Author: Ben Clapton

I'm a violinist, teacher, composer and arranger from Ellenbrook, Western Australia. I love my family, coffee, AFL and running.

Back to the beginning

by Ben Clapton, posted in Archive, Life

My first post on this blog was way back in March, 2007, and it was entitled The Importance of Something Different, but I have a feeling that I had some posts created a bit earlier than that. Hmm…

My Website first appeared in June 2004, and was an HTML effort promoting me as a musician. It went through a few different redesigns, and it was the design in 2007 that introduced a blog. At that point, I was running WordPress on a spare computer at home, using it as a web server. I’ve since moved onto the WordPress.com servers where you view my site now.

I think part of the reason I started building my website was because I wanted a place where I could try out the HTML techniques that I was interested in learning. Plus I was able to share some feelings of what I was going through at the time, and share interesting videos.

I’m a bit sad that I’ve lost many of the posts from my old blog. I don’t know what happened to them, or remember what I didn’t do in transitioning over to this blog. But Thanks to the WayBack Machine, I’ve found my first post. Here it is, titled “Out into the wide blue yonder”:

Well… not quite yet. Though I’m half way there. I’m on my way but I haven’t started yet.

I’ve completed one course… and Advanced Diploma of Performing Arts, and am now just commencing a Bachelor of Music. I’m still a fair way off a career… but it’s kinda scary that I’m only 18 months from being outside of the University arena.

Current Goal: Become an orchestral violinist.

Other possibilities: Instrumental teacher, Musicologist, Music Critic

Pathways: Practice like hell, see what my new teacher can do for me. Get in as much experience in orchestras as possible, and learn as many orchestral parts as possible. Pick up new students to supplement income and pay for flights for auditions.

It’s nice to have something to aim for. For the past few weeks, my interest has been waning a little, but I’ve got my first lesson with my new teacher on Tuesday. I’m looking forward to it – I’m looking forward to seeing what she can do with me, and what I can do with her.

Well, that’s a rather odd Intro for where this blog is going. It’s basically going to be my forum for ideas about my career progress, interesting tidbits I pick up. I’ll also be adding in some Concert Reviews, and Classical Music news.

Maybe I’ll go through and post some interesting posts that didn’t make it through…

Postaday2011 links

2011 – ever looking forward

by Ben Clapton, posted in Archive, Life

I’m really excited about this year. There are lots of exciting things happening in my life. Lots of things that my wife and I have planned. For example, we have a couple of holidays that we’re looking forward to. We’re going to go to Margaret River for a weekend to see Michael Bublé, and we’re looking to go to Melbourne to stay for a week. I’m looking forward to visiting Kalgoorlie for the first time later this month – though I wish I had booked a bit of extra time there so that I could play a round on the Kalgoorlie Golf Course.

Speaking of which, I’m looking forward to playing lots of Golf this year. I’m planning on going every fortnight, and really hoping to get my round scores down. Start shooting more pars and bogies than double bogies and above. I’m also looking forward to getting my weight “below the line” – get down into the “ideal” BMI range.

I’m looking forward to some pretty significant achievements at work – putting together the directory for the Uniting Church for one thing, and developing a few new themes for the congregational website.

I’m also looking forward to progressing down the path towards becoming a Salvation Army officer, and exploring that calling deeper.

And finally, but most importantly, I’m really looking forward to celebrating my first anniversary with my wife. Definitely going to do something super special for that.

What are you looking forward to this year?

Postaday2011 links

What do I want to be remembered for?

by Ben Clapton, posted in Archive, Life

What do I want to be remembered for is the topic today at postaday2011, and it’s a tough one. Because you’re either saying “I’m awesome at this” or “you should think I’m awesome at this.”

Why are people remembered? They either do great things, such as Don Bradman, or Phar Lap – who accomplished great things in their field during a dark time – or they are remembered “fondly” by their family and friends. But there’s a whole range of people out there who deserve better than being remembered “fondly” but who might not have accomplished the things that will grant them wider-ranging remembrance.

For example, one of my old priests, George Trippe, was incredibly influential on my faith in the short time he wast at St Anselm’s. Or my friend Max Pengelley, who despite being well into his 80’s and losing his eyesight, produces a letter on his computer that would rival the skills of many in their 20’s. Or my violin teacher for a period, Peter Tanfield, who has been a wonderful teacher across Australia and an incredible performer, but won’t get remembered in the same company as Heifetz, Oistrakh or Menuhin. These people all deserve to be remembered more than “fondly”

As for me, I don’t know what my future holds, or what I will be remembered for. But I guess if I can be remembered more than “fondly” then I’ve done well.

Postaday2011 links

Snow? What Snow?

by Ben Clapton, posted in Archive, Life
Taken in Megeve, France
Image via Wikipedia

The topic for The Daily Post today is “How do you keep yourself entertained when snowed in?” Well, living in Perth, I have never seen any snow. In fact, I’m not certain but I think Perth has never had any snow since it was founded. Australia doesn’t get much snow – we have some ski resorts in the Blue Mountains, and Tasmania gets snow sometimes, but never enough to be snowed in.

I had a small glimmer of hope that when I went to Hong Kong it might be cold enough to get some snow. It was cold alright – our first day we went to a theme park, and everyone rushed to buy very expensive beanies because we were freezing – but we didn’t get any snow.

So how would I keep myself entertained in the rare situation that I did get snowed in. Well, if it was just me, I have a large collection of computer games that I could play through. Playing through NBA 2k11 at the moment and loving it. Need to get back into Starcraft 2 though. But if my wife was here with me, well we’ve got board games which would be able to keep us entertained, and then we could also watch through the few series that we’ve got on dvd – we’re watching Friends at the moment after Liesl got the box set for Christmas, but then we’ve also got Will and Grace, M*A*S*H, Star Trek the Original Series, I have a couple of seasons of The Next Generation (if anyone wants gift ideas, seasons 3+ of TNG would be greatly appreciated), Big Bang Theory, and I’ve got a box set of all the Gilbert and Sullivan musicals which would take up a fair bit of time as well.

So all up, in the unlikely circumstance that we did get snowed in, I think we would be able to be sufficiently entertained.

Postaday2011 links

A-ha! So that’s the problem, now what’s the solution?

by Ben Clapton, posted in Archive, Life
Lightbulb Sun
Image via Wikipedia

Ever since the Uniting Church had their website re-done back in 2008, they have had an Activity search in the top right hand corner. And it works great… mostly. There was one big problem – sometimes it wouldn’t return results that should be there. For example, if you type in “greenwood” it would return that there were no Churches within 15km of Greenwood. Despite having a Greenwood Uniting Church in Greenwood. However, if you were to search “Kingsley” – the suburb directly north of Greenwood, it would return Greenwood Uniting Church as the closest church.

When I started at the Uniting Church, this was one of the problems I had noticed with the website. But I didn’t know what was causing the problem. Until one day, when talking about it with my manager, she said that if you typed the state as well, you got the correct result. A-ha! my mind went, so that’s what the problem was.

See, our activity search uses the Google maps API, and there’s more than one Greenwood in Australia. Likewise, there’s more than one Mount Pleasant. So what was happening was that the search would find the first Greenwood, which was invariably not in WA. But our users, coming to the website of the Uniting Church in Western Australia would assume that the activity search would search WA first. Having it search other states is completely useless to us, but there seemed to be no setting in the plugin that we were using to set it to only search WA.

Knowing that if you added “WA” to the end of the search it worked correctly, the simplest way I could think of to solve the issue was to append “, WA” to every search that didn’t end in “WA”. Now, while I work on the website, I’ve had no formal training. I taught myself HTML and CSS, and working with WordPress has taught me a bit of PHP, but in terms of coding something like this I needed to know JavaScript. I had a search around the internet to see if someone had a similar problem, or a solution that would work. I think my first effort ended up breaking the search completely. I talked to a friend who actually codes websites for a living, and he came up with some code that he thought would work, but wasn’t certain. It didn’t quite work, so I posted it in a forum and asked for help. They helped me out by pointing out the errors (needed a capital letter instead of a lowercase letter, and a ‘ instead of a “).

So now, if you search for “Greenwood” you will receive results for “Greenwood, WA” and find the details of the Greenwood Uniting Church. All I needed was for someone to discover why it was doing what it was doing, and my A-Ha moment came as to how to fix it.

Postaday2011 links

Staying Focussed

by Ben Clapton, posted in Archive, faith
Distracted Bunny
Image via Wikipedia

I don’t have much trouble staying focussed. Given a task, I will often dive in and get it done, ignoring many other things happening around me. There have been many times at work where I’ve been engrossed in a task and someone comes in, says hello and I jump because I was not expecting them.

How do I do it? Two main things:

  1. Remove distractions, and
  2. Set mini goals for larger tasks

Removing the distractions is the big one. Remove everything that could distract you from your task – internet, twitter, tv, radio etc. If there’s something else happening your focus will be split and not working effectively.

Setting mini goals allows you to acknowledge that your brain wants to be distracted. So say my task was to write 5 blog posts. I would set myself a mini goal of a single blog post, and once that was completed I would take a short break. Or if I was designing a website, I would split up the different areas and when one area was complete then I’d allow myself to get distracted before getting focussed again.

What tips do you have for staying focussed?

Postaday2011 links:

(PS: It surprised me looking through the posts on this topic that have been posted already, the amount of posts from people who say they can’t stay focussed. Is this reflective of a generation with a short attention span, a world with too many distractions, an over-reliance on drugs for ADHD, or are bloggers just generally the type of people who can’t stay focussed?)

Job Interviews

by Ben Clapton, posted in Archive, Life

I’ve been to a few job interviews over my years. My first was at K-Mart. It was a big group interview thing, they call your name, head to the next available spot and have your interview there. I started as a Christmas Casual, then continued and worked there for three years.

When I started at university, I had a job interview at a Music school attached to a music shop. I must have impressed as they offered me the job and said they’d call me when they organised some students. They never called me back. I wouldn’t be so annoyed had I not gone out and registered a business, bought supplies and music books to teach from.

Apart from that one, there’s only been one other job that I’ve gotten to interview and not gotten the job. It was really a job I wasn’t qualified to do, but after a few months of job searching and not getting even a glimmer, I had put far too much hope on it, and when I didn’t get the job I came down hard.

The biggest piece of advice I can give to anyone going for a job is to be yourself, and don’t put too much pressure on yourself.

Postaday2011 links

Stressed? Stressed?!?

by Ben Clapton, posted in Archive, Life
Stress
Image via Wikipedia

Thankfully, I’m not someone who gets stressed out very often. I’m fairly relaxed in my disposition, so things that might stress other people out don’t generally stress me out. I just go with the flow.

That’s not to say that I haven’t been stressed out before. The 6 month period at the beginning of last year when I was searching for a job was particularly stressful. Getting constant rejections, running out of time before my wedding, and more, it got very stressed.

I also got stressed towards the end of this year as I started to work on the directory for the Uniting Church. Having never done anything like this before, and knowing it was such a big project, it was getting me stressed out as to whether I would have enough time to get it done. I even chose to take the train for a work trip to Kalgoorlie that I have coming up, so that I could have an extra 14 hours to work on it. However, once I actually started working on getting the layout done, and working in access, I got it working fine in no time and am now trying to figure out what I’m going to do on my 14 hour return train ride.

So am I stressed right now? No – because I’ve just finished a nice little break, and go back to work today (for a day, then a three-day weekend). Are you stressed? What’s some of your techniques for dealing with stress?

Postaday2011 links

Text or Talk

by Ben Clapton, posted in Archive, Life
Demo Cell Phones
Image by djwudi via Flickr

When it comes to preferred method of communication, I far prefer text over talk. The reason for this is that I prefer to be able to read and review what I say before I send it. However, text (and e-mail) does have its limitations.

For example, you can’t put any meaning in text. No Emphasis. For example, a sentence my mum would use when teaching English as a second language: Do I know Elvis Presley? This can be said in a number of different ways. Do I know Elvis Presley, Do I know Elvis Presley, Do I know Elvis Presley, Do I know Elvis Presley and Do I know Elvis Presley. Five different ways of saying the same sentence, each with a slightly different meaning.

I’m getting more comfortable on the phone. My work has me calling some people, and it does make me nervous sometimes, but so long as I go through my head what I’m going to talk about I’m usually ok. When I get calls, I can’t do that, but I’m getting better.

So What about you? What do you prefer to use? Let me know in the comments, or vote in the poll.

Postaday2011 links