This is the month for doing all the domestic things I haven't got around to doing for the last few years.
Tidying the bedroom, scanning the stories I wrote between 18 and 22 (I found two more), sorting out the boxes of paper, converting more cassettes to mp3 etc.
I made a video diary of the day I went to Hastings to see Nick C's band. The tapes have been sitting in a box for months, waiting to be digitised or transferred to VHS. Now that's done, I can keep the promise I made to myself to wait one year after the event before watching them.
-----
Another promise I made was last week, to spend this evening showing Sion R how to mix and master on a computer. I had completely forgotten the arrangement, and just as I was thinking how nice an evening nap would be, my phone started beeping to remind me.
Sion's new computer is rather impressive - flat screen, 1024MB RAM, three-point-something GHz and 350GB HD(!). I partitioned it into something more managable, and gave him quick run-through on multitracking, automated pan and volume, in-line effects, dynamics compression and mixing down.
We ate far too much chinese takeaway with his wife Michelle, and sat feeling bloated listening to each other's back catalogue. They much enjoyed my songfight work, though they said my singing style is sometimes "mad".
-----
I photocopied five books on speedreading in about 1997. The irony is I did it partly because I didn't have time to read them. Well, now they're getting converted to PDF, and the other irony is it's much more difficult to speedread from a screen than a page.
Cleaning out my Closet
I spent most of last night listening to Ladytron and old Radio 4 comedy serials, while digitising photocopies of books about artificial languages. Back in the early 90s, the only reliable way to copy a book was with a photocopier - or a professional transcription typist if you could afford one. So, when I borrowed rare books from libraries, I took the (somewhat) cheaper option.
Interlingua is done, Volapuk is in progress, and I'll do Eurolengo when I find the box it's in. There's also Esperanto (obviously), and at least one natural language - Swahili.
Two hundred pages of formatted text in a half-megabyte PDF. Equivalent to thirty seconds of mp3 music, three seconds of divx video, or one ten thousanth of a Windows 2000 installation. Amazing, really.
When scanners became faster and higher quality in the late 90s, I used them to make digital photocopies, in TIFF or PNG form. There's some CDs in front of me containing twelve books on politics and philosophy.
You may not believe me, but I always knew something like the current technology would come along eventually, and I could turn my clunky copies into something much better. The same way I knew all those albums I put together using 8-bit samples and taped TV snippets were preliminary work for something years down the line.
All you need is inhuman patience and lots (and lots) of storage space.
The new scanner arrived today - an OpticBook 3600, for a reduced one hundred and sixty something pounds. It's taken us all day to figure out how to make it work. So I get the old scanner in my room. That's the old Cannon scanner, not the old HP one or the newish HP one or the ancient one without a logo.
-----
The Strict Machines are continuing their roll towards domination of the local music scene, tonight amplified through my microphones. I was too exhausted to go and see them this time, but they're asking for some future performances to be recorded, and we're looking at recording a full length album of 'unplugged' work.
-----
It seems that in a moment of madness I agreed to attend some godawful conference next Sunday. The is one thing scarier than a large room full of socialists disagreeing. A thousand socialists who all agree with each other.
-----
It's rained each day for the last six. The wind has blown just like it's supposed to in Autumn - judging by the speed of the clouds it's blowing very hard at high altitudes, But the air is still warm, as though it were still summer.
Interlingua is done, Volapuk is in progress, and I'll do Eurolengo when I find the box it's in. There's also Esperanto (obviously), and at least one natural language - Swahili.
Two hundred pages of formatted text in a half-megabyte PDF. Equivalent to thirty seconds of mp3 music, three seconds of divx video, or one ten thousanth of a Windows 2000 installation. Amazing, really.
When scanners became faster and higher quality in the late 90s, I used them to make digital photocopies, in TIFF or PNG form. There's some CDs in front of me containing twelve books on politics and philosophy.
You may not believe me, but I always knew something like the current technology would come along eventually, and I could turn my clunky copies into something much better. The same way I knew all those albums I put together using 8-bit samples and taped TV snippets were preliminary work for something years down the line.
All you need is inhuman patience and lots (and lots) of storage space.
The new scanner arrived today - an OpticBook 3600, for a reduced one hundred and sixty something pounds. It's taken us all day to figure out how to make it work. So I get the old scanner in my room. That's the old Cannon scanner, not the old HP one or the newish HP one or the ancient one without a logo.
-----
The Strict Machines are continuing their roll towards domination of the local music scene, tonight amplified through my microphones. I was too exhausted to go and see them this time, but they're asking for some future performances to be recorded, and we're looking at recording a full length album of 'unplugged' work.
-----
It seems that in a moment of madness I agreed to attend some godawful conference next Sunday. The is one thing scarier than a large room full of socialists disagreeing. A thousand socialists who all agree with each other.
-----
It's rained each day for the last six. The wind has blown just like it's supposed to in Autumn - judging by the speed of the clouds it's blowing very hard at high altitudes, But the air is still warm, as though it were still summer.
Scan Man
"You're thirty five years old, Mister Vale. Why are you such a derelict? Such a piece of human junk? The answer's simple. You're a scanner, but you don't realise it. That has been the source of all your agony. But I will show you now that it can be a source of great power."
- Lines from the film Scanners, directed by David Cronenberg
At two'o'clock in the morning on Thursday, I had a small brainwave - one of those sideways but in-retrospect-obvious ideas had by computer programmers, philosophy students, and habitual problem solvers. And I've been all three.
If my OCR software has trouble recoginising superscript numbers, use the training function to teach it what they look like. But where can I find a document to train it with? A page containing a hundred or so examples of superscript numerals embedded in normal text? Simple. I make one in a wordprocessor. Print it out at different common sizes and fonts, then scan it at various slightly skewed orientations.
So that's what I spent the early hours of the morning and the late hours of the afternoon doing. In between, sleeping, signing on, and completing the sleep.
I want to give it some more training before re-OCRing the articles. But before that, there's some short stories (and the odd novel) that I wrote fifteen years ago. There's also a dozen books (mostly on languages or linguistics) that I've had in photocopy form for about the same amount of time.
Digitise them, and finally get to throw away the mountains of paper. What once took up tens of boxes, reduced to a few CDs.
Oh, and just in case you think I'm not a serious, hardcore scanning and oCR freak, mother and I are splitting the cost of a brand new fancy scanner designed for books.
The idea is to make digital copies of our somewhat unwieldy library of textbooks, Open University courses and trashy novels for our own use, and ditch the originals, possibly making back some of the cost by flogging them on ebay.
-----
Two hours later, and 26 of 28 short stories scanned. Only one was so abysmally awful I decided to just bin it, and one was printed on thermal paper (remember thermal printers?), which has degraded too much to OCR.
-----
I haven't been looking at the newspapers lately. I hear fragments. 80,000 deaths so far from the Indian earthquake, and maybe another 40,000 to come. The public have charity fatigue and the governments don't feel pressured to donate. There's a new wonderdrug to treat breast cancer, the Yorkshire Ripper is back in fashion, and The Tory leadership election is a choice between Davis (Hague clone) and Cameron (Blair clone).
- Lines from the film Scanners, directed by David Cronenberg
At two'o'clock in the morning on Thursday, I had a small brainwave - one of those sideways but in-retrospect-obvious ideas had by computer programmers, philosophy students, and habitual problem solvers. And I've been all three.
If my OCR software has trouble recoginising superscript numbers, use the training function to teach it what they look like. But where can I find a document to train it with? A page containing a hundred or so examples of superscript numerals embedded in normal text? Simple. I make one in a wordprocessor. Print it out at different common sizes and fonts, then scan it at various slightly skewed orientations.
So that's what I spent the early hours of the morning and the late hours of the afternoon doing. In between, sleeping, signing on, and completing the sleep.
I want to give it some more training before re-OCRing the articles. But before that, there's some short stories (and the odd novel) that I wrote fifteen years ago. There's also a dozen books (mostly on languages or linguistics) that I've had in photocopy form for about the same amount of time.
Digitise them, and finally get to throw away the mountains of paper. What once took up tens of boxes, reduced to a few CDs.
Oh, and just in case you think I'm not a serious, hardcore scanning and oCR freak, mother and I are splitting the cost of a brand new fancy scanner designed for books.
The idea is to make digital copies of our somewhat unwieldy library of textbooks, Open University courses and trashy novels for our own use, and ditch the originals, possibly making back some of the cost by flogging them on ebay.
-----
Two hours later, and 26 of 28 short stories scanned. Only one was so abysmally awful I decided to just bin it, and one was printed on thermal paper (remember thermal printers?), which has degraded too much to OCR.
-----
I haven't been looking at the newspapers lately. I hear fragments. 80,000 deaths so far from the Indian earthquake, and maybe another 40,000 to come. The public have charity fatigue and the governments don't feel pressured to donate. There's a new wonderdrug to treat breast cancer, the Yorkshire Ripper is back in fashion, and The Tory leadership election is a choice between Davis (Hague clone) and Cameron (Blair clone).
It's a Type of Car, Apparantly
Tuesday
My mobile phone is my alarm clock. It's supposed to wake me up with loud annoying beeps in the morning. Nowadays though, it wakes me up with a loud annoying ringtone from someone with computer problems.
On Monday it was dear old Max. With words to the effect of "The printer's buggered again and I can't send emails and I need to print stuff out and send some important things over the net by today at the latest so please come and make everything alright."
So I bicycled up to see him, and fixed the printer using my secret magical method of turning it off...and then back on again. The email problem was hotmail's stupid verification system. That's where they make your hotmail inaccessible at random intervals, requiring you to log on to their site and enter a reactivation code to get access back.
However, this led to something more interesting. A few months ago, John M and I discussed the possibility of making his published work availaible on a website. He's written five books and a shedload of articles over the last thirty years, mostly now out of print but still relavant.
So, seeing as his books were there, I borrowed one, and spent the evening messing around with OCR software. It's been nearly a decade since I tried to use OCR seriously, and wasn't terribly impressed at the time - 99% accuracy sounds good, until you realise it means labourious proofreading to find the one out of every hundred letters that are wrong. And it took you longer to scan a page than to read it.
Things have improved a lot. After two hours experimentaion, I produced a near-perfect PDF of a two hundred page book in ninety minutes.
-----
Strict Machines had a gig arranged at Portsmouth's latest music venue, uninspiringly named "The Front Room". They were headlining, with two support bands. But then one of the other bands dropped out, then so did the other one, then the gig was cancelled by the management because it would be pointless having just one band onstage, then one of the support acts de-cancelled, so there was just one band onstage.
They were bloody awful too. Instrumental blues-rock without the soul of blues or the drive of rock. Good musical ideas, just performed like a finger exercise.
-----
Back up to the cluttered living space of John and Max, to discuss getting John's thirty-year back catalogue of articles and books into cyberspace. A lot of his more influential articles are already there, but it's a tiny selection and scattered.
The Marxist Internet Archive has an extremely large collection of theoretical writings, including some by rather insignificant thinkers. But nothing there from John, who's been an influential figure on the British left for as long as I've been alive.
We found about twenty periodicals containing stuff he's written, and I carried it back home in a taxi driven by a charming young Turkish man (married of course, hah!) who left the sun of Istanbul to drive through the rain in Portsmouth.
Wednesday
Scanning and OCR are the easy bits. Proofreading and correcting will drive any normal man to drink. The superscript footnote references tend to be OCRed as commas - because they're small and in the right place. And as converting a two-column scan into a single column HTML page, with correct formatting, it ought to be easy. It's so easy I'm seriously considering saving the whole thing as plain text and hand coding the HTML to format it.
At least that way the HTM files won't be several times the size they need to be - as they are in Word or Dreamweaver. I have an instinctive dislike of bloatware and almost always code HTML by hand in the original oldschool editor - Windows Notepad.
Anyway, I now have about twenty articles on political philosophy OCRed, ranging from 4000 words to 25000. Maybe proofing and correcting is a good way to get more familliar with their content?
-----
Paul T's grandmother is buried tomorrow. Or more likely cremated, I don't know. He didn't invite me to the funeral, but did invite me to the gig the day after. He wants to borrow a microphone.
While he's reading out the speech (which is much too long, of course), I will be signing on. No, I didn't remember it this time - I've just been reminded.
-----
Love to be dancing
At the disco
Where you buy your
Winniebago
- Goldfrapp, "Ride A White Horse"
What kind of deranged songwriting is that? And what the hell is a winniebago anyway? Is it the kind of item commonly purchasable from a discoteque?
My mobile phone is my alarm clock. It's supposed to wake me up with loud annoying beeps in the morning. Nowadays though, it wakes me up with a loud annoying ringtone from someone with computer problems.
On Monday it was dear old Max. With words to the effect of "The printer's buggered again and I can't send emails and I need to print stuff out and send some important things over the net by today at the latest so please come and make everything alright."
So I bicycled up to see him, and fixed the printer using my secret magical method of turning it off...and then back on again. The email problem was hotmail's stupid verification system. That's where they make your hotmail inaccessible at random intervals, requiring you to log on to their site and enter a reactivation code to get access back.
However, this led to something more interesting. A few months ago, John M and I discussed the possibility of making his published work availaible on a website. He's written five books and a shedload of articles over the last thirty years, mostly now out of print but still relavant.
So, seeing as his books were there, I borrowed one, and spent the evening messing around with OCR software. It's been nearly a decade since I tried to use OCR seriously, and wasn't terribly impressed at the time - 99% accuracy sounds good, until you realise it means labourious proofreading to find the one out of every hundred letters that are wrong. And it took you longer to scan a page than to read it.
Things have improved a lot. After two hours experimentaion, I produced a near-perfect PDF of a two hundred page book in ninety minutes.
-----
Strict Machines had a gig arranged at Portsmouth's latest music venue, uninspiringly named "The Front Room". They were headlining, with two support bands. But then one of the other bands dropped out, then so did the other one, then the gig was cancelled by the management because it would be pointless having just one band onstage, then one of the support acts de-cancelled, so there was just one band onstage.
They were bloody awful too. Instrumental blues-rock without the soul of blues or the drive of rock. Good musical ideas, just performed like a finger exercise.
-----
Back up to the cluttered living space of John and Max, to discuss getting John's thirty-year back catalogue of articles and books into cyberspace. A lot of his more influential articles are already there, but it's a tiny selection and scattered.
The Marxist Internet Archive has an extremely large collection of theoretical writings, including some by rather insignificant thinkers. But nothing there from John, who's been an influential figure on the British left for as long as I've been alive.
We found about twenty periodicals containing stuff he's written, and I carried it back home in a taxi driven by a charming young Turkish man (married of course, hah!) who left the sun of Istanbul to drive through the rain in Portsmouth.
Wednesday
Scanning and OCR are the easy bits. Proofreading and correcting will drive any normal man to drink. The superscript footnote references tend to be OCRed as commas - because they're small and in the right place. And as converting a two-column scan into a single column HTML page, with correct formatting, it ought to be easy. It's so easy I'm seriously considering saving the whole thing as plain text and hand coding the HTML to format it.
At least that way the HTM files won't be several times the size they need to be - as they are in Word or Dreamweaver. I have an instinctive dislike of bloatware and almost always code HTML by hand in the original oldschool editor - Windows Notepad.
Anyway, I now have about twenty articles on political philosophy OCRed, ranging from 4000 words to 25000. Maybe proofing and correcting is a good way to get more familliar with their content?
-----
Paul T's grandmother is buried tomorrow. Or more likely cremated, I don't know. He didn't invite me to the funeral, but did invite me to the gig the day after. He wants to borrow a microphone.
While he's reading out the speech (which is much too long, of course), I will be signing on. No, I didn't remember it this time - I've just been reminded.
-----
Love to be dancing
At the disco
Where you buy your
Winniebago
- Goldfrapp, "Ride A White Horse"
What kind of deranged songwriting is that? And what the hell is a winniebago anyway? Is it the kind of item commonly purchasable from a discoteque?
We're All Doomed
This evening, a forum on the political aspects of the New Orleans disaster. The speaker cancelled with hours to spare having put her back out. The replacement speaker couldn't get out of London because of a body on the line. Half the usual atendees couldn't come for one reason or another, so there were 11 of us in the room.
So actually we had a very good improptu discussion, with myself as nominal chair, asking slightly dumb questions when the discussion flagged, so someone could jump in and provide the answer. This is my technique of stimulating debate.
-----
Of those who couldn't come, Paul T was simply exhausted after a day being painfully polite to family members.
Ivy - his grandmother - said in her life and her will that she wanted a simple (cheap) secular funeral, with donations to charity instead of wreaths and flowers. The family take this to mean a grand christian funeral with lots of flowers. Because although they didn't speak with her for years at a time, they know what she really wanted.
-----
A quick flick through the virtual papers...
Terrorist groups are giving practical help in Pakistan to recruit members from the grateful. Translation: Nationalist groups who opposed the government and were consequently banned using the standards excuse "links to Al-Qaida" are doing their bit.
The Times has one story about how high court judges are still sexist (duh). Nearby a story about a Su Duku champion, marvelling at the fact that she is female. While The Observer pretends there is a debate over whether men can be friends with women without wanting sex.
In Iraq, the Sunni (the bad guys) have failed to veto the new constitution which gives power to the Shia (the good guys). Blair and Rice promise to "sort out" Iran (prevent it getting nuclear weapons), where the Shia are the bad guys and in control. Meanwhile Blair wants to replace Trident missiles with something more modern.
A future Tory leader may have taken "drugs" as an oxford student. This is vitally important because political leaders must be models of moral probity, otherwise the public might not trust them. Apparantly.
Up to 750,000 Britons could die from Bird Flu in the winter of 2006. Questions about who is most at risk, how transmissible is it between humans, how effective are vaccines and treatments, and how rapidly does the virus mutate don't seem to be answered anywhere.
So actually we had a very good improptu discussion, with myself as nominal chair, asking slightly dumb questions when the discussion flagged, so someone could jump in and provide the answer. This is my technique of stimulating debate.
-----
Of those who couldn't come, Paul T was simply exhausted after a day being painfully polite to family members.
Ivy - his grandmother - said in her life and her will that she wanted a simple (cheap) secular funeral, with donations to charity instead of wreaths and flowers. The family take this to mean a grand christian funeral with lots of flowers. Because although they didn't speak with her for years at a time, they know what she really wanted.
-----
A quick flick through the virtual papers...
Terrorist groups are giving practical help in Pakistan to recruit members from the grateful. Translation: Nationalist groups who opposed the government and were consequently banned using the standards excuse "links to Al-Qaida" are doing their bit.
The Times has one story about how high court judges are still sexist (duh). Nearby a story about a Su Duku champion, marvelling at the fact that she is female. While The Observer pretends there is a debate over whether men can be friends with women without wanting sex.
In Iraq, the Sunni (the bad guys) have failed to veto the new constitution which gives power to the Shia (the good guys). Blair and Rice promise to "sort out" Iran (prevent it getting nuclear weapons), where the Shia are the bad guys and in control. Meanwhile Blair wants to replace Trident missiles with something more modern.
A future Tory leader may have taken "drugs" as an oxford student. This is vitally important because political leaders must be models of moral probity, otherwise the public might not trust them. Apparantly.
Up to 750,000 Britons could die from Bird Flu in the winter of 2006. Questions about who is most at risk, how transmissible is it between humans, how effective are vaccines and treatments, and how rapidly does the virus mutate don't seem to be answered anywhere.
Big Old Mess
There are between 200 and 300 CDs in this bedroom. A dozen are commercial music discs, the others various forms of data - mp3, DivXes of TV programmes and films, raw footage taken for my MA film, scans of entire books, system backups, wordprocessed short stories, sound samples, a video diary I kept for a few months, files for music tracks I've made or mixed, and most of all, software.
It's got to the state where I can't find anything without a half hour search, during which I will find something that I needed but failed to find the previous week. So, time to rationalise, be ruthless, and tidy up the bedroom while I'm about it.
Once upon a time, there was filing system, but there's always more categories than boxes, and there's always more tasks than time. Some discs contain mixed data, much is duplicated, and most is redundant. Except that I never know what will suddenly be useful in six months.
So I have to ask myself: Do I want to keep the video diary that chronicles six months of my life when I ran an art gallery and my mother almost died from a tumour? Most of what I said into the camera was tedious and sometimes pretentious.
Just how meticulously can I sort through 75 discs of software, most of which won't work properly, is no longer useful, or has been superceeded?
There's 30 discs of specially shot video fragments which two years ago I wove into a satirical film - how many might be useful in a future video project?
You know, I think it might be more than 300.
-----
Okay, I've started putting the video fragments onto DVD, and in the process discovered some mp3s and documents that I'd completely forgotten about. I must have put them on the CDRs because they were floating around on the hard disk, the CDR had some unused space, and backing store was expensive and not-to-be-wasted at the time. This would have been back in 2001.
It's got to the state where I can't find anything without a half hour search, during which I will find something that I needed but failed to find the previous week. So, time to rationalise, be ruthless, and tidy up the bedroom while I'm about it.
Once upon a time, there was filing system, but there's always more categories than boxes, and there's always more tasks than time. Some discs contain mixed data, much is duplicated, and most is redundant. Except that I never know what will suddenly be useful in six months.
So I have to ask myself: Do I want to keep the video diary that chronicles six months of my life when I ran an art gallery and my mother almost died from a tumour? Most of what I said into the camera was tedious and sometimes pretentious.
Just how meticulously can I sort through 75 discs of software, most of which won't work properly, is no longer useful, or has been superceeded?
There's 30 discs of specially shot video fragments which two years ago I wove into a satirical film - how many might be useful in a future video project?
You know, I think it might be more than 300.
-----
Okay, I've started putting the video fragments onto DVD, and in the process discovered some mp3s and documents that I'd completely forgotten about. I must have put them on the CDRs because they were floating around on the hard disk, the CDR had some unused space, and backing store was expensive and not-to-be-wasted at the time. This would have been back in 2001.
Roll Over George Smiley
Tuesday
In the late afternoon, I sit down to work on the Big Yankee Fan track for SongFight. Half an hour later I get a call from Simon M, saying he's trying to put a pack of DVDs on ebay but is getting confused.
So I say I'll come over within the hour. And then I get a call from John M, who needs a decent wordprocessor installing on his computer, which is mostly working since I last fixed it. I say I'll call round when I'm finished with Simon.
So, I drink four cups of tea with Simon, taking him through the submission process and knocking up an advertising blurb between us. And then cycle off to see John, stopping off at Paul T's house to drop off some CDs I copied for him.
Only to find he's feeling down and in need of a distraction, because his grandmother - who he cared for until a few months ago - had died the night before in a nursing home. So I functioned as distraction, got fed, and talked about music and philosophy for 90 minutes, over another three cups of tea.
He now needs a lodger, I could use a place to live that isn't my parent's house, and he's my friend. Unfortunately, I'd go stark staring mad if I had to see him every day.
Arriving at John's house, I let myself in through the back door, to find him fast asleep on the sofa in front of the television. I'm seeing that quite a lot lately - he's not getting nearly enough sleep, so when he does get some, it happens suddenly, and rarely in bed.
I let him snooze while I install MS Word. Max comes downstairs and tells me "I'm extremely stoned, because I've got a lot of work to do. The printer isn't working at all. Can you sort that out?"
The work of which he speaks is for a performance of the play The Investigation, which he's directing. Max is a very laid back director. As in horizontal.
It takes two hours to find, download and install the printer drivers, but it works perfectly afterwards. Meanwhile John wakes up and we talk about politics until three in the morning. And drink tea.
I cycle home, watch another four episodes of House (one cup per episode), and go to bed.
-----
Wednesday
I've finished Big Yankee Fan - with two days to spare. This is unprecedented for me, as I usually work on a track to within hours of the submission deadline.
Probably because I didn't have to write lyrics this time - I came up with a dub reggae backing, and cut up five minutes from the Johnathan Neale seminar as vocals.
I expect a hostile response from certain songfighters, on the grounds that (a) it's not a proper song because there's no singing (b) the musical style is weird and beyond their comprehension and (c) the politics doesn't cast the American response to hurricane Katrina in a glorious light.
-----
MI6 now has a website. Beginning with the ever so slightly ironic words "Welcome to the official website of the Secret Intelligence Service".
There's a rather nice glossary. Agent - "A covert human intelligence source". Humint - "Human intelligence or intelligence derived from human sources". Source - "Any source of information or intelligence. An agent may be a source but a source is not automatically an agent". The FAQ assures us that they're not really like James Bond.
The site also tells you how to apply for a job with them, warning that you shouldn't tell anyone you've done it, unless they're a "close partner". SO you can tell your wife you're a spy, but not your mother.
There's a search engine too. Here's the number of hits I got for carefully selected keywords:
Burgess: 0
Blunt: 0
Bond: 1
Love: 0
Mansfield: 7
Homosexual: 0
Russia: 0
Communist: 1
Terrorism: 4
-----
According to The Times, Al-Qaida has stopped being a 'franchise', 'tendency' or 'banner' and gone back to being a real global organisation run by Osama bin Laden. But only long enough for the second in command (Ayman al-Zawahiri) to warn the head of Iraq division (Abu Musab al-Zarqawi) to stop killing shias, because it's bad for publicity.
David Blunkett has had sex, again. And the women has told the press, again.
Robert Fisk has published a book (titled The Great War for Civilisation) about the current situation in Iraq. He says in 30 years of war reporting, he's never seen such a level of destruction, but that most of the country - including most of Baghdad - is controlled by the resistance. The occupying armies don't patrol the streets - they sit in their barracks for days or weeks, occasionally speeding out in tanks and jeeps, guns firing constantly to scare off anyone who might attack them, completing the assigned operation as quickly as possible, before rushing back to the safety of the barracks.
The Independent gave it's version of the book's contents: "Most of Iraq is in a state of anarchy, with insurgents controlling parts of Baghdad" and "Fisk...painted a picture of deepening chaos and misery in Iraq"
Pakistan is no longer in the headlines, but reports are divided between stories of hopeless suffering caused by lack of food and medical supplies, and stories about greedy looters with no respect for private property.
Oh, and Tony Blair has criticised Iran for interfering in the affairs of a foreign country, namely Iraq. Duh.
-----
Thursday
My network connection has been down for most of the last three days. So I'm saving up blog entries.
-----
I've been trying to copy some old VHS recordings (mine and Simon M's) to digital format, but the sound on the captures keeps shifting or drifting out of sync with the video. I get the same effect digitising to DivX and MJPEG - probably a matter of so much information being lost through compression to VHS and then tape decay.
Audio and video are separate streams, and different bits of the two streams are dropped in different places. Result: bad sound and bad video badly sychronised. And of course it's worse with Long Play recordings.
Capturing to MPEG2 might help, but editing out adverts and unwanted stuff would be an absolute pig.
-----
Okay. tried MPEG2. Didn't work. Can't think of anything else to try so give up.
In the late afternoon, I sit down to work on the Big Yankee Fan track for SongFight. Half an hour later I get a call from Simon M, saying he's trying to put a pack of DVDs on ebay but is getting confused.
So I say I'll come over within the hour. And then I get a call from John M, who needs a decent wordprocessor installing on his computer, which is mostly working since I last fixed it. I say I'll call round when I'm finished with Simon.
So, I drink four cups of tea with Simon, taking him through the submission process and knocking up an advertising blurb between us. And then cycle off to see John, stopping off at Paul T's house to drop off some CDs I copied for him.
Only to find he's feeling down and in need of a distraction, because his grandmother - who he cared for until a few months ago - had died the night before in a nursing home. So I functioned as distraction, got fed, and talked about music and philosophy for 90 minutes, over another three cups of tea.
He now needs a lodger, I could use a place to live that isn't my parent's house, and he's my friend. Unfortunately, I'd go stark staring mad if I had to see him every day.
Arriving at John's house, I let myself in through the back door, to find him fast asleep on the sofa in front of the television. I'm seeing that quite a lot lately - he's not getting nearly enough sleep, so when he does get some, it happens suddenly, and rarely in bed.
I let him snooze while I install MS Word. Max comes downstairs and tells me "I'm extremely stoned, because I've got a lot of work to do. The printer isn't working at all. Can you sort that out?"
The work of which he speaks is for a performance of the play The Investigation, which he's directing. Max is a very laid back director. As in horizontal.
It takes two hours to find, download and install the printer drivers, but it works perfectly afterwards. Meanwhile John wakes up and we talk about politics until three in the morning. And drink tea.
I cycle home, watch another four episodes of House (one cup per episode), and go to bed.
-----
Wednesday
I've finished Big Yankee Fan - with two days to spare. This is unprecedented for me, as I usually work on a track to within hours of the submission deadline.
Probably because I didn't have to write lyrics this time - I came up with a dub reggae backing, and cut up five minutes from the Johnathan Neale seminar as vocals.
I expect a hostile response from certain songfighters, on the grounds that (a) it's not a proper song because there's no singing (b) the musical style is weird and beyond their comprehension and (c) the politics doesn't cast the American response to hurricane Katrina in a glorious light.
-----
MI6 now has a website. Beginning with the ever so slightly ironic words "Welcome to the official website of the Secret Intelligence Service".
There's a rather nice glossary. Agent - "A covert human intelligence source". Humint - "Human intelligence or intelligence derived from human sources". Source - "Any source of information or intelligence. An agent may be a source but a source is not automatically an agent". The FAQ assures us that they're not really like James Bond.
The site also tells you how to apply for a job with them, warning that you shouldn't tell anyone you've done it, unless they're a "close partner". SO you can tell your wife you're a spy, but not your mother.
There's a search engine too. Here's the number of hits I got for carefully selected keywords:
Burgess: 0
Blunt: 0
Bond: 1
Love: 0
Mansfield: 7
Homosexual: 0
Russia: 0
Communist: 1
Terrorism: 4
-----
According to The Times, Al-Qaida has stopped being a 'franchise', 'tendency' or 'banner' and gone back to being a real global organisation run by Osama bin Laden. But only long enough for the second in command (Ayman al-Zawahiri) to warn the head of Iraq division (Abu Musab al-Zarqawi) to stop killing shias, because it's bad for publicity.
David Blunkett has had sex, again. And the women has told the press, again.
Robert Fisk has published a book (titled The Great War for Civilisation) about the current situation in Iraq. He says in 30 years of war reporting, he's never seen such a level of destruction, but that most of the country - including most of Baghdad - is controlled by the resistance. The occupying armies don't patrol the streets - they sit in their barracks for days or weeks, occasionally speeding out in tanks and jeeps, guns firing constantly to scare off anyone who might attack them, completing the assigned operation as quickly as possible, before rushing back to the safety of the barracks.
The Independent gave it's version of the book's contents: "Most of Iraq is in a state of anarchy, with insurgents controlling parts of Baghdad" and "Fisk...painted a picture of deepening chaos and misery in Iraq"
Pakistan is no longer in the headlines, but reports are divided between stories of hopeless suffering caused by lack of food and medical supplies, and stories about greedy looters with no respect for private property.
Oh, and Tony Blair has criticised Iran for interfering in the affairs of a foreign country, namely Iraq. Duh.
-----
Thursday
My network connection has been down for most of the last three days. So I'm saving up blog entries.
-----
I've been trying to copy some old VHS recordings (mine and Simon M's) to digital format, but the sound on the captures keeps shifting or drifting out of sync with the video. I get the same effect digitising to DivX and MJPEG - probably a matter of so much information being lost through compression to VHS and then tape decay.
Audio and video are separate streams, and different bits of the two streams are dropped in different places. Result: bad sound and bad video badly sychronised. And of course it's worse with Long Play recordings.
Capturing to MPEG2 might help, but editing out adverts and unwanted stuff would be an absolute pig.
-----
Okay. tried MPEG2. Didn't work. Can't think of anything else to try so give up.
The Munch Bunch
Sunday
A restrained 40-something (or is it early 50-something?) birthday lunch with Simon M. Scrupulously healthy stir-fry with prawns, followed by not-exactly-healthy ice-cream, chocolate, red wine and champaigne.
On the way home, another guilty few bars of chocolate from the smiling Iraqi man in the all-night shop, another box of fried chicken and chips from the smiling Turkish man in Ken's Fried Chicken, another three episodes of House...
Monday
...another afternoon with Simon M, this time helping him set up his first ever ebay auction. At some point, I'll have to teach him how to use the digital camera, tranfer the images, crop and mapipulate them, and upload. When both of us have the strength. This time, I did it myself. Which means I may end up doing it for the next item or so.
Anyway, I now have my TV back, and nowhere to put it, because the bedroom is unfeasibly cluttered with stuff. It's not junk, it's materiel.
And I must put some of it on ebay myself soon. I might get £10 for a £100 USB soundblaster box that proved to be completely and utterly useless. How much for theology textbooks that managed to get dogeared while never actually being read?
-----
Exchange of emails with H. He's unspeakably busy at the moment, but will keep in touch when he can.
-----
The earthquake in Pakistan. On Saturday the death toll was "up to 1000", yesterday it was "up to 19,000", and today it's "up to 40,000". And that's before disease, famine and drought kick in.
My god, it's unimaginable. The scale of it is quite literally beyond imagination. It's difficult enough to think of 50 deaths without each individual dissolving into a large amorphous mass, but tens of thousands?
A restrained 40-something (or is it early 50-something?) birthday lunch with Simon M. Scrupulously healthy stir-fry with prawns, followed by not-exactly-healthy ice-cream, chocolate, red wine and champaigne.
On the way home, another guilty few bars of chocolate from the smiling Iraqi man in the all-night shop, another box of fried chicken and chips from the smiling Turkish man in Ken's Fried Chicken, another three episodes of House...
Monday
...another afternoon with Simon M, this time helping him set up his first ever ebay auction. At some point, I'll have to teach him how to use the digital camera, tranfer the images, crop and mapipulate them, and upload. When both of us have the strength. This time, I did it myself. Which means I may end up doing it for the next item or so.
Anyway, I now have my TV back, and nowhere to put it, because the bedroom is unfeasibly cluttered with stuff. It's not junk, it's materiel.
And I must put some of it on ebay myself soon. I might get £10 for a £100 USB soundblaster box that proved to be completely and utterly useless. How much for theology textbooks that managed to get dogeared while never actually being read?
-----
Exchange of emails with H. He's unspeakably busy at the moment, but will keep in touch when he can.
-----
The earthquake in Pakistan. On Saturday the death toll was "up to 1000", yesterday it was "up to 19,000", and today it's "up to 40,000". And that's before disease, famine and drought kick in.
My god, it's unimaginable. The scale of it is quite literally beyond imagination. It's difficult enough to think of 50 deaths without each individual dissolving into a large amorphous mass, but tens of thousands?
Blessings to Count
I feel like I'm just about to have a bad cold. You know the feeling, before the symptoms kick in fully, there's one or two days of mild headaches, vagueness of thought, general tierdness, oversleeping and odd muscle aches. Well I've had that for a month, and it's getting very slowly worse.
Though partly to blame might be today's breakfast. There is definitely an art to poaching eggs in the kettle, and I haven't mastered it yet.
The second half of the daylight hours were spent drinking tea, eating (excellent) cold pizza, and listening to Paul T's ruminations on the contradictions in middle class consciousness.
I'm introducing myself the Epoxies 2nd album, Goldfrapp's third, and a band completely new to me - Ladytron. Very synth rock retro - Blondie and Georgio Moroder, via Kraftwerk and DJ Shadow. Great stuff.
-----
Oh yes, todays newspapers.
* A 7.6 earthquake in India, Pakistan and Afganistan. Very scarce info.
* Most broadsheets have decided to adopt a 'nuanced' view of Bush's statement that god told him to invade Iraq.
* The prez has started preaching 'energy austerity'. To the public, obviously, not big business. Global warming is the consumer's fault for being greedy.
* The effect is slightly undercut by congress passing a bill offering financial incentives to build oil refineries, and lessening environmental legislation about their construction and operation.
* On to the trivial news. Boy George and Robbie Williams take cocaine. So do supermodels and the journalists who write shocked articles about them doing it.
There's also a scientific report showing humans are genetically programmed to hoard possessions (except when they're not), and Bill Clinton is being rubbished in print yet again for having sex (but not for being corrupt). Maybe I should try American papers.
-----
There's still good things in life. Watching three consecutive episodes of House at four in the morning, sex-obsessed synthpop, a little bundle of affectionate puppy-shaped madness, http://www.crank.net, caramel chocolate bars, Oliver Postgate, living in a dreary town that's suddenly once again full of cute students.
Though partly to blame might be today's breakfast. There is definitely an art to poaching eggs in the kettle, and I haven't mastered it yet.
The second half of the daylight hours were spent drinking tea, eating (excellent) cold pizza, and listening to Paul T's ruminations on the contradictions in middle class consciousness.
I'm introducing myself the Epoxies 2nd album, Goldfrapp's third, and a band completely new to me - Ladytron. Very synth rock retro - Blondie and Georgio Moroder, via Kraftwerk and DJ Shadow. Great stuff.
-----
Oh yes, todays newspapers.
* A 7.6 earthquake in India, Pakistan and Afganistan. Very scarce info.
* Most broadsheets have decided to adopt a 'nuanced' view of Bush's statement that god told him to invade Iraq.
* The prez has started preaching 'energy austerity'. To the public, obviously, not big business. Global warming is the consumer's fault for being greedy.
* The effect is slightly undercut by congress passing a bill offering financial incentives to build oil refineries, and lessening environmental legislation about their construction and operation.
* On to the trivial news. Boy George and Robbie Williams take cocaine. So do supermodels and the journalists who write shocked articles about them doing it.
There's also a scientific report showing humans are genetically programmed to hoard possessions (except when they're not), and Bill Clinton is being rubbished in print yet again for having sex (but not for being corrupt). Maybe I should try American papers.
-----
There's still good things in life. Watching three consecutive episodes of House at four in the morning, sex-obsessed synthpop, a little bundle of affectionate puppy-shaped madness, http://www.crank.net, caramel chocolate bars, Oliver Postgate, living in a dreary town that's suddenly once again full of cute students.
"The battery is 1.5V; It is full, and with the use time adding, the power display will be decrease"
Thursday
My wake up call didn't happen, so I slept blissfully on till midday. Then found my MP3 player had arrived.
The manual is lovingly translated from Chinese to English via Martian, and the player looks like a miniature red penknife - complete with belt clip.
It's slow to respond to button pushing, so navigating and changing parameters can be tiresome. But it's nice and loud, and I can get roughly 7 hours high quality MP3s on it. I've been blasting my ears with The Epoxies and Joy Division.
-----
I never remember when I'm due to sign on. Every second thursday, it comes as a complete surprise that I have an appointment at the jobcentre to share bafflement with my advisor that there still aren't any jobs around.
-----
Excellent seminar in the evening on climate change with Johnathan Neale, which I filmed and will summarise when I have the strength.
-----
Friday
I've taken to skimming newspapers on the web. In the news today:
* President Bush says God told him to invade the middle east. To drive out evil, bring peace and American values to all. Because Islam wants to invade the world, and force everyone to be muslim. Funny that.
* Nestle have launched a brand of Fair Trade Coffee. To give them ethical credibility. Because one of their hundreds of pruducts is less opressive than the others. They're a bit late - Fair Trade was recognised as largely fraudulent (or at best tokenistic) years ago.
* It will soon be a crime to not report suspicions of "extremism" and "indications of terrorism" to the police. It was once estimated that in stalinist albania, one in five of the population were police informers. But I don't recall it being a crime to not inform enough.
* The creationism debate is back yet again, but of course only in America. Barbarous tyranical nations with evil ideologies grasp evolution without difficulty.
You read statistics about American beliefs - 40% don't want evolution taught in schools, 20% think the sun goes round the earth, 70% believe Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and 80% think the CIA is hiding evidence of extraterrestrials. But I wonder where all these stupid Americans are. I've met plenty of Americans on the internet or in person, and they've been reasonable, informed, and decently mistrustful of their government.
Maybe they've got polls showing Brits are paranoid about BSE, love Tony Blair and think a measles vaccine causes autism.
-----
Everyone's timetables are in constant flux at the moment, but the current plan for the weekend is: Spend Saturday afternoon with Paul T, checking his modem and computer, then ensuring the children of record compay executives starve by copying CDs neither of us would know about if it weren't for the other. And then get fed by him.
Then spend Sunday afternoon with Simon M, celebrating his birthday by surfing the net for daft conspiracy theories, watching a charming and even dafter movie obtained from Ebay...and then getting fed by him.
My wake up call didn't happen, so I slept blissfully on till midday. Then found my MP3 player had arrived.
The manual is lovingly translated from Chinese to English via Martian, and the player looks like a miniature red penknife - complete with belt clip.
It's slow to respond to button pushing, so navigating and changing parameters can be tiresome. But it's nice and loud, and I can get roughly 7 hours high quality MP3s on it. I've been blasting my ears with The Epoxies and Joy Division.
-----
I never remember when I'm due to sign on. Every second thursday, it comes as a complete surprise that I have an appointment at the jobcentre to share bafflement with my advisor that there still aren't any jobs around.
-----
Excellent seminar in the evening on climate change with Johnathan Neale, which I filmed and will summarise when I have the strength.
-----
Friday
I've taken to skimming newspapers on the web. In the news today:
* President Bush says God told him to invade the middle east. To drive out evil, bring peace and American values to all. Because Islam wants to invade the world, and force everyone to be muslim. Funny that.
* Nestle have launched a brand of Fair Trade Coffee. To give them ethical credibility. Because one of their hundreds of pruducts is less opressive than the others. They're a bit late - Fair Trade was recognised as largely fraudulent (or at best tokenistic) years ago.
* It will soon be a crime to not report suspicions of "extremism" and "indications of terrorism" to the police. It was once estimated that in stalinist albania, one in five of the population were police informers. But I don't recall it being a crime to not inform enough.
* The creationism debate is back yet again, but of course only in America. Barbarous tyranical nations with evil ideologies grasp evolution without difficulty.
You read statistics about American beliefs - 40% don't want evolution taught in schools, 20% think the sun goes round the earth, 70% believe Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and 80% think the CIA is hiding evidence of extraterrestrials. But I wonder where all these stupid Americans are. I've met plenty of Americans on the internet or in person, and they've been reasonable, informed, and decently mistrustful of their government.
Maybe they've got polls showing Brits are paranoid about BSE, love Tony Blair and think a measles vaccine causes autism.
-----
Everyone's timetables are in constant flux at the moment, but the current plan for the weekend is: Spend Saturday afternoon with Paul T, checking his modem and computer, then ensuring the children of record compay executives starve by copying CDs neither of us would know about if it weren't for the other. And then get fed by him.
Then spend Sunday afternoon with Simon M, celebrating his birthday by surfing the net for daft conspiracy theories, watching a charming and even dafter movie obtained from Ebay...and then getting fed by him.
The Impossibility of Sleep in the Mind of Someone Waking
Oh lord, it's 0600. I'm due to wake up at 0700. Then trapse around Portsmouth pushing election leaflets through letterboxes, then fix a modem problem, then film a seminar on global warming.
I think I may contrive to oversleep slightly.
I think I may contrive to oversleep slightly.
Slob
Woke up at midday, and cycled (rather painfully) to Maplin to get a USB PCI card for Simon M. Seeing as he's broke, and I owe him £10, my repayment for the £30 card was the loan of two porn DVDs.
Believe it or not, the card worked perfectly first time. So now he can continue to spend money he doesn't have on fat-loss and muscle-building supplements from Ebay.
According to his high-tech bathroom scales, around one third of my bodyweight is fat. 10-15% is desirable, so 31% is not terribly good. He gave a lot of good advice about diet and exercise - including one very useful tip to computer-bound snackers like me: keep a bowl of fruit next to the computer.
He's still got my TV, but I now have the laptop back.
-----
Karma involves cycles and things balancing out, right? Well, my bike gets stolen, I buy another one, and an abandoned bike turns up in middle of the road. Father asks around and keeps it in the garage for a month before mentioning it to me.
Not exactly balanced, but certainly cyclic. And I now have a spare bicycle.
-----
Not quite in the same vein, but: My parent's digital camera (£300 and very cool) is not economically repairable after it started taking only black pictures. And I've got my camcorder (£650 three years ago and hopelessly out of date) taking stills again.
We think the bank of light-sensitive capacitors in the camera has become disconnected or burned out. And I just found the 'Format Memory Stick' option on the camcorder.
They've bought a new, even cooler camera now.
-----
A sudden cloud of committments means I can't reasonably finish the 'Boundaries' song this week.
Wednesday: RESPECT meeting in the evening. Not an important one, but I need to speak with John M about slide digitisation and Sion R about co-producing his album.
Thursday: Leafleting with Lee S for the local elections in the morning, trying to fix Paul T's net connection in the afternoon, and going to a seminar from the great Johnathan Neale in the evening.
Saturday: Lunch and television retrival with Simon M. Probably with one of his deeply crap but camply enjoyable movies.
Christina C thinks he and I should 'get together', presumably on the grounds that we're both gay, so must be compatable. Exactly why a bisexual woman with three boyfriends (who have their own girlfriends and indeed boyfriends) should think this, I'm not sure.
Believe it or not, the card worked perfectly first time. So now he can continue to spend money he doesn't have on fat-loss and muscle-building supplements from Ebay.
According to his high-tech bathroom scales, around one third of my bodyweight is fat. 10-15% is desirable, so 31% is not terribly good. He gave a lot of good advice about diet and exercise - including one very useful tip to computer-bound snackers like me: keep a bowl of fruit next to the computer.
He's still got my TV, but I now have the laptop back.
-----
Karma involves cycles and things balancing out, right? Well, my bike gets stolen, I buy another one, and an abandoned bike turns up in middle of the road. Father asks around and keeps it in the garage for a month before mentioning it to me.
Not exactly balanced, but certainly cyclic. And I now have a spare bicycle.
-----
Not quite in the same vein, but: My parent's digital camera (£300 and very cool) is not economically repairable after it started taking only black pictures. And I've got my camcorder (£650 three years ago and hopelessly out of date) taking stills again.
We think the bank of light-sensitive capacitors in the camera has become disconnected or burned out. And I just found the 'Format Memory Stick' option on the camcorder.
They've bought a new, even cooler camera now.
-----
A sudden cloud of committments means I can't reasonably finish the 'Boundaries' song this week.
Wednesday: RESPECT meeting in the evening. Not an important one, but I need to speak with John M about slide digitisation and Sion R about co-producing his album.
Thursday: Leafleting with Lee S for the local elections in the morning, trying to fix Paul T's net connection in the afternoon, and going to a seminar from the great Johnathan Neale in the evening.
Saturday: Lunch and television retrival with Simon M. Probably with one of his deeply crap but camply enjoyable movies.
Christina C thinks he and I should 'get together', presumably on the grounds that we're both gay, so must be compatable. Exactly why a bisexual woman with three boyfriends (who have their own girlfriends and indeed boyfriends) should think this, I'm not sure.
Still the Wabbit
I spent most of Sunday with hiccups. Five bouts of them, that came from nowhere and disappeared in their own time, regardless of whatever breath-holding measures I tried to get rid of them.
Now it's Monday, and I've spent most of it with a headache. But no hiccups. Yet.
-----
Paul T called to say his internet connection still wasn't working in spite of getting a new cable and he was sick of things not working.
Then he called again to spend ten minutes moaning about having to spend ten minutes in a customer queue listening to a voice saying the same thing over an over again, before being told they couldn't identify the problem.
I told him I didn't know why he wasn't getting connected. First time as tradgedy, second as farce, comrade.
Anyway, I called the techical helpline (with no queue), and ascertained there was 'a problem on the line', to be fixed by BT in the next 24 hours.
-----
Oh drat. I knew I'd forgotten something. Simon M's internet connection.
-----
I'm just not feeling well enough to compose, let alone sing. Still got the wabbit.
-----
John M has hundreds of slides for his lectures, and an urgent need to digitise them before the university phases out slide projectors completely. I've pointed him towards a print shop which can do the job, but if they're too expensive, I'll do it myself.
I'll also have to teach him how to use Powerpoint. Which means learning it myself - something I've always avoided.
I've never yet seen a powerpoint presentation that added to what the speaker was saying. In fact, usually the speaker just reads out the bullet points they've just projected. Pretentious and pointless in one handy package.
Now it's Monday, and I've spent most of it with a headache. But no hiccups. Yet.
-----
Paul T called to say his internet connection still wasn't working in spite of getting a new cable and he was sick of things not working.
Then he called again to spend ten minutes moaning about having to spend ten minutes in a customer queue listening to a voice saying the same thing over an over again, before being told they couldn't identify the problem.
I told him I didn't know why he wasn't getting connected. First time as tradgedy, second as farce, comrade.
Anyway, I called the techical helpline (with no queue), and ascertained there was 'a problem on the line', to be fixed by BT in the next 24 hours.
-----
Oh drat. I knew I'd forgotten something. Simon M's internet connection.
-----
I'm just not feeling well enough to compose, let alone sing. Still got the wabbit.
-----
John M has hundreds of slides for his lectures, and an urgent need to digitise them before the university phases out slide projectors completely. I've pointed him towards a print shop which can do the job, but if they're too expensive, I'll do it myself.
I'll also have to teach him how to use Powerpoint. Which means learning it myself - something I've always avoided.
I've never yet seen a powerpoint presentation that added to what the speaker was saying. In fact, usually the speaker just reads out the bullet points they've just projected. Pretentious and pointless in one handy package.
What Have I Got in My Pocket?
Did I mention I'd lost my wallet? Well I've found it again, and it's lovely and clean, thanks to having gone through the washing machine twice.
Having no cash was an extremely effective way to avoid the temptation to buy emormous blocks of chocolate. Unfortunately....
-----
My N-Pod MP3 player has a 40BG hard disk and a rechargable lithium battery that lasts six hours. Plus an FM radio and text viewer. It also has extremely buggy firmware and absolutely no support from distributor or maunfacturer.
At unpredictable intervals, it starts to play MP3s silently, though the radio still works. Occasionally, it just freezes during bootup. The cure seems to be to poke a pin into the 'Reset' hole in the base, hold for 10 seconds, and switch on. Several times until the unit works properly.
For £128, it would be an excellent unit if it worked properly. As it is, given the bugs and quiet playback, I feel slightly cheated.
I've bought a 'backup' MP3 player from Ebay. Lower specs - 1GB drive and runs for 2-3 hours from a AAA battery, and at £50 (including postage etc) it's not one of those fabled Ebay bargins.
-----
I'm copying the 'Play It Today' piano tutorial cassettes to digital form. The course seems well thought out, but the presentation and 'real music exercises' are embarassingly cheesy.
A plummy voice-over artiste teaching me how to play like Richard Clayderman. How to play with perfect posture, impeccable timing, and all the passion of stale water.
-----
Without too much pain, I got Paul T's computer set up for internet action. Or as he puts it 'North Korean Lesbian Action'. Sadly, the sapphist ladies of communist Korea are not currently available to him, because he has no cable that (a) is long enough to reach the phone socket and (b) actually works.
Once we have a new five metre RJ11 cable, we'll see what other impediments to all-girl digital fantasy arise.
-----
I seem to have almost no lung capacity. Cycling fairly gently for ten minutes leaves me completely winded and in pain.
I'm not muscularly weak, or lacking in muscle endurance. It's just the aerobic side of exercise that defeats me.
Having no cash was an extremely effective way to avoid the temptation to buy emormous blocks of chocolate. Unfortunately....
-----
My N-Pod MP3 player has a 40BG hard disk and a rechargable lithium battery that lasts six hours. Plus an FM radio and text viewer. It also has extremely buggy firmware and absolutely no support from distributor or maunfacturer.
At unpredictable intervals, it starts to play MP3s silently, though the radio still works. Occasionally, it just freezes during bootup. The cure seems to be to poke a pin into the 'Reset' hole in the base, hold for 10 seconds, and switch on. Several times until the unit works properly.
For £128, it would be an excellent unit if it worked properly. As it is, given the bugs and quiet playback, I feel slightly cheated.
I've bought a 'backup' MP3 player from Ebay. Lower specs - 1GB drive and runs for 2-3 hours from a AAA battery, and at £50 (including postage etc) it's not one of those fabled Ebay bargins.
-----
I'm copying the 'Play It Today' piano tutorial cassettes to digital form. The course seems well thought out, but the presentation and 'real music exercises' are embarassingly cheesy.
A plummy voice-over artiste teaching me how to play like Richard Clayderman. How to play with perfect posture, impeccable timing, and all the passion of stale water.
-----
Without too much pain, I got Paul T's computer set up for internet action. Or as he puts it 'North Korean Lesbian Action'. Sadly, the sapphist ladies of communist Korea are not currently available to him, because he has no cable that (a) is long enough to reach the phone socket and (b) actually works.
Once we have a new five metre RJ11 cable, we'll see what other impediments to all-girl digital fantasy arise.
-----
I seem to have almost no lung capacity. Cycling fairly gently for ten minutes leaves me completely winded and in pain.
I'm not muscularly weak, or lacking in muscle endurance. It's just the aerobic side of exercise that defeats me.
Groundhog
See if you can spot the recurring pattern.
Thursday: Eight hours of night with Christina C and her computer, trying to fix her internet access. The initial and eventual diagnoses were that she needs a new modem.
Friday: Five hours to fix John M's internet access. I eventually wiped the hard disk and reinstalled everything. When I left at 0215, with John quietly snoozing on the couch in front of the TV, it seemed to be working okay.
Today is Saturday. Paul T's modem has arrived, and the evening will be spent setting up his net access.
The plan for Monday is to get a new USB card for Simon M. So he can plug his modem into it and surf the net.
It's 0315, I'm exhausted and sick of computers. Each day I promised myself I'd work on the latest song, and each day I got a phone call from someone with a crap computer who needs the net for their work.
Thursday: Eight hours of night with Christina C and her computer, trying to fix her internet access. The initial and eventual diagnoses were that she needs a new modem.
Friday: Five hours to fix John M's internet access. I eventually wiped the hard disk and reinstalled everything. When I left at 0215, with John quietly snoozing on the couch in front of the TV, it seemed to be working okay.
Today is Saturday. Paul T's modem has arrived, and the evening will be spent setting up his net access.
The plan for Monday is to get a new USB card for Simon M. So he can plug his modem into it and surf the net.
It's 0315, I'm exhausted and sick of computers. Each day I promised myself I'd work on the latest song, and each day I got a phone call from someone with a crap computer who needs the net for their work.
Computers and Calories
Lunch (and dinner, and an unspecified in between meal) with Simon M and his computer, which needs a new USB card. Or for preference replacement, but he can't afford it. Work on Christina C's computer was delayed till (probably) tomorrow when her daughter went into labour.
-----
Speaking of Labour. In the news today the big event was at the Labour Party conference, where an 82 year old longtime member was violently ejected from the hall and detained as a suspected terrorist. His act of sedition was to shout the word "Nonsense" during a speech. Another deligate who protested at the manhandling was treated the same way, and a third taking snaps in the entrance lobby had his pictures deleted.
Second is a visit to this country from the family of a man shot nine times through the head in public by an undercover police officer who "mistook him for a suicide bomber", as the radio news puts it.
The officer, under orders to maintain a low profile, mistook a white man walking with a rucksack for a dark-skinned man running with a koran and a bomb. And decided the best way to remain hidden, protect lives and maintain calm was to chase him into a busy tube train and empty his gun, thus defusing the invisible bomb.
Over the next week, the media will accuse the family of "giving succour to terrorists", and then hint at "connections to Al Qai-ida".
Tucked away behind non-stories about school dinners and fragile I-Pods is news that the polar icecap is melting even faster than expected. Personally, I wish the world would hurry up and end.
-----
Last time we attempted to spring clean - about 5 years ago - we found a lot of my computing coursework from 1992. This time it's theology from 1994. So, progress. Except it seems to be mixed with work on phonetics, film studies, and the finer points of second order logic.
If anyone asks me what I've done with my life, the answer might be, "Try to understand the world, in the hope that it would stink less."
-----
Speaking of Labour. In the news today the big event was at the Labour Party conference, where an 82 year old longtime member was violently ejected from the hall and detained as a suspected terrorist. His act of sedition was to shout the word "Nonsense" during a speech. Another deligate who protested at the manhandling was treated the same way, and a third taking snaps in the entrance lobby had his pictures deleted.
Second is a visit to this country from the family of a man shot nine times through the head in public by an undercover police officer who "mistook him for a suicide bomber", as the radio news puts it.
The officer, under orders to maintain a low profile, mistook a white man walking with a rucksack for a dark-skinned man running with a koran and a bomb. And decided the best way to remain hidden, protect lives and maintain calm was to chase him into a busy tube train and empty his gun, thus defusing the invisible bomb.
Over the next week, the media will accuse the family of "giving succour to terrorists", and then hint at "connections to Al Qai-ida".
Tucked away behind non-stories about school dinners and fragile I-Pods is news that the polar icecap is melting even faster than expected. Personally, I wish the world would hurry up and end.
-----
Last time we attempted to spring clean - about 5 years ago - we found a lot of my computing coursework from 1992. This time it's theology from 1994. So, progress. Except it seems to be mixed with work on phonetics, film studies, and the finer points of second order logic.
If anyone asks me what I've done with my life, the answer might be, "Try to understand the world, in the hope that it would stink less."
Been Reading the Bible Again
I've come up with a song for this week's SongFight, for the title 'Boundaries'. It's about the sense of vertigo that hits when someone loses their religion. Moral certainties are no longer garrunteed by obscure lines from an old book. Boundaries between right and wrong, true and false, important and trivial seem disconcertingly free to slip around when no longer held in place by church authority.
Unfortunately, I can't find a way to insert the title into the lyrics. Well, this is how they stand at the moment:
VERSE 1:
One choice
Two trees
One bite of the apple
And now we are free
One sin
Two sons
One moment of anger
Cannot be undone
CHORUS:
(No one)
No one to forgive me
(No one)
No one to blame
(No more)
No one to decieve me
(No more)
No more games to play
VERSE 2:
One child
Three kings
Tell it on the mountain
Now rise up and sing
One cross
Three nails
Silver in my pocket
The price of betrayal
Unfortunately, I can't find a way to insert the title into the lyrics. Well, this is how they stand at the moment:
VERSE 1:
One choice
Two trees
One bite of the apple
And now we are free
One sin
Two sons
One moment of anger
Cannot be undone
CHORUS:
(No one)
No one to forgive me
(No one)
No one to blame
(No more)
No one to decieve me
(No more)
No more games to play
VERSE 2:
One child
Three kings
Tell it on the mountain
Now rise up and sing
One cross
Three nails
Silver in my pocket
The price of betrayal
Now We're in the Mood
Sion R has a nice shiny new computer. For which he has requested multitracking software and training. And probably help plugging it in.
Speaking of shiny new computers, Simon M wants one. So tomorrow's lunch will be one of his wonderful culinary creations with more calories than a weightlifter needs in a week.
We'll go through the various suppliers and specifications, but I'll recommend a cheap (£300) Dell machine. 2.6GHz, XP Home, 512MB RAM, 80GB HD, 17'' CRT Monitor, DVD Combo.
-----
My kitchen is full of fruit. Apples, pears, bananas and figs. I gave the oranges and passion fruit a miss. And what the hell is a butternut?
Father is mystified that figs can be eaten raw. They can be eaten raw, can't they?
Anyway, there's now no excuse for snacking on biscuits. The 70% coaca chocolate I got with them has given me a spacey buzz and a headache.
H used to look at me in wonderment and say "You're not meant for this world, are you?"
-----
I've got the 'cassette digitisation' machine set up again. Currently transferring Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds and the BBC radio production of The Hobbit to mp3.
There's Lord of the Rings, Hitch-Hiker (first two seasons) and Lost in Space lying around on cassettes we no longer have the facilities to play. Plus about 100 Open University course casssttes and 200 music cassettes.
We've rediscovered the piano teaching course called 'Play it Today' - consisting on about 30 cassettes and booklets. It's been sitting in a quiet corner for about 15 years since Mother and I tried to learn. I don't think I got past lesson 1. I'll copy it to mp3 and see whether I can learn some basic keyboard technique at some point.
Speaking of shiny new computers, Simon M wants one. So tomorrow's lunch will be one of his wonderful culinary creations with more calories than a weightlifter needs in a week.
We'll go through the various suppliers and specifications, but I'll recommend a cheap (£300) Dell machine. 2.6GHz, XP Home, 512MB RAM, 80GB HD, 17'' CRT Monitor, DVD Combo.
-----
My kitchen is full of fruit. Apples, pears, bananas and figs. I gave the oranges and passion fruit a miss. And what the hell is a butternut?
Father is mystified that figs can be eaten raw. They can be eaten raw, can't they?
Anyway, there's now no excuse for snacking on biscuits. The 70% coaca chocolate I got with them has given me a spacey buzz and a headache.
H used to look at me in wonderment and say "You're not meant for this world, are you?"
-----
I've got the 'cassette digitisation' machine set up again. Currently transferring Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds and the BBC radio production of The Hobbit to mp3.
There's Lord of the Rings, Hitch-Hiker (first two seasons) and Lost in Space lying around on cassettes we no longer have the facilities to play. Plus about 100 Open University course casssttes and 200 music cassettes.
We've rediscovered the piano teaching course called 'Play it Today' - consisting on about 30 cassettes and booklets. It's been sitting in a quiet corner for about 15 years since Mother and I tried to learn. I don't think I got past lesson 1. I'll copy it to mp3 and see whether I can learn some basic keyboard technique at some point.
Food Glorious Food
I'm Hungry! Three cups of tea and two apples haven't helped, and there's a bar of chocolate sitting on the bed just beckoning to be devoured. Oh there's no actual empty stomach feeling - just a craving to stuff something edible (and preferably sweet) into my mouth.
Anyway, the upshot is that twelve hours into my invigorating healthy lifestyle, I'm distracted, bored, somewhat ratty and constantly thinking about the one thing I can't have.
It's a bit like being in love with someone who's 100 miles away, in that respect.
Lee S and Simon M have given up smoking, Christina C and her man John have stopped eating meat, John M has forsworn sugar, and my brother and his girlfriend have shed stone simply by having small portions of everything.
I'm off to have some more tea. And no chocolate. Mmmm...chocolate.
-----
EDIT: Alright, alright. I ate it.
Anyway, the upshot is that twelve hours into my invigorating healthy lifestyle, I'm distracted, bored, somewhat ratty and constantly thinking about the one thing I can't have.
It's a bit like being in love with someone who's 100 miles away, in that respect.
Lee S and Simon M have given up smoking, Christina C and her man John have stopped eating meat, John M has forsworn sugar, and my brother and his girlfriend have shed stone simply by having small portions of everything.
I'm off to have some more tea. And no chocolate. Mmmm...chocolate.
-----
EDIT: Alright, alright. I ate it.
Gotta Go Home
I spent most of Saturday in places I didn't want to be, feeling slightly ill. The kitchen, far too early in the morning, bolting down an extremely ill-advised fried breakfast. The coach up to London for two hours, stuffy and humid, feeling a fried egg slop around in my stomach. The streets of central London, walking amid hundreds of banners, absorbing the cold and the smog. Hyde Park with sore feet. Ending with another two hours on the coach, dehydrated and aching.
I hate travelling. I especially hate travelling on coaches. In this case, with a lot of young socialists slowly getting over hangovers.
-----
The demo itself was orderly and uneventful. We estimated 50 to 60 thousand people there, which is respectable. Actually it's a bloody big turnout, but we've all got spoiled by enormous demos in recent years.
The police estimate was 10,000 - which shows they're sticking to their line of dividing their real estimate by five for public consumption.
Odd that the media image of 'ten thousand hardened and irrational fanatics' should sound comforting to Mail readers. Half that number of genuinely hardnosed and dedicated fanatics could storm parliament in a few hours. If they all happened to be in central London at the same time...
Actually there was a group of 10-20, walking along with us and handing out leaflets. Chanting "Nine-eleven! inside job!" - their leaflets 'prove' (i.e suggest) that the CIA hijacked the planes on 911 and MI5 blew up the london tubetrains a few months ago.
Mad conspiracy theorists aren't unknown, but a well organised group of them, enthusiastic and demo-savvy, appearing out of nowhere. That's distinctly odd.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/archives/london/index.htm
-----
Mother and I have the same health problems. Being overweight, frequent tierdness, and joint pains, especially in the legs. So either we're both diabetic (which is possible - there's family history), or we're both just desperately unhealthy.
We've decided the join the rest of the progressive world in vegitarianism and Only Eating Proper Food. OEPF means nothing in the 'convenience' (aka 'microwave') range, and nothing whose sole selling point is it's cheapness or being 'low fat' (aka 'high sugar').
She can take Dino for long brisk walks, and I can climb lots of imaginary stairs. But the emphasis at the moment is on Not Eating Junk Anymore, and Only Eating Proper Food.
-----
Tonight was spent once again plonked down in front of Christia C's ancient computer, and in the company of her ever expanding circle of eccentric family and friends.
120MB RAM, 8GB HDD, c200MHz. Windows 2000 crashes, so I installed Windows 98 (twice). Now it doesn't crash - nor does it recognise the modem. It's second hand, more than a decade old, and in an area subject to random power cuts. And she can't afford a new one.
Why is it I only get to see my friends when attempting repairs on unrepairably old and battered computers? It's like I only get to see the outside world reflected in someone else's blue screen of death.
Anyway. For some reason, four hours of work culminating in failure is more tiring than four hours work ending in success. So, I sleep, probably to dream of placards printed with Windows error messages.
I hate travelling. I especially hate travelling on coaches. In this case, with a lot of young socialists slowly getting over hangovers.
-----
The demo itself was orderly and uneventful. We estimated 50 to 60 thousand people there, which is respectable. Actually it's a bloody big turnout, but we've all got spoiled by enormous demos in recent years.
The police estimate was 10,000 - which shows they're sticking to their line of dividing their real estimate by five for public consumption.
Odd that the media image of 'ten thousand hardened and irrational fanatics' should sound comforting to Mail readers. Half that number of genuinely hardnosed and dedicated fanatics could storm parliament in a few hours. If they all happened to be in central London at the same time...
Actually there was a group of 10-20, walking along with us and handing out leaflets. Chanting "Nine-eleven! inside job!" - their leaflets 'prove' (i.e suggest) that the CIA hijacked the planes on 911 and MI5 blew up the london tubetrains a few months ago.
Mad conspiracy theorists aren't unknown, but a well organised group of them, enthusiastic and demo-savvy, appearing out of nowhere. That's distinctly odd.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/archives/london/index.htm
-----
Mother and I have the same health problems. Being overweight, frequent tierdness, and joint pains, especially in the legs. So either we're both diabetic (which is possible - there's family history), or we're both just desperately unhealthy.
We've decided the join the rest of the progressive world in vegitarianism and Only Eating Proper Food. OEPF means nothing in the 'convenience' (aka 'microwave') range, and nothing whose sole selling point is it's cheapness or being 'low fat' (aka 'high sugar').
She can take Dino for long brisk walks, and I can climb lots of imaginary stairs. But the emphasis at the moment is on Not Eating Junk Anymore, and Only Eating Proper Food.
-----
Tonight was spent once again plonked down in front of Christia C's ancient computer, and in the company of her ever expanding circle of eccentric family and friends.
120MB RAM, 8GB HDD, c200MHz. Windows 2000 crashes, so I installed Windows 98 (twice). Now it doesn't crash - nor does it recognise the modem. It's second hand, more than a decade old, and in an area subject to random power cuts. And she can't afford a new one.
Why is it I only get to see my friends when attempting repairs on unrepairably old and battered computers? It's like I only get to see the outside world reflected in someone else's blue screen of death.
Anyway. For some reason, four hours of work culminating in failure is more tiring than four hours work ending in success. So, I sleep, probably to dream of placards printed with Windows error messages.
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