Bully For You

 

"Pale Blue Dot" by Carl Sagan is absorbing and I am now over halfway through. I was semi-shocked to find out the Apollo missions were not to explore or for the enhancement of scientific knowledge, but to show the world that the USA had the ability to build big rockets that could be used to nuclear payloads, ie to show the world that they are the biggest bully. 

The Voyager 1 and II missions are somewhere out there but maybe not transmitting now. Launched in the seventies here is a current link from NASA that tells us where they are.

 "The Midnight Library" by Matt Haig is on my shelf as the next hard copy read. 

I have resumed "Imajica" by Clive Barker on my Kindle. This is a book I never want to end. When I finish it, I just restart it.

I recently discovered that my American Amazon Author page has a feed from this blog which you can see here. It only shows on the .com site but not on others. C'est La Vie.

The music is "Bully For You" by The Tom Robinson Band

Mike Singleton - Vocal Stories

I am not sure if you are aware of my writing on Vocal, but these are a few of my stories if you would like to sample them:

1. Barter Books - An Amazing Bookshop In A Railway Station In Alnwick
2. The Plagiaristic Poetry Series - Poems Taken From Random-Themed Lines
3. Another Raven - A Take On Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven"
4. The Cleaner - An Autism-Focused Christmas Special
5. The King Of Elfland's Daughter - A Wonderful Book By Lord Dunsany
6. An Owl In A Towel - A Beautiful Book by Lesley and Cheryl
7. Three Reasons Why I Love Settle - Scaleber Force, The Hoffman Kiln and Castlebergh Crag
8. The Accidental Book - Helping a Great Vocal Friend Resulted In Me Publishing My First Book
9. Call Me Les - A Great Friend and An Amazing Writer and this is her Instagram

Black Skies

 

 "Pale Blue Dot" by Carl Sagan is getting more interesting with each page turn. It mentions the contents of discs sent with teh Voyagers, but now toucheds on how different planets have different colours due to their atmospheres but once you get above the atmosphere the shy is black but the stars are brighter.

The Voyager 1 and II missions are somewhere out there but maybe not transmitting now. Launched in the seventies  here is a current link  from NASA that tells us where they are.

 "The Midnight Library" by Matt Haig is on my shelf as the next hard copy read. 

I have resumed "Imajica" by Clive Barker on my Kindle. This is a book I never want to end. When I finish it, I just restart it.

I recently discovered that my American Amazon Author page has a feed from this blog which you can see here. It only shows on the .com site but not on others. C'est La Vie.

The music is "Dark Clouds" by Space

Mike Singleton - Vocal Stories

I am not sure if you are aware of my writing on Vocal, but these are a few of my stories if you would like to sample them:

1. Barter Books - An Amazing Bookshop In A Railway Station In Alnwick
2. The Plagiaristic Poetry Series - Poems Taken From Random-Themed Lines
3. Another Raven - A Take On Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven"
4. The Cleaner - An Autism-Focused Christmas Special
5. The King Of Elfland's Daughter - A Wonderful Book By Lord Dunsany
6. An Owl In A Towel - A Beautiful Book by Lesley and Cheryl
7. Three Reasons Why I Love Settle - Scaleber Force, The Hoffman Kiln and Castlebergh Crag
8. The Accidental Book - Helping a Great Vocal Friend Resulted In Me Publishing My First Book
9. Call Me Les - A Great Friend and An Amazing Writer and this is her Instagram

Some Jarre and Scandi-Noir

In my first for years of posting I posted 6 - 42 - 82 - 46 posts annully. This one is my 54th this year so I post a bit more often and write a bit more and hopefully the quality and content have improved a little. You can see the history on the right hand side. I did set up the blog to be a sort of travel diary, but as I don't travel a great deal that was hardly going to be a long term goer.

And so it turned into what it is today a sort of diary with music included, which sometimes fails when Youtube pull the video for whatever reason.

Last night I watched "In Order of Disappearance" by Hans Petter Moland and featuring Stellan Skarsgård. I was think Fargo with touches of Tarantino and nods to classics such as Steven Spielberg's "Duel". I hadn't seen the tag line  "DEATH WISH set in FARGO and BLOODIER" which does sort of some it up. It's full of black humour (it is subtitled for non Nordic speakers) and one toch I love (and this is not giving away the plot) are the black screens with the name and religious / national ikon of the recently despatched.

Today it looks like winter is returning in the form of cold and frost. I've on the downward slop for February's step totally which I surprisingly breezed through. Yesterday I ended up doing 16K steps even though I'd expected to just hit 12K, but having to go out for supplies when I got home (and managing to forget my wallet three times when I was going up) helped me hit that high.

I finally succumbed and listened to Jean-Michel Jarre's "Oxygene" . I had heard the pedestrian "Part IV" on the radio and when certain people started gushing about how futuristic it was it just turned me off. It seemed a slight improvement on "Magic Fly" by the French Space. The cod SF cover of of the earth being peeled to reveal a skull was another turn off for me, a good idea badly executed. This album was twenty years after the first fully electronic album , the soundtrack to "Forbidden Planet" by Louis and Bebe Barron.

Anyway I added the second album and have just discovered there is a third one to listen too nad must say I was impressed. It is not pedestrian for large parts and the second album carries more of a sonic punch, which has now whetted my appetite for the third album.

It just shows that it's not a good idea to dismiss music on a snippet, though I don't see me litening to Westlife or Steps any time soon.

It's Friday , wrap up and have a good one.

Don't Give Me Space(s)

There is one thing , well there are a lot of things , that so called data suppliers and system designers seem unable to grasp. The one I'm on about is the processing of leading and trailing spaces in data strings. While this may be required for data formatting in say a Word document or on a web page , it should never be treated as an integral part of the data. At this point to have to remember that computers are essentially dumb and just do what they are told ...... perfectly  ..... too perfectly at times.

So at work I find that on certain systems , searches and comparisons are unable to take into consideration spurious leading and trailing spaces , when the simple application of the trim function (preferably on data entry , but also in the actual search / comparison)  would save a lot of messing about. To me FIVE = FIVE  . Doesn't it? Oh no the second on has an extra trailing space! The n there's also case sensitivity which should be i the control of the user but often isn't.

Anyway the thing that got me going on this was the changing of my iTunes id. Fairly simple I though, until verification of the new email. Then I kept getting password doesn't match error. Tried the old . the new and my nick name. Nothing worked. Then thought , no , it can't be , there was a space at the front of the email field but because of kerning it was hardly noticeable. Removed it , and it worked. Why couldn't Apple trim the input ? Or are leading and trailing spaces allowable in a name?

Thought this gave me an excuse to post Space Is Deep by Hawkwind , featuring one of my favourite saxophone solos of all time, starting with some brilliant drone guitar about 3:20 , though listening to this it sounds more like a synthesiser , but who cares it is brilliant.