Rapallo log 3 - Genova

During the night, I could feel pain from my left 'big toe' - gout again. I had a mild attack about a week ago and treated it with Ibuprofen that I bought from the chemist, but one pill seemed to do the trick and so I didn't bother bringing those tablets with me. Fortunately, there is a chemist situated less than 100m from the hotel, so I hobbled over there as soon as I could and bought more Ibuprofen 200 mg. During the day, the pain wore off, so I was able to walk better; I took another pill in the evening.

After a stroll through the historic town choosing a different route from before, we arrived at the train station in order to catch a train to Genova. There are several stations in Genova; we alighted at the teminus, Genova Brignale. The plan was to get on the Genova Hop on/Hop off bus that I assumed would have a stop near the train station - it didn't. After some dillying and dallying, we took a taxi to the aquarium.

Before going in, we saw that there was a stop for that bus where we alighted the taxi; after a short wait, the bus came so we boarded it. We were handed headphones and not asked for our tickets, so we rode for free. Just as well, because what we saw was not very inspiring. When the bus came round to the aquarium again, we alighted. 

After waiting in a short queue, I bought tickets; being over 65, we were eligible for a 15% discount so our tickets cost 27€ each. I know that I am not doing this justice, but the aquarium was very good. There were many types of sea organisms on display, ranging in size from miniature sea horses and jellyfish to large sharks and dolphins. This seems to have been the first time I have seen a sea horse at close range, and at first I couldn't understand how they managed to move; eventually I saw a small dorsal fin, and apparently they also have pectoral fins on their head that are used for steering (thank you, Gemini AI). 

After a short interlude in the cafeteria for an onion foccacio, we carried on to see more sights. Eventually the tour finished and we were outside. Yesterday, I wrote There are a few gelateria in Rapallo that display their goods so that one can choose by sight as oppose to name; I'm hoping that I will find my favourite mint choc chip flavour. As one can guess, outside the aquarium was a small cafeteria that displayed its ice cream as well as listing them, so finally I had my first taste of mint choc chip (in Italian, "menta", which is the same in Israel. I'm always afraid that pistaccio will be substituted for peppermint). It wasn't as good as I remembered, probably because this was a commerical outlet who do not make their own ice cream.

After finishing our ice cream, we went to the taxi rank and took one back to Brignale, where we waited about 30 minutes for our train. The Italian train service works differently from the Israeli - this may be because there are different companies operating on the same lines. In Israel, there is a fixed price for every journey and it doesn't matter what the time of day is. Here, the same journey can have different prices. I saw that there was a train to Rome whose first stop was at Rapallo; had we travelled on this train, the price would have been far higher than the price that we paid for a local train that made about seven stops before arriving in Rapallo. The ticket in the morning was slightly cheaper than the ticket in the late afternoon because the morning was off-peak whereas the evening was probably considered to be in the rush hour.

Back in Rapallo, we made the compulsory stop in Carrefour (milk, water, etc) before carrying on home to the hotel. Underneath our balcony is a restaurant that is a subsidiary of the hotel; we had been warned that is best to make a reservation first, and as today was Saturday, meaning restaurants would be full, I made a reservation for another hour. We ate grilled "fish of the day", expertly filleted by one of the waiters. This was supposed to be served with seasonable vegetables, but there was a slight misunderstanding with the waiter: my wife wanted a salad instead of the vegetables but I didn't, so initially I was served with the fish (much more than the fillets that we ate a few nights ago) and nothing else. Never mind. 

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
1	06/09/2005	Introduction	Personal
83	06/09/2007	The happiness formula	Psychology, Martin Seligman
399	06/09/2011	At risk	MI5, Stella Rimington, Liz Carlyle
400	06/09/2011	At risk/2	MI5, Stella Rimington, Liz Carlyle
627	06/09/2013	Late November/December 1973: my gap year, part 4	Israel, Kibbutz, Gap year
973	06/09/2016	Central sleep apnea	Health, CPAP
1070	06/09/2017	A legacy of spies 2/How old is George Smiley?	John Le Carre
1336	06/09/2020	What a weekend!	Delphi, Musical instruments, Weather
1526	06/09/2022	The ink black heart	Cormoran Strike
1815	06/09/2024	New goggles	Swimming

Rapallo log 2 - a day with two halves

Half one: a rainy morning in Rapallo

The weather forecast for Friday was light rain until 7:30 am, and then again from 10-12 am. This forecast was very accurate, and so I woke to the sight (but not sound) of light rain on our balcony. This rain wore off while we were having breakfast, and so did not cause us any problems when we set off for the historical town, which is after all only 100 metres from our hotel.

Walking through this area and stopping at several shops took some time, but by the time we finished one walk through and ended up again at the Porta della Saline, rain had started to fall again. The intensity varied from light to moderately heavy, causing us to both put on our rain gear (we had come equipped this year) and to seek shelter under trees. In tribute to last year¹;I had to have my picture taken in full regalia. I should point out that my belly is not so big: my bag was being sheltered inside the rain coat.

Eventually we got to the hotel, dried off then had morning tea. As the rain had stopped and was not predicted to return, I walked to Carrefour and bought today's lunch.

Half two: a sunny afternoon in Portofino

After lunch, we set out again to the ferry point (which can be seen in the background of my picture) in order to sail to Portofino. Despite its fame, I wasn't overly impressed, but that's probably because we only walked around the harbour area that was at times quite crowded. We intentionally set sail to Portofino relatively late in the day (we arrived at 2:30 pm) in order to miss most of the crowds, the day tourists; I had bumped into a few groups in Rapallo in the morning. Also, the village itself is higher up than the harbour, and it's a slightly awkward walk to get there - the pedestrian area is mainly cobbled which is bad enough when walking on the level, but hard when walking up a slope.

The first thing to do was to eat gelato: there hadn't been an opportunity yet in Rapallo to eat ice cream so I was determined that we should have some here. As I wrote many years ago, "A day in Italy without gelato is a day wasted". I wouldn't say that this was excellent ice cream (actually mine was a sorbet). There are a few gelateria in Rapallo that display their goods so that one can choose by sight as opposed to name; I'm hoping that I will find my favourite mint choc chip flavour, then ask what it's called so that I might buy it again.

After buying a few trinkets and a dress for our youngest grand-daughter, we walked a bit more around the harbour, then waited for the next ferry back to Rapallo.

Maybe we didn't take advantage of what was on offer in Portofino (I can't see my wife walking up to Castello Brown), but I can't say that I was overly impressed. The ferry journeys were fun, though.

Internal links
[1] 1751

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
196	05/09/2009	More porting issues	Programming, Delphi, ClientDataSet, dbExpress
626	05/09/2013	Late September/Early October, 1973 - My gap year, part 3	Israel, Gap year
1069	05/09/2017	A legacy of spies	John Le Carre
1419	05/09/2021	Walking apps and smart watches	Mobile phone, CPAP, Walking
1525	05/09/2022	Hard boiled eggs	Cooking, Kibbutz, 1972

Rapallo log 1 - Market day

I had read in advance that on every Thursday there is a market held in Rapallo so I wasn't too surprised when sitting on our veranda, I saw that trucks were setting up on the promenade. After a good breakfast, we went out and checked the market. I find them tiresome but my wife likes them. Unlike most of the markets that we've seen, this one had precisely one stall selling bric'n'brac, a few stalls selling cooked food and a few selling vegetables. All the rest were selling clothes or sheets, which for me is very boring.

After a few hours of this, we 'came home' via part of what constitutes the 'historic town' of Rapallo. It was a pleasure walking through these alleyways as at least they were in the shade and so cool - it was hot out on the promenade. We cut through to Carrefour, where we bought rolls and cheese, making a light and cheap lunch.

After siesta, I went out in search of a bancomat; I had found via Google Maps several, but they were all bunched together near where we had been in the morning, so I had to walk there again. Actually, I went through the historic town until I reached the main road that should lead me both to the machines and to the promenade (it did). In doing so, I came across the Porta delle Saline, so of course I took a picture of this. 

When I came back to the area of the hotel, I thought that I would check out something else. My contact Francesco¹ had sent me a list of places in Rapallo, Santa Margherita and Portofino, where their chocolates can be found. I tried to locate the three addresses that he had sent me for Rapallo; one I found - a minute away from the hotel - but I couldn't find the others. Coming back from my walk, I checked out this road only to discover that not only were there no shops but as it happened there was also no building No. 1, as written in the list. Checking the email, I understand now why I had no luck: I had written that we would be in Ravello² (which is near Amalfi) and not Rapallo! I've written back to Francesco, admitting my mistake, and maybe tomorrow I'll receive a new list for Rapallo.

Dinner tonight should be branzino ai ferri (aka grilled sea bass) at a nearby restaurant that is not on the promenade and so should be cheaper.

Internal links
[1] 1794
[2] 721

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
280	04/09/2010	Ian Rankin: "The Complaints"	Ian Rankin, Police procedurals
506	04/09/2012	Admission to Heriot-Watt DBA programme	DBA
624	04/09/2013	It was 40 years ago today - My gap year, part 1	Israel, Habonim, Kibbutz, Gap year
625	04/09/2013	Welcome to the Beehive - My gap year, part 2	Israel, Yoni Rechter, Gap year
972	04/09/2016	Revising lyrics, again	Song writing
1418	04/09/2021	(Yet another) new chicken dish	Cooking
1814	04/09/2024	Psychology of visits to the doctor	Health, BCC

Rapallo log (0) continued - Life is a minestrone

As Lol Creme sang in 10cc's song from 1975, "Life is a minestrone, served up with parmesan cheese". After a few hours of settling in, we went out to hit the Rapallo promenade that of course starts outside our door and stopped at (by chance) the first restaurant "Da Monique" as they serve minestrone. The soup was very tasty and the inside of the restaurant was very tastefully designed. 

Rapallo log (0): Travelling

Today was a long, long day.

It started at 1 am, when my wife's alarm clock (telephone) rang. We were to be picked up at 2:30 am in order to be at the airport at 3 am for a 6:10 am departure. Unlike last year¹, when the check-in process was very fast, this year it was very slow - the airport was surprisingly busy for that hour of the morning - and we didn't pass passport control until after 5 am. We made our way to the gate; boarding was supposed to start at 5:25 am, but at 6 am, we were still waiting. Eventually we boarded, with a one hour delay, and arrived at Malpensa at about 11:40 am our time, 10:40 am local time. After walking a fair amount, we arrived at passport control, and this time we were diverted into the priority queue, because of my wife's walking stick. Thus we passed that hurdle quickly, but then had to wait for our suitcase to appear on the carousel,  so we didn't really gain anything. 

At customs, we naturally went through the nothing to declare exit, but I was stopped by a lady from the Guardia di Finanza who started asking me questions, such as where I was from, did I have anything to declare, and most interestingly, how much cash I had on me. "Forty euro", I replied, "and ah, four euro coins, so forty four euro". "How do you know?", she asked me. I told her that I counted the coins a few days ago when I prepared a wallet for Italy with only two credit cards and the euros left over from last year. I'm not sure what the point of this exercise was, but I was let through.

As we had got up very early and hadn't really eaten anything, we decided to stop at a pizzeria in the airport. I used to think that Italians viewed the American combinations of ingredients as anathema, but there were all kinds of varieties, including various meats and also salmon. My wife had a tomato and anchovy pizza whereas I had a simple margherita. Very tasty.

Then a long walk to where the trains are; with a little difficulty, I bought tickets from Malpensa to Milano Centrale, and from there to Rapallo. We got a 33% discount on the Rapallo tickets due to our age. We had to wait some time for a train to arrive, and when it did, it was over-full, unlike last year when there was almost no one on the train. When we arrived in Milano, I looked at the departures board for our train - I didn't know what the final destination of the train would be. The trains are numbered, and the train number was on our ticket, so I quickly determined that our train would leave from platform 21 - which was as far away as possible from the platform of the Malpensa express. We got there, found our carriage and thence our seats. A two hour journey passed.

We disembarked at Rapallo station and walked outside. There were two taxis waiting, so we took the first that drove us to our hotel. 15€ for what turned out to be a five minute journey. Never mind: we had the luggage that I had been dragging around almost all day, and we didn't know where the station was relative to the hotel.

From what we've seen of it, the hotel is great. As can be seen from the picture, it's right next to the castle of Rapallo, and on the promenade. We have a 'superior sea view' room; not only do we have a sea view, but we also have a semi-private terrace with sun beds, table and chairs.

After minimal unpacking and a quick shower to wash off all the sweat that had accumulated during the day, I went off in search of the Carrefour supermarket that was supposed to be 250 metres from the hotel. Find it I did: it's on the way to the train station, and I reckon that we can walk there in 15 minutes at the most. I bought a few items there then came home.

It's only 7 pm local time, but we're worn out. It's been a long day and I've walked 9,500 steps already. I don't think we're going to do anything more this evening. I've hardly slept over the past few nights, so an early night will be a pleasure.

Internal links
[1] 1749

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
401	03/09/2011	Financial report	MBA, Finance
623	03/09/2013	Frederik Pohl, 26/11/1919-02/09/2013	Literature, Obituary
1068	03/09/2017	Casualty - one (tv series)	TV series
1256	03/09/2019	Priority tip: another thing to be aware of	Priority tips
1661	03/09/2023	GAS	Guitars
1813	03/09/2024	Belated birthday present	Personal

No luck with guitar strings

Two weeks ago, I changed strings on the Stagg and wrote¹ "I'm leaving the [E] string to settle, and tomorrow I'll tune it then remove the excess". I didn't remove the excess as I intended as previously this caused a problem with the string. Today I decided to trim the excess: I made the cut ... then the string snapped, leaving me no option but to take an E string from yet another set. I strung this string and again I'm leaving it for a fortnight to settle in. 

These are supposedly Fender strings, "tens", and should be good. I haven't had a guitar string snap on me for decades, and then it probably was the G string, not the E. Strange.

Internal links
[1] 1985

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
622	02/09/2013	The Magic of Belle Isle	Films
1164	02/09/2018	Delphi community edition	Delphi
1335	02/09/2020	Wedding stairs	Personal, Kibbutz
1417	02/09/2021	Once again, John Martyn	John and Beverley Martin
1812	02/09/2024	Eight months of Temu	Temu

More management email problems

About ten months ago, I wrote¹ about problems that one user had when trying to send emails from the OP's management program. Not very much has happened since then, but a few days ago another user had to start sending emails via the auxiliary program ... and they weren't being sent. Files containing the mails were created but the auxiliary program wasn't sending them. I stopped the program and restarted it: the emails were sent. 

So for a few days I would stop the program in the morning then restart it. After a few more days, I thought it better that I ditch the timer in the program and run it every fifteen minutes via a batch file. At this stage I converted the program to be a console program - there was no need for the visual interface. This led to some problems that I had not foreseen, e.g. how would the application know where the email files waiting to be sent were situated? In the original version, I would use the application object to get the program's directory and from that the mail sub-directory, but a console application has no application object. I added a new registry value that would help.

Emails still weren't being sent, but I realised that this was because the program was not waiting for threads to close. This is a problem that I was aware of last year but had forgotten. I solved it in a simple matter: a counter would be incremented every time a thread was launched to send a mail, and decremented when a thread completed. At the end of the program, there is a tight loop that checks if this counter's value is zero; if not, the program sleeps for five seconds then checks again.

Away from the computer, it occurred to me that there was really no need for the emails to be sent via threads. This makes sense in the context of the complete management program: instead of having to wait for an email to be sent, a thread can be launched to do this work whilst the user continues as usual. But in this standalone program, I could just as well send the emails directly instead of via a thread. I'll have to check if I have a program that sends emails directly as opposed to via a thread.

Internal links
[1] 1864

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
191	27/08/2009	Climbing the learning curve	Programming, Firebird, MBA, dbExpress
192	27/08/2009	Firebird date fields	Firebird, dbExpress
620	27/08/2013	Children of the revolution	DCI Banks, Kindle, Peter Robinson, Ian Rankin, Police procedurals
970	27/08/2016	The murder detectives	TV series, DCI Banks, Police procedurals
1254	27/08/2019	Yet still more doctoring	DBA, Psychology, Martin Seligman, Non-fiction books
1809	27/08/2024	Nightnoise	Ambient music, Time signatures

Synchronicity

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

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

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

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

Internal links
[1] 1982
[2] 1826

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This day in blog history:

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

Yet another excision

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

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

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

Internal links
[1] 1879
[2] 1299

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This day in blog history:

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

The Tu b'Av performance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Internal links
[1] 1971
[2] 1923

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This day in blog history:

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

Video cameras

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This day in blog history:

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

80 years since Hiroshima

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is no escaping the legacy of Hiroshima.

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This day in blog history:

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

Discoveries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This day in blog history:

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

My most frequent type of bug

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This day in blog history:

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

69 years old

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

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

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

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

Internal links
[1] 1796

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This day in blog history:

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

To See the Invisible Man

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

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

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

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

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This day in blog history:

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

No more normal ... and how science fiction handles mental illness

My current reading is "No more normal" by Dr Alastair Santhouse, a fascinating and very interesting discussion of various issues connected with mental health, and how our view of these issues has changed over the past century. Fortunately, I haven't really come across most of the issues raised in the book, although I identify with the rhetorical question, At what point does a low mood tip over into depression? I was very unhappy from the autumn of 1977 through to the spring of 1978, but was I depressed? I thought so, but psychiatrists thought not.

I don't want to write about most of the issues raised in the book, but rather something that seems somewhat tangential and amusing. Santhouse writes: I often used to wonder how mental illness would be treated in the future. Generally, it was a topic ignored by science fiction writers. Inasmuch as it was covered in the Star Trek world, there were two broad approaches. The main theme seemed to be that mental illness was a quaint relic of a near-forgotten past, like money or petty ambition. I imagine the assumption was that the social utopia that led people to the stars also cured the world of mental illness. The second approach was the use of a telepathic, albeit human-looking woman from another planet, who could sense emotion and then offer counselling. [Chapter 13]

Robert Silverberg touched on this topic several times: sometimes the solution would be a 'happy pill', and sometimes an expulsion of the self and its replacement by another 'self' (e.g. "The second trip"). But I think that the best treatment comes from the novella "How it was when the past went away" (which after a long search I found in the collected stories volume "To the dark star"). One thread of this excellent story is concerned with Nate Haldersen. A dialog with a diagnostic computer reads as follows:

“You have been suffering from social displacements and dysfunctions whose origin, Dr. Bryce feels, lies in a situation of traumatic personal loss.” 

“Loss of what?” 

“Your family, Dr. Haldersen.” 

“Yes. That’s right. I recall, now—I had a wife and two children. Emily. And a little girl—Margaret, Elizabeth, something like that. And a boy named John. What happened to them?” 

“They were passengers aboard Intercontinental Airways Flight 103, Copenhagen to San Francisco, September 5, 1991. The plane underwent explosive decompression over the Arctic Ocean and there were no survivors.” 

Haldersen absorbed the information as calmly as though he were hearing of the assassination of Julius Caesar. “Where was I when the accident occurred?”

“In Copenhagen,” the robot replied. “You had intended to return to San Francisco with your family on Flight 103; however, according to your data file here, you became involved in an emotional relationship with a woman named Marie Rasmussen, whom you had met in Copenhagen, and failed to return to your hotel in time to go to the airport. Your wife, evidently aware of the situation, chose not to wait for you. Her subsequent death, and that of your children, produced a traumatic guilt reaction in which you came to regard yourself as responsible for their terminations.”

The guilt arising from this situation caused Halderson to become severely depressed; when introduced in the story, he says that he hasn't left his hospital room for two and a half years. 

When the sensors discovered him slipping below the depression line, ultrasonic snouts came nosing up from the recesses of the mattress, proximity nozzles that sought him out in the bed, found the proper veins, squirted him full of dynajuice to cheer him up. Modern science was wonderful. It could do everything for Haldersen except give him back his family.... 

“How can I make a conscious effort to forget something? Tim, Tim, isn’t there some drug I can take, something to wash away a memory that’s killing me?” 

“Nothing effective.” 

“You’re lying,” Haldersen murmured. “I’ve read about the amnesifacients. The enzymes that eat memory-RNA. The experiments with diisopropyl fluorophosphate. Puromycin. The—” 

Dr. Bryce said, “We have no control over their operations. We can’t simply go after a single block of traumatic memories while leaving the rest of your mind unharmed. We’d have to bash about at random, hoping we got the trouble spot, but never knowing what else we were blotting out. You’d wake up without your trauma, but maybe without remembering anything else that happened to you between, say, the age of fourteen and forty. Maybe in fifty years we’ll know enough to be able to direct the dosage at a specific—” 

“I can’t wait fifty years.” 

“I’m sorry, Nate.” 

“Give me the drug anyway. I’ll take my chances on what I lose.” 

“We’ll talk about that some other time, all right? The drugs are experimental. There’d be months of red tape before I could get authorization to try them on a human subject.”

The point of the story is that several antisocial subjects dumped into San Francisco's water supply various chemicals that destroy parts of one's memory; different people in the story lose different parts of their memory (Halderson forgets the adultery and so loses his guilt - he becomes a 'free' man, whereas Dr Tim Bryce seems to be fine - except that he forgets everything about his wife). There are those who drink bottled water and so were not effected. Between a coalition of people who lost some memories but not all, Dr Bryce and others manage to put the city back together again.

Returning to real life, I am sure that Dr Santhouse would be pleased to know about these amnesifacients but he would be worried about their non-specificity. Maybe in the future there will be developed such drugs that can work on specific memories - but how could one program them? My memories of late 1977 lie in some part of the brain, whereas someone else's memories of the same period could lie in a different part of the brain. Not only that: when I access those memories, they are brought into short-term memory and deleted from long-term memory; when I stop remembering, they either get transferred immediately to somewhere in long-term memory (almost certainly not the same location) or they get transferred at night when I sleep. 

Santhouse writes: Even if science fiction has failed to conjure a convincing future psychiatry, it is possible for us to draw on our knowledge of recent technological advances in physical medicine to imagine their application to conditions of the mind, understanding that mental problems originate or are marked within the brain. Where exactly though? Future technologies may have the answers. We may be able to follow thinking processes in the brain, to ‘see’ depression, anxiety and psychosis and prove that they are real and not, as some critics of psychiatry maintain, socially constructed artefacts.

Maybe I'll be able to find an address for Dr Santhouse and pass him the Silverberg reference. This episode only goes to show that Star Trek does not speak for all science fiction, but rather for only a very small part. 

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
272	31/07/2010	How things have changed	Literature
745	31/07/2014	Feral systems	DBA
1059	31/07/2017	Mobile CPAP	CPAP