Recording: Playing with the ipod recording gadget I bought in Portland: A quick violin practice of Pachelbel Canon in D. It’s not to concert standard by any means (several obvious mistakes there), and my first real attempt at sitting down and preparing Jesu joy of man’s desiring for Hannah and Joe Wrigley.
Thanks to dsaxena, I’ve taken interest in the 10,000 Maniacs. They’re pretty cool. I think I’d heard of them ages ago but until now ignored them. I’m listening to “Eat for two” as I write this. It reminded me to mail one of the girls who recently left the office to check on how she’s getting on. A friend just went off on paternity leave, hope he’s getting on ok too (for USians: this is probably a very British/European legal thing, but men can take limited leave too here – which is obviously pretty cool for my friend whose wife gave birth last weekend).
dsaxena amused me with his latest blog entry about picking up a random hitchhiker, that’s cool. Unfortunately, we live in a world of such mass hysteria and paranoia that it’s also probably a pretty rare event by now. We mutually distrust everyone and think everyone is a witch (terrorist) who is out to get us. Did you know that less than 2,000 people died as a direct result of a terrorist incident around the whole world last year, according to U$ government figures I saw cited on American TV*? (around 700 were in Iraq – and they only choose to “account” for certain limited incidents). So, on the one hand we have millions dying from hunger or from AIDS (not helped by certain religious nuts’ views on contraception – would you rather people died from AIDS as some kind of curse then?) and on the other, a few random people – equivalent to statistical noise – are enough to get George and fellow morons ripping away at an otherwise mostly peaceful society we live in.
Photo: One of the ML300 development boards, hooked up to a hardware debugger.
I’m at home this morning, having gone to bed at a more sane hour of the day. Lo and behold, I’m up at a sane time without having to cut short on sleep and without having to smash too many alarm clocks for once. This place is a mess, so many receipts, invoices and other assorted bits of paper. My receipt for the Amsterdam flight turned up in the mail yesterday. I need to check everything’s good with atp as I’ve only received an email confirmation (which might be all they generally send).
Today, I need to get articles wrapped up, start planning for the next set, and go through some proposal documentation for Debra, in collaboration with Frank. I’ve got some ecos work that’s ongoing, must go out and vote at some point, a talk to write and assorted other stuff. I’ve switched from Nutella to Cadbury’s chocolate spread for my breakfast (due to someone else’s acquired nut allergy) and realised I don’t really care, just so long as the spread on my morning bagels/toast is very chocolatey. I also recently sent my old driving instructor an SMS (around the time that I finally bothered to check the DSA website – UPDATE: test now booked for June 21). Although certain “schools” of motoring won’t get you a test within a million years of your desired time, it is actually possible if you are prepared to use the DSA website at the last minute. I’ll get onto that, it’s silly that I’ve learned to drive but don’t yet have the paperwork.
Jon.
* But did they bother to point out how small that figure was? Nope. US TV really fascinates me. It’s generally so unbelievably crap that you wonder how any civilised nation could tollerate it. Finally, I realised that it’s so crap that the smart people don’t watch it any more or end up having to have PVR type equipment just to make it bareable. At least they get BBC World, sometimes.