A great - if unheralded - step forward

When computers were steam-powered I read Computer Shopper every month and imagined I understood it all. But the years rolled by, the complexities increased and my desire to understand shrivelled. I wish now I’d hung on for a little longer because during this time the USB socket/lead system was introduced.

These days USB is almost universal. From where I’m sitting I see it linking my mouse, my camera and my Skype to the computer. Round the back there are more links. Why get excited? It’s just a simple plug and socket. But it’s the word “simple” that excites me especially when I remember one of its predecessors. The dreaded Scart lead (see inset).

Scart leads still connect TVs to video recorders and once they were the standard link between printers and computers. Engaging Scart meant aligning a huge cumbersome 32-pin plug with a 32-hole socket. Bend a pin and you were done for. Now even a person interested only in poetry can unite a USB connexion. A great step forward but I’m still unaware of the theory.

IN THE INTERESTS OF SCIENCE This Cote de Beaune Villages has an odd history. Part of a clutch of cheapies it was bought for €1 at least twelve years ago to fill a hole in the wine rack at our French house. Its intended function was decorative, never gustatory. The house was sold ten years ago and this bottle ended up in a futile kitchen wine rack (Six slots vs. seventy-seven in the rack that matters) here in Herefordshire. The futile rack has been purged in the kitchen renovation and the bottle must now go. Cheap wine like this does not mature in bottles but I will taste it before disposing of the rest. Watch this space.

A case for Crop-Dad

Modified (See OS comment: Before - above; after - below)

This chap is an adolescent belonging to a jury of his peers called Keane. Recently he and the others shouted themselves hoarse at the Oh-two (sorry, can’t do the subscript) Stadium while plucking electronically-amplified guitars. Why do I know this? Younger daughter and her daughter drove to Greenwich, shouted back at the entertainment and flashed off their digitals indiscriminately.

Twas my job to trawl PhotoShop, crop their efforts and retrieve lost detail. More fun than attending the event itself. Pop musicians demand extreme cropping and I enjoyed sawing off the tops of their sweaty heads to give each his very own Massif Central. Brightness, contrast, hue and saturation tweaks on this one revealed the microphone stand, previously invisible. Great software used in a great cause: yoof culture.

THEY’VE DONE IT BEFORE! I’m impressed by companies who go the extra mile (or centimetre). The doors and drawer fronts are being replaced in our fitted kitchen. The work could not be completed in a single day but we weren’t left scrabbling access to our crocks and cutlery. Note the tape “handles” on anything that opened - replaced the following day by the specified knobs. Good on you, Lord Kytchener Kitchens (Yes, that’s the way they spell it and the explanation is quite boring.)

The furlong fights back

I marked my hundredth post with a celebration of the metric system slanted towards its technical benefits. My two-hundredth looks at the continuing metric/imperial divide

DRINK. “I can’t be bothered with litres of beer. I’ve got drunk on pints all my life.” Comment: They’re smaller - for timid drinkers.
ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM You can’t say: “Give him 2.54 centimetres and he’ll take 1.60934 kilometres.” Comment: True, it’s a cliché.
DECIMALS WOULD SPOIL SONG LYRICS: “I lurve you/A bushel and a peck/Yuh bet yur purty neck I do.” Comment: none.
…COMPLICATE COOKING: Gram cake. Comment: Don’t lose it between your teeth.
…PERMIT COAL-HEAVER FRAUD: “I asked for a ton not a tonne.”/ “So here’s a handful of slack.” Comment: First define slack. Mini-coal? Nah, too boring.
…LEAD TO SOCIAL COWARDICE: “The barman’s got arms like ham hocks. Quick, what’s a firkin in metric?” Comment: An end to Morris dancing as we know it.
GOD ORDAINED METRICS “Ten tiny fingers/Ten tiny toes.” Comment: But didn’t Anne Boleyn have six on one hand?
GOOD PR Singer Lita Roza (Dark Ages pop) re-spelled her first name to get work in Northern working men’s clubs. Comment: Yet became unfamous in the sixties.

US PROBLEMS You pave a yard, you don’t mow it. However, you can read a meter. Comment: A metric USA will arrive with worldwide suffrage.

How not to court popularity

My mention of simultaneous equations in a recent post caused Avus to groan, adding it wasn’t his subject at school. I sympathise. Also, I know full well such references lay me open to charges of showing off and poncy-ness.

Maths wasn’t my subject at school either. An essay I wrote on my preferred career admitted to journalism because it was distant from that old bromide about life being based on mathematics. Apart from the previously mentioned “techno-epiphany” my interest in maths developed much later. And even then I have added little in the way of technical competence.

No great mystery. I see maths – utterly unoriginally – as a language. As such it’s quite stunted. Beware those who talk flossily about its beauty (unless they’re Paul Dirac and he’s entitled): they’re usually poseurs. Maths is a language stripped of nuance and would be a poor basis for a poem. It’s far too clear. Lack of immediate clarity is often at the heart of great poetry.

On the other hand, clarity can taste like chilled sauvignon blanc. It’s sharp and it engages your senses. Take the social device: “How are you?” It’s not at all clear. It could mean: “I’m saying this because I’m passing you in the street.” Or (among Brits): “Don’t for goodness sake tell me about your aches and pains.” If it could be expressed mathematically we could ensure it meant, quite specifically: “I’m getting in first with this meaningless formulation because I’ve forgotten your name.”

Not a kinder world but an unambiguous one. There is no other meaning to “One over two-pi root el-cee, is the resonant frequency.” And I hope everyone’s thankful for that.

Electronics to tranquillise Zach

Now this does work and we the adults are very grateful.

For the third year running the five of us (the BBs, daughter, son-in-law and offsprig Zach) will holiday in the Languedoc. It’s a long two-day journey from Hereford and Zach’s behaviour during this ordeal has depended very much on the screen you see hanging behind the front passenger seat. As I’m sure you’ve guessed the screen is attached to a DVD player and for Zach, the unwinding autoroute is as nothing.

For me, one of two designated drivers, the tinkle of CBeebies discs endlessly recycling themelves was a small price to pay in Year One and Derek Jacobi’s soothing voice narrating In the night garden was a measure of normalcy. In Year Two I was less enamoured by The Wiggles and xenophobic tendencies had to be suppressed. This year Zach will be 3¼ and a cultural step-up is indicated. If not as far as Pulp Fiction surely he’s ripe for Citizen Kane? In the interim we shall test his ability to follow narrative.

The DVD player is plugged into an extension lead from the cigarette lighter. Another of the lead’s sockets accommodates the plug for the satnav. On the dashboard the computer calculates fuel consumption (trip and elapsed), reports the external temperature and tells us how much diesel we have left. An incredible amount of data processing whereas the only message from my Austin Cambridge in the early sixties was that I’d bought a rotten car.

All part of the healing process

General anaesthetic? They stick a plumber’s friend over your mouth and pump in isoflurane. But not quite. Don’t forget the muscle relaxant.

The prep didn’t work and I lay awake and febrile on a trolley close to where they keep the sharp things. Desperate, I read The Daily Telegraph proving that the balance of my mind was disturbed. A scruffy quasi-medical figure declared himself baffled by my alertness.

I awoke from the procedure to hear the surgeon complaining it had all taken far too long. But I was concentrating on breathing. It’s a simple activity, I’d been doing it all my life. Except now it wasn’t so simple. My chest muscles were inoperative and my lungs seemed to be elsewhere, perhaps in a waste bin. I was the star in a film about dying from shortness of breath. And I knew what a 35 lb carp feels after being whipped from the river and held for minutes by a grinning angler posing for the camera.

Later the surgeon visited me in the ward. Was I OK? Yes, but the non-breathing had been scary. Ah but that’s all over. Alas, no. I now chose to pass on the bad news that I’d been commissioned by World Medicine to write an article about my experiences. Hmmm.

Ten minutes later I was visited by the scruffy quasi-medical figure who smelt overpoweringly of cigarettes. The anaesthetist. Just the after-effects of the muscle relaxant, he said. But I wouldn’t be writing about that, would I? I reassured him I wouldn’t. But I lied.

A brief attack of the oldies

This one’s going to be tricky. I distrust Golden Eras (“Those Edwardian summers when the afternoons were long and sunny and the gels so pretty…”) but here I am, harking back.

Several blogs and/or comments I’ve read recently speak fondly about digital cameras. Blogging wouldn’t be the same without them. No delay waiting for prints. Lots of technology easily accessed. Zero overheads. Good quality for low outlay. All good stuff.

My 6 megapixel Traveller DC-6900 cost £69 at Aldi and its only fault (rechargeable batteries last about 20 shots) may not be attributable to the camera. Yet who could love this Christmas cracker toy? This deformed Easter Egg?

While still gainfully employed I used a Fuji battery-powered non-digital camera and clearly advancing the film threatened the battery’s capacity. The unease became reality at a T. J. Maxx warehouse in remotest Canada when I ceased to be a photo-journalist and was reduced to my notebook alone. The Pentax replaced the Fuji and my thumb now advanced the film. Speed had to be balanced with aperture. For two years after I retired I did freelance work which meant using a tripod and long long exposures in stygian industrial buildings. I could never have trusted the Traveller.

The Pentax doesn’t do “instant”. It’s heavy too. But it’s beautifully made, the lens is gin-clear and, I’m afraid, I love it. It deserves an ode, if not an eclogue. On verra.

Meet my better half

My 195th post and I’m experiencing a sense of self-persecution. If I renounceed my blogonym a perfect replacement would be: The Man in the Iron Mask - Outside, Tungsten Carbide; Inside, Liberal Arts Jelly-Baby.

Despite this blog’s aims, I have read fiction, some hardish (eg, The man without qualities), listened to music (including Alban Berg’s violin concerto), watched subtitled films and looked at paintings. All potential epiphanies but rejected as grist for this mill. For one thing culture blogging is competitive, for another most people regard the arts as a likely source of “perceptions of the essential nature or meaning of something” and I doubt I could add anything new.

Hence technology and its siblings. And here’s a techno-epiphany. At age 12, in the Monster Puzzle Book, I came upon this: a will is divided so that Jack gets half as much as Jill while Humpty’s portion is equal to… etc, etc. With an insight that has not visited me since, I recognised it as an expression in prose of a pair of simultaneous equations. Gazoing! Although to appreciate that Damascene moment you need to know what a wretched scholar I was. Two French adjectives say it best: débile (feeble) yet têtu (obstinate).

Anyway I decided on a blog which touches on such moments, on the delights of well-cut gears, the neatness of some software and the excitement which motorbikes generate. With each post an additional part of that iron mask was created and the visor descended some months ago. I am now a figure held together by cables, pistons and printed circuits despite pathetic attempts (like this) to re-establish my membership of the intelligentsia. Ahead, the dump.