Friday Morning

I was thinking August would be difficult to keep up my steps because of my Liver Biopsy at the start of the month, but surprisingly that's not actually been an issue hitting 20K steps on a couple of days and sitting with a 30K step surplus and close of play yesterday.

I was also thinking that #August50 was an impossible target but after this post I only need to post 18 more entries before the end of the month and we still have two weeks to go, so that's nine posts in each of the next two weeks which is more than doable (is that a word? and how many times have I asked that question).

The problem with doing an hour's walk it that it takes an hour of your time and  to hit my 11K a day that does take two hours and i often think that could be better spent doing someting else.

On my walk to work I am always looking for photo opportunities and vary my routes, but always in the direction of work (essentially Newcastle City Centre) from home. I seldom deviate from this direction except when I have to pick someting up from the Post Office, and to be quite honest I prefer traversing parkland to urban areas.

Walking is a simple form of exercise and anyone can do it and make it interesting. I always found gyms soul destroying but others swear by them, but it's different strokes for different folks.

Today on my walk in I kept with Mike Nesmith and listened to "Tropical Campfires" for the first time, and though it covers some standards such as "Brazil" and "Begin the Beguine" more than adequately the original stuff is excellent, I particularly liked the instrumental "One". Specific late period Mike Nesmith songs are difficult to find on Youtube (ie they are not there) but I found this full concert from 2012 at Union Chapel for your enjoyment, which includes a few songs from "The Prison"

While it is grey , it is Friday and we have a wonderful weekend to look forawd to. Enjoy

Aretha IS Aretha

It was sad  that we lost Aretha and I've seen lots of "RIP" Aretha posts on Facebook, and people suddenly people doing the Facebook sadness as though Aretha were a close family member. It was the same with David Bowie, George Michael, Freddie Mercury and Lemmy and any artist you can think of.

All of a sudden their artistic output is halted.

Thanks to human brilliance and science and things like Facebook ,we can share our memories and listen to Aretha's sing and even watch her perform anywhere we are on our phones, tablets and computers.

I shared her Blues Brothers sequence singing "Think" which summed up  a small part of her brilliance, but she had a brilliant range of singing styles.

I feel for her family, and they will be grieving quite rightly, but her fans should be celebrating what she has done for them ,and enjoy the music she made because all of it made you feel uplifted and feel better. That's what music does for you and and song featuring Aretha will make you feel good.

I will leave you with her collaboration with George Michael, the appropriately titled "I Knew You Were Waiting For Me" .

Have a great Friday and enjoy some of Aretha's music. Remember the wealth of great music she has given us.

Reading The Garden

Tonight when I got home, I decided to read and listen to Mike Nesmith's "The Garden". It's surreal and follows on from The Prison, The narrative is fairly simple and the story can be read as you listen to the album. The narrative is split into chapters that take as their influes seven paintings by Monet:

1. The Artist's Garden of Giverny (1900)
2. A Bend in the Epte River, Near Giverny (1888)
3. Vertheuil in Summertime (1879)
4. Valley of the Petite Creuse (1889)
5. Poppy Field in a Hollow Near Giverny (1885)
6. Wisteria (1920)
7. Waterlilies and Japanese Bridge (1899)

The album clocks in at 55 minutes but it does seem to pass more quickly than that, or it seemed to for me. The Wiki page is here.

While you don't have to have read "The Prison" itis referred to many times in "The Garden" and it does help if you have experienced "The Prison" fully.

I enjoyed both, though I don't feel I have to reread either but can still enjoy the excellent music.

There isn't too much from either album on youtube so I have included the opener from "The Prison" to give you a taste.

Link Past Geek Talent

I often get requests from people to add me to their networks on Linked In and I usually add them no problem, mostly they are recruitment wallahs , but today took the opportunity to trawl though my network list and cull cetrain people, mainly people who didn't have a photo or who have crossed me since we linked up.

The big surprise was the number of people who I had just forgotten about, and the surprising titles of some who I actually have friendships with and respect for.

I remeber after my redundancy at EE that I was really happy about (though not how they were after) I spent a couple of months with Geek Talent who had a brilliant recruitment concept that used social media connections including Linked In to create relationships between you and recruitment targets They've come a long way since then and were using a lot of software which I found impressive but felt I was swimming the deep end, but the people I worked with knew their stuff and could translate any ideas or notions that I had into something that was actually useful. Their site is worh a visit to find out more about the.

Rather than a music video I've included a video about Geek Talent featuring among others my friends Dominic (the MD) and Keith.

It is surprising how a Linked In request sent me off on a tangent to write this post.

First Visit To The Garden

A while ago I bought "The Prison" a book and album that should be read an litened to together. I read and listened on the train journey to Edinburgh and was quite surprised that I finsihed the book as the last piece of music finished and we rolled into Edinburgh.

I bought the follow up, "This Garden" but as yet haven't done the read / listen thing. On my walk to work this morning I thought it may be nice to listen to the (largely) instrumental album and it was particularly appropriate on my walk through parts of Nunsmoor (some pictures here), although my headphone power ran out halfway through the penultimate piece "Wisteria".

I may actually try to read the book tonight just to see what the experience is like. While Mike Nesmith is a far better songwriter than book writer, it is a engaging concept , and as I have mentioned previously done particularly well withe Camel's take on Paul Gallico's "Snow Goose". I would encourage you to try all three of these, each one will only take you around forty minutes and will definitely treat you to a new concept of enhancing your reading.

We have a lot of cloud, but some blue sky. Enjoy your Thursday.

Let Forever Be

Finally finished "How To Stop Time" an easy / hard read but with an upbeat ending so happy about that, and now I've started on "The Fouteenth Letter" by Claire Evans. It doesn't look like the sort of thing that I normally read but has started very well and I shall inform you how it progresses. I have started other books and films that have an explosive start and then you spend ages waithing for something to happen and nothing ever does. YOu do need something to keep your attention, and the Matt Haig book certainly does that.

I don't know if it's me or my computer or my ISP but everything seems to be getting much slower, possibly due to the number of adverts, and the number of security bits that then they try to bypass. I don't want to stay logged in to most sites, especially not Paypal or Facebook, and I don't want Firefox or Chrome to remember my passwords either.

I've just listed some more CDs on Discogs as I need to make some more space and I do have digital copies of most of my CDs. I've just list a lot of Paul Weller if he's your thing. On the one hand it's difficult getting rid of stuff but you have to think if you are not going to play them again then someone else may have them.

It's the same with books and DVDs, if you are not going to use then make room, space is good.

The stuff I don't think will sell quickly are dropped in to Charity shops, mainly the Westgate Ark shop round the corner from me.

So another day like many other days, skies are grey ,but yesterday I sorted a couple of major work things, then came home and watched an episode of Gotham and Black Sails before retiring to bed. Bruce Wayne's car is getting more and more Batmobile like every week.

I have some web updates to do for Bob Armstrong and Woodlands Plants and at Art exhibition Ivelina Goverdovskaya: "Work in Progress" at Arch 16 to attend tonight so not a lazy day today.

For some reason (maybe talking about art) the excellent Michel Gondry video for The Chemical Brothers "Let Forever Be" came to mind, so I'll sign off with that.

Phone Blinkers

For lunch I nipped to the Mean Eyed Can for a couple of Empanadas and a diet coke (see here), and found it almost amusing the number of people sat in the sun, or walking but engrossed in the mobile devices almost oblivious to anything else.

While I listen to music (and now radio) on my phone I very seldom do anything that distracts me for walking or whatever. If I want to take a picture or video I stop and make sure that I am not blocking anyone or at risk of running into anything.

While listening to John Niven he told me about a book "Makin' Tracks" by Debbie Harry and Chris Stein that resulted in him getting into Television.

So although phones are very useful they do seem to act as blinkers for so many people, blinding them to all that is going on around them. Having said that I have been guilty the odd time of concentrating too much on my phone and nearly walked into to a person or stationary object.

Listening To John Niven

On Sunday 6Music broadcast a show by one of my favourite authers John Niven. The series is called Paperback Writers and has a writer talking for an hour about music that has shaped him and influenced him.  If you want to catch it (before September 2018) you can listen to it here.

Now I'd missed it on Sunday, but then remembered there;s a BBC Radio iPlayer app that you can download onto your phone, and thought "Aha" . As well as music and podcasts I can listen to radio shows on demand on my phone.

So that was my listening for my walk to work this morning. He opened with Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Up Around The Bend" a song I loved since I first heard that razor sharp opening riff, although the lead guitar parts seem remarkably muted compared to the main riff.

He played a lot of great music including Television's "See No Evil" which I tried to emulate in my song "Communication" for The Bok  (and failed totally), and actually pointed out a very dark concept of Middle of The Road's "Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep" that I hadn't countenanced before about losing your mother as a child.

He also talked about and played a song from The Wishing Tree, the band he was a member of in his early twenties who, from the song he played, well worth a listen.

Basically this has given me another option for listening on my walks, which is all very good.

And Now Blue Sky

After the rain of yesterday, and the cloudy start to today we are now starting to see blue skies with fluffy white clouds. So that obviously opens the door for The Orb's "Little Fluffy Clouds" which is probably thirty years old now. It is amazing how time has flown but that is th enature of the beast.

I also think about how, when I started this blog I would sometimes post two or three lines maybe fifty words. I do a few more these days.

One of the good things is that technology does improve over time, although it does allow us to waste more time using it.  This blofg for instance, a lot of people will see as a waste of time.

We can now wastch TV and read books on our mobile devices, as well as playing games, though I've yet to find Quake or Doom for Mobile, all the games are far to sophisticated for my capabilities.

Anyway this is just a short post towards my #August50 project target, so enjoy the rest of your day.

Clouds and Total Football

Looking out of the window and there is an amazing cloud formation overhead. Here's my nstagram post.

Well it looks like the site visits have taken another dive, c'estla vie. The last two nights I have gone to bed early and this morning I was wide awake at 2:30.

I had woken from a dream but the dream was very influenced by the book I'm reading Matt Haig's "How To Stop Time" which is certainly a page turner but the main protagonist is possibly the most depressing since Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant. Both characters have a heavy burden but it does become wearing in the way it's presented., although other charaters do provide the hope and lighter sections.

The rain has taken a break so I may be able to walk into work to day and listen to some good music.

Today is the first round of the Carabao Cup and Preston North End are playing Morecambe, and on 6Music Chris Hawkins has just played "Total Football" by Parquet Courts so it has to be that doesn't it.

Have a good day everyone.

Sheets

Probably a good description of the rain I've woken up to thi smorning. Not quite biblical but if it keeps up like this I won't be doing much walking, I didn't do much yesterday either but luckily Friday and Saturday I walked quite a long way. so still ok for August.

It is the 13th, it is Monday, it is raining the sort of day when everything doesn't seem exactly good or inspiring but it has given me something to at least start off this post.

One of the things with these blog posts is that it does allow me to share music that I either like or have eard and found interesting. One of the problems is that I only have a finite capacity to listen, but still manage to fit in quite a lot. I still haven't read and listened to Mike Nesmith's "The Garden" yet even though I had planned to this weekend. That is a record from my yeenage years that I completely missed. I knew about "The Prison" because it was the big box with a book, but at the time it didn't hold any pull for me, but having read and listened to it that has now changed., and I do want to do "The Garden"

This morning on 6Music John Hilcock played "Patience" by Gorgeous Bully which is rather excellent and you can find them here. Too often we always keep going to the past but we should always be open to new things., or life would be very boring, I think you should take a listen you may enjoy it too. Gorgeous Bully have been going for at least four years so it's another band who have past me (and a lot of others by).

It looks to be brightening up now, which is good, but now it's time for a shower. Have a good Monday everybody.

Visits and Numbers

Since I restarted this #August50 the average number of vists, reads or hits per post has probably increased by about 50%. I still don't get that many visitors, no one is going to ask me for an endorsement or product placement, and it may be just robots reacting to the increase in activity on the blog, but it's an interesting phenomenon for me.

The skies are still greay so I suppose summer may be taking a break, but I think that weather is just a very complex process. No doubt people will be telling us that we haven't had a summer again, even though we are in the midst of a drought.

Anyway this is an exuse to share "Goldrush" by Death Cab For Cutie from the album "Thank YOur For Today" which reminds me so much of something else but I can't remember what. I love this video which takes the Bob Dylan "SubteraneanHomesick Blues" lyric sheet format. So I thought I'd include that video as well.


Death Cab For Cutie was a song by The Bonzo Dog Band and I just found some out takes from the Beatles "Magical Mystery Tour" film of them performing it. So I've gone off on lots of tangents and provided you with three videos for you to enjoy.

Hope your Sunday is going well.

Precipitate

It's been raining during the night, which is a good thing. Still too heavy to walk in, but not threat of biblical floods here in Fenham. I'vewoken up fairly demotivated, and not even had a shower but think a shower will wake me up an dmakeme a little less lethargic .

ven if I stopped writing now this still counts towards my #August50, but I don't feel that I am going to make that at this moment in time.

I had some weird dreams including my friend Juli getting a bubble perm and suiting in it a large school hall where I was trying to take a photograph of an amazing sight through the windows of the moon and the eather next to each other shaded in blue, but I couldn't get a decent shot sho went into the field outside to get a less restricted shot and they had disappeared and all there was was a big blue IKEA like cube.

That is roughly all I can remember of it but I am sure it would provide some psychiatrist or analyst a bit to go one, but as Half Man Half Biscuit stated in "San Antonio Foam Party" which appeared on their excellent "Cammell Laird Social Club" album from 2002:

"Your weird dreams

Don’t impress in any way

In dreams

Weird things are mundane and everyday

Strange to me would be

Buying a loaf

And coming straight home"

Such is the nature of dreams. So that's provided a song for this post though there is quite a lot more music that I do want to share with you, maybe I will take a chance to do that later. Now it's shower time, the maybe get a paper, do a crossword, write a song

Enjoy the rainy Sunday my friends.

Going Mobile

It's a hell of a long time since my daughter Juliet palmed off her old mobile to me introducing me to having a mobile phone. Since then they have metamophosed from handsets with the hus plus of being able to text people, and if you were lucky actually send a picture to the hand held computers that we have now.

You still see the odd person with the old Nokias (thatill work)  or the Doro's (but even they have a smart version now) but I am still waiting for my phaser / teleporter Star Trek one to turn up.

It used to be that if you were meeting up with someone you would specify a time and place and you would all meet up  and all will be fine. No it's texting ,Google Calendars , messaging and the like. We often don't even use our phones and phones prefering to use some form of messaging, and there is an absolute deluge of them.

It's another glorious morning so I will get off, feeling very good although my left shoulder is still painful, but that should be rectified when I go through the physiotherapy.

This is an excuse to play The Who's "Going Mobile" from one of my favourite of their albums, "Who's Next".

Have a brilliant Saturday everyone.

Moonfall

I was watching an episode of Stan Lee's "Lucky Man" and saw a speeded up timelapse sequenceeof the moon falling towards a river, and thought "Moonfall" sounds quite lovely.

It is Friday and it has been an interesting day, and despite feeling tired and getting some aches in my right side I've still nearly clocked up 20K steps and expect to do something similar next weekend too, with a walk to Wylam with Fiona, Mark, Molly and Kirsty, and an opportunity to give Juliet her blue vinyl copy of "A Life Less Ordinary" by Ash.

I am quite tired, but thought Iwould leave a note  to potentially get a little nearer #August50. This means I am averaging 2 a day so far in August, and incidentally the last post was post number 1666 in a pointer towards the Great Fire of London. It was just a small coincidence that I thought I would mention which makes this post 1667.

So we are now in 2018 steaming towards 2019 and it's 22:28 and maybe it is time for my bed.

I just been flicking through a pile of CDs and there is stuff in there I didn't know i had, I mean my taste is impeccable, but it's a bit worrying when you have stuff you didn't know you had. I am slowly putting things for sale on Discogs but that's the merest scratch on the surface.

Still I will leave you with something that I know I have before I go to bed, the wonderful "Pleasure" by Baxter Dury.

A Million Bright Ambassadors of Morning

It's Friday Morning and the Transfer Window is shut. It's cloudy but the sun is fighting through. I really don't think the #August50 is a goer. while I've walked a long way today I've got an ache in my side and think th eweather is draining me again.

Yesterday I was hoping for a decent amount of posting but couldn't get the inspiration to write, and that's what I feel with this post, and if  I keep hitting a brick wall like this then I can't really do it.

I could possibly post a video or a link but I do like to write around 250 words to ensure that I am actually saying something. However there is not much I have to say.

Over the last couple days on my walks I have revisited my favourite ever album, "Future Games" by Spirit, and while it doesn't contain any of my favourite songs, even by Spirit, overall it is a brilliantly complete album, a veritable film for the ears.

That was followed by possibly my favourite Pink Floyd album, "Meddle" which does contain my favorite Pink Floyd song "Echoes" which takes up side two of the vinyl incarnation of the record. This was also used for a great part of the soundtrack to the 1973 Australian surf movie "Crystal Voyager". The title of the post is a line from "Echoes".

So I did manage to find something to write about, and the weekend is a little bit closer so things are now looking good.

Enjoy yoursef.

AM

Another beautiful day and I am actually on course to make #August50. There's still a long way to go and it may all crash and burn but I am keeping pace and hopefully can find something interesting to share with you , roughly on average twice a day  during th emonth of August.

So far today I have been to the post office, played a couple of moves on Facebook Scrabble, got off a couple of business related emails (mainly to get myself out of doing work) and the garden is looking OK after last nights mow.

I decided to try a MeatStack (in the Grainger Market) burger for lunch and though I am not  a burger person it was absolutely excellent. While I was in the Grainger Market I got a battery replaced in my watch and one of the problems with having a lot of esoteric watches is that batteries do run out (if they are battery operated). I probably have about ten watches , three of which are running , two may now not be working and the rest need a new battery.

So this has been the first half of my day.

It's Sixty Minutes After Midnight Therefore 1 AM

Maybe the temporal nature needs a temporal song and what better than Clocks by The Buena Vista Social Club with Coldplay from the first "Rhythms Del Mundo" album.

A Garden

It's strange how sometimes you find the time and energy to do things, in adverse circumstances. Due to a couple of unexpected events at work I ended up missing lunch, and after rising at 4:30 am I thought tonight I would be very tired.

While I am tired, I got home and looked at my back lawn that was more like a lush field and decided that it was time  to mow it. Four lawnmower bags later it was done then I came it and caught up on the latest episode of the excellent Gotham. I cut a fish finger sandwich for tea after taking drugs so it wasn't too musch of a surprise that I had a hypo, but that 's what you get with a lot of physical effort and not musch sustenance.

The problem is, in this weather you don't really feel like eating too much.

I've just watched the clouds turn red as the sun goes down in 'Nam so I am not sure if we will get rain anytime soon.

Anyway although I am a little tired I think I am improving, and as I have been talking garden things I will share The Levellers "This Garden" with you, though I could have shared Mike Nesmith's "The Garden" , his follow to "The Prison" the former of which I have still to read and tell you about.

Sleep well my friends.

Your Password

There is so much idiocy about security. Banks tell us to hide our PIN, enter it under a cover so you can't see what you are typing, treat everyone as a potential thief and then make your cards contactless, no ID required (apart from odd random PIN requests).

I've always believed that much more than four passwords becomes a security risk, because people start writing them down. The only secure place for a password is in your head, and it has to be something that you can remember, maybe a phrase with a smattering of numbers and other characters.

When I worked for Littlewoods on their IT systems, the backspace was considered a valid character for a password, so if you made a mistake, you had to completely start again with your log in.

There are systems that won't allow sequences, repetitions, numbers, special characters and these again generate security risks because people end up writing down passwords.

There are even software packages that remember your passwords for you. Think about that. You are entrusting all your logins to a piece of software, that is the digital equivalent of your notebook that you give to someone else for safekeeping. I was also amazed to see the number of password notebooks for sale on Amazon, it's like people want to give away their information, although if you think of your Tesco and Boots clubcards that track all your purchases, and Facebook, where you publicly share so much personal information.

Facebook, Google and PayPal always ask me if I want to stay logged in, now how insecure is that? You enter a system securely, and when you are finished, you log out. The really annoying thing is that they use cookies to remember your preferences. Cookies are by their nature transient, and I always clear my web cache because I do web work and want a clean browser cache, which means all the particular site starts asking me for all sorts of things. To log into Facebook or this blog, I am asked three times if I want to save my password.

Though again, this blog is me sharing my thoughts with you.

I have had many arguments about IT security over the years, and it seems to me, often people do things because they can or it gives them control, rather than because it's a good idea.

Fingerprints, Face Recognition and Retina scanning are more security options, but my friend Nic managed to lock himself out of his iPhone when he accidentally sanded off his fingerprints.

So what else to play but "Security" by The Saints.

I Wonder

After yesterday going on about Roman Numerals I thought what is the Roman Numeral for Zero? It turns out there isn't one, but medieval scholars used the word "nulla" to signify zero. In IT we used to be familiar with the concept of "null" (and those who know what they are talking about still are).

Zero is the numeric representation of no items, as in "I have zero pounds in my bank account", but it is a numeric value, it is one less than one or one more than minus one, though this summation could be done with any numbers. The formula:

x - x = 0

is always true, though mayb Stephen Hawking, Andrew Wiles or someone else could possibly dispute that successfully with me.

Null on the other hand is a complese absence, it cannot be used in computation whereas zero can, and will often cause systems to crash if returned as an answer. Null is the bane of any programmer's life, in that it is often valid but you can't actually do anything with it, and no doubt I will come across it in some calculation today.

I'm still feeling absolutely shattered and  despite have nine hours in bed last night after watching Black Sails and Nightcrawler, I didn't feel up to walking into work, so though this would be the first time in a long time that I walked into work having done less that a thousand steps.

Then I decided to get off the bus at the BBC and walk down Barrack Road from there thus giving me a couple of thousand steps.

I thought I'd include "Countdown" by Lindsey Buckingham from his album "Out of the Cradle" as I love the song and it's vaguely numerically themed.

The sun is shining so it should be a good day.

III II

Well this is my second attempt of trying to do three posts in a day, and today I have at least started, so that means that I am probably on course for #August50. I could stop writing here, but I thought using Roman Numerals for the title was and interesting departure.

I am so glad that we didn't stay with Roman Numeration and went for the decimal Arabic number system, although you do become used to whatever you grow up with. I someone want was brought up with Octal or Hexadecimal instead of Decimal that would be a fine number system for them.

Talking all this Roman stuff (and I watched four hours of  documentaries by Mary Beard on the genesis of Rome last Friday) reminds me of the WH Auden poem "Soldier on the Wall" that was turned into a song by Alex Harvey,  which I used as a soundtrack for some film I took of Vindolanda so I will share that with you.

Tonight I am feeling absolutely drained again, so there won't be any more writing today. I'm not even up to mowing the lawn, but maybe that's a good thing given the lack of rain.

Sleep well my friends.

I Am Not A Cyclepath

Coming off Nunsmoor Park this porning I was nearly hit by two #twikers (Tw@ Bikers) riding two abreast on the footpath despite their being a widish cycly path are on the road. I could have walked out in front of them but didn't fancy being hit myself and they road past oblivious to me.

The thing about being a cyclist is theat you should be aware of your surroundings or that that latest thing you are oblivious to may be a ten ton lorry. All cyclists I know are sensible and responsible but there are a hell of a lot who think that road based laws don't apply to them.

The humid weather is still draining on me, and I was reading an article on signs of mental exhaustion and these include getting irritated my minor things (twikers) , not sleeping (the ach in my left shoulder is keeping me awake), and a few other things.

I do feel I need some time away from everything, including work, but  the more you don't do things the more it just adds to the pile of things to be done. Rightly or wrongly there are no people who could pick up everything I can do at work, which on the one hand should make you more valuable but the reality is that people gloss over things and don't see you as part of the system, until you don't do what you do.

So the song that comes to mind is Spandau Ballet's gay anthem "Muscle Bound" which was always one of my favourites.