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 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.