To make these little beauties, you first need heat-proof jars, food coloring, and essential oil. You can find inexpensive essential oils of various scents at craft stores and some grocery stores. I chose a raspberry scented oil…it smells delightful!

Into each jar, drop a few drops (I repeat…a few…it doesn’t take more than 2 or 3) of food coloring.

Then, put in about 30 drops of essential oil, give or take. The more essential oil you put in, the stronger the smell.

Now for the fun part. Gather up 4 envelopes of unflavored gelatin, a tablespoon of salt, and 2 cups of cold water.

Why salt? Salt (or vodka) apparently help to keep the gel from molding. Interesting fact, isn’t it?!?

Get one cup of water boiling on the stove. When it begins to boil, whisk in the gelatin, stirring until it’s all dissolved.

Then, pour in the other cup of cold water and the salt, stirring until the salt is dissolved.

Quickly pour the hot gelatin mixture in each of your jars, and then use a disposable stick or spoon to stir it into the oil and food coloring.

Let these gel overnight, and then voila! Air freshener!

I would assume that people want to pass on a great hobby too younger generations, and encourage growth and moving forward. To try new things, and push our limits to do better instead of stagnating doing the same old thing.

Unfortunately it appears that the festivals that I have attended seem to play the same old songs at every event, with the same boring beginner lessons, The same people on stage playing a 4/4 dreary old song with no feeling for the most part, with only the odd decent act.

STOP REPEATING SONGS

I’m at the point where i hear songs like ‘Oh haere mai’ and i just want to walk out. If you sang that song at a previous festival, it seems logical to change the song to a different one, not to play the same 4-5 songs year in, year out. At least revamp it and make it a little more complex or harder for some people ?

If you have ever seen what the Big Muffin Serious do with a song, you will understand what i mean.

GET WEBSITES

Another thing that bothers me is the lack of cohesion between all the groups and festivals. It seems that you have to be on a facebook page, email list or similar to hear about it. Whilst some are listed on eventfinder, a vast majority are some obscure pdf or webpage forwarded around via email.

I think it would be neat if people had some communal place to list their ukulele festival, and also to show the full program of events for the whole day BEFORE we got there, so we could see who was doing what classes were on. Information on places to go, addresses, maps, and similar would also be excellent.

Information on what we need if we need things (eg food, sunscreen, a theme etc) is all ideally needed prior to the event. I recall once turning up to Auckland Ukulele Festival the first time, and found out the hard way its outdoors … i ended up leaving early to avoid sunburn. Having that information prior to turning up would have been nice. I would have also liked to have known there was no open mic (my favourite part!), and nothing interactive with only pacific Island music for he most part also.

Best place to easily get a free website is at http://wordpress.com or http://blogspot.com - It’s as easy as using a word document (No, really it is!). Avoid using PDFs or anything people need to download. Make sure you hand it out once its made, post it to your facebook, in your emails, or even set it as your email sig!  Make sure its updated  often, even if its a teaser post about what new prizes or events you are adding, or potential sponsors.

FEEDBACK

I have tried to talk to a couple of people, in a nice helpful manner to request perhaps more information or suggest things, however the most that happened was the New Zealand/Auckland Ukulele festival blocked me from their facebook page. Apparently its not acceptable to give suggestions or feedback regarding it.

On the other hand, the Ukulele conference in Orewa were excellent and had not realized something was not clear from media, in fact, they thanked me for feedback, adapted and changed things and requested i give more feedback please if i had any. They went out of their way to liven things up, including a ton of celebrities, nice venue, excellent food, and a great variety of stores selling excellent goods.

NEW BLOOD

I know a lot of younger people play ukulele now, and some are actually really brilliant at playing. A lot of young girls are inspired by Taylor Swift, or other popstars who are taking up the ukulele, and others even play rock or heavy metal on the uke. We need to ask ourselves why these people are not turning up? Is it because its old music and old people doing old things? can we somehow merge the generations and learn from each other?
A lot of the High schools have ukulele bands in fact, Is there some way to contact these schools and perhaps organize some sort of mini competition to get these kids in? If you get 3 or 4 schools in they will interact with each other, thus wanting to come back to see friends they may have made, or similar.

THINK OF THE CROWD

Lastly, whilst i have generalized a lot, one incident really annoyed a few people at the Katikati festival.  A women who was organising decided that her 2yo grandson needed to be on stage, and invited other little kids on stage. I’m all for kids on stage, and doing stuff, however in this case none of the kids played or sang, it was just this one women singing baby songs (Old McDonald etc).
At the time, the program was already running late, and people were getting frustrated, and to have to sit through 3 or 4 songs being sung to kids on stage was just painful
I get it that people are proud of their grand kids, kids, other, but ideally surely we want to be thinking about the vast majority vs one or two people?

WHAT TO DO

So, if you are going to do a Ukulele Festival for any reason here are a few suggestions (summing most of the above up, plus a couple more.).

• Stop singing the same old crap in dreary voices, try something new and fun for teaching!
• Ban “haere mai” song or similarly over done songs
• I love Kevin Foggerty, but some songs are well over done, and others not well liked (from what i have overheard others saying)
• Kiwiana is great, but stop flogging a dead horse, can we get some modern songs? or revamp old with newer styles? Even modern Kiwi songs would be great!
• Make prizes ukulele/music related or usable to most people if you have them. if you can’t get sponsors to give things like this, probably better to go without the prizes (personally i’m happy without one)
• Information on what classes are on BEFORE you get there, on a website is good!
• Proper websites with a program on them!
• Look into getting get people from overseas or bigger names (Amanda Palmer? WIUO? )
• Involve schools and school orchestras (maybe a comp?), but not at the exclusion of adult entertainment like the Auckland/New Zealand ukulele festival
• Try and get a good variety of acts on stage, not just one genre or ethnicity
• More Songs, up beat or modern, or even revamp older ones to make them work.

[C]I got my ticket for the long way ’round    
[F]Two bottle ‘a whiskey for the [C]way
[F]And I sure would like some sweet [C]company
[G]And I’m leaving tomorrow, wha-do-ya [C]say?

[Am]When I’m gone
[G]When I’m gone
[F]You’re gonna miss me when I’m [C]gone
[F]You’re gonna miss me by my hair
[C]You’re gonna miss me everywhere, oh
[G]You’re gonna miss me when I’m [C]gone

[C]I’ve got my ticket for the long way ’round
[F]The one with the prettiest of [C]views
[F]It’s got mountains, it’s got rivers, it’s got [C]sights to give you shivers
[G]But it sure would be prettier with [C]you

[Am]When I’m gone
[G]When I’m gone
[F]You’re gonna miss me when I’m [C]gone
[F]You’re gonna miss me by my walk
[C]You’re gonna miss me by my talk, oh

[G]You’re gonna miss me when I’m [C]gone

You can see it played with these chords here

Yep! we finally achieved a goal we have been trying to get for many years, buying out own house. Its has 4 bedroom, 2 bathroom, 2 lounges, large outdoor patio, and enough lawn to keep everyone happy!

These photos are from the advert online, so the furniture is not ours.

We have settled in well, most things are sorted out and unpacked, house warming party out of the way, cats settled in. We even installed Elle-Maes (daughter) new weather station http://liz.rimuhosting.com/cambridge/

Life is back to normal, except that we have a huge debt now to pay off

A Quick google shoes that the pink overlay created by dcraw and ufraw . I the latest version of dcraw easily compiled and had the problems fixed, no major deal. It was a single dcraw.cc and easily compiled.

However, in saying that, i generally use ufraw due to ufraw-batch due to more options and previously posted HDR script, so i was a bit disappointed that there was no patch.
So i downloaded the code for ufraw-0.18 , grepped for strings, found some entries for similar cameras, duplicated the settings. I then checked images for unique identifiers and updated with the correct values. A Couple of compiles later and i have a working ufraw !

Anyway, after all that, i found the cvs version of ufraw now has it patched already, so bit of wasted time, but in case anyone else wants a working copy here is my one http://lizquilty.com/uploads/ufraw-0.18-650D.tar.gz
This is compiled on/for 64bit machine, so if you are using otherwise you will need to recompile. If you are running debian you will need to run this to compile

apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev liblcms-dev libgimp2.0-dev libtiff-dev libjpeg62-dev libpng12-dev libexiv2-dev zlib1g-dev libbz2-dev libgtkimageview-dev

Untar, cd ufraw-18-650D/ ; ./configure && make ; ./ufraw file.CR2 . Once that is going just replace the system copy (or make install?)

More instructions at http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/Install.html

Update:

In case you have a Canon camera and need to add support, its fairly easy. Basically it needs to be told to decode it as a CR2 and what default settings.
Grab a copy of the source, and edit dcraw.cc . Search for a string for a camera similar to your own, i used the Canon 550D, so searched for 550D. You will find code that looks like this

{ "Canon EOS 550D", 0, 0x3dd7,
{ 6941,-1164,-857,-3825,11597,2534,-416,1540,6039 } },

This is the default make/model/and a few other settings shown from above it. Copy/paste the lines changing the model (you can tweak them later if you think they are vastly wrong)

Further down you will see

} else if (is_canon && raw_width == 5344) {
top_margin = 51;
left_margin = 142;
if (unique_id == 0x80000270)
adobe_coeff ("Canon","EOS 550D");
goto canon_cr2;
} else if ....

Again, copy/paste a new else if statement, change the model number. The raw_width/margins/unique_id are in a photo you can get off your camera. Use exiftool to grab the exif data from an image and replace it with the correct items. The main thing to get right is the unique_id .

Save and exit that file now and open up wb_presets.c . Again search for the model similar to your own and you will find something similar to this
{ "Canon", "EOS 550D", Daylight, 0, { 2.1426, 1, 1.5488, 0 } },
{ "Canon", "EOS 550D", Shade, 0, { 2.4619, 1, 1.3193, 0 } },
{ "Canon", "EOS 550D", Cloudy, 0, { 2.3066, 1, 1.4258, 0 } },
{ "Canon", "EOS 550D", Tungsten, 0, { 1.5264, 1, 2.3428, 0 } },
{ "Canon", "EOS 550D", WhiteFluorescent, 0, { 1.9072, 1, 2.1973, 0 } },
{ "Canon", "EOS 550D", Flash, 0, { 2.3701, 1, 1.4141, 0 } },

These are just the white balance for different settings based on the camera, feel free to adjust or use them however you want, it may take a recompile or two to get it right. Make sure you change the model name!
Once that is done, compile! that was all there was too it.