His Master's Voice

From time to time a thought occurs to me which makes me think, "wow, that's amazing!" but then leaves me not quite able to work out what exactly is amazing about it.

This has happened again!

I was listening to the first three chapters of PAME!, which I have recorded with the intention of putting the whole thing online as a listen-to-able tale, and I started thinking about how people always get a surprise when they hear their own voices. Over the years I have got used to hearing my own voice played back to me but I still remember thinking - just like everyone else does - "that can't my voice, it's horrible!!" the first time I heard it.

Anyway, this led me on to consider recording in general and that's when this amazing-but-don't-quite-know-why thought occurred to me. Edison was the first person to record sound in... erm... 1877 (thanks, Google) on his newly invented Phonograph. Before that there had not been any way for any one to hear their own voices!

We've been able to see ourselves - at least reflections of ourselves - since the beginning of humanity; in pools of still water, in polished metals and silvered glass - but to hear our own voices - that has only been possible since 1877. Three million years minus the last 130 not able to record any sounds, music, voices...

"Wow!" I thought, "Amazing!"

And then I thought, "but what exactly is it that's amazing?"

Anyway, for bloggy purposes I will hide behind an adapted form of the avant garde poet or artist's defence, "it can mean whatever you want it to mean!"

So, "the amazement is whatever you wish to be amazed by!"

That should do it.

Sleep...

I have problems with it; three main problems ...

The first is going to it,

the second is staying in it ,

and the third - which, incidently, I am dealing with now - is emerging from it.

Of the three, the worst is the first.

This image of "the going to sleep process" occurred to me last night. Somewhere near the bed there is a continuously moving cable, like in a mine underground, and this cable travels off towards Sleepy Oblivion and all you have to do when you lie down is hang your consciousness onto it and - whoosh - off you go into dreamy slumber.

I can be as tired as you want: droopy-eyed tired; nodding-off-and-waking-with-a-start tired; weary-achy-limbs-of-lead tired, but the moment I get into bed I wake up and I thrash about in vain looking for that cable to hook my consciousness onto.

The only way is to read - read a book until I start to dream a sentence or two at which point I normally drop the book because I am dropping off. Then, if I am lucky and my timing is dead on, I can lie down without emerging too far from this incipient nod-offiness and hook my consciousness onto the cable... and ... zzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.

That's if I'm lucky; if not it takes another 15/20 minutes of further reading till I can try again.

Last night it was the third attempt I think ... but then having read what I had read and then having proceeded to integrate what I had read into a dream...and then let the dream take some nasty, nasty turns and make some nasty, nasty developments ... I woke myself up!

Finally, it took till about 5 to get all drowsy again and that was an hour or so before the alarm WOKE ME ... and left me with problem 3 ... emerging.

Now, 2 coffees later, I only feel bleary-eyed and brain-dead - so it seemed the perfect time to blog!

Buggeration...

... hmmm ... looks like we didn't win the Champions' League then.

We've Won It 5 Times...Could it Be 6...?

Blimey, after what seems like weeks of none stop work I got a minute to think about tomorrow evening in Athens...

Tension is beginning to mount. It looks like the whole family is going to watch it here in the living-room plus a couple of boyfriends.

So, we'll get a load of crates in, get a big pot of chile going and then, from 20.45 Deepest Bavaria Time, we will scream and shout, bite nails and suffer heart attacks and not really enjoy a single minute until either we win it in Greece for the 6th time or ...

Elate, paidia!

Vatertag...

It is Ascension Day in deepest Bavaria. I seem to remember in the diaries I had as a kid it would say, "Ascension Day - quarter day in Scotland" or something. I never did work out what that was supposed to be.

Anyway, as the card companies would have it, Ascension Day is also Fathers' Day - and true to form it is a drizzly grey morning ... and anyway I have to get a translation done for tomorrow so I am working away .. yoohoo.

But I don't care ... the main thing is I have my connection back! I have been going nuts over the last few weeks cos my internet connection was constantly patchy and crashy and S L O W.

I have been tapping the WLAN box, fiddling about with the computers, kicking the cat (haven't got one actually... cats ... oooh ... shudder ... but I even felt like getting one just so I could kick it). Everything seemed to be going haywire; even my new(ish) laptop, Lappo was all grumpy and crashy and slow - with very intermittent and unreliable internet.

So I decided on Tuesday evening ... rashly as usual ... to do a Systemwiederherstellung which is what in English? Erm, a "put-your-system-back-to-how-it-was-in-the-good-old-days-when-everything-worked" thing.

This is NOT advisable! I don't know exactly what it put my system back to but it was some place in laptop hell. Suddenly nothing was working! Aaaarrrrgghhhh!!!

So, in between trying to work yesterday, I tried all sorts of virus finders/malware smashers/trojan killers etc etc ...

Finally I went back to something I'd noticed a few weeks ago. I saw that someone in the vicinity was using exactly the same WLAN box as me. I wondered at first if maybe that was causing the problem; same frequency somehow blocking each other or something - but I thought, "nah, can't be - they must have different configurations."

I had a look at the various WLANs operating in the vicinity - there are a good few now - and there they were, the two Fritz boxes, mine and some neighbour's. I, of course, was connecting to the one at the top of the list; it being in the same flat and all. On an impulse I checked the MAC number (don't ask me what a MAC number is but it is something the WLAN boxes and PCs all seem to have) .

Shock ... horror ... enlightenment ...

My box was second on the list. The neighbour's box was giving me a better, stronger signal than mine!!! AND I had somehow been tapping in to that box - hence patchy slow connections???

Anyway, I reset it and ... ka-pow ... connection back/everything works/FAST/and I can use Skype again!!

Just had to get all the bits and pieces on Lappo, which the Systemwiederherstellung killed, to work again.

I finally got that done late last night after scouring the PC forums and using a bit of intuition born of panic and now I have a leaner, safer Lappo ... and it is BLISS!

Best Fathers' Day pressie!

(Only Fathers' Day pressie ? ?)

You Know You're Tired When You Start Shouting at Traffic Lights

Problems are like buses except that they increase exponentially. You spend ages sorting out one or two and then suddenly 150 more come along at the same time.

I have been battling on a number of fronts recently, notably with the tax authorities here in deepest Bavaria, who also have an exponential touch with the amount of tax they expect people to pay, and with the Sphinx-like local council in Liverpool regarding my mother's house.

Then on top of that there are the 18-hour working days in which you try to catch up with the time you have lost dealing with all these people and problems so that you can earn the money you need to pay them in the first place.

This has meant that my poor old blog has been relegated to the less creative sections of my overloaded bonce and has had to do a fair bit of languishing in the doldrums as I have been too tired or uninspired to blog anything.

When you play music you often find yourself driving home from a gig late in the night when no one else is around. No pedestrians, no cars, empty deserted streets ... except for the traffic lights which keep on blinking their colourful warnings through the night When I lived in my old flat, there was one set of lights on the way home which I particularly loathed. A set of lights on a main carriageway at an insignificant side road where probably only three cars would emerge all day. You could see the lights a long time before you got to them and they would always be on green. Green, green, green, green ... and then comes that psychologically critical moment when you think you are going to make it through this time and start to speed up ... and just at that moment the lights start their arrogant, languid change ... green .... ah, well ... might as well go to ... ho hum ... hmm ... let's see ... oh ... amber ... no, not to keen on that ... how about ... um ... yes ... red!

And you screech to a halt in the middle of the night on a wide deserted road - not a human or moving vehicle within miles - and you sit in your car in front of this bloody red light, tired, irritated, just wanting your bed...

On occasions I have been known to shout and rave at these particular lights - and I realised it was always when I was particularly knackered.

And that was happened last night as I was trying to get home late in the night and all the traffic lights had conspired to play that game with me ... and then I realised "hmm, Neutron, old chap, all this is getting to you more than you think!"

ΔΕΝ ΘΑ ΒΑΔΙΣΕΤΕ ΜΟΝΟΙ ΣΑΣ ΠΟΤΕ!

...answers on a postcard!

Moanlish

It wouldn’t be a trip to England if I didn’t have a moan about English...

“The ball probably hits the bar; it comes down to Nugent who taps it in!”

So … erm … goal, GOAL, GOAL!!!

Well, no actually … this is just a brain-dead ITV football commentator who has never learned that it can be quite handy to use conditionals when you speak English if the things you want to talk about didn’t actually happen. The only concession to the conditional tenses is the adverb “probably”. That is a bit of a giveaway … but not enough.

What actually happened was that the keeper tipped the ball over the bar preventing Nugent from getting the chance to score and what this illiterate doughnut of a commentator wanted to say was, “the ball would probably have hit the bar (if the keeper hadn’t tipped it over), and then it just might have come down to Nugent who could maybe have tapped it in.”

This berk was the “expert” teamed with a match commentator who kept on saying, “that’s the sikth corner of the game … we are in the sikth minute …” another one of my long-term bugbears (see: Sick of Sikth)

In the Sunday Times this sentence jumped out at me:

“The universe runs on nuclear power, why not us?”

It made me blink that one, and I had to think about it – I mean you can’t say, “… why not we?” but you could say, “… why can’t we?”

And that’s the Sunday Times!!! And the BBC is by no means immune to the kind of Stephen-King-horror-grammar that makes you jump in shock.

BBC1 News reporting on Prince Harry/William (can never remember which is which) who is in the army and who might have to go with his squadron to Iraq:

“… so, it could be that Prince Harry/William’s squadron and him will now be sent to Iraq …”

Him? HIM!!!??? His squadron and HIM!!!?????

Still the choicest bloops come from the footy commentators. Last night as Man Utd ripped Roma to pieces the “expert” had this to say about Ronaldo:

“Well, Ronaldo certainly bears comparison with the incomparable George Best…”

Ho hum.

British (Laughing) Gas

...every time I come to Liverpool, it's the same story...

The basic situation is this:

I live in Deepest Bavaria - my mother's house is in Liverpool - she died in 2005 - I come over every few months to see things are ok ...

Because of this I get all the utility bills online ... should get ...

I opened an online account with British Gas so that they would send me the bills by email and I could pay them by online banking.

Simple!

But it seems that British Gas suffers from some sort of corporate Alzheimer's; every time I get to the house there is a series of frantic letters from British Gas ... a final final demand for a bill; they want to break in to check the boiler; they want to break in to make a reading ... and now they want to break in to take out the electricity meter ...

So every time I have to go through the intensely irritating telephonic jumping through hoops to get to speak to someone about whatever panic they now have ...

"Thank you for calling British Gas - your call is very important to us - if you are calling about blah press blah, if you have a blah, press blah ..."

I mean if the call really is important to them then how about having a REAL person there answering the phone?

And the main problem with the options is that there is never one that says, "if you live in Deepest Bavaria and keep getting a load of stupid letters from British Gas, please press blah ..."

What you need is a hacker who gets into the system and adds a few options:

"if you would like a bucket of water to be thrown at the next available operator, press blah - if you would to crash the next available operator's computer, press blah - if you would like someone here to be given a mild electric shock through the phone, press blah ..."

On second thoughts, cancel that last one ... I would end up with a series of letters asking for me to pay for the shock ...

Tempus Fugit

... that'll have you rummaging in cobwebbed corners of your memories through creased and faded Latin vocabulary lists.

Anyway, as time is flying, it is time to fly ... time to fly over to Liverpool again and see if there is any sign of a leak in the ceiling.

So, tomorrow it will be Wolfgang Amadeus to John Winston again ... and maybe tempus will fugit a little more slowly and i will be able to do some serious blogging again...!