Wash your hands.
Don't touch your face.
Stay away from other people.
Wear a mask.
Stay two metres away from everyone.
Open the windows.
One hundred years of research since the Spanish flu, thousands of PhD's and untold millions in research grants, and that's it? That's all they got? Your grandmother's advice? When a real, Spanish Flu killer-pandemic comes along, that's what the public health officials are going to tell us to do, as we watch others dying in front of us?
It's a good thing this virus is not serious. (Look at the excess death rate. That's all that matters. Infections without symptoms are meaningless.)
The virus is not a medical problem. It's a flu. It's going to mutate, it's going to stay with us. There will be another one along later. Get over it.
The virus is a political problem. The politicians, punch-drunk from the continuing fall-out of 2008, and the shocking events of 2016, were faced with a public health lobby that was looking for its next panic, a media that was looking for something to beat the politicians with, and a sense that they were losing control over their countries. One by one, terrified by the prospect of being wrong and having the press hounding them, they looked around for something to do.
They were desperate. Desperate people do things that barely make sense to them. And make no sense to anyone else.
Lock healthy people inside their homes.
Shut businesses and shops. Make them spend thousands on virus paraphernalia.
If anyone is found to be infected, lock them up with their families for a fortnight.
Policies that are ridiculous on their face, and required fear-based propaganda to spread.
They did not do it to save lives. None of those measures will save lives.
They did it to stop the papers, television and social media showing photographs of patients lying on trolleys in corridors.
Public relations, not public health.
Never try to understand what desperate people do. By definition, it has no justification.
Never underestimate what weak, mean-spirited, small-souled people can do if they get into a position of influence. We are seeing it now.
Never underestimate how unscrupulous people will try to benefit from a crisis. See the "experts" lining up for their fifteen minutes of fame.
Never underestimate how much people who believe they are right will force their views on the rest of us.
There is nothing to understand here. To record, to document, to cost - yes. To understand - NO.
And never try to understand why your fellow citizens scuttled so willingly into their homes on 23 March 2020, and continue to go along with mendacious Government propaganda, and follow ridiculous advice. (Some do it, like me, to access what we need. But who wears a mask on the street?)
I will try in 2021 to focus on what I can do to maintain and improve the quality of my life, and of the few people left who mean something to me.
I will...
... exercise
... read
... continue at the day job until this s**t-show is over.
... listen to music
... try to eat well (but remember that chocolate is medicinal)
... keep myself and my digs clean
... experiment with all sorts of little things
... keep my head away from the crazy
One day at a time.
Which is mostly what I do every year. Because I've pretty much had this living thing down for a while now.
Monday 28 December 2020
Friday 25 December 2020
Happy Christmas - and a Sovereign New Year
I will never entirely trust Boris again. Not after Tier 4. How difficult is it to say NO to a bunch of professors whose grants, by way of another Cabinet Minister, you control?
Perhaps he had other things on his mind? What could that have been?
On Brexit the lad came through. Leaving Ursula von Leyden-Jar to mutter the most incomprehensible things about sovereignty ever spoken, and which would result in her failing any course of political philosophy.
How much of the negociations was theatre we may never know. And why it wasn't done three years ago? Well, because and bluntly, the EU is not staffed with the first class of politician or administrator. It is where the second-rate go when their career stalls in their home countries.
I was suprised at how emotional Remainers were at the time. As if what the UK did mattered. We're a bunch of rougues, bankers, eccentrics, and ineffectual twats who can't even deport a murderer. We're the slightly loud, coarse guest at your party who made a pass at your friend's undergraduate daughter. Who could possibly get upset if that person left?
I have no idea, aside from the loss of all that money, why the EU might have got so upset. Ah. ****ocks. Of course I do. It was the money. It was losing the sixth largest economy on the planet. It was knowing that the Germans would be paying for everything. It was losing the aura of economic, moral and political respectability that the UK gave the whole project. (I know, how the UK manages to retain an aura of respectability, I have no idea. But it does.)
Anyway. That's the first fight.
Now we have to get out lives back from those frauds on SAGE, NERVTAG, the Guardian and all those other Believers in the One True Virus, bringer of death and furlough, of fame to the justly obscure and power to the properly ignored.
Happy Christmas.
Monday 21 December 2020
That Audiophile Sound
Listen or read enough audiophile reviews and you will notice something missing.
Classical music.
In the non-technical sense of the phrase. With a small 'c'.
Neither Bruckner nor Corelli, nor Beamish nor Cage; not a mention of Debussy, Handel, Palestrina or John Taverner; not one wag of the stick from von Karajan, Simon Rattle, or Joanne Falletta. As for finding that a piece of gear reveals even more of Solti's Ring Cycle? Not going to happen.
This may be because a lot of them don't listen classical music. A lot of people don't. Even though Tidal and Spotify has all sorts of it.
It may also be because big orchestras just don't provide that audiophile sound, and one of the things the audiophile guys want is, well, that audiophile sound.
Audiophile-sounding music is made by a small number of people whose instruments can be individually recorded, recorded in a reasonably dry studio through very good mics and with top-notch digital transfer to the final media. It will be carefully constructed to have easily-separated parts that can be placed on a stereo soundstage with precision. Jazz from any era except big-band; any music made on a Mac (dance, ambient, rap, electronica etc); most classical music before about 1780, and period performances of anything up to about 1830; plainchant, but not four-part masses by Palestrina and others of that ilk; contemporary classical music, especially the minimalists and their disciples; and some pop, rock and soul.
That kind of music creates a well-defined soundstage, has lots of details that good gear can pick out, and also has a narrower dynamic range than Wagner at his best. There is enough going on to be interesting and engaging, but not more than you can handle at once.
Whereas I defy anyone to tell the difference between Shostakovich's 12th on CD or Naxos 192kps streaming. There's so much sheer volume of sound the idea of 'details' is just silly. You're not supposed to be able to pick out the horns from the oboes and the violins: it's supposed to be one glorious uplifting <>sound. It was written to sound good in concert halls that were not designed by acoustics engineers. Rather like chart music today is mixed to sound good on headphones via a mobile phone.
Orchestral music does not provide the same opportunity for talking about, or even identifying in the first place, the very subtle differences between one bit of hi-fi kit and another. Those would simply get lost in the horns. There are even piano-cello pieces that are so thumpy and loud that they would browbeat any piece of kit into sounding like a boombox.
If you don't believe me, reflect on the fact that nobody has ever tested hi-fi using Canadian post-rockers Broken Social Scene. Get the eponymous Broken Social Scene album. Any track will do, but Shoreline (7/4) is worth hearing because it is the only piece of music in 7/4 that swings. Play it over whatever set-up you like, it is never going to sound tight, spacious, and well-defined. It sounds messier on CD through speakers than it does on AAC over headphones for heaven's sake.
What I think I'm suggesting is that a) audiophiles listen to a certain kind of music for the same reason that people with racing cars like to drive on closed circuits: it brings out the best in their equipment; b) a lot of orchestral music simply is not recorded well enough to benefit from higher-end gear; and maybe c) a system that plays orchestral music well may not bring out the best in a Nils Frahm piece.
And it may mean that the Solti recording with the Chicago Symphony of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra, which is an audiophile dream, is a rebuke to a lot of lazily-recorded or badly sound-designed (and sound-design is part of composing) orchestral music. (Edit 5/1/21: Hans Beekhuysen lists some hefty orchestral music amongst his test tracks. So he's one.)
Classical music.
In the non-technical sense of the phrase. With a small 'c'.
Neither Bruckner nor Corelli, nor Beamish nor Cage; not a mention of Debussy, Handel, Palestrina or John Taverner; not one wag of the stick from von Karajan, Simon Rattle, or Joanne Falletta. As for finding that a piece of gear reveals even more of Solti's Ring Cycle? Not going to happen.
This may be because a lot of them don't listen classical music. A lot of people don't. Even though Tidal and Spotify has all sorts of it.
It may also be because big orchestras just don't provide that audiophile sound, and one of the things the audiophile guys want is, well, that audiophile sound.
Audiophile-sounding music is made by a small number of people whose instruments can be individually recorded, recorded in a reasonably dry studio through very good mics and with top-notch digital transfer to the final media. It will be carefully constructed to have easily-separated parts that can be placed on a stereo soundstage with precision. Jazz from any era except big-band; any music made on a Mac (dance, ambient, rap, electronica etc); most classical music before about 1780, and period performances of anything up to about 1830; plainchant, but not four-part masses by Palestrina and others of that ilk; contemporary classical music, especially the minimalists and their disciples; and some pop, rock and soul.
That kind of music creates a well-defined soundstage, has lots of details that good gear can pick out, and also has a narrower dynamic range than Wagner at his best. There is enough going on to be interesting and engaging, but not more than you can handle at once.
Whereas I defy anyone to tell the difference between Shostakovich's 12th on CD or Naxos 192kps streaming. There's so much sheer volume of sound the idea of 'details' is just silly. You're not supposed to be able to pick out the horns from the oboes and the violins: it's supposed to be one glorious uplifting <>sound. It was written to sound good in concert halls that were not designed by acoustics engineers. Rather like chart music today is mixed to sound good on headphones via a mobile phone.
Orchestral music does not provide the same opportunity for talking about, or even identifying in the first place, the very subtle differences between one bit of hi-fi kit and another. Those would simply get lost in the horns. There are even piano-cello pieces that are so thumpy and loud that they would browbeat any piece of kit into sounding like a boombox.
If you don't believe me, reflect on the fact that nobody has ever tested hi-fi using Canadian post-rockers Broken Social Scene. Get the eponymous Broken Social Scene album. Any track will do, but Shoreline (7/4) is worth hearing because it is the only piece of music in 7/4 that swings. Play it over whatever set-up you like, it is never going to sound tight, spacious, and well-defined. It sounds messier on CD through speakers than it does on AAC over headphones for heaven's sake.
What I think I'm suggesting is that a) audiophiles listen to a certain kind of music for the same reason that people with racing cars like to drive on closed circuits: it brings out the best in their equipment; b) a lot of orchestral music simply is not recorded well enough to benefit from higher-end gear; and maybe c) a system that plays orchestral music well may not bring out the best in a Nils Frahm piece.
And it may mean that the Solti recording with the Chicago Symphony of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra, which is an audiophile dream, is a rebuke to a lot of lazily-recorded or badly sound-designed (and sound-design is part of composing) orchestral music. (Edit 5/1/21: Hans Beekhuysen lists some hefty orchestral music amongst his test tracks. So he's one.)
Thursday 17 December 2020
My Brief Roon Trial
It's a terrific piece of software. You get 14 days free trial and then they zap you for the full $119.88 (if I read right).
I tested it with an MP3 file of Annabel Lamb's Backwards Through The Looking Glass, which is unjustly not available on CD. Even Spotify knows not of her. You Tube does, and the track you need to hear is lined up for you
Notice the fierce attack of the piano, the echo around the drums. Every note and drum stroke is clear, isolated, percussive. And that echo makes the whole thing sound slightly spooky. And that's over my Mac Air speakers via You Tube. You can only imagine what the original vinyl sounded like. Or what the rips I found on the internet sound like.
So with huge anticipation, I played it through Roon onto my Sonos Connect and out through the amp.
It was like a veil had been put over the whole thing. The attack wasn't there. The echo was not as clear. Roon told me it had chopped off the last 8 bits to get a 16-bit signal to send to the Sonos Connect.
So I played it through File Explorer on my iPod Touch and out through a Jitterbug and black Dragonfly into the amp.
Oh yes. That's it. That's how I remember it.
It is tempting to conclude this only proves that the Sonos DAC is not as good as the black Dragonfly, and perhaps that the Mac Air isn't as good a source as a more recent Pod Touch(?!). Those things may or may not be true. It doesn't matter. Because it shows that with my current set-up Roon doesn't play as nice as my current file-streaming method.
And Roon had to fit in to my current set-up. Not start me off buying new DACs and other gear.
Everything else about Roon is as advertised. It wailed through my 1,000 directory collection in less than ten minutes. It found album art all over the place. It had some interesting things to say about some of the discs and artists. It found every device in my house in the blink of an eye. (But then so does Windows Explorer on my Windows Machine, and my Air finds all my Sonos speakers and presents them in the menu of the loudspeaker). It found Air Play and Sonos, though it didn't find my iDevices.
If I want to know about the artist and album, there's a little thing called... oh, what is it?.... Wikipedia. If I want lyrics, those are available on a dozen sites. If I want my AAC rips cataloged I use Apple Music. Because I've downloaded a lot of commuter music my AACs are a superset of my CDs, so that Music "Library" is the entire collection.
I prefer to listen to CDs when I can. Streaming services are useful for background music, or checking out an artist or composer. At those prices Roon needs to be a daily driver, and it won't be for me.
Finally, Roon is a resource hog. I watched it ease its way up to 1GB of RAM, and it prefers to be the exclusive user of whatever machine it is running on.
I tested it with an MP3 file of Annabel Lamb's Backwards Through The Looking Glass, which is unjustly not available on CD. Even Spotify knows not of her. You Tube does, and the track you need to hear is lined up for you
Notice the fierce attack of the piano, the echo around the drums. Every note and drum stroke is clear, isolated, percussive. And that echo makes the whole thing sound slightly spooky. And that's over my Mac Air speakers via You Tube. You can only imagine what the original vinyl sounded like. Or what the rips I found on the internet sound like.
So with huge anticipation, I played it through Roon onto my Sonos Connect and out through the amp.
It was like a veil had been put over the whole thing. The attack wasn't there. The echo was not as clear. Roon told me it had chopped off the last 8 bits to get a 16-bit signal to send to the Sonos Connect.
So I played it through File Explorer on my iPod Touch and out through a Jitterbug and black Dragonfly into the amp.
Oh yes. That's it. That's how I remember it.
It is tempting to conclude this only proves that the Sonos DAC is not as good as the black Dragonfly, and perhaps that the Mac Air isn't as good a source as a more recent Pod Touch(?!). Those things may or may not be true. It doesn't matter. Because it shows that with my current set-up Roon doesn't play as nice as my current file-streaming method.
And Roon had to fit in to my current set-up. Not start me off buying new DACs and other gear.
Everything else about Roon is as advertised. It wailed through my 1,000 directory collection in less than ten minutes. It found album art all over the place. It had some interesting things to say about some of the discs and artists. It found every device in my house in the blink of an eye. (But then so does Windows Explorer on my Windows Machine, and my Air finds all my Sonos speakers and presents them in the menu of the loudspeaker). It found Air Play and Sonos, though it didn't find my iDevices.
If I want to know about the artist and album, there's a little thing called... oh, what is it?.... Wikipedia. If I want lyrics, those are available on a dozen sites. If I want my AAC rips cataloged I use Apple Music. Because I've downloaded a lot of commuter music my AACs are a superset of my CDs, so that Music "Library" is the entire collection.
I prefer to listen to CDs when I can. Streaming services are useful for background music, or checking out an artist or composer. At those prices Roon needs to be a daily driver, and it won't be for me.
Finally, Roon is a resource hog. I watched it ease its way up to 1GB of RAM, and it prefers to be the exclusive user of whatever machine it is running on.
Monday 14 December 2020
Medium Format is about the Square
I made a remark about "seeing in medium-format" recently. I took it to mean that, of course, I needed a medium-format camera to get the shots I was really seeing. (Because the cure for photography problems is mo' gear, of course.) Since medium-format cameras are more expensive than a fully-kitted out Macbook Pro, I wondered about second-hand ones. Those were mostly film, or as expensive as settling for a 512GB SSD card instead of the full 1TB. Plus there's the whole thing where medium-format cameras can be used as dumb-bells if you can't get to the gym, and need a trolley to carry them around.
OK. Slight exaggeration.
For some reason I looked at the entry in Wikipedia on medium-format cameras. it told me that most of them were 6cm x 6cm, and some later ones were 6cm x 4.5 cm. Wait, what? Square? Like Instagram?
I hauled out my Panasonic DMZ-40TY-H4562 or whatever silly name it has, and clicked through the menus. Aspect Ratio: 3:2 (35mm), 4:3 (HDTV), 16:9 (widescreen), 1:1 (square). Whoa. The sun was out. I nipped into the park and took some photographs.
So here's a piece of fence in 16:9
OK. Slight exaggeration.
For some reason I looked at the entry in Wikipedia on medium-format cameras. it told me that most of them were 6cm x 6cm, and some later ones were 6cm x 4.5 cm. Wait, what? Square? Like Instagram?
I hauled out my Panasonic DMZ-40TY-H4562 or whatever silly name it has, and clicked through the menus. Aspect Ratio: 3:2 (35mm), 4:3 (HDTV), 16:9 (widescreen), 1:1 (square). Whoa. The sun was out. I nipped into the park and took some photographs.
So here's a piece of fence in 16:9
and again in 4:3
and again in 3:2
and this is what it should look like.....
Doesn't that feel more solid? The wider formats just go on about how much fence there is, but somehow, to my eyes, the square format gives a better sense of how the fence relates to the ground and open sky as well. There's no open sky in the 16:9.
The next one is just plain perfect. Ordinary, but perfect.
If that had been a 35mm shot I would have made a 'meh' and moved on. But that bank of gorse is so much more impressive when you can't see lots of open ground to the right. Here's a 16:9
and here's what it should look like
The photograph is about the water and the stream. We only need to see one post-war semi to understand that this is in a suburb somewhere. The top picture gives us too much detail we don't need.
Medium-format, yes. But it was about the Square, not the film or sensor size.
Thursday 10 December 2020
Bye-bye Evernote and Dropbox
I got Dropbox and Evernote because I read about them on Rands in Repose. That was a long time ago in Internet Years. Something like (looks up account on Evernote) 8th October 2010. (Stone me guv'nor, 10 years.)
Now I use iCloud instead of Dropbox and Apple Notes instead of Evernote. Why?
Bloat.
About a year ago I looked at what was using my RAM. I have 4GB in my early 2015 Mac Air (blimey guv, I've had that for five years) so this is something I need to do, even though OS X handles memory way better than Windows 7 as disfigured by an FTSE 100 company.
Fire up Activity Monitor, look at the Memory tab, but order by the Process Name column, not the Memory column. This is because apps are now split into a number of processes. For instance, my Brave Browser with one tab open has one main process, two Helper processes, a GPU process, and six Renderer processes going. The main process is 240MB, and all the others take 504MB. That browser is taking 0.75GB of memory.
(I just closed Brave and opened Firefox at my Amazon Wish List. Main process 401MB, supporting processes 337MB, so still 0.7GB of memory. Re-opening Brave on my Wish List gets me 135MB in the main process and 270MB of supporting processes. Which is better. I bet if I open You Tube it bloats out bigly.)
When I did that exercise for Dropbox, it was using over 0.5GB of RAM. Just to sync some files in a Cloud. WTF? Since the iCloud process was already running - because Apple - this was a ridiculous use of resources. It took a few minutes to put the files I wanted backing in the iCloud in the iCloud drive directory, and then I could shut down Dropbox. I even uninstalled it on all my machines.
Evernote updated itself a couple of weeks ago. One of those OMG-they-have-so-changed-everything-WTF-did-they-do-that? changes. Every time Evernote does a major change its users lose control over more and more things. This one changed the fonts and graphicalised everything - like Office 2016 did and Apple Notes is. The feel of how the type appears on the screen in response to the keyboard is different. It was when I navigated to a large note which choked the viewer I began to think something was wrong. Yep, Evernote, which used to be whip-cracking smart and fast, now had a Renderer process that took around 400MB. The whole lot took up around 0.7GB, and Evernote has never been great at memory management.
Notes is running in less than 84MB, and even Pages takes only 153MB. How the **** does it need a 400MB renderer process to do what Apple does in 84MB? Makes me wonder what other dumb things they did.
Export all my Evernote Notebooks. Load them into Apple Notes. Close Evernote. I had cancelled my Premium membership a few months previously. I haven't uninstalled it, and I still have an account I can access via a browser. Moving to Apple Notes is one-way: it only lets you export to pdf files. Because Apple.
I blame SSDs. I see this at work, where people who don't have problematical unknown programs like SAS Base (oh, wait) are getting Windows 10 machines with SSDs and 8GB of RAM. Half of that is taken by Windows and security bloatware - McAfee and Tanium Endpoint plus all the supporting Windows services - so users are still trying to run their real programs in under 4GB. Everyone with one of those machines is agog at how fast they are - what do they have at home? - but that speed comes from the SSD, not efficient and effective use of the RAM. The fast disk swapping SSDs allow seems to make people lazy about RAM use and program bloat - who cares how big it is, it'll swap real fast on an SSD, and the clock speed will cover up the lousy coding.
So deeper into the Apple eco-system I go. Because third-party suppliers got lazy with their coding.
Now I use iCloud instead of Dropbox and Apple Notes instead of Evernote. Why?
Bloat.
About a year ago I looked at what was using my RAM. I have 4GB in my early 2015 Mac Air (blimey guv, I've had that for five years) so this is something I need to do, even though OS X handles memory way better than Windows 7 as disfigured by an FTSE 100 company.
Fire up Activity Monitor, look at the Memory tab, but order by the Process Name column, not the Memory column. This is because apps are now split into a number of processes. For instance, my Brave Browser with one tab open has one main process, two Helper processes, a GPU process, and six Renderer processes going. The main process is 240MB, and all the others take 504MB. That browser is taking 0.75GB of memory.
(I just closed Brave and opened Firefox at my Amazon Wish List. Main process 401MB, supporting processes 337MB, so still 0.7GB of memory. Re-opening Brave on my Wish List gets me 135MB in the main process and 270MB of supporting processes. Which is better. I bet if I open You Tube it bloats out bigly.)
When I did that exercise for Dropbox, it was using over 0.5GB of RAM. Just to sync some files in a Cloud. WTF? Since the iCloud process was already running - because Apple - this was a ridiculous use of resources. It took a few minutes to put the files I wanted backing in the iCloud in the iCloud drive directory, and then I could shut down Dropbox. I even uninstalled it on all my machines.
Evernote updated itself a couple of weeks ago. One of those OMG-they-have-so-changed-everything-WTF-did-they-do-that? changes. Every time Evernote does a major change its users lose control over more and more things. This one changed the fonts and graphicalised everything - like Office 2016 did and Apple Notes is. The feel of how the type appears on the screen in response to the keyboard is different. It was when I navigated to a large note which choked the viewer I began to think something was wrong. Yep, Evernote, which used to be whip-cracking smart and fast, now had a Renderer process that took around 400MB. The whole lot took up around 0.7GB, and Evernote has never been great at memory management.
Notes is running in less than 84MB, and even Pages takes only 153MB. How the **** does it need a 400MB renderer process to do what Apple does in 84MB? Makes me wonder what other dumb things they did.
Export all my Evernote Notebooks. Load them into Apple Notes. Close Evernote. I had cancelled my Premium membership a few months previously. I haven't uninstalled it, and I still have an account I can access via a browser. Moving to Apple Notes is one-way: it only lets you export to pdf files. Because Apple.
I blame SSDs. I see this at work, where people who don't have problematical unknown programs like SAS Base (oh, wait) are getting Windows 10 machines with SSDs and 8GB of RAM. Half of that is taken by Windows and security bloatware - McAfee and Tanium Endpoint plus all the supporting Windows services - so users are still trying to run their real programs in under 4GB. Everyone with one of those machines is agog at how fast they are - what do they have at home? - but that speed comes from the SSD, not efficient and effective use of the RAM. The fast disk swapping SSDs allow seems to make people lazy about RAM use and program bloat - who cares how big it is, it'll swap real fast on an SSD, and the clock speed will cover up the lousy coding.
So deeper into the Apple eco-system I go. Because third-party suppliers got lazy with their coding.
Monday 7 December 2020
Why You Should Print (Some of) Your Photographs
All the photography websites say print your photographs, usually while holding up an A3 or larger print that has been through the colour-correction wringer in Lightroom or something similar. Mine were all A4 from a Canon MG7500, which was also the scanner for the film prints. Those are the ones with what looks like some fancy colour tweaking. Nope, just film, age, and the MG7500.
I'm not a professional photographer, and nor am I the kind of hobbyist who would join a local photography club. I like taking photographs, from time to time, but I like looking at views which would make good photographs even more. A lot of the views I like just can't be captured on an iPhone, or what I suspect is the ⅔ inch sensor of my Panasonic. 35mm with a 50mm lens captures what I see pretty well, but what really does it is medium-format. My eyes see in medium-format. That's expensive eyes. The latest Fujifilm X-S10 seemed to get close, but even that costs £1,300 with the 18-55mm lens.
Why print your photgraphs? It makes you look at what you have done. That is when you realise that there's something about that quirky shot of the Stage Door. There is - it's full of rectangles. I didn't rate it much when I first took it.
Today a print is a commitment to the image: in the past, when we got 4x6's of everything (unless you were a real pro and got contacts, but those weren't actually cheaper than 4x6's) the commitment was to an enlargement. Now as much as printer ink costs - the printers are practically free - photographic enlargements cost way more. You thought very carefully about enlarging and framing. Now an A4 print really is not that expensive. An A3 colour-corrected one is not cheap, because it's twice as much ink and a decent A3 printer is at least £500 or so. And weighs a ton, and takes up a lot of space. A4 prints can be put in a folder with transparent sleeves, and a very pleasant sensation it is to pick it up and leaf through it from time to time. If there's a weak choice, it quickly becomes apparent, and it's dead easy to replace it with a better one.
I was not looking for those stand-out, once-in-90-days, shots that the professionals show you on their websites, Instagrams and You Tube channels. They are not showing the hundreds of meh shots they took to get the stand-outs.
I was looking for photographs that looked good, and/or that meant something to me. The one of the Thames Police boat is not an outstanding photograph, but it reminds me of the couple of years I spent working for the Riverbus project and spending a lot of time on the river and with the Thames Watermen who drove the boats. The one of the two groups of people standing on the dockside under a bright blue sky is partly about the day I drove round half the Algarve, and partly about what it says about the community that lives there.
That's all I had to do. I'm an amateur who can take a decent picture now and again. There's more enjoyment from looking at those on paper than there is on a screen.
Printing your photographs helps you recognise what you've done that has produced an image that pleases you for one reason or another. And that makes you appreciate your own ability.
I'm not a professional photographer, and nor am I the kind of hobbyist who would join a local photography club. I like taking photographs, from time to time, but I like looking at views which would make good photographs even more. A lot of the views I like just can't be captured on an iPhone, or what I suspect is the ⅔ inch sensor of my Panasonic. 35mm with a 50mm lens captures what I see pretty well, but what really does it is medium-format. My eyes see in medium-format. That's expensive eyes. The latest Fujifilm X-S10 seemed to get close, but even that costs £1,300 with the 18-55mm lens.
Why print your photgraphs? It makes you look at what you have done. That is when you realise that there's something about that quirky shot of the Stage Door. There is - it's full of rectangles. I didn't rate it much when I first took it.
Today a print is a commitment to the image: in the past, when we got 4x6's of everything (unless you were a real pro and got contacts, but those weren't actually cheaper than 4x6's) the commitment was to an enlargement. Now as much as printer ink costs - the printers are practically free - photographic enlargements cost way more. You thought very carefully about enlarging and framing. Now an A4 print really is not that expensive. An A3 colour-corrected one is not cheap, because it's twice as much ink and a decent A3 printer is at least £500 or so. And weighs a ton, and takes up a lot of space. A4 prints can be put in a folder with transparent sleeves, and a very pleasant sensation it is to pick it up and leaf through it from time to time. If there's a weak choice, it quickly becomes apparent, and it's dead easy to replace it with a better one.
I was not looking for those stand-out, once-in-90-days, shots that the professionals show you on their websites, Instagrams and You Tube channels. They are not showing the hundreds of meh shots they took to get the stand-outs.
I was looking for photographs that looked good, and/or that meant something to me. The one of the Thames Police boat is not an outstanding photograph, but it reminds me of the couple of years I spent working for the Riverbus project and spending a lot of time on the river and with the Thames Watermen who drove the boats. The one of the two groups of people standing on the dockside under a bright blue sky is partly about the day I drove round half the Algarve, and partly about what it says about the community that lives there.
That's all I had to do. I'm an amateur who can take a decent picture now and again. There's more enjoyment from looking at those on paper than there is on a screen.
Printing your photographs helps you recognise what you've done that has produced an image that pleases you for one reason or another. And that makes you appreciate your own ability.
Monday 30 November 2020
Photographs I'm Printing (34)
(Olympus OM-10)
Taken around 07:15 at Embankment Station during the week, back in the early 1990's. In 2019, there would have been a person in the frame all the time.
Monday 23 November 2020
Photographs I'm Printing (33)
(Sony-Eriksson cameraphone)
Cameraphone. Look at the detail on that water. It's a railway bridge (duh!) near Utrecht. Cannot remember the name of the town it's near.
Thursday 19 November 2020
Why Orchestral Music Doesn't Sound Super-Sharp On Any Hi-Fi
To understand how and why orchestral music sounds on hi-fi, first understand how orchestras are seated.
The bass is on the right (as the listener sees it), the mid-range in the middle, and the treble on the left. All the loud noise is on the right, and all the delicate sounds are at the top or on the left. Orchestral instruments are also loud<;, which is why a classical solo violinist can fill the Albert Hall without an amplifier. A full-strength orchestra at high volume can be over 100 dB. And nobody else gets heard when the brass section lets loose.
A lot of orchestral pieces have passages where a theme or phrase is passed from one group of instruments to another with slight variations: from flutes to clarinets to oboes to violins to bassons. A lot of those groups are between the middle and the left and half-way up the soundstage.
As I write there's a particularly soulful bit of Bruckner going on. It's all in the darker tones: middle C and lower: violas, cellos, oboe, clarinets. All in the middle and right.
If the composer has the orchestra playing a chord around middle C across the instrumental groups, the result will be a splotch across the soundstage. Because the instruments are literally positioned across the soundstage.
There are maybe two or three orchestras in the world, or maybe all of history, with string sections that change notes within a millisecond of each other, and all hit the exact same position on their (fretless) fingerboards. Seriously. Same with the wind players: it might be the same horn, but there will be tiny differences in the moment they start playing and in their breathing. The orchestral sound has smear built right into it. That's why it's such a relief when just one or two instruments play a soprano phrase: it sounds precise.
And this is before we even consider the difference between the way smaller ensembles are recorded - with one mic per instrument and other sound isolating methods - and the way orchestras are recorded with Decca trees and two other mics each side high up to add width.
If you are used to Nils Frahm, John Digweed or even Corelli and Bach, and then listen to even the best recording of Bruckner or Schumann, you're going to think something just went wrong with your hi-fi.
Nope. That's what orchestras sound like. All that gear that picks apart every bit of the sound and separates it from the others? Not going to work on the London Symphony Orchestra at full blast in Wagner. Many of the hi-fi reviewers are into rock, indie, jazz, electronica and perhaps some contemporary composed music: that stuff is well-treated by the kit they review. Heck, my mid-range system sounds fabulous when fed Nils Frahm, Chico Hamilton or John Jenkins. Not so sharp with even a modern recording of Dvorak or Bruckner, though much better now I have the speakers well-positioned, but I can't un-pick the clarinets from the oboes.
A lot of orchestral pieces have passages where a theme or phrase is passed from one group of instruments to another with slight variations: from flutes to clarinets to oboes to violins to bassons. A lot of those groups are between the middle and the left and half-way up the soundstage.
As I write there's a particularly soulful bit of Bruckner going on. It's all in the darker tones: middle C and lower: violas, cellos, oboe, clarinets. All in the middle and right.
If the composer has the orchestra playing a chord around middle C across the instrumental groups, the result will be a splotch across the soundstage. Because the instruments are literally positioned across the soundstage.
There are maybe two or three orchestras in the world, or maybe all of history, with string sections that change notes within a millisecond of each other, and all hit the exact same position on their (fretless) fingerboards. Seriously. Same with the wind players: it might be the same horn, but there will be tiny differences in the moment they start playing and in their breathing. The orchestral sound has smear built right into it. That's why it's such a relief when just one or two instruments play a soprano phrase: it sounds precise.
And this is before we even consider the difference between the way smaller ensembles are recorded - with one mic per instrument and other sound isolating methods - and the way orchestras are recorded with Decca trees and two other mics each side high up to add width.
If you are used to Nils Frahm, John Digweed or even Corelli and Bach, and then listen to even the best recording of Bruckner or Schumann, you're going to think something just went wrong with your hi-fi.
Nope. That's what orchestras sound like. All that gear that picks apart every bit of the sound and separates it from the others? Not going to work on the London Symphony Orchestra at full blast in Wagner. Many of the hi-fi reviewers are into rock, indie, jazz, electronica and perhaps some contemporary composed music: that stuff is well-treated by the kit they review. Heck, my mid-range system sounds fabulous when fed Nils Frahm, Chico Hamilton or John Jenkins. Not so sharp with even a modern recording of Dvorak or Bruckner, though much better now I have the speakers well-positioned, but I can't un-pick the clarinets from the oboes.
Monday 16 November 2020
Photographs I'm Printing (32)
(Olympus OM-10)
Because what else would you have in the middle of a lake in the middle of Helsinki? Every capital city lake should have a broken-up boat there.
Thursday 12 November 2020
John Rawls and Really Existing Distributive Justice
Recently, someone called Zeke Emanuel, who is a "Coronavirus Advisor" to the man who might be President of the USA, said that the Pfizer vaccine should be handed out to poor countries first. It is a problem of distributive justice, he said.
If you ever thought that philosophers were all harmless scribblers, then think again. One of them turned out not to be, and it wasn't Nietzsche. It was a boring political philosopher at Harvard called John Rawls.
Ever wondered where all those Social Justice Warriors and their ideology came from? The money may come from all sorts of sources that scuttle away at the approach of investigative sunlight, but the idea comes from John Rawls.
In 1971 he published A Theory of Justice . I was a philosophy student at the time, and I bought a copy. I started to read it, and soon ran out of energy wading upstream against the awful syntax and the endless digressions and discussion of counter-arguments I wasn't even interested in. Even without getting too far in, I had the feeling that Rawls was pulling a fast one. In fact I was sure of it.
Justice is the application and enforcement of the laws. It can be done well or badly. Amongst the ways it can be done well is that it is `blind': it treats everyone the same.
If that sounds like America today, that's because America for the last forty years has been the world's experiment in really existing distributive justice. Just as Russia was for really existing socialism. An idea that can be hi-jacked so easily by apparatchiks and political grifters is a bad idea.
And what does one say to someone who takes the taxpayers' money for his salary, and then tells those taxpayer they have to wait in line for a vaccine so they can pay for the rest of the world to get it first?
Voila, monsieur, la madame Guillotine perhaps?
If you ever thought that philosophers were all harmless scribblers, then think again. One of them turned out not to be, and it wasn't Nietzsche. It was a boring political philosopher at Harvard called John Rawls.
Ever wondered where all those Social Justice Warriors and their ideology came from? The money may come from all sorts of sources that scuttle away at the approach of investigative sunlight, but the idea comes from John Rawls.
In 1971 he published A Theory of Justice . I was a philosophy student at the time, and I bought a copy. I started to read it, and soon ran out of energy wading upstream against the awful syntax and the endless digressions and discussion of counter-arguments I wasn't even interested in. Even without getting too far in, I had the feeling that Rawls was pulling a fast one. In fact I was sure of it.
Justice is the application and enforcement of the laws. It can be done well or badly. Amongst the ways it can be done well is that it is `blind': it treats everyone the same.
That has now become controversial: mere `blindness' to the individual is not enough. Now we have to take into account their exact degree of victim status. Race blindness is racism. Gender blindness is sexism. Anything that does not allow the victims compensatory privilege is oppression.
For all that, you can thank John Rawls.
In his 1971 book, Rawls was pushing a particular conception of justice - he called it Justice as fairness. Rawls' idea of fairness was that a society is fair if it was arranged in such a way that the least-advantaged were better off than they would be under any other arrangement. Which is not what you and I mean at all. Justice for Rawls is not something procedural about the law, but about the distribution of the resources of an economy and society.
Rawls claimed that this was a conclusion we would reach if we were making the rules of justice from scratch, but without knowing what position we held in society, if we were rich or poor, or even if we had marketable skills. If we treat this as a test - would you approve of that law if you were poor? - it has a use, but as the moral equivalent of Cartesian doubt, it just won't work. And he never explained why rules made by a bunch of people with serious psychoses (they do not even know if they are able-bodied, intelligent, have social skills, friends, children, jobs; they know how society and the economy work but not how they got that knowledge; the list of impossibilities goes on a while) should be superior to those made by people who know who they are, and also know they are lucky to be so fortunate.
The idea of distributive justice (aka 'from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs') sounds attractive. But the flaw is built right into the idea. For people to be `disadvantaged', there has to be a norm, which is also the norm for being `advantaged'. If the reason for the disadvantage cannot be overcome with hard work, social skills, education or a trade, if it is held to be structural or innate, then it is insurmountable, and that justifies a massive State bureaucracy dispensing welfare and administering hiring quotas, positive discrimination, and unrestricted immigration (because distributive justice knows no national boundaries).
For all that, you can thank John Rawls.
In his 1971 book, Rawls was pushing a particular conception of justice - he called it Justice as fairness. Rawls' idea of fairness was that a society is fair if it was arranged in such a way that the least-advantaged were better off than they would be under any other arrangement. Which is not what you and I mean at all. Justice for Rawls is not something procedural about the law, but about the distribution of the resources of an economy and society.
Rawls claimed that this was a conclusion we would reach if we were making the rules of justice from scratch, but without knowing what position we held in society, if we were rich or poor, or even if we had marketable skills. If we treat this as a test - would you approve of that law if you were poor? - it has a use, but as the moral equivalent of Cartesian doubt, it just won't work. And he never explained why rules made by a bunch of people with serious psychoses (they do not even know if they are able-bodied, intelligent, have social skills, friends, children, jobs; they know how society and the economy work but not how they got that knowledge; the list of impossibilities goes on a while) should be superior to those made by people who know who they are, and also know they are lucky to be so fortunate.
The idea of distributive justice (aka 'from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs') sounds attractive. But the flaw is built right into the idea. For people to be `disadvantaged', there has to be a norm, which is also the norm for being `advantaged'. If the reason for the disadvantage cannot be overcome with hard work, social skills, education or a trade, if it is held to be structural or innate, then it is insurmountable, and that justifies a massive State bureaucracy dispensing welfare and administering hiring quotas, positive discrimination, and unrestricted immigration (because distributive justice knows no national boundaries).
If that sounds like America today, that's because America for the last forty years has been the world's experiment in really existing distributive justice. Just as Russia was for really existing socialism. An idea that can be hi-jacked so easily by apparatchiks and political grifters is a bad idea.
And what does one say to someone who takes the taxpayers' money for his salary, and then tells those taxpayer they have to wait in line for a vaccine so they can pay for the rest of the world to get it first?
Voila, monsieur, la madame Guillotine perhaps?
Monday 9 November 2020
Photographs I'm Printing (31)
(Olympus OM-10)
I may have posted this before. Definitely a wide-angle lens, possibly 23mm. Thanks to Sonera for sending me over there a few times. Sonera doesn't exist now, the Swedes took it over a long time ago.
Monday 2 November 2020
Photographs I'm Printing (30)
(Olympus OM-10)
Obligatory black-and-white of bottles on a kitchen table. Everyone has to do these, just to prove they can.
Monday 26 October 2020
Photographs I'm Printing (29)
(Olympus OM-10)
I took one of my girlfriends to New York - way back in the day. We went to an exhibition at PS1, which was in Brooklyn. The contrast between Manhattan and Brooklyn at the time was stark: PS1 could have been on a small town in a western. The girlfriend wasn't sure she liked the vibe and we scuttled back over the river. Good art though.
Monday 19 October 2020
Thursday 15 October 2020
I went up to London last Friday during the day. I obeyed all the rules. I caught a cold.
Notice how the health policy discussion has changed? Nobody now even makes a gesture to the idea that the Virus is serious or life-threatening. Sometime in the last month or so, everyone accepted that it was the flu, unless you were unlucky, but then you can get unlucky with the flu as well.
Nobody thinks there is any `science’ behind lockdowns, social distancing and masks. Equally, most people accept that crowds, indoors, and / or poor ventilation encourage infection. Turns out that 75% of all infections happen in family homes, hospitals and homes for the elderly. Or halls of residence, which combine crowds and lack of decent air-conditioning.
We have accepted that there are four of them, locked in a folie a quatre, making stuff up as they go along. Doubling-down on actions that don’t work is the first sign of desperation. But then, thinking that you can legislate and penalise your way out of a public health event is the first sign of political madness. It turns out that the people in SAGE have lost the plot as well.
It should be obvious that all a lockdown does is temporarily halt the spread of any virus, unless you can lock everyone down, seal the borders and hold on until the last virus cell dies. Then you can't let anyone or anything in from anywhere else in the world without decontaminating it and them. Virus gonna virus. The only people who don't know this are SAGE and a bunch of professors whom I would not hire as a junior analyst.
I went up to London last Friday during the day. I obeyed all the rules. I caught a cold. Not the Virus. A cold. I don't need to say any more.
If there were dead bodies in the streets, the sounds of ambulance sirens throughout the day, hearses daily on every street, if our work-mates were falling before our eyes... there would be no need to make any rules. Those of us who could carry on with our laptop jobs would, and the rest could choose between death by bankruptcy or the Virus. It’s exactly because the Virus was not killing everyone in its path that Governments could do a ‘national lockdown with more holes in it for essential services than a sieve’ that kept far more of the economy going than anyone had a right to expect.
In other words, the politicians can only **** around like this because the Virus is not that serious. And that's what we all know in the back of our minds.
Nobody thinks there is any `science’ behind lockdowns, social distancing and masks. Equally, most people accept that crowds, indoors, and / or poor ventilation encourage infection. Turns out that 75% of all infections happen in family homes, hospitals and homes for the elderly. Or halls of residence, which combine crowds and lack of decent air-conditioning.
We have accepted that there are four of them, locked in a folie a quatre, making stuff up as they go along. Doubling-down on actions that don’t work is the first sign of desperation. But then, thinking that you can legislate and penalise your way out of a public health event is the first sign of political madness. It turns out that the people in SAGE have lost the plot as well.
It should be obvious that all a lockdown does is temporarily halt the spread of any virus, unless you can lock everyone down, seal the borders and hold on until the last virus cell dies. Then you can't let anyone or anything in from anywhere else in the world without decontaminating it and them. Virus gonna virus. The only people who don't know this are SAGE and a bunch of professors whom I would not hire as a junior analyst.
I went up to London last Friday during the day. I obeyed all the rules. I caught a cold. Not the Virus. A cold. I don't need to say any more.
If there were dead bodies in the streets, the sounds of ambulance sirens throughout the day, hearses daily on every street, if our work-mates were falling before our eyes... there would be no need to make any rules. Those of us who could carry on with our laptop jobs would, and the rest could choose between death by bankruptcy or the Virus. It’s exactly because the Virus was not killing everyone in its path that Governments could do a ‘national lockdown with more holes in it for essential services than a sieve’ that kept far more of the economy going than anyone had a right to expect.
In other words, the politicians can only **** around like this because the Virus is not that serious. And that's what we all know in the back of our minds.
Monday 12 October 2020
Thursday 8 October 2020
Loudspeaker Happiness and Soundstage - At Last
What, you thought I'd given up with futzing about with the speakers? When we last left, I had the balance turned over to the left as I faced the speakers. This stopped the feeling that the music was coming from somewhere around the back right corner of the room.
But having the balance wound over is not natural. So I went on reading hi-fi sites of dubious quality, until I ran across one run by an actual sound engineer who wrote like he had studied physics, and he said that my speakers needed to be at least 5cm from the wall but no more than a metre, as there was a dead zone between one and three metres from the back wall. Aha! So I'm okay with that.
Another said that my speakers needed to be at least three feet from the side walls. Fumbles for tape measure in toolbox. One was three foot from the wall, but the other was only 18 inches. Could that make a difference? I moved it.
Whoa! Suddenly the musicians were in the space between the speakers, not wandering down my right-hand wall. And I could return the balance to neutral, as God intended it should be.
The standard wisdom on placement has you the listener between the speakers as three points in an equilateral triangle. I can't do that in my room. But yet another article said, well, shelf speakers should be about 4 feet apart, but standmounts should be at least 8 feet apart. And don't forget a little bit of toe-in.
Grabs tape measure. Nearly six feet apart. Okay, what do I have to lose except my sanity? So I shuffled the speakers along the shelves by moving some books, tweaked a bit of toe-in, sat down and...
Oh yeah rock and roll!
You know when the reviewers talk about a tight, well-defined and clear soundstage and that thing where if everything is set up right, the speakers should feel as if they are not actually conveying sound?
It's all true.
I was streaming an Evelyn Glennie CD the other night, and I swear I could see every single shiny thing she was hitting, between the speakers. Mind you, that recording was probably mic'ed to within an inch of its life.
The music now stays between the speakers even if I'm concentrating on something else - though if there's a lot of sustained chords around Treble C, it does drift to the right.
I have no idea why I put up with that awful splashy, diffused sound I had before. Perhaps because I wasn't really listening, or perhaps I thought it was the gear, or perhaps I thought I would have to put baffles around the room. I did not believe that speaker placement could make such a huge difference.
But it does, and if you don't believe me, try it.
But having the balance wound over is not natural. So I went on reading hi-fi sites of dubious quality, until I ran across one run by an actual sound engineer who wrote like he had studied physics, and he said that my speakers needed to be at least 5cm from the wall but no more than a metre, as there was a dead zone between one and three metres from the back wall. Aha! So I'm okay with that.
Another said that my speakers needed to be at least three feet from the side walls. Fumbles for tape measure in toolbox. One was three foot from the wall, but the other was only 18 inches. Could that make a difference? I moved it.
Whoa! Suddenly the musicians were in the space between the speakers, not wandering down my right-hand wall. And I could return the balance to neutral, as God intended it should be.
The standard wisdom on placement has you the listener between the speakers as three points in an equilateral triangle. I can't do that in my room. But yet another article said, well, shelf speakers should be about 4 feet apart, but standmounts should be at least 8 feet apart. And don't forget a little bit of toe-in.
Grabs tape measure. Nearly six feet apart. Okay, what do I have to lose except my sanity? So I shuffled the speakers along the shelves by moving some books, tweaked a bit of toe-in, sat down and...
Oh yeah rock and roll!
You know when the reviewers talk about a tight, well-defined and clear soundstage and that thing where if everything is set up right, the speakers should feel as if they are not actually conveying sound?
It's all true.
I was streaming an Evelyn Glennie CD the other night, and I swear I could see every single shiny thing she was hitting, between the speakers. Mind you, that recording was probably mic'ed to within an inch of its life.
The music now stays between the speakers even if I'm concentrating on something else - though if there's a lot of sustained chords around Treble C, it does drift to the right.
I have no idea why I put up with that awful splashy, diffused sound I had before. Perhaps because I wasn't really listening, or perhaps I thought it was the gear, or perhaps I thought I would have to put baffles around the room. I did not believe that speaker placement could make such a huge difference.
But it does, and if you don't believe me, try it.
Monday 5 October 2020
Photographs I'm Printing (26)
(old second-hand camera I don't think I have anymore)
I used to work for the company that ran the Riverbuses - now Thames Clippers - back in the day. So I was around the river Thames a lot.
Thursday 1 October 2020
The Coof? Nobody's Listening Anymore
A former colleague of mine sent a message with a photo of Boris making his speech about how he fought off those who would lock us all down again, and how we needed to... blah blah blah
Under the photograph they wrote
"Is anyone still listening?"
Not me, I replied.
We've all stopped listening.
The other day in the queue for the self-serve checkouts, the big guy in the black mask behind me said "I can't wait for this to be over". I nodded.
Most of us know this has gone on too long and the measures are not justified by the facts. Some people are still scared, but some people will always be scared of something.
The handful of Ministers who used 100 different Acts of Parliament to pass 224 different regulations without a single vote are trapped in their own hysteria.
And we the people are twiddling our thumbs, waiting for them to catch up, like they were the huffing, puffing stragglers on a country walk.
Under the photograph they wrote
"Is anyone still listening?"
Not me, I replied.
We've all stopped listening.
The other day in the queue for the self-serve checkouts, the big guy in the black mask behind me said "I can't wait for this to be over". I nodded.
Most of us know this has gone on too long and the measures are not justified by the facts. Some people are still scared, but some people will always be scared of something.
The handful of Ministers who used 100 different Acts of Parliament to pass 224 different regulations without a single vote are trapped in their own hysteria.
And we the people are twiddling our thumbs, waiting for them to catch up, like they were the huffing, puffing stragglers on a country walk.
Monday 28 September 2020
Photographs I'm Printing (25)
(Camera unknown)
Somewhere in Florence. What other country would have so many scooters in one place?
Thursday 24 September 2020
Never Attribute to Conspiracy What You Can Assign to Stupidity, Ambition, or Cowardice
The problem is that the alternative narratives are mostly conspiracy theories, and in some cases pretty batty ones. Now I like a good conspiracy theory, and a good one is plausible.
One of my favourites is 'bureaucratic cover-up'. If you have ever worked in a bureaucracy, you will know that there is no need for anyone to arrange a cover-up of a cock-up. The people involved do it as automatically as they would arrange a working group to to delay a decision.
Combine the cock-up theory of history with the need of politicians and other members of the Establishment to maintain their position and privileges (and that's another motive no-one even needs to discuss), and you have a powerful explanatory tool.
The only reason we were in the shameful position of having a Prime Minister threatening his electorate with the Army is because of a half-robust broadband internet network in the towns and the wide availability of reasonably capable laptops. In 2000, there would have been no thought of sending people home to work, nor, I suspect would there have been in 2010.
Almost the entire Covid farce follows from the availability of high-speed broadband and laptops.
The rest follows from the fact that while politicians always were a bunch of morally-flawed people with latent personality disorders, once upon a time, even as recently as the 1970's, some of them were capable people with moral flaws and latent personality disorders. Now none of them are capable. Capable people can make much more money in other jobs, without needing to stain themselves with politics. Or university teaching. Or working in local or national government. There are no Civil Servants as capable as Sir Humphrey, though many may be as smug.
Have the sheer nerve to make those judgements out loud, and the need for elaborate conspiracy disappears. A converse of Asimov's Rule might be: any sufficiently stupid group action or decision is indistinguishable from a conspiracy.
If you stop thinking that the world is being run by smart people with stable personalities, and malign ambitions and flawed morals, then you don't need a conspiracy. Never attribute to conspiracy what you can assign to stupidity, ambition, or cowardice.
Whitty and Vallance don't say the things they say because they are conspiring to create Project Fear. Whitty's experience is with contagious diseases in Africa, which will lead him to think of zebras when he hears the sound of hooves, and Vallance comes from the pharmaceutical industry and wants a silver-bullet cure for everything. The man who caused the panic, Neil Ferguson at Imperial College, has never seen a virus he didn't think that culling thousands wouldn't stop. All three of them are willing patsies.
The truth is that the UK Cabinet could not stand the pressure from the press, and the peer-pressure from other governments who had already locked down. Weak-ass bitches.
It is fairly scary to think you live in a world run by dumb, often malicious, people with personality disorders. Even though the current situation has made it fairly clear that many of the Democrat politicians and elected officials in the USA are all of those things.
Over here, Nicola Sturgeon needs some quality time with a psychiatrist, Boris Johnson needs a while with a therapist, and Matt Hancock needs to grow the **** up? None of them understand that their job is not to tell us what to do. Their job is to oversee the large companies, and the institutions and organisations of the State, and stop them from cheating and swindling us. Oh and there's something about secure borders and putting the interests of the UK electorate before any other country's electorate. But I'm just old-fashioned, I guess.
One of my favourites is 'bureaucratic cover-up'. If you have ever worked in a bureaucracy, you will know that there is no need for anyone to arrange a cover-up of a cock-up. The people involved do it as automatically as they would arrange a working group to to delay a decision.
Combine the cock-up theory of history with the need of politicians and other members of the Establishment to maintain their position and privileges (and that's another motive no-one even needs to discuss), and you have a powerful explanatory tool.
The only reason we were in the shameful position of having a Prime Minister threatening his electorate with the Army is because of a half-robust broadband internet network in the towns and the wide availability of reasonably capable laptops. In 2000, there would have been no thought of sending people home to work, nor, I suspect would there have been in 2010.
Almost the entire Covid farce follows from the availability of high-speed broadband and laptops.
The rest follows from the fact that while politicians always were a bunch of morally-flawed people with latent personality disorders, once upon a time, even as recently as the 1970's, some of them were capable people with moral flaws and latent personality disorders. Now none of them are capable. Capable people can make much more money in other jobs, without needing to stain themselves with politics. Or university teaching. Or working in local or national government. There are no Civil Servants as capable as Sir Humphrey, though many may be as smug.
Have the sheer nerve to make those judgements out loud, and the need for elaborate conspiracy disappears. A converse of Asimov's Rule might be: any sufficiently stupid group action or decision is indistinguishable from a conspiracy.
If you stop thinking that the world is being run by smart people with stable personalities, and malign ambitions and flawed morals, then you don't need a conspiracy. Never attribute to conspiracy what you can assign to stupidity, ambition, or cowardice.
Whitty and Vallance don't say the things they say because they are conspiring to create Project Fear. Whitty's experience is with contagious diseases in Africa, which will lead him to think of zebras when he hears the sound of hooves, and Vallance comes from the pharmaceutical industry and wants a silver-bullet cure for everything. The man who caused the panic, Neil Ferguson at Imperial College, has never seen a virus he didn't think that culling thousands wouldn't stop. All three of them are willing patsies.
The truth is that the UK Cabinet could not stand the pressure from the press, and the peer-pressure from other governments who had already locked down. Weak-ass bitches.
It is fairly scary to think you live in a world run by dumb, often malicious, people with personality disorders. Even though the current situation has made it fairly clear that many of the Democrat politicians and elected officials in the USA are all of those things.
Over here, Nicola Sturgeon needs some quality time with a psychiatrist, Boris Johnson needs a while with a therapist, and Matt Hancock needs to grow the **** up? None of them understand that their job is not to tell us what to do. Their job is to oversee the large companies, and the institutions and organisations of the State, and stop them from cheating and swindling us. Oh and there's something about secure borders and putting the interests of the UK electorate before any other country's electorate. But I'm just old-fashioned, I guess.
Monday 21 September 2020
Photographs I'm Printing (24)
(Olympus OM10 ?)
Sometime when I was working in Covent Garden for an obscure Finnish telco. London snow is wonderful while it is falling for the first time.
Monday 14 September 2020
Thursday 10 September 2020
The Consumer Economy Has Recovered...
I spent a while at work developing some MI to show how the consumer is doing. After a lot of experiment, I wound up with:
Personal loans taken split by credit risk
Personal loans taken split by credit risk
Savings deposits and withdrawals <£1,000
Month-end current account balances
Credit transactions (income, basically) by category in current accounts
Spending by category through current accounts and credit cards
All compared to the same month in 2019. The first three run as a time series. The graph shows if people are doing more or less of whatever it is.
Why these metrics?
Personal loans are a significant decision and commitment. You're not going to take one if you're feeling insecure about your future. What I found was that the best-risk customers were borrowing as much as they were a year ago, but the worse-risk customers were borrowing less. A lot less. My estimate is that 40% of the population don't feel secure.
Savings deposits or withdrawals tell us about how much cash people have spare or need. Withdrawals fell a lot in the lockdown, but are returning to last year's levels. Deposits are up slightly: the longer-distance London commuters are saving a lot, but there aren't that many of them, compared to the size of the workforce, most of whom do not have as much to save.
Current account balances at month-end tell you if people have enough money to get by. Overdrafts are down on last year, credit balances are up slightly.
Now sit down.
Income and spending are at the same levels as they were last year.
I told you to sit down.
Yes, 1.2m people have lost their jobs and are claiming benefit. My data shows me the share I expect to see. Yes, in July around 4m people were getting 80% of their salary on furlough. These things are hitting the lower-paid more. The net effect of them losing income, but getting benefits, and of pay rises on last year for the remaining 80% of the working population still in full-time employment, is about zero.
Spending is at about the same level. How can that be when The Ledbury has closed and no-one can fly anywhere? Those activities have a high profile - at least for elite London-based journalists - but are a very small proportion of the economy - and again, mostly employ lower-paid workers. The bulk of most people's spending is non-discretionary: food, water, gas, electric, council tax, landline, mobile, insurance, petrol, road tax and the rest. Of discretionary spending, people have been doing DIY, buying furniture, or upgrading TV's, signing up for streaming services and spending more in supermarkets. Less spending in high street shops, more via mail order. Winners and losers in a zero-sum game.
That recovery everyone thinks is going to happen?
It happened. This is it. Same money, different consumption. That's how consumerism rolls.
What this tells us is that, faced with disruptive nonsense, people will attempt to lead the best lives they can within the restrictions. That's why everyone who was working in over-crowded hot-desk offices went home in a flash. Or why people on furlough did DIY or really did learn to play the piano.
And local high streets, and smaller commuter towns, with cafes and family restaurants are doing well.
All compared to the same month in 2019. The first three run as a time series. The graph shows if people are doing more or less of whatever it is.
Why these metrics?
Personal loans are a significant decision and commitment. You're not going to take one if you're feeling insecure about your future. What I found was that the best-risk customers were borrowing as much as they were a year ago, but the worse-risk customers were borrowing less. A lot less. My estimate is that 40% of the population don't feel secure.
Savings deposits or withdrawals tell us about how much cash people have spare or need. Withdrawals fell a lot in the lockdown, but are returning to last year's levels. Deposits are up slightly: the longer-distance London commuters are saving a lot, but there aren't that many of them, compared to the size of the workforce, most of whom do not have as much to save.
Current account balances at month-end tell you if people have enough money to get by. Overdrafts are down on last year, credit balances are up slightly.
Now sit down.
Income and spending are at the same levels as they were last year.
I told you to sit down.
Yes, 1.2m people have lost their jobs and are claiming benefit. My data shows me the share I expect to see. Yes, in July around 4m people were getting 80% of their salary on furlough. These things are hitting the lower-paid more. The net effect of them losing income, but getting benefits, and of pay rises on last year for the remaining 80% of the working population still in full-time employment, is about zero.
Spending is at about the same level. How can that be when The Ledbury has closed and no-one can fly anywhere? Those activities have a high profile - at least for elite London-based journalists - but are a very small proportion of the economy - and again, mostly employ lower-paid workers. The bulk of most people's spending is non-discretionary: food, water, gas, electric, council tax, landline, mobile, insurance, petrol, road tax and the rest. Of discretionary spending, people have been doing DIY, buying furniture, or upgrading TV's, signing up for streaming services and spending more in supermarkets. Less spending in high street shops, more via mail order. Winners and losers in a zero-sum game.
That recovery everyone thinks is going to happen?
It happened. This is it. Same money, different consumption. That's how consumerism rolls.
What this tells us is that, faced with disruptive nonsense, people will attempt to lead the best lives they can within the restrictions. That's why everyone who was working in over-crowded hot-desk offices went home in a flash. Or why people on furlough did DIY or really did learn to play the piano.
And local high streets, and smaller commuter towns, with cafes and family restaurants are doing well.
Monday 7 September 2020
Thursday 3 September 2020
Making My Hi-Fi Sound Better
Before you read this, let me tell you a story about how a simple mod made the picture on my TV so much better. It made the colours brighter, all the shapes become more defined, a haziness vanished from the screen, the blacks get blacker and the contrast became more pronounced. The experience of watching was more absorbing, thrilling and involving.
Spoken like a true hi-fi reviewer. What's the mod?
I drew the curtains. Which in anyone's house will make all those things happen, if the TV screen is in a room with a window.
So not snake-oil then.
My speakers used to be above my height on bookshelves, about eight feet apart, and about six inches from the wall. Nothing around them. The sound was good, but could get overwhelming quickly on turning up the volume, and orchestral symphonies were often a bit of a mush. Also, sitting on the couch about ten feet away and half-way between the speakers, the sound would seem to come predominantly from the right-hand speaker, and on some recordings, more from a triangle between the speaker and the right-hand side wall (!), than from between the speakers. The left speaker never felt like it was involved in producing sound: it was just there. I would notice this especially after I had been writing for a while.
Then the venerable Paul McGowan of PS Audio said something that had me leaping off my sofa. If you really are going to put your speakers on a bookshelf, so they are near the back wall, put books around them to act as baffles.
Oh. Because I thought I shouldn't do that. But if Paul McGowan says so, and John Darko quotes him with respect, maybe I should give it a try. What can I lose?
So I put books round my speakers, and, um, well, the sound changed. It felt less harsh in the treble and more contained. Less bounce off the back wall I guess. But the music was still veering to the right.
Then I saw a video by Hans Beekhuysen in which he said that the speakers should be at ear height. So I stared at the shelves again and figured out how to do that. And I moved the speakers in so they had books on either side of them. Those changes made another difference. That mythical stereo sound stage between the speakers would appear now and again, only to wander away when I started concentrating. The sound was more contained and much less splashy, since the speakers were now surrounded by books to the side and shelves above them, cutting down a lot of leakage. I could play the music louder without getting confusion and harshness.
It's a small room, by the way. And there are French windows behind the couch, so the sound can bounce straight back off the glass. Yes, I know. One step at a time.
Saturday morning, I'm still noticing the sound veering to the right. By now a number of thoughts are occurring to me:
Maybe a lot of lower-cost orchestral recordings were not made with an ear to the stereo sound stage? (1)
Maybe it's my hearing? Who said my ears worked equally? (2)
Maybe the amplifier favours the right channel? (3)
Maybe working takes away the brain-cycles needed to process sound into a stereo picture? (4)
Maybe it's time to abandon Source Direct and use the balance and tone controls like a normal person? (5)
The tone controls on the Marantz PM6003 don't make a lot of difference: the bass doesn't suddenly boom, or the treble hiss, if you turn either up high. It's more like some of the weight goes out of the sound when turning that bass down, and some of the edge goes off the treble when turning that down. I skewed the balance WAY OVER TO THE LEFT.
At last. The sound stays where it should be, in the middle. It now feels like the left speaker is doing something.
Except, I then discovered from another Paul McGowan video, that the sound should not feel as if it is coming from the speakers. It should seem to be coming from somewhere in the middle, which is what the `sound stage' idea is all about. The speakers should be there, but the music should be elsewhere.
So I turned the balance back to neutral and sat in a chair to make an equilateral triangle with the speakers, shut my eyes and listened to the music. The orchestra was in the middle. The sound was coming from between the speakers, rather than from the speakers. As it should be.
But the moment I started working, the orchestra shuffled over to the right while I was looking at the screen. I looked up: there they were, and the right speaker was in the middle of the orchestra. Which is actually what I had been experiencing.
It's definitely me. I'd say it makes sense. The sound comes from the speakers and the brain translates it into music and makes it seem to be coming from the space between the speakers. That's a reasonable amount of processing: think about how hard you have to concentrate to hear where a sound is coming from when you have no visual cues. So when I take a whole load of processing capacity to write some of the things I do, it's maybe not surprising that my audio processing gets a little sloppy.
Hefting the balance to the left cancels out that `processing drift'. If I'm listening in full attention mode, which I would do more on headphones, then I would put the balance back to neutral.
Maybe a lot of the hi-fi stuff about speaker placement and room set-up is the same as drawing the curtains. Maybe the sound from the right speaker is bouncing off the table in front of it? Who knows? That's what the balance control is for. It works. Who cares if it's not the purest hi-fi practice? I have a decent stereo sound image and a tighter sound that I can crank up the volume on without it turning into mush.
Which is what I want.
(1) I think that is definitely true. I'm not convinced that sound design in classical music is as good as in pop/rock/dance, or even if they've heard of it. After all, if you're sitting at the back of the Festival Hall, you're really getting mono sound. In posh churches, the choir doesn't even face the audience, but sings across the aisle to each other.
(2) When I use headphones or in-ears, I don't notice a skew to the right. Just a wonderful all-over stereo sound-stage. So I think my ears are okay.
(3) You would think they tested for that.
(4) Possible, if not actually plausible.
(5) Because I fell for the whole real-audiophiles-use-Source-Direct thing. Which is a conceit that assumes all your kit is electrically and sonically transparent. And anyway, who says the source CD / music file was mixed properly? DJ's adjust the EQ to suit the mood (or at least they say they do). Using Source Direct is like trusting the chef to add the right amount of salt and seasoning. The chefs who can be trusted to do that make very expensive food. Eating what I can afford, I'll taste-and-add, thank you.
Spoken like a true hi-fi reviewer. What's the mod?
I drew the curtains. Which in anyone's house will make all those things happen, if the TV screen is in a room with a window.
So not snake-oil then.
My speakers used to be above my height on bookshelves, about eight feet apart, and about six inches from the wall. Nothing around them. The sound was good, but could get overwhelming quickly on turning up the volume, and orchestral symphonies were often a bit of a mush. Also, sitting on the couch about ten feet away and half-way between the speakers, the sound would seem to come predominantly from the right-hand speaker, and on some recordings, more from a triangle between the speaker and the right-hand side wall (!), than from between the speakers. The left speaker never felt like it was involved in producing sound: it was just there. I would notice this especially after I had been writing for a while.
Then the venerable Paul McGowan of PS Audio said something that had me leaping off my sofa. If you really are going to put your speakers on a bookshelf, so they are near the back wall, put books around them to act as baffles.
Oh. Because I thought I shouldn't do that. But if Paul McGowan says so, and John Darko quotes him with respect, maybe I should give it a try. What can I lose?
So I put books round my speakers, and, um, well, the sound changed. It felt less harsh in the treble and more contained. Less bounce off the back wall I guess. But the music was still veering to the right.
Then I saw a video by Hans Beekhuysen in which he said that the speakers should be at ear height. So I stared at the shelves again and figured out how to do that. And I moved the speakers in so they had books on either side of them. Those changes made another difference. That mythical stereo sound stage between the speakers would appear now and again, only to wander away when I started concentrating. The sound was more contained and much less splashy, since the speakers were now surrounded by books to the side and shelves above them, cutting down a lot of leakage. I could play the music louder without getting confusion and harshness.
It's a small room, by the way. And there are French windows behind the couch, so the sound can bounce straight back off the glass. Yes, I know. One step at a time.
Saturday morning, I'm still noticing the sound veering to the right. By now a number of thoughts are occurring to me:
Maybe a lot of lower-cost orchestral recordings were not made with an ear to the stereo sound stage? (1)
Maybe it's my hearing? Who said my ears worked equally? (2)
Maybe the amplifier favours the right channel? (3)
Maybe working takes away the brain-cycles needed to process sound into a stereo picture? (4)
Maybe it's time to abandon Source Direct and use the balance and tone controls like a normal person? (5)
The tone controls on the Marantz PM6003 don't make a lot of difference: the bass doesn't suddenly boom, or the treble hiss, if you turn either up high. It's more like some of the weight goes out of the sound when turning that bass down, and some of the edge goes off the treble when turning that down. I skewed the balance WAY OVER TO THE LEFT.
At last. The sound stays where it should be, in the middle. It now feels like the left speaker is doing something.
Except, I then discovered from another Paul McGowan video, that the sound should not feel as if it is coming from the speakers. It should seem to be coming from somewhere in the middle, which is what the `sound stage' idea is all about. The speakers should be there, but the music should be elsewhere.
So I turned the balance back to neutral and sat in a chair to make an equilateral triangle with the speakers, shut my eyes and listened to the music. The orchestra was in the middle. The sound was coming from between the speakers, rather than from the speakers. As it should be.
But the moment I started working, the orchestra shuffled over to the right while I was looking at the screen. I looked up: there they were, and the right speaker was in the middle of the orchestra. Which is actually what I had been experiencing.
It's definitely me. I'd say it makes sense. The sound comes from the speakers and the brain translates it into music and makes it seem to be coming from the space between the speakers. That's a reasonable amount of processing: think about how hard you have to concentrate to hear where a sound is coming from when you have no visual cues. So when I take a whole load of processing capacity to write some of the things I do, it's maybe not surprising that my audio processing gets a little sloppy.
Hefting the balance to the left cancels out that `processing drift'. If I'm listening in full attention mode, which I would do more on headphones, then I would put the balance back to neutral.
Maybe a lot of the hi-fi stuff about speaker placement and room set-up is the same as drawing the curtains. Maybe the sound from the right speaker is bouncing off the table in front of it? Who knows? That's what the balance control is for. It works. Who cares if it's not the purest hi-fi practice? I have a decent stereo sound image and a tighter sound that I can crank up the volume on without it turning into mush.
Which is what I want.
(1) I think that is definitely true. I'm not convinced that sound design in classical music is as good as in pop/rock/dance, or even if they've heard of it. After all, if you're sitting at the back of the Festival Hall, you're really getting mono sound. In posh churches, the choir doesn't even face the audience, but sings across the aisle to each other.
(2) When I use headphones or in-ears, I don't notice a skew to the right. Just a wonderful all-over stereo sound-stage. So I think my ears are okay.
(3) You would think they tested for that.
(4) Possible, if not actually plausible.
(5) Because I fell for the whole real-audiophiles-use-Source-Direct thing. Which is a conceit that assumes all your kit is electrically and sonically transparent. And anyway, who says the source CD / music file was mixed properly? DJ's adjust the EQ to suit the mood (or at least they say they do). Using Source Direct is like trusting the chef to add the right amount of salt and seasoning. The chefs who can be trusted to do that make very expensive food. Eating what I can afford, I'll taste-and-add, thank you.
Monday 31 August 2020
Thursday 27 August 2020
Why Musicians Aren't Audiophiles (h/t Adam Neely)
Musicians are mostly broke. Let's get this one out there. Audiophile gear costs serious money. When they do get some money...
Musicians spend money on musical instruments, and associated gear. Duh. Performance-grade instruments cost at least ten times as much as the ones your kids might use in school. There's no such thing as a cheap, good electric guitar. Plus these days musicians have to fork out for Macbooks and music software, recording gear, and headphones. Plus running costs: professional guitarists change strings on way more guitars way more often than I do.
Musicians listen for different things. Audiophiles want to hear the squeak of the third violin's chair during a quiet passage. I can understand that. Musicians talk about hearing flat-7-add-4 diminished chords like they can actually hear one in the music as it's playing. (I can hear major vs minor, and a major 7-th. I can hear that a chord has odd notes in it, but I can't tell that it's a Lydian 5th with an augmented 13th. Audiophiles have no idea if those are real chords or not.)
Musicians don't play in audiophile conditions. Small clubs have awful acoustics. The Royal Albert Hall is famed for its echo, and the Royal Festival Hall for an acoustic drier than the Sahara desert. Anyway the musicians are on stage and can't hear themselves. Orchestral musicians are deafened by the brass section. The guys in bands, well, there's a reason they look at each other's playing (and in flamenco, the dancers' moves), because there are a lot of cues from the movements another player makes, and those visuals help fill in the messy audio.
Musicians regard gear as tools. This is the big difference between pros and amateurs. A pro regards their gear as a tool with which to ply their trade, an amateur regards it as a good-in-its-own-right. (This is very noticeable in photography.) Musicians want to hear what other musicians are playing so they can steal ideas. They can do that with a Spotify account and a decent pair of noise-cancelling phones. Musicians want to create certain sounds and effects, at an affordable cost, with gear they can afford to insure to play in public.
Audiophiles draw from a narrower range of sources. Audiophiles play from ripped CDs (a lot), CDs (a little), vinyl (rarely), or stream from Tidal or Quboz - the high-end streaming services. They rarely mention the other services that feature newer artists: Beatport, Soundcloud, Soundclick, and Reverb Nation to name just a few I found on Google. Nor do they mention Naxos for classical music.
(I was inspired to think about this by Adam Neely, who has remarked on a couple of occasions that all the musicians he knows are NOT audiophiles.)
Musicians spend money on musical instruments, and associated gear. Duh. Performance-grade instruments cost at least ten times as much as the ones your kids might use in school. There's no such thing as a cheap, good electric guitar. Plus these days musicians have to fork out for Macbooks and music software, recording gear, and headphones. Plus running costs: professional guitarists change strings on way more guitars way more often than I do.
Musicians listen for different things. Audiophiles want to hear the squeak of the third violin's chair during a quiet passage. I can understand that. Musicians talk about hearing flat-7-add-4 diminished chords like they can actually hear one in the music as it's playing. (I can hear major vs minor, and a major 7-th. I can hear that a chord has odd notes in it, but I can't tell that it's a Lydian 5th with an augmented 13th. Audiophiles have no idea if those are real chords or not.)
Musicians don't play in audiophile conditions. Small clubs have awful acoustics. The Royal Albert Hall is famed for its echo, and the Royal Festival Hall for an acoustic drier than the Sahara desert. Anyway the musicians are on stage and can't hear themselves. Orchestral musicians are deafened by the brass section. The guys in bands, well, there's a reason they look at each other's playing (and in flamenco, the dancers' moves), because there are a lot of cues from the movements another player makes, and those visuals help fill in the messy audio.
Musicians regard gear as tools. This is the big difference between pros and amateurs. A pro regards their gear as a tool with which to ply their trade, an amateur regards it as a good-in-its-own-right. (This is very noticeable in photography.) Musicians want to hear what other musicians are playing so they can steal ideas. They can do that with a Spotify account and a decent pair of noise-cancelling phones. Musicians want to create certain sounds and effects, at an affordable cost, with gear they can afford to insure to play in public.
Audiophiles draw from a narrower range of sources. Audiophiles play from ripped CDs (a lot), CDs (a little), vinyl (rarely), or stream from Tidal or Quboz - the high-end streaming services. They rarely mention the other services that feature newer artists: Beatport, Soundcloud, Soundclick, and Reverb Nation to name just a few I found on Google. Nor do they mention Naxos for classical music.
(I was inspired to think about this by Adam Neely, who has remarked on a couple of occasions that all the musicians he knows are NOT audiophiles.)
Monday 24 August 2020
Photographs I'm Printing (20)
(Panasonic DMC-TZ40)
This is a photographer's photograph. Or perhaps a painter's photograph.
Thursday 20 August 2020
Why Some of Us Are Not Going Back To The Office
If I hear one more TV pundit, You Tube talking head, or blame-dodging politician say that I need to get back to work or get back to the office, I will know that they are actually ignorant twerps.
I have never stopped working. I've been at my laptop and work mobile since being sent home in March.
One reason I'm working at home is...
...the office is locked. I couldn't go back if I wanted to. Ask the Board Member for HR and Property (now that's what I call a conflicting remit) why he's hibernated the building. He keeps talking about new ways or working, which is code for we're going to unload half our estate of office space.
Another reasons I'm not going back to my old office because it's a ****-hole.
For those of you who don't work for FTSE 100 companies, which includes journalists and politicians...
Most large-company offices are open-plan. Always have been in my working life. The department heads had offices of their own, and of course the boss had the corner office, which had two windows. Now the boss is out in the open office along with the rest of us. If (s)he is there at all: most bosses are somewhere else in meetings or networking. In a large company with a national presence, the boss might be in another office in another town. In the old-style open plan offices, every employee had a seat, and maybe even a pedestal draw. Then the cost-cutters moved in.
The latest iteration of open-plan is best described as no-fixed-abode, so that you have no desk of your own. A lot of them assume that a proportion of the people based there will be on holiday, in another office, in a meeting room, working from home or off sick, and so have fewer seats than people. It's called the over-crowding ratio and the office I'm based in has an over-crowding ration of 1.6. It has a handful of small meeting rooms, and a couple of larger ones. Don't even think of having letters or parcels sent to you at such an office, since there is no internal mail and they don't like Amazon deliveries for the staff.
Because almost any working group has people scattered all over the country, everyone in the office spends a lot of time on the phone, and these days, on Microsoft Teams. It was easier to e-mail the person sitting next to you than find a moment they were free to talk to. The noise levels were high, except when some complete stranger sat amongst us to make phone calls, when we all shut up in case they were a stooge. The air-conditioning was barely sufficient, the place smelled of food between about 11:30 and 14:00, I and my neighbour could do an elbow-bump without moving our chairs, and if I pushed my chair back too vigorously, I would hit the chair behind me. Every other person had £259 Bose QC35's over their ears, which is not a good thing. It says the people around you are pointlessly noisy and are wrecking your concentration. The only thing we did in that office was use the telephones, the internet and the heating, in winter. That aside, there was no reason to go in.
In summary: modern offices suck. Big time.
Don't even talk about the commute.
I would gain nothing by going back, lose a lot of money, and lose a chunk of my quality of life.
Even if that was all not true, I still could not go to work in the office. Because the management have closed it in response to rulings handed down by the Government. Because, you know, reasons.
I have never stopped working. I've been at my laptop and work mobile since being sent home in March.
One reason I'm working at home is...
...the office is locked. I couldn't go back if I wanted to. Ask the Board Member for HR and Property (now that's what I call a conflicting remit) why he's hibernated the building. He keeps talking about new ways or working, which is code for we're going to unload half our estate of office space.
Another reasons I'm not going back to my old office because it's a ****-hole.
For those of you who don't work for FTSE 100 companies, which includes journalists and politicians...
Most large-company offices are open-plan. Always have been in my working life. The department heads had offices of their own, and of course the boss had the corner office, which had two windows. Now the boss is out in the open office along with the rest of us. If (s)he is there at all: most bosses are somewhere else in meetings or networking. In a large company with a national presence, the boss might be in another office in another town. In the old-style open plan offices, every employee had a seat, and maybe even a pedestal draw. Then the cost-cutters moved in.
The latest iteration of open-plan is best described as no-fixed-abode, so that you have no desk of your own. A lot of them assume that a proportion of the people based there will be on holiday, in another office, in a meeting room, working from home or off sick, and so have fewer seats than people. It's called the over-crowding ratio and the office I'm based in has an over-crowding ration of 1.6. It has a handful of small meeting rooms, and a couple of larger ones. Don't even think of having letters or parcels sent to you at such an office, since there is no internal mail and they don't like Amazon deliveries for the staff.
Because almost any working group has people scattered all over the country, everyone in the office spends a lot of time on the phone, and these days, on Microsoft Teams. It was easier to e-mail the person sitting next to you than find a moment they were free to talk to. The noise levels were high, except when some complete stranger sat amongst us to make phone calls, when we all shut up in case they were a stooge. The air-conditioning was barely sufficient, the place smelled of food between about 11:30 and 14:00, I and my neighbour could do an elbow-bump without moving our chairs, and if I pushed my chair back too vigorously, I would hit the chair behind me. Every other person had £259 Bose QC35's over their ears, which is not a good thing. It says the people around you are pointlessly noisy and are wrecking your concentration. The only thing we did in that office was use the telephones, the internet and the heating, in winter. That aside, there was no reason to go in.
In summary: modern offices suck. Big time.
Don't even talk about the commute.
I would gain nothing by going back, lose a lot of money, and lose a chunk of my quality of life.
Even if that was all not true, I still could not go to work in the office. Because the management have closed it in response to rulings handed down by the Government. Because, you know, reasons.
Monday 17 August 2020
Thursday 13 August 2020
Covidiots Both: Bonkers Boris and Crazy Chris Whitty
Here I sat recently on one of the hottest nights of this or any other year, and my real problem is a horribly itchy insect bite just below my right ankle. I want to scratch the hell of it, but of course I shouldn't.
(Leaves room)
OK. I just showered it with cold water for about six tracks of Heinrich Biber's Joyful Mysteries. It feels better. When it itches again, I will put my foot in a bowl of cold water.
Covidiocy is like that itch. It won't stop, it distracts me from doing anything else, and if I give way to it, I will wind up worse than before.
How exactly am I affected by Covidiocy?
Out of politeness, I have to wear a bandana when I go shopping or travel on public transport. Ear loops are not stylish and no amount of floral pattern on the mask can distract from that. Those blue not-really-surgical-scraps of plastic and paper are terminally ghastly.
My office has been locked, so I have to work at home, but that means I save a bunch of money not commuting or paying for over-priced sandwiches. The quality of my life improves in so many ways. However, if I pay attendance to my laptop for eight hours plus lunch, I can get to the end of the week and not have done things that would have benefited my life. Just as if I was working in the office. So I've decided to give myself an hour in the morning to do stuff that requires going out: like getting the nearside front wheel trim on my car replaced because it was broken and potentially dangerous. Doing that makes me feel like work is not getting in the way of my life.
(While it's not my choice to work from home, it's my home and work is intruding. When I get a choice, I will or won't set up a dedicated work space and adjust my attitude accordingly.)
So what's the problem?
The problem is that I'm locked in the world with a crazy person. A crazy person who is on record as setting out, in March 2020, to create an atmosphere of fear so that we would stay home. Who chose to call it a `lockdown', which is a term that comes from prison management, so we would think we were prisoners. Who still wants us to stay two metres away from each other and wear masks because we are all diseased. A crazy person who can lock us into our streets and houses on a whim. Who makes up inconsistent rules about what is and is not acceptable behaviour.
For the Regular People, it's like playing a game of Simon Says. They don't need the world to make sense, it's all part of the rich tapestry of life. If you can't take a joke, they will tell you, you shouldn't have joined.
But I'm an alcoholic from a dysfunctional family, so I can't handle crazy people, and I definitely can't handle gaslighters. I can't be around denial and lies. That's why this is affecting me.
(Leaves room)
OK. I just showered it with cold water for about six tracks of Heinrich Biber's Joyful Mysteries. It feels better. When it itches again, I will put my foot in a bowl of cold water.
Covidiocy is like that itch. It won't stop, it distracts me from doing anything else, and if I give way to it, I will wind up worse than before.
How exactly am I affected by Covidiocy?
Out of politeness, I have to wear a bandana when I go shopping or travel on public transport. Ear loops are not stylish and no amount of floral pattern on the mask can distract from that. Those blue not-really-surgical-scraps of plastic and paper are terminally ghastly.
My office has been locked, so I have to work at home, but that means I save a bunch of money not commuting or paying for over-priced sandwiches. The quality of my life improves in so many ways. However, if I pay attendance to my laptop for eight hours plus lunch, I can get to the end of the week and not have done things that would have benefited my life. Just as if I was working in the office. So I've decided to give myself an hour in the morning to do stuff that requires going out: like getting the nearside front wheel trim on my car replaced because it was broken and potentially dangerous. Doing that makes me feel like work is not getting in the way of my life.
(While it's not my choice to work from home, it's my home and work is intruding. When I get a choice, I will or won't set up a dedicated work space and adjust my attitude accordingly.)
So what's the problem?
The problem is that I'm locked in the world with a crazy person. A crazy person who is on record as setting out, in March 2020, to create an atmosphere of fear so that we would stay home. Who chose to call it a `lockdown', which is a term that comes from prison management, so we would think we were prisoners. Who still wants us to stay two metres away from each other and wear masks because we are all diseased. A crazy person who can lock us into our streets and houses on a whim. Who makes up inconsistent rules about what is and is not acceptable behaviour.
For the Regular People, it's like playing a game of Simon Says. They don't need the world to make sense, it's all part of the rich tapestry of life. If you can't take a joke, they will tell you, you shouldn't have joined.
But I'm an alcoholic from a dysfunctional family, so I can't handle crazy people, and I definitely can't handle gaslighters. I can't be around denial and lies. That's why this is affecting me.
Monday 10 August 2020
Thursday 6 August 2020
Monday 3 August 2020
Monday 27 July 2020
Photographs I'm Printing (16)
(Panasonic DMC-TZ40)
Looks like somewhere out of a design magazine. So does everywhere in the Netherlands.
Thursday 23 July 2020
My Western Digital Network Drive Has The Green Flashing Light of Death!
Western Digital My Book Live drives can get the flashing green light of death. They boot up, start talking to themselves and don't stop, locked in an endless read-write loop. Heaven knows what they are reading and writing, but that's what they are doing. Hold the device and feel the disk rumbling away to itself. A reset does not help. The drive becomes invisible to the outside IP world, so I assume it's failing to load some of its software. Good thing I did a backup of it in March. It was pretty darn old: I must have bought it in 2013 or so. (You do not know how long I just spent with my Calendar app trying to work that out.)
The My Book Live was a 2TB network drive: it had ethernet connectivity. Its main use was to hold my iTunes files so I could stream on my other iDevices, and load up my iPhone with music now and again.
They don't make ethernet drives like that anymore. Now the choice is between USB3 portable drives, USB3 desktop drives, and NAS units. Or Cloud storage.
Cloud services reserve the right to scan your content for copyright infringement and other naughties, and delete at will. Not that I have any content like that, but there is no appeal to Apple, so why take a chance? As well as that, I would be at the mercy of Talk-Talk. It so much as rains for twenty minutes and my alleged high-speed broadband drops to half-pace, putting them in breach of contract. I can live with the 20 / 7 Mbps that results, and it does seem to sort itself out after a few days. On the other hand, HDD's have mechanical failures and I bet NAS's get OS problems as well.
Nevertheless, it's worth having the costs.
5GB free at iCloud 2TB at £6.99
iCloud = £83.88 / year
2TB external HDD approx £70 = 10 months of iCloud
4TB Synology DS218Play £400 (2TB storage with Raid 1) = 57 months of iCloud = 5.5 external drives
2TB external SSD approx £320 = 4xHDD or 46 months iCloud
1TB external SSD approx £150 = 2xHDD or 21 months iCloud
512GB on Air £200
2TB on Air £800
(Note that Apple internal SSD storage is more than twice the price of external SSD storage.)
We text-people don't need lots of storage. It's photographers, video-makers and serious musicians who need serious storage, fast graphics cards and 8-core processors. If I was one of those, I would already have a NAS. Not all NAS are made by Synology, but it's the only name you hear in consumers circles. I could in theory get away with 500GB of storage: my music is around 120GB, my photos including Photos Library are about 15GB, and Calibre back-up is about 5GB.
Of course, using drives to share music is just so 2014. So audiophile. I mean, do I even Roon? https://roonlabs.com I dream about Roon-ing. Not so much having a subscription, but leading a life that would make Roon necessary. If you dropped a lifetime subscription in my lap, I would thank you very much. But I just can't justify it.
I listen to music on CDs. I watch movies and foreign cop shows on DVD. I stream music from Spotify, and I have been hitting the Above and Beyond live concerts on You Tube recently. I stream movies from MUBI and Curzon Home Cinema via my Apple TV. I have no desire to download anything.
If I want to stream music in other rooms, I can. It's called Spotify + Sonos. Spotify has all the music I do and a bit more. Without that I would have needed a NAS.
Which is cross-product substitution for you. £400 of Synology is 40 months of Spotify. This is a no-brainer of a decision. Unless you think you can tell the difference between a 320kps stream and a 4Mps uncompressed stream.
A NAS can provide back-up especially if it's RAID 1 or above, but one should still backup the NAS now and again, and that means portable drives. Which I have already.
So this is what I did. I re-set my Music directory to my Air and imported the files from the last backup. That leaves me with 60GB spare after clean-up, which is enough. Then I copied all my content directories onto a portable drive. After that fiddling around, I decided to find a proper backup / sync program, and found FreeFileSync. It's pretty easy to work out how to use it. I trialled it, it worked nicely, so I gave them a donation. It's now a whole lot easier to do backups.
Let's face it, I barely used the My Book Live. So replacing it with a more expensive NAS would be silly. Next time around I will spend money on additional storage in my iDevices instead.
The My Book Live was a 2TB network drive: it had ethernet connectivity. Its main use was to hold my iTunes files so I could stream on my other iDevices, and load up my iPhone with music now and again.
They don't make ethernet drives like that anymore. Now the choice is between USB3 portable drives, USB3 desktop drives, and NAS units. Or Cloud storage.
Cloud services reserve the right to scan your content for copyright infringement and other naughties, and delete at will. Not that I have any content like that, but there is no appeal to Apple, so why take a chance? As well as that, I would be at the mercy of Talk-Talk. It so much as rains for twenty minutes and my alleged high-speed broadband drops to half-pace, putting them in breach of contract. I can live with the 20 / 7 Mbps that results, and it does seem to sort itself out after a few days. On the other hand, HDD's have mechanical failures and I bet NAS's get OS problems as well.
Nevertheless, it's worth having the costs.
5GB free at iCloud 2TB at £6.99
iCloud = £83.88 / year
2TB external HDD approx £70 = 10 months of iCloud
4TB Synology DS218Play £400 (2TB storage with Raid 1) = 57 months of iCloud = 5.5 external drives
2TB external SSD approx £320 = 4xHDD or 46 months iCloud
1TB external SSD approx £150 = 2xHDD or 21 months iCloud
512GB on Air £200
2TB on Air £800
(Note that Apple internal SSD storage is more than twice the price of external SSD storage.)
We text-people don't need lots of storage. It's photographers, video-makers and serious musicians who need serious storage, fast graphics cards and 8-core processors. If I was one of those, I would already have a NAS. Not all NAS are made by Synology, but it's the only name you hear in consumers circles. I could in theory get away with 500GB of storage: my music is around 120GB, my photos including Photos Library are about 15GB, and Calibre back-up is about 5GB.
Of course, using drives to share music is just so 2014. So audiophile. I mean, do I even Roon? https://roonlabs.com I dream about Roon-ing. Not so much having a subscription, but leading a life that would make Roon necessary. If you dropped a lifetime subscription in my lap, I would thank you very much. But I just can't justify it.
I listen to music on CDs. I watch movies and foreign cop shows on DVD. I stream music from Spotify, and I have been hitting the Above and Beyond live concerts on You Tube recently. I stream movies from MUBI and Curzon Home Cinema via my Apple TV. I have no desire to download anything.
If I want to stream music in other rooms, I can. It's called Spotify + Sonos. Spotify has all the music I do and a bit more. Without that I would have needed a NAS.
Which is cross-product substitution for you. £400 of Synology is 40 months of Spotify. This is a no-brainer of a decision. Unless you think you can tell the difference between a 320kps stream and a 4Mps uncompressed stream.
A NAS can provide back-up especially if it's RAID 1 or above, but one should still backup the NAS now and again, and that means portable drives. Which I have already.
So this is what I did. I re-set my Music directory to my Air and imported the files from the last backup. That leaves me with 60GB spare after clean-up, which is enough. Then I copied all my content directories onto a portable drive. After that fiddling around, I decided to find a proper backup / sync program, and found FreeFileSync. It's pretty easy to work out how to use it. I trialled it, it worked nicely, so I gave them a donation. It's now a whole lot easier to do backups.
Let's face it, I barely used the My Book Live. So replacing it with a more expensive NAS would be silly. Next time around I will spend money on additional storage in my iDevices instead.
Monday 20 July 2020
Photographs I'm Printing (15)
(Olympus OM-10, Kodak black and white - scanned on Canon MG7570)
Standard operating procedure for young men with degrees and careers in the 1970's was to live in a number of different flats across London, before moving into the first purchase at age around late-20's. This was one of them, in South Wimbledon.
Thursday 16 July 2020
Hold The Economy Hostage!
We're nearly there. They think they've got us where they want us, but actually, we've got them where we want them.
The Government is getting desperate to have us back at work and spending money as the summer goes by. On its terms. With masks and one or two metre distancing and staggered working hours and all that jazz. Will we please take part in the economy but on their terms?
No. We will not.
The British people don't care about the economy because the economy stopped caring about them a couple of decades ago. They will give the politicians the economy when the politicians stop threatening them with the Virus, and until then, they will stay home, save money, and let the railways, the buses, the theatres, cinemas, restaurants and all those useless shops, bleed cash unto closure. Because most of the British public never did go to the theatre, or the ballet, or eat in a Michelin-Star restaurant, they hate commuting, and they have realised how much useless junk they have been buying.
It's not only the individuals. The corporations with big offices are not going to spend millions pounds on moving the furniture when the lifts and the Covid Security won't let them get the people in and out in time. So the city centres and business parks will stay closed for a long time.
The shops need our business more than they need us to wear a mask. Tell them you don't have a mask, but do they still want your money? If they turn us away once, they risk it being forever, as we find what we want online. Covid Secure is not the experience we want: we will not go into the restaurants and pubs: some people will, but not enough to make it worthwhile unlocking the doors. Wait for the first retailers to announce they are closing again until customers can come back without restrictions.
Profit margins are so slim, cash flows are so weak, that even having a fifteen per cent drop in turnover means it is not worth staying open. Even if we participate back three days out of five, which might suit a lot of people, the economy will bleed to death. The Government does not understand that yet.
Hold the economy hostage! Do not go back until they sound the All Clear, and we can huddle and muddle together like we are supposed to.
The Government is getting desperate to have us back at work and spending money as the summer goes by. On its terms. With masks and one or two metre distancing and staggered working hours and all that jazz. Will we please take part in the economy but on their terms?
No. We will not.
The British people don't care about the economy because the economy stopped caring about them a couple of decades ago. They will give the politicians the economy when the politicians stop threatening them with the Virus, and until then, they will stay home, save money, and let the railways, the buses, the theatres, cinemas, restaurants and all those useless shops, bleed cash unto closure. Because most of the British public never did go to the theatre, or the ballet, or eat in a Michelin-Star restaurant, they hate commuting, and they have realised how much useless junk they have been buying.
It's not only the individuals. The corporations with big offices are not going to spend millions pounds on moving the furniture when the lifts and the Covid Security won't let them get the people in and out in time. So the city centres and business parks will stay closed for a long time.
The shops need our business more than they need us to wear a mask. Tell them you don't have a mask, but do they still want your money? If they turn us away once, they risk it being forever, as we find what we want online. Covid Secure is not the experience we want: we will not go into the restaurants and pubs: some people will, but not enough to make it worthwhile unlocking the doors. Wait for the first retailers to announce they are closing again until customers can come back without restrictions.
Profit margins are so slim, cash flows are so weak, that even having a fifteen per cent drop in turnover means it is not worth staying open. Even if we participate back three days out of five, which might suit a lot of people, the economy will bleed to death. The Government does not understand that yet.
Hold the economy hostage! Do not go back until they sound the All Clear, and we can huddle and muddle together like we are supposed to.
Monday 13 July 2020
Photographs I'm Printing (14)
(Olympus OM-10 Kodak film - scanned on Canon MG7570)
This one goes right back to the late 1970's - the house of a university friend I would visit now and again. Then time and stuff happened and we drifted out of touch.
Thursday 9 July 2020
Mac OS Big Sur - Stop Futzing Already
I have seen at least three You Tube reviews of macOS Big Sur. Which is supposed to be an operating system. 85 new features later, nothing about the operating system. Emojis, searching in messages, some pointless new options in Music, face recognition in the Home App, and a bunch of other stuff in the Apps.
What about changes to the actual operating system? Does it use less RAM than Catalina? Does it load apps faster? How about the firewall? Improvements to the music playing software? Does it sandbox like iOS does? Any new features I might like to know about as a developer?
When the **** is Apple going to give us proper window management, because Windows still does that better than anyone. When are they going to detect all the hard drives and other equipment on my network, and re-connect to them, like Windows does, even if the devices aren't in Apple's ecosystem? And WHEN will they get the album art in Music sorted out? It works if I have all my files on my Air, but on the NAS? Half the images would go missing and the loading time was awful. My Sonos and File Manager apps on the iPod Touch did a better job. And please can we have the same wonderfully functional File Open / Save dialogs that Windows does so much better.
I get the feeling that Apple do a lot of hard-core OS-stuff to improve performance. They should crow about it some more. But maybe they don't, because they can fix it on the chip, in a way that Microsoft can't.
It may also be the reviewers, who assume their audience want to know about the awful battery icon more than the way Apple have (maybe) improved battery life by doing something with the battery management algorithm. I'd rather know about the algorithms. I can see the awful design for myself.
What makes a computer operating system is flawless multi-tasking, powerful peripheral management, and simple multi-user management. If I can't run Nora En Pure on my browser on one screen, while typing in Evernote and downloading some Amazon music, while rendering a movie clip, then it's not a real computer. So I would expect to hear about improvements to those things as well.
But OMG the desktop art on Big Sur! I suspect it's going to be a while before this late adopter adopts it.
What about changes to the actual operating system? Does it use less RAM than Catalina? Does it load apps faster? How about the firewall? Improvements to the music playing software? Does it sandbox like iOS does? Any new features I might like to know about as a developer?
When the **** is Apple going to give us proper window management, because Windows still does that better than anyone. When are they going to detect all the hard drives and other equipment on my network, and re-connect to them, like Windows does, even if the devices aren't in Apple's ecosystem? And WHEN will they get the album art in Music sorted out? It works if I have all my files on my Air, but on the NAS? Half the images would go missing and the loading time was awful. My Sonos and File Manager apps on the iPod Touch did a better job. And please can we have the same wonderfully functional File Open / Save dialogs that Windows does so much better.
I get the feeling that Apple do a lot of hard-core OS-stuff to improve performance. They should crow about it some more. But maybe they don't, because they can fix it on the chip, in a way that Microsoft can't.
It may also be the reviewers, who assume their audience want to know about the awful battery icon more than the way Apple have (maybe) improved battery life by doing something with the battery management algorithm. I'd rather know about the algorithms. I can see the awful design for myself.
What makes a computer operating system is flawless multi-tasking, powerful peripheral management, and simple multi-user management. If I can't run Nora En Pure on my browser on one screen, while typing in Evernote and downloading some Amazon music, while rendering a movie clip, then it's not a real computer. So I would expect to hear about improvements to those things as well.
But OMG the desktop art on Big Sur! I suspect it's going to be a while before this late adopter adopts it.
Monday 6 July 2020
Photographs I'm Printing (13)
Olympus OM-10 Kodak colour film scanned and printed on Canon MG7550
Back in the 1990's the British telecom industry used to have an annual bash in Brighton. I went one year, and before I got stuck into whatever it was I was there for, I wandered along the pier and took some photographs. It was one of those reels where every one was a winner.
Thursday 2 July 2020
10 Virus Dodges You Should Be Doing Now
From my limited recent experience in the real world, it seems that the official communications are one thing and the reality is another. A lot of those communications about Covid Secure working are for the benefit of insurance companies and compliance managers. Reality is not far from how it was in the past. Except you can't sit down in a cafe, you have to go through the mask-farce on public transport, and perspex screens.
Anyway, here are a bunch of fun things to do as we continue to be extras in this year's hit farce Two Metres and a Mask.
1. Ask if the sanitiser has alcohol, if it does say you can't use it. Look pained and apologetic when you say this, add that you can't drink the stuff either. Works for me.
2. No volunteering for tests. There are no reliable tests for the Virus or for its antibodies. You may as well flip a coin and stay in for 14 days if it shows Heads.
3. No tracing apps. The Apple / Android tracer that was downloaded automatically recently is set to OFF by default. You're just exposing yourself to the dodgy test results other people might get.
4. Edit the contacts on your phone. Delete anyone you don't want to hear from. Only answer your phone if there's a name you recognise.
5. Set up a filter on your e-mail to junk mails containing 'Covid', 'Corona', 'virus', 'difficult times', 'lockdown', and other such words.
6. In the unlikely event anyone official asks why you ignored their mail or call, say "We've been told at work only to answer calls or accept e-mails from people we know. For our safety."
7. Don't argue with anyone about this stuff. The bureaucrats who have to deal with it know it's bullshit, and it's not polite of you to point that their job is a meaningless waste of time. There are a lot of decent people who believe the scare, indeed, decent trusting and trustworthy people will tend to believe what their Government tells them. Just nod along.
8. DO. NOT. QUEUE. Just walk away, Rene. Do not use shops that do 'No mask, no service' or 'One in, one out'.
9. Use mail-order, delivery, click-and-collect and takeaway as much as possible.
10. If you are working from home, tell everyone the camera on your laptop has mysteriously stopped working (On Windows 10, Settings->Privacy->Camera->Let Apps Use My Camera set OFF) and turn off those Teams notifications. Go back to e-mail and phone calls. You will thank me for this advice.
Bonus: The trains and tubes are almost empty even in the rush hours. Put on a mask and enjoy the peace and quiet.
Anyway, here are a bunch of fun things to do as we continue to be extras in this year's hit farce Two Metres and a Mask.
1. Ask if the sanitiser has alcohol, if it does say you can't use it. Look pained and apologetic when you say this, add that you can't drink the stuff either. Works for me.
2. No volunteering for tests. There are no reliable tests for the Virus or for its antibodies. You may as well flip a coin and stay in for 14 days if it shows Heads.
3. No tracing apps. The Apple / Android tracer that was downloaded automatically recently is set to OFF by default. You're just exposing yourself to the dodgy test results other people might get.
4. Edit the contacts on your phone. Delete anyone you don't want to hear from. Only answer your phone if there's a name you recognise.
5. Set up a filter on your e-mail to junk mails containing 'Covid', 'Corona', 'virus', 'difficult times', 'lockdown', and other such words.
6. In the unlikely event anyone official asks why you ignored their mail or call, say "We've been told at work only to answer calls or accept e-mails from people we know. For our safety."
7. Don't argue with anyone about this stuff. The bureaucrats who have to deal with it know it's bullshit, and it's not polite of you to point that their job is a meaningless waste of time. There are a lot of decent people who believe the scare, indeed, decent trusting and trustworthy people will tend to believe what their Government tells them. Just nod along.
8. DO. NOT. QUEUE. Just walk away, Rene. Do not use shops that do 'No mask, no service' or 'One in, one out'.
9. Use mail-order, delivery, click-and-collect and takeaway as much as possible.
10. If you are working from home, tell everyone the camera on your laptop has mysteriously stopped working (On Windows 10, Settings->Privacy->Camera->Let Apps Use My Camera set OFF) and turn off those Teams notifications. Go back to e-mail and phone calls. You will thank me for this advice.
Bonus: The trains and tubes are almost empty even in the rush hours. Put on a mask and enjoy the peace and quiet.
Monday 29 June 2020
Photographs I'm Printing (12)
Olympus OM-10 Kodak colour film scanned and printed on Canon MG7550
Nice. The town. The only disappointment is that it has a pebble beach. This is looking towards the Castel Plage and Castle Hill. I have a feeling this was taken with an 18mm lens I had, hence the distorted perspective.
Thursday 25 June 2020
It's not what you know about me that matters. It's what you do about what you know about me.
It's not what you know about me that matters. It's what you do about what you know about me.
I don't mind being tracked, monitored, surveilled, recorded, pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered.
I mind anything being done with what they learn.
Especially by someone with powers they should never have been granted by legislation that should never have been passed.
That is a lot of people in central and local government, the Police, Intelligence services, the Armed Services and all sorts of quangos.
What I mind is that people who should need a Judge's permission to enter my house, can come storming in without permission. They can freeze my bank accounts, and lose me my job. All without the Court's permission and my chance at a defence.
And when it's all over and if I have proven my innocence, I have no-one to claim against.
All those people should be personally liable for the damage their mistakes and bad judgements cause to their victims' lives. Social workers, policemen, spies, inspectors of all kinds... anyone whose word will be taken in preference to mine and to my detriment. They should have to buy insurance against those claims, and they should not be granted any powers unless they have that insurance.
But they don't have to, and that's what I mind.
I don't mind being tracked, monitored, surveilled, recorded, pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered.
I mind anything being done with what they learn.
Especially by someone with powers they should never have been granted by legislation that should never have been passed.
That is a lot of people in central and local government, the Police, Intelligence services, the Armed Services and all sorts of quangos.
What I mind is that people who should need a Judge's permission to enter my house, can come storming in without permission. They can freeze my bank accounts, and lose me my job. All without the Court's permission and my chance at a defence.
And when it's all over and if I have proven my innocence, I have no-one to claim against.
All those people should be personally liable for the damage their mistakes and bad judgements cause to their victims' lives. Social workers, policemen, spies, inspectors of all kinds... anyone whose word will be taken in preference to mine and to my detriment. They should have to buy insurance against those claims, and they should not be granted any powers unless they have that insurance.
But they don't have to, and that's what I mind.
Monday 22 June 2020
Photographs I'm Printing (11)
Olympus OM-10 Kodak colour film scanned and printed on Canon MG7550
Somewhere between Lynton and Porlock Weir (I think), on the cliff side of the A39. There are some steep and winding roads there. I thought the sign had just the right amount of deadpan whimsy.
Thursday 18 June 2020
Facial Recognition Officially A Loss-Maker
Arvind Krishna, CEO of IBM, has decided to get out of the facial recognition business. His letter to the US Congress waffled about advancing racial equality. That's an utter non-sequiter, of course. What he meant was this **** is a potential litigation money-pit and we want no part of it. Or if he didn't, you may want to consider shorting IBM stock.
Facial recognition software is widely available. There's a Python library for it. It uses a package called dlib. Apple has facial recognition software. Facebook has its own algorithms, as does Google. A recent study by the NSIT included 189 algorithms from 99 developers. That survey concluded that facial recognition software works just fine for white folks, and pretty well for Chinese, Koreans and Japanese. It totally sucks when identifying African women, half of whom it thinks are men. The darker the skin, the less well it works.
In the 2011 UK Census, 87% of the UK population weas White, 3% Black, 4.2% from the India and Pakistan, 2% were mixed and the remainder Arabs or Far Eastern Asias. In Newham, however, only 29% of the population is White (no, that's not a typo). That's a lot of poor identification. In 33 districts of England the proportion of Whites is below 80%, and those are the populous ones.
The concern is that a local council or police force will buy a cheap algorithm, some second-rate cameras, and use a mid-range scanner to load up their rogue's gallery to the database. The result will be a mass of false identifications, accusations and arrests, disproportionately affecting people with black or brown skin. The council or police force will do what all public bodies do when they make a dumb decision, which is double-down. Next thing you know, half your council tax is going on out-of-court settlements to not-actually-minorities-in-that-postcode represented by solicitors who play golf with the councillors. Or whatever those people do.
The world is full of unaccountable bureaucrats with way too much power. Giving them facial recognition would be dumb. Not as dumb as locking down your country, but you know, half-way there. We should be concerned. So should anyone supplying this stuff: it should not be sold to just anybody. Especially to anybody who can fine us, lock us up, and put us on registers we should not be on. Which is pretty much any Government department or agency. Of course the Spies will have the really good stuff (at least I hope they do) but the Spies can't lock anyone up. At least in this country.
If IBM thinks it can't beat the ethinic-facial-recognition problem, it's a good bet that no-one else can. Unless the people at IBM aren't as smart as they used to be. Facial recognition is a nice toy for social media, and a useful tool for organisations with large photo libraries of public figures. However, the real money is in security and surveillance, and IBM have decided that there wasn't enough to justify the risks.
Facial recognition software is widely available. There's a Python library for it. It uses a package called dlib. Apple has facial recognition software. Facebook has its own algorithms, as does Google. A recent study by the NSIT included 189 algorithms from 99 developers. That survey concluded that facial recognition software works just fine for white folks, and pretty well for Chinese, Koreans and Japanese. It totally sucks when identifying African women, half of whom it thinks are men. The darker the skin, the less well it works.
In the 2011 UK Census, 87% of the UK population weas White, 3% Black, 4.2% from the India and Pakistan, 2% were mixed and the remainder Arabs or Far Eastern Asias. In Newham, however, only 29% of the population is White (no, that's not a typo). That's a lot of poor identification. In 33 districts of England the proportion of Whites is below 80%, and those are the populous ones.
The concern is that a local council or police force will buy a cheap algorithm, some second-rate cameras, and use a mid-range scanner to load up their rogue's gallery to the database. The result will be a mass of false identifications, accusations and arrests, disproportionately affecting people with black or brown skin. The council or police force will do what all public bodies do when they make a dumb decision, which is double-down. Next thing you know, half your council tax is going on out-of-court settlements to not-actually-minorities-in-that-postcode represented by solicitors who play golf with the councillors. Or whatever those people do.
The world is full of unaccountable bureaucrats with way too much power. Giving them facial recognition would be dumb. Not as dumb as locking down your country, but you know, half-way there. We should be concerned. So should anyone supplying this stuff: it should not be sold to just anybody. Especially to anybody who can fine us, lock us up, and put us on registers we should not be on. Which is pretty much any Government department or agency. Of course the Spies will have the really good stuff (at least I hope they do) but the Spies can't lock anyone up. At least in this country.
If IBM thinks it can't beat the ethinic-facial-recognition problem, it's a good bet that no-one else can. Unless the people at IBM aren't as smart as they used to be. Facial recognition is a nice toy for social media, and a useful tool for organisations with large photo libraries of public figures. However, the real money is in security and surveillance, and IBM have decided that there wasn't enough to justify the risks.
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