Again, vertigo

In the past few days, I've noticed that I've suffered from dizziness much more than normal. I should qualify that statement: normally I don't suffer from dizziness at all, but if I am sitting down and get up quickly, I feel a bit light-headed. This is normal! As I had a doctor's appointment yesterday for something else (an odd pain in my foot), I thought that I would mention the dizziness.

The doctor asked me to sit on the examining bed; he took my head in his hands and said that he wanted me to quickly lower my head until it rested on the bed. I did so and suffered immediately from a severe attack of dizziness. "Aha", the doctor said (or would have, had he been British): this is a clear case of vertigo.

I told him about my previous encounter with vertigo and the tests that I underwent. He said that there was no need for the ENG test again; instead he would prescribe a medication (that apparently is not very effective), but that the best way of curing the vertigo was by performing the Epley manoeuver. He asked for my phone then searched for this term in YouTube, finding a couple of videos that explain what to do.

The home Epley maneuver is a type of exercise that helps to treat the symptoms of benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV). You can do this exercise at home. BPPV is caused by a problem in your inner ear. Your semicircular canals are found inside your ear. They detect motion and send this information to your brain. The utricle is a nearby part of the ear. It contains calcium crystals (canaliths) that help it detect movement. Sometimes these crystals detach from the utricle and end up inside the semicircular canals. When these crystals move inside the canals, they may send incorrect signals to your brain about your position. This can make you feel like the world is spinning. This is called vertigo. Dr. John Epley designed a series of movements to dislodge the crystals from the semicircular canals. These movements bring the crystals back to the utricle, where they belong. This treats the symptoms of vertigo. [whoever wrote this has apparently never heard of the semicolon; this is very simple English]

So yesterday evening I laid down on my bed, trying to approximate the position shown in the video. I was turned to the right, but had no vertigo when lying down. I then turned 90° to my left; this gave me intense vertigo, and shows that the 'active' ear is my left ear (rereading my blog from seven years ago, I see that there also I noted that the left ear was more sensitive than the right; I also hear better in the left ear). I waited until the dizziness went, then turned back to the original position; more dizziness. I waited again until this passed and then assumed the third position, lying on my stomach with my head turned. I don't recall now, but I think that this wasn't so bad as the two previous turns. After waiting a bit, I got up and carried on as usual, although I was feeling a bit nauseous and fragile - normal responses to the manoever. 

This morning I repeated the manouever but felt no dizziness as I turned: this is good! I did feel a bit unsettled afterwards, but this feeling went fairly quickly. Later on my wife went to the pharmacy and bought the prescribed betahistine; I took one immediately when she returned, and to be honest, it made me feel a bit unsettled again. I will repeat the manouever at least twice a day until all dizziness has ceased.

Obligatory Peter Hammill quote: Cathedrals spiral skywards, I think I'm getting vertigo ("German overalls").

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This day in history:

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

Yehonatan Geffen (1947-2023)

With a great deal of sadness, I have to report the death of Israeli author/poet/songwriter Yehonatan Geffen. I wrote extensively about my connection with him here. In fact, I don't think that I have paid much attention to him since.

He was a huge influence on me in my first years of living in Israel and he will be missed.

Here is an obituary in English.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
31	19/04/2006	Strumming the guitar - stage one	Programming, MIDI
246	19/04/2010	Books and films	Films, Nick Hornby, Time traveler's wife, Hugh Grant
699	19/04/2014	Researching during the Passover holiday week	DBA, Psychology
944	19/04/2016	Programmers in MOBI	Programming, Computer, Kindle
1023	19/04/2017	Donating blood (2)	Health, Donating blood
1123	19/04/2018	70 years of independence	Israel, Kibbutz

Revisiting the Hebrew song "Birthday"

I wrote two and a half years ago about this song. I had occasion to listen to the recorded version a few months ago and did not like it at all: it seemed too fast and the arrangement was too 'busy'. I started work on a new arrangement that would be much slower, 80 bpm instead of 100 bpm. I'm not sure about the original key of this arrangement: the previous version started in B minor (mutating in the middle to A minor), whereas this new version seemed to start in C#m minor.

I tried recording the vocals to this in a few barren sessions without getting very far. The major problem is that the tessitura is very large, from the absolute bottom of my vocal range until the absolute top. Whilst I can normally reach the high notes (although without much power), the low notes are very much hit and miss. I even tried adapting my current arrangement such that I could place the original vocal on top, which is when I discovered that I had removed breathing noise from the original vocal in such a way to cause 'pumping'. This didn't sound very good and as I couldn't achieve reasonable sounding tone settings, I abandoned this idea too.

Considering the song one night in bed, I hit upon a rather radical solution: record the lower parts of the vocal in D minor, then record the high parts in A minor. By means of vocal tuning software, I could lower the first part and raise the second part, having the finished song in C minor. So today I set out to accomplish just that. It turns out that almost all of the song was sung in the first part, with only a few lines sung in the second part. After several takes and a great deal of technical manipulation, I had a completed version.

Listening to it with fresh ears, it seems obvious to me that certain lines were recorded at a separate time (the high lines); this is primarily because there is less of a pause between the end of a line sung by vocal #1 and the beginning of the line sung by vocal #2. Tonally there is also a difference, but this can be explained away by the different vocal register.  Also, there were a few lines towards the end of the first verse with which I had trouble, so I sang these again at the end (in C minor): it seems that my vocal technique had changed over the hours working on the song, as this part sounds like the pasted high part.

Cheating, but the end product is what counts, and quite probably no one else but me will know how I managed to record this song. A clear conclusion, though, is to try and find songs with a smaller range; this was an undocumented conclusion to my previous song, 'Wonderful days', from two weeks ago.

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This day in history:

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

Rain, rain, rain

I mentioned a few days ago, almost in passing, that the temperature on Sunday was at least 35°C. Since then, the rain hardly seems to have stopped. On Monday evening, there was a little rain, but on Tuesday, 11 mm fell. Yesterday 36 mm fell, almost continuously, making it very difficult to find time to take the dog for a walk. Rain fell at 5:30 am this morning, but stopped shortly afterwards, thus allowing me to walk the dog. Since then, it's been bucketing down, sometimes with thunderclaps. [46.9 mm]

Three young people were killed a few days ago when crossing what would normally have been a dry stream in the Negev; instead they were swept away by the strong flow and their bodies were found a few kilometres away.

My son and his wife drove to Eilat yesterday afternoon; the road was blocked by the police at some stage because of the weather, but later on they were allowed to continue their journey and arrived safely in the evening. They say that it's a sunny day where they are. Meanwhile snow is falling in the north of Israel.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
349	13/04/2011	Advanced SQL for me - NULLIF	Programming, SQL
696	13/04/2014	Fifteen minute meals	Cooking
827	13/04/2015	Vinyl log 3 - 13 April	DCI Banks, Richard Thompson, Vinyl log
1021	13/04/2017	April thesis update	DBA

More bells and whistles for the 'Blog' program

In the course of retrieving the tag frequency counts for the 1600 blogs, I had some more ideas for improving the 'blog' program. The first (that I am not going to show here) appears in the 'choose entries' form: one now has the option of choosing tags either alphabetically or by frequency (this of course means that every now and then I have to recalculate the frequencies). I don't know whether this idea is going to be a keeper, but it definitely helped, at least for cataloguing this blog entry, as 'programming' and 'delphi' are in the top five tags.

The other idea took me by surprise. In the 'show entries' form that is fed by the above 'choose entries' form, I had previously added a popup menu with a few options and short cuts. Today I added another option; as one has to rely on one's memory in order to know which short cut does what, I thought that I would add the options to the screen's status bar.

Then I had a delicious thought: would it be possible to click on a pane in order to execute the appropriate command? I've never done this before so I did some Stack Overflow research and found this question. There are a couple of solutions given; I used the first method that uses the OnMouseDown event of the status bar. As this solution simply displays the pane number, I had to exend it in order to have the click execute something. At first I listed the various options in a case statement, but I wasn't very happy with this. Then it occurred to me that the panel index is the same as the popup menu index, so I could use this and save a case statement that was getting a bit awkward because the event handler had to exit if an option were chosen. My contribution below is the tmenuitem (popupmenu1.Items[i]).Click line. Maybe I can use this idea in the 'manager' program.

procedure TShowEntries.sbMouseDown(Sender: TObject;
  Button: TMouseButton; Shift: TShiftState; X, Y: Integer);
begin
 tcomponent (sender).tag:= x;
end;

procedure TShowEntries.sbClick(Sender: TObject);
var
 accwidth, i: integer;

begin
 accwidth:= 0;
 for i:= 0 to sb.panels.count - 1 do
  begin
   accwidth:= accwidth + sb.panels[i].width;
   if sb.Tag < accwidth then
    begin
     tmenuitem (popupmenu1.Items[i]).Click;
     break
    end 
  end;
end;

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
826	12/04/2015	How not to display data in graphs	Statistics
1121	12/04/2018	Apology to Israel Railways	Trains

Half truths and outright lies

Last night, we had the dubious pleasure of watching on television a press briefing by Israel's prime minister, ostensibly about the security situation. When he started with a tirade against the previous government for making an agreement with Lebanon and/or Hizballa about the disputed gas fields off the coast, I knew that there was no point in continuing to listen to his combination of half-truths, outright lies and the incapability of recognising that maybe he has made mistakes.

At the end, there was a question and answer session; I would have liked to ask the following questions 

• For how long are you going to blame the previous government (that existed for barely a year) for all of Israel's problems? When are you going to take responsibility yourself?
• Endlessly you repeat that you and your supporters were given a clear mandate by the electorate ... for reforming (or ruining) the legal system. Do you remember that your election message was about fixing the cost of living? And that the legal system was not mentioned? When are you going to do something about the cost of living?
• Again, you claim that the number of terrorist attacks doubled under the previous government. Please explain how it has doubled and trebled since your government was sworn in.
• As you say, you were given a clear mandate. How do you explain the fact that your ratings in opinion polls is very bad? How have you managed to do so badly in such a short time?

I bare my buttocks to you.

---

This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
28	11/04/2006	Sitting shiv'a	TV series, Obituary, William and Mary
242	11/04/2010	Driving lessons	Films, Diane Keaton
243	11/04/2010	Surprised and pleased	Organisation behaviour, MBA
571	11/04/2013	Speeding up Excel	Programming, Office automation
942	11/04/2016	Farewell to Sorrento (2016/6)	Holiday, Sorrento, Italy
943	11/04/2016	Coda: Rome airport (2016/7)	Mobile phone, Holiday
1120	11/04/2018	Troubles with trains	Trains
1492	11/04/2022	Our son got married!	Personal

1600 blogs

Before I get started on the 'hit parade', I want to note that yesterday was a sharav, with temperatures reaching at least 35°C. Today has cooled by about 10°C; about an hour ago we had a thunderstorm and a little rain - the sort of rain that gets one wet but doesn't do much for the vegetation. I wonder what tomorrow's weather will be like.

---

1600 blogs. Here are the most popular tags, along with their position in the previous 100 blogs.

Position	Tag	Count	Previous	All time position
1	Israel	12	-	13
2	DBA	11	12	2
3	Personal	11	2	4
4	Programming	11	4	1
5	Bari	9	-	-
6	Holiday	9	-	3
7	Italy	9	-	9
8	Meta-blogging	7	-	36
9	Non-fiction books	7	(18)	49
10	Cooking	6	7	7
11	Weather	6	22	31
12	Obituary	5	17	10
13	Headphones	3	-	78
14	Health	3	1	5
15	Kate Bush	3	-	102
16	Kibbutz	3	-	19
17	Sleep	3	-	93
18	Song writing	3	3	16

Well, it's pretty clear that the 11 months and 100 blogs since 8 May 2022 are completely different from the 100 blogs previous to this period. Health has almost dropped off the charts - I've been healthy even since my blood pressure has been balanced, save for a minor incidence of gout that has not returned. 

No more Covid-19 means holidays! Italy! Bari! 

Unfortunately, the political situation of the past few months in Israel has forced me to write 12 blogs on the topic.

In these past 11 months I've done a great deal of work on my doctorate, performing all the research and writing it up. 

Non-fiction books is a new category, although I've back tagged previous entries; there were 3 entries between 1401 and 1500 that would have put this tag in 18th place.

Only personal and programming have held their position; these are activities that always take place.

There's barely been any blogs about song writing; this is a topic that has almost dropped off the radar. Since May last year, I've completed only one song.

I wouldn't dare make a guess what the next 100 blogs are going to be about.

---

This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
27	10/04/2006	What's been happening	Health, MIDI
241	10/04/2010	Speaking the statements	Programming, Delphi, Resource files
569	10/04/2013	Pictures from a balcony (6)	Personal, Dog
570	10/04/2013	A new CPAP machine	CPAP, Apnea, Gadgets
694	10/04/2014	Calibre	Kindle
695	10/04/2014	A picture is worth a thousand words	Personal
825	10/04/2015	Sandy Denny: songwriting and production	Sandy Denny
1308	10/04/2020	I like the sound of falling rain	Song writing
1491	10/04/2022	The view from our rear balcony	Personal

Problems with headphones

Five years ago, I wrote For walking around the kibbutz, I have a pair of headphones with a built in player; these are good, the player continues from the last song played which normally is good, but problematic if the 'song' is a complete album. The headphones themselves aren't as good as the Sony ones, which is not surprising; these barely cover the ears and don't fold, so I don't take them on the train.

Something happened to the phones a few weeks ago: the right hand speaker became detached from the arm; I'm not sure exactly how this happened. I tried repairing the damage with a splint and adhesive tape but this was clearly an interim solution. I quickly ordered a new pair of headphones with an internal mp3 player from Ebay.

These arrived about two weeks ago; whilst they look very good, the problems started as soon as I finished charging the player. After extracting the sd card from the old headphones and making some additions (and deletions) to the songs stored within, I inserted it into the new headphones - this was very easy to do. Then I turned the headphones on: the output was in mono but not even centred. I switched the headphones around - no difference. So it was time to write to the person from whom I had purchased them.

I tried a few experiments, like connecting the headphones via a cable to my external mp3 player; no change. The vendor suggested using the headphones with bluetooth, so I copied a few songs to my phone (including "Yours is no disgrace" by Yes, featuring various stereo effects), turned on the bluetooth and listened. Whilst the sound was very clear, Steve Howe's guitar did not alternately sound from left and right phones. The vendor wanted a video (!) of the phones, although for what purpose I cannot fathom (unless he sells many products), as the problem is with the sound.

A few days ago I decided to cut my losses and ordered another set of headphones, at only half the price. Maybe these will work properly.

In the mean time ... I was about to take the dog for a walk about an hour ago when the right hand speaker became detached from the arm! I'm going to try glueing the speaker as the damage seems easier to repair than with the prior set of heaphones. But even so, these headphones are destined for the rubbish bin.

For my walks, I will now use the external mp3 player connected to my very expensive noise cancelling headphones, although I won't turn this function on.

---

This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
348	09/04/2011	dbProlog	Programming, Delphi, SQL, Firebird, Prolog
567	09/04/2013	Passover hall pictures	Jewish holidays, Mobile phone
568	09/04/2013	Mobile phone problem solved	Mobile phone
693	09/04/2014	Switching mentors	DBA
824	09/04/2015	Trevor Lucas trivia	Sandy Denny, Fotheringay
941	09/04/2016	A few quiet places in Sorrento (2016/5)	Holiday, Sorrento, Italy
1209	09/04/2019	Shadrach in the furnace	Kindle, Robert Silverberg, 1978
1307	09/04/2020	Pesach in the shade of Corona	Jewish holidays, Israel, Covid-19

Recording 'Wonderful days'

Two months ago, I wrote about starting a new song. I worked diligently on this during spare time and eventually completed an arrangement. The third version of this finished with a section that is based on the Andalusian cadence; this suggested itself to me after the Phrygian portions of the song (especially during the 'middle eight' - actually eight bars of instrumental and eight bars of singing). But I used a twist on the casdence as I will explain below. 

Earlier in the year I had been sequencing the Van der Graaf Generator song "My room (waiting for wonderland)" and although this does not feature the Andalusian cadence in full, it's very similar. What also is interesting about this song is that the verse features an odd rhythm that I wrote about two years ago: one bar of 4/4, one of 2/4, then two bars of 4/4. As it happens, David Bennett uploaded a video a few days ago about songs that are in 14/4 time; although I consider this to be a somewhat artificial time signature, it does describes the rhythm in 'My room', and thus the rhythm in the coda of my new song. I mapped the Andalusian cadence onto this rhythmic structure, with the second chord having only two beats. Maybe the non-musical amongst you won't notice this. What follows below is more for my benefit that for anything else.

The music was written on 4 February but the words arrived only three weeks later. I decided that I have written enough sad songs and that it is time for something more uplifting, hence the title 'Wonderful days'. This phrase appears right at the end of the song; indeed, until that moment, I was wondering what the song would be called. I spent most of Saturday 11 March trying to record vocals to the song and not really succeeding. It doesn't help that the tune is awkward - the first line starts on a C#, the second line starts on D and the third line on D# - and that there are many words to each line. The lyricist in me is annoyed with the musician in me who insists on writing such complicated vocal lines.

That initial 'recording session', whilst not being successful, did at least clarify a few things. The song was originally written in the key of A but even then I knew that this was far too high for my vocal range. For several weeeks, the song was lowered to E, making its highest note C, an octave above middle C, and its lowest note Ab, four semitones below middle C (this is not a recognised male vocal range; it's somewhere between a high tenor and an alto). The recordings showed that I could reach the high note but not the low note, so I had to transpose the song up to the key of F# - a key with six sharps, should I have written the sheet music out (I could also call this Gb, in which case there would be six flats in the key signature). As the second chord in the tune is now F# augumented, the first note on this chord should be called C double sharp (i.e. C# augumented) - but this doesn't really make any difference to me or to the MIDI sequencer. 

Once I could sing the song, I found that I also had great difficulty in producing a good vocal track; the tone of my voice seemed to change from line to line. I couldn't find good settings for reverb and eq, and also couldn't decide whether to have the vocals in mono or in fake double tracking. I decided to leave recording the vocals for later, although as the middle section was good (including the highest note that is now D, an octave and two semitones above middle C), I kept this short passage. I'm fairly sure that I reached that D without any mechanical help.

In the mean time, I discovered that Audacity, the 'free and open-source digital audio editor and recording application software', has the ability to make a continuous change to the tempo and/or pitch of a selection within a music file (this is confusingly called a 'sliding stretch'), so I used this to slow down the ending of the coda. Now that I know how to do this, I may use it to speed up parts of songs without affecting the pitch; Reason (or, at least the old version that I have) does not allow changes in tempo whatsoever.

It is now the first day of the Passover holiday; I had promised myself that I would work on this song during the holiday. So this morning I set up the microphone, briefly warmed up my voice - then sang the entire song with the same quiet tone throughout! One take. Processing the vocal track was also straight-forward, as was the mixing (this was partially due to my previous work). So after two hours of problem free work, I completed this song.

Now all I have to do is write words for the two songs that I had completed prior to this one but are still lacking words. Only then will I be able to record them. I also have a few covers of songs that I want to record (or rerecord) vocals for, so maybe I'll work on these for the time being.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
125	06/04/2008	The night of the long knives	Redundancies, Downsizing
165	06/04/2009	Dave Stewart/Barbara Gaskin - Green and Blue	Richard Thompson, Peter Hammill, Randy Newman, Jackson Browne, Canterbury sound
347	06/04/2011	Green MBA	MBA
565	06/04/2013	Back to blogging	DBA, Jewish holidays, Cooking, Mobile phone
1208	06/04/2019	Maybe I'm doing it wrong	multi-track
1305	06/04/2020	Days of Corona (3)	Personal, Psychology, John Le Carre, Covid-19

Passover night, 2023

After a gap of several years, Anat and I returned to performing 'our' song at the beginning of the Passover ceremony. The entire evening was very enjoyable and allowed one to forget the past few years. 

As expected, there were more than a few references to the current internal situation in Israel; whilst the text of the ceremony is fixed (in the booklet that contains the text, but one could produce a new booklet), the 'blessings' that accompany the traditional four cups of wine are written anew each year. Naturally the topic of being slaves in Egypt and suffering under the Pharoah has several parallels to today's situation, although we feel that it's the story in reverse: after having been free men, we are now entering a period of 'slavery', or at least, having our freedoms curtailed.

I could choose from two pictures to display here: the other picture doesn't cut me off on the left, but I can see that we are getting ready: I am fixing the capo on the guitar and Anat is looking off to the side and not to the microphone. So I feel that the above picture is better.

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This day in history:

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

The end of the country as we knew it

On 11 December, barely 14 weeks ago, I wrote the following: I (and I am not alone in this) feel now that everything that has happened to Israel and to me personally is about to be taken away by the extremist government that is in the process of being formed as I write these words. The juidicial system, the education system, the police ... everything that screams 'democracy' is now considered to be 'undemocratic' and has to be replaced.

I certainly didn't expect what would happen during those 14 weeks. I didn't expect the demonstrations that would grow and grow exponentially; I didn't expect that the Defence Minister would speak on Saturday night, saying that the 'judicial reforms' are causing irreparable damage to the army and its defences and so he could not support those 'reforms'. Whilst his being fired was a predictable move by the Prime Minister, I didn't expect that thousands of people would immediately take to the streets and demonstrate against this.

I've seen similar happen in other countries, but never in my country. I can't find the words at the moment to describe how I feel .... I am trying to work but I am listening to the television - the Histadrut has called for a general strike until the proposals are removed, the airport authority has announced that there will be no more take-offs, the local authorities have joined the general strike ... it's the end of the country as we knew it.

We're still waiting for Netanyahu to make his speech that will define how things will go from here. 

As an aside, there are a few statements that have been developing within me over these past weeks -

1. Every government is supposed to work for the people and improve their life. This government has worked only to improve the lives of its members.
2. The Likud party came to power based on a platform of handling the housing crisis, handling the rising cost of living, handling violence in the Arab cities, returning law and order to the Negev and handling Iran. It has done none of these things, instead concentrating on something (judicial reform/ruin) that was never mentioned in their pre-election platform.
3. Yariv Levin, the 'justice' minister is afraid that if he does not carry on with his legislation, he will be framed for some offence (such as treason). Paranoia.
4. The same YL said on 12 January "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". The name of this party is Yair Netanyahu, the PM's son. He thinks that he rules the country.  Did he stand in the elections? Who voted for him?

I don't see how we can continue from here. The first thing to be done is cancelling the firing of the Defence Minister: the last thing that anyone wants is that the security of the country be compromised. IMHO, the most responsible thing to do should be to call for new elections but I can understand why that is an unpalatable option.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
564	27/03/2013	Lost videocassettes reappear	TV series
1017	27/03/2017	Thesis update	DBA
1488	27/03/2022	Cystoscopy	Health

Reality Is Broken -- Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World

I am currently reading the above book, written by Jane McDonigal and published in 2011. I am also part of the minority who do not play [computer] games. Or do I? In the opening chapter, McDonigal writes that all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation.

It occurs to me that my music making is a game. It has

• a goal:  create a song
  
• rules: the 'rules' of music, primarily melody, harmony and rhythm
• a feedback system: I listen to the song and can hear (hopefully) where it needs improving. Also, one could include posting the song on YouTube then counting the number of plays that it receives, along with any comments
• voluntary participation: no one is making me do this!

I've only read the opening chapter so far, but somehow I don't expect that McDonigal will include making music amongst the games covered in the book. But still ... I quote a paragraph slightly further on in the chapter: When we’re playing a good game—when we’re tackling unnecessary obstacles—we are actively moving ourselves toward the positive end of the emotional spectrum. We are intensely engaged, and this puts us in precisely the right frame of mind and physical condition to generate all kinds of positive emotions and experiences. All of the neurological and physiological systems that underlie happiness—our attention systems, our reward center, our motivation systems, our emotion and memory centers—are fully activated by gameplay.  That's how I feel when I'm making music.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
465	25/03/2012	Pharyngitis, Darkness	Health, Van der Graaf Generator

UN Happiness report

It's hard to believe, but according to a headline that I read today, 'Israel has risen five places to fourth in the 2023 World Happiness Report, which is sponsored by the UN, through a poll conducted by Gallup, measuring happiness in countries between 2020 and 2022. In the 2022 report Israel has risen from 12th to ninth, and it now finds itself in fourth place'.

I can't figure out when this poll was conducted; is <this year>'s position dependent on the values of three years prior to <this year>? One thing is clear: maybe we were happy, but not in 2023! I suspect that the 2024 report will show a sharp decline in Israel's happiness.

---

This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
121	21/03/2008	Literary allusions	ERP, Literature, Satie, 1984
690	21/03/2014	Research questionnaire / 3	DBA
933	21/03/2016	Zero values in Priority tables (2)	Priority tips
1482	21/03/2022	Severe stomach cramps	Health

I contain multitudes

My current reading is "I contain multitudes" by Ed Yong, that is about bacteria within our body. Unlike most non-fiction books that I read, this one makes me feel old.

I studied microbiology in the years 1974-8, where the focus was on pathogens that might appear in food. We learned how to distinguish when faecal contamination occurred, according to the bacteria found in food. I don't recall them off-hand, but one indicated contamination within the past day, one within the past week, and one (almost certainly clostridium perfringens) within the past month.

But this book is about the good things that our internal bacteria can do for us, a view that was unheard of 50 years ago. It's statements like 'By the 1990s, scientists knew that there were more than 100 HMOs in milk, but had only characterised a few' that make me feel old. The way it's written, the 1990s were long ago, but for my studies, they were 20 years in the future.

I wouldn't say that everything that I learnt has been overturned, but it also seems so antiquated now.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
119	16/03/2008	Back to blogging	Office automation, Meta-blogging
120	16/03/2008	Chava Alberstein	Chava Alberstein
464	16/03/2012	Rubber duck debugging	Programming
1480	16/03/2022	My first year as a Londoner, part 1 - being a student	Personal, 1975, 1974

Goodbye, Dilbert (at least for the time being)

For those who don't know, Dilbert is an American comic strip written and illustrated by Scott Adams, first published on April 16, 1989. It is known for its satirical office humor about a white-collar, micromanaged office with engineer Dilbert as the title character. [Wikipedia]. I've been following it for years, sometimes very much enjoying it and sometimes finding it boring. A week or so ago, Scott Adams made remarks that were construed as racist and so many newspapers have dropped his comic. The strips were still appearing on Dilbert's web site - at least, until yesterday. Now he has disappeared. 

So as a reminder, I am pasting here a strip from a few days ago, that is very appropriate to my situation.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
463	15/03/2012	Sequencing "Lost" / 2	Van der Graaf Generator, Peter Hammill, Home recording
688	15/03/2014	Boy, was I wrong - programming naivety	Programming, Delphi, ClientDataSet
1381	15/03/2021	A year of Covid-19	Covid-19

Yes, today is the "anniversary" of Covid-19 in Israel and the date that the Occupational Therapist uses to compare values 'before' and 'after' the outbreak.

I wish I hadn't seen yesterday evening's News on tv

There was further coverage of demonstrations against the judicial ruin, this time in London, Paris and Rome - cities where the prime minister has visited or will visit in the near future. There was also coverage of counter-demonstrations: apparently someone setup a Whatsapp list but has managed so far to sign up 1,100 people. A physical counter-demonstration drew 10 people. I will refrain from drawing the obvious conclusion from this.

But what really upset me was a short clip of Simcha Rotman (1), chairman of the Knesset Constitution Committee, saying that all these demonstrations were because 'the left wing cannot accept that Netanyahu is the prime minister'. Whilst no left winger is pleased that Netanyahu is the prime minister, THIS IS NOT THE REASON FOR THE DEMONSTRATIONS!!!!!! Is Rotman so thick that he cannot understand that the people are against judicial ruin and the beginning of dictatorship? Has he even read any of the slogans daubed on the demonstrators' placards? 'No to judicial reform' is very much to the point. 

We are told that he had a three hour meeting with the President yesterday; hopefully this 'misunderstanding' has been overcome. But I doubt it. The rhetoric of the right wing needs to be taken down several pegs.

The father of Justice Minister Yariv Levin died on Saturday night, so the minister will be out of action for a week.

My anxiety level is increasing far too fast. This anxiety has dominated my thinking since yesterday evening, not allowing me to think about programming problems that are more immediate.

(1) I don't know to whom Rotman was speaking, but he did so in good English with no accent. Until these elections, no one had ever heard of Rotman, so what gives him the right to be so intransigent??

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
462	13/03/2012	Post mortem on the Negotiation exam	MBA, Negotiation
557	13/03/2013	Ring out the old, bring in the new! (My motorbikes)	Motorbikes
931	13/03/2016	Priority tip of the day	Programming, Priority tips
1298	13/03/2020	Apocalypse now (continued)	Personal, Kibbutz, Weather, Covid-19

More ideas for the 'blog manager' program

Recently, I've been forgetting to add 'This day in history' to a few blogs. The way that the procedure is written in the 'blog manager' program allows me only to find blogs for 'today', whatever 'today' might be. So for the past few days I've been thinking about adding the ability to find blogs for any given day of the year, not necessarily today. Fortunately, it was very easy to do this: I simply moved 99% of the code into an auxiliary procedure then called that procedure either with the date of 'today' or an arbitrary date.

procedure TMainForm.ShowHistory (adate: tdatetime);
var
 y, m, d, instance: word;

begin
 decodedate (adate, y, m, d);
 instance:= dm.NewInstance;
 with qInsert do
  begin
   sql.text:= 'insert into temp (id, instance) select entries.id, ' +
              inttostr (instance) + ' from entries ' +
              'where extract (month from curdate) = :p1 ' +
              'and extract (day from curdate) = :p2 ';
   parambyname ('p1').asinteger:= m;
   parambyname ('p2').asinteger:= d;
   execsql
  end;
 TShowEntries.create (instance, 'This day in history, ' + inttostr (d) 
                      + '/' + inttostr (m), true);
end;

procedure TMainForm.mnHistoryClick(Sender: TObject);
begin
 ShowHistory (date);  // i.e. today's date
end;

procedure TMainForm.mnSomeDayClick(Sender: TObject);
var
 adate: tdatetime;

begin
 with TChooseTagDates.create (nil) do
  try
   adate:= GetOneDate
  finally
   free
  end;

 if adate > 0 then ShowHistory (adate);
end;

Not only was I forgetting to add the blog history, I discovered that I had neglected to log a few existing blogs. This happened to me a few times when I was entering the first 600 blogs manually. I was forced to renumber entries in two tables that fortunately the SQL manager allowed me to do. But it's a pain and the possibility of making mistakes - especially in the tags per entry table - is high. So today I thought that I would add the functionality to renumber automatically, should the need arise again (and it probably would). The main insight was to renumber 'in reverse'; if the maximum blog id number is 1589, then first 1589 should be renumbered to 1590, then 1588 to 1589, etc.  One has to input a starting number, or rather, a stopping number. This would be, of course, the first blog after the missing blog, so that a gap would be left for the missing blog. Renumbering the tags per entry table is performed in the same manner.

This blog is actually being written a day in advance (11/03/23) but now I can show the blog history for 12 March, thanks to the new functionality.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
460	12/03/2012	Another example of Excel usage	ERP, DBA, Excel
461	12/03/2012	Proposed doctorate	DBA, Excel
556	12/03/2013	Pictures from a balcony (3)	Personal
816	12/03/2015	This boy is on fire	Programming, ERP
1016	12/03/2017	How to exclude rows from summation	Priority tips
1297	12/03/2020	Apocalypse now	Personal, Kibbutz, Weather, Covid-19
1380	12/03/2021	The continuing saga of saving unicode text - this time in the 'manager' program	Delphi, Unicode
1479	12/03/2022	Another dismal Saturday	Home recording

Further down the slippery slope to dictatorship

I haven't written on the topic of the judicial reform/introduction to dictatorship since I walked to the Knesset a few weeks ago. Whilst I personally have not been involved in the demonstrations, nothing has changed since then in terms of anything changing in the attitudes of the Justice (sic) Minister and the chairman of the law committee. The president has made two speeches on the topic; the first was like a shot across the bows - a warning sign but doing no damage - whereas his speech on Thursday night (i.e. 09/03/23 - a translation of the speech can be found here) was of a different species altogether: much more militant.

I want to quote from the speech of reknowned historian Yuval No'ach Harari, author of the book 'Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind' amongst others, who spoke at the main rally in Tel Aviv last Saturday night (04/03/23). The Guardian posted a translation of his speech that is. to put it mildly, excellent and outraged. I want to quote one part of the speech:

"Coups are not always carried out with tanks in the streets. Many coups in history were carried out behind closed doors with pens and papers, and by the time people understood the meaning of what was written in those papers – it was too late to resist.

History is full of dictatorships established by people who first came to power through legal means. It’s the oldest trick in the book: first you use the law to gain power, then you use your power to distort the law. When examined together, the laws this government is currently legislating have one simple meaning (and you don’t need a PhD in law to get it): if these laws are passed, the government will have the power to completely destroy our freedom".

Although Harari didn't say it outright, the closest parallel is Germany in 1933 when a madman was elected to the Bundestag, then became chancellor, repealed many democratic laws and finally started the path to the Holocaust. Have we learnt nothing from history?

Should the anti-democratic laws be passed, all that needs to be done is to repeal the laws concerning elections - and then Netanyahu, or his extremist son, or any of his henchmen, can become our dictator for the next 50 years. No wonder many people are suffering from extreme anxiety (apparently, the number of people seeking psychiatric care has jumped in the past month).

Ther was an interview with Harari on television last night; he repeated the second paragraph quoted above, but refrained from making the conclusion that I did (after all, he is a professor; maybe he wants his students - i.e. us - to make the conclusion on their own). But he did say that there is no way that we can return to the [legal?] situation as it was on 31/10/22, the day before the painful election day.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
69	11/03/2007	Weekend migraines (part 2)	Programming, Migraine
1589	11/03/2023	Further down the slippery slope to dictatorship	Israel

That's all, say amen, close the door

The title of this blog is actually a Richard Thompson song that is supposedly (and quite probably) about Sandy Denny. I recorded a cover version of this several years ago, but that's not the point of this blog.

I have just uploaded my resubmitted doctoral thesis to the UK Turnitin site, from where it will be accessed by the university staff. I only have to pay another examination fee of £150 and then my thesis will be passed to the external examiners. That's all, say amen. This is not the end of the doctoral process - there still will be the viva exam - but I've written all that I have to write. Actually, that's not completely true: the examiners will probably ask for revisions, hopefully minor.

I have just looked at what I wrote nearly three years ago when I was in the same position, about the problems that I had including a pdf scan of the signed submission form along with the thesis itself. Just as well as I didn't even think of reading this, as today I took a completely different approach and completely the task within minutes. I scanned the submission form then included this into the thesis as a Word file; I submitted the Word file - no conversion to pdf. I hope that there will be no problems with this.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
68	09/03/2007	Weekend migraines	Maccabi Tel Aviv, Migraine
555	09/03/2013	I'll never get those wasted hours back	Programming, Email, Problem solving, Nick Hornby
930	09/03/2016	Sir George Martin, RIP	Obituary, Beatles
1204	09/03/2019	The Tel Aviv saxophone quartet	Ambient music
1379	09/03/2021	Sometimes it takes a long time for the light to go on in my head	MIDI
1588	09/03/2023	That's all, say amen, close the door	DBA