2026 swimming

As I wrote¹ last year, as usual, the swimming pool opened at the time of the Harvest festival (known as Whitsun to our Christian friends); this seems to be the earliest date for some time as normally the pool doesn't open until June. For the first two days, the pool opened at 10 am, which is an inconvenient time for me, but today, there was health swimming at 8:30 am, which is much better for me (actually I would have preferred even half an hour earlier). 

Several months earlier, probably after the removal of yet another growth, I considered how I can minimise my exposure to the sun. When I'm swimming, my back is exposed and I've had quite a few growths removed from there. The answer was a Quick-Dry Swim Shirt Short Sleeve that I ordered from Temu about six months ago. I hadn't tried wearing this shirt until this morning so there was a slight worry that it might not fit, but the size was fine. As opposed to the sort of swimming shirt that I would wear 20 years ago that would flap around in the water and slow me down, this one fit snugly (without being too tight) so it was as if it wasn't there. I should note that the colours in the accompanying photograph have been manipulated; the original was too dark.

By 8:30 am, I was at the swimming pool, alone; the lifeguard opened the gate and I went in. I suspected that the water would be cold but I didn't expect it to be so cold! The first step down the ladder where I'm standing had the water cover my ankles; I waited a minute or so to acclimatise. Then another step down the ladder and my calves froze up. One more step and my thighs were covered; then I let go and floated for a bit. The water was freezing! Of course, I paid less attention to the cold once I started swimming. My body remembered was it was supposed to do and the only ache came from my neck (normally my left arm starts aching after a few lengths).

I swam two lengths, had a short rest. swam another two lengths and a rest, etc. In total I swam 10 lengths. That was enough for this year's debut performance. I should note that I was the only swimmer in the pool; my normal pool-opening companions were strangely absent. I sent a WhatsApp message to one of them and received an answer a minute ago: she was at her brother in law's flat in Tel Aviv. She also suffered from the cold when she was in the pool (I don't know when). Two people turned up only as I was preparing to leave and they too were surprised that I had been the only swimmer.

I had dug out my bone conducting headphones² a few days ago and fully charged them in preparation. The set list for today was two of my songs, 'Night scented stock' by Kate Bush, 'Katie's been gone' by The Band, and 'Stormbringer' by John Martyn. Another song might have started just as I finished but I don't recall. I often find it hard to recognise the songs at first because they play in a completely random order. 

I've been suffering quite a bit from stomach problems over the past few months and there have been the odd hint about them here. As a result, I abandoned my time restricted eating, as I found that eating something in the early evening helped with the aches. I saw a gastro-enterologist about six weeks ago who ordered a gastroscopy; this didn't reveal anything interesting, although a polyp was removed and sent for biopsy. I saw the GE doctor again who wasn't impressed by any of the possible findings of the gastroscopy. The one strong recommendation that he made was that I should double the dosage of omepradex; I always thought that this worked like paracetamol - the effect of each pill would wear off after some hours - but apparently not. I can definitely say that the days when I have 'gastric distress' are becoming fewer, and when they do occur, they are much milder than some of the bad days that I had before. All this is to say that I will be able to resume time restricted eating on the days when I go swimming - and this year I intend to swim frequently. Last year, time restricted eating helped reduce my weight and I don't eat on pool mornings until after swimming.

On the other hand, the new prophylactic medication Depalept³ that I have been taking to prevent migraines has worked well in that respect but seems to have caused my weight to balloon, although this may be water retention as my wife says that I don't look any worse. The medication has also had a very interesting effect on my sleep apnea: the central sleep apnea have almost completely disappeared (I didn't have even one such event in the past week) and obstructive apnea have also almost completely disappeared - two in the past week. Whatever the CPAP measures as deep sleep has also been affected: whereas this used to be in the range 0 - 20 minutes a night, now it's 50 - 120 a night. I shall mention these side effects to the neurologist in the follow-up appointment next month.

Internal links
[1] 1946
[2] 1587
[3] 2095

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
363	23/05/2011	Apology	Mobile phone
584	23/05/2013	Doctorate on hold	DBA
857	23/05/2015	Venice log 4 - Waiting	Holiday, Venice, Italy
1223	23/05/2019	Arriving in Athens (Greece 7)	Holiday, Athens, Greece
1224	23/05/2019	Athens hop-on hop-off (Greece 8)	Holiday, Athens, Greece

Jasmine Myra - Where light settles

Two and a half months ago, I wrote¹ Jasmine Myra has recorded a new album that will be released in a few months' time (15 May 2026)! Over the past 12 months, there has been silence from her camp and I seriously wondered whether she was continuing with music. As I expected, there was a letter in my mailbox on May 15 giving me access to her new album, "Where light settles", so that I could download it in mp3 format.

I put the songs on continous play via the computer and have been listening to them as I work and read. And ... I don't know what to write. On a visceral level, I don't enjoy listening to this as much as I did the earlier work. I've been trying to figure out what the problem is, and I think that it's because the disc is less of a group performance this time. Drums, for example, are rarely heard. There also don't seem to be tunes that can be recognised as such but rather a collection of notes.

There is much less guiter and fewer harp arpeggios; the piano takes an even more dominant role that it had in the past (eg the opener, 'Opening' seems to be solo piano). There is more flute than bass clarinet. 

I think that my conclusion has to be: if these were the first tunes that I heard from Jasmine Myra then I wouldn't have been so enthusiastic about her work as I was when I first heard her.

Strangely, 'the new piece that does not as yet have a name but was influenced by Kenny Wheeler' that was played in Zurich, October 2024² does not appear here.

Internal links
[1] 2083
[2] 1876

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
850	17/05/2015	Florence log 3 - Take it easy	Holiday, Florence, Italy
1217	17/05/2019	Arriving at Andros (Greece 1)	Holiday, Andros, Greece
1318	17/05/2020	Heatwave	Israel, Weather
1502	17/05/2022	Yesterday's sky	Weather
1761	17/05/2024	In silence	Song writing
1937	17/05/2025	Recording "Maeve's song" - production notes	Home recording

Horizontal scolling

I haven't blogged much recently, primarily because there hasn't been much to blog about, but also because quite often I get struck by a mysterious malaise that hits at around 2 pm and only dissapates in the evening. I had a gastroscopy test at the beginning of the week whose conclusions were unclear; I don't have anything seriously wrong, but still. On the topic of health, I can report that since starting the new prophylactic medicine¹ for migraines, I have been mercifully free of headaches, but there have been other side effects, such as adding 3 kg to my weight! And now for today's topic: horizontal scrolling.

In the OP's management program, there is a very simple form that has exactly one visible component, a TDBGrid. The grid's datasource is a query that has three fields: a date, a subject and a hidden id field. The subject can be very long and so it can be wider than the width of the form. Both the form and the grid have their bidimode set to biRightToLeft, as it should be for a Hebrew form. When one double clicks on the grid in order to open a form that is dependent on the hidden id field, the grid scrolls horizontally all the way to the left, thus effectively hiding the date field. A user complained that she had to scroll all the way to the right in order to overcome this.

I admit that I've seen this problem before but haven't cared enough to fix it. I also didn't know how to repair it. I assume that the solution would be some message that is sent to the grid to make it scroll back to the right. According to CoPilot, When a TDBGrid is in Right‑To‑Left mode: The visual left edge is actually the logical right edge. The scrollbar is reversed. When the grid receives focus again (after your double‑click opens the EditTask form), Windows sends a WM_HSCROLL message. The default handler scrolls the grid to the logical left, which in RTL mode is the visual right. But Delphi’s RTL support is partial, and the grid ends up scrolling to the visual left instead — exactly the opposite of what you want. So after returning from the EditTask form, the grid scrolls to the wrong side.

The fix seems to be to send the WM_HSROLL message to the grid (as I assumed): DBGrid1.Perform (WM_HSCROLL, SB_RIGHT, 0). But this code actually sends the cursor to the left of the grid (as I see it), whereas I want it to go to the right. So the real fix is DBGrid1.Perform (WM_HSCROLL, SB_LEFT, 0). And this does work.

Internal links
[1] 2095

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
72	08/05/2007	(Welcome to the) Hotel California	Van der Graaf Generator, Randy Newman, Jackson Browne, CSN, Barney Hoskyns
130	08/05/2008	Amsterdam diary	Programming, Holiday, Amsterdam
357	08/05/2011	More facts your mother never told you about Word automation	Programming, Office automation
581	08/05/2013	Analysing my sleep	CPAP, Gadgets
704	08/05/2014	Doctoring, researching, sampling	DBA, Kindle
1500	08/05/2022	1500 blogs	Meta-blogging
1757	08/05/2024	Milano: the final day	Computers, Holiday, Italy, Milan

Chamber music concert

I mentioned in a rather off the cuff manner a few months ago that 'there was supposed to be a chamber concert taking place in the kibbutz in another few hours' but that it was postponed because war with Iran had started that day. Finally, that chamber concert took place today and some of it was wonderful. 

The concert started with a short explanation about the harp as an instrument; this one had been built in the 1840s. The strings of a harp are tuned to a diatonic major scale, begging the question of how sharps and flats are played. It turns out that there are seven pedals at the bottom of the harp, where each pedal has three positions - flat, natural and sharp. This allows all the notes to be played, although sometimes enharmonics have to be employed, eg substituing F# for Gb. I know that Debussy wrote 'La fille aux cheveux de lin' (the girl with the flaxen hair) in the key of Gb which has six flats, so this must be a rather challenging piece to play.

The first piece of music to be played was Gabriel Fauré's 'Sicilienne' (Op. 78); the version that I am familiar with is played by cello and piano. There didn't seem to be much difference to the version played here by violin and harp, but this is always a good solid piece of music.

Next up was a real surprise as it wasn't in the pieces listed in the 'advert' for the concert - Debussy's 'Clair de lune' (the third part of the Suite Bergamasque). I wonder how the harp part was written as the music is notated in Db major with five flats. Surely it would be easier for both instruments simply to transpose the music up a semitone to D major - this would be a good key for the violin as well as two open strings, the D and A, are in this key. This was pure divine magic.

I have a memory of my mother saying that 'Clair de lune' was her favourite piece of music. Of course, I can't check with her as she passed away 24 years ago, and now it seems an odd statement for her to make as I don't have any recollection of her ever passing comment about a piece of music. I can't imagine any context in which she would have made this statement, either. But it is still a beautiful piece of music and the harp makes it more celestial than the piano does.

The other pieces on the set list were not familiar and I didn't enjoy them as much: a piece by Tchaikovsky that I can't name (a section from a violin concerto), Rumanian dances by Bartok, 'Fantasy for violin and harp' by Saint Saens (naturally I enjoyed this more). The final piece was probably part of 'Rapsodie espagnole' by Ravel (I didn't know that he was of Basque origin; I've always considered him to be French). I'm sorry to be so vague on the titles but I don't know the pieces and I'm having to transliteate their original names that were transliterated into Hebrew, so it's hard to be accurate.

The concert took place in a small building that one member turned into an art gallery. I was sitting in the second row on the left (I can recognise the bald patch on my head if I enlarge the picture) so of course the instruments were fairly loud, but they also had a large dynamic range as befitting top professional players.

Internal links
[1] 2083

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
171	02/05/2009	Heron - River of fortune	Heron
1213	02/05/2019	Diet	Health, Anaemia, Diet
1751	02/05/2024	Menaggio in the rain	Holiday, Italy, Varenna
1932	02/05/2025	Maeve's song	Song writing, Police procedurals