August 2018 Diary

The heat really did take it out of me. I took a week off after the weather cooled down, and in the few days up to the break, I could feel the gears in my head grinding. I was making mistakes at work that I would never normally make. I could not think straight. It was so bad I woke up at 08:00 for three days during the week off.

I read Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany by Norman Ohler; John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Start-Up; The Secret Barrister; The Panama Papers by Bastian Obermayer and Frederik Obermaier; G K Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday; Alan Furst’s A Hero In France; and John Lange (aka Micheal Crichton) The Venom Business and Drug of Choice; and Olga Sviblova's book on Rodchenko

I saw no films and finished S7 of House. I watched Terence Davies’ Of Time and the City, and both the Jack Reacher films on DVD.

Sis and I dined at Delamina, off Wigmore Street. I lunched at The Botanist on Sloane Square because the District Line was up the creek and it was a way to sit it out. I had supper at Blanchette in Soho as well.

I decided it was time to knock working from home on the head. I lost a day of walking - I do 10,000+ steps a day with the commute and other walking - and I was not making the best use of the time. ‘Working from home’ is good when, instead of chatting with others in the office networking with my colleagues, I can do some light housework. With the hot weather, I hadn’t been doing that.

I took my Bose cans into work - I use the in-ear QC20’s for the commute - and that experiment worked: the cans are more comfortable and provide a bit more physical sound exclusion. And I went back to sitting on all sorts of seats around the office, because I’d let myself slip into sitting into a tolerable chair that is still distracting enough that I can’t work fluently in it. Hey, given a choice between reducing property costs per employee and decreasing productivity per employee, there’s really no choice, right?

The white tee-shirts under the blue work shirt came back as well. I’d let the previous lot get too old and scratchy, and of course they shrank in the wash *cough* and became uncomfortable, so as an experiment I stopped wearing them. Finding: wear tee-shirts under the work shirt, and renew the tee-shirts every year or so.

The Great iTunes Album Art project got completed, and only those who have done it will appreciate what that means.

I took some photographs. I know everyone does that all the time, but I had stopped. The Rodchenko book made me think about what taking photographs is about. I don’t have any profound answers, but it shifted how I saw some of the things around me. Made me want to take photographs again.

Policed Speech is Dishonest Speech and Other Thoughts on Call Centres

Taping phone calls at call centres is a good thing, right? Keeps everyone honest, yes?

Not so much. Get the popcorn and read this tale.

The other day I got one of those just-calling-to-see-if-you’re-on-the-best-account-for-you calls from Vodafone. We chatted about the cost of the Samsung Note 9 and the iPhoneX, and then I asked if it was possible to move to a SIM-only contract on my phone. I didn’t think I could, as the contract runs out at the end of January, but hey, no harm in asking.

To my surprise the salesman (it always is a man) said that, yes I could, indeed to a 12-month contract offering 20GB of data per month. Sounds good to me. (I have an iPhone SE, it’s not very expensive, but this was still a saving, and much more data.) He said he would send me a SIM out that evening, which would reach me Friday, and I should call 191 to get everything set up.

The SIM arrived Saturday. We will pass over the call to Vodafone 191. It was long, it was full of people in Chennai popping off to make a cup of tea consult with a colleague while I was on hold, and none of them seemed to be able to grasp the problem, or of they did, they didn’t prove it by describing the problem and the remedy to me in their own words. In the end I think I hit the wrong button with my ear and dropped the call. Or they did. I can get upset after forty-five minutes going nowhere on a call.

It was during this call I learned that I had two lines. I explained that I didn’t want two lines, only one, and I wanted the SIM-ony tariff transferred to my existing number, not on the new number.

What had happened was this: the salesman created a second line for the new SIM card which would be billed alongside my existing monthly contract for the next five months. I am going to pass on speculating whether that was intentionally setting me up for double-billing. The usual way of changing is a tariff doesn’t involve changing a SIM card, but hey, who knows how these things work?

I went into that oasis of sanity, a Vodafone shop, and explained what had happened, showing them the SIM and the letter that came with it. The assistant looked at at his screen and in reply to my comment “I think the guy on the phone messed things up” said that, indeed, the guy on the phone had done bad.

Here’s the thing. In the shop, they can say that. On the phone, they can’t, because everything is taped, and so they have to go through a dozen contortions to avoid saying “Yeah, he pulled a fast one on you, let me straighten that out”.

Turned out the new card was cancelled on Saturday evening, when I made the 191 call, so something came out of that, but they could not tell me they had done that, because that would have been tantamount to admitting that the salesman had tried to con me. Or had misunderstood what I wanted and caused me a bunch of nuisance and potential double-billing problems. Neither of which make ‘Vodafone-the-corporation’ look good.

That’s what tapes do to any attempt to be honest.

In the shops, nobody is taping, so the staff can be honest with the customers. They can also deny they ever suggested that the salesman was pulling a fast one. Sometimes deniability leads to greater honesty for the customer.

Want it in five words? Policed speech is dishonest speech.

A brisk 10 minute walk twice a day cannot improve your health

No. A ten-minute walk twice a day won’t make the slightest difference to your health. Except in some very rare circumstances, none of which will bring you to the platform at St. James’s Station. In fact, if you are reading this poster there, chances are very high you are already walking ten minutes twice a day - just for the commute.

But these ads are not for the benefit of the audience.

These ads are there so the Government can say “We have a health awareness programme. You saw our ads on your way to work.” 

Nice Red Shed

Every year I re-paint the garden shed. Having a garden shed is an important part of being a Normal Person. If I have a garden shed, I must be Normal. And if I paint it Cederwood Red every year, I must be a good Normal. So here's my nice red shed.

Fixing That Missing Artwork in iTunes

Macs make a lot more sense when you think of them as designed to be stand-alone. OS X can do networking, but it doesn’t really get it. That’s partly because of the UNIX everything-is-a-file philosophy: Unix doesn’t see networks, it only sees external drives. Windows sees networks and drives on the networks, which sounds as if it should be the same, but really is not.

Windows exposes the filesystem to the user in its programmes, and asks the user to make the filesystem their friend. In Windows you open a file by navigating through the filesystem in the File Open dialog or by clicking on a name in the Recently Used Files list. The only time you see icons representing your files in Windows is a) when you’re looking at the directory in Explorer, or b) when you’re using a programme that’s modelled on something from OSX, such as Calibre or most music management programs.

By design, OS X hides all the nasty OS stuff - such as the filesystem - from the user. This is usually done by adding an intermediate layer between the user interface and the filesystem. In an OS X programme the user sees a friendly icon and clicks on that: the programme looks at a database file - usually in XML format - that tells it where the file is stored. This works wonderfully until the user does something with their music files directly via the filesystem, say, with Finder and then everything goes to pieces. Because the database behind the cool interface has not been updated and indeed can’t be updated with changes made directly via Finder or with Unix commands on the Terminal.

OS X wants you to deal with your music collection ONLY through iTunes or a similar programme. That is the only way the database is kept up to date. It’s also the only way that the very quirky file permissions that iTunes uses get handled correctly. It’s possible to alter the file and directory permissions to 777 (all access to everyone) in Terminal but not have that show up in Finder, or have iTunes behave as if the files and directory have permission 777. (Oh yes, I have done this.)

(Windows programs assume that you’re going to do all sorts of things, so they have a ‘Watch this directory’ function that scans and updates the cool interface when you start the program. That can be kinda annoying at times. But it’s swapping one annoyance for another.)

Suppose you copied Volunteers by the Jefferson Airplane from your Macbook iTunes directory to a backup directory on your NAS. When you later build an iTunes library from this NAS directory, it will add the Volunteers album and files it finds, but you won’t be able to modify the album info, and the artwork will get lost. What’s happened is that the file and directory permissions have become mis-aligned - not in Terminal world, but in the parallel universe of iTunes / Finder permissions.

So how do you get the artwork back, and become able to change the album info?

Here’s the fix that occurred to me…

1. Create a directory in the Music section on the computer that has the iTunes you are using. This will typically be the SDD of your Mac Book / Air / Pro. I called mine Temp. It doesn’t matter.

2. Copy the files from Volunteers (or whatever) into this Temp directory.

3. Use iTunes to delete the original Songs and the Files.

4. Check that the directory for Volunteers (or whatever) is also deleted, as it might not be if it has artwork files or other stuff in it

5. in iTunes, do File -> Add to Library and choose Temp. iTunes will now do its stuff.

6. Now you can add the album artwork and make whatever other changes you want, and it will stick.

7. Delete the files in Temp.

8. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

9. Works On My Machine and NAS. YMMV.

It sounds clunky, but it soon become muscle memory. Do it as a background job when you’re writing blog entries or something, and you’ll be all caught up before you know it.

Ripping The CD Collection

I’m not an audiophile, but I want the music to sound right. What comes out of my iPhone through the Bose QC20’s noise-cancelling earphones is right for the purpose, but what comes out of the headphone socket through my hifi is muffled and tiring. Same signal, different context. Hence all my fussing around with Dragonflys and Jitterbugs earlier this year. While not quite up to the DAC in my Marantz CD player, the combination is close, and the sound isn’t tiring. And I fall asleep to music from the Bose Colour Sound fed via Bluetooth from my iPhone streaming via WiFi from the NAS.

I was not ripping the CD collection for backup. That would have meant copying the discs. And then buying another NAS to backup the backup, because NAS can fail more frequently than a CD. Anyway, there is a CD backup service: it’s called Amazon, or Foyles, or any number of other online retailers. This won’t work for compilations of obscure composers by performers whose careers never lived up to their early promise (British Piano Music of the 1980’s where art though now?) but then, well, how often did you listen to it when you had it? Classic performances that you really want tend to be re-released. Or surpassed.

I ripped the collection because I stream more than I do, and may stream more, especially with the Sonos in the front room, and because I do put some of it on the iPhone and the Nano for portable use from time to time. And I’ve only got 128GB on my Air SDD. Which is my way of explaining why I used the iTunes default of 192kps M4a.

Why did I use iTunes? For one thing, Hans Beekhuysen mentions it as one of three which are decent rippers. Since one of the others is Roon, that’s a pretty good recommendation. iTunes is good at getting song titles and parsing the artist / composer, no worse than any of the others at getting album art (I tried Clementine: it won some, lost others) and once you accept its quirky little ways is pretty good at managing the library. It’s not Roon. But neither is the price.

So the workflow looks like this:

0. Create an Album Artwork directory on your Mac. Open a new music library in iTunes and point it at your NAS. Save.

1. Put CD into drive

2. Choose the album title that a) isn’t in Japanese, and b) doesn’t say it’s Disk 3 of some ‘Best of Bach’ collection when your CD is a stand-alone

3. Let iTunes do its thing

4. While it is, if you ripping a jazz or classical CD, copy the CD title, paste it into the Amazon search box and see if they have a decent copy of the artwork. Almost always they will, but if not, use Google. I did so on less than one in thirty CDs. Paste the CD title into the the ‘Save As’ name and save it to your Album Artwork directory (*).

5. When the CD is done, eject it, and right-click for Album Info. Here I put in the artwork, change the Album Artist to the composer for classical music, and get rid of the [Disc 1] that often appears in titles. Sometimes, as with the 22-CD Stravinsky set, the disk number is useful, but not for double-albums.

6. Untick that damn Album is compilation of songs by various artists box. Otherwise it winds up in a Compilations directory. And you won’t find it when browsing with File Explorer.

7. Press OK and find something to do while iTunes does its thing with the music files over the WiFi to the NAS.

It’s tedious. It’s best done while doing something else, pausing to deal with the album info, eject the disc, put another one in. I did it in batches of about twenty, one day at a a time, until it was over.

8. Review the results and edit. How much work you put into changing what iTunes (or any other organiser) found is up to you. Filling in the missing artwork, un-compiling compilations that aren’t really, making sure that J S Bach is spelled and spaced like that in all the albums so it’s easier to find when browsing outside of iTunes… just how anally-retentive are you? (Turns away as if this doesn’t concern him…) The day you see me changing genres, I really will have nothing to do.

9. Accept that the music catalogue is a case of progress not perfection. I’m going to make tweaks every now and then when I notice something.

Because some of the files I have were ripped earlier, under different versions of iTunes, there were permission issues, and I needed to refresh the library in the way described in a future post. It was worth it. A library with every bit of cover art and all the double-albums put together is a thing of delight.

(*) WHY THE FRACK DON’T JAZZ and CLASSICAL CD’S HAVE ARTWORK? I load a progressive house CD, it has artwork. I load a Mahler box-set, I have to get the artwork myself. Digital music libraries and organiser programs have been with us for over a decade, and iTunes, Roon and all the others aren't going to disappear. How difficult can it be for a record company to package all its artwork up and send the zip to Apple? And how difficult would it be for Apple not to charge the record company, in the name of giving us all a better experience? Not even Amazon restrict the number of times we can find and download artwork. (Because they’re smart: every time you get some artwork from them, they get some more goodwill, and you might buy something.) Music industry, get your freaking act together on this.

July 2018 Diary

You would think these were the easiest posts to write. All I have to do is list everything I did. I should be able to do that the day after the ends of the month. Yet I never get round to doing it until the middle of the month. Is there a reason for the hesitation? I don’t feel as if I’ve done enough in the month and would rather not have to document it so quickly?

At the start if the month I went to Doddle at Liverpool Street collected the Asus Aspire I’d ordered in June. I don’t know about your offices, but ours actively discourages having items delivered. The post room for our floor is a pile of letters and packages: nothing is delivered, and there are no pigeon-holes. Send me something to that address and it will never reach me. So Doddle is a really useful service.

In the middle of the month, I collected the Sonos Beam soundbar. I had it working the next evening. Oh yeah. More oomph, clearer speech, fuller sound. My TV set doesn’t have the HDMI-out for sound, so I have to use the optical digital adapter, and there’s a very slight delay between the screen and the soundbar, but once the brain understands what’s happening, it adapts after about five minutes. If you have a modern TV and don’t have a decent soundbar or a 5.1, you are missing out. And yes, the Sonos is controlled by an app you load onto your iDevice and the app can stream music from your subscription service.

I got a day trip for work up to sunny Solihull via Euston and Birmingham International. Most of the day was spent in trains, taxis and conference rooms, so I had no real sense of the place, but it makes a change from the usual commute. I’ve been to Birmingham town centre before with work, and only really remember the awful road system and the restaurants down by the canal. I collected the soundbar from Sonos’ Covent Garden shop on the way back from Solihull, and by the time got to Richmond was so darn hungry - conference centre food doesn’t count - that I had some “street food” at the Yo! Sushi across from the station.

Sis and I had our annual trip up the Kingsland Road to Tay Do for Vietnamese at the start of the month, taking the long but half-scenic route back via the North London Line rather the usual route on the Overground.

I saw Leave No Trace at the Curzon Soho - excellent - and got through S6 of House. I read Ellen Wood’s East Lynne, Joel Dicker’s The Truth About The Harry Quebert Affair, and David Szalay’s All That Man Is. East Lynne was a best-seller in the 19th century, and it’s a fantastic read. I started on Cobbet’s Rural Rides, but that’s bedtime reading, so it will be many months before that gets finished.

I almost finished the great CD ripping project. I’m going to write about that separately.

It was too damn hot. I managed to keep up the exercise for a couple of weeks, and then the heat just wore me down. Sleep is not as good as it needs to be. I don’t like being sweaty and hot. I spent a lot of the heat indoors, with the curtains drawn to keep the heat down.