2014 — 29 September: Monday
Much less enticing weather this morning, so far.1 However, I still have it in mind to shop for some replacement shirts (seven years of wear strikes me as pretty good value) and there's also a (large) degree of local ¬derangement needed before Peter and his g/f show up in less than two weeks. I can clearly hear the call of the local domestic refuse recycling containers, assuming they are still operating opposite Matalan.
Time for my next nice, hot cuppa. I also need to snaffle as much of the accumulated BBC radio stuff as I can before my monthly download cap is fitted. Yesterday, for example, I happened to catch an extract from a previously unperformed play ("Denmark Hill") by Alan Bennett on the "Pick of the Week" programme I often forget to listen to. It's something of a spoof on "Hamlet" (in the suburbs) that had gone out on Saturday without my even realising. Tut, tut.
A flying visit...
... from the Man in Black (who's usefully taken the Asus Android Transformer Tablet PC off my hands) as he popped round to hand over some cash and also demonstrate the music stand, Tablet clamp, and software solution he will be using live in public for the first time this evening. His use case for the Tablet is nearly as singular as mine for the SHIELD Tablet, but we both love this technology.
Right! Time for a spot of lunch already. [Pause] Then it's time to greet Mr Postie, as he hands over another long-time favourite, which I dodged school to see up in London in 1968:
As I said a while ago, my earliest "grown up" variant of the graphic novel subspecies was probably this copy ...
... of Jean-Claude Forest's "Barbarella" that I bought for the enormous sum of 21 shillings, in 1968. J-C Forest created the lady for his own amusement (doing both storyline and pictures for a full page feature) in 1962. He died on 30 December 1998. There are far worse things to be remembered for...
I've been engrossed...
... with the NPR "Fresh Air" interview between Terry Gross and Lena Dunham. An amazing pair of women.
My wandering...
... minstrel (or, perhaps, troubadour? — actually, he's a ukulele player) has just checked in to report "100% total success" with his hi-tech Android music stand and songlist/chord display unit:
Not only does it make sorting the plethora of music out so much easier but actually using it when playing is as easy, if not easier, than paper music. I'd forgotten that I could also use Android pinch gestures to expand the PDF to fill the screen exactly so get a bigger font than on paper. The only very minor negative was the one song that went over two pages. On paper I make sure the parity in my songbook is such that both sheets are open together, on the tablet I had to miss a bar and swipe down to page 2. Not much of an inconvenience for someone of my standard but building a bluetooth pedal may be on my project list :-)
I don't think I've seen reference to the parity of a songbook before. Mind you, I knew nothing about parity in general until I read Martin Gardner's "The Ambidextrous Universe" back in 1970 — and it was jolly good that I did, too, because it enabled me to do a satisfactory job of answering the mirror left-right inversion question as part of the writing test I did in late 1973 to get me as far as an interview for my ICL job. By then, I had also read Richard Hamming's "Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers" and knew a little more about error-correcting codes and parity errors. The rest, as they say, is history. Increasingly ancient history these days, of course.
Speaking of which, I've been indulging in a repeat viewing of the gently comedic Beiderbecke trilogy by Alan Plater. Marvellous stuff that first started appearing 30 years ago.