Synchronicity

I'm currently reading a memoir by Andy Summers (né Somers) called 'One train later'. The meaning of this title didn't seem to mean anything at first, but it's just occurred to me what it is referring to: when The Police was in the formation stage, Summers took the underground train to central London where he was to meet with Sting. His intention was to discuss the firing of the original guitarist, Henri Padovani. As he got off the train, so coincidentally did Steward Copeland; Summers wonders had he taken one train later, would Padovani still be in the group with Summers excluded? The book is somewhat short on dates, especially in the early part of Summers' life.

The title of this blog (and as it happens, also one of The Police's albums) comes from the fact that just as I started reading about the formation of The Police (about half way through the book), on the radio I heard "Every step you take". One can't make this stuff up.

And if I'm writing about music, I am pleased to say that videos from my musical group's performance¹ from last week have now hit YouTube. Here's a link to the playlist, and should one wish to see a complete performance of 'my' song (although it's missing the slow introduction), it can be found here. So far ten songs have been uploaded with another six promised for tomorrow. The songs have been uploaded in a random order, not matching the order in which we played them. 

I changed strings on the Stagg guitar today; it's been eleven months since they were last changed², which is certainly long enough. The strings still look clean and play well, but enough is enough. With the old strings removed, I cleaned and applied polish to the neck. Putting the new strings on went smoothly at first, although I discovered after a few hours that I had inadvertently tuned them about three semitones too high. Five strings were then tuned correctly, but the top E string refused to tune; it kept on slipping and eventually slipped out completely. With no other option, I removed that string and took another E string from a separate set of strings. So far, I've added this string but have not yet chopped off the excess; I'm leaving the string to settle, and tomorrow I'll tune it then remove the excess.

Internal links
[1] 1982
[2] 1826

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
101	16/08/2007	Holiday	Holiday
752	16/08/2014	Archeology (my computer music evolution)	MIDI
971	16/08/2016	Second version of intermediate thesis submitted	DBA
1331	16/08/2020	New CPAP machine	CPAP
1658	16/08/2023	More Matthew Halsall	Matthew Halsall

Yet another excision

After my previous excision¹ of a growth last December, the surgeon recommended that I see my dermatologist again in six months. So about a month ago, I presented myself for the usual treatment with liquid nitrogen: several spots of actinic keratosis on my right arm and hand, along with one on the nose. The treatment on the arm and hand is quite bearable, but the treatment on the nose hurt! After a week or so the scabs formed from the treatment fell off, but I've been very careful and have been spreading body cream on my arms and hands after every swim.

The dermatologist also examined the site of a previous excision²; she remarked last November that this should be checked at my next visit. In July, she decided that it was time for a biopsy, so today I presented myself at the clinic in Bet Shemesh to have yet another excision. This growth was not a BCC but rather a subcutaneous sebaceous cyst, a fact that I had forgotten today, but noted at the time.

As usual, the procedure was straight-forward, although this time there were no stitches put in so there's nothing to remove. I have a huge bandage on the left side of my neck that you don't really want to see. I can shower tomorrow, but will have to wait a week or so before I can go swimming again.

Internal links
[1] 1879
[2] 1299

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
616	12/08/2013	Puzzle	Puzzles
750	12/08/2014	Robin Williams, RIP	Films, Obituary
1655	12/08/2023	Eli, continued	ERP, Obituary
1656	12/08/2023	Walk exactly 3,967 steps in a day	Walking
1801	12/08/2024	Genesis of a new song	Song writing

The Tu b'Av performance

Last night "The House Band" took the stage at the kibbutz pub in order to play a long set of love songs. I'll try not to repeat anything that I wrote in my pre-performance blog ¹ from two weeks ago. 

As opposed to our previous performance² at this venue, a space was made for me to stand in the front line. As a result, none of us had much room in which to move, which is just as well as we are very static in our playing. Not only that, the two singers and I had chairs so that we could sit during the slower songs, so room really was limited.

Unlike previous performances, we had a professional soundman with his own mixing desk; this allowed us to achieve a more balanced sound than normal. We could have done with one more on-stage monitor, as 'The Other Guitarist'  (TOG) - placed on far stage left - said that he couldn't hear everyone else very well. The soundman told him to turn down his amplifier, thus effectively giving me credit to my contention that he always plays too loud. The nasty person within me was somewhat glad that we couldn't hear his dominating playing at full volume either, and so apparently could not the audience. 

I have to admit that I lost concentration for a few seconds in at least two songs and played a few wrong chords. Next time I won't bother looking at the audience at all if it means that I mess up. Other than that, I played well; there's one song on which I played lead guitar for most of the song and I was criticised in rehearsal for repeating the same lines. So last week, I thought up enough variations that I wouldn't have to repeat myself. We had a great deal of trouble with this song in rehearsal, not so much because of me, but because the coda has a solo from TOG and a hand-off to the keyboardist who continues until the end. It took a long time before this hand-off worked properly. My pedals worked properly. 

There were two slow songs on which I did not play guitar. Instead I sat on my chair and rattled a maraca. I have no idea whether this could be heard by the audience.

I had wanted to keep my vocal song a secret from my wife so that it would be a surprise, but before we 'took the stage', she saw that there was a microphone in front of my place and asked why. So I had to tell her, although I didn't tell her about my backing vocals in "You're the one that I want" (from Grease). She filmed "I saw her standing there" on her mobile phone; I tried to upload it to YouTube but it got blocked as it contains copyrighted material, so I'll have to share it here. I hope that it plays. [The first minute has been uploaded to YouTube]

Of course, everyone - both band and audience - were very pleased with the show; today I received some compliments from those who were in the audience. I also sent the video via WhatsApp to two friends at work who passed it on to a few more people - they said that it revealed a hitherto hidden side of me. My manager said that she knows now why I want to retire. 

I still have my doubts about the group. A week ago, I (and apparently a few others) had apprehensions about the performance. They were worried about the general level of preparation, whereas I was more worried about the attitude of TOG. I wrote my thoughts in a document that I sent to my wife for comment; she was somewhat shocked by it. I told her that I wouldn't send it to the others until after the show as I don't want to ruin it. The show gave everyone a huge jolt of adrenaline, but I know that when the euphoria wears off, my concerns will still be valid. I may rewrite it before distribution.

It's not really connected, but the alarm woke me at 6:30 am (after having gone to bed at about 11:30 pm), and later I swam 26 lengths, which is the most I have swum this year. After a late breakfast (intermittent fasting, remember), I worked a little then started watching a recorded show on TV. In the middle I felt my eyes closing so I laid down for a little sleep that lasted at least an hour. At least from now I should have much fewer late nights so I can return to sleeping well and long.

Internal links
[1] 1971
[2] 1923

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
501	08/08/2012	Back to normal (well, almost normal)	Health
749	08/08/2014	Twenty five years ago	Personal
1249	08/08/2019	Night walking	Walking
1330	08/08/2020	Masked songs	Kibbutz
1798	08/08/2024	Pedal board at the beginning of August 2024	Pedal board

Video cameras

I don't remember from when and what our first video camera was. I think that my father bought something in the mid-1990s, but I may be wrong. I do remember that I took a camera with me to Gravesend at the beginning of August 1998 in order to have me filmed giving presents to members of Fairport Convention, but I don't remember whether that was our first camera. What I do remember is that I dropped the camera on the ground, thus ruining it. A few weeks later, I bought another camera; this was the type that recorded directly onto a JVC cassette.

When we were in America in 2005, my first purchase was one of the new digital cameras that had a separate screen so that I could see what was being recorded. This camera used DV cassettes; I didn't have a way to digitise their contents so I had to record on JVC cassette the images while they were being played through the video player and television. 

This camera accompanied us on many trips, but in June 2013, when we were about to travel to Barcelona, London and Edinburgh, I wrote¹ I needed to buy mini DV cassettes for our camcorder. No shop in the vicinity had such cassettes and it seems that no one in Israel sells them anymore. I could buy via eBay but it's a bit late for that now. So my wife bought a new camcorder yesterday afternoon with a built in memory card - Panasonic SDR S70. I intend to spend the flight learning how to use the new camera. Hopefully in London I will be able to buy an extra battery and charger for the camera.

That camera was very good, and obviously I had no problems in transferring what I had filmed to the computer for editing, as everything was on the memory card. Unfortunately, a year ago I had to write² ... but more inconveniently, I discovered that my video camera had also died. I had used it a little bit during a walk, but now I couldn't even turn it on. I don't think that this is due to a battery failing, as the camera won't work even when connected to its charger. At least no filmed videos will have been lost as what is filmed is stored on an SD card, but it is very annoying. The importance of my mobile phone as camera now assumes a greater importance.

I hadn't bother buying a new video camera until recently when it became clear that we would be going on holiday in September. I originally ordered a really cheap video camera from Temu; this was powered by battery, but I couldn't insert the AA batteries in a satisfactory manner to turn the camera on. Into the bin it went. After this I ordered another, more expensive but still relatively cheap camera that arrived about a week ago. This seems to be an updated version of the Panasonic: instead of batteries, it is powered by an internal battery that is charged by USB. It will help that I have an external battery³ with a USB plug that I can connect directly to the camera, so I'll carry this around as a spare. More importantly, the annoying four-way menu button of the Panasonic has been replaced with a saner arrangement, although this took me some time to figure out. The camera came with a 32GB SD disk so I don't even have to buy one. There is no lens cap, not that this is important.

By coincidence, the camera arrived the same day as my computer technician posted a request on the kibbutz notice board for a video camera that records onto DV cassettes. I told him that I have one, dug it out and passed it on to him. When I was at his house the other night, watching him repair my mobile computer, he told me that the camera was very useful and that he managed to digitise his cassettes. He offered to do the same for mine, so now I have to find the cassettes from our American trip, but also from those that followed (at least Switzerland and Prague).

Internal links
[1] 588
[2] 1750
[3] 1787

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
748	07/08/2014	Blackberries (or are they blackcurrants?)	Health, Food science
967	07/08/2016	Turning a corner?	Health, Personal, CPAP

80 years since Hiroshima

When I was ten years old and still in junior school, I read two books that were in the school library written by the same author whose name I do not remember. Both books were fiction aimed at young readers and both were about events in the Second World War (this would have been in 1966, so only 21 years after the end of the war; it still resounded loud in the culture of the time). I don't remember what one book was about, but the other started a life-long interest: it was about the atomic bomb and the events that led it to be dropped on Hiroshima. I don't know quite why this caught my imagination so strongly; maybe because it was only three days after my birthday, so I felt a 'calendar connection'.

Either at junior school or secondary school, in an exercise I wrote a free verse poem about this; the only lines that I remember were something like 'The Enola Gay [the name of the airplane that dropped the bomb] flew through the sky on a sunny day". I remember feeling very apologetic about the rhyme Gay/day as we were supposed to be writing free verse. 

In my second year at BGS, we were allowed to join school clubs, so I joined the chemistry club. Maybe even then I knew something of the physics behind the bomb, for I proposed to the amusement of the master in charge that I wanted to build an atomic bomb. I knew about the separation methods between Uranium 238 and 235, but obviously I had no idea of the quantities required nor of the damage that the radiation would create. I was advised to stick to something simpler; this probably led to me creating plastics. I would make a terrible stink in our kitchen at home by boiling together urea and formaldehyde that I obtained from our local chemist (pharmacist), after explaining what I needed those chemicals for.

I learnt a great deal of the development of the bomb by reading Richard Feynman (both his books and his biography) and a little from the biography of Robert Oppenheimer. A few days ago I read a new book called 'The Hiroshima men' that didn't go into the physics of the bomb, but rather discussed the Pacific war, the various island campaigns and what life was like in Hiroshima both before and after. 

I have to admit that as a European, I knew very little about the Far East campaign. I'm embarrassed to say that my main sources of information were 'The Cryptonomicon' (once again) and one book by Tom Clancy whose name I don't recall but was centered on Saipan in the Mariana islands. I did know that the Enola Gay took off from the island of Tinian but I didn't know that Saipan was close to Tinian. I did know the name of the pilot, Paul Tibbets, but I didn't know that his mother's name was Enola Gay (and thus the plane).

So this book added a great deal of my understanding of the Pacific war and the A-bomb whilst duplicating very little. It is only fitting that I read this book only a week or two before the 80^th anniversary of the major event described.

Shortly after having written the above words, I find myself engrossed in what might be termed 'a historical romp', called 'The Turing Protocol", by one Nick Croydon. This plays fast and loose with history; like 'The Cryptonomicon', we have a fictional Alan Turing who does a lot of things that the real Turing did, but also a lot of things that the real Turing did not, such as inventing a machine for sending message back though time, called Nautilus. It is used when 'in real life', it is decided to have the D-day landings at Calais, due to supposedly bad weather at Normandy. A massacre occurs. Fictional Turing sends himself a message back in time by two weeks, to convince Churchill to stand fast on the target of Normandy, even if Eisenhower invokes bad weather as a reason to land at Calais. I've just got up to the following paragraphs
On the 6th of August 1945, the uranium bomb codenamed ‘Little Boy’ was loaded on to a B-29 bomber called the Enola Gay. After a six-hour flight, Colonel Paul Tibbets dropped his weapon from 31,000 feet above the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The bomb exploded 1500 feet above the city at 8.15 in the morning, destroying every building in a one-mile radius.... The war was over, but the world had changed forever. The military use of atomic bombs had a profound effect on Alan. He knew that, through technology, weapons would get more powerful, faster and smaller. He was determined that Nautilus and its power should never be weaponised. Nautilus’s legacy should be to prevent the horrors of war, to save lives. He considered whether Nautilus could be used to prevent such an atrocity, but came up short. The Americans would never have changed their minds and the Japanese would never have surrendered solely from the threat of destruction. His only hope was that once the world experienced the power of atomic weapons, they would never be used again.  

There is no escaping the legacy of Hiroshima.

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
275	06/08/2010	Back to school	MBA, Project management
1412	06/08/2021	My father's eyes (slideshow)	Home movies, Father, Youtube, Song videos

Discoveries

I wrote about the rechargeable wireless business clip-on earbud¹ a few weeks ago; since then, I've been accustomed to using it.  This morning I popped out of the house to pick up a parcel; I had the earbud in my ear before I left, and I decided to keep it there. Of course, someone telephoned me when I was out. I didn't even have to take my phone from my pocket: I simply pressed on the correct button and talked. When I came back with the parcel, I forgot that I had the earbud in; I picked up the headphones connected to the computer and continued listening to music. A bit later, someone else called, or maybe it was a WhatsApp message which is when I realised that I could hear both the earbud and the headphones. In other words, when someone calls, I only have to remove the headphones; I don't have to start fiddling around with the earbud because it's already in my ear. So I'll put it in when I start work in the morning and I'll take it out in the evening.

My regular computer has been giving me problems ² again. On Sunday morning, the first working day of the month (and incidentally my birthday), the computer simply stopped in its tracks maybe five times in the space of an hour. I gave up and continued working with the computer that I have from work. This second computer doesn't have a separate numerical keyboard (which I find very useful) and has a smaller screen, but it has never given me any problems. After working with this computer non-stop for a day and a half, I wanted to print something. This computer does not have my Pantum printer³ defined, so I dug out the installation cd and copied its contents to the computer. I then ran the setup program; this installed not only the printer but also the scanner program that for some reason was not defined on my primary computer. This morning I've been working without any problem on the primary; maybe the problem was overheating*. Anyway, now that I know that the scanner can be installed, I went ahead and installed it on this computer. No more scanning via a third computer then transferring the files via Anydesk.

Unfortunately, scanning takes a long time (several minutes for a page): this is because the data has to be transferred via wifi. The scanner is connected physically to the XP computer with a USB cable, so naturally that works much faster.

I also found out how the computers - and my mobile phone, for that matter - connect with the printer: I originally wrote "I failed to connect the printer to my wifi: I gave it the network name and password but no connection was made. When I installed the printer driver on the computer, it gave the option of accessing the printer via its own wifi.And lo and behold: I can now print from my mobile to the printer via the magic of wifi!" But this isn't strictly true. What actually happens is that the printer is connected to the router via a network cable, whereas the computers and phone connect to the router via wifi. The computers are not connecting to the printer's wifi but to the router. This isn't going to change anything - as opposed to the first two discoveries - but it's nice to know. It also helped me understand how I (or my wife) can print directly from our mobile phones instead of having to send me something by WhatsApp so that my computer can see the message and print it.

* Indeed it was. It was like watching open heart surgery when the technician took the mobile apart, found the fan - that was not turning - and extracted it, in order to clean all the gunk away. Putting it all back together was somewhat nerve-wracking for me, but he knew what he was doing.

Internal links
[1] 1966
[2] 1928
[3] 1477

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
45	05/08/2006	Eilat activities	Israel, Holiday
747	05/08/2014	Information quality	DBA
1652	05/08/2023	Dead Sea weekend	Israel, Personal, Holiday
1797	05/08/2024	Agriculture	Kibbutz

My most frequent type of bug

The OP told me about a problem in the management program, that it wasn't calculating bonuses correctly. Each psychologist gets paid a certain amount per interview, but in order to encourage them, the OP defined that if they carry out more than a certain number of interviews in a given month, they'll receive a bonus for each interview. There can be defined more than one level of bonus, eg if a psychologist carries out more than 10 interviews, then there will be a 15 NIS bonus per interview (for all, not only for those after the tenth), and if she does more than 15, then the bonus will be 45 NIS from the first interview.

I worked on this quite heavily a few months ago and got certain things straightened out; I won't go into this now. The OP said that although the psychologists were getting a bonus, they weren't getting the correct bonus.

I started debugging the code, watching how much a certain psychologist would get as a bonus. Apart from moving one statement out of the loop that updates the interviews (a loop invariant), I didn't change anything. The code worked perfectly. I then tried it out for all the psychologists; the wrong amount was being added to the basic price. Again, I checked for one psychologist (a different one) and the code worked. For everybody, the code did not work.

I decided to run the code for everybody under the debugger, checking the size of the bonus for each psychologist. The first received 15 NIS (ok), the second 15 NIS, the third 15 NIS as did the fourth. At this stage, it began to become clear what the problem was. There is a query that obtains from the bonuses table the correct bonus amount for a psychologist during a period time for a given number of interviews; this query was returning the correct value for the first psychologist but not for the others.

This seems to be the most frequent type of programming mistake that I make: I pass parameters to a query, open it, get values back ... and then forget to close the query. As a result, the next time that parameters are passed, they get ignored because the query is still open. One might say that this is a bug with the query component, but to be honest, it's my fault that I forget to close the queries.

Once I made this small but important correction, the program calculated correctly the bonuses for all the psychologists.

Just to show that I'm not the only one who has 'senior moments', the OP texted me asking why she couldn't update one of the rows in the bonuses table. She was trying to define for one of the psychologists a period that ended on 31/06/25, and she couldn't understand why the SQL engine kept on refusing her edit. I asked her how many days there are in June and hinted that it's not 31.

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
274	04/08/2010	The in-basket 6	In-basket
966	04/08/2016	Updates	Personal, DCI Banks, Fotheringay, John Le Carre, Police procedurals
1411	04/08/2021	Third Covid-19 vaccine shot	Trains, Covid-19
1523	04/08/2022	My first year at Bristol Grammar School (1967-8), along with memories of sports	Personal, Bristol Grammar School

69 years old

I have to agree with almost everything that I wrote¹ a year ago: Leaving aside the geopolitics of the past month and year, this has been a very hot summer and we still have another month and a half to go before more temperate weather will arrive. I find the constant heat (most days between 32°C and 36 °C at 12 pm) extremely debilitating and I postpone my evening walk until 7 pm, when the sun is lower in the sky although it's still around 30°C. I'm not grumpy; it's just the constant heat that is reducing my mental capacity.

Healthwise I'm fine as is my wife. On the positive side, my youngest grand-daughter started walking a few weeks ago, and we are promised a grandson by the end of the year.

I have given in my notice at work: another year and I'm done. I will be 70, and enough is enough. My first thought this morning upon waking was 'one more year and I escape the tyranny of the phone alarm'.

I really don't feel my age. Life seems to be like swimming lengths: the first few are pleasurable, then there's a bit of a slog trying to get into rhythm, and then suddenly I discover that I've swum all the lengths that I intended to swim, and didn't notice them passing me by (yesterday I swam 24 lengths and wasn't tired afterwards). 

Internal links
[1] 1796

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
273	03/08/2010	Tuna mousse	Cooking
746	03/08/2014	Kindle problems	Kindle
1329	03/08/2020	Musicians that I have heard of who share my birthday	Personal
1522	03/08/2022	My life as multiples of 11	Personal
1650	03/08/2023	67 years old!	Personal
1651	03/08/2023	Middle England, and Israeli partition	Israel, Personal
1796	03/08/2024	Birthday blues	Personal

To See the Invisible Man

After I found the Robert Silverberg story, "What we did when the past went away", I reread stories in the same collection, "To the dark star". The first story is called "To See the Invisible Man"; as Silverberg writes: This story, written in June of 1962, marks the beginning of my real career as a science-fiction writer, I think.... The veteran writer and editor Frederik Pohl, with whom I had struck up a friendship in my earliest days as a writer, had taken over the editorship of Galaxy and its companion magazine If from the ailing Horace Gold in June of 1961, and he lured me back into the field which was still, after all, more important to me than any other. Fred had long been vexed with me for my willingness to churn out all that lucrative junk, and he believed (rightly, as time would prove) that a top-rank science-fiction writer was hidden behind the pyramid of literary garbage that I had cheerfully been producing over the past few years. So he made me an offer shrewdly calculated to appeal to my risk-abhorring nature. He agreed to buy any story I cared to send him—a guaranteed sale—provided I undertook to write it with all my heart, no quick-buck hackwork.

The story is about a man who has been found guilty of the crime of coldness. "Refusal to unburden myself for my fellow man. I was a four-time offender. The penalty for that was a year’s invisibility". What does that mean? A brand was attached to his forehead, and from that moment on, no one can "see" him for a year. At first he tests his abilities: he tries to get into a museum and initially queues for a token but he is not served. Eventually he realises that all he need to do is to take a token from the cashier's booth and walk in for free. He tries to get served in a restaurant but no one will see him, so even if he takes a seat at a table, no one will serve him. At one stage he feels ill, so he calls a doctor via the videophone; the doctor starts to diagnose him, but when the doctor sees the invisibility brand on the man's forehead, the doctor disconnects the call. Invisible means invisible.

I won't discuss the rest of the story, but I was contemplating what it might mean to be 'invisible' in 2025. As the COVID-19 pandemic showed, many people were able to continue functioning as normal - order meals via the internet and have them delivered to one's door, etc - although the medical side of the things could be quite problematic. And of course, there's no real way having the vaccination, but those appeared only after a year of the epidemic starting, so maybe the invisible man might have served his sentence by then.

Needless to say, the government could order the disconnection of internet access, both for phone and for computer, so that would definitely leave the invisible man without recourse to any form of interraction that has been added in the past sixty years.

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
189	02/08/2009	Speed IV	Programming
500	02/08/2012	Still coughing	Health
1061	02/08/2017	Theanine again	Theanine
1795	02/08/2024	Linda Lewis	Personal