Bleep

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"There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those that understand binary and those that don't."

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Six months ago I invented something in a dream. Quite literally.

I was dreaming about problems with filesharing on home servers - which gives you some idea just how interesting my dreams are. And I thought...

"There has to be something easier than spending days setting up a server, breaking large files into chunks small enough to avoid timeouts, and queueing them manually. Like maybe a program which reads requests for files sent by email, then splits the files as needed, and sends them off to the requester's inbox, staggering the sends so as not to overload it. And a similar program monitoring the reciever's email, sending confirms and putting the files back together automatically as received."

I woke up, spent a day working on the details, then decided (a) it would take time and skills I don't really have to develop and (b) its use would be marginal anyway.

But maybe it wasn't such a dumb idea after all. Because someone else has already developed it. It's called Peer2Mail.

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My theory of songs continues to develop. I can't seem to manage all-encompassing obsession these days, which I rather miss. There was a time - two decades ago, I admit - when I'd stay up all night and spend most of the day reading and thinking about something esoteric, for weeks at a time, not caring that everyone thought I was weird.

I still don't care they think I'm weird - in fact I rather like it. But the attention span's gone. Or the obsession. I want my obsession back.

Anyway, I was wrong about syllable stress. So long as you only sing monosyllables, it's a simple matter to fit your sung version of your spoken sentence intonation to the weak and strong beats of the music.

I think there's at least eight ways to sing "One more kiss dear" over four beats.

But once you start using polysyllables...it gets a whole lot more complicated - with three (or possibly four) levels of syllable stress which have to fit, not only with the weak-strong pattern of the semibreve, but the weaker weak-strong pattern of the minim too.

To put it another way: There's only two ways to sing "Happy Birthday Mister President" without mangling your intonation. And no one wants their intonation mangled.

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This week's guilty musical pleasure: Chinese Theatre.

A Swedish female synthpop duo - so not chinese or theatrical. Somewhere between Erasure and Ladytron.

Ever-so-slightly cheesey retro electroclash (retroclash?) you can admit to liking on your blog, but not in real life.

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Half my brain says I should get Twitter.

The other half says I should spend some time away from computers.

The third half says I'm not so good at maths.

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