Sunday 7 May 2017

Sunday Morning


And it hardly looks like summer, the ground is wet and the clouds are grey and it's cold out at the moment. Yesterday the five o' clock EFL League Two program was very exciting , if heartbreaking for Hartlepool fans, and their most famous one Jeff Stelling. Sky have cruelly put it up on their web site here , am I evil for sharing. The thing is they will be winning next season and that will put a smile on his face. The coverage was far more animated that the Premier League coverage early in the day.

Anyway it's Sunday morning and I have some much to do today I can't begin the think about it. I have a more reliable step counter (I think, for my Million Step Challenge, I'd hit 68K steps in the first six days and this was missing, I reckon about 10K steps from Thursday and Friday). I'm using Google Fitness and manually recording my daily steps on Google Sheets.

Anyway I will leave to with John Martyn's "May You Never" for my #ATuneaDayinMay sequence. I have a feeling I won't keep this going, but this is a week so far and I have had only one deviation with David Bowie's "All The Madmen" , but I did have to include that.

So have a brilliant Sunday my friends, either relax or do something really fun and positive.

Saturday 6 May 2017

Sometimes The Dream is ... Well ... Weird


I had a dream last night. The bit I remembered was looking out of my window on to may neighbours' garage / extension (they don't have one) to see their big cat sitting on the roof. Then I something and said something along the lines of "Bugger .. look at that..." A rather large snake appeared and made short work of the cat ... my neighbours' cat world never get bested by a snake. Just a totally weird dream.

I have found a solution to my Step Counter problem, I installed Google Fitness and then found a "Track Workouts" button in Samsung Health, switching it on seems to have let it capture the steps I'm making, I will be able to certify that tomorrow.

Anyway today I got my drone and crashed it three times, also got a few photos out of it. My new Canon printer has been set up and used to print a couple of duplex sheets. I also want to print a couple of CDs so am going to try that tomorrow, as well as mowing the lawn and watching the Championship season come to an end.

I also want to look at printing a copy of The Hawkwind Log from the album "XIN Search of Space". I got a vinyl copy of the album to add to my collection for the wonderful Barney Bubbles cover and packages , but the Log would complete it but an original copy would set be back about fifty quid. I managed to acquire a PDF version of it, so that is a challenge for me as well.

It's time for bed so I'll leave with "Hair Like Brian May Blues" by Half Man Half Biscuit for my #ATuneaDayinMay sequence, sleep well my friends.


Friday 5 May 2017

Sometimes The Plan Just Falls Apart


It's that thing called life. On Monday I started my Million Step Challenge, but my phone started playing up , which I was using as my tracker. My printer failed so I bought a new "small footprint" one, and I bough a new phone. The new phone had a major flaw so I got another one, which seemed to be doing the business, but yesterday I took a walk down to Denton Burn and I thought my phone wasn't tracking my steps, well the S-Health app on my Sony Xperia XA phone wasn't.

A walk to the Post Office depot this morning proved it wasn't tracking correctly last night, and today it stopped again (it's more that 200 steps from Wildflower Cafe back to work, even if it is downhill, and it recorded 800 steps to get there, though with my old phone it recorded closer to 1500 steps. So my step recorder doesn't seem to be working, so I will have to choose another pedometer app. For the first time in two months I haven't hit 10K steps in a day according to the app. Still it's another challenge to get that sorted.

Then my printer, and it is very good, but obviously some new previously unknown definition of the word small, but I have managed to deal with it and fit it in with all the other stuff on my desk.

That's life , if stuff were guaranteed it might become very boring. My life is certainly not that (although it may seem that way to you).

Anyway it is late for me, although I will probably wake up in a few hours, but one of my #ATuneaDayinMay, is Kevin Ayers' "May I" (in English this time, I let you have the French one on Monday) , but if I remember rightly this features a young Mike Oldfield on guitar.

Sleep well my lovely friends.



Thursday 4 May 2017

How Mad Must I Be?


One of the the problems with anything new is that you have to learn how to use it. One of the benefits of the Sony Xperia XA is that I can use my bluetooth headphones but I hadn't sorted random play so I went for "The Man Who Sold The World " album by David Bowie.

"Width of A Circle" has that ace opening riff and goes on for eight minutes or so then next.....

.... next .....

    .......next .....

Black and White Madman Sells The World
"All The Madmen". I had forgotten how awesomely alien and scary this song is, and it is truly wonderful. Like when I first heard it 45 or so years ago , it still sound as fresh and threatening as ever. The dark malevolent spirit of Bedlam and abandoned Victorian asylums when the inmates have been left behind to fend for themselves.

The cover of the album was the two colour black and white Bowie not the original dress cover, and the song cuts your mind in black and white slices veering from rock to creepy children's song with some disconcerting woodwind sections.









I know this song has nothing to do with theme of May but it ii a song that hit me as hard this morning as when I first heard hit. It's frightening but you don't want it to finish... like fraying rope on your sanity .. you become more and more frightened that it's going to break .. and after five minutes ... wel did my mind break?

You know what I'm like , would I have been different had I not heard this?  Probably


For better or worse?

We'll never know

Listen and Experience

Tomorrow is Friday.

So Much For May Songs

Games For May - 1967

I was going to post a tune a day in May but I thing two songs in four days has scuppered that idea, although I will maintain the May theme if I can, and today's will be "See Emily Play" by Pink Floyd which features the line "Games For May" the titles of summer events Pink Floyd were involved in around 1967.

This week has been a little fraught to say the least, starting the Million Step Challenge then my Samsung Note becoming unreliable, replacing it with a Huawei P8 that wouldn't run the Barclays banking app (this has been the situation since January with no resolution in sight. Huawei blamed Barclays, Barclays pretend nothing is wrong much like Apple. EE gave me a refund on condition I bought another phone. I pointed out it wasn't actually fit for purpose and they replied "we just sell the phones"


Anyway I ended up with a Sony Xperia XA which was much cheaper and isn't too bad, apart from slow start up. I'm also worried it is not recording my steps properly . What I was sure was 4K steps recorded on the Samsung (home to Denton Burn) was recorded as less than 2K steps. Tomorrow I will walk to the Post Office Depot to pick something up and that should be about 2.2K . If it's less I will know I have a problem.

Anyway if I post another May Song tonight I could be back up to speed tonight, though I am feeling very tired.

So that;s what's happened this week so far, I'm sure it's not finished yet.

Monday 1 May 2017

...and Another and Another


It's May Day and the first day of my Million Step Challenge , and what happens? The phone I use to track my steps finally gives up the ghost (well it's a bit like Meg Shelton, it keeps pretending it's OK then when you want to do something returns to it's death state) , but I have just gone for a new phone. The old one probably just needs wiping and reflashing, but I think it's quicker to go with a new one.

The old one was a Samsong Note 4 and the new one is a Huawei P8 Lite with a much faster processor and apparently greater reliability that Samsung. We will see. It took and age to copy my stuff but then found it needs a nano SIM and the Note has a micro SIM, so have to sort that tomorrow.

I managed to get my step data over and I have managed to clear 13K steps today, that's six miles which is good considering the technological problems. I think I've had enough technological failures today and intend to be a bit closer to normal tomorrow.

So it's back to work tomorrow, and I will leave you with "Puis Je" by Kevin Ayers, so we have the first two #ATuneaDayinMay songs on the first day, it's one to hold in reserve in case I miss a day.

Time for bed 

One Thing Leads To Another


My phone has been playing up, but I have a feeling it's the battery, so I ordered one online. It came quickly, I put it in and nothing. I tried leaving it charging a few times , but nothing. My current battery just seems a bit temperamental and can shut the phone down when it gets down to less than 30% charge. So today I will hopefully buy a new battery (hopefully from the Asian guy in the Grainger Market near Pumphreys coffee, reasonably priced and knows his stuff but the battery is not a Samsung - the last one lasted over a year for a tenner so that's good, my current Samsung one has lasted six months BUT it had been sitting in a drawer for over a year so you know).

Anyway to return the faulty battery I need to print off a label and an email, then I find my printer has decided it's not printing three colours including black. The printer is an Epson, and prints CDs and has been fine, but it's way past it's sell bay date (I do have a grammatical problem with when I should use "past" and "passed" so apologies if I get it wrong).

The point is the the failure of by phone then just highlighted the failure of my printer when I needed it. My printer is like a spare tire, I only need it every so often. Anyway I managed to find a Canon printer for under £50 that prints CDs , is also does double sided printing and uses wifi, so I've ordered that here , it's not a scanner but I can use a camera or the local library for that.

So I have a feeling that this Samsung battery may sit around for a year in a drawer too.

The thing is I need my phone to track my steps for my Million Step Challenge that starts today, and I need to maintain 11.5K steps a day. SO far I have done 104 steps, but I still haven't taken drugs or had a shower.

So do I do the #ATuneaDayinMay with May themed music? I did one in 2012 here, but that was just a post a day in May and I did 37 posts that month, and you can see lots of link failures due to the fact that technology changes, companies go to the wall, and things don't work any more, much like the initial reason for this post.

I will start with Queen's "Keep Yourself Alive" which features Dr. Brian May on guitar , no synthesisers and a great phased guitar intro and great lyrics, which was one of the reasons I bought it straight away when I heard it on John Peel. Amazingly this doesn't appear on Queen's Greatest Hits. I loved Queen's singles but the first album I liked was "Sheer Heart Attack" still one of my favourite Queen discs.

It looks beautiful outside so I thing a wander into town to track down a new battery is called for.

Have a great Bank Holiday Monday my friends