Sousa

There's a web site with loads of Sousa marches - mostly as MP3 snippets, a few also as complete MIDI tunes.

http://www.dws.org/sousa/works.htm

I want to put in links to at least two of them for the RPG.

One is to be The March of the Queen's Own Aerial Hussars, a Victorian regiment whose mission statement is "Defending the Empire from the Scourge of the Supernatural", e.g. Victorian vampire-hunting air-cav - think of the Initiative but with flying machines, decent military organisation, a brass band, and regular stories about them in the Times. No secrecy for these guys - they're the best of the best, and everyone knows it.

The other is a little more tentative right now - I want music to be played at the launch of a Victorian spacecraft. Probably of the "REALLY big cannon" variety, but I'm not quite ruling out antigravity or rockets yet.

They all sound like they might work, especially the ones written at the end of the 19th century, but if anyone has any particular preferences let me know - NB, not Liberty Bell (the Monty Python theme), The Thunderer (Doc Savage theme), or (for obvious reasons) The Stars and Stripes Forever.

A later thought on this - could the new music program for the Mac generate something like this? Don't have a Mac and couldn't do it myself, but maybe it'd be an interesting project.

(no subject)

Copied from drplokta - if you've ever wondered why Adobe Acrobat is so slow, it's because it's installing loads of plug-ins that it probably doesn't need whenever you run it. Running Acrobat Reader Speedup fixes that. I tried a couple of big documents that were painfully slow last time I looked, they're now loading about four times as fast. It's a 78k download, a zip file containing a program that you run once; you can tweak settings if necessary but it shouldn't be. But keep the program, if you want to upgrade Acrobat you'll probably need to return to the full set of plug-ins.