook page.
We’ve had some pretty wild thunderstorms here recently and there have been plenty of tornados in the midwest of the US. A lot of you have been asking if I’m ok… the answer is yes. My house is doing fine as well.
We had one night where winds were somewhere around 80 mph. I believe there were some reported tornados about 3 miles away from my house in Liberty. I went to look at some of the damaged houses and it’s really quite incredible – one house was entirely moved off it’s foundation and put down about 40 feet away! A lot of houses had significant roofing damage.
It’s all very different to back in Australia!!!
I just arrived back from ISPCon in Chicago. Bryan and I headed up there to meet with some of our competitors. We had lunch with the CEO of Bluetie yesterday, which is one of FuseMail’s main competitors. It was a very interesting lunch to say the least. We were also able to catch up with the CEO of Outblaze as well as Funambol, Hostopia & Tucows.
There was a lot of discussion about Google’s continuing expansion of Gmail and its Apps platform. There was evidently growing criticism of Google and people were quick to applaud when Google’s lack of customer service was mentioned. However, there were some Google stats that were quite interesting:
Just some early comments. More to come.