Bone conduction headphones/mp3 player

Five months ago, at the end of the swimming season, I wrote about bone conduction headphones. As I wrote, I ordered a device, but I had great difficulties with it when it arrived. It was very small, the control interface was terrible, and I was never able to change its source from bluetooth to memory card. In other words, I wasted about 120 NIS.

About a month ago, I returned to the task of finding a suitable device. I don't understand how a device intended for swimming can work with bluetooth: surely the distances involved and the water would prevent transmission. This time I was smart enough to look for devices that only work from their internal memory card. There were two serious contenders: one cost about 700 NIS and the other about 600 NIS. I decided to order the 'cheaper' one: it's only five or six times more expensive than the piece of junk that I previously bought. The above picture is of the Finis Duo player that comes with 4GB memory. 

Apart from anything else, this device has easily accessible controls, although I doubt that I'll need more than on and off. I thought that there was no way to control the volume, but whilst looking at the FAQs for this device, I see that there is... sort of. The instructions say Volume Up: Press and Hold to increase volume, blinking GREEN light but it doesn't say on which button to press. Presumably the big button on top of the X sign - although I wonder how this is disinguised from turning the device on and off. This button appears to control the power, the volume, play and pause. No doubt I'll get the hang of it.

I pondered how I am supposed to 'wear' the device: which bones conduct the sound? The blurb says that An integrated clip design secures the Duo™ to goggle straps to rest on the cheekbones for a comfortable and streamlined fit. Looking closely at the phones, I can see where how the goggle strap holds the phones.

4GB memory doesn't allow me to store all that I might have wanted to listen to. I've loaded it almost completely; in the future, I'll see which songs don't suit swimming (no King Crimson nor van der Graaf Generator!).

Due to the price of this device, I had to pay customs duty (anything over $70 or $75 is liable for duty). I received an SMS supposedly from the Israeli Post Office on Saturday, but this looked like a scam. Then I saw in my (physical) mailbox a note from the Kibbutz 'post office' that I had received a parcel and that I had to pay 87 NIS duty; the SMS said 10.25 NIS duty. I tried to pay the duty via the official Israeli Post Office, but I didn't seem to have the correct parcel number. The parcel was physically in our office, but the lady there wouldn't let me have it until I paid the duty (I asked her out of curiosity how she would know, and she said that she would take my word for it). As I had to go to the local town's post office anyway for something else, I took a picture of the parcel's label, hoping that the postal clerk would be able to figure out the correct identity number. 

I showed the clerk a printout of the website to which I was directed from the SMS - he identified it as spam, as I suspected. Thinking about it now, I find it strange that the scamming sum requested included agorot (cents); I imagine that the customs duty is rounded to a whole shekel number (who uses agorot now?). I also understand the psychology of the scam - it's only a small amount, so it won't cause much damage. But if 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 people pay 10 NIS - that's a lot of money! 

I find the timing of the scam interesting - how did the scammer know that I was about to receive a parcel?

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
337	27/02/2011	Michael Palin	TV series, Prague, Poland, Michael Palin
456	27/02/2012	More spooks	TV series, MI5
928	27/02/2016	Chicken breasts in tomato sauce	Cooking
1013	27/02/2017	What are the benefits of ERP enhancement?	ERP, DBA
1203	27/02/2019	Pneumonia again	Health
1476	27/02/2022	More musicians	Obituary, King Crimson
1587	27/02/2023	Bone conduction headphones/mp3 player	mp3, Headphones

Anniversary

The photos app on my mobile phone often shows me photographs taken one, two or three years ago on this day (similar to my 'this day in history' links in the blogs). Today I was shown some pictures from a plant nursery from six years ago; I don't know why I kept these pictures in the phone's memory as I'm not at all interested in plant nurseries, but I do remember that day very well.

Instead of looking at plants, I was deep inside my head, trying to figure out a new direction for my doctoral studies, as my first attempt had foundered on not being able to find sufficient participants for my proposed statistically-based research. After no small amount of thinking, I wrote this paragraph: a possible title would be "Benefits of user extensions to post-implementation ERP systems", where the word 'extensions' is comparable to what has been called 'customising' in my thesis. There are different levels of extensions....

The blog went on to denote different types of extensions, but that was intended more to help my thinking than as a title for the research. The following day, I wrote this: today I want to leave the taxonomy of enhancements and think about what results I am supposed to achieve from the research. The title states that "benefits" - whatever they are - are to be examined. As one reviewer overlooking my work wrote at one stage (I don't remember exactly where), let us not forget that this is a doctorate in Business Administration; there should be some effect on the bottom line.

In other words, the technical side is not particularly relevant; what is relevant is the management of such enhancements ... and that is the crux of my research topic. Six years later, I think that I have completed what is effectively my third attempt. A week and a half ago, I wrote about transferring an interview for the fourth case study that I had conducted from my phone to the computer. A few days ago, I conducted another interview for the same case study and transferred it painlessly.

But the point is not the data transferral, but rather that I had conducted another interview (the fourth vocal interview, along with my own 'self-interview' that was of course written), this time with the line manager. There are two reasons why this interview is important: firstly, it increases the number of interviews that I can report upon, and secondly, it is with someone who was not part of the original design team and so comes to the enhancement with a completely different point of view. Unfortunately, as I suspected in advance, the interviewee had difficulty in distinguishing between the technical points of the enhancement (which does not interest me, or at least, the research) and the way that the enhancement was managed (that does interest the research very much). As such, the interview didn't bring much value, although the interviewee did make the interesting point that the enhancement deals with only one part out of many, and so this is a partial enhancement. The other case studies examined complete solutions.

I had written several times in the thesis that this fourth case study is a validating study, in that the enhancement was managed as much as possible on the basis of the model that had been developed as a result of the earlier case studies and that this case study could validate the model. I had also written that the main critical success factor (CSF) is active user participation (or a lack of user resistance); the fourth case study showed abundant existing user participation and so there was no need to overcome any resistance. As such, this doesn't really validate the model, although it does strengthen the case for the CSF.

I don't recall if I have written here about a kind of measure that I invented, the net overhead score (NOS). The idea is that a successful enhancement reduces overhead, and so I evaluated how much overhead there was before the enhancement was enacted, and how much there is afterwards. As I noted in the methodology chapter, this score is entirely subjective, based on my evaluation. Each time the NOS was mentioned, I called it 'calculating the NOS'; my supervisor made a general remark about the NOS, but when I looked closely at the subject, I realised why there was some concern about this. No 'calculation' is involved at all - it's all 'estimating'. So I ran a global search/replace on the thesis and changed most of the calculats to estmats. 

Once I had written up the interview and made some more observations, I sent the latest version of the thesis off to my supervisor for his input. As far as I am concerned, the thesis is now complete, so there is a month left for polishing. In fact, the day after sending it, I started going through the thesis once more with a very critical eye; so far I've found one grammatical mistake (a word should have ended with 'ed' but I left that out) and I've added a few sentences here and there - and I've only finished the second chapter!

So: six years from first articulating the idea to completion.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
66	25/02/2007	Another one bites the dust	Obituary, King Crimson
1010	25/02/2017	New direction for doctorate?	DBA
1011	25/02/2017	Visiting a plant nursery	Personal
1473	25/02/2022	Mint chocolate ice cream comes to Bet Shemesh!	Peppermint, Weather

Transferring another interview

Two weeks ago I wrote about the problems that I had in transferring an interview recorded on my mobile phone to my computer. There I wrote that I used the 'My files' app in order to find the file.  I conducted another interview today, but I couldn't find the file via 'My files'.

After a moment's panic, I accessed the 'Voice recorder' app and 'pressed' on the 'List' button. The interview appeared at the top of the list. Pressing on the three dots option on the top right of the screen allowed me to share the file - again, I sent it to myself via gmail. This would seem to be an easier way of transferring the files; a bit late now, as I only want to conduct one more interview.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
64	16/02/2007	Working hard (but seeing the light at the end of the tunnel)	Programming, ERP, Cooking, Soundclick
454	16/02/2012	Solving the unflushed inventory problem	ERP
1008	16/02/2017	Reviewing someone else's academic work	ERP
1201	16/02/2019	I can't sleep without CPAP	CPAP

Why we sleep (2) - sleep deprivation

I travelled to Haifa yesterday by train, and on the way reread parts of 'Why we sleep'; something that I noticed previously but didn't really pay attention to, stood out. Chapter 7 of the book is entitled 'Too Extreme for the Guinness Book of World Records: sleep deprivation and the brain', and in it, an experiment is described that measures concentration. 

All of the subjects started off by getting a full eight-hour sleep opportunity the night before the test, allowing them to be assessed when fully rested. Then, the participants were divided into four different experimental groups. Rather like a drug study, each group was given a different “dose” of sleep deprivation. One group was kept up for seventy-two hours straight, going without sleep for three consecutive nights. The second group was allowed four hours of sleep each night. The third group was given six hours of sleep each night. The lucky fourth group was allowed to keep sleeping eight hours each night.

Those individuals who slept eight hours every night maintained a stable, near-perfect performance across the two weeks. Those in the three-night total sleep deprivation group suffered catastrophic impairment, which was no real surprise. After the first night of no sleep at all, their lapses in concentration (missed responses) increased by over 400 percent. The surprise was that these impairments continued to escalate at the same ballistic rate after a second and third night of total sleep deprivation, as if they would continue to escalate in severity if more nights of sleep were lost, showing no signs of flattening out. But it was the two partial sleep deprivation groups that brought the most concerning message of all. After four hours of sleep for six nights, participants’ performance was just as bad as those who had not slept for twenty-four hours straight—that is, a 400 percent increase in the number of microsleeps. By day 11 on this diet of four hours of sleep a night, participants’ performance had degraded even further, matching that of someone who had pulled two back-to-back all-nighters, going without sleep for forty-eight hours.

Ten days of six hours of sleep a night was all it took to become as impaired in performance as going without sleep for twenty-four hours straight. And like the total sleep deprivation group, the accruing performance impairment in the four-hour and six-hour sleep groups showed no signs of leveling out.

I think back to my days of basic army training: we were allowed 6 hours sleep each night, although this is not what happened. It actually means that evening activities ceased at 11 pm and recommenced the next morning at 5 am. There are obviously a few minutes required to get undressed in the evening, but we would fall asleep immediately. It does not include any time for showering, so normally we went without. More importantly, it does not include being woken up in the middle of the night for an hour's guard duty; the most lucky were those who had the first shift (i.e. they stayed awake for an hour then had five hours of uninterrupted sleep), then those who had the last shift. Everyone else fell asleep, got woken up for an hour's walking around, then went back to sleep again an hour later. I don't remember the frequency of guard duty: if there are 40 soldiers in the platoon, six hours to guard and two people per hour, then we would have guard duty once every three to four nights. Of course, more soldiers meant a lower frequency. This went on for several months. No wonder we used to fall asleep at any opportunity. There was a certain amount of time (say 15 minutes) in the early morning between running, breakfast and the daily expection, when one could clean oneself, polish boots and similar, as well of course cleaning up the tents, etc.

In reserve army duty, when it was guarding (as opposed to my first easy years working in a laboratory), it was most frequently four hours on and eight hours off. This later became amended to: between 6 am and 6 pm, four hours on and eight hours off (there were three platoons). Between 6 pm and 6 am, three hours on and six hours off. So, if one guarded from 6 am - 10am, one would also guard from 6 pm - 9 pm and then again from 3 am to 6 am; 10 hours out of 24. This went on for a few weeks.

The point that I am trying to make is that we were sleep deprived; our powers of concentration were shattered, so how exactly were we supposed to learn and internalise what we learned during basic training, or act appropriately during guard duty? 

I know that the sleep deprivation during basic training is one method by which the individual is 'broken down' then gets reintegrated into a unit, but it has always seemed somewhat cruel.

I wonder whether the orders about sleep are still the same; I wouldn't be surprised if nothing has changed despite all the research into sleep deprivation during the last forty years.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
453	15/02/2012	Maslow's hammer beats again	ERP, DBA
674	15/02/2014	In Lambeth	Ambient music
927	15/02/2016	Two films	TV series, Enigma, Films, DCI Banks
1291	15/02/2020	Appropriating the 'HTML document' framework	Priority tips

Putting words into action

In September 1982, there was a series of demonstrations in Jerusalem: a march that ended at the knesset. This was in response to the Sabra and Shatila massacre, and the entire (first) Lebanese war. Obviously my memory is at fault because apparently the demonstrations that I recall took place in February 1983. At that time I was studying accountancy near Netanya so maybe I wasn't too free to take place. The week before I did go, the demonstration resulted in the death of Emil Grunzweig, thrown by an Israeli right winger. The following week, the size of the demonstration doubled. Even so, I came away with a feeling of a wasted evening: all I did was walk a kilometre or so in Jerusalem.

Today I returned to Jerusalem in order to demonstrate against the judicial reforms: today, The Knesset Constitution Committee has approved the first stage of the government's judicial overhaul. The amendment to the law on the changes to the composition of the panel which chooses Supreme Court judges was passed by the votes of 9 MKs from the coalition while 7 MKs from the opposition voted against. The amendment, which will allow the government to choose future Supreme Court justices, will now move on to a first reading in the Knesset plenum.

This is despite an empassioned plea by the President yesterday evening for the coalition to suspend its plans for some time in order to allow some form of dialogue to take place. But no: the coalition (and especially two people, Justice Minister [some joke] Yariv Levin and chairman of the Constitution committe, Simha Rothman, seem determined to pass the new laws, regardless of how many people may be against them. 

Two people are holding the country to ransom.

The Prime Minister is barred from taking an active role in all this as at the moment he is involved in a court case where he has been charged with receiving bribes, etc. This is, as the Americans would say, an 'easy out' for him, as any requests for him to take action are refused because of conflict of interests. Despite this, he requested that the Attorney General release him from this bar; she apparently refused.

Estimates vary as to how many people took part in the demonstration today: anywhere between 60,000 and 100,000. Not only that, as I was leaving, more people were coming in, so the total number of participants will certainly be higher than any one-moment estimate.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
452	13/02/2012	Gateway	Gateway
673	13/02/2014	A flaw with spreadsheets	ERP, DBA, Excel
926	13/02/2016	ERP thoughts	DBA

Memories

It has long bothered me that I am able to recall (hopefully with some degree of accuracy) events that happened 50 years ago but have difficulty in remembering much about later events. Specifically, I am referring to the various blogs that I have written about my teenage, pre-emigration, years (1970-8), as opposed to many of my adult years (e.g. 1982-1989). I've always assumed that this was because many of my 'British' memories came from specific individual events, whereas my 'Israeli' memories came from the years that I was working full-time, where one day was very much like the next.

I am currently reading a book entitled 'The body keeps the score' by Bessel van der Kolk M.D. Roughly speaking, the thesis of the book is that a child's early environment, specifically how well she is loved and treated by her parents in her formative years, will determine her emotional outlook later on in life. A 'good' environment will lead to a balanced personality, whereas a 'bad' environment is liable to lead to a personality that 'shuts down' when faced with adversity.

I want to share a paragraph that comes from chapter 11, 'normal versus traumatic memory': Whether we remember a particular event at all, and how accurate our memories of it are, largely depends on how personally meaningful it was and how emotional we felt about it at the time. The key factor is our level of arousal. We all have memories associated with particular people, songs, smells, and places that stay with us for a long time.... We remember insults and injuries best: The adrenaline that we secrete to defend against potential threats helps to engrave those incidents into our minds. Even if the content of the remark fades, our dislike for the person who made it usually persists. 

I don't seem to remember insults and injuries best; to be honest, I barely remember most of the insults although there are a few mental injuries that I remember only too well (and I've documented them here).

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
809	12/02/2015	Frankie	TV series, William and Mary
1470	12/02/2022	You hold me (yet another new song)	TV series, Song writing, Home recording

Hot filling soup

The weather has been bad almost all week. Fortunately the earthquakes that happened in Turkey and Syria did not affect Israel; there were also some minor earthquakes in the north of Israel but these were barely felt (3.5-4.5 on the Richter scale) and caused no damage. Instead we had heavy rain and strong winds for three or four days. All week long I have had a runny nose, and twice I had to go to bed early as I felt very tired and/or very cold.

Today was dry and colder than the thermometer would have me believe. Whilst walking the dog in the afternoon, I decided to make soup in the evening, so that we would have something warm and nutricious to eat (and not fill ourselves with bread all the time). I checked what we had in the fridge - onions, carrots and parsley - but no courgettes or anything more interesting, so I ran down to the kibbutz shop and bought some courgettes, a leek and a can of black beans (I don't know what these might be called in English).

Before starting to cook, I first peeled some carrots then diced them. Following this I diced the courgettes and then the leek. I put some olive oil into a deep saucespan and heated it whilst I diced an onion; this went in first. After a few minutes of frying, I added the leek, and then a few minutes later, the carrots and parsley. After this mixture cooked for a bit, I threw in some pearl barley and quinoa (much less than a handful each), along with the black beans and their accompanying sauce. After a few more minutes, I began adding water, at first mixed with (vegetarian) chicken and onion soup powders, and then plain boiling water. I added various condiments, such as cumin, ginger and oregano. I then let the soup boil before reducing the heat and continuing to cook for another hour.

By the time it came to taste the soup, the level in the saucespan had reduced somewhat - a sign that the liquid had been absorbed by the barley and quinoa. My first bowl was very tasty. This kind of soup is somewhat different to the vegetable soup that my wife sometimes makes; in fact, there's almost nothing in common except for onion and carrot. She was somewhat sceptical about the soup before she tasted it, but afterwards was very generous in her abundant praise; "better than soup one gets served in a restaurant", she said. We both had a second bowl each. 

As usual, the soup looks like something the dog brought home, but I concentrate on taste and not on appearance. It looks more the CMB than something edible [scroll down to the section 'Microwave background observations', where there is an image of the CMB].

I don't think that I've ever made soup at home; I used to make it in the kibbutz kitchen on Saturdays when I worked there, but even then, that soup was different. Certainly I never added barley or quinoa (I don't think that we had even heard of quinoa in the 1990s). I may have to add more water later on as the barley is liable to continue absorbing liquid. Now we know what we'll be having for supper tomorrow evening. 

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
24	11/02/2006	One small step	Programming, Psychology, Kaizen, The brain
451	11/02/2012	A change is gonna come	Films

This week's rant

The week's rant comes from the financial paper/website, Globes, with the headline Moshe Gafni's attack on the governor of the Bank of Israel illustrates precisely what critics of the proposed judicial overhaul fear. "You are the governor of the Bank of Israel, the economic adviser to the government, and suddenly I hear you talk about the judicial reform being liable to harm the economy. There’s a political debate here that goes to the root of the matter. Why do you have to express a view on it?" Knesset Finance Committee chairperson Moshe Gafni asked Governor of the Bank of Israel Amir Yaron at the opening of a committee session yesterday. "Do you think that the governor of the Bank of Israel should express a view when half the residents of the State of Israel think otherwise?" Gafni continued. [end of quote]

I want to stop here, because that final sentence deserves some attention. It's true that "half the residents of Israel" voted for the political parties that comprise the ruling coalition; it's good that they don't claim that 55% or 60% or even more voted for those parties. This statement acknowledges that for every person that voted 'for', there is another person who voted 'against'. It is only the peculiarities of the electoral system that awarded a majority to those parties.

In my 'enlightened leftish traitor' world view (deliberate sarcasm), when there are two people who have to decide on something and their opinions are opposed, normally the option that causes the least damage is the one chosen. Obviously Gafni et al. have never heard of this; they don't mind causing damage if the decision taken will improve their position.

Also, as we were informed on the Friday night news (admittedly from the supposedly leftish Channel 12 news), 42% of those who voted for the ruling parties want to stop or delay the legislation regarding the judicial system; 45% of those who voted for those parties want to continue the legislation. This translates to 71% of the population want to stop or delay this legislation. That's not a statistic that one hears.

If I'm writing about the Channel 12 Friday evening news, then I have to mention that in order to balance things up, they have introduced a right wing commentator who in my humble opinion is exceedingly annoying because of his total inflexibility and his undying belief that 'right [wing] is always right'. It was bad enough last night, but the previous week he was so obnoxious that it was unbelievable. The discussion then was not about the judicial system legislation or even anything political; it was about women's rights, especially after a horrifying report of a man who broke into a flat on the second floor of a building (of maybe eight floors), then tied up the woman living there and raped her. This commentator automatically attacked the (female) reporter who delivered the story and widened it to include other cases of abuse. His attitude to the three female commentators (out of six) appearing on the show was extremely rude and should be condemned.

I hesitate to bring evidence coming from the 'Wonderful country' [ארץ נהדרת] satirical tv programme (also channel 12); they had in the past a popular section based on one of the cast who posed as a taxi driver and would make provocative remarks to the people that he transported with their responses being shown. If one thinks about this, the people filmed would have had to give their consent to having their remarks broadcast, so this is hardly an unbiased sample. Anyway, the programme restored the taxi driver to life and showed him talking with various people who 'naturally' voted for the right wing parties. They were all against the judicial system reform/ruin, especially once it was explained to them (most of them did not know what the 'override clause' was, where the Knesset can override decisions taken by the Supreme Court, thus making the court superfluous and allowing the government to do whatever they like).

One of those days

As today is Saturday and I went to bed relatively late last night, I allowed myself to sleep until I awoke naturally at 7:15 am. Actually, I only partially awoke naturally; the other part that woke me was the sound of the rain that was falling outside. We have had a very dry winter so far, but on Tuesday the rain started to fall and didn't really stop until Thursday evening. Friday was dry, but again the rain fell on and off all day today. 

I waited for the rain to stop so that I could take the dog for a walk without her getting wet, but the weather had other ideas, so eventually I buttoned up and took her to the local school, which is two or three minutes away from my house. There is a long corridor that I can walk up and down, sheltered from the rain. It's not as good as a real walk but it's better than nothing . Later on during the day I was able to take advantage of the few dry periods to take the dog for real walks (enabling her to do her business properly).

During breakfast I watched a YouTube video analysing part of the song 'Starting over' by John Lennon. My wife was also listening but she didn't understand the point of the video; "how does she [the presenter] know what Lennon intended", she asked, missing the discussion of the interesting chord progression. 

I listened and internalised, for later on in the day, I sat at the piano and started messing around with some of the chords from that song, specifically A A+ Bm9 E. I shortly found a tune that would sit on these chords (not the tune of 'Starting over'), but intuitively decided that I too would let the melody dictate the chords. So after two iterations of those four chords, I found myself adding a little phrygian flavour by descending to Dm before returning to E; the tune again went down to Dm, this time for twice as long. Although the phrase ended up on the note E, I decided to harmonise this with a C chord (half a bar) before a short triplet turn over Bb (I realised a bit later that this comes from Fauré's "Pavane") and a resolution to A, the tonic (a slightly weird cadence). The second time around, after the A chord, I found myself improvising something similar with Gm and A: again, I let the tune (the same phrase but first starting on D, then on F and finally on G) dictate the harmony. The third time around, the tune ended on a B that I harmonised with a B minor chord, and thence to E, creating a ii V I turnaround.

After playing this through a few times, I recorded it onto my phone then started the task of transcribing the music. I discovered that the four chord opening required two bars of each chord to support the melody, whereas the phrygian part varied from two bars per chord down to two chords per bar. The Gm/A part was one bar per chord. I created only a simple chords and melody version; I'll leave arranging it for later. 

Thinking about the tune later on, I'll definitely have to lower it by about a fourth (i.e. from A down to E). The highest note is an F, that is far too high for me; if I lower this to C, then the lowest note will be an A (an octave and a bit below that C), fitting my range perfectly.

I haven't done much musically in the past two months, both because I've had plenty of consulting work, but also because I have two completely arranged songs that can't be recorded as I don't have any ideas as to what their words could be. As it happens, this new tune may get words quite quickly: while I was playing it, the words "What makes you think that our time together" fell quite naturally on the tune. I can definitely make something from this; whilst I could be the cruel one, trying to get my partner to understand that 'our time' is over, I could also be the person who is being told that 'our time' is over. This role playing may make writing the lyrics a bit easier.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
448	04/02/2012	An untypical Thursday	ERP, Sandy Denny, Peter Hammill, Diet
804	04/02/2015	Copper socks (2)	Health
925	04/02/2016	Intermediate submission not accepted	DBA
1469	04/02/2022	Completing a new song ("Blind as a bat")	Song writing, Home recording

Thesis status at the end of January - two months before the final submission date

About six weeks ago, I wrote about a new enhancement and how it can serve as a validating case study for my research. I concluded with the words at home I will be revising whatever needs to be rewritten in the thesis, and adding what needs to be added. I expect that everything will be over by the end of January.

Well, we're now at the end of January - actually the day before the end - and I have just uploaded a new version of the thesis for my supervisor to read. I would say that for the first three weeks after the previous blog, I didn't add very much to the thesis, but the past few weeks have seen a great deal of activity. The most important part of that activity was holding interviews - one with myself and two with members of the enhancement's steering committee. I was able to write these up very quickly; writing up my own interview took a bit longer, but I was also establishing the format so that I could paste the other interviewees' answers in very easily.

I had some technical problems in accessing the interview recordings that I partially documented in the thesis (this is all good meta-data). The first interview was held via Teams and lasted just under 18 minutes; when I came to listen to it and transcribe the answers, the interview cut off sharply at about 11:30 minutes. This means that answers to the final questions were not recorded. Fortunately I wrote up this part of the interview the day after it had occurred (coincidentally I had stopped the previous day just before the recording finished), so the answers were clear in my mind. Strangely, the same thing happened with the previous interview with this person: the last part of the conversation was not recorded.

Avoiding Teams, I conducted the second interview via telephone, recording the conversation. There were no problems with the file itself, but I had great difficulty in transferring the recording from my phone to my computer. After connecting the two with a USB cable, the computer would not recognise the existence of the phone, even though the latter device was charging via the cable. I have used the same cable to transfer songs from the computer to my wife's phone, so the cable is not the problem.

After trying a few approaches to get my computer to recognise the phone, I began to think of alternative strategies. First I found the file on the phone (via the 'My files' app) then looked at the various options available to handle the file. Fortunately I found the option to share the file with another application, so I was able to send myself an email with the file attached. Listening to the (now backed up) recording, there is heavy breathing every few seconds that probably comes from me breathing normally but onto the headset microphone. As I was writing up the interview shortly after it occurred, I wasn't too dependent on the recording, so the breathing didn't mask much of the conversation.

Let's see what the supervisor has to say.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
329	30/01/2011	Sumptuous Sunday 5	Cooking, Slow cooker
330	30/01/2011	Marketing	MBA, Marketing
543	30/01/2013	Notes on 'The Fingertip effect" and ERP	ERP, DBA
1198	30/01/2019	Yet another mp3 player	mp3

Improving a query in the Management program

The management program that I maintain for the OP has had a comments table 'from time immorial'; depending on a field in the table, a comment can be connected to a docket, a therapist or to a project. From these screens, the appropriate comments can be seen (otherwise known as vertical access); i.e. for a given docket, one can easily see the comments for that docket.

A few months ago, I added the concept of a 'comment type' as we had introduced certain automatic comments; whilst these comments can still be in the vertical manner, there was no way of seeing all comments of a given type (aka horizontal access). So I developed a report that showed all the comments, depending on the various parameters chosen. As a comment regarding a therapist is somewhat different from a comment regarding a docket, the query that I had to write required a case statement in order to selectively display data. As this query was written in the 'modern age', it included all the bells and whistles developed in the past (i.e. adding parameters in a dynamic fashion).

select comments.curdate, comments.subject, comtypes.name, 
case when comments.sug = 'D' then comments.docket
when comments.sug = 'T' then therapists.name
else comments.docket end as avalue,
customers.name, comments.comment
from comments
left join comtypes on comtypes.id = comments.comtype
left join therapists on therapists.id = comments.docket
left join xtracust on xtracust.docket = comments.docket
left join customers on customers.id = xtracust.customer
where 1 = 0

This worked, but yesterday I noticed that the screen took a long time to open; the query itself won't return any records because of the 'where 1 = 0' clause, but apparently the SQL parser still has to parse the entire statement.

This morning I woke up thinking about this query and how it could be improved. At first I couldn't see how to do this, but a bit later, I realised that the default query (as shown above) is replaced by a more dynamic query when the program runs; the purpose of the default query is only to define the fields that will be displayed in the database grid, and to define the indexes on the basis of those fields. So all I need do was write the most minimal query that showed the same fields. This became

select comments.curdate, comments.subject, comtypes.name, 
cast (comments.docket as varchar (32)) as avalue,
customers.name, comments.comment
from comments
left join comtypes on comtypes.id = comments.comtype
inner join xtracust on xtracust.docket = comments.docket
inner join customers on customers.id = xtracust.customer
where 1 = 0
and comments.sug = 'P'

There's no need for left joins: removing them speeds up the query. Unfortunately, I discovered that the 'case' statement had concealed a problem: in the 'avalue' field was being displayed either a number (comments.docket) or a string (therapists.name). Once I had removed the 'case' statement, I had to display a string as the fourth field, so I had to use the extremely ugly 'cast...' function. Why cast the docket number to a string when I could use the therapist's name (after all, there are fewer comments for therapists than for dockets, although there are fewer comments for projects than for therapists)? Because in the context of retrieving therapist comments, there is no concept of customers, making the 'customers.name' field even more complicated than using the cast.

Once I had done this, I realised that by the time the dynamic query is built, the screen already 'knows' whether it is to display comments from dockets, therapists or projects, so there's no need for the 'case' statement in the live query. The query itself has to change according to which type is chosen; in the end I defined several constants (as shown below) then built the query line by line.

const
 q1 = 'select comments.taarich, comments.subject, comtypes.name, ';
 q2 = 'cast (comments.docket as varchar (32)) as avalue, customers.name, ';
 q3 = 'therapists.name as avalue, cast (''-'' as varchar (32)) as name, ';
 q4 = 'comments.comment from comments ';
 q5 = 'left join comtypes on comtypes.id = comments.comtype ';
 q6 = 'inner join xtracust on xtracust.docket = comments.docket ';
 q7 = 'inner join customers on customers.id = xtracust.customer ';
 q8 = 'inner join therapists on therapists.id = comments.docket ';
 q9 = 'inner join projects on projects.id = comments.docket ';
 q10 = 'inner join customers on customers.id = projects.customer ';
 q11 = 'where 1 = 1';
 
[following is the code that builds the query]
 s:= q1;  // this is the query string
 sug:= GetSug; // 'sug' is Hebrew for 'type', a reserved word
 if sug = 'T'
  then s:= s + q3
  else s:= s + q2;
 s:= s + q4 + q5;
 case sug[1] of
  'D': s:= s + q6 + q7;
  'T': s:= s + q8;
  'P': s:= s + q9 + q10
 end;
 s:= s + q11;

This strange code builds the query as according to the type. Note that if the type is 'T' (i.e. therapist) then the value for the customer name is '-'.

Thinking about the above now (a few hours after having implemented the above), I've noticed one other problem that is not with the SQL code but with the parameters. On the screen is displayed a combo box from which the customer can be chosen. As I've noted above, this makes no sense in the context of therapists; I should add to the 'rgSugExit' event handler to update the combox box data with those of the therapists should the T option be chosen; this event handler already reloads the 'comment type' combo box with the types applicable to the comment type. After looking at the code one more type, I see that in fact the customers combo box is hidden (but not its label!) if the T option is chosen. This is almost correct but a little more needs to be done.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
118	28/01/2008	Brains and mirrors	Psychology, Social intelligence, Martin Seligman, The brain
1374	28/01/2021	Cormoran Strike	TV series, DCI Banks, Cormoran Strike

More David Crosby: Guinnevere

Some web pages devoted to this song:

A live performance

An analysis video

And not for the faint of heart, a tab. I can hear the transition between 4/4 and 3/4, but the transition into 11/8 eludes me for the time being.

Graham Nash's "guitar playing" in this video (and the one following, "The Lee Shore") reminds me of a story in his autobiography: 

One day, in February 1963, we finished a particularly energetic lunchtime show at the Cavern. The girls had left, the lights came up, and people were cleaning the place, picking up popcorn packages and cheese wrappers, wiping up piss. We were hauling our meager gear into the tiny side dressing room when a short, older man with glasses pushed his way into the cubicle. 

“I’m Ron Richards,” he said, thrusting out a hand. “I work at EMI and I liked your show. I especially liked the guy who was playing without any guitar strings.” 

Would the guilty party please step forward? Okay, that would be me. The night before, we had played at Colston Hall in Bristol, and during the show I’d broken my last string and couldn’t afford new ones. So I did the lunchtime show at the Cavern with my Harmony guitar—and no strings. What did it matter? Tony, Eric, and Don made up the Hollies’ dynamic rhythm section. I strummed along, except I didn’t plug in, so it didn’t make any difference whether I had strings on or not. Ron didn’t care. In fact, he found it intriguing. He loved our energy, and we’d gone down great. That was all he needed to make the next move. 

“I’d be very interested in recording you,” Ron said. “What do you think?”

Frequently I've seen videos/pictures of CSN where Graham is unencumbered with a guitar; presumably his instrumental capabilities were negligible to those of Stills, Crosby and Young.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
328	23/01/2011	Sumptuous Sunday 4	Cooking
541	23/01/2013	The simplest ideas are normally the best	ERP, Problem solving
920	23/01/2016	Vinyl log 27 - 23 January	Vinyl log, 10cc
1371	23/01/2021	Porting an application to Windows 10/Delphi 10.2 (part 3)	Programming, Delphi, Unicode
1372	23/01/2021	Porting an application to Windows 10/Delphi 10.2 (part 4)	Programming, Delphi, Unicode

David Crosby (1941-2023), RIP

Probably like most of my peers, my first exposure to David Crosby was the eponymous 'Crosby, Stills and Nash' album from 1969 (he's the one with the mustache on the right - the order of names is in reverse to their pictures). I'm not sure when I first listened to it properly: certainly not upon its release. I remember at the infamous Weeley festival (August 1971) reading a copy of the International Times* that featured an article based upon CS&Y's 'Wooden ships' - the article was called 'songs ... the apocalypse' (I don't remember now whether it was 'songs of', 'songs for', 'songs about' or even something else). Then again, there was the soundtrack of the film of the Woodstock festival that featured two good songs from the trio.

However it was, I reconnected with this album during my gap year (73-4), especially liking the divine song 'Guinnevere', written by DC. Unfortunately, in my humble opinion, he was never able to reach the same dizzy heights of this song or 'Wooden ships'. I've no doubt written this before, but I think the album would have been improved by removing the final song ('49 bye byes') and replacing it with David's 'On the lee shore'. There exists an almost finished version of this song on the unofficial album 'Studio Archives 1969': the lead guitar is a bit rough here and there and presumably would have been replaced had the song made the album. '49 bye byes' on the other hand is a waste of space. 

Thinking about it now, during the gap year I was also introduced to another Crosby song, the very contentious 'Triad', as performed by Jefferson Airplane. I have this version as well as Crosby's version (also on 'Studio Archives').

Then the Crosby trail ran dry, at least for me. Graham Nash's autobiography naturally contains a great deal of material about Crosby; one comes away thinking that Crosby peaked too early, and spent the last 50 years of his life in a crack cocaine haze. 

A few years ago I found the CSN  album that opened with a very strong Crosby song, 'Shadow captain', co-written with pianist Craig Doerge. His other songs on the album are not so good.

Other activities of note are 'discovering' Joni Mitchell and producing her first album. He also sang harmony vocals on several songs by Jackson Browne.

So farewell David, a voice from youth. Considering his life style, one might be surprised that he lasted so long.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
799	20/01/2015	Position paper submitted	DBA
1105	20/01/2018	Noise cancelling headphones	Personal, Headphones
1284	20/01/2020	Grand-daughter #2 standing	Grandfather
1465	20/01/2022	Accountant's gloves	Personal
1574	20/01/2023	David Crosby (1941-2023), RIP	Obituary, CSN

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* I found the article in the International Times archive; it was written by Jody Breslaw and is actually called "A hard rain's gonna fall", but it's subtitled 'visions of the apocalypse', which is what I remembered. The article covers two pages; the second page is very legible, but the first (that of course refers to 'Wooden ships') is not. In desperation, I 'printed' the page to PDF then in a PDF viewer increased the magnification to 400%: this is definitely legible.

Breslaw would appear to be a writer for the music press, as there are a few references to him (her?) in various rock publications. After writing about the apocalyptic vision of the early Dylan, Breslaw goes on to write The Buffalo Springfield-Byrds-Airplane-CSN&Y family pick up where Dylan left off.... From the first CS&N album, "Wooden Ships" is one of the classic apocalyptic songs. It arises from the humanistic, fabulistic science fiction tradition of, say, Vonnegut, but is more suffused with anguish and loss. Here it is again, an explicit depiction of the collapse of Western civilisation, etc., presumably through atomic holocaust. "Horror grips us as we watch you die", but there's still hope for us - "we are leaving" to make a new and better world. The music and lyrics have a pleading quality, a yearning theme of return to innocence which was later to culminate in Woodstock.

Reading this 50 years after the event, I am struck by how erudite is the above. One might imagine that IT was written by people who weren't too concerned with the niceties of language, but the punctuation of the above paragraph is 100% - 'etc' is written with a full stop before the comma as behoves an expression that has been shortened (et cetera). Similarly, the multiple commas around Vonnegut are correct. The only word that is wrong is the 'which' in the final sentence that really should be a 'that'.

Inside and outside the lemon tree

As I've probably written before, we have a lemon tree in our garden. In the past, it's given us a fair amount of lemons, but for some reason, the last year has been somewhat barren. I'm pleased to see that now we have plenty of lemons growing. 

The picture on the left was taken from inside the tree; there's a nice clump of lemons in the top left hand corner. The picture on the right was taken from above the tree (from our balcony): there are some good sized lemons in the middle of the picture, but I'm going to need a ladder to get to them (if at all).

But even the small lemons are very juicy, so the size doesn't matter too much. Some rain would help....

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
443	14/01/2012	More City Boy	City Boy
534	14/01/2013	Election day duty driver	Kibbutz, Probability
669	14/01/2014	Commuting	Personal
915	14/01/2016	MP3 Headphones	Richard Thompson, mp3
916	14/01/2016	Alan Rickman, RIP	Films, Obituary
1574	14/01/2023	Inside and outside the lemon tree	Personal

Israeli democracy nightmares

Yesterday evening at about 7:45 in the evening, we turned on our television, by chance to see a live speech from the president of the Israeli Supreme Court, Esther Hayut. Following are parts of what she said.

"This is an unrestrained attack on the legal system, as though it were an enemy to be stormed and subdued. Cynically enough, those who thought up this plan call it a plan ‘to fix’ the legal system. And I say, this is a plan to dismember the legal system. It is intended to land a mortal blow on the independence and impartiality of the judicial branch of government and to turn it into a silent branch....

"Whoever tells you ‘no more striking down laws’ actually means: no more prohibiting the arrest of soldiers for days without bringing them before a court, as the court ruled in the Tzemah case; no more protection of the right of a car owner to receive income supplement, as the court ruled in the Hassan case; no more realization of the right of single-sex couples to parenthood and a full family life, as the court ruled in the Arad-Pinkas case.

"And anyone who tells you ‘no more disqualification of decisions marred by extreme unreasonableness’ actually means: no more prohibiting cutting off electricity to citizens in financial or medical difficulty, as the court ruled in the Moisa case; no more reinforcement of all educational institutions near the Gaza border, as the court ruled in the Wasser case; no more cancellation of severe restrictions on freedom of political expression in the press and in demonstrations, as the court ruled in the Schnitzer case, and in many other cases; no more obliging a local authority to build a mikveh (ritual bath) for religiously observant women in a settlement with a secular majority, as the court ruled in the case of Kfar Vradim; no more protection of the right of children with special needs to receive free special education, even when they are integrated into the regular education system, as the court ruled in the Yated case. No more, and these are just a few examples.

"In other words, if government decisions are the end of the matter, and the court is deprived of the tools for fulfilling its function, it will not be possible to ensure protection of rights in cases in which government agencies infringe them in an uncalled for way through legislation or administrative decisions."

A few minutes later, the new Minister of Justice, Yariv Levin, said (in a speech that almost certainly was written earlier in the day, i.e. without knowing exactly what Hayut was going to say):

"Something happened this evening. It turns out that there is another political party in Israel. A party that did not compete in the election that took place only two months ago. A party that has put itself above the Knesset, above the decision of the people. This evening, we heard rhetoric familiar from black flag demonstrations. It’s the same political agenda, the same call to set the streets on fire".

That's not what we heard, but never mind.

As usual, I awoke in the middle of the night (at about 2:20 am) for a toilet visit; unusually I didn't fall asleep straight away once back in bed. Instead, I had nightmares of Yariv Levin running the country.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
325	13/01/2011	Mirror mirror on the wall	Personal
442	13/01/2012	Caught in a musical timeweb	10cc, City Boy
533	13/01/2013	Embedding pictures in HTML emails	Programming, Delphi, Email
798	13/01/2015	Split questionnaire design	DBA
914	13/01/2016	Reviving the research	DBA
1461	13/01/2022	Desiccated apple slices	Cooking, Ninja grill

Passports

Our Israeli passports will run out at the beginning of June 2023. I remember this date well as we had to renew our passports in a hurry ten years ago in order to travel to Spain and Britain. Five months in advance should be plenty of time, no? So I search for 'renew passport' on the Internet (in Hebrew, of course) and receive details of what I should do. The first step is to make an appointment for the local office that deals with passports, identity cards, etc. Since Covid-19, they have set up an appointments application easily accessible via the Internet.

The first available date for Bet Shemesh is ... 4 July! That can't be right! But, yes, it is: I have to make an appointment six months in advance! As one cannot use passports in the three months prior to their running out, and a new one could take as long as six weeks to arrive, this means that we cannot leave the country between the beginning of March and the middle of August. 

What does this mean if I am honoured to attend the degree ceremony in Edinburgh in June, should I be awarded my doctorate?

The website shows various locations and dates - I could make an appointment for Karmiel on 2 May, thus saving two months! As I and my wife travel half price on trains, this wouldn't cost very much. Unfortunately the website won't allow me to make multiple appointments. OK, I cancel Bet Shemesh and make an appointment for Karmiel.

Now we're set for 2 May... in Karmiel, with a 3 hour journey ahead of us (and 3 hours back). Even so, I'll check the website every day for cancellations in Bet Shemesh.

As for paying, if I do so before the end of February and via the website, the renewal will cost only 160 NIS. I understand that after February, it will cost 320 NIS, and paying in person is even more expensive. I believe that I can pay in advance, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
530	07/01/2013	Recurring actors in long running TV shows	TV series
910	07/01/2016	Vinyl log 25 - 3 January	Vinyl log, Jackson Browne
1000	07/01/2017	1000 blog entries	Meta-blogging
1369	07/01/2021	I haven't disappeared	DBA, Health
1456	07/01/2022	Fourth time around	Covid-19

Randy Newman's 20 greatest songs

It all began with an article (if that's the correct word these days) on the Guardian's website from yesterday evening listing Randy's 20 greatest songs, at least as according to author Elle Hunt. First, let's look at the list before making comments:

 
 
20. Short people
19. Have you seen my baby? 
18. Lonely at the top
17. You can leave your hat on
16. When she loved me
15. Love story (you and me)
14. Mama told me not to come
13. Birmingham
12. Political science
11. Louisiana 1927
10. I think it's going to rain today
9. I love LA 
8. Simon Smith and the amazing dancing bear
7. Rednecks
6. Marie
5. In Germany before the war 
4. My life is good
3. Living without you
2. Sail away
1. God's song

Really? It's as if Randy has done nothing good since 'Trouble in Paradise' (1980). 'Living without you' in position 3? As much as I like the old songs, most of them don't belong on this list. 'You can leave your hat on' may have earned more money than the other songs, but it's not much of a song as a song.

If I were going to list his 20 best songs, they might be (in chronological order)

  1. I think it's going to rain today
  2. Simon Smith and the amazing dancing bear
  3. Davy the fat boy
  4. Sail away
  5. Lonely at the top
  6. Rednecks
  7. Louisiana 1927
  8. In Germany before the war
  9. It's money that I love
  10. Same girl
  11. My life is good
  12. Christmas in Capetown
  13. Dixie flyer
  14. New Orleans wins the war
  15. Bad news from home
  16. The world isn't fair
  17. A piece of the pie
  18. Shame
  19. Lost without you
  20. She chose me
  

One thing that I have noticed about Randy's songs is that they have become less amenable to covers. How could anyone else record 'The world isn't fair', a song that in my point of view is amongst his best?

Today really is Sandy Denny's birthday. In the summer of 1973, she played some concerts as support to Randy Newman, but I've never been able to find anything out about these concerts.

200 best singers of all time

No small fuss was made in Israel when Rolling Stone published their list of 200 best singers of all time, including Ofra Haza in position 186. Nice that they've heard of her. I admit that I haven't heard of many of the singers placed in these positions.

Anyway, I idly wondered whether the late great Sandy Denny would appear in the list. And appear she does: position 164! 

Denny’s buttery, mystical croon is so timeless that it sounds centuries older than the Sixties folk revival, making her the perfect choice to appear on a song about Middle-earth (and take home the award for Led Zeppelin’s only guest vocalist, on “The Battle of Evermore”). In both Fairport Convention and her solo work, she commanded a sense of longing with her phrasing and feathery register that gave her an ethereal quality on par with other tragic folk icons like Nick Drake and Judee Sill. She died in 1978 at just 31, making her obscurity all the more alluring to those who stumble upon her catalog. “What you heard was a kind of awe at the contingency of human life and the beauty of the world,” Greil Marcus wrote in her Rolling Stone obituary. “A certain reverence for the past, and a steady determination to take her place in the long story she was telling.” —A.M. 

Good news for her birthday that by chance is today. And also by chance, the t-shirt at the top of the pile that I took today to wear underneath my buttoned shirt was the one with the David Bailey picture of Sandy.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
666	05/01/2014	End of year blues	ERP
1104	05/01/2018	Business rules in Priority which do not apply to specific users/2	Priority tips
1455	05/01/2022	Sandy Denny would have been 75 years old today	Sandy Denny

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Correction: Wikipedia has Sandy's birthday as tomorrow, meaning that the coincidences that I wrote about are not coincidences. Today is, however, Maartin Allcock's birthday.