Memory upgrade

Five and a half years ago, I wrote about purchasing a mobile computer; I'm surprised that it's so long ago (in computer terms). Since I started working at home, I've been using this computer as opposed to the mobile that I have from work, as mine has a bigger screen. I keep the other mobile ready in case I have problems; at one stage I used to keep one computer connected to work and use the other for Teams conversations.

I've noticed in the past few days that it's becoming more and more difficult to work with my home computer: it's slow in switching from one program to another. I use Remote Desktop Manager and Teams and Whatsapp and Chrome ... and there isn't enough memory for all of them. So Windows swaps out memory to disk, and it transpires that the disk is considered slow (at least, when compared to SSD). So these memory swaps make the computer seem even slower.

I got fed up with this. The original configuration had 6 GB memory installed - I went to my local computer hardware man and asked him to enlarge the memory as much as possible. The computer has 4 GB on board and another slot in which the extra 2 GB was installed, so the maximum that he could add was 2 GB (replacing the 2 GB memory chip with a 4 GB chip). So now the computer has 8 GB.

And it flies! Today was a real pleasure working with the computer. It seems that I was using the maximum possible, and a small increase in memory size brought a huge improvement in performance. A worthwhile enhancement. 

8 GB memory! I remember enlarging the memory of my first clone computer from 512 KB to 640 KB and feeling pleased. According to my calculations, 8 GB is more than 16,000 times larger that the memory in that first computer. 

Joan Didion, RIP

A formal obituary can be found here.

I first became aware of Joan Didion in the mid-70s: she was another author who appeared in Tom Wolfe's "New Journalism" anthology. I'm not sure that the word "enjoyed" can be applied to her chapter in the book about San Francisco in early 1967, but I found it very enlightening in historical terms, having been slightly too young to have read about that period when it occurred in real time.

Shortly after, I found her collection of articles, "Slouching towards Jerusalem": this definitely was enlightening. Of all the articles, the most interesting was "On keeping a notebook", written in 1966 but referring to events that happened a few years earlier. This was a most personal article and at the time this was exactly the sort of material that I was looking for. 

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year-old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford and their echoes sing “How High the Moon” on the car radio. (You see I still have the scenes, but I no longer perceive myself among those present, no longer could even improvise the dialogue.) The other one, a twenty-three-year-old, bothers me more. She was always a good deal of trouble, and I suspect she will reappear when I least want to see her, skirts too long, shy to the point of aggravation, always the injured party, full of recriminations and little hurts and stories I do not want to hear again, at once saddening me and angering me with her vulnerability and ignorance, an apparition all the more insistent for being so long banished.

Whilst I did not sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice at the age of seventeen, I can very much appreciate the sentiment, especially about the twenty-three-year-old me. Whilst I never kept a notebook or a journal, I used to be a copious letter writer. Unfortunately, what I remember as hundreds of letters that I wrote before about 1985 are lost; sometime in the mid-80s, I started writing letters via a computer and so I have copies of all those letters. Then I moved on to blogging, which in many ways is simply the modern variant of a journal, except that here, blogs have a start, a middle and an end. They are not random jottings but are about something.

In the early 80s, I bought a copy of her latest book (as it was then), "The white album". This collection piqued my interest less: there was a chapter about Jim Morrison and the Doors and there was another chapter containing some information about amitryptiline, but otherwise I was left untouched. I bought a copy of one of her novels (I think this was "River Run") in the second-hand bookshop in Rehovot that I used to frequent, but I found this opaque.

Still, I found Joan to be a very intriguing person. I never had a clear mental picture of what she looked like so here is one from 1972.

Joan Didion in Vogue in 1972. Photograph: Henry Clarke/Condé Nast/Shutterstock

 

Janis Ian

When I emigrated, one of our group had the LP "Between the lines" by Janis Ian. In those days I was quite the magpie regarding music (as if I'm not, now) and so I taped the record. Over the years I came to love most of the songs on the album, and some time in the 1990s I bought the cd.

"At seventeen" was a very good song then, and even now, I greatly appreciate its lyrics. Janis writes in her autobiography: I was alone in the apartment, absentmindedly playing a little samba part on the guitar while I read an article about debutantes. The woman who’d written it was talking about her coming-out party, how excited she’d been before it, how flat she’d felt in the aftermath. The opening line was “I learned the truth at eighteen.” Interesting line, I thought. Might be a song in there somewhere. I hunted around for a melody to go with my samba lick, and tried the line. Nope, it didn’t scan. I needed another syllable. I learned the truth at seventeen, I sang to myself.... I stared at the paper. How could I write about high school girls, or prom night and homecoming queens? I hadn’t had any of those experiences. I thought about that for a while. There were plenty of other school things I had experienced. I knew what it was like to never be asked out on a date. I knew the sinking feeling when everyone else in class came in to find a valentine on their desk, and yours was empty. And I sure as heck knew what it was to feel clumsy and ugly. I could write this song, I was sure of it.

But to be honest, I love the opening two songs (including "At seventeen") and I love the last two songs, especially the closing song ("Lover's lullaby") but not so much the songs inbetween. The music theorist inside of me has to point out that the first two verses of "Lover's lullaby" are in 4/4 time but the rest is in 3/4.

At some stage I had on cassette a few more songs ("Jesse", "Stars") along with another album that included "Hopper painting" (that's the only name that I remember; maybe I only had this one song). Scouring YouTube didn't bring up many other songs, if at all. About a month ago, I went on a Janis Ian kick and discovered most, if not all, of her discography; certainly all of the pre-1990 records. I listened to most but didn't connect with them, especially her first albums (with her breakthrough hit, "Society's child").

On the other hand, a record that might be called "Janis Ian II" captured me: this is the album that contained the aforementioned "Hopper painting", as well as several more songs that seemed extremely familiar. I find now that I am preferring this record to "Between the lines", although of course there has to be one song that I don't particularly like ("Hotels and one night stands"). Janis herself doesn't care for this album, writing It was painful, hearing songs that had seemed vibrant when I’d demo’d them reduced to flat, uninteresting recordings. Joe [the producer] was from Los Angeles, and my album ended up reflecting the current L.A. sound, over-smooth and dulled around the edges. I hated it. When I heard the mastered record Janis Ian II, I wanted to throw it out and start over again.

I beg to disagree. I very much like the piano based songs.

Below appears Janis as she looks today (or, at least recently).

Further thoughts on running Excel from a background thread

As I'm on a thinking roll this morning, I thought that I would document some thoughts that I have about code that I wrote just under a month ago that runs Excel in a background thread. Specifically, I want to address the problem of passing two discrete ranges to Excel, where each range has to have a different format (for example, E:F should be integers and G:H should be floats). At the moment I can pass E:F,G:H (i.e. two ranges) but they will both receive the same format.

It seems that what is needed is to pass a stringlist, where the first string would be something like E:F,i and the second would be G:H,f. In other words, each string would be composed of two parts separated by a comma: first a range then a character indicating what the format should be (i=integer, f=float, of course).

That's a good idea.

A fruitful day, part three: continuing work on PrioXRef

I devoted about an hour and a half in the evening working on my Priority Cross-referencer and syntax checker. The details can be found on the other blog so I'm not going to write about them here. I just wanted to say that these hours were a bonus on top of what had turned out to be a very successful and fruitful day.

There are innumerous blues songs that start off with the words "I woke up this morning"; a quick search revealed "I woke up this morning/The blues all around my bed" (link); "I woke up this morning, feeling round for my shoes" (link); and "I woke up this morning with a awful aching head" (link). On the other hand, there's the perky song "You were on my mind" that also starts with "Well I woke up this morning and you were on my mind".

If I were writing such a song, it would start "I woke up this morning with ideas in my head"; it seems that the intellectual aspects of yesterday had passed from my left brain to the right, that started  ruminating on them, a process that lasted all night. As a result, my walk with the dog (and prior to that) had me thinking of

• A replacement line for the new song "Building the life"
• What to write in the latest draft thesis version
• That I hadn't considered all the possible cases of 'LOOP' appearing in a Priority procedure. 

And now that I write that line about LOOP, I realise that there is also a case where RETVAL can occur outside of a cursor (after a 'select ... into' statement). Oops.

A fruitful day, part two: A conversation with my doctoral supervisor

As I noted about a week ago, my DBA supervisor had been ill with Covid-19 and then an ear infection took advantage of his weakened immune system, so it was a few weeks before we could talk about my last draft thesis version. He sent me some comments about a week ago that were easy to incorporate and  suggested that we talk on Friday about the problems that I saw with analysing the data from the pilot study.

As I told him, these conversations are always very valuable as they include a certain amount of brain-storming as well as giving me a push to continue work on this seemingly never-ending work (at this point I should state that I have exactly one more year to go - if I don't finish by December 2022 then that's that. I also paid tuition for this final year, a process that I don't want to go through again). The conversation brought up two new topics to be looked at - more material for the literature review - but more importantly shone a light on the direction of the research. It is so easy to concentrate on discovering whether and why the enhancements being studied succeeded, but that's not the real question, which is ...

How does the process of developing the enhancement affect the degree of success? Or in other words, would a failed enhancement have succeeded had the process been different/better? What could be done to improve the process in order to improve the probability of creating a successful enhancement?

The above three questions are really one; they're just phrased differently. And anyway, I'll have to translate them into Hebrew before asking them, so the subtleties may get lost (the subjunctive mood barely exists in Hebrew).

This morning, whilst walking the dog, I considered yesterday's conversation. At one stage I was tempted to run another pilot study that would include the above questions, but by our walk's end, I realised that the pilot did what it was supposed to do: check the methodology and suggest questions that weren't asked. The new questions can be asked in the 'real' research.

I'll probably work a few hours today and in the following days incorporating this new material and direction into the thesis. There will also be the new topics to research and possibly write about.

A fruitful day, part one: "Building the life" (new song)

Yesterday (Friday) didn't start off very promising - there was a light drizzle that doesn't help the plants but gets me wet. Weather like this always semi-paralyses me: I had to make a conscious effort to do things and not sit back and wallow in the dismal scene. I can see that this is going to be a very long blog so I'm going to split it into three, so readers that are interested in one topic don't have to read about something completely different.

Friday mornings generally start with a conversation with the Occupational Psychologist; following our hour-long conversation I generally spend two or three hours working on our programs - either a new module has to be added to the management program or there is a bug to be fixed. Yesterday our conversation was short and the programming was even shorter: there were a few bugs in a routine that I wrote several years ago. The bugs were easy to fix, which makes me wonder how many other land-mines are waiting to be triggered. Obviously I don't aim to write code with bugs and I do test my code, but it happens that I don't test sufficiently. Anyway, by 9 am I had finished with the OP (as opposed to 12 am or later on most Fridays).

What to do next? I have been working on a song for the past few weeks; like most (if not all) new songs, I think that this one is good. Over the weeks I've been adding little bits and pieces; on Thursday I added a bridge section - until then there had only been three verses. Unfortunately the bridge didn't connect well to the instrumental part that came after and I experimented with several chords until I found something that worked ... except that this required that the instrumental be lowered by a tone. Not a problem. The instrumental itself causes a very subtle modulation at its end, going up by a semitone - so now the final verse was a semitone lower than the first verse. Yesterday I dropped the entire song by two semitones as the tune (deliberately simple after the spider-like melodies that I've been writing lately) was pitched too high. As a result, I'm not really sure what chords are being played towards the end, making it difficult should I need to add anything. But no: as far as I'm concerned, the music is finished.

On the other hand, there were no words, as usual. I had a few blithe phrases that would fit the opening lines but I had no idea what the song was to be about, and without knowing, I couldn't write anything. I should note here that a few weeks ago I read the autobiography of Janis Ian and felt encouraged/challenged to improve the level of my lyrics, so knowing what the song was to be about was important. Another book which I have just finished reading (for the second time) is 'What Alice forgot' by Liane Moriarty (I wrote about this here). I realised that I could write lyrics about the problems that Alice and Nick (her estranged husband) face; the following paragraph was the catalyst.

“I’d be at work, where people respected my opinions,” said Nick. “And then I’d come home and it was like I was the village idiot. I’d pack the dishwasher the wrong way. I’d pick the wrong clothes for the children. I stopped offering to help. It wasn’t worth the criticism.”

I know how he feels, although I'm not as bad as he is in the house (after all, I'm the cook). As I had the time yesterday, I started work on writing the lyrics to a song that is now called 'Building the life'. Once I had them complete, I tried singing them (this is where lowering the key of the song came in), and a few phrases were changed. There was still one line that I wasn't completely comfortable with: it didn't express the exact sentiment that I wanted, but whilst walking the dog this morning, the perfect line entered my head.

At work he's considered a star in the making
His word always carries weight
He's thought as an asset, delivering value
Embodying good as a trait
He understands
He recommends
His opinion is highly treasured by all

At 8 in the evening, he closes his laptop
And heads out into the night
His wife is not happy: he’s missed their son’s party
There’s nothing he can do right
He’s lost in thought
She’s practical
She is getting impatient with his failings

When she is down, he is up
When she is up, he is down
When she is happy, he cries
When she is smiling, he frowns

Where is the balance between these two people?
What compromise can be made?
They both acknowledge their failures as partners
But can their marriage be saved?
He contributes
She must accept
They together can build the life that they want

I can't stress enough that these lyrics are imagined! They are not about my wife and I even though the couplet "He’s lost in thought/She’s practical" is more about us than they are about Alice and Nick (so is the first verse).

On the technical side, I note once more how easy it can be to write lyrics once I know what I'm writing about; for example, the bridge section ('when she is down ...') came to me when I was on my way to my daughter's flat, not while I was sitting down and physically writing the words. In other words, once I'm in 'writing mode', the words can come quickly.

Darwin and Covid-19

I thought that I had written that so far no one has made the connection between Darwin's survival of the fittest and the various Covid variants: surely each variant that 'catches fire' (the latest being omicron) should proliferate more than other variants - that's why it's the current variant to cause everyone worry. Presumably I had this insight after reading 'The planet of viruses' but I can't see that I wrote it there. Now I remember that I wrote it in a message to my doctoral supervisor after he told me that he had suffered from Covid.

Today I read the following: The mechanism was laid out by Charles Darwin more than 150 years ago: evolution through natural selection. If a person is infected with Covid but mounts a weak immune response, the infection can persist for months. In that time, antibodies neutralise some of the virus, but not the versions they bind to less well. These surviving viruses proliferate, mutate and undergo further selection – potentially leading to variants that evade immune defences. [source] 

One study showed that a particular sample of coronavirus [was traced] to a 36-year-old woman who was not receiving effective antiviral therapy. Tests revealed that she had harboured the Covid virus for 216 days, in which time it accumulated 32 mutations, making it similar to the vaccine-evading Beta variant.

The article goes on to consider that the variants are being established in people with weakened immune systems, such as those undergoing treatment for cancer or for HIV.

Mike Nesmith, RIP

It's early 1967 and the 10 year old me is watching 'The Monkees' TV show and listening to their first record (along with a Jewish 10 year old girl who lived vaguely near me). Whilst I appreciated Micky Dolenz's singing voice (that's him in the background of the photo, 'playing' drums), I didn't like his on-screen persona; the Monkee I most identified with is Mike Nesmith: guitarist (note the electric 12 string guitar!), singer and songwriter. He is the third Monkee to die (yesterday?), leaving Dolenz as the sole survivor.

I find it intriguing now to note what were the qualities that attracted me: the musical parts (Nesmith was a 'real' musician) but also the somewhat shy and introspective character that he played. I remember very much liking the song "Papa Gene's blues" that got played a few times in the series and was on their debut record - this was a song that Nesmith wrote.

Of course, writing about The Monkees requires that one describe how the group was put together, what the goals of the producers were, how they were considered to be manufactured and how the group members expressed their dissatisfaction with all this, but I'm not going to go into this.

Several years ago, I looked for the Monkees' songs; there are a few on the first album  (especially "Take a giant step") that I think are very good and stand up well today, but for me, the most interesting song was written by Nesmith, entitled "You just may be the one": the rhythm of the opening verse lines is not exactly the simple fare for which the group are supposedly known. A tape of the recording sessions can be heard here: this is a fascinating audio documented about how the song was recorded and produced (by Nesmith). This version shows that the time signature of the song is 4/4; the opening lines are placed at odd places over the instrumental rhythm.

I listened somewhat to Nesmith's post-Monkees music but this was in a style that did not appeal to me. An obituary can be found here.

The week of the virus

Last week started off with me reading a book called 'A planet of viruses' by Carl Zimmer. The version that I have was published in 2011, probably making it the first edition; I understand that there is now a third edition of the book. It's a good book in that it explains very well what a virus is and gives examples of several types of virus (because the book was published ten years ago, Coronavirus is mentioned briefly at the end in connection with SARS). But I found that it didn't go far enough in explaining things and found myself somewhat dissatisfied by the end. There also seems to be some confusion (maybe on my part) whether 'ten million viruses' means ten million separate virus entities (like ten million people) or ten million types of virus. There is a huge difference between the two. I imagine that the third edition is probably much better.

After completing that, I received a message from my DBA mentor, that he had been ill with Covid-19, "flat on his back for ten days" ... despite having been vaccinated twice.

As I noted in my previous blog entry, 'my body is like a barometer', I noticed that it was getting painful to swallow on Wednesday. By the evening, I was feeling much worse which is when I realised that I had been the recipient of a visit from my good friend the rhinovirus. I have just completed three days of feeling about 50% competent: either my throat aches or my nose drips (fortunately, not the two at the same time). I'm glad that this happened over the weekend as it didn't affect my professional life very much (I took Thursday off for personal reasons not connected with my health, but in retrospect, I'm pleased that I did). 

The worst part of this viral visit was at night: over the past few months I've been getting up about three or four times a night due to the diuretic effect of one of my medications, but the last few nights have seen me getting up six or seven times a night; this may be due to the increased amount of tea that I've been drinking, even though I try not to drink after about 6:30 pm. To add to my problems, last night I also had a mild nosebleed from my right nostril. This wouldn't be considered a problem, but having a nosebleed whilst wearing a CPAP mask is problematic. 

I've just looked at the CPAP data for the past few days (the last day with data is currently Friday); to my surprise, there were no apnea for the past three days, and the amount of deep sleep has been encouraging. The usage time is getting longer - Friday night had just over 10 hours - but as I always note, this isn't sleep time but rather the amount of time that the machine is working. On the other hand, my blood pressure has gone up.

Thursday morning was the date of my long awaited appointment with the new female sleep doctor. It turned out that the doctor was male, and that he is a 'lung doctor', not a sleep doctor. He was more interested in the pleural effusions that I had in late May/early June than anything to do with my sleep. Apart from a referral for a new chest x-ray that I was supposed to have done several months ago, and a partial referral to the sleep clinic in Hadassa hospital, the only thing that I learned from this appointment was not to place any value in the 'deep sleep' data provided by the CPAP machine. On the other hand, the apnea data is very good.

Following the doctor's observation about the deep sleep, I decided not to bother with headphones and binaural beats one evening. Funnily enough, after a few minutes of lying in bed, I began to feel 'lonely': I missed the noise! So I put the headphones back on and they do seem to help.

My body is like a barometer

I've discovered that I don't need a barometer or weather forecasts: my body tells me when it's hot or cold. The past few days have been very hot in Israel and as a result, my normally dry skin has become even dryer, making it very itchy. I checked the outside temperature, and our combined barometer/thermometer showed a maximum of 32.5°C; this explained why my legs were so itchy. I tried as much as possible not to scratch, but it's hard not to give in to temptation. I attempted to soothe/hydrate the skin on my legs with a variety of creams that were only partially successful.

Fortunately I was saved from the constant scratching by a change in the weather. Some time during the night I became aware that it was slightly painful for me to swallow, a condition that has yet to be alleviated by constant cups of tea. The reason for the pain is that it started raining just after 7 am (my half hour walk with the dog had me home at 6 am) and has been raining on and off since then.

I of course prefer neither hot nor cold weather, so that my body doesn't react.