Daniel Kahneman, RIP

The Israeli psychologist who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2002 has died, aged 90. His most recent book was "Thinking, fast and slow"; I suspect that I never finished reading this book, not that it's not interesting, but because it's a long and concentrated read. 

 

Ironically, today I read the following (from "Originals" by Adam Grant, chapter 8)

Imagine that you’re an executive at a car manufacturer, and due to economic challenges, you need to close three plants and lay off six thousand employees. You can choose between two different plans: Plan A will save one of the three plants and two thousand jobs. Plan B has a one-third chance of saving all three plants and all six thousand jobs, but a two-thirds chance of saving no plants and no jobs. 

 

Most people prefer Plan A. In the original study, 80 percent chose to play it safe rather than take a chance. But suppose we gave you a different set of options: Plan A will lose two of the three plants and four thousand jobs. Plan B has a two-thirds chance of losing all three plants and all six thousand jobs, but a one-third chance of losing no plants and no jobs. 

 

Logically, these are the same options as the first set of choices. But psychologically, they don’t feel the same. In the latter option, 82 percent of people prefer Plan B. Their preferences reverse. 

 

In the first case, the options are framed as gains. We prefer Plan A because we tend to be risk averse in the domain of benefits. When we have a certain gain, we like to hold on to it and protect it. We play it safe to guarantee saving two thousand jobs instead of taking a risk that might leave us saving no jobs. After all, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. 

 

But in the second case, we’re presented with a guaranteed loss. Now, we’re willing to do whatever it takes to avoid that loss, even if it means risking an even bigger one. We’re going to lose thousands of jobs anyway, so we throw caution to the wind and make the big gamble, hoping that we’ll lose nothing. 

 

This line of research was conducted by psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman; it helped give rise to the field of behavioral economics and win Kahneman a Nobel Prize. It revealed that we can dramatically shift risk preferences just by changing a few words to emphasize losses rather than gains. This knowledge has major implications for understanding how to motivate people to take risks.  

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
1018	28/03/2017	Priority tip: creating business rules with functions	Priority tips
1304	28/03/2020	Thesis update	DBA
1489	28/03/2022	Another year, another growth	Health, BCC

UN Happiness report 2023

Slightly over a year ago, I wrote about the 2022 UN Happiness report, where Israel was in 4th position. Once I overcame my surprise, I wrote One thing is clear: maybe we were happy, but not in 2023! I suspect that the 2024 report will show a sharp decline in Israel's happiness. Then I was referring to the proposed ruin of the judicial system. The events of Oct 7 were six months in the future.

So today I was even more surprised to read that Israel is ranked 5th in the 2024 World Happiness Report, which is sponsored by the UN, through a poll conducted by Gallup, measuring happiness in countries between 2021 and 2023.... the report's authors said that the survey was conducted, "After the hostage taking (on October 7th) but before much of the subsequent warfare". 

If we're so happy here then life really must be tough elsewhere.

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Computer update: Firefox is now working well. I've added some of the missing links, but more importantly I've added passwords to various sites. I managed to reinstall AnyDesk and to establish links to three computers with unattended access so I can retrieve files now. I also reinstalled MegaSync that synchronises files between my computer and remote backup. So now I can return to uploading large database files from the OP's server then back them up at Mega. Still no luck with installing Chrome although I've managed to uninstall it.

Kobo update: I continued reading the mobi version of 'Troubled blood', ignoring the various letters that were inserted randomly into the stream. But one of these letters caused the Kobo to display the book in bold text which was very annoying. Also the Kobo reports all the time that 1% of the book has been read which is obviously wrong. So I converted the mobi file to epub format and uploaded that: a huge change! Apart from no superfluous letters, chapters now work properly, I can see in which chapter I am and how many pages remain to be read in that chapter (an odd metric, in my opinion) and what percentage of the book has been read. So now I will have to convert mobi books back to epub and upload them, whilst deleting the mobi version.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
563	24/03/2013	Pictures from a balcony (5)	Personal
818	24/03/2015	Zooming the millenium	ERP
935	24/03/2016	Draining the ear	Health
1116	24/03/2018	The Belstaff Bouncers	Personal, Habonim, 1975
1484	24/03/2022	My first year as a Londoner, part 4 - "The movement"	Personal, Habonim, 1975, 1974
1485	24/03/2022	My first year as a Londoner, part 5 - The girlfriend	Personal, 1972, 1974
1486	24/03/2022	My first year as a Londoner, part 5 and a half - The girlfriend, continued	Personal, 1975, 1974

Looking for his tribe - revisions

I thought that I would look for my video of 'Looking for his tribe' on YouTube. In the search box, I entered the song's name: I found my video, along with a few others of similar name. 

The video of 'Searching for my tribe' by Selwyn Birchwood left me somewhat bemused as this features a young lady with a prominent bust who apparently sings in a male's bass voice. She also can't play the guitar, which is when I realised that this lady is simply miming. The song itself is a fairly standard blues; there's only so much of this that I can take, not withstanding the lady's bust.

The author writes as an explanation: "I had always been a loner from a very young age. At 19 years old, I discovered an entire world of blues music that felt like 'home'. I knew then where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do. Just when I thought I had found my place in the sun, it appears as though all of the people and sounds that brought me in have been replaced with other trends." Sounds familiar. 

Another video that was found is 'A Tribe of People Are Looking for Your Music!' by the same person who has a series of videos explaining how to play ambient guitar. This is a talk-only video explaining how to grow one's audience.

But back to my video: although the most of the song is good, I cringed at the performance of the opening line. To be honest, I have never been happy with the way this line was sung but I had let it drift. This time I decided to do something about it. I connected my microphone to the computer, warmed up a little than sang the first line onto a new track. Normally I would have silenced the first line in the original vocal then mixed that track and the new one together, creating a composite vocal - as I did originally - but as I needed to replace the first line only, I thought it easier to cut out the first 5.3 seconds of the original file and paste in 5.3 seconds of the new vocal. I had to change the volume somewhat in order to match the original vocal's volume, but once that was done, the editing was invisible. I then had to mix the song once again, then create an mp3 file then remove the original soundtrack from the video and paste in the new one..... I deleted the original video from YouTube and uploaded the new one, so the link has changed. Quite possibly I could have uploaded the new video that would have replaced the original but this option was not documented.

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Naturally I spent a lot of time yesterday working on computers.The first thing that I did was to download an offline installer for Firefox onto my work computer, then via a diskonkey transferred this to the broken computer. I was able to install Firefox but not access all the bookmarks. Undeterred, I exported the bookmarks on my work computer (these comprise about 75% of my current bookmarks), transferred these to the broken computer and imported them.

Chrome, AnyDesk and the backup synchroniser are still not working, and the disk frequently goes to 100% usage, but at least there is an improvement. I've been happily typing away for the past ten minutes with no problems, but of course, Blogger doesn't access the disk. Starting programs is a slow process, but once they are loaded, they work almost normally. Even so, I'll take the computer to my repair man on Sunday and see what he can do.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
122	23/03/2008	Clarification	Programming, Literature
817	23/03/2015	Breaking radio silence	ERP, DBA
934	23/03/2016	Composing a bolero	Health, MIDI
1115	23/03/2018	Egged tales (more stories from 40 years ago)	Personal, Habonim, 1978
1205	23/03/2019	Wake up call	Health
1301	23/03/2020	Days of Corona	DBA, Israel, Grandfather, John Le Carre, Covid-19
1483	23/03/2022	My first year as a Londoner, part 3 - "The cellar"	Personal, 1974

Introducing the Kobo

I was recently gifted a Kobo Clara 2E electronic book reader - a Kindle clone, if you like. As my Kindle has battery problems (it doesn't keep its charge long and sometimes doesn't charge at all), I was quite pleased with this gift, but I haven't had the need to do anything with it yet. I woke up early this morning (having gone to bed early the night before) and was considering what to do with my problematic computer, My first decision was to copy all the books that I have stored on it to the Kobo whose memory capacity is a generous 16 GB, far outweighing the Kindle's paltry 1 GB - and even that's plenty for books that rarely exceed 1 MB in size. The second decision was to back up music, photos and videos to an external drive, but that's another story. 

So: I now supposedly have 2200 books on this device, although I think that this number is somewhat inflated; I copied various ancillary files to the Kobo and I think that these files have been included in the count. All the books are in mobi format, the default format of the Kindle, but the Kobo can handle epub files as well, so it looks like I won't have to convert books anymore, should I settle on the Kobo. On the other hand, I read many books on the computer via a program called Mobipocket Reader, so I'll still need mobi files for this.

I decided that the first book that I would read on the Kobo would be 'Troubled blood' by Robert Galbraith (a Cormoran Strike novel), primarily because I had started reading this on the problematic computer yesterday. This book also has graphics within, so it will be interesting to see how the Kobo handles them. Operating the Kobo is a bit troublesome for the long-time Kindle user: there are no buttons! Everything is operated by touching, swiping and pinching, as with a smartphone. I figured out how to build a collection (aka directory) and how to add books to the collection - this requires touching three dots ... next to the book's name; this process wasn't always successful and sometimes resulted in opening the book. Eventually I succeeded in adding all seven Strike novels to the collection.

The Kobo does not seem to recognise chapters in the mobi format. There seems to be no way to jump to a specific chapter, and navigation within the book isn't easy. At one stage I decided to upload a book in epub format solely to see whether these are handled better; the font was far too small so I had to learn how to change the font size. When I went back to the mobi book, the font was too big so I had to change it again. Apparently one can change the font size simply by pinching, instead of having to go to the settings page. I have been careful with my language here, using 'seem' and 'apparently' - maybe there are ways of achieving what I want and I simply haven't learned them yet.

I read in a review somewhere that the Kobo is slow. I didn't notice any problems when actually reading and 'turning' pages (achieved by touching the screen about half way down on the right hand side to get to the next page), but bringing up the settings page and the book catalogue was a bit slow. This isn't much of a problem; indeed, when adding books to a collection on the Kindle, the operation is a bit slow, but this is a rarely used option and so isn't important. Every now and then, the top right hand corner of the page is shown folded - like one used to do with a real paper book when wanting to save a reminder or to bookmark the page. I am not aware of doing anything to cause this graphic to appear and I don't know what it means (RTFM).

At the moment I'm reading black text on a white background; I've already discovered how to invert this and have white text on a black background, but that looks strange (white on blue would be good). There's also some function to change the background colour according to the hour of the day: reducing one's exposure to blue light at night is a good way to help fall asleep, whereas exposure to blue light at night can prevent falling asleep, or at least, making it difficult.

Obviously there's a lot to learn and get used to; one hour of reading is not sufficient to form a learned opinion.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
163	22/03/2009	Left/right hemisperes of the brain	Psychology, The brain
691	22/03/2014	Reseach questionnaire / 4	DBA

Spring equinox

Two days ago (Tuesday) we had thunderstorms and rain all day long - in total, 29 mm rain fell in less than 24 hours: a good amount. A tremendous clap of thunder woke me just before 4 am, and although I fell back asleep, it wasn't a deep sleep and I could hear the rain outside. By evening, though, the rain had stopped and the skies were clear. Wednesday had clear skies and warm weather during the day, but chilly before dawn and after sunset. Today - Thursday - it's bright and warm. I didn't wear a coat when taking the dog for her walk early morning, and I've just returned from picking up a parcel, wearing only a shirt and trousers. A complete change-around in the weather in time for the spring equinox.

At home, the last two days have been very problematic for my main computer; it has been running extremely slowly and when I look at the task manager, I can see that there is 100% disk usage. This, of course, makes running anything of the computer almost impossible. Fortunately I have my work mobile computer, so I have been working on this (and writing this blog). At first, I thought that the problem was with the synchronisation program to Mega; shutting this down seemed to help and yesterday evening, the computer was running almost normally. But again overnight the disk usage had gone back to 100%.

Could it be, I wondered, that a program that I installed a few days ago was causing this problem? I uninstalled what might be the offending program and again, it seemed that the problem had been alleviated. I ran a diagnostic program that found many problems, but it wouldn't fix any of them. I then restarted the computer only to receive a screen that no one ever wants to see: there was a problem rebooting Windows and the computer would not work at all. 

Frantic googling showed me how to restart the computer in recovery mode. This allowed me to run the program that should have restored the computer to how it was a few days ago. Unfortunately, this program exited, saying that there were problems and that it could not restore properly. With no option left, I rebooted the computer, intending to take it back into recovery mode and run the chkdsk program; I couldn't do this but fortunately the computer did this on its own. After about an hour (there were problems), the computer went into automatic repair mode and once again is rebooting the computer. 

As I write this, "diagnosing your PC" is displayed on the screen ... leading to the 'Automatic Repair' screen and the ominous message "Your PC did not start correctly". I going to try system restore again.  

< Two and a half hours pass >

System Restore says that it has restored the system to how it was 10 days ago. After rebooting and holding my breath, the computer restarted but it's still at 100% disk usage. After about an hour and a half the computer calmed down and it became possible to do some work with it. But Anydesk and Chrome seem to be damaged, so I'm having to finish this blog on my work computer, hence no 'today in history' for the time being ... maybe I'll add it later, assuming that I can get Chrome to work.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
121	21/03/2008	Literary allusions	ERP, Literature, Satie, 1984
690	21/03/2014	Research questionnaire / 3	DBA
933	21/03/2016	Zero values in Priority tables (2)	Priority tips
1482	21/03/2022	Severe stomach cramps	Health
1594	21/03/2023	UN Happiness report	Israel

The end of the end?

Slowly but surely, over the past 15 years many of the traditional things that the kibbutz held dear have slowly wittled away. With regard to celebrating festivals, the New Year ceremony and communal meal has long disappeared, and now to my great dismay, the Passover ceremony and communal meal will not be held this year, due to the low numbers of members who have indicated their participation.

About two weeks ago, we were informed that only about 50 people were intending to attend the communal seder, a number that is considered to be too small to make the evening viable, even with a subsidy from the kibbutz to cover part of the cost of the meal. I wrote the following on the kibbutz electronic notice-board in response to a thread that was started by someone complaining about why there should be a subsidy at all.

Unlike some of the participants in this discussion, I don't come from a large family that is used to holding its seder privately. For me, the kibbutz seder (or, at least how it used to be twenty or thirty or forty years ago) expresses the traditional and best way to celebrate the seder, and I must say that the tendency of members to celebrate in their homes in the past few years only harms the enjoyment that I derive from the evening. There's no fun in participating in a seder when more than 50% of the participants are guests, who don't know the customs and traditions of a kibbutz seder. In my humble opinion, the price of the seder is not the central issue here, but the desire - or lack of desire - to celebrate as a kibbutz. The central issue is not the food (that creates the cost) but the experience.

To which someone replied (I think in a sarcastic tone, but it's impossible to know): I apologise if I have harmed your enjoyment because I have decided to celebrate in the bosom of my family.

My final words on the topic were: Generally, there are no private actions of member x that affect member y (I'm not talking about unsocial acts like there were in the past week [a member complained that someone had slashed his car's tyres, maybe because he hadn't parked correctly]). But when the seder is in danger of being cancelled because of the small number of participants, there is a negative influence. It's the same thing when there was the duty driver [someone who used to drive to and from Bet Shemesh in the evenings picking up people, eg here] and private cars: the moment that a certain number of members had cars, the need to use a general service declined below a certain level. As a result, the duty driver system was abolished, and I would not be surprised if there were members who felt the need (or where even forced) to purchase for themselves a private car, as the kibbutz had ceased supplying this service. This discussion started from money but it's a societal issue: apparently we have passed the tipping point at which it's not worth the kibbutz's while to supply a service, and as a result, members are harmed.

No one bothered to reply. 

Today we are informed that indeed due to the paucity of participants, the seder will be cancelled. Where am I going to celebrate the Passover this year? There have been a few times when I did not go to the kibbutz seder - and I was miserable. I'll see what my wife has to say on the subject.

The fact that I heard at our last band rehearsal that maybe we will be playing at a reduced Spring festival does not cheer me up.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
559	17/03/2013	Sumptuous Sunday 6	Cooking
1382	17/03/2021	DSupt Banks: Not dark yet	DCI Banks, Peter Robinson

Jasmine Myra (2)

For the past two weeks, I've been listening to Jasmine Myra almost exclusively (at least, when I'm at my desk), and I'm now ready to offer comments about her music. I will be referring to this performance below as it's a fine document of a live performance; the only problems are that the first seven minutes contain nothing and there's also a fifteen minute break in the middle. I downloaded the performance then edited out the long waits. For some reason, the microphone into which JM speaks is at a very low volume so it is almost impossible to hear what she is saying; I increased the volume of these parts while I was editing the file.

The line up is JM - alto sax; Arran Kent – flute/bass clarinet; Matt Cliffe – flute/alto sax; Liam DeTar – guitar; Jasper Green – piano; Sam Quintana – double bass; Alice Roberts – harp; George Hall – drums. The last four appear to play with JM frequently over the years whereas the others are not so constant. Liam DeTar - an unfortunate name for a guitarist - is superfluous in this performance; his parts are minimal and can barely be heard. This is somewhat strange as on other videos of JM there is a different guitarist who often plays in tandem with JM.

Unfortunately, I have no idea of what most of the pieces are called. Probably my favourite is the one that starts after about 47 minutes in the unedited video and is the last piece before the break. This starts out as another tone poem with harp arpeggios in 3/4 time; after a few minutes there is a break for the clarinet and then the piece continues in 4/4. A theme is played then there's time for a wild bass clarinet solo before the ensemble comes back in for a stomping finale - although in fact, the piece peters out after the finale, a mistake in my opinion. The bass clarinet adds depth to the sound whilst not being another saxophone. This piece is supposed to be on the upcoming album to be released in May.

My other favourite and unnamed piece is the encore, another piece from the upcoming album. This is introduced as being a slightly silly song, although it is not clear to me why JM calls it this.

I would not like to be the harpist in this group as several songs depend on harp arpeggios played without break for a few minutes each time. I don't know whether this is normal for harp pieces but I imagine that it can get confusing.

I don't understand the economics of this group and how they manage to tour (at one point, JM says that this is the first night of her first tour); can you imagine taking a harp from venue to venue? It won't fit in the van and is also more delicate than a guitar. Matt Cliffe has a booking page that states than he can be booked from £180 a gig (and he's cheap compaired to some of the other names that appear on that page). Let's say that his fee is £200 a night, and if everyone charges the same amount, that's £1400 a night, not including travel and living expenses. Can an almost unknown musician charge £2000 for one gig?

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
463	15/03/2012	Sequencing "Lost" / 2	Van der Graaf Generator, Peter Hammill, Home recording
688	15/03/2014	Boy, was I wrong - programming naivety	Programming, Delphi, ClientDataSet
1381	15/03/2021	A year of Covid-19	Covid-19
1592	15/03/2023	Goodbye, Dilbert (at least for the time being)	Personal, Covid-19

Italian language lessons

My wife and I both love Italy and have visited there several times; at the moment we are preparing for another trip to take place in a few months' time. This fascination with Italy has prompted my wife to take an Open University course to learn spoken Italian: she travels once a week to Tel Aviv and learns a bit. At the beginning she mentioned that she doesn't always manage to write down everything the teacher puts up on the white board; remembering my MBA days, I recalled that there were students who never wrote anything but photographed the white board, and so I suggested that she do this. No one else in the class (about ten people where the youngest is maybe 55 years old) had even thought of this. Below is a cleaned-up example.

This picture, and all the others like it, remind me of when I was a schoolboy learning Latin: our homework one night was to write out the conjugations of a few verbs, and that exercise stuck with me for years. The same thing happened when I learned Hebrew; whilst the present tense in Hebrew only has four forms (masculine/single, masculine/plural, feminine/singular, feminine/plural), the past tense has eight forms, two of which aren't used in spoken Hebrew. It's the same in Italian: the picture shows the various forms of the verb 'Essere' - to be. This was an unfortunate choice to start off with; although Hebrew has an infinitive for 'to be' as well as past and future forms, it doesn't have a present tense, so it was very difficult for me to explain what 'Io sono' (I am) would be in Hebrew. Fortunately we've got past that stage.

I sort of understand written Italian, but can't really understand spoken Italian as it's always spoken too fast. So I was pleased that during my YouTube searches for material on Italy, I came across a series called 'Easy Italian', in which two or more people (one of whom turns out to be British) speak in slow Italian, or as one might say, Italiano lento. These videos are both fun to watch and very educational. Whilst it is good that there are Italian subtitles, having English subtitles as well is slightly problematic. On the one hand, I don't want to see the English so that I can understand the Italian as Italian, whereas on the other hand, having the English helps me with understanding the words that I don't know. My wife can't read the English fast enough.... But will these videos help me to speak Italian? I can say a few phrases, but recently whenever I try to say something in Italian, it comes out in French.

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Obligatory guitar effects pedal paragraph: last night we had band practice and I took along my new pedalboard. Some of the effects were ok, but I will have to dial down the number of echoes in the presets of the multi-effects pedal. The octave pedal was also interesting: I might use it more in the 'down one octave' setting in order to add depth. Today arrived the tremolo pedal that I ordered a few weeks ago; it's a shame that it didn't arrive yesterday. Apart from the slightly annoying fact that the power socket is on one of the sides and not on the top, the pedal came with two pieces of sticky tape/velcro that will enable me to attach the pedal to the pedalboard easily. Yesterday the two mini-pedals fell off the pedalboard, as the velcro that was attached to the pedal came loose. The sticky side took with it something from the bottom of the pedal casing, leaving the pedals unattached. I put new sticky tape/velcro patches on the pedals that seem to have improved the situation.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
238	14/03/2010	Toyota	Organisation behaviour
558	14/03/2013	Minimising the overhead	Programming, ERP
687	14/03/2014	Research questionnaire / 2	DBA

Looking for his tribe - now on YouTube

I'm not waiting for a 'reset password' email from SoundClick, I'm uploading the song to YouTube.

I made a text-only video of the song, showing the lyrics as they are sung. The video can be found here.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
162	10/03/2009	Share with you (continued)	MIDI, Soundclick
237	10/03/2010	An end to OB?	Organisation behaviour, MBA
686	10/03/2014	Cognitive styles and sense of ownership	DBA, Psychology

Looking for his tribe (recording)

On Thursday, I received an email saying that a parcel from Temu would be delivered to me. As all their parcels so far have been delivered to the kibbutz 'post office', I walked there after lunch (another 2000 steps there and back to my credit). Whilst there were a few parcels from Temu, there was nothing for me, so I started composing in my mind a letter to the delivery service as I walked home. My wife came home a bit later and in her hand was the missing parcel: it seems that this time the delivery was to my home! This parcel contained the tuner pedal, so in the evening I got out the pedalboard and fixed the tuner to the right hand side of the board, connecting both power and signal leads. I tuned my guitars - both the Washburn and the Stagg were slightly flat. It's much easier tuning with this pedal than with the little tuner that I attach to the end of the guitar, and I can also now tune when there's a lot of noise going on (e.g. during a rehearsal) as the pedal is not affected by environmental factors.

I devoted most of Friday to the recording process: on Thursday I had been running through my repertoire of traditional tunes, playing them through the octave pedal and the chorus preset of the multi-effects pedal. As a result, I decided to record myself playing 'My Lagan love' live. This took a few attempts but eventually I was able to play the whole thing through without mistakes. The sound is somewhat strange. I might persuade my wife to film me playing this song then upload it to YouTube.

I then recorded a guitar part for 'Looking for his tribe'; as I wrote last week, my original recording was a mess so yesterday I played a simple part. I added this fairly low to the mix and as a result it's not obvious what the guitar is. It's an unfortunate coincidence that the guitar through the octave pedal sounds something like the the flute organ that plays the solo, so some may think that the solo was played on guitar; no.

Once the guitar part was finished, it was time to record vocals. Every time I made a mistake or fluffed a line, I would restart from the beginning of which ever section I was singing at the time. In other words, the first take had the first verse complete, but then I fluffed a line in the middle of the second verse, so the second take started from the beginning of the second verse. Eventually I had a complete vocal, so I cleaned up each take then mixed them all down to one file that then underwent tuning. A few more manipulations and I was ready to start mixing the complete song; this took much longer than usual because I made a silly mistake.

Normally the process is that I create a mix in the multitrack software program and save it to a file; I normalise and compress that file then listen to the result, noting any changes that have to be made (normally this means reducing the volume of the vocals). This process goes on and on until I achieve the sound that I want, where each mix deletes the previous mix. For some reason, I forgot to keep using the same name for the output file, and as a result I had created several mix files but I was always listening to the same mix! Eventually I figured out what I had done wrong and shortly thereafter created a good mix.

But whilst listening to this mix all the way through, I noticed that it was hard to understand the words, especially in the last verse. I then remembered a trick that I frequently forget, so I'll document it here: I make a copy of the main vocal track, saving the copy to mono. I then run a high-pass filter on the copy, starting from about 700 Hz: this produces a very thin trebly vocal that normally has to have its volume increased by about 300 percent. This mono track then gets added to the mix without any effects (or maybe a little reverb); when done correctly, it adds upper end to the vocal without adding volume and makes hearing the words easier. Theoretically this could be done by adding subtle equalisation to the main vocal, but I find using this technique more effective for achieving the last elusive part of the mixing process. With the extra vocal track in place, I still had to make another four or five mixes before the final result was achieved.

I would like to upload the sound to SoundCloud then add a link to it, but that's not possible at the moment as I seem to have forgotten my password and the site won't send me a new one.

Although it's very early, I am thinking of contributing this song to the Yom Kippur song evening. The lyrics turned out to be far more autobiographical than I might have originally intended.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
68	09/03/2007	Weekend migraines	Maccabi Tel Aviv, Migraine
555	09/03/2013	I'll never get those wasted hours back	Programming, Email, Problem solving, Nick Hornby
930	09/03/2016	Sir George Martin, RIP	Obituary, Beatles
1204	09/03/2019	The Tel Aviv saxophone quartet	Ambient music
1379	09/03/2021	Sometimes it takes a long time for the light to go on in my head	MIDI
1588	09/03/2023	That's all, say amen, close the door	DBA

Looking for his tribe (new song)

On Friday, the stars aligned or at least I was in a suitable frame of mind that enabled me to write the words to the song whose music I wrote at the beginning of February. As I wrote here the other day, the quote about living in a bubble (from book 5 of the Dublin Murder Squad) gave me the initial inspiration; this joined forces along with a similar idea that I had several months ago about someone looking for his tribe. I wouldn't say that the words flew out of me: they required some work, both in capturing the rhythm of the tune and in finding rhymes (there aren't many suitable rhymes for 'world' and 'companionship'). 

The lyrics start with a sort of non sequitur that sets up the song:

She turned her head to hear his words
He spoke so softly next to her
He told her of his early life
He spent them looking for his tribe
Once found, they became all his world
Friends, brothers, they were his to hold
Like a bubble from some fragrant soap
They gave him strength, they gave him hope

Here we have the key words, 'bubble' and 'tribe'. In the second verse the bubble bursts (of course), introducing conflict into the story and the third verse has resolution. I'm not going to quote the entire song but the idea is clear.

On Saturday, I thought that I would record guitar parts for the song: two takes of fingerpicked guitar, one with chorus and one with octave pedal. But upon listening to the playback, I am strongly considering ditching them as they are messy and hinder more than they help. This is especially clear when considering how much time and deliberation I spent on the MIDI tracks, compared with how much time I spent on the guitar tracks. I am leaning to the opinion that a simple one chord strum per bar is what is required for the first verse - and that's all.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
26	03/03/2006	Watching sports	Maccabi Tel Aviv, Milton family
160	03/03/2009	Share with you (story of a complex arrangement)	MIDI, Reason
339	03/03/2011	Coincidences	MBA, Peter Hammill, Marketing
458	03/03/2012	Incremental search in a combo box	Programming, Delphi, Combo box
1294	03/03/2020	Sending a report via email in English (Priority)	Priority tips