Wizz Jones RIP

Somewhat peripheral to my life, guitarist Wizz Jones came close in 1971-2 when one of his records was released on Bristol's "Village Thing" record label. I wrote¹ about him and that 'Bristol' record many years ago.

I have just learnt that Wizz (real name Raymond) died a few days ago, aged 86. His wikipedia entry gives all the background.

Guardian obituary here.

Internal links
[1] 211

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
579	30/04/2013	Automating Outlook - adding/updating a contact	Programming, Delphi, Office automation
948	30/04/2016	Writing lyrics (2)	Song writing
1025	30/04/2017	April 1977	Israel, Personal, Food science
1128	30/04/2018	The Americans	TV series
1496	30/04/2022	Covid and teeth	Health, Covid-19
1612	30/04/2023	Shmulik Budagov	Personal, Guitars
1749	30/04/2024	Varenna in the sun	Holiday, Italy, Varenna

My army service, part six

Whilst attending the kibbutz's Memorial Day (or evening) ceremony, I was reminded of this event that occurred twice when I was in the army. I have absolutely no recollection of this day and the following Independence Day when I was nearing the end of basic training. I suspect that we stayed on the base, guarding, but I may be wrong. The second time, approaching the end of my service, was somewhat different.

As I have probably written before, I spent most of my service in the chief medical officer's headquarters near Tel Aviv. Our small base was only one part of a huge base that housed at least ten different units; I have written before how once I was duty sergeant¹ for the entire base, and once before that I spent a very boring weekend guarding the southern entrance to the base. For Memorial Day, each unit contributed one or two soldiers who would stand guard over the memorial monument for the entire 24 hours.

For some reason, I was chosen to represent my unit. All the soldiers who were to guard were gathered together a few hours before the memorial period began and received an explanation of what we were to do. Each soldier would be one of a pair that would stand guard over the memorial, not moving for 15 minutes, with one foot straight and the other touching it at a 90 degree angle (quite uncomfortable); this would be repeated three times, once an hour. The officer in charge of the ceremony asked if there was anyone who lived far away, and I raised my hand. As a result, I was one of those chosen for the first shift of guarding: I was 'on' from 6 - 6:15pm, 7 - 7:15pm, 8 - 8:15pm and 9 - 9:15pm; after that I was free to go home. Others had to spend the night on the base.

I didn't return to the base the next day, granting myself an unofficial holiday, to the slight annoyance of my direct superior, the laboratory manager who was expecting me to conduct some experiment with her. This allowed me to escape the burden of the Independence Day (ID) parade that presumably took place on the morning before the evening of ID; I'm fairly certain that the parade wasn't held on the morning of ID itself, but I have to admit that I haven't thought about this in 44 years.

It was an honour to have been chosen to guard over the monument, but as I say, I have no idea as to why I was chosen.

Internal links
[1] 1913

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
476	29/04/2012	Two films	Films, Meg Ryan, Steig Larsson
703	29/04/2014	Yo'av Tibon, RIP	Personal, Obituary, Kibbutz
1127	29/04/2018	DBA update	DBA
1313	29/04/2020	Stormbringer!	Nick Drake, 1970, Joe Boyd, John and Beverley Martin
1389	29/04/2021	DBA: Methodology chapter	DBA
1611	29/04/2023	The seer (new song)	Peter Hammill, Song writing

Fourth hard disk

Last week, I reported¹ that my computer froze three times one day. I ran some diagnostics and repair tools that seemed to allieviate the symptoms, or at least improve matters, but each day the computer would freeze. Fortunately no work was lost at any stage; one time I was writing a blog when the computer froze, but when I got back to work, the blog text had been saved upto and including the last word that I had typed. The wireless network link had also disappeared, meaning that I couldn't use the computer even if I wanted to. I completed the blog on my second computer, the one that I have from work. In some respects, this is a better computer - at least, it's never given me any hardware problems - but its screen is smaller and it has no separate numerical keyboard.

At some stage I remembered that the SSD disk had been replaced on the computer several months ago after a similar attack of freezing; could it be that the replacement disk had also been damaged? I backed up various directories to an external hard disk, turned off the computer then took it to my repairman.

Yes, once again, the SSD disk has had to be replaced. I now have a collection of old disks, although I have no idea what I will do with them, or to them. After all, there is some sensitive data on the disks so maybe I should try and destroy them at some stage.

Internal links
[1] 1925

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
169	26/04/2009	Knowledge hoarding	ERP, Psychology, Kaizen
170	26/04/2009	The iron law of bureaucracy	ERP
354	26/04/2011	Crocs	Shoes, Copper
833	26/04/2015	Vinyl log 6 - 26 April	Richard Thompson, 1975, Vinyl log, Walking
1126	26/04/2018	Programming text screens in Priority	Priority tips
1748	26/04/2024	Porting an application to Windows 10/Delphi 10.2 (part 5)	Programming, Delphi, Unicode

Highlighting text in the blog manager program

In September 2024, I described¹ how I added search capability to the BMP. Some time ago, I thought it would be a 'righteous hack' if when a 'show blog entry' window were opened, the sought-for text would be highlighted. For example, there are eight blogs (so far) from the beginning of this year that contain the word 'guitar'; I want that if the contents of one of those blogs are displayed, the word 'guitar' will appear with a yellow background (as shown on the left; this is entry #1908)².

I tried to achieve this about a month ago in a very ad hoc manner and unsurprisingly I did not succeed. I decided yesterday to resurrect this idea, and although I wasn't feeling very focused, I managed to implement this idea. There are two separate goals that have to be attained:

1. Passing the search string to a 'show blog entry' window
2. Highlighting the sought-for text

My original idea for goal #2 was to somehow fake a ctrl-F keypress in the browser window; this brings up a 'find' dialog. Then somehow I would have to enter the search string into this dialog and execute it. I found some code that purported to do this but I couldn't get it to work, which is probably the primary reason why I abandoned my original attempts.

This time around, however, I came across some code that allowed Delphi/TWebBrowser to execute arbitrary JavaScript code. OK: what would the JS code be to find a string and highlight it? I found some complicated (to me) code that ultimately surrounded the search string with <mark> and </mark> tags. I took a blog entry, went to its source, added those tags ... and nothing happened. But this gave me an idea, a realisation, an epiphany. The code for the 'show blog entry' windows receives the number of a blog then retrieves the raw text (including all HTML tags) from the database; this text is then turned into a stream and passed to the web browser. The epiphany was that during the loading stage, I could search for the search string, and if found, surround it with span/style tags that would highlight the text. An inner loop is used as the search string may appear more than once on any given line. As follows (sl is a TStringList):

     sl.Text:= HTMLCode;
     if searchstring <> '' then
      for i:= 1 to sl.Count do
       begin
        aline:= sl[i - 1];
        flag:= false;
        j:= pos (searchstring, aline);
        while j > 0 do
         begin
          flag:= true;
          s:= copy (aline, 1, j-1);
          aline:= copy (aline, j + length (searchstring), 200);
          s:= s + '<span style="background-color: yellow;"> '
              + searchstring + '</span>';
          j:= pos (searchstring, aline);
         end;
        if flag then sl[i - 1]:= s + aline;
       end;
     sl.SaveToStream (ms);

In the first line of the above code, the variable HTMLCode contains the raw text of the blog entry, including the various tags. I should change the line 'i:= 1 to sl.count' so that the loop starts with the second or possibly third line of the text; the opening line(s) contain the title and other text that is not displayed so there's no reason to consider them candidates for HTML insertion (it looks like the first seven lines can be skipped - this should also be applied to the code that searches for the string in the first place).

But how to pass the search string? This is complicated because of the recursive manner in which the list of blogs containing the search string is displayed; the TShowEntries window gets called by several different functions and it also calls itself. I found an elegant way of solving this problem: which ever way this window is invoked, it always receives an instance number that points to the data stored in the temp table (see here³ for an explanation). If I store the search string in these tuples, then it can be retrieved when the TShowEntries window is executed, and the search string can be passed to each 'show blog entry' window when opened.

All this took about half an hour to program and it worked first time. I admit that it could be polished but what exists is substantially correct.

Internal links
[1] 1828
[2] 1908
[3] 1548

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
127	22/04/2008	Holiday week	Programming, Delphi, Cold feet
702	22/04/2014	More research	DBA
1024	22/04/2017	Jerry Lee Lewis rides again	Grandfather
1607	22/04/2023	Songbird	Song writing
1747	22/04/2024	Wishing you a happy and kosher Pesach!	Personal

Type C headset

When I received my new phone, I wrote that I needed a new headset with a type C connector. I ordered one and received it quite quickly. At first the headset seemed not to work, but after some playing around, I noticed that the plug had markings on one side whereas the other side was smooth. The side with the markings has to be 'on top' when inserted into the telephone. The power cord, on the other hand, is apathetic; it doesn't care how it is inserted.

Whilst those headphones did their job admirably, I shortly came across two problems. First, quite quickly I managed to break the arm where the microphone is situated. Fortunately, the break was next to the body of the headphones, so this wasn't too much of a problem - as long as I didn't change the orientation of the arm. The second problem is more problematic: as can be seen from the picture, the headphone cushions are supposed to enclose the ears. But they are too small for my ears and hurt my ears somewhat. So I resolved to buy a headphone set where the cushions are flat; the headset that is connected to my computer is like this. This is much less fatiguing.

So I looked for, found a headset with flat cushions and a type C connector, and ordered it. The headset came today and already I have had a chance to use it and find out where its problems lie. The headset comes with a short cable that terminates in a 3.5 mm connector. 

This connects to another piece of cable which appears immediately to the left of the headset in the picture; this cable has the volume controls and terminates in a standard USB socket. To this one connects the USB to type C adapter, pictured on the top left. A kludge but it works and presumably was cheaper than having to change the socket on the volume unit. Unfortunately, this socket was somewhat mangled, but with the help of a screwdriver, I managed to straighten it and so plug in the final connector.

Internal links
[1] 1904

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
167	21/04/2009	Dangerous ideas	ERP, Kaizen
575	21/04/2013	Finally, a thesis title	ERP, DBA
576	21/04/2013	Who knows where the time goes?	Sandy Denny
832	21/04/2015	More home movies	Home movies
1124	21/04/2018	Sandy Denny: 40 years gone	Sandy Denny
1211	21/04/2019	Hardware woes	Mobile phone, Computer
1746	21/04/2024	More performance videos	Home movies, Musical group

Digital voice recorder

I mentioned yesterday that I was going to try and use the digital voice recorder which I purchased about six years ago in order to record from our new mixer in the rehearsal room. I charged the device throughout Friday night, and on Saturday morning, I took it down to the room. 

I had already discovered that there is a problem with the recorder: when the USB cable is connected to power, the recorder shows that it is 100% charged, but when I disconnect the cable, the recorder says that its battery is empty and immediately turns itself off. This is annoying but not insurmountable as next to the mixer is a strip of power sockets, so I can always have the recorder connected to power when it is supposed to be recording.

After turning the mixer on and connecting the cable to the input socket on the recorder, my first attempts at recording were unsuccessful and recorded nothing. When I looked at the mixer, I understood why: for some reason, after our final rehearsal, someone muted all the channels. So I unmuted the channels to which were connected some microphones, started recording then walked to a microphone where I counted to eight. I stopped the recording and played it back: I could hear silence then me counting. So it appears that the recorder does record.

When I got home, I continued playing with the recorder. For some reason, the files on it were dated 01/01/15, so I tried to find any setup options that would allow me to set the recorder's date. I did indeed find the required setting and set the date, but as soon as I disconnected the recorder from the power, as noted earlier the recorder turned itself off. When I reconnected the power, the clock had reset to 01/01/15.

But more importantly, I discovered that I could set the input source: there were three options, being microphone, line in and one other that I don't recall. The microphone was set as the input source, and it seems that this change is maintained even if the recorder is turned off. In other words, my test in the rehearsal room didn't test anything as I recorded my counting through the internal microphone and not via the line in socket. Despite this, I strongly suspect that the line in socket will work next time.

As a new voice recorder can be had for about 70 NIS (about $14), I decided to order a new one so that the power problem wouldn't be a problem. A new device would probably solve the problems that I was having with this old one.

Yesterday was also problematic in that my mobile computer froze three times. At first I thought it was because of the voice recorder being connected, but the computer froze after I restarted it. The first step in checking the computer was to run the command sfc /scannow; this checks the validity of the standard Windows files. A few problems were discovered. I then ran the command DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth; this restores any missing Windows files. This completed successfully and a second run of sfc showed no errors, so hopefully the computer should not freeze today. 

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
32	20/04/2006	Printer ate my fours	Programming
472	20/04/2012	Levon Helm, RIP	Obituary, The Band, RIP
574	20/04/2013	Emerging from the morning mist	Dog
700	20/04/2014	700 blogs	Meta-blogging
701	20/04/2014	Musical progress	MIDI, Song writing
945	20/04/2016	Programmers at work (2)	Kindle
1386	20/04/2021	Yet another new song ("There she goes")	Song writing, Home recording
1495	20/04/2022	Still positive	Health, Covid-19
1606	20/04/2023	Again, vertigo	Health
1745	20/04/2024	The morning after the morning after	Musical group

Spring performance continued

In my hurry to load yesterday's post, when I concentrated on the video link, I neglected to mention several topics. We played twelve songs plus an encore, where four of the songs were in English and the rest in Hebrew. The encore was a song that we played at our performance¹ exactly one year ago; we practiced it again maybe twice on Wednesday evening - everyone was on the ball. When my wife heard it advance that we were playing twelve, she thought that this was too many - but when I asked her after the show, suddenly twelve (or thirteen) wasn't enough.

One of the songs that we played in English was Elton John's "I guess that's why they call it the blues"; we started playing this only about three weeks ago, but its absorption was fast. This slightly surprised me as the song is in 68 and we've never played anything that wasn't in 44. I decided early on that I would play arpeggios, each quaver on its own. This was quite painful towards the end as I had to press hard on the strings with the fingers of my left hand (rhythm guitar requires a lighter touch) and my right hand also had to pick three or four strings in a constant rhythm.

This song is also much more deceptive that it seems. Not that it's important, but it's not clear (to me, at least) in which key it is. The verse seems to be in G whereas the chorus seems to be in C. The verse is more subtle than it might seem: each line has four chords, G X F C, where the second chord X varies from line to line. The first line has Em, the second Bm, the third B7 and the fourth Am (this time around, the line finishes on G): a good test of the memory.

To most of the band's surprise, we were joined by a guest vocalist for this song. Literally a few minutes ago, I received a WhatsApp message answering my query about this: 'It was spontaneous, for [the guest] had sung the song with us several years previously". I would have linked the recording of this, but someone - probably the guest - was singing out of tune and slightly ruined the performance.

The evening before the performance - Wednesday - we had a long rehearsal that started at around 7pm as I and the keyboardist tried to figure out how we could record from the mixer - no luck. It later transpired that the cable that we were using was plugged into the wrong sockets on the mixer; the cable was set up so that an external source (e.g. a computer) could play music through the mixer (i.e. it was connected to an input). On Thursday morning, I moved the cable to different, output, sockets, and tried connecting the 3.5mm plug on the other end of the cable to my computer's mic socket. The computer did not recognise this connection and recorded through the internal microphone - equivalent to the quality of recording that we achieved with a mobile phone. I've dug out a digital voice recorder which I bought several years ago but never used that may work - I'm going to try that out later this morning.

After the rehearsal, I came home, showered then went to bed but I couldn't fall asleep. My legs were hurting, possibly as a result of the fact that I had been standing throughout the entire rehearsal, and in my mind various songs continued to play non-stop. Eventually I did fall asleep and fortunately I didn't have to wake up early the next day. I wonder how professional musicians manage the decompression after a show; do they too have songs running through their head or are they inured to this? Maybe they decompress by drinking - or at least, they used to. Is this a private problem of mine?

Internal links
[1] 1744

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
31	19/04/2006	Strumming the guitar - stage one	Programming, MIDI
246	19/04/2010	Books and films	Films, Nick Hornby, Time traveler's wife, Hugh Grant
699	19/04/2014	Researching during the Passover holiday week	DBA, Psychology
944	19/04/2016	Programmers in MOBI	Programming, Computer, Kindle
1023	19/04/2017	Donating blood (2)	Health, Donating blood
1123	19/04/2018	70 years of independence	Israel, Kibbutz
1605	19/04/2023	Yehonatan Geffen (1947-2023)	Israel, Yehonatan Geffen
1744	19/04/2024	A triumphant end to a tumultuous week	DBA, Health, Priority tips, Musical group

Spring performance

For those who don't read Hebrew, the poster on the left says that 'The Home Band' will be playing a set of 80s songs on Thursday night, 17 April [at the kibbutz pub that opens only on Thursdays]. Doors open 9 pm, the performance will start at 9:30 pm. A free drink on the house - entrance free.

Yes, after what seems like several months of rehearsals, we finally appeared, playing the fruits of our labours. Fortunately, most of us have been at least on partial holiday during this Passover week, so we could devote plenty of time and concentration to the final rehearsals.

The 'pub' itself is very small; there's some seating on a balcony but most of the seating is outside. We of course played outside; the area set aside for a stage is once again a bit too small for seven people; as a result, I'm lurking in the background with very little room for maneouvering (in the picture on the left, I'm third from the right, wearing a hat). Behind us can be seen some of the cowsheds, although I don't think that any cows were out and boogieing. 

As usual, the balance was not that good; the pianist and the lead guitarist are heard only intermittently. Most of the guitar work that can be heard in the YouTube videos comes from me. Below is a link to the song "Karma Chameleon" (spelt incorrectly in YouTube), featuring 'mouth organ' coming from the keyboard that finally is audible.

I very much enjoyed myself, as did the rest of the group. It was very satisfying to see all the audience singing along. Our next performance is scheduled to be on 9 August (although it will probably be either the day before or two days before); this date in the Hebrew calendar is Tu B'Av, a full moon and the equivalent of Valentine's day. So we'll be looking at a set list of love songs, some of which we may have played in the past, some new.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
30	18/04/2006	Slouching towards Jerusalem (part one)	Israel, Bar mitzva, Jerusalem
352	18/04/2011	Reharmonising	Jewish holidays, Guitars
471	18/04/2012	Mixing and producing	Sandy Denny, Van der Graaf Generator, Peter Hammill, The Band
573	18/04/2013	Dynamic parametric queries	Programming, Delphi, SQL
831	18/04/2015	Making a movie	Holiday, Sorrento, Home movies
1385	18/04/2021	Rennin vs Renin	Health, Blood pressure

New equipment for our practice room

The local arts centre decided to award us 50,000 NIS (about $13,000) for the purchase of new equipment for the musical group's practice room (we're not the only users, but our use far exceeds anyone else's). Whilst it would be good if we could move the practice room elsewhere (we play in one room of a two room public air-raid shelter), at the moment it's better to buy the equipment.

In descending order of cost, we bought a 32 input mixer, monitor speakers and wedges, a drum kit (the previous one belongs to someone specific and not to the kibbutz), microphones and a great deal of wiring. Above are some pictures of the room, taken from near where the mixer sits. [I tried to place the pictures side by side, but the old hack that I had no longer seems to work. I later handled this by defining a table with invisible borders and placing the pictures in the table]

The first half hour of our first practice with the new equipment was trying to get a decent balance. The use of a good mixer now allows us to mic up the guitar amplifiers (these aren't shown in the top picture) so that everything goes through the mixer and can be balanced. One of the singers told me afterwards that this was the first time that he's heard everyone properly.

Although it can't be seen in the top picture, there is wiring that goes along the walls with a multi-XLR socket here and there; into this can be plugged a monitoring device (a Behringer PM1) and earphones plugged into this device, thus allowing in-ear monitoring. I tried this at first with a pair of headphones that sits outside of the ears; I discovered that I could hear just as well with my ears and the ambient sound as with the headphones, so I stopped using the headphones. I may try again with another set of headphones that enclose the ears. I thought that we were going to have wireless receivers; at the moment, one has to connect the PM1 with a cable to the wall. Of course, this is useless outside of the practice room, which is when we need the in-ear monitors!

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
469	15/04/2012	[no title]	MBA
1022	15/04/2017	Return to Kaizen	DBA, Kaizen
1210	15/04/2019	Communications	Mobile phone
1309	15/04/2020	Italian holiday film	Holiday, Home movies, Covid-19
1604	15/04/2023	Revisiting the Hebrew song "Birthday"	Home recording

Passover begins tonight

It seems to be unusual this year (although probably isn't) that the first night of Passover falls on a Saturday night. This must make preparation difficult for observant families as of course they don't do anything that can be construed as work on a Saturday.

Once again, there is no kibbutz Seder to my disgruntlement; this year we will be hosting the Seder for our smallish family. This is going to require some juggling with regard to food preparation: I'm making a stir-fry in the wok and chicken thighs in the slow cooker, as well as mashed potatoes, crispy potato cubes and possibly rice. The chicken dish isn't a problem in terms of when it has to be cooked, but I don't want to start making the stir-fry while we're reading the Hagada, so I'll make this in advance and keep it warm for an hour or so. Obviously I'll make the mashed potatoes and rice in advance; the potato cubes can be prepared in advance but only cooked once we begin.

I wish a happy and kosher Pesach to all my readers.

Unusually, it rained this morning - very untypical weather for Pesach. On the other hand, we had a heat wave at the beginning of the week that was very unpleasant.

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A couple of weeks ago, I started work on a new song. At first I was suffering from what I call 'second chord syndrome' - deciding on a first chord is easy but what should come after it? I'll tried all kinds of intervals as well as changing the quality of the chord (minor, augmented - although I don't think that I've ever had a diminished chord as the second in a sequence), but it always seems to be a problem, especially as I am harmony led and not melody led. Somehow I got past this barrier and developed what was initially an eight bar sequence that defies standard harmonic practice: Em7 A Dm7 G C Bb Am D. I keyed this into the sequencer along with its tune, but I wasn't too enthused about it. Every now and then I would play with the sequence, doubling it to create a verse, then creating a second verse and then a bridge, but all through this process I wasn't too enthusiastic. That D chord later became a Bm chord, which is more interesting, and at the end of the verse where it is doubled, it becomes a B chord, thus leading back into the Em chord.

About a week ago I changed some of the instrumentation and suddenly the arrangement took off; had I plotted the number of changes against time, I would have attained an exponential curve. Since Thursday I've been adding change after change (for example, a more syncopated bass part in places) and earlier this morning I deemed the arrangement complete - except for the small matter of a solo in the song's coda. This was 'originally' going to be the bridge, or at least a slightly abbrieviated version of the bridge, but as the first four bars of this section had the chords G F C Bb, I couldn't think of anything reasonable that would sit upon this (I didn't want to repeat the tune). Last night I had a minor breakthough when I told myself that I don't have to follow the sequence lavishly and so I replaced the Bb with a F: much more harmonious and easier to play over.

By chance, I happened to hear a song on the radio this morning - I have no idea what the song was except for the fact that it is a modern style - that caused my ears to perk up, as in the instrumental breaks this song seemed to include a traditional tune (also not recognised). I thought to myself that maybe I could find a tune in a major key and in common time that I could lay over the chords. After some poking around and searching, I found 'The fairy ring' that appeared to be suitable. I had to change the tune slightly as the harmony in the 7th bar is an Eb chord and the 8th bar starts in Eb then moves to F, but this wasn't too difficult.

As usual, I have no idea whatsoever what the words are going to be about. These will have to wait a few days.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
826	12/04/2015	How not to display data in graphs	Statistics
1121	12/04/2018	Apology to Israel Railways	Trains
1602	12/04/2023	More bells and whistles for the 'Blog' program	Programming, Delphi, Blog manager program
1741	12/04/2024	Update on our spring performance	Musical group

Slow cooked leg of lamb

In recognition of the upcoming Passover festival, we had informally decided that one of the dishes to be served would be a leg of lamb (yes, we're hosting the Seder this year). By chance, I was at the butcher's this week, my wife not feeling too well, so I asked about lamb and was directed to their freezer cabiner where there were legs of lamb, as pictured below on the left. This joint weighed about 1.3 kg uncooked and at 130 NIS/kg cost 169 NIS: that's about the price of an expensive cut of beef. I thought that I would cook it for Saturday lunch and get an idea of what to do ... and what not to do.

I left the leg to defrost overnight, which is just as well, as frozen it wouldn't fit in the slow cooker. This morning, the leg was slightly more supple ('bendable' would be a better adjective) and I managed to not only get the leg into the cooker but also into a relatively flat position. On top of the leg, I placed the barbecue mat and on this I placed diced onions, carrots, celery and parsley, as usual. Finally I added about 150 ml red wine and 200 ml chicken soup.

I was using my usual method of slow cooking beef, combined with this online recipe. As the recipe notes, A leg of lamb is naturally quite tough, since the muscle has had to work hard, so [it] benefits from being cooked low and slow in a slow cooker.

On the left is the cooked lamb after the removal of the mat; the leg seems to have shrunk. I managed to get the joint out of the pot and into a container, where I tried to slice the meat, unsuccessfully. There were more bones than I expected; I extracted these and managed to cut some pieces of meat. This didn't go too well, and some of the pieces had skin attached.

Eventually I managed to prepare enough meat for my wife and I. The meat was definitely tender but somewhat lacking in taste. The only diner who really enjoyed the dish was the dog who got several bones to feast upon.

So I have to conclude that this experiment didn't particularly succeed, and I doubt that I'll be repeating it. My son is going to cook a similar joint next week for the Passover meal and I hope that he has more success than I did. The meat is definitely edible but not stupendous.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
240	05/04/2010	Holiday	Cooking
346	05/04/2011	Firebird fixed!	Computer, Firebird
692	05/04/2014	Pneumonia	Health, Nick Drake
821	05/04/2015	Vinyl log 1 - 5 April	Vinyl log
937	05/04/2016	Sorrento shopping (2016/2)	Holiday, Sorrento, Italy
1118	05/04/2018	The sense of an ending (2)	Films, Literature
1207	05/04/2019	Excellent music blog	Beatles, Song writing
1597	05/04/2023	Passover night, 2023	Jewish holidays, Kibbutz

AI updates picture

One of the musical group's members seems to have a surfeit of spare time, as he is always suggesting more and more ridiculous names (the latest that will probably be accepted is a variation of 'Flying drumsticks', in recognition of our drummer's propensity to lose her grip). His latest escapade is letting AI have a go at enhancing our picture¹ from last year, requesting an 80s look - as our current setlist is composed only of songs from that decade. AI obviously recognises that this was a time of big hair.

A discerning eye might see a grain of resemblance between these people and their real-life counterparts, but a great deal of imagination is required. I look like some middle aged tearaway and our drummer has suddenly developed a cleavage. Were leather jackets fashionable in the 80s?

Incidentally, I showed a few people at work the picture of Timothy Busfield² that I uploaded a few days ago; they thought it was me.

Internal links
[1] 1744
[2] 1918

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This day in history:

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468	04/04/2012	Spring is in the air	Holiday, Dubrovnik
936	04/04/2016	Return to Sorrento (2016/1)	Holiday, Sorrento, Italy
1739	04/04/2024	Drinking sand (not really)	Health

Is this me or a double?

This morning I went to the clinic to have my blood pressure and weight measured formally (as if I don't do this on my own, but they need it for their records). One is advised to wait about ten minutes to allow the bp and pulse to settle down, and during this period, the nurse said that she watches a series on Netflix called 'Designated survivor' and that there is an actor there who looks almost exactly like me.

After having my bp measured (it was fine), I went home to look for this actor who appears on the left. In most of the pictures, the resemblance is amazing, so my wife decided to send this picture to our children, and captioned it as "Daddy when he had longer hair". Our daughter immediately wrote back that it isn't me, but when we asked her who it was, she replied "An AI version of Daddy"! I can tell that it's not me but it's hard to put my finger on what exactly is different. The nose isn't right and the hair on my forehead isn't so pointed.

Well, it's the actor Timothy Busfield, who is slightly less than a year younger than me, so our appearances match throughout the years. I remember seeing him in the series "thirtysomething", although I saw this only rarely. He had red hair then so there was less of a resemblance. He also appeared now and then in 'The West Wing' as Danny Concannon, the boyfriend of press secretary and then Chief of Staff C.J. Cregg. I liked his character but I never thought that we looked the same. 

Now that his and my hair is white, the resemblance is remarkable.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
1384	01/04/2021	You and your action research project	DBA