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May 2003 - archive ********** Saturday 31 May
The matter of the swordfish behaviour is now sorted thanks to Britannica:
The swordfish, an elongated, scaleless fish, has a tall dorsal fin, and a long sword, used in slashing at prey fishes, extends from its snout. The sword is flat, rather than rounded as in marlins and other spear-nosed fishes, and has thus given rise to the name broadbill.
Very hot sun. Hacking away at ivy on the wall..
I was putting a new PP3 battery in my guitar tuner and I suddenly had a vivid flashback to times at school inserting a PP3 into my first ever transistor radio. It was a 6 transistor pocket radio made by Panasonic - one of the first pocket size on the market I should think. It was given to me on my school holidays in Hong Kong by an affluent Chinese friend of my parents. It became one of my most valued companions. On the beach at Bournemouth I would use it to pick up the pirate radio ships Radio Caroline and Radio London. Under the sheets at night I'd be listening to the swirling reception from Radio Luxembourg or a far off test match.
The thing is those particular batteries with their little circular connectors are still as popular today - quite a technical acheivement after 30 years. The batteries I was putting in the tuner were also made by Panasonic. It wasn't entirely dissimilar to this one
When I was returning to the UK I bought a few Chinese PP3s with me. I think they went under the brand name "3 bombs" or something equally uncool. Anyway these things were great - they lasted far longer than Evereadys (the only battery available at the time) and I even had a little device that used to be able to put a bit of charge into them. I was so delighted that I wrote to the Chinese Government congratulating them on the batteries and lamenting the fact that I could not get them in the UK. Perhaps I was hoping that Chairman Mao would send me over a crateful as a reward for my endorsement. I can picture it now.
The secretary brings him my letter on an ornate plate. Chairman Mao reads it and his face lights up. "Wonderful" he exclaims, " a twelve year old English schoolboy has written to us in praising our "3 Bombs" brand of battery and advising us that there is a huge potential market for them in the UK. Instruct the workers to start shipping at once. I may make that boy a Hero of our Great nation...."
Friday 30 May
Hot sun. In the evening Sam, my sister visits from Norfolk. The vital question about whether swordfish impale their prey never really does get answered satisfactorily though Jeeves helpfully provides stories of people stabbing other people with swordfish. A swordfish's "sword" is known as its bill.
Somwhere there's an excellent cartoon that I've seen of two swordfish having a duel. Contextless it drifts in my memory as a vision. Maybe Disney had something to do with it.
Thursday 29 May
Tonight's Horizon featured the first worthwhile overview of the SARS story that I've seen. It carried the whiff of one of those apocalyptic stories by Wyndham or Ballard accompanied by suitably dramatic music and viruses rendered even more baleful by a practised special effects team. It seems that we can breathe a sigh of relief that the WHO guidelines worked well enough to stop the thing in its tracks. Uncertainty still remains about how big a threat will exist from it in the future.
Wednesday 28 May
If all the good people were clever
And all clever people were good,
The world would be nicer than ever
We thought that it possibly could.But somehow, 'tis seldom or never
The two hit it off as they should;
The good are so harsh to the clever,
The clever so rude to the good!
-- Elizabeth WordsworthA couple of lines from this little ditty sprang to mind after I was asked to co-moderate a new conference on CIX called "game of life" and Google turned up this page of miscellaneous quotations. Another that rang rather too many bells with me at the moment was
Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!
--Lewis CarrollTuesday 27 May
A new look to the page.....
Last week Gnutty displayed the full range of his acrobatic talents before saving time by by biting a hole in the bottom of the steel mesh container.
And I wrestled an oil filter...and survived. After twelve years of managing to have nothing to do with laying on my back in road underneath a car it appears that I'm on the road to engagement with grease, rust and engine dirt again The car engine is now cleanly lubricated. 'Nuff said really.
Sunday 25 May
OK - I've shifted March and April to the archives and this should be a meaner, leaner faster loading page as a result.
There are a lot of ideas turning over each other in my head at the moment. It's difficult to disentangle them from each other. Some thoughts are too vague to turn into words or ideas. They just lay there like whales on a beach flapping their tails occasionally. Do you mind if I mix my metaphors? Tough. Deal with it!
There's a constant difficulty in coming to terms with the underwhelming response to the music I've made which represents to me the heart and soul of what I can contribute to the world. Words are slippery but music is solid. There again perhaps my tastes are too abberrant to happily mesh with the current musical memes. I dunno. I can listen to an eclectic mix of world music, classical, jazz, rock, etc and find something to like in 95% of what I've selected. But only a few percent make that final jump to ineffability. And one thing that really doesn't impact on the equation at all are production values. But there is a way in which music can perhaps strike directly to the heart of what is going on that no other art form can. Being Beethoven would help of course and the mention of his name brings me up short with the unimaginable hurdles that he had to overcome to even hear his own music.
La de dah.
Today I have finally managed to divert myself from physical endeavours by conveniently neglecting to buy an oil filter. It doesn't seem worth changing the oil without changing the filter does it? No, I thought so.
Saturday 24 May
I'm going through the novelty of constructing this blog on a different computer every day. It's hell getting all their settings matched up you know. But a combination of a stubborn network virus and unco-operative software that makes this page look even more dire than it already is forces the issue. Anyway it symbolizes the actual situation here. Everything's hanging loose but hanging together, priorities are fluid...
In this sort of situation Beefheart is essential
Trust Us The path is the mask of love a way a way
The flow is the task above today there is no other way (repeat)
You gotta trust us when you need a friend
To find us you gotta look within
You gotta trust us (repeat) before you turn to dust (repeat)
You gotta see before you see you gotta be before be(we love you)
You gotta touch without take
You gotta hear without fear
You gotta feel to reveal
You gotta touch without take
Such is is and uh ain't is ain't (repeat)We're for you love you with you love you just a few We love you we tell you true we love you
The path is youth let the dying die
The path is life yeah; let the lying lie
Let the dying die let the lying lie
(trust trust trust)Transcribed by John Ellis, typed by cbm ...except of course possibly for the thing about "youth" but I'll go with the theory that he's talking about the inner child.
Feel free to commentFriday 23 May 2003
Today I did something I've never done before. I fitted a proper telephone extension at work. Admittedly it's not in the same league as climbing Everest or winning the lottery but nevertheless it does constitute a slice of experience which can be filed under "done that". I could even wear a T shirt celebrating the fact.
Is it the start of Big Brother which prompts my descent into mindless drivel? Watch the text messages fly by on E4 into the early hours and give up on all hope for the human race.
I'm going to change things round on this page soon, honest.
This thing about Google hiving off blogsearches into a separate compartment is bound to generate cyber-reams of comment. It's probably the logical thing to do but I think it'll impact on the serendipitous nature of discovery via Google. I would imagine that a large proportion of people rarely access the other tabs.
Thursday 22 May
I feel as if I'm running to catch up with myself lately. There is not enough time for anything to be done before two new tasks are generated. Having broken equipment from PCs to garden strimmers doesn't help. Actually the duff PC is now working having responded postively to the fourth PSU that I tried. Even now I've left the floppy drive disconnected because I fear it may be a PSU killer. Dramatic stuff n'est-ce pas?
There was a second blast from the past yesterday when I met Jimmy, a rap musician who used to rehearse at the Mayville about ten years ago whilst we were both in the somewhat undignified position of shopping in the Mall. We both got off on yatting about all the talented musicians who used to come to sessions in the basement and their various fates.
Wednesday 21 May
It is becoming a bit of a cliché that seminal influences on people in the artistic, musical, or philosophical sphere tend to arise during the formative years of adolescence and the early twenties. The ideas (or whatever) are formed and then become worked out and progressed as a kind of backdrop to the rest of life. For myself that backdrop has been largely aligned with the notions of counter culture that were around in the late sixties and the music that energised it.
So it's ultra cool that someone I spent a lot of time with around 30 years ago and haven't seen since has just emailed me. All praise to the Great Google which makes such things possible!
Tuesday 20 May
At last I have managed get working network connections between my computers and the internet. Disabling the XP firewall was the final step that let the network.....work.
Feel free to comment
Monday 19 MayToday I have been mostly trying to install programs on this computer. The internal DVD reader doesn't read some of my CD ROMs and this has led to several awkward holdups. Eventually I've succeeded in getting Hotmetal Pro 4 installed from a magazine cover disc so I will now have some practice on another HTML editor. Meanwhile ye olde Windows 98 machine has given up the ghost for the moment due to a creaky Power supply. So I guess I got this new machine just in time - an impulse buy that has come good for a change.
After such lengthy absences from my blog it would be nice if I had some new or profound insight to bring to the eyes of an astonished world. No such luck. Life has become a practical exercise in pitting myself against unco-operative wood and metal, keeping the garden from concealing itself in its own luxuriant growth and thinking about TCP/IP with a regard to my network layout (ie learning how it works from scratch). The PC is faster with its extra RAM but still subjectively seems slower to open applications and Windows than my old 333MHz computer.
So there hasn't been much time for metaphysics though I did buy a copy of Henry Miller's "Tropic of Capricorn" in a charity shop. Does that count?
Pat and I spent the weekend in Norfolk being looked after by Ben the dog and Cookie the cat.
Monday 12 May
The past week has been one long round of fiddling with computers. Doncha just luv'em? Getting networking working between my Win 98 computers and the new XP one has been.....let us just say largely unsuccessful.
However I have been learning a lot about the subject in an uncomfortably accelerated manner - this will be even more necessary when my router arrives......shortly.
More successful was the fitting of a 32MB Savage 4 videocard which I picked up cheaply on CIX some time ago. This has improved the speed of the XP machine which still runs like an arthritic dog. It appears that 128MB really is the minimum spec for XP. Should I be impressed? It is definitely disappointing to see that the performance doesn't come anywhere near my old PII with 96MB ram. Anyway I've bitten the bullet and ordered 512MB of DDR RAM from Crucial to give it a helping hand. Crucial must have the best website in the world for getting accurate information about memory requirements.
And for now I'll leave the fine details of my computing experiences to a thread in the discussion forum lest this blog turn too geeky. But I'll just mention that various complications mean that I will have to put this web page on a floppy disk (remember them?) and transfer it to the other machine in good old sneakernet fashion.Tuesday 6 May
Whilst my PC is up and running I could post here to say that since lunchtime yesterday I have had a few problems in getting the hardware, the software and the network all working coherently towards the same ends.
The machine died......probably PSU I thought and found an old 200W box with the bits and pieces. Got sidetracked for an hour imagining that the switch had died, trying to find a replacement. Then the PSU would boot the machine....as long as I left one of the hard drives disconnected. It wasn't a critical hard drive - just an extended partition 8GB so it has been put to one side.
OK up comes the Windows 98 splash screen, up comes the network login box...Whoops! Windows promptly falls over again.
Unplug the network cables...up comes Windows again and everything looks OK. After a while I discover that I can plug in the cable modem and get broadband again. Heaven! I run a virus check on the C:\ drive. I dowload and install the latest versions of Ad Aware and Zone Alarm. Ad Aware finds 250 iffy files which are bunged into quarantine. Uh huh.
I discover that if I boot the machine with the cable modem connected then the activity light goes mad and the mouse doesn't initialise properly, in effect giving me a frozen computer. I begin to suspect the record companies.(New York Times - needs registration)Friday 2 May
Personally I'm glad that SARS is being kept at bay for the moment. My chest is weak and I think I have some form of Bronchitis. It may be unrealistic to suppose that SARS can be confined to China or South East Asia in the long term. The hope must be that China can wipe it out through quarantine measures. If it cannot then a gradual spread to most countries seems inevitable. Even controlling traffic through the airlines has not been perfect. What then of people leaving China illegally overland or by sea? There must be hundreds doing this every month who hope never to be seen by the authorities let alone being examined for illness.
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