Books (new song)

Friday afternoon: as for a change I had a few hours with no demands on my time, I thought that I would stop procrastinating and settle down to write the words for the song¹ whose music I put together at the beginning of the month. I had, in fact, managed to write four lines last week that fit the rhythm of the song and made sense; when I started listening to the music suddenly more words popped into my mind and before I knew it, I had completed a verse.

Although it wasn't my original intention, the lyrics are about books: the first verse fiction, the second verse non-fiction, featuring such lines as
Science books keep me on my toes
There's always something new to learn
From biology to chemistry
Nutrition has to wait its turn

The final verse is about my total dependency on books ('my dearest friend/my constant companion'). Tomorrow I'll make a demo recording of the song with vocals; I may improve the words here and there, and I may record a new vocal at a later stage. It's much easier to do this after living with and listening to a completed version for a few days.

And so another 'album' has been finished. This one started with the song 'Songbird'² at the beginning of October 2022, so obviously I haven't been writing particularly fast. I don't have to say that there have been many things over the past two years that have occupied me and made it harder to make original music (especially to write lyrics).

Internal links
[1] 1801
[2] 1546

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
195	30/08/2009	The world of Henry Orient	Films
504	30/08/2012	Three emails	Health, Robert Silverberg, MBA
1161	30/08/2018	Maximum word count for submission	DBA
1255	30/08/2019	Priority tip: beware of linked files when checking in Windbi	Priority tips
1334	30/08/2020	Evening ferry	Song writing, Andros, Greece

More on internal links in the blog manager

I apologise in advance about continually writing about my blog entry manager program. Unfortunately or otherwise, this is what is currently occupying a great deal of my mental space (instead of writing lyrics) and I seem to have new ideas every day.

I wrote¹ the other day about including internal links in my blog so I can easily find blogs referenced within the daily entries. The code that parses the links is rather ad hoc but seems to do the work. I also developed a system for adding internal links to old blogs, which at the moment of course constitute a vast majority. In order to display an internally linked blog, I would have to press on the system menu and choose 'internal links' that brings up a dialog with a list of the linked blogs. Clicking on one of the lines causes the chosen blog to be displayed.

Today I had the idea of displaying an internally linked blog from within the 'show entry' window. My original idea was to do this by means of key clicks such as Alt-1, Alt-2, etc, but it seems that the web browser swallows these key clicks as the handler that I added didn't see them. Then I tried adding tool buttons or speed buttons on a panel, but these solutions, whilst feasible, caused display problems. Then I remembered a trick that I've already used in this program: adding the blog titles to a status bar² (as shown below).

When the 'show entry' window is displayed, a simple query iterates over the referenced blogs and adds them to the status bar. I would like to do this dynamically but at the moment I have yet to find code that shows how to do this. I may add the reference number to the text, and now it occurs to me that maybe I can adjust each panel's width to show the entire text - in other words, prevent the title 'Neat hack - but is it useful? (Management program)' from being truncated, whilst not allowing any space after 'redesigning the 'blogs' program'. That can wait for another day. Even so, using the status bar saves at least one click of the mouse, and as I tell people at work, I get paid by the number of clicks that I save people (this is a joke as I hasten to point out to those people).

Of course, five minutes after having written the above paragraph, I found code that allows me to add the panels dynamically. I also found code to set the width according to the text to be displayed but that code doesn't quite get the width correct, so I'm adding on an extra 18% as shown below (18% is the increment that I determined after testing).

with qGetInternals do
 begin
  params[0].asinteger:= blog;
  open;
  while not eof do
   begin
    newpanel:= sb.panels.add;
    newpanel.text:= fields[0].asstring + '-' + fields[1].asstring;
    newpanel.width:= (sb.canvas.textwidth (newpanel.text) * 118) div 100;
    next;
   end;
  close
 end;

Internal links
[1] 1808
[2] 1602

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
193	28/08/2009	Firebird date fields, continued	Programming, Firebird, dbExpress
503	28/08/2012	Disappointing blood test results	Health
621	28/08/2013	Nothing more	MIDI, Sandy Denny
1333	28/08/2020	Time sheets and perceived value	ERP, DBA, Organisation behaviour

Nightnoise

In the mid 1990s, there was a married couple on the kibbutz who used to run a cassette library on Saturday mornings (and at some stage I computerised their library and lending records). Although most of the cassettes that they had were classical, there were also some from other types of music. I used to borrow a few cassettes every week or so, hoping to find some new music to like.

And I did: 'The parting tide' by the American/Irish group Nightnoise. I imagine that it was shortly after hearing that cassette that I ordered the CD from Windham Hill (according to my records, 1 Oct 1995); I used to play it frequently. Eventually the penny dropped and I looked for other discs by this group - I found three more. I ripped one of the discs to mp3 several years ago and these tracks found their way onto my mp3 players, so I hear them every few months.

I even met the guitarist of the group, Mícheál Ó Domhnaill, when he and another musician (probably the violinist Kevin Burke) came to play a concert in Israel. At the time I was in my Irish music phase - along with Lunasa - so I was very enthusiastic. Ó Domhnaill signed the various cd sleeves and music book that I brought along with me.

For reasons of neglect, I haven't listened to 'The parting tide' for maybe twenty years, so the other day when I was digging through my archives for a certain disc to rip, I found this along with its siblings and ripped them all. I'm listening to 'The parting tide' now and really enjoying it.

And whilst not really paying attention, I noticed that one instrumental, 'The kid in the cot' was in 54 time; or was it? It seems that there are alternating bars of 54 and 64, although I wouldn't go so far as to call this 114. Very sophisticated. Like everything else these days, it's available for listening to on YouTube, apparently uploaded only a year ago. Listening to it again, it sounds now like a phrase consisting of four bars of three beats each, only that the second bar has dropped a beat. And almost without listening, I realised that the second part of 'This just in' from the 'Shadow of time' is in a rollicking 54 rhythm.

The genre of music that Nightnoise played is described as New Age Irish; most of the time one can hear the melodies of Irish traditional music filtered through the sensibilities of the digital age. Listen to 'The kid in the cot' - the first two minutes are Irish, then at 2:09 there's a very modern section that lasts until about 2:49. Then's it back to Irish themes.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
191	27/08/2009	Climbing the learning curve	Programming, Firebird, MBA, dbExpress
192	27/08/2009	Firebird date fields	Firebird, dbExpress
620	27/08/2013	Children of the revolution	DCI Banks, Kindle, Peter Robinson, Ian Rankin
970	27/08/2016	The murder detectives	TV series, DCI Banks
1254	27/08/2019	Yet still more doctoring	DBA, Psychology, Martin Seligman, Non-fiction books

Internal links in the blog manager

Yesterday, I wrote at the end of the lengthy blog entry, I realised that I could easily display the 'this day in history' list in a suitable format for the blog manager program and forgot the idea of finding referenced blogs. I've been researching this a little and what I have found is not encouraging. Apart from the 'this day in history' links, there are two other kinds of links in these blog entries: those external to my blog (e.g. to YouTube or Wikipedia) and those that are internal (e.g. referencing a blog that I wrote a week ago). I am not interested in the external links; what I would like is that the internal links would bring up the referenced link when used in the context of my blog manager program.

Well, I don't think that's going to happen. To give an example, there's a blog dated 11/07/24 ('Pedalboard power supply problems') that contains an internal link to another blog written sometime in February

<a href="https://nbnewman.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-dublin-murder-squad.html" 
target="_blank>

Note that this reference doesn't give the actual date but rather the page name that Blogger assigns (I wonder what would happen if in the same month I wrote two blogs with the same title - presumably the second would be rejected). Of course, there is no blog number as Blogger apparently has no concept of a reference number.

This came through to my program as

<A href="https://www.blogger.com/#">

This is less than useless. I've discovered that all the internal links appear like this in the text that is saved by exporting the email that is sent automatically by Blogger to my account managed by a non-current version of Outlook (the current version completely mangles the text). Thus I am stymied even if I wanted to parse the HTML text that I receive in order to extract data leading to the blog stored in the blog manager.

I think that I will have to insert manually references of the type [1]  or [2], where these are stored in a database table, so I can bring up a list in the same way that the 'blog day in history' option is activated. Thus in the pedalboard case, [1] would reference blog #1725. I see that in one blog, I saved the link point with a sup tag ¹ then presumably I added the reference manually. So I'll see how this works out when I see the HTML text emitted by Outlook.

Internal links
[1] 1640

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
278	26/08/2010	Updates (mainly The Swell Season)	DCI Banks, Peter Robinson, Swell Season
397	26/08/2011	Implicit vs explicit joins (SQL)/2	SQL
619	26/08/2013	Chaining functionality	ERP

Using multiple values in a query

Caveat: heavy programming content ahead.

Nearly two years ago, I wrote¹ about the 'temp' table that I had added to my blog manager program. As I wrote then (edited): I would like several different functions to output a list of blogs, each showing different data. This would mean using the multiple document interface (MDI) and displaying the same form several times. How would each instance of the form know what to display? I added to the temporary table a new field, 'instance' that would be part of the primary key; each query would get a unique instance and store its data (entries) along with that instance. The form that displays the data would be sent the instance number and so would retrieve the correct data. When the form closes, it deletes the data from the temporary table and frees the instance number for further use. In other words, the 'temp' table is being used to store data for output.

I thought of another, more sophisticated use, a few months ago. Due to limitations in Delphi, or rather limitations in how I write database programs in Delphi, a program is limited to passing a single value of an entity (e.g. a customer) to a query. In the (purposely) truncated picture of an input screen on the left, one is limited to passing a single value for 'Tag 1' (I am using this example solely because the input screen is in English). What happens when one wants to pass several tags to the retrieval query at one time? Enter the 'temp' table as a mechanism for passing multiple values to a query. 

I added a checkbox (here it's a radio button, but later on I discovered a problem with this) that when pressed brings up the familiar two listbox screen. Here one chooses tags from the left listbox then by means of the arrow buttons one transfers the tags to the right listbox. When one presses the 'OK' button, a new instance of the 'temp' table is created with the ids of the various tags chosen added to lines in the table.

The code for using the the temp table from this example is too convoluted to display here because apart from anything else, the output of the query is sent to another instance of the 'temp' table. Instead, I'll show the various necessary lines to support multiple values in the OP's management query ('s' is a string that contains the various lines of the SQL query, at this point consisting of the 'SELECT' and 'FROM' clauses but before the 'WHERE' clause; 'tipulim' is the name of the 'treatment types' table so an alias is used for the temp table).

 if rgTipulim.Checked
  then s:= s + ' inner join temp tipul on tipul.id = tipulim.id ';
 ... // part of the WHERE clause
 s:= s + 'tipul.instance = :p4';
 ... // parameters
  sdsShowByTreatment.parambyname ('p4').asinteger:= rgTipulim.tag; 

In other words, if multiple values are required than an extra line is added to the 'FROM'  clause, joining the temporary table to (in this case) the treatments type table. Later on the instance is added to the WHERE clause and finally the parameter is passed. This works very well.

Why did I write earlier here it's a radio button, but later on I discovered a problem with this? In that 'set values for retrieval' form, there is only one parameter capable of choosing multiple values, but in the form in the OP's management suite from which I quoted above, there are two parameters that can have multiple values - customers and treatment type - and if I used radio buttons (as I did at first), selecting one will deselect the other and vice versa. If one wants multiple values for both parameters, then a radio button is useless but a checkbox is fine.

That's how things stood six months ago. On Friday I was talking with the OP about selecting dockets that could be defined with one of several treatment types - in other words, a clear case of a multiple value parameter. But after adding this to the form, I was struck with a new idea: what if I wanted to save this combination of values in a similar fashion to saved queries?

I was thinking about how to implement this when I went swimming on Saturday morning; as a result of all that thinking, I swam better and faster as I didn't have the brain power to spare on quotidian matters such as breathing. I wish every swim was like this!

In a prior blog², I described how I extended the 'saved queries' table in order to store predefined complex sort conditions. Thus in terms of the data structures, I didn't have to change anything in order to store what I am calling 'bundles' - a saved list of multiple values from a table. To the two listboxes form I added the visual components of a saved query, but the code for saving and restoring the values was far different and somewhat complicated; eventually I figured it out (and improved it this morning).

One interesting observation is that these bundles are available wherever a query requires a customer or treatment type parameter, so once defined, they can be used in multiple forms. Another idea that occurred to me (once again inspired by Priority) but yet to be implemented is adding the capability of duplicating a saved query/sorter/bundle from one user to another. Using this, I can define the saved whatever without having to explain to the user how to define it, then allow the user to use it in practice. Whilst quite complicated to program, this is simple in conception.

In the course of writing this blog entry, I am reminded of what I wrote in my previous blog, Another addition was the possibility of displaying within the blog manager the list of blogs mentioned in the 'this day in history' list at the bottom of the blog. What that idea ignores are any blog entries mentioned in the text of the current entry (here there are three links to prior blogs). If I recall correctly, I was thinking that I would have to parse the text of a blog entry in order to find those links and that this idea did not appeal to me very much. Then I realised that I could easily display the 'this day in history' list in a suitable format for the blog manager program and forgot the idea of finding referenced blogs. That will have to wait for a few days.

[1] 1548
[2] 1680

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
277	25/08/2010	More inbasket	In-basket, Psychology
396	25/08/2011	Spam mail	Spam
618	25/08/2013	Research questionnaire	ERP, Excel
754	25/08/2014	Computer woes	Personal, Computer
1415	25/08/2021	New oven gloves	Cooking
1660	25/08/2023	Preparing for the New Year ceremony	Musical group

Italy 2024 movie / blog management

Over the past few days I've been working on the Italy 2024 movie. As usual, I have only complaints about Microsoft Movie Maker and how one has to wait for ever when there are many clips in the movie.

As always, I learn something new every time I put together one of these movies. This time, I wanted the soundtrack of the Como part to be soothing waves and bird calls; unsurprisingly, this is the native sound of one of the various clips. I discovered that there are web sites that will take an mp4 file (this was the source) and extract from it the audio portion, saving it as mp3. This initial audio file was about one minute long, so in my music editor I duplicated it several times in order to create one 20 minute long clip. Then I realised that there was someone talking in the background of the original clip, so I had to edit this out then start again.

The Milano half (or more accurately, third) is accompanied most of the time by some light jazz. The train station sequences are without music as is the Andean piper at the castle, but other sections have this music along with the real time noise - mainly water fountains or bird calls.

It's interesting to note how long each chapter is - this gives an idea of how much we enjoyed ourselves at each point.

Chapter	Subject	length (mins)
1	Varenna	11:35
2	Menaggio	5:25
3	Bellagio	2:15
4	Milan: trains, hotel	2:32
5	Duomo	1:46
6	Castle	5:34
7	Il naviglio	2:23

The Bellagio chapter had to be filled out with pictures that I found on the Internet as we barely took any pictures there ourselves.

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I've also had more ideas about the blog management program. Most of these have not required much coding; basically they've made existing functionality easier to access. For example, if the query from the 'set parameters for retrieving entries' form returns only one entry (as will happen if one is searching for a specific number or date), then the intermediate form ('choose entries') that shows all the entries returned by the query will not be shown; instead the entry itself will be opened directly.

I discovered that I had included at some time an option to bring up the 'edit HTML text' form on the 'show entry' form; I had neglected to allow a successful edit to cause the 'show entry' form to redisplay with the edited text. This required changing the visibility of certain variables from 'private' to 'public', but otherwise was managed easily.

Another addition was the possibility of displaying within the blog manager the list of blogs mentioned in the 'this day in history' list at the bottom of the blog. Should I choose to click on the list in the blog, then the 'real' internet browser will be invoked and will open the chosen page from the blogger site. I wanted the capability of opening up another 'choose entry' form with these blogs and at first I went down a rabbit hole of investigating how to add my own context menu to the internal web browser. Later it occurred to me that all I need do was add an option to the 'show entry' form's system menu that would call the 'ShowHistory' routine; again, I had to change something from private to public.

This morning I thought it would be nice to display the contents of several blogs at one go instead of bringing up a listing of those blogs (the 'choose entries' form). This was achieved by making the grid that displays the listing multichoice and then writing a little code to open the chosen blogs. As I write this, it occurs to me that adding an 'open all' button would be useful in certain circumstances (I was thinking about opening up all the blogs that I wrote during our Italian holiday).

I appreciate that all of the above is somewhat meaningless to someone other than myself as only I have this program. But some of the ideas behind this program migrate into the OP's management program, as ideas from her program migrate to mine.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
49	20/08/2006	Toothache and detectives	DCI Banks, Peter Robinson, Ian Rankin, Teeth, Morse
753	20/08/2014	Abattoir blues	DCI Banks, Kindle, Peter Robinson
1524	20/08/2022	Oat biscuits	Cooking
1659	20/08/2023	Financial management and metabolism	Nutrition

More about yesterday's YouTube listens

First: The Doors. I dug out my cassette mixtape dating from 1975/6 and listened to parts of 'The End'. As I suspected, the obscene lyrics in the double time section towards the end were not audible; I think that Elizabeth must have been listening to a remixed version. Other versions of 'The End' or its parent album available on YouTube have the vocals of this section at different levels. Going to the cassette was the closest that I could get to a time capsule version. I also thought that the volume of Ray's organ had been reduced.

'The Yes Album': at the youth club that I attended in those days (I'm sure I've written about it but I can't find the reference at the moment), this was a hot item and constantly played. I lent it to Andy V. who eventually returned it slightly warped. I used to use 'Yours is no disgrace' as a test for stereo systems due to the amount of panning involved.

Andy was my 'patrol leader' (is that what they are called?) in the Scouts when I graduated from the cubs, so we sort of knew each other prior to my joining the youth club at the beginning of 1970. Of course, he was a couple of years older than me and acted rough (despite going to one of the three direct grant grammar schools in Bristol, but not mine) so I was always wary of him. I was quite relieved when he left Bristol in late 1972 to go to university, leaving me with a year without him at the youth club (1972-3).

It must have been Andy who invited me to play football on The Downs on Sunday afternoons in late 1969/early 1970. I have a memory of being in the bath, washing off the mud, whilst listening to the radio playing the Keef Hartley band. From the football came the introduction to the youth club.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
393	18/08/2011	Continuing the family tradition	Personal
1252	18/08/2019	What I did on my weekend	DBA, Cooking, Walking, Swimming

Saturday afternoon with the YouTube

A few of the YouTubers that I watch frequently were discussing pieces of music that I know well so it was a very entertaining time spent on the YouTube this afternoon.

First up was Doug Helvering listening to the entirety of 'The Yes Album'.  The six songs on this album are well known to me and I hear them frequently. On the 'walking headphones' they take their turn with all the other songs, but often during the working day I will play this album. I am, of course, very familiar with it.

According to Wikipedia, it was released on 19 February 1971. I saw Yes, supporting the forgettable Iron Butterfly, on 17 January 1971. Unfortunately I can't access my vinyl copy of the album at the moment, but I imagine that it was bought within the first days of its release. I wrote about this here.

Doug, of course, talks about the harmonic structures of the songs which is very interesting, as to be honest, apart from the third part of 'Starship Trooper', I've never really given much attention to the chord sequences. What I have listened to is the changing rhythms which come to the fore in the aptly titled 'Perpetual change'. This begins with a riff in 104 before resolving to a melody in 34. Elsewhere in the song there's a passage that can be counted in different ways: it's fourteen beats but seems to be grouped as 4, 2, 5 and 3. Incidentally, note the neat way of writing time signatures: someone was kind enough to develop some HTML code that displays the numbers vertically as opposed to an apparent fraction.

I've always considered the song 'A venture' to be a throwback to the earlier style of Yes, It doesn't seem to be as progressive as the other songs. Also, for the first time in 53 years, I wondered why 'Clap' was included; maybe there was a paucity of new material (that can also explain 'A venture') and 'Clap' helped fill out the time.

Anyway - compulsory listening.

Following that was 'The Charismatic Voice' (aka Elizabeth Zharoff) listening to 'The end' by The Doors. I love watching her videos: she is so enthusiastic about the music, spreading smiles and laughter, that it is a pleasure just to watch her reactions, never mind the music. Her videos with Kate Bush's music are outstanding examples of this.

What always amuses me is the fact that music that I consider to be well known is completely new to her - but what should one expect of someone who was/is an opera singer and was only born in 1986? As far as I am concerned, very little good music was made after that year. As someone said in a recent video, "were you brought up in a cave?".

Normally Elizabeth will frequently stop and replay sections of songs in order to point things out. At times I find this somewhat distracting as I would like to hear the song in its entirety before making a second, interrupted, run over it. This tendency was especially annoying in today's video as 'The end' is hardly a strophic song but rather a completely improvised live recording - although I imagine that most of the words were pre-written. Stopping and replaying doesn't allow the music and mood that it creates to build dramatically.

My teen years friend Jeremy was very much a Doors fan, especially when he was younger (ie until 16). He came to stay with me once at the beginning of July 1971 and I had to break to him the bad news that Jim Morrison had just died. At one stage I bought for him a biography of Jim entitled "Weird scenes inside the goldmine", which is a phrase uttered in this song. Elizabeth missed this.

I admit to not having heard this song in many years as it is not on my playlist, although I did have it on a Doors' compilation tape. I remember the famous Oedipal sequence, "Father ... I want to kill you. Mother ... I want to ......." and I remember the bit that comes after it about meeting at the back of the blue bus, but I don't remember what comes after that: a double time section with what can be politely described as explicit lyrics accompanying a musical description of someone having an orgasm. Maybe I simply blanked them out as these lyrics would definitely have been a no-no in 1967 and I certainly would have been aware of them otherwise. Elisabeth had to explain that it's the vowels that carry a melody, and consonants on their own ('f', 'ck') simply make percussive sounds. Maybe I'll dig out my cassette and listen to it for the first time in 40 years.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
1066	17/08/2017	Submitting an outline	DBA
1159	17/08/2018	Using indexes	Programming, SQL

Another night with bad sleep

Couldn't sleep a wink last night
Bryan Ferry, "Pyjamarama"

That quote from a long forgotten song from 1973 is not totally relevant; I doubt that anybody really doesn't "sleep a wink" - one might think that there is no sleep, but looking at the clock every now and then shows that time passes.

Last night this might have happened for pharmacological reasons: I forgot to take my evening medication that includes a theanine pill as well as a low dosage of amitryptiline, a prophylactic treatment for the prevention of migraines. Both of these drugs can cause sleep.

But I suspect that the real reason was an over-active right hemisphere of the brain. Earlier in the evening I had seen a YouTube video by David Bennett Piano about key changes in Beatles' songs. This isn't exactly new material for me but it was presented in an interesting way. My mind insisted throughout the night that the bridge of "There's a place" from the first album "Please please me" contains a modulation from the E major key of the verses to C# minor (relative minor). I think that David missed this one. There was also some syncopated guitar lick that I heard in my mind all night but by morning I can't remember what it was.

More work by the right hemisphere: in the late afternoon, I was doing some consulting work when the topic of Bills Of Materials (BOM) and BOM revisions cropped up. A certain report based on BOMs worked properly most of the time but gave erroneous results for one particular BOM. After examining a few things, I came to the conclusion that there was a problem with the BOM revisions for this part (more about this on the other blog). I took the dog for a walk after this and figured out a slightly complicated way of handling the problem.

This problem continued to hound me during the night, possibly as a way of not forgetting the solution, until about 2:20 am when suddenly a very simple solution occurred to me. Having this solution didn't help me fall back asleep, though.

It then occurred to me that maybe the words to my new song should be about solving puzzles or having topics whirl around in my brain's right hemisphere. I already have one song entitled "Another sleepless night" so that won't do.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
392	15/08/2011	Beginning the diet	Diet
751	15/08/2014	Research proposal supplement accepted	DBA, Health

The amazing race

One of the Israeli TV channels broadcasts a reality show called 'the race to the million', a licensed version of the American TV show, 'The amazing race'. The prize from the American show is $1 million dollars, whereas the winners of the Israeli show win only NIS 1 million (about four times less) and in reality, only NIS 750,000 after tax is paid. Such is life. This is the only reality show that I can watch parts of without breaking out with a rash. This is not the sort of TV programme that I would normally write about, but the current episodes display a puzzle that I thought I would share here.

There are three jerrycans: one holding 10 litres, one holding 7 litres and one holding 3 litres. The 10 litre jerrycan is full of petrol. The puzzle is to obtain one jerrycan holding 5 litres petrol (without spilling any, of course).

In order to show the steps, I'll use the following table, where the three columns at the end show the contents of the three jerrycans after the action has been taken. Instead of writing 'the 10 litre jerrycan' or similar every time, I'll label the jerrycans A, B and C.

Action	10 l (A)	7 l (B)	3 l (C)
Initialisation	10	0	0
Move 3 from A to C	7	0	3
Move 3 from C to B	7	3	0
Move 3 from A to C	4	3	3
Move 3 from C to B	4	6	0
Move 3 from A to C	1	6	3
Move 1 from C to B*	1	7	2
Move 7 from B to A	8	0	2
Move 2 from C to B	8	2	0
Move 3 from A to C	5	2	3

* This is the critical step in my opinion. Every other move uses the full capacity of whichever jerrycan is being used (normally C); this is this only step with a different amount.

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As can be seen, this blog uses a 'spoiler' button. I had great difficulty with getting this to work; as far as I can understand, the button works when viewed after 'publication', which is what all visitors to the blog can see. But the button doesn't work when I am writing the blog nor when I am previewing it. I'm leaving this note to myself for the next time that I use a 'spoiler' button.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
47	13/08/2006	Graduation show	Fairport Convention, Canterbury sound, Bar mitzva, Music festivals
1065	13/08/2017	Road 38 is brought into the 21th century!	Personal
1251	13/08/2019	Night walking (2)	Walking
1414	13/08/2021	Back to the graveyard	Kibbutz, Father

Genesis of a new song

Last Saturday (3 Aug), I thought that I would try out the guitar interface that I recently bought. I connected the guitar to the interface and the interface to my mobile computer, then started playing around. I hit on a slightly unusual chord sequence that features the Bb6/9 chord (shown below); if I remember correctly, this chord is used in 'Blue river'.

After recording sixteen bars of chords, I tried recording a tune over what I was playing. Here I discovered that either the interface or the computer has long latency (i.e. the amount of time between playing a note and hearing it played back). This made recording over a previously recorded track impossible. 

The chord sequence itself was interesting, so I started transcribing it into the MIDI sequencer. Transcribing the chords was not a problem, but when I started transcribing what I thought the melody was, it seemed not to fit a 4/4 bar. This might well be due to the fact that I'm not very skilled at transcribing note durations - I'll enter a phrase into the sequencer, play it back then fiddle with it until it sounds like what I imagined in my head. OK, I said to myself, maybe the time signature should be 5/4; why not - this will make it even more interesting.

At first I sequenced the notes of the tune using what I could call the 'Mission Impossible' (MI) rhythm: two dotted crotchets followed by two single crotchets. This is useful if I am turning a song that was previously in 4/4 into 5/4, but now seems a little hackneyed to my ears.

I left the song for a week as I had other things to do. I resumed work on Friday (9 Aug) when I starting improving the quality of the melody by discarding the MI rhythm. I managed to get a certain amount done, but this was proving to be hard, so I started working on an instrumental introduction that also was not based on the MI rhythm.

On Saturday afternoon, I continued work and completed the melody for the verse. I then started building the complete structure of the song: introduction, verse, link, verse, bridge, instrumental, verse, coda. I tried out various combinations of instruments playing different types of accompaniment, but I knew that this would be temporary as everything would change once I imported the MIDI file into Reason.

A few hours later, I had an idea: there was an arpeggio that was 'originally' played on the vibraphone, but this didn't sound too good so I moved it to a Rhodes electric piano. My idea was to take this arpeggio and distribute it between three single voice synths, where one is panned centre, one panned hard left and one panned hard right. The effect was so good in Reason that I used the arpeggios more frequently in the arrangement and reduced the amount of background pad.

And this is currently where the song stands. I'll listen to it over the next week or so, both in order to imagine improvements in the arrangement, and also to start writing words.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
616	12/08/2013	Puzzle	Puzzles
750	12/08/2014	Robin Williams, RIP	Films, Obituary
1655	12/08/2023	Eli, continued	ERP, Obituary
1656	12/08/2023	Walk exactly 3,967 steps in a day	Walking

1,800 blogs

I know that the 1,700^th was written on the final day of 2023, so it's easy to see that the following 100 blogs were written in slightly less than seven and a half months. That's a bit faster than normal, although it helped that I had two holidays this year, which is when I blog daily. Here's the 'league table':

Position	Tag	Count	Previous position	All time position
1	Holiday	14	37	3
2	Italy	11	-	9
3	Obituary	9	10	7
4	Computer	8	31	18
5	Kibbutz	8	16	17
6	Pedal board	8	-	98
7	Personal	8	5	4
8	DBA	7	-	2
9	Guitars	6	7	32
10	Musical group	5	4	47
11	Song writing	5	8	12
12	Delphi	4	14	6
13	Greece	4	-	31
14	Jasmine Myra	4	-	168
15	Literature	4	40	22
16	Milan	4	-	172
17	Programming	4	13	1
18	Swimming	4	11	38
19	Varenna	4	-	179
20	Cooking	3	-	8
21	Grandfather	3	-	39
22	Health	3	1	5
23	Home recording	3	38	43
24	Kindle	3	39	44
25	Kobo	3	-	198

All of the above shows that for any eight month period (or at least, the last two), the topics that interest me can change wildly. All time leader 'programming' is only at position 17 this time around, although it should be said that I've written several entries on the 'other' blog about programming in Priority. In all time second place is DBA although this will probably not appear again. At least all time bronze medal winner, 'holiday', has moved up to first place after last year's dismal showing. Mind you, I can't see myself going on holiday again in the coming eight months, so again this tag will drop out.

57 distinct tags were used in this hundred blogs, by chance the same number as the previous hundred.

From the 'learn something new every day' department: while researching the previous positions in the above table, I found myself wishing for a 'find' function in the blog program. Out of curiosity I pressed control+F and to my delight a kind of 'find' dialog box popped up. I suppose that this is not too surprising had I thought about this as the table is displayed in an instance of the TWebBrowser component that is a mini-web browser.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
46	11/08/2006	Bruford live DVD from 1979	Canterbury sound
100	11/08/2007	Cropredy festival	Richard Thompson, Fairport Convention, Music festivals
190	11/08/2009	Moving office	Personal
1064	11/08/2017	One second of fame	Personal, Kibbutz
1654	11/08/2023	Yet another black Friday - Eli Granit, RIP	Personal, Obituary

Friday night at the Newmans

Last night we held my postponed 68^th birthday celebration and above appear two of the pictures. On the left, Romy is examining the dog's 'socks' while the dog looks on, interested in seeing what mischief Romy can get up to. On the right hand side we have the other two grandchildren and their 'birthday cards'.

Yesterday I nominally swam 21 lengths, but as I lost count twice, it could quite easily be 23 or even 25 lengths. Judging by how tired I was for the rest of the day, 25 lengths is a distinct possibility. Today I swam a tidy 24.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
99	10/08/2007	Nothing new under the sun	TV series, Skins, The Simpsons
1063	10/08/2017	Friend leaving work	Personal, Fairport Convention, Theanine
1653	10/08/2023	Robbie Robertson, RIP	Obituary, The Band

Pedal board at the beginning of August 2024

I made an addition to my guitar pedalboard today so I thought that I would document it. I've just noticed that in the same way that Hebrew is written and read from right to left, the pedalboard is laid out with the signal flow going from right to left. Interesting.

On the far right is a metallic looking pedal; on its right hand side is something blue that is not easy to identify: this is a wireless receiver that replaces a guitar lead.There's a similar looking transmitter that I plug into the guitar. The receiver is plugged into the guitar tuner. The blue cable leaving the tuner goes into a black pedal, my latest acquisition, which is an overdrive pedal. More about this later. The red cable leaving this goes into the octave pedal; the white cable goes into the multi-effects box that is acting more and more like a chorus and delay pedal (I should redefine the presets to make this more useful). The green cable connects the multi-effects box to the tremolo pedal, and finally a guitar plug (barely seen) connects the pedal to the amplifier.

On the power side: the rectangular black box on the top left is the solar power bank, aka portable battery. Although it's difficult to see, there are two usb cables connected to this. The black cable connects to a usb charger - obviously when I want to charge the battery. The white one connects to the thin box on the right of the battery; this is the power distributor. A few black cables can be seen emerging from this box; they go to the power sockets on the cables. The new pedal came with its own power cable; one end has a standard plug for powering a pedal whereas the other end was a usb plug. The 'documentation' that came with the pedal was extremely uninformative and seems to be suitable for several pedals. As this cable seems to hint that the pedal needs more power than other pedals, I used the supplied cable to power it. The distributor has a usb socket on the far right end, so I plugged this cable in there.

I don't really need an overdrive pedal; in fact, I was sure that I had ordered a compressor, so I was somewhat surprised when I opened the box containing the pedal. As far as I can see, this is a rebranding (or a non-branding) of the Joyo overdrive pedal that itself is a version of other overdrive pedals. The control layout is slightly different on my pedal and fortunately it is matte black as opposed to the somewhat garish Joyo pedal. It cost me all of 80 NIS; the fruugo site is selling it for a mere 189 NIS + 9 NIS shipping, only almost two and a half times the price that I paid.

I found an interesting site with a review of the pedal. I don't imagine that I'll be using the pedal when I'm playing chords, which is most of the time, but I'll try and find a setting that gives me a little amount of 'dirt' or 'grit' as I would prefer to call it.

I've been watching several YouTube videos about pedals recently. I've noticed that in most of these, the guitar is far louder than the accompanying drums and bass, and especially with chorus, phaser or flanger pedals, the music played is very 'airy' that allows the effect to be heard clearly. I haven't seen many videos of someone demonstrating a pedal whilst playing rhythm guitar in a loud band, which is not exactly an occasion for subtlety in the sound.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
501	08/08/2012	Back to normal (well, almost normal)	Health
749	08/08/2014	Twenty five years ago	Personal
1249	08/08/2019	Night walking	Walking
1330	08/08/2020	Masked songs	Kibbutz

Agriculture

Late yesterday afternoon, the kibbutz's business directorate, of which I am a member, took a 'field trip' into the fields of the kibbutz to see some of the developments that we have been discussing and approving over the past few years. It makes a change to go out and see the reality of topics that we see only as numbers and promises.

First off was the new water filtering plant that supplies water to all our crops as well as to those of neighbouring settlements. The water is sourced from waste water, mainly from Jerusalem, that runs down the hills to a primary filtering plant. We take water from there and filter it again, producing secondary reclaimed water (I don't know what the correct term for this is in English) that is used for crops such as cotton, vineyards and sweet corn. The improvement that we saw yesterday is a further filtering system that produces tertiary reclaimed water; this is used for our new crops of vegetables and melons: plants whose fruit is close to the ground. The extra filtering allows us to charge a higher price for the water and so is a good source of income. Delivering the water is dependent upon a maze of long distance pipes and pumps; there are plans to deliver water to settlements 40 km from us.

From there we travelled along bumpy paths until we came to fields that have melons and cabbages growing in them. These are new crops for us and became possible only because of the tertiary filtered water (I don't remember whether we decided first to build the plant that allowed us to grow the crops or that in deciding to grow the crops, we needed to build the plant). These are crops that need to be harvested by hand, a problem in these troubled times. The sewing of the crops was staggered in order to prevent the harvesting being overwhelmed and also to provide for a longer marketing period. The fields will be used for something else next year in order to allow for crop rotation, which is a problem when growing vegetables.

From there we travelled further and further away until we came to a huge area filled solely with metal stands (we don't have hedge rows in the British sense that divide fields); this is where a new vineyard will be planted in the coming days. As opposed to previous vineyards that we have had that grew grapes for wine, these grapes are intended for eating and so there will be several varieties. Although these vineyards will be planted over a period of time, the staggering is less important as the grapes will only be picked and marketed for the first time in another four years.

I have to admit that being in these fields for the first time reminded me of the 1980s in my first kibbutz where in the spring we used to get up early and go out in the cotton fields to weed the cotton seedlings manually. I also have a very wispy memory of vineyards - maybe we trimmed them by hand?

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
45	05/08/2006	Eilat activities	Israel, Holiday
747	05/08/2014	Information quality	DBA
1652	05/08/2023	Dead Sea weekend	Israel, Personal, Holiday

Birthday blues

In one of the minority of my songs where the words are more important than the music, I wrote the following lyric eight years ago.

There was a time when the sky was grey
And nothing seemed to go your way
That was the time when hope withdrew
And friends faded from your view
The word was out that your shares were down
No wonder you always wore a frown
You thought that nothing could go right
You'd struggle hard but would lose the fight

Take a breath and look around
Smell the breeze and hear the sound
Of rustling wind and birds in trees
Life's not as bad as you think it seems
Take your chances one by one
Make your winnings as they come
See the possibilities
In living as you choose to please

Times change, options arise
Go forth and take life on a high

This is the year when your dreams come true
When worries vanish like the morning dew
This is the year when it all works out
When finally you can banish doubt
This is the year for having fun
When you show the world all the work you've done
This is the year you reach your goal
When you claim the prize and redeem your soul

Of course, the 'you' of the song is me. Maybe there were some years in which the final verse was relevant, but these days I feel as if I've reverted to the existence defined in the first verse. This certainly isn't the year for having fun, I didn't get the chance to show the world all the work I've done, I didn't reach my goal and I definitely did not claim the prize. Maybe I have redeemed my soul because after all, I am a good person and I have done many good things.

Leaving aside the geopolitics of the past month and year, this has been a very hot summer and we still have another month and a half to go before more temperate weather will arrive. I find the constant heat (most days between 32°C and 36°C at 12 pm) extremely debilitating and I postpone my evening walk until 7 pm, when the sun is lower in the sky although it's still around 30°C.

I am 68 years old today. I should update the description of this blog to "I'm not 68 years old, but rather 22 years old with 46 years' experience". I was making some notes for a new song a week ago, "when I was young, I had the future planned ….. nothing has turned out the way I expected, not much has turned out the way I had wanted". But at the moment I can't achieve the mental state required for writing lyrics. I also don't have any music. 

I'm not grumpy; it's just the constant heat that is reducing my mental capacity.

Healthwise I'm fine as is my wife, but the health of three close family members is worrying, thus taking a hefty mental price from us.

I logged into GMail this morning and noticed balloons floating across my profile picture!

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
273	03/08/2010	Tuna mousse	Cooking
746	03/08/2014	Kindle problems	Kindle
1329	03/08/2020	Musicians that I have heard of who share my birthday	Personal
1522	03/08/2022	My life as multiples of 11	Personal
1650	03/08/2023	67 years old!	Personal
1651	03/08/2023	Middle England, and Israeli partition	Israel, Personal

Linda Lewis

Way back when in the early 1970s, there was a singer who I liked to hear, although generally her material wasn't too much to my taste - Linda Lewis. She died last year and her death sort of made the news. 

Several years ago, I found on YouTube a recording of what I consider to be her best song, "Rock a doodle doo". Unfortunately there were problems with the recording - what was stereo for the first minute suddenly collapsed into mono on the left hand side with nothing on the right. Completely by chance (I was looking for something completely different), I came across a remastered version of this song that has its stereo image corrected.

I have to admit that the lyrics are somewhat cringe inducing and hardly feminist. I've never looked before but I also found the actual (?) lyrics as well; some of them seem incomprehensible. I mean, what does Pop, a bumper, sevens and jeans even mean? This is followed by the sort of thoughts that an adolescent male might have, but not a grown up woman: You're always be in my dreams, You're next to ecstasy, Why don't you notice me? And also

'Cause I got a crunch* for you, baby
I filled with butterflies
Yes, I give up my lunch for you, baby
If you just give me the eye
I wanna rock with you
Rock-a-doodle do
Rock-a-doodle do
Rock-a-doodle do
  

I'm probably an unreconstructed male who can't allow the thought that women might feel the same way about men as men feel about women.

Linda Lewis also has the distinction of being one of the few who played their songs live on 'Top of the Pops'; there exists a version that is quite different, showing Linda playing electric guitar. 

* Surely this should be 'crush'. This makes me doubt the veracity of some of the other lyrics.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
189	02/08/2009	Speed IV	Programming
500	02/08/2012	Still coughing	Health
1061	02/08/2017	Theanine again	Theanine