Time Sharing

When I started first in programming at Littlewoods we were given access that used a "Time Sharing System" which we were told would make it seem as though we were the only person using the system. It was a lie of course but we dealt with it.

In life we often have to work out how to share time between work , chores , stuff that needs doing , time to be alone, do what you want and rest , and spending time in a social environment with friends, family and loved ones. I try to load mine in favour of the last two, but each of these groups can also be subdivided into sub groups.

Today I have to go to work so that's eight hours out of my day , after six hours sleep, ninety minutes of getting up and showered and writing this, then an hour to walk in to work , to try and hit my 11K for today, but I need to get the bus home as I have a delivery from Iceland coming. How mundane is this post? Still these things may be the highlights of some people's lives.

Ideally aim to do what you want and enjoy , and be happy. Life is difficult and confusing at times, but if you do things you want, then life improves wonderfully.

So before I leave , here's #ATuneaDayinMay , what more appropriate that The Buzzcocks "Boredom" from the "Spiral Scratch" EP. This allows me to have a brief rant on the genre of "indie" music. Many "indie" bands are on major labels, so how can they be "indie". It's 1984 doublespeak (which the governments in the UK, USA and Russia seem to use as a matter of course where the words used mean the opposite of their real meaning) . "Spiral Scratch" however was real "indie" , the Buzzcocks first release which they organised end to end. Ironically in this digital age we all have the technology available to record and release stuff from our own bedroom or office.... and that is still on my "To Do" List.

I decided to include the whole of the EP for you so you have eleven minutes of real "indie" music.

Anyway, have a great Monday everybody.

Catching Up

Due to one thing and another , rain and Andrew and Glen's wonderful wedding , I didn't even hit 6K steps yesterday, although I am still 1K steps past the required target, so today I need to catch up.

As a start I thought I would walk down Two Ball Lonnen to Westgate Road, then back all the way up Wingrove Road to the Central Motorway , then along the Motorway to Morrisons, pick up a few essentials and walk back down Two Ball Lonnen then eventually home. That clocks in at 10.5 K steps which puts me just ahead of the required number but I need to do another few thousand. We shall see.

Yesterday I ran out of data on my EE phone plan. Because of EE's grabbing top up policy (like every mobile phone company) I am going to try not to buy a day add on. They put a time limit of a week on the data you buy, 1Gb would last me a fortnight, but there's not much one can do if you want to stay on the same number.

It's a bit weird not having information at your fingertips but if you walk along Westgate Road there is free on street wifi provided by the shops via XLN and it works (unlike As You Like It when I was at Andrew and Glen's wedding, which spent an age before timing out, like several bus companies I could mention), a sensible concept but mobile phone companies like EE won't like it.

Without data the step monitoring app doesn't update (but it records steps) , so having done 10.5K I wanted to hit 12K, but had to just guess and when I got home I found I'd done another 5.5K so that's 16K for today and I am back to 6K over my required target.

I wrote this in two parts as I was incredibly tired after my first walk, and still feel awfully tired and achey, almost as though I have the physical aches of 'flu' without the cold symptoms , I should have really had a bath , but it's too late so I will probably just go to bed.

I haven't really done much today apart from catch up on some TV (Broadchurch, The Fall, The Aliens, Doctor Who) and am enjoying Darwin's Armada although Charles Darwin liked a fight and hunting animals, odd as he wanted to be a clergyman.

So #ATuneaDayinMay, , what's it to be, it's just come to me , as my may walk today to catch up on my walking was a big rectangle we'll have Dave Brubeck's "Unsquare Dance", which all based on the handclap rhythm then everything hangs of that. The piano is almost superfluous.

There's a load of  other things I was going to write about but they will keep for another day.

Sleeping In

My body has stopped letting me sleep in at weekends. I used to be able to sleep til mid day quite easily. Now it's like I have an internal alarm that kicks me out of bed as early as 6 am, sometimes leaving me til 7 am. But both are a lot earlier that it used to be. My eyes are tired and my body and brain are, but something is pushing me to get up, and by the time I have washed and shaved I think I may as well have a shower and by that time I am awake and up.

So while it's 7:45 when I am writing this, I have done everything I mentioned and gone out and got the papers, done my first thousand steps of my Million Step Challenge , and need to iron a shirt or two because later I am going to Andrew and Glen's Wedding.

I need to update Song of The Salesman , and see if I can fly that drone again , write some songs (and more importantly record them) and walk at least another ten thousand steps and probably a lot more things.

I have ripped a couple of music DVDs including The Who at the Isle of White, Public Service Broadcasting at Brixton Academy and Van Der Graaf Generator at Metropolis Studios, because I am now so lazy I can't be bothered to get up and put the DVD in the player, though that same Sony Player plays the ripped DVDs from my home network as I become "Homo Sedens".

I also found a load of rare David Bowie songs on Youtube and need to update the MP3 tags and ad to my already vast Bowie collection, and although I've used it before I will use the Spiders from Mars version of "Holy Holy" which is not on official CD release but in my opinion one of Bowies's finest songs (but how many songs could you say that about). His original was good but a little pedestrian and both version are available in the Five Years Box Set here, a ittle expensive but ten discs for £90 is not that bad really.

Anyway I will let you listen to both versions so you get two candidates for #ATuneaDayinMay,  enjoy your Saturday my friends.

Stepping Into Space

I'm still ahead of the game on the Million Step Challenge and I am managing at least #ATuneaDayinMay musically. Today has been a grey day, but there wasn't any rain where I was, so I managed another 13K steps. That was helped by a working app and a walk into work this morning and a walk up to Wildflower for lunch and the back to work.

This weekend I may fall off a bit as I have two of my good friends Andrew and Glen geting married , although that is later in the day so I need to get my walking done early.

I have just tried booklet printing on my Canon Printer to print a copy of The Hawkwind Log to go with my vinyl copy of  "XIn Search of Space"  by Hawkwind. Some of the print is small , but for an original copy you would pay upwards of £50.

So it has to be "Master of The Universe" just a simple riff , six minutes of space rock to take you into your heavens , loved this as a teenager and it's a perfect song because anyone can pick up a guitar an play it, with only the most rudimentary musical knowledge.

Time for me to hit the sack, spacemen.

Stepping Out

Today is a bit grey and I am still just ahead of my target for my Million Step Challenge. The thing is we all can do a million steps , eventually, just by walking around, my slight problem is that I still have a target of 10K a day when it needs to be 11K a day, but this challenge allows me to slip back as long as I make up the deficit.

I'm finding some annoyances with my Sony Xperia XA, file management is really awkward and every time you connect to your computer to put stuff onto it it asks how you want to use your USB connection, then often mid transfer will finish the the transfer to ask you what you want to do with the USB connection. Also it wont block spam calls and texts. You have the option of blocking all calls (with some broad definitions like international, incoming and outgoing) but nothing about individual numbers. Apparently there are apps to do these tasks which I will look into.

Also you can copy and delete files using Windows Explorer but not move them , so you have to delete and recopy from the source.

I've managed to watch some TED talks on it and they are fine, but I lost all the downloads I had on the old Samsung Note, but they are all somewhere online.

Anyway it's time to start and see if I can hit 11K steps today (I did 13K yesterday), also I will be visiting Wildflower for lunch today and Fenham Fish Bar for tea , so that should be about 5K steps accounted for , as well as 5K from walking in.

I was going to use Joe Jackson's "Steppin' Out" but decided that John Kongos' "He's Gonna Step On You Again" was a better option. This is where The Happy Monday got "Step On" from.

It's Friday, It's weekend, have a good one.

**** IS A FOUR LETTER WORD

It always makes me laugh the concept of a four letter word being offensive, The sort of people who use that term and the sort who are continually looking to be offended. "ooh he used a four letter word!! How disgusting" , well I use lots of four letter words. At this point in this post I have used about fourteen four letter words . Are you offended. It's like the Americanish of the bathroom or the rest room or if you are really daring the john, actually there's no bath in there, and you don't go in there for a rest. It's for a wee or a poo.

Ironically I suppose a thing that offends me is people finding something to be offended by without actually checking it to see if it's actually offensive. Remember Monty Python's "Life of Brian".

People get offended by women breastfeeding , and an exposed female nipple is deemed mor eoffensive that an assault rifle by some people. I saw two armed policemen at Central Station with machine guns. That offended me.

 So four letter words, what about :

• WORK
• LOVE
• POLE
• HOPE
• NEWS
• WHIP
• STOP

The list could go one, but I think you get my point. If something is demonstrably bad you a free to be offended and take appropriate action, but not cos someone comes from Sunderland, wears a short skirt , feeds her baby , is a morris dancer, likes a kebab, wears a hat.... these are not reasons to take offense.

So we'll go for "Always Look On The Bright Side of Life" from Monty Python's "Life of Brian" because is cheerful , funny and will only offend those who want to be offended, so they won't be reading this..... or maybe they should be ... think how offended people could get with me.

Books, Evolution and Heavy Metal at Download

A lot of my reading recently have been influenced by books I've been reading , namely "Tom Waits on Tom Waits" (I don't know if the pun was intended) edited by Paul Maher and "The Age of Bowie" by Tony Morley , so I thought my next would be fiction, possibly in the realms of Michael Moorcock, JG Ballard or John Niven. I'm amazed to find this is the first time ever in this blog that I've mentioned JG Ballard as he's my favourite author. But no, I picked up "Darwin's Armada" (another FOPP capture from Edinburgh) by Ian McCalman and very good it is, essentially the grounding for the Theory of Evolution by Charles Darwin and contemporaries. Here's the blurb:

"Darwin's Armada tells the stories of Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Joseph Hooker and Alfred Wallace, four young amateur naturalists from Britain who voyaged to the southern hemisphere during the first half of the nineteenth century in search of adventure and scientific fame. It charts their thrilling voyages to the strange and beautiful lands of the southern hemisphere that reshaped the young mariners' scientific ideas and led them, on returning to Britain, to befriend fellow voyager Charles Darwin. All three crucially influenced the publication and reception of his Origin of Species in 1859, one of the formative texts of the modern world. 

For the first time the Darwinian revolution of ideas is seen as a genuinely collective enterprise and one that had its birth in a series of gripping and human travel adventures. Many of the most urgent ecological and social issues of our times are seen to be prefigured in this compelling story of intellectual discovery."

I do find it amazing that the idiotic anti thought concept of Creationism actually exists, but when you look at how easily people are influenced , a thoughtless concept that means you don't have to think becomes attractive to some people.

I'm agnostic, there might be a God, but I have certainly seen no evidence of a God in my lifetime and doubt I will. Also the "you can't prove that God doesn't exist" is not really a valid argument. The only God I will acknowledge is on Facebook here. In fact I just this minute signed up to his mailing list.

So today's #ATuneaDayinMay obviously has to be "Charlie" by The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing , who I first saw at the behest of my friend Gillian and recorded it on Spoongig here in November 2014. I found a live performance of them at Download at Donington and "Charlie" starts about three minutes in after some serious metal assault. I once described them as a cross between Anthrax and Chas and Dave. Watch the clip and you will see what I mean. Enjoy.

It's a beautiful day, so enjoy yourself and I hope to see you soon.