If John Le Carré were still alive

If John Le Carré were still alive¹, I have no doubt that he would be having a field day with what has been happening between Israel and Lebanon over the past two weeks.

The events of "pager night" and "walkie talkie night" are mind-boggling when one considers how much planning and preparation must have gone into them. The basic idea, the production of the altered pagers, the setting up of an agent/importer who could supply goods to Hezbolla and then inducing the owners to look at them exactly at the right time (and targeting only pagers that were being held) is breath-taking. The planning and preparation as told in Le Carré's "Little drummer girl", painstaking and inventive as they are, are nothing in comparison to what was required for "pager night".

And then of course, the precision bombing of the Beirut compound in which Nasralla was located depended on information apparently supplied by an Iranian mole.

Truth is stranger than fiction!

Internal links
[1] 1365

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
15	30/09/2005	Getting a musical education (2)	The Band
104	30/09/2007	More folktronik	MIDI, Steeleye Span, Fairport Convention, Folktronix, The mythical man-month
888	30/09/2015	Recommended statistics book	DBA, Statistics
1076	30/09/2017	Relaxing foliage	Ambient music, Home movies

Peripheral edema

Over the past few months, I've been suffering from peripheral edema in my right calf and foot. At first I thought it was due to the hot weather and the fact that I sit without moving for several hours a day. I retrieved from the chair factory my foot rest that had been orphaned for the past three and a half years, but using this didn't improve matters. The idea of the foot rest is to give the feet something to press against that is supposed to help fluid return to the rest of the body.

This has happened to me before¹ and the cause was one of my medicines that is intended to lower blood pressure but also has the side effect of fluid retention, so I'm not overly worried about this. My weight also suddenly increased by a kilo about a month and a half ago - this could all be due to excess water. Eventually I decided to see my GP; when I told her about the edema, about my weight, blood pressure (very good) and pulse (rises in the afternoon/evening), she decided first to order new blood tests and an echocardiogram before making any changes in my medicine regime.

The GP is most interested in the level of blood creatinine because this relates to kidney function, but the blood tests didn't show anything decisive (although they could have been better: potassium is a bit high).  Liquid may be pooling in the legs because the kidneys aren't working too well.

The echocardiogram showed nothing abnormal ('normal left ventricular size and systolic function, normal right ventricular size and systolic function, grade 1 mild diastolic dysfunction', etc). I would like to compare it to the previous test from four years ago but the report format is completely different, and although it might seem that my heart has shrunk slightly, I think that this is due to more accurate measuring (or more accurate reporting) than for physiological reasons.

We're just about to enter the New Year and all the attendant festivals (and days off), so it's not immediately clear when I will see the GP. I imagine it will be in another nine days.

Internal links
[1] 1347

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
55	29/09/2006	Donwloading from YouTube	King Crimson, Van der Graaf Generator, Youtube
513	29/09/2012	Watching the dark	DCI Banks, Peter Robinson
1262	29/09/2019	Many rivers to cross	DCI Banks
1340	29/09/2020	Birthday (song)	MIDI
1670	29/09/2023	A new amplifier for a new guitar	Guitars

Where good ideas come from

I am currently rereading this excellent book (WGICF) by Steven Johnson. In Chapter 3, 'The slow hunch', I came across the following passage about 'commonplace' books.

In its most customary form, “commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations.... John Locke first began maintaining a commonplace book in 1652, during his first year at Oxford. Over the next decade he developed and refined an elaborate system for indexing the book’s content. Locke thought his method important enough that he appended it to a printing of his canonical work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Locke’s approach seems almost comical in its intricacy, but it was a response to a specific set of design constraints: creating a functional index in only two pages that could be expanded as the commonplace book accumulated more quotes and observations.

It occurs to me that this very blog is the modern equivalent of 'commonplacing', and I am devoting no small amount of time to develop[ing] and refin[ing[ an elaborate system for indexing the [blog]’s content.

Recently I was considering MDI programs (e.g. the blog manager) as opposed to non-MDI programs (e.g. the documentation manager), although I don't remember the context. I remember thinking that MDI has the great advantage that one can easily traverse all the 'child windows' that are currently open and perform something upon them. The same idea does not exist in non-MDI programs.

Or does it? Rereading the blogs about DOCU¹ for the first time in years (I wrote them twelve years ago), I find the following statement: As DOCU is not an MDI program, another solution is required; Delphi stores all on screen forms in the 'forms' property of the 'screen' variable. Apparently once I knew this but I've forgotten. So maybe there is an alternative to MDI. So there is value to my 'commonplace' blog - as if I ever doubted it.

Reading a few pages further on in WGICF, I come across Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web. This leads me to the idea of including forward references in the blog manager program; for example, if blog #1787 ("Pedalboard power supply problems") references blog #1725 ("The Dublin murder squad"), then a forward reference would have #1725 referencing #1787. This would be trivial to implement, but I wonder what value this would have. I note that several very interesting developments in the OP's "ERP" program came about from me hacking without regard to the usage of those hacks, and some of them have proved very useful. So I'll throw it in and wait for a future need to occur. 

The tag system provides a way of finding blogs connected to the same topic, but sometimes that topic can be very wide - for example, at the moment there are 188 blogs tagged as 'programming' but those blogs are paired with another 73 distinct tags. Sometimes this is due to having a blog that discusses two completely different topics (for example there are four blogs tagged both 'programming' and 'Randy Newman', one of which is a mistake), and sometimes this is a narrowing of the term, with co-tags like Delphi, office automation and SQL.

Another quote from WGICF about serendipity is appropriate here: But how do you get those particular clusters of neurons to fire at the right time? One way is to go for a walk. The history of innovation is replete with stories of good ideas that occurred to people while they were out on a stroll. (A similar phenomenon occurs with long showers or soaks in a tub; in fact, the original “eureka” moment—Archimedes hitting upon a way of measuring the volume of irregular shapes—occurred in a bathtub.) The shower or stroll removes you from the task-based focus of modern life—paying bills, answering e-mail, helping kids with homework—and deposits you in a more associative state. How many times have I written here that I reached an impasse that was solved by taking the dog for a walk or having a shower? Removing myself from the keyboard helps in finding solutions to programming problems.

I see that I have not created a tag for Steven Johnson - inexplicable (and neither does a full text search find him referenced in this blog, although it found Boris Johnson and Bob Johnson). His book "How we got to now" was the first of his that I ever read and it is amazing in how it traces how a solution to one problem created all kinds of solutions to other problems, where it appears that there is no connection whatsoever between them. 

The book begins with glass - a prehistoric deposit of glass created by nature in Libya intrigued and delighted all those who knew of its existence. But mankind had to wait until it was capable of building furnaces that could heat sand to high temperatures (over 1000°F) before one could make glass. Once there was glass, there were lenses, then telescopes (and that caused a huge scientific and religious revolution when Galileo discovered moons circling Jupiter), mirrors (causing a paradigm shift in art now that people could see what they looked like, and artists began painting self-portraits) then there was photography, then fibreglass, originally for building but later for communication purposes. You get the picture.

Internal links
[1] 520

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
14	28/09/2005	Something special - Delphi rules!	Programming, Delphi, Randy Newman
289	28/09/2010	Malta log #1	Holiday, Malta
290	28/09/2010	Malta log #2	Holiday, Father, Malta
636	28/09/2013	Reading books	Films, Literature, Beatles
637	28/09/2013	More afterwords (My gap year, part 8)	Gap year, Old recordings
1075	28/09/2017	Train journey to Karmiel	Trains
1176	28/09/2018	Walking the dog leads to epiphanies	DBA
1261	28/09/2019	Understanding the UNLINK command in Priority	Priority tips
1669	28/09/2023	The amateur nutrionist	Health, Nutrition

Searching

In the past few months, I've often felt the need for the ability to search my blog database looking for a word in a blog's title. This was very simple to program, although I had problems with quotation marks. The key line to this is split into two: first, the clause '[and] 'entries.name like :p6' is added to the query, then the value of the parameter :p6 is defined as parambyname ('p6').asstring:= '%' + edTitle.Text + '%'; I've done this before in at least one other program, so I knew where to look when I became muddled.

A more intriguing functionality would be the possibility of searching the text of the various blogs for some phrase. At first I was very wary of this as I suspected that it would be very difficult. First of all, there's the population to be considered (i.e. which blogs to search); I didn't want every search to be over the entire database, so I hit upon a scheme by which the results of a blog search (by date, tag, number and now title) would serve as the search population. Then I realised that the search would be very easy, using the built-in function pos that returns the position of a sub-string within a larger string. The sub-string is the search string, and the larger string is the text of each blog. If a match were found - I don't care where - then the blog number would be entered into a new instance of the temp table and eventually the same ShowEntries form would be displayed, showing those blogs whose text contains the search string.

Coding this turned out to be more simple - or at least, quicker - than coding the 'find title' code. I was concerned about the time it would take to run such a query so initially I worked on a population consisting only of two blogs. This was very fast. I then ran a query looking for the word 'guitar' on all the blogs of this month; the first few queries returned were obviously concerned with guitars, but where was the connection between 'Is this the government that we deserve?' ¹ and guitars? It took me several minutes to realise that the search had found the target word in the 'This day in history' section! This convinced me that the code 'knew what it was doing' and that I could rely on it.

As it happens, a few days earlier I had been going through older blogs and came across the phrase 'Following the recent entry about Gillian McPherson'; unfortunately this hadn't been linked so I didn't know when 'the recent entry' was. I ran a new query on all the blogs in the database (1826), although had I been a bit more discerning then I would have noticed that there was no point in including blogs written after that specific blog. I barely had time to say 'Jack Robinson' when the results popped up. That was fast!

I've written before about ideas migrating from the OP's "ERP" management program to the blog manager program and vice versa. I considered what I could do with this new capability of searching text. One possibility is adding it to the module that tracks calls with customers. Then I remembered that we have often felt the need for searching text in the documentation program (I just used the 'search title' functionality to find these blogs), so I set about adding it to this program.

As opposed to the blog manager, it took me a long time to get this working in DOCU. There were two problems that exist with this program that don't exist in the blog manager: the first was table structures (I was searching on a wrong parameter which is why many early tests failed), but more importantly, the text is saved not as text but as rich text, so this had to be decoded before the search worked. Eventually I found the correct sequence of commands and now we have full text search there. 

I've just remembered a third problem that held me up for a long time: even though I had added a new button that would execute the full text search, every single time the 'by title' search was executed. Eventually I found what the problem was: the edit box in which one wrote the search phrase had an OnExit handler that called the 'by title' search, so this bypassed the new functionality.

All three of these problems stem from my unfamiliarity with the code; I haven't looked at the source for a couple of years. I still would have had to convert rich text to standard text, but it wouldn't have taken me so long to realise why the searches weren't working.

The dimming hack won't work in DOCU because there isn't really a main window in the sense of the blog manager. This program is not MDI but is an attempt at writing something similar without MDI; as a result, windows can be opened all over the screen, and z-order is maintained by using the 'sendtoback' and 'sendtofront' methods.

Internal links
[1] 1822
[2] 518

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
1260	27/09/2019	Blood test results	Health
1531	27/09/2022	More statistical analysis	Programming, Statistics, Psychology

Dim the main application form when a modal dialog box is displayed

I don't remember how I stumbled upon this web page, but the idea of dimming the main form is quite interesting. To give a quick explanation: whenever a modal dialog is displayed, apparently a message gets sent to a program's main form; this message causes a predefined dialog to appear that 'dims' whatever windows the program is currently displaying. When the modal dialog closes, another message gets sent that causes the dimming window to hide itself. Modal dialogs stop the program from working until they are closed so they should be used sparingly¹.

There is a minor bug with this code - in the 'Display' procedure, reference is made to 'MainForm', but it is not mentioned that one has to include the main form in the unit's 'uses' clause. I found what is virtually the same code elsewhere: here the 'main form' bug is handled by calling 'Display' with the calling form as a parameter.

Both versions of this code use the OnModalBegin and OnModalEnd methods of the TApplicationEvents component; unfortunately I discovered that the version of TApplicationEvents defined in the Delphi version that I use (the old but excellent version 7) lacks these methods. So how could I write something that would achieve the same effect with the tools that I have?

My first version went as follows: I went through the test program (the blog manager, not that it matters) looking for calls to 'showmodal' - there are five or six scattered throughout the program. I bracketed these calls with two calls to SendMessage that would send a message to the Dimmer form. When the program starts up, the Dimmer form saves its handle in a variable in the data module, so every form in the program can send a message to the Dimmer form without the form having to be declared as used by each form (itself an interesting idea).

procedure TDimmerForm.FormCreate(Sender: TObject);
begin
  AlphaBlend:= true;
  AlphaBlendValue:= 128;
  BorderStyle:= bsNone;
  dimhandle:= handle;     // this variable is saved in the data module
end; 

procedure TDimmerForm.DefaultHandler(var Message);
begin
 case TMessage (Message).msg of
  SC_startdim: show;
  SC_enddim: hide;
  else inherited DefaultHandler (Message);
  end;
end;

...
in a calling form -
sendmessage (dimhandle, SC_startdim, 0, 0);
showmodal;
sendmessage (dimhandle, SC_enddim, 0, 0);
...

As can be seen, I didn't bother with a 'display' procedure; as I know that the entire program is maximised/full screen, the dimmer form is also set to be maximised and is simply shown or hidden.This system worked although it was somewhat tedious to add all those sendmessages. I thought that there should be a simpler solution, and indeed there is.

In the data module that also functions as a library holding functions, procedures and queries that are used at least once by other parts of the program, I added a new function as shown below.

Function MyShowModal (sender: tobject): integer;
begin
 DimmerForm.Show;
 result:= TForm (sender).ShowModal;
 DimmerForm.Hide;
end;

The dimmer form appears only in the 'uses' clause of the data module; no other form knows of its existence. As a result, I can call the dimmer form directly by its automatically defined form variable which normally gets deleted. I then replaced all the appearances of 'showmodal' with 'myshowmodal (self)' with the global replace function, compiled (no errors) and ran the program. Every time a modal form appears (which actually is not very often in the blog manager program), everything behind it is dimmed.

Neat but ultimately useless. This is what can be termed 'eye candy'.

Internal links
[1] 225

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
287	26/09/2010	Prague log #4	Holiday, Prague
288	26/09/2010	Prague log #5	Holiday, Prague
635	26/09/2013	More holiday	DBA, Statistics, Sandy Denny, Old recordings
1175	26/09/2018	Turnitin	DBA
1259	26/09/2019	Two important events	DBA, Health
1338	26/09/2020	Priority procedures cross referencer	Programming, Priority tips
1668	26/09/2023	"The great escape", aka "The 7/4 song"	Song writing

The guitar returns

I travelled yesterday morning to Tel Aviv in order to collect the Stagg Tele that had undergone its first setup¹. The guitar looked cleaner and brighter than it did before the setup, so maybe they buffed the body as well as checking the mechanics. New strings gauge 10 were put on the guitar.

I had the chance to check the guitar out immediately as in the evening we had a rehearsal for New Years Eve, next week. I could feel the difference that the slightly heavier strings made - they were more resilient and not so loose. One of the songs that we are playing requires me to place a capo on the first fret; we're playing the song in Bbm and it's much more comfortable to play it as if it were in Am. Not only that, for this song I'm providing a heavily strum sound, as if I were playing an acoustic, and half barre chords don't sound so good in this context. I noticed after I removed the capo that one string was now out of tune; fortunately, this Bbm song is the final song so I won't have to retune before any other song.

Last year² we played four songs, one of which is a 'traditional' New Year song ("12 months" written by Naomi Shemer) and three more modern songs. This year, we continue the tradition of the same New Year song and three new songs (i.e. not those that we played last year). Fortunately these songs are not as complicated as those from before so I won't need a music stand on stage.

The line up for this performance will be the two singers, bass and guitar from our musical group. Joining us is a guest keyboardist who is the partner of a kibbutz member; I don't know how permanent will be his presence in the kibbutz. He is a much better player than our current keyboardist so there may be some problems in the future. Our drummer will be unavailable so we may have a guest drummer.

Internal links
[1] 1818
[2] 1662

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
202	25/09/2009	Defining my laptop computer's wireless IP settings	Computer
286	25/09/2010	Terezin	Holiday, Holocaust, Terezin
634	25/09/2013	Emigration	Israel, Kibbutz
1174	25/09/2018	It was 40 years ago today	Israel, Personal
1339	25/09/2020	Accordion	Musical instruments
1530	25/09/2022	Two films	Films
1667	25/09/2023	Emigration day	Israel, Personal

Latest ideas for the 'blog manager' program

The more I use this program, the more ideas I have for improving it. As I have written before, it's a shame that I'm the only person using the program (although if anyone else wants to use it for their own blogs, then I'm open to distributing it), but some of the ideas expressed have migrated to the OP's "ERP" program, such as displaying the contents of a popup menu on a status bar. This morning I decided to create a new 'blog manager program' tag (or as Blogger calls them, 'label') in order to find more easily entries about this program and not about the blogs themselves.

Sometimes Blogger doesn't send me automatic mail with the contents of my latest blog - this seems to be a random event and fortunately is not frequent. In the cases where there isn't an automatic mail, I copy the blog text into a letter and send it to myself, so that I can export the contents to an HTML file. In one of the more recent blogs of this nature, I noticed that there was text aligned with a picture as appears here¹; normally in the exported file, the picture appears first then the text appears below it. I wondered what was causing the text to align with the picture and found the magic HTML spell

<A style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 1em; FLOAT: left; CLEAR: left; MARGIN-RIGHT: 1em"

I read that "The float property specifies whether an element should float to the left, right, or not at all" (although this doesn't define what 'floating' is). So there you go. I saw how I can identify where this style command should be added to the HTML text, so I added it to the code that imports the HTML code into my program. To my mild surprise, it worked first time, so I don't have to bother doing this manually.

Another improvement, which actually is a chain of improvements, is concerned with internal links². The previous blogs were mainly writing about reading in new blogs and creating the links automatically, but I'm also concerned with adding manually links to old blogs. Here my process wasn't very streamlined: I would read an entry and see that there was an internal blog referenced, so I would open up the source of the entry, see which blog was being referenced and add the necessary <sup> links. Then I would open up the 'internals' form and add the referenced link. My first improvement was to add to the 'show source' dialog five speedbuttons: these are numbered 1-5, and pressing one of them will add code like ¹ to the source at the correct place. That's 12 characters that don't have to be typed (especially as my fingers will often type 'sus' instead of 'sup').

But I still had to add the number of the blog being referenced, so now pressing a speedbutton not only adds the HTML code but also brings up the 'define internals' dialog, automatically adding the reference number to the correct place. After I add the number of the blog being referenced, the 'define internals' dialog closes, but at the moment it is also closing the 'show source' dialog and the added tags are not being saved. I don't understand why this is happening, but I'm sure I'll figure out a solution. I would prefer a proper solution (that displays understanding of the problem) but I may just add an ad hoc solution.

[Edit] I quickly found the problem. The 'show source' dialog was defined as a standard dialog box instead of being an MDI child dialog. Once I changed the 'formstyle' property, added the missing border icons and an OnClose handler, this form worked as it should.

Internal links
[1] 1823
[2] 1808

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
283	22/09/2010	Prague log #2	Holiday, Prague
1171	22/09/2018	A framework for the successful implementation of enhancements	DBA

More on seventh chords, along with the whole tone scale

Just under a year ago, I presented¹ a table with various seventh chords. To recap, a seventh chord has four notes (root, third, fifth, seventh), and so has three intervals, where each interval can be either a minor or a major third. I also wrote about the 7#5 chord, saying that it sounds like an enhanced dominant seventh chord and I also mentioned the 7b5 chord, although I didn't say much about it.

I've just watched a David Bennett Piano video in which these chords appear; not in the context of denoting seventh chords but rather in the context of the whole tone scale. There are only two whole tone scales, so it makes little sense to talk about the 'C whole tone scale' or the 'D whole tone scale' - these 'scales' contain the same notes, but one starts on C and the other starts on D. The other whole tone scale, by the way, contains the six notes that are not in this scale, and would start on C# or D#.

What's the connection between this scale and 7#5 chords? Let's say that we're playing C7#5 - the notes would be C E G# Bb, or enharmonically C E G# A#. The C whole tone scale contains the notes C D E F# G# A# - in other words, four of the six notes in the C whole tone scale are contained with the C7#5 chord, and so using the whole tone scale to solo over this chord would make a great deal of sense. The same is true for the C7b5 chord - F# replaces the G#.

Unfortunately, as I noted in the earlier blog, I've only rarely used the 7#5 chord and I strongly doubt that I've ever used the 7b5 chord. Should I do so in a future song, I will remember to use the whole tone scale to accompany it.

Internal links
[1] 1681

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
408	21/09/2011	Firebird DB management tool - continuing the story	Programming, SQL, dbExpress
633	21/09/2013	Quiet perks	Films, Literature, Introversion, Prague, Social intelligence
759	21/09/2014	Grilled chicken breast	Cooking
1170	21/09/2018	Vinyl log #30 - 21 September	Sandy Denny, Vinyl log, Peter Hammill
1426	21/09/2021	Dave Evans, RIP	Obituary, Dave Evans
1427	21/09/2021	A song of changes	Swell Season, Song writing, Home recording, Song videos

You can all join in - very long term mystery solved

Way way back in 1970, in the wake of 'Nice enough to eat'¹, I bought a copy of its elder brother, the first Island sampler, 'You can all join in'. I have the feeling that I bought this second hand, not that it matters. I preferred NETE as YCAJI was more jazzy and more bluesy, although there were some excellent tracks on this album as well. I remember being at the house of my hockey playing friend, Chris King, and saying "I wish I could write songs like that" when hearing Fairport's 'Meet on the ledge'.

The cover features artists who appear on the record. The easiest to identify is Sandy Denny, but at the time I could also recognise three members of Free (at the front), Ashley Hutchings and Ian Matthews of Fairport, Ian Anderson (Jethro Tull), Steve Winwood (Traffic) and Mike Harrison (Spooky Tooth). 

But there was always one face that eluded me: who is the guy with glasses and mustache near the front? At one stage I thought that it was Hugh Hopper, but he played with the Soft Machine and wasn't signed to Island. I admit that I haven't given this any thought for the past 54 years....

Online music magazine Siiye devotes issue 86 to sampler albums, including YCAJI, NETE, 'Bumpers' and many more. A map of the people is shown on page 15, so finally I could find out who that musician was. Whilst writing this blog, I accessed the sampler's page at Wikipedia, where the same map and key is shown. So who is number 16?

To my immense (and double) surprise, apparently this is Ian A. Anderson - not Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson, who is also pictured, but Ian A. Why the double surprise? Firstly, Anderson was not signed to Island records and was not in any of the groups featured on the record (see footnote 9 on the wiki page). Secondly, I was to meet IAA several times², maybe not in 1970, but certainly in 1971-3. Obviously YCAJI was not on my mind in those days.

Internal links
[1] 91
[2] 211

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
102	19/09/2007	Welcome back	Holiday, Santorini, Greece
200	19/09/2009	The Girl with the dragon tattoo (two)	Literature, Ian Rankin, Steig Larsson
632	19/09/2013	Enforced holiday	Personal, Introversion
758	19/09/2014	The dead lie down (Sophie Hannah 2)	TV series, Literature, Olivia Williams
1528	19/09/2022	I held an interview!	DBA

Is this the government that we deserve?

Joseph De Maistre (1753-1821) wrote “Toute nation a le gouvernement qu'elle mérite.” [Every nation gets the government it deserves.] I wish that were true, but at the moment in Israel, we certainly don't deserve the current government that is generally regarded as its worst and certainly the most extreme that this young country has ever known. The task of the government is to improve the lot of its population: whilst it might have improved the lot of maybe 10% of Israel's population but for the rest of us, it's taken us maybe twenty years into the past.

The current outrage is plan to fire (once again¹) the defence minister, not because he is bad but because he is too good and does not agree with the Prime Minister. So much for having a democratic government when the real decisions depend on two extremists, Ben Gvir and Smotrich, and eventually on the wife of the Prime Minister. Who elected her????

I cannot understand the other ministers of the Likud party. Have they lost their consciences (assuming that they had a conscience to begin with) or are they too mainly consumed with retaining their position? After 7 October, the Justice (sic) minister felt very bad about the fact that the reforms (sic) that he initiated to ruin the country's judicial system gave our enemies the false belief that Israeli society is so split that it can't function effectively. That bad feeling didn't last very long because he soon returned² to the public stage.

And as for Gideon Sa'ar, the man who is touted to join the government as defence minister (despite having no military background) - he used to be full of integrity. The tv news last night showed several clips of him from the past few years saying that he would never sit [again] in the same government as Netanyahu, and even showed a clip of him signing a document to this effect. I and probably many others do not understand his being open to 'dance with the devil' again despite having spoken many times against this.

Well, we have always been at war with Eastasia³.

Somehow we have to endure another two years of this government, paradoxically the only one in the past 20 years that will serve a complete term.

Internal links
[1] 1596
[2] 1701
[3] 1563

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
199	17/09/2009	The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo	Literature, Steig Larsson
977	17/09/2016	Obligatory monthly grandfather picture	Grandfather
1072	17/09/2017	Interface for importing XML files into Priority	Priority tips
1168	17/09/2018	Maartin Allcock, 1957-2018	Obituary, Fairport Convention
1664	17/09/2023	The GI tract and the new guitar	Guitars, Musical group, Nutrition

A gentleman in Moscow

Probably like many other people in the world at this moment, I am strolling through the book 'A gentleman in Moscow' by Amor Towles. I am quite enjoying the book even though I don't understand what the story is about (other than describing the life of the eponymous gentleman). To put it concisely, I haven't figured out yet 'what the point of the book is'.

The book was turned into a television series that is being shown on Israeli TV at the moment. I missed the first episode but caught the second; what I saw seems to have little connection to the book itself.

But that's not why I am writing this. I came across the following interchange in the chapter "Arachne's art" which is in book three, set in 1930. It's a conversation between the eponymous gentleman (Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov) and a seamstress, Marina.

“It’s just that to hear Nina talk of her upcoming journey, she is so passionate, so self-assured, and perhaps so single-minded, that she seems almost humorless. Like some dauntless explorer, she seems ready to place her flag in a polar ice cap and claim it in the name of Inevitability. But I can’t help suspecting that all the while, her happiness may be waiting in another latitude altogether.”

“Come now, Alexander. Little Nina must be nearly eighteen. Surely, when you were that age you and your friends spoke with passion and self-assurance.”

“Of course we did,” said the Count. “We sat in cafés and argued about ideas until they mopped the floors and doused the lights.”

“Well, there you are.”

“It’s true that we argued about ideas, Marina; but we never had any intention of doing anything about them.” [emphasis mine]

---

Thinking back on my ideological youth, as I do quite frequently, I am struck by that final sentence. Did my comrades (to use a suitable word from the book) feel that way, that they had no intention of doing anything about the ideas that were argued so passionately? The older I get, the more I wonder about my youth. Was I the wise, or at least dutiful, one who believed in what we were talking, or was I the fool for believing in those ideas?

Maybe it's because I was working again on 'Looking for this tribe'¹ that I remember how little I had in common either with my fellow students or with those with whom I worked during my industrial placements during the 1970s (the "ideological years"). Not having a close family meant that I didn't have any supporting community except that of my friends in the bubble, and so I had to fulfill the ideas.

Internal links
[1] 1726

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
9	15/09/2005	Migraine	Migraine
406	15/09/2011	Planning the SQL	Delphi, SQL, Firebird
511	15/09/2012	My father's 90th birthday	Personal, Father
1663	15/09/2023	Cropping videos	Home movies, Musical group

Remixing 'Tribe'

On and off, I've been listening to 'the new album' via the stereo system in the living room. I have to say that some of the songs sound a bit 'samey' so I thought that I would remix one. At first I thought that the most 'samey' song was 'Another sleepless night'¹ but then I realised that the song that needed work was 'Looking for his tribe'². 

The first thing that I did was delay the entrance of the live guitar until the first bridge; this opens up the opening verses. Then I changed the sound of the instrument playing the solos; this was a pipe organ but in the living room it sounds very undistinguished, so this was replaced with a spacey sounding synth. The opening four bars weren't very good, so I replaced the string pad playing the opening chords with arpeggiated harp.

The most radical change was dropping out all of the MIDI instruments (save drums) for the second bridge; this is now accompanied solely by live guitar. But to spice this up, I created a harmony vocal that adds a little variety.

Unfortunately, creating a new mix for this specific song means that I have to create a new video and upload this new video to YouTube.

Internal links
[1] 1778
[2] 1727

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
281	14/09/2010	A twilight health stage	Health
405	14/09/2011	Firebird DB management	Programming, Delphi, Firebird
510	14/09/2012	Happy New Year!	Jewish holidays
974	14/09/2016	Intermediate submission accepted!	DBA
1662	14/09/2023	A long, long day	Jewish holidays, Health, Guitars, Musical group

Vaccinations

Almost exactly six months ago, I had my first (of two) vaccination for shingles; there's been quite an amount of raising public attention for this in the past few years. Indeed, my dentist tells me that she had a case of shingles recently as did my dental hygienist. Anyway, the vaccination was painless and I had no side effects. Maybe two months ago I had a vaccination against pneumonia; I was vaccinated five and a half years ago after my last case¹ of pneumonia, and I thought that I was now covered. No, the nurse said: then you were younger than 65 and now there's a new vaccine for the over 65s. Again, the vaccination was painless and without side effects.

So I wasn't expecting anything different when I had my second and final vaccination for shingles yesterday. How wrong could I be. This time I felt a little twinge during the vaccination itself, and by the evening my arm was aching slightly when I raised it. I didn't have a good night's sleep, tossing and turning, so when I got up this morning I wasn't feeling particularly spry. I had two recurring dreams: one was trying to explain to someone the all-white key scale that starts on F (this is F Lydian, with the sharpened fourth, but I couldn't remember the word 'lydian' in the dream), and one was about improving something in the management program (it's already been improved so my ideas were for naught).

I was fairly worn out after walking the dog around the kibbutz then shopping; I realised that there was no way in which I could go swimming as I was totally drained. Numerous cups of tea and the odd sandwich have sustained me until now, 24 hours after the vaccination, when I am starting to feel normal again. My wife (who was vaccinated along with me) has had similar symptoms. Fortunately I didn't have anything to do today (the OP is on holiday in Romania) so I could just "veg out" in front of the television.

Internal links
[1] 1203

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
201	13/09/2009	Using dbExpress - conclusions	Programming, Firebird, dbExpress
509	13/09/2012	The Ministry of Health enquires about MY health	Health
887	13/09/2015	New Year greetings	Jewish holidays, Israel, Kibbutz
1424	13/09/2021	Potassium levels in food	Health, Food science

Guitar setup

I took the Stagg Tele to Tel Aviv today for a setup.  I bought¹ it almost exactly one year ago so now is a good time for a professional to have a look at it. I wouldn't dare do it by myself with my three left hands. 'The man in the shop' asked which gauge strings I wanted put on the guitar; he suggested using 10s. I explained that originally I had put 10s on but they cut my fingers (even though I have 10s on the Washburn) so I had put on 9s - and these may have caused tuning problems, hence the setup. Looking at the order now, I see that he has charged me for a set of 10s. Changing gauge is also a good reason for getting a setup as the intonation may change slightly.

The price seems very reasonable to me - 250 NIS for the setup (the strings are extra, of course); this is about $66.

I asked to replace the tuners with locking ones; the shop doesn't have any in stock, and these of course will cost extra. I think that the advantages will outweigh the one off cost.

I also asked about replacing the pickguard, as I have noticed all kinds of scratches on it. To my embarrassment, 'the man in the shop' said that it looked as if there was a plastic film on the pickguard that had not been removed, and this film was developing bubbles. Indeed, as the man said, there's a thin plastic film, in the same way that the pickups were originally wrapped in plastic. He'll remove this when replacing the strings.

Internal links
[1] 1662

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
6	11/09/2005	Song uploads	Soundclick
7	11/09/2005	Comments	Meta-blogging
198	11/09/2009	Sandy Denny in "Ma'ariv"	Sandy Denny
404	11/09/2011	Fictional MI5	TV series, John Le Carre, MI5, Stella Rimington
755	11/09/2014	Last of the Luddites	Mobile phone
1167	11/09/2018	New Year holiday	DBA, Personal, Swimming
1257	11/09/2019	Mobile phone problem ... solved	Mobile phone
1421	11/09/2021	Chicken and rice together in one pot (2)	Cooking
1422	11/09/2021	Smart watch (2)	Mobile phone, Walking, Swimming
1527	11/09/2022	The ink black heart (2)	Cormoran Strike

Temu surprises!

Once again, I am surprised by Temu. After writing¹ a week ago about macramé owls and 'arm table clip on trays', that parcel has arrived, delivered to my door! I didn't even receive any advance warning; that large parcel took all of one week to arrive, and also I didn't pay any customs duties, even though the price exceeded $75. I received another parcel yesterday that took maybe two weeks to arrive and it was delivered to the kibbutz 'post office' so I had to walk there in the sweltering heat.

I've got another order ready, also priced around the $75 mark (it depends on which currency exchange rate one uses). The most interesting item for me is, as it happens, the cheapest, and is billed as a 'Reusable Non-Stick BBQ Grill Mat'. I've been thinking about a product like this for some time and I think that I've found what I'm looking for. I won't be using it as a BBQ grill mat, but rather intend to use it within the slow cooker when cooking braised beef: the meat is at the bottom of the cooker, the mat will lie on top of the meat and the vegetables will lie on top of the mat. This way I will have a clean separation of meat and vegetables for serving purposes. The mat shouldn't affect the taste of the meat or vegetables. 

My wife is more picky than I am and she wasn't very pleased with the macramé owls that arrived today: she says that they look more like monsters than owls. So I've had to order more owls, similar but different, causing me to bump an intended purchase of mine to another order for the second time.

Internal links
[1] 1812

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
403	10/09/2011	Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world	Israel
508	10/09/2012	PDF games	Programming, Computer

Weekend observations

• On Friday evening, just after we had finished eating, I heard on the radio "Little umbrellas" by Frank Zappa, from the 'Hot Rats' album. I would never have expected to hear this song on the radio and especially not at the hour at which it was played. Weird.

• In the pool on Saturday morning, I swam 30 lengths. I looked at my records and saw that not only had I swum this distance in the past, but also that a few times in 2019 I had swum 36 lengths. I didn't write about that here, but I did note¹ a few weeks earlier than that record-breaking (for me) swim that I swam 32 lengths . Of course, I was younger then, but also I was swimming only once a week. Now I swim twice a week, so my aggregate distance this year exceeds that of any previous year.

• To finish off the weekend, we held our first band practice for several weeks last night; this was the first chance that I have had to try out the overdrive pedal² that I've arrived a month ago. It is very noisy and dirties the sound excessively, much more than I would like. I only used it on a song that requires noise ('Wonderwall') but this is very disappointing. Maybe I will find a setting that adds overdrive without the attendant noise.

• A few days ago I decided to expand my blog manager program so that I could also maintain data from 'the other blog'. Creating an empty database but with the same structure was easy, primarily because only one table has an autoincrement primary key that had to be set. Getting the program to access the correct database on start up was not straight forward, but I got it to work. Entering the first few blogs was very difficult, as the 'choose tag' dialog box expected values. Somehow I got past this hurdle and now I'm entering the various blog entries. There are only slightly more than a hundred blogs so this shouldn't take long.

• I didn't notice until I had posted my last blog entry on Friday, but 6 September 2005 was when I wrote my first blog. As I wrote then³, What is this blog going to be about? Mainly music (that's why my year of birth is important as it colours my attitudes to music), but also computer programming, books and films. Certainly no politics. Is it going to be interesting? I certainly hope so - as long as you're interested in the same things as I am. I doubt that I have written about films in the past few year, and unfortunately I've had to write about politics, but otherwise, nothing much has changed in the past 19 years.

Internal links
[1] 1252
[2] 1798
[3] 1

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
3	08/09/2005	The Rotters Club	Literature, Canterbury sound
4	08/09/2005	More Hatfield, Jonathan Coe and Ben Trotter	Literature, Canterbury sound, James Taylor
197	08/09/2009	Richard Thompson - You?Me?Us?	Richard Thompson
629	08/09/2013	March-June 1974, my gap year part 6	Israel, Kibbutz, Gap year
1165	08/09/2018	Ikigai - a reason for being	Personal

New goggles

I haven't been happy with my swimming goggles over the past few weeks; they were a cheap pair that I bought several years ago, and tightening them so they don't let in water is becoming more and more of a problem. So I decided to order a new pair from Temu - obviously much cheaper than I could buy locally and better designed.

They arrived at the beginning of the week, and I prevailed upon my wife to remove the bone conduction headphones¹ from the old pair and transfer them to the new ones. Today was my first chance to use them in the pool, and they are far better than the pair that they replace. They fit snugly and I don't have to pull at anything in order to tighten the band.

After coming out of the pool, I decided to take a selfie whilst still wearing the goggles; this came out very well. The headphones can be seen: the one on the right (my left) is hard to see but the other one can be seen clearly. If one looks closely, one can even see the light green pad that actually conducts the music.

Shades (pun not intended but happily accepted) of Blade Runner: one can look into the lenses and see what is behind me. One side shows what apparently is called a 'lifebuoy swim ring' (I've totally forgotten what I would have called this when I was young) and the other side shows a picnic table.

I wouldn't say that the goggles made me swim better, but they certainly aren't hindering me, and after last week's epic swim, I swam slightly more than I normally do on a Friday (I'm limited by time) in less time than I normally do. I am looking forward to tomorrow's swim. The first few lengths are still an effort, but then the machine locks in and the lengths seem to melt away like butter in a frying pan (terrible metaphor).

Internal links
[1] 1587

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
1	06/09/2005	Introduction	Personal
83	06/09/2007	The happiness formula	Psychology, Martin Seligman
399	06/09/2011	At risk	MI5, Stella Rimington, Liz Carlyle
400	06/09/2011	At risk/2	MI5, Stella Rimington, Liz Carlyle
627	06/09/2013	Late November/December 1973: my gap year, part 4	Israel, Kibbutz, Gap year
973	06/09/2016	Central sleep apnea	Health, CPAP
1070	06/09/2017	A legacy of spies 2/How old is George Smiley?	John Le Carre
1336	06/09/2020	What a weekend!	Delphi, Musical instruments, Weather, Swimming
1526	06/09/2022	The ink black heart	Cormoran Strike

Psychology of visits to the doctor

My wife noticed some time ago that there was an array of odd-looking marks on my back, so I made an appointment for the dermatologist. Yesterday I had my appointment; I told her immediately about my back so she examined this first. No actinic keratoses so no liquid nitrogen on the back, but there is one red area that she considers to be a candidate for excision. She's marked this red area as can be seen in the photo on the left. She made no remark about the various brown patches above and to the left which ironically is why I made the appointment in the first place.

Of course, no one leaves the dermatologist without some liquid nitrogen; some went on my forehead and some on my neck, at the same place where I had a BCC removed four years ago¹. 

But that's not really what I'm writing about, but rather about the positive feeling with which I left the dermatologist. Somehow I'm pleased that there is a growth; I recall how bad I felt the first time (in or around 2006) when I was first diagnosed with a BCC (because the word 'cancer' filled me with dread). But now it's as if I'm vindicated that there is something wrong with me. 

If I am not mistaken, the surgeon who will remove this growth is the same doctor who diagnosed my first BCC. I used to see her for a few years then one day when I went to book an appointment, I was told that she had left the sick fund, so I went to another doctor with whom I spent a few years before reaching my 'new' dermatologist. It seems as if my first doctor has used the intervening years to train as a surgeon (or maybe she always was but there wasn't a position for her then).

Internal links
[1] 1299

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
280	04/09/2010	Ian Rankin: "The Complaints"	Ian Rankin
506	04/09/2012	Admission to Heriot-Watt DBA programme	DBA
624	04/09/2013	It was 40 years ago today - My gap year, part 1	Israel, Habonim, Kibbutz, Gap year
625	04/09/2013	Welcome to the Beehive - My gap year, part 2	Israel, Yoni Rechter, Gap year
972	04/09/2016	Revising lyrics, again	Song writing
1418	04/09/2021	(Yet another) new chicken dish	Cooking

Belated birthday present

On Sunday morning (1 Sept), the CEO's secretary phoned me. "Happy birthday!" she enthused. I was slightly taken aback by this as my birthday was at the beginning of August, not September. It turns out that her records show my birthday as 30-08 and not 03-08. Whatever. She told me that the company now has a policy of giving birthday presents and mine was awaiting me in the chairs factory. She also asked how 'back to school' was: I could proudly inform her that one grand-daughter was starting school that day and that the newest grand-daughter was starting at a crèche (she only lasted until 10:30). My son informs me that she stayed for only 3 hours the first two days but that he expects her to last longer today.

So what was the present? As opposed to most of this type of present, it's actually useful: a thermally insulated bag in which to put one's lunch box, and a thermally insulated water bottle. My first thought that this would be ideal when I go to Tel Aviv, but then it struck me that at the moment I know which bag is mine in the fridge at work by its colour, and that if everyone uses the same kind of bag then no one will know whose is what (so I'll have to put a tag on the bag). Unfortunately people move the bags around in the fridge so one can't always go by original placement.

While I was at the factory, a few people tried to guess my age. "60?", they said. When corrected, they didn't believe it as apparently I don't look my age. As I say, "60 is the new 40" and one is only as old as one feels - and I feel fine (28 lengths in the swimming pool on Saturday; I feel that I could have swum more had I wanted to - and that's already a 40% increase on my usual swim). I didn't say that working from home for the past 3½ years and not travelling saves a great deal of mental wear and tear.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
401	03/09/2011	Financial report	MBA, Finance
623	03/09/2013	Frederik Pohl, 26/11/1919-02/09/2013	Literature, Obituary
1068	03/09/2017	Casualty - one (tv series)	TV series
1256	03/09/2019	Priority tip: another thing to be aware of	Priority tips
1661	03/09/2023	GAS	Guitars

Eight months of Temu

At the beginning of the year, I wrote¹ about the Temu web site and ordering items from there. Since then, I have become somewhat addicted to this site. At first, I started off with items for my guitar (pedal board and pedals) then it was deck shoes (very comfortable and very cheap) then shirts then .... The list goes on and on.

At some stage my wife got into the act, so after ordering curtains for my grand-daughters' rooms, we've gone on to macrame owls, sofa covers and 'Arm Table Clip On Trays'. She broke my little USB fan that sits next to the computer and blows air into my face, so of course I had to order a new fan (it arrived today). Some of the items are junk (some of the cables that I ordered, a lock) but some are very good. All of the items are cheap, so I don't have to beat myself up about it if something turns out to be useless. At first, I used to order only once a month but after a few months, I began ordering twice a month. This month we've gone wild and I've made three orders (by 'month', I mean the month between paying credit card debts, so the current month started on 11 August and will finish on 10 September).

Regarding the fan, my old one started to work when it was connected to the computer and stopped when it was disconnected (should I need the USB port for something else); it had one speed. This new fan has five speeds, but more importantly, it appears to have an internal battery, so I can disconnect it from the computer and it will continue to work. Useful during power cuts and when I need the USB port.

I am about to test one new, important, fact about Temu: they say that they will pay import duties on orders. In Israel, one can order goods costing up to $75 without having to pay customs duties. Thus I have been careful to limit each order so as not to cross this boundary. That's why there have been more than one order a month lately. But the total cost of the third order - with the macrame owls, etc - exceeds $75, so I'll wait and see whether they do in fact pay the tax, or whether I will have to.

Why is this important? At some time in the future I am intending to buy what I would call a MIDI guitar but is advertised as a 'smart guitar' that allows one to play with or without volume; it has multiple tone possibilities and is always in tune. What interests me is that "it is a midi [sic] guitar for writing music score with the built-in USB 2.0 micro USB interface". Elsewhere in the user manual it is written "The smart guitar adopts nearly 100 groups of sensors and up to 5 CPUs to work in coordination. Through AI learning of bionic traditional guitar, players can realize the real-time detection of the guitar fretboard". I would use this device in order to create MIDI files by playing as opposed to having to type everything and so get a more realistic sound. At the current rate of exchange, this device would cost $106 which of course is well over the minimum. But if Temu pays the customs duties....

Not all that glistens is gold. I have read stories of how Temu forces its suppliers to sell at a price that may not be economic for them, and that there are privacy concerns regarding the smartphone Temu app. But I order from their website via a computer and I doubt very much that the privacy concerns are relevant.

Normally the orders arrive quite quickly. Today was the first delivery that almost exceeded the delivery time - had the delivery been tomorrow then I would have received a small credit. This is hardly Temu's fault as flights to Israel are somewhat erratic at the moment. But it's also interesting to examine the local delivery company: there have been cases where orders have been collected by them from customs but have waited nearly a week to be delivered. Today's order was collected yesterday afternoon and delivered today. So they can be efficient when they want to be.

Internal links
[1] 1712

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
622	02/09/2013	The Magic of Belle Isle	Films
1164	02/09/2018	Delphi community edition	Delphi
1335	02/09/2020	Wedding stairs	Personal, Kibbutz
1417	02/09/2021	Once again, John Martyn	John and Beverley Martin