This appears to be the same ensemble cast behind the Ned Buckle, Jr. File Clerk commercials, created by Ad Firm BENSIMON BYRNE for the Ontario Lottery Commission, and which won the 2006 Cassies.

Great creativity and brilliantly acted.

In honour of the beautiful summer we’re having DJ Heavy Smurf has created a new mix for listening to while at your local beach, tanning salon, lawn, or (if you’re Martha Stewart) in your jail cell..

Paper Thin Suntan packs 18 tracks on one mix, journeying from 92 BPM to 117 BPM over 79 minutes and 55 seconds. Insodoing it winds its way around the world from France to Norway to Lebanon to Honolulu to Brooklyn to London and Brazil,

The Smurf hopes you enjoy it at: http://heavysmurf.com

Track listing: “Paper Thin Suntan”

Air All I Need 92 BPM Jaffa Sneakin’ 94 BPM Elak Remember Me 96 BPM Royksopp Cry Baby 96 BPM Thievery Corporation Lebanese Blonde 97 BPM Bebel Gilberto Bananeira 97 BPM Fantastic Plastic Machine Honolulu, Calcutta 98 BPM Blue Boy Remember Me 99 BPM Roy Davis, Jr. Lyrical Trip 101 BPM Nightmares on Wax Ease Jimi 102 BPM Fila Brazilia Freedom 103 BPM Saint Germaine Acid Jazz 105 BPM Royksopp Eple 107 BPM Marschemellows Soulpower 110 BPM Telepopmusik Breathe 112 BPM Spiller Groove Jet 114 BPM Fred Derby 116 BPM Jamiroquai Little L 117 BPM

It’s encoded as 192kBps MP3… like most of the others…

-Enjoy!

During the concert that I went to (in 1999, in fact) he explained that he had re-arranged a bunch of new songs while riding in the bus from Calgary to Vancouver and that they were going to play those new arrangements for the first time at the show.

Pretty amazing.

-Ian.

——- http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/04/business/04PATE.html?pagewanted=print

March 4, 2002 Crooner Uses Computers to Replace Sheet Music By TERESA RIORDAN

Harry Connick Jr. is a versatile guy: crooner, composer, big-band leader, piano player, actor, comedian. And an inventor, as well.

Mr. Connick, who has been described by one critic as a new and improved version of Sinatra, recently received United States patent 6,348,648 for a “system and method for coordinating music display among players in an orchestra.”

“It basically eliminates old-fashioned sheet music,” Mr. Connick said in a phone interview 10 days ago, before leaving for Salt Lake City, where he performed “Over the Rainbow” during the closing ceremonies of the Olympics.

His patented idea came to him one day several years ago when his big band was playing outdoors and the sheet music was blowing around. Why not, he thought, have all 16 band members read their music off computer screens instead?

So before he started a long tour in 1999, Mr. Connick bought enough blue and white G3 Power Macs, each with a rotatable screen, that everyone ‹ from his trombonists to his drummer ‹ could read from electronic sheet music.

For technical advice, he turned to his neighbor David Pogue, who is a former Broadway conductor and a computer guru to the stars, whose clients have included Stephen Sondheim and Mia Farrow. (Mr. Pogue, who also writes the State of the Art column for the weekly Circuits section of this newspaper, has no commercial ties to Mr. Connick’s invention.)

“A lot of the guys I knew from my pit work on Broadway said that it would never work,” Mr. Pogue recalled. “They said the computer would crash or the screen wouldn’t refresh itself in time for a professional situation.”

In fact, Mr. Pogue said, the technology had progressed far enough that the electronic page could be turned faster and more reliably than a paper page.

At first, Mr. Pogue said, the members of Mr. Connick’s band were skeptical. “They circled it and sniffed it the first day,” he said. “But by the time they opened the tour they were really into it.”

Mr. Connick started the digital- score tour in a relatively low-stakes locale ‹ Ames, Iowa ‹ so that any kinks could be worked out beyond publicity’s glare.

Unlike most other pop musicians, Mr. Connick does his own musical arrangements right on his Macintosh computer, using Finale software from Coda Music Technology, a division of Net4Music (news/quote). His system allows him to make changes to a given arrangement ‹ knock out eight bars here, add eight bars there ‹ and have them entered automatically into his musicians’ copies of the music.

“Oh man, it’s made my life easier,” Mr. Connick said. “Before, I would write out a song by hand and give it to a couple of guys in the band who are copyists and they would figure out the instrumental sections. It could take days. Now I can write a new score in the morning and everyone has it on his computer screen in the afternoon. Imagine if a Duke Ellington or a Stravinsky had had a system like that.”

The system has had some unforeseen benefits, as well. In studio recordings, for example, it’s no longer necessary to digitally remove the page-turning rustling in the background. Moreover, musicians can insert page breaks wherever they want.

And doing away with sheet music also means doing away with music lights for the musicians. So when the lights dim and Mr. Connick begins to sing, Mr. Pogue said, all the audience sees of the other musicians is “this super-cool bluish glow on their faces from the computer screens.”

Mr. Connick’s patent covers more territory than electronic sheet music. He hopes that eventually the computers will have their own operating system and feature a touch screen that allows a composer to write music as he would on paper.

But he makes it clear that he is a concept man.

“I can do stuff like put RAM in a computer, but I’m not a programmer,” he said. “You start talking about the technology involved in making it, and I’m going to be completely lost. I don’t have any interest in actually building it. I just want someone to send me one in the mail when it’s done.”

In fact, Mr. Connick approached Apple Computer (news/quote) about helping him develop the system.

“I love their products and I thought for sure they would go for it,” he said. “They put up a lot of `Think Different’ posters and I sure think different. But they weren’t interested.”

On the day his patent was issued, Mr. Connick said, his wife, Jill Goodacre, a former Victoria’s Secret model, asked him if he was proud of himself.

“I said not really,” Mr. Connick recalled. “It’s not like I invented Velcro or anything.”

Or maybe the split that I was advocating is just plain common sense.

Being a socialist, I took it further by nationalizing the local loop / wholesale side of the business. But within reasonable confines this guy has the right frickin’ idea.

-Ian.

——–

http://www.telecomcareers.net/Resources/News/shows,etc/S1364.htm

Legislative Update: A new bill aims to split the Bells

Industry nosedive aside, telecom is–and has long been–a house divided. To foil a fall, most now agree, the Telecom Act of 1996 must be amended. But how? Therein lies the discord. It’s the scrappy CLECs vs. the mighty RBOCS vs. anti-Bell AT&T–to simplify the schism(s). But on Capitol Hill, where (officially) the battle is being waged, the matter has become increasingly complex. We’ve seen aisle-crossing-with co-sponsored bills-and now, House-hopping as focus shifts to the Senate. 

Earlier this month, the new chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, Sen. Fritz Hollings (D-SC) entered the fray armed with S-1364, a bill that would split the Bells into separate wholesale and retail companies. They call it structural separation. Its aim? To prevent the Bells from hindering competition through control of the local loop. That control would instead be given to independent spin-off companies that would lease lines not only to the Bell retail units but also to competitive carriers. 

As the local dominant carriers, the Bells would have to put their wholesale and retail operations in separate divisions within a year of S-1364’s enactment. If, within another year, they violate competitive provisions of the ’96 Act, the FCC could force them to fully separate the operations into separate subsidiaries.

CompTel, the Competitive Telecommunications Association, is supporting the measure. 

“CompTel has long maintained that separating the Bells into wholesale and retail units is the only way to ensure that Bells give up their local phone monopolies,” said CompTel president H. Russell Frisby, Jr. in a recent press release. “Given the Bells’ refusal to honor their legal commitments to open their local networks as codified in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, there really is no other choice.” 

The Hollings bill would also give the FCC more power to fine dominant local phone companies when they fail to open their networks to rivals. The bill extends the statute of limitations for a violation from one year to five years. 

“Given the lack of competition in the local markets, the intransigent behavior of the Bell companies, and concerns about poor service quality, we are left with no choice but to adopt measures that will ensure Bell compliance with the 1996 Act,” Hollings said in a statement. 

He and the bill’s co-sponsors, Sens. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) and Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii), have built-in opposition to S-1364 in the sponsors and supporters of HR-1542, a piece of telecom legislation introduced earlier this year. 

Sponsored by House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-La.) and Ranking Member Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich), HR-1542 proposes to ease regulations in the ’96 Act, allowing the Baby Bells to enter long-distance data markets without opening portions of their local network to competitive use. The Tauzin-Dingell bill passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee but was voted down by the House Judiciary Committee. That action did not kill the bill, however; it merely “recommended” against its passage. 

In-House opposition to HR-1542 came when Reps. Chris Cannon, R-Utah, and John Conyers, D-Mich. introduced alternative legislation, HR-1697/1698, to counter what they call “the anti-competitive practices” supported by HR 1542. In short, the Cannon-Conyers bills aim to discourage those practices and uphold the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The bills would prevent RBOCs who hold more than 85 percent of the market from offering long-distance data services. The legislation would also allow competitors to resolve interconnection disputes before one arbitration board instead of state by state, and it would create a $3 billion loan program to assist companies in rural broadband deployment.

And so the legislative battle rages on, underscored by a fierce lobbying battle that’s become one of the most recognizable features on the telecom landscape. You might say that the Hollings bill simply adds a new twist to an old plot. 

But with HR-1542, HR-1697/1698 and S-1364 on the table, The Net Economy’s Paul Coe Clark III says there may be more to it than that: 

“What we are seeing in Congress now in the realm of telecom is something very different. Two completely different philosophies toward the public network are hurtling toward each other at ruinous speeds, each supported by apocalyptic rhetoric, massive lobbying and considerable political clout. Something’s gonna explode.”