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So the snow came down again, but I'm still on my trusty bike.

I cycle into Leeds from Morley every day, something I've been doing for 8 months now.

Even when the weather turns bad, it's still the best way to get around. No parking, no traffic jams, no waiting around in the cold for buses. Sure, it's a bit chilly when you first set off but once I get home I'm always warm, even if it's snowing.

(I apologise for the crappy camera phone quality picture).

I managed to make some progress today on a project I've had in mind for a while.

I want to build a MIDI control panel for a synthesizer board I've had for some time, so that it can be housed in a proper case with an LCD display and some knobs and buttons. I'm using an Arduino board for the brains of it.

For the unaware, MIDI is a system used by electronic musical instruments to communicate information such as what notes are being played, which instrument sound in in use and so on, to other instruments. It's been around since 1983 and is still the de-facto way of moving that sort of information around a studio.

The blue board to the right is an Arduino prototyping platform for the ATmega series of microcontrollers and can be programmed using C.

Programming in C is very much out of my comfort zone, and the tiny amount of memory is difficult to work with. The laptop I'm typing this on has two million times the amount of RAM (2GB vs 1kB).

So far, I've got it to decode the MIDI instrument data, and tell me which instrument is being played (in this case, a church organ).

We took the Christmas decorations down today.

I particularly did not enjoy disentangling the heap of lights I was given.

It's the first day back in work and it's a busy one.

I still managed to find time to get to Farnell for some parts for my current electronics project - a MIDI synthesizer.

The big dial will do something useful eventually!

The last day of the Christmas break, so I decided to wash my bike, but ended up washing the car too.

My hands are freezing now!