sea nerd blog
schueberfouer twenty fourteen
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septemberSeptember’s been rather good for me, for the arts. Now, compared to a professional, what I’m going to say is laughable, but for me, it’s rather good.
I took part in two arts events, Konscht am Gronn, and Poets Live in Paris. They both not just paid for themselves, but made a reasonable profit. The latter grossed €100, which even covered the train fare from & to Luxembourg. That’s never happened for me before! Poetry events need a lots to happen for books to sell well. First of all, the audience has to particularly enjoy the event, which means the poets have to read well. I have to thank my fellow poets, Rod Mengham, Marc Atkins and Kate Noakes for their performances. Kate in particular teased the audience deliciously with her delivery. Secondly, the event itself has to work well. Everyone has to get there, enjoy things, feel comfortable, expect and want to buy poetry, and have no problems. I thank Pansy Maurer–Alverez for running a great poetry evening, and the staff of Carr’s for making such a good setting work. But, of course, most of all, I have to thank the audience for wanting to show their appreciation, and doing so by buying my books. Thank you, everyone! :-) There’s a video of the evening on the Paris Lit Up website. Thanks to Jason at Paris Lit Up for taking and posting it. 20.9.14 |
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Rod MenghamI heard Rod Mengham read last night (I managed to persuade him & Marc Arkins to come to Luxembourg to read). I’ve not heard him before.
He was superb. I heard all kinds of semantic resonances I didn’t see when I read the written poems. It’s a rare and delightful experience, a rhythm of recognised references (a phrase that should get me justifiably barred from ever attending poetry events again, so you’ll have to forgive me for deleting it before you could read it). He reminded me of what I particularly enjoy about the Cambridge academic school of poetry, if I can call it that. They’re not afraid of using knowledge as poetic effect. It’s not just them, of course, but this effect seems to be concentrated among poets such as Keston Sutherland, Peter Riley, Emily Critchley, Drew Milne, and others. I want to hear more, again! 16.9.14 |
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information againThe IEEE ran a piece a couple of years ago on how facebook (and others) can computationally work out things about non–facebook users, including habits, interests and even probable place of residence, from the info provided by their users.
Twitter started emailing me all kinds of technical EU political stuff when I took a job there, even though I’m not on twitter (although my company, corrupt press, is). I’m actually rather grateful to them for that, since they bought it home to me what any organisation with dosh and wit could do, and thus will have done. Privacy is dead; we’re living in Marshall McLuhan’s global village, where everyone can know what everyone else is up to. Well, right now, no, it’s where the rich few can know what everyone else is up to. I seem to be coming to the opinion that the information shouldn’t be just in the hands of the industrial aristocrats or the dark state, but available to everyone; a democracy of secrets. 15.9.14 |
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IMEOIMEO (In My Egotist Opinion): most of life is surfing reality, most internal change is a forced–upon side effect of external events. It’s not easy to change yourself beyond that, but it can be done.
For example, I became veggie at 20. That was a decision I’d been mulling for a few years before some event (I forget what) had me make it. To some extent, I’d primed myself to change when the right thing happened. Responding to an event like this is rather like taking advantage of an opportunity, something I usually don’t do (most supposéd opportunities are wheezing old nags I’m assured will win the Grand National; by the time the race comes along they’re distributed across Europe as McCrap–o–burgers). When I was 49, I was monolingual. I now speak 4 lingos, 2 very badly. One annoyance (employer went bust) cascaded to big change (I left blighty) & a big decision for me (to learn foreign; turned out there were lots of them). One of the reasons I left blighty was that I’d become sick of the selfish us–us–us nationalism. You have to be specially dim to think there’s no such things as itching backs. It turned out all the European countries have idiots who think they’re special. Well, I suppose they are, in the education sense. Oooh, I am feeling antisocial today. 15.9.14 |
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konscht am gronnn cinq
Konscht am gronn the fifth today. Not bad. Sold some stuff, including some poetry. I’m seriously undercharging for my photos. They’re original, very original. That’s what they should cost. 7.9.14 |
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no hat is big enoughCan’t keep this under my hat. I sent it in to not always related. It’s straight up. It still amuses me. Ironic Meets Moronic
(and, yes, the title is supposédly ironic.) 4.9.14 |
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mavericks open directory certificatesServer services are finicky, and Mavericks server is no different. For a long time now, my OS X Open Directory server has refused to accept certificates in the Server app.
The certificates were a bit of a mess: there were outdated certificates from Apple, the root certificate of a Windows domain that I deleted six months ago, that kind of thing. Worse, there were different certificates with the same name. The chances of screwing things up in a couple of years time was not insignificant. I decided, in the end, it’d be better to have a clean start, to replace all the certificates I’d been using on the server. I run my own PKI, using OpenBSD, so this wasn’t so difficult. When I first replaced the certificates, the old Open Directory problem was still there. It wouldn’t accept the new certificate, even though all the other services would (which resolved another problem, the reason I’d gone through the exercise). Then I realised I’d forgotten to update my certificate revocation server. Since I’d created a new CA for this renewal, that was necessary. So I fixed my ommission. Once I’d done that, Open Directory accepted my new certificate. I cured the problem by accident. Anyone else who’s having the same problem might find it worthwhile to check their certification authority properly maintains a Certificate Revocation List. That’s not the only reason why the Open Directory server might sulk, but it seems to be one of them. 31.8.14 |
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experience of nagiosAlthough Nagios has been useful at identifying some problems with my computer network, it keeps producing false positives. Those false positives come from NRPE and, to a lesser extent, its Windows equivalent. These are the daemon/services that run on the machines to be checked, and supposédly offer more detailed checks for developing problems.
One day, Nagios stopped talking to my Linux server. Nrpe was running on it. The usual commands, ping, SSH, etc., all worked. I could call Nrpe by hand from the command line on my Nagios system, & it returned the expected results. Yet Nagios keep reporting otherwise. I never worked out the problem, because every test I could think of worked. In the end, I decided detailed problem detection on that server just wasn’t worth the hassle (it’s a build server, so it’ll be pretty obvious when it’s borked), so deleted the checks. I’ve been told Mac services that are running have stopped. This is particularly annoying because many Mac services are so brittle they’re liable to fall over if next door’s dog sneezes: I really do want to know when they stop. So, of course, a Mac service that completely borked its host was not mentioned until the host went down. I’ve had false positives from Windows machines. I’ve deleted the lot. I told Nagios to only report errors once every couple of hours. I’m a home user, there’s no one depending on my systems working perfectly. Yet, despite this, when an error occurs, I get an alert every three minutes. Now this is probably me getting the configuration wrong, but given I’ve replaced 5 with 120 in every field I can find (or 360 in some cases), the fact that I get a warning every three minutes is not encouraging. Some of the false positives might be configuration errors. A lot are not, they’re problems with the product (such as sending my Linux server to Coventry). So I’ve dropped NRPE and stripped Nagios back to the core, only using the basic checks that come with it. They’ve only reported two problems, both of which were real. If this stabilises, fine. If not, I’ll go find an alternative product. 28.8.14 |
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fulfilling a lifelong dreamIt was a very simple dream. For twenty–five years, I wanted a strong cup of coffee when I got up. I wanted an espresso.
The trouble is, for all but the last six months of that wish, I lived in the UK. It was impossible. One could mess around whilst half–awoken to get a not–too–weak filter coffee, and I did, but there were problems. First of all, getting filter coffee right when not properly awake is not guaranteed. In the end, I made a ceremony out it. Secondly, most filter coffee sold in the UK was crap: Lavazza was an honourable exception. That’s just the way the UK is. It was only when I escaped blighty, and got to Luxembourg in 2006, that I found the how. It was simple. I bought a machine to make espresso from capsules. I’ve drunk an espresso first thing ever since. Whilst I can, I will. Yum! These machines are pretty common now, of course. I think they’ve even sold in the UK, although there they’re posh exotica, rather than the working man’s machines they are (that’s the archaic meaning of man: the modern phrase, per son, doesn’t scan). Dreams can be fulfilled, but they often require change. If everyone around you eats shit, that’s why shit is the only thing on the menu. Get out, move on, see how other people did it, do it too. I did. You can. Yum! 27.8.14 |
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jacket 2
Wow: Jacket 2 has been very nice to me. An article by Christodoulos Makris, called Monoculture beer no more, presents Anamaría Crowe Serrano, Catherine Walsh, me, Kit Fryatt and Susan Connolly as something of a vanguard of a new Irish poetry revolution. Some poets are rightly used to this kind of attention. I’m not. 22.8.14 |
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… and more macMy iMac was getting slower and slower at booting into OS X Mavericks, to the point of me giving up waiting for it. Oddly, my Windows partition booted easily, so I could still do online stuff.
Doing the advised disk check from the install disc didn’t seem to resolve the problem. Doing an PRAM reset made no difference, beyond screwing up my screen settings (a known side–effect). I even went into single user mode and ran fsck. I was getting very worried about developing hardware problems, despite the Windows behaviour (my Windows installation doesn’t use or configure all the Mac hardware). Then, suddenly, everything started working well. Indeed, it all started working much better than before. I’d just done another disc reboot and disk check, this time looking for USB problems. I only did the disk check because I was there.
Two possibilities occur to me:
I think it’s likely to be a corrupt disk, but I can’t rule out USBs, even though Windows worked perfectly. I don’t have all windows drivers installed. Even if I did have the correct drivers for the troublesome USB device, Windows drivers are obviously different to Mac drivers, so often drive a device in a different way, and by luck they might avoid a problem. Anyway, the important thing is that I now have a better Mac. 21.8.14 |
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Podcast app addendumFuck it, this software’s completely out of control. Last night, I put two podcasts on it. This morning, it had downloaded another 250. Never mind that I’ve already got everything on my (turned off) main machine. Never mind that I had all the app’s (mostly destructive) defaults disabled. Never mind all that, this software goes ahead and wastes the bandwidth I pay for copying stuff I’ve already got. It makes no sense. FFS.
It simply can’t be trusted. It spends my money without notice or permission, it deletes collected things by default. Whoever designed this software is an data thug. So, for a third time, I’ve had to delete the App without listening to a podcast. This really is very bad design. I an wait for my ear infection to clear up, so I can go back to listening to my old first generation iPod. Quite obviously, at some point, though, that old iPod is going to fail. It’s only by Apple’s thankful behaviour (this time) that it works to the current iTunes (one disadvantage of being a software engineer building software for current designs of terminals is that I need current software to do so). It’s fine at the moment, but that won’t last. It seems evident the Apple podcast and music storage system is going to fail me disasterously at some point: it’s only my mistrust of it that’s save me getting into serious trouble as it is.
I need to find an alternative for storing and hearing the sound arts. Which brings me to another problem. For a while, back in the mid–2000s, I bought some stuff from the Apple iTunes store. Each was corrupted by DRM. I’m not sure I can port my property to other systems. I’ve long since had a policy to refuse to download DRM corrupted works, but my earlier naïvity now threatens to catch me out. There are other problems with moving to another terminal ecosystem. Android has pretty awful security, mostly due to the laziness of manufacturers and phone companies, who seem to regard google’s security updates as a nuisance to be put out eventually, if at all. Despite Google’s work, system updates are delayed far too long, and sometimes don’t go out at all. Even Google has a product that hasn’t been updated for a long time: the manufacturer, TI, pulled out of the market and refuses to be responsible for their products: the take home message from that is don’t buy TI, folks. The exception seems to be Motorola. Anyway, that leaves a Windows phone, or one of the small ecology products. Well, it now has an extra requirement: works as a terminal (e.g. is a smart phone), runs SSH with keys, and now, can manage a podcast ecology politely. To be honest, I’ll probably go Nokia for the glass. 21.8.14 |
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iTunes Podcast appWhen the iTunes Podcast app came out for the iPhone, I tried it, and very quickly deleted it. It was dire.
More recently, Apple changed the iPhone so you had to use the Podcast app to listen to podcasts. I listen to them a lot, they’re my main source of quite a lot of types of information. The problem was the app, although improved, was still crap, doing things like not showing podcasts loaded on the phone. Luckily for me, I could go back to my first generation iPod, which still runs iOS 1. That has the glorious advantage of being completely unable to run the crap Podcast app—it can’t run anything that wasn’t on it when I bought it. I listen to podcasts on that device in the old way. It works ok. In the last couple of days, I’ve had an ear infection, a common consequence of using earphones. I’ve reverted to using my old Bluetooth headphones. They’re great, but somewhat bulky in the pocket, which is why I don’t use them so often. They need to be charged daily, too, which I often forget. Unfortunately, my old iPod doesn’t have Bluetooth, so I’m forced to use my iPhone.
Well, I’ll give the Podcast app, it now shows all the podcasts loaded on the phone. It no longer hides episodes at random. Actually, it’s gone from not showing podcasts that are loaded on the iPhone to showing podcasts that aren’t. That’s better than hiding those present, but wouldn’t it be better to simply list the podcasts on the phone, and leave it at that? Evidentally, the obvious and the sensible are to be avoided. The trouble is the app is not just still stupid, it’s become dangerous. I don’t collect things to throw them away. The verb collect, there, it a bit of a hint. I’m one of these weird people who occasionally listens to things I own again. That applies to music, to poetry, to prose: I revisit. It’s something that comes with collecting. I keep the things I own until I decide otherwise. Yet this app’s insane default is to delete things from my collection once I’ve heard them. WTF? What blind musicogynist came up with that? I just don’t get Apple. They produce these brilliant pieces of hardware, and they produce some excellent software, and they produce some fundamental blunders. Deleting people’s possessions by default, eh, Apple? Good God.
Fortunately, I know Apple well enough now to check for such idiocies—and avoid them when I can. My Mac is full of Microsoft software for a reason. My server hardware is Apple, my server software is Microsoft, my front–facing kit is neither. Deleting people’s possessions by default, eh, Apple? Good God. 20.8.14 |
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greengrocers
Damn those greengrocers and their apostrophes, they keep catching me out. It doesn’t help the greengrocer’s apostrophe is a correct plural form in Dutch, and too many of the sodding words are the sodding same. I have to keep stopping, thinking, and checking, when writing should be flowing. 19.8.14 |
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studio artist presetsThis blog’s readership, my dear imaginary reader, should have noticed by now the recent emphasis on a certain style of image.
I’m exploring a product I’ve owned for a long while, Synthetik’s Studio Artist. I used it a long time ago, rather effectively if I don’t say so myself, in my old seen heard) blog, but never explored it properly. As a photographer, I could describe it as a sophiscated package of photographic effects, in much the same way that I might describe a Giant Sequioa as a piece of wood. I’ve been putting the software through it’s paces, applying what it can do to a photo I took at La Défense earlier in the year (below). You’re seeing some of the results. Everything’s being put together in a new section on this site, here. There’s a long way to go. I’m about a tenth of the way through.
So why am I doing it? I sense the software may be a very useful tool to give my photography a kick up the arse the next time it dries up, like my music has dried up at the moment. I think it will give me the freedom to do to any photograph what I’m learning from my exploration of reflection, or my old exploration of mold (a very nice town). Go read the introduction for a more detailed … er … introduction. 19.8.14 |
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BCD–2The album BCD–2, by Basic Channel, will always remind me of riding Paris tram line 2. along the side of the Seine, in the afternoon sun. That’s where I really got the know the album, listening on my iPod. I was listening today, on a Luxembourger bus, in August’s grey rain. I’ve not found another electronic album like it, and was wondering why. Just asking people who know electronic music (I don’t) has got me nowhere. I suspect I wasn’t explaining what I was seeking properly.
So what is it about the album that so appeals to me? I think it’s because BCD–2 shares certain key characteristics of minimalism. The music develops at a similar rate with a similar growth to the pieces Steve Reich wrote when he was starting to really explore minimalism. Well, minimalism. I knew the school, but I’m not explored it for a long time. I knew and generally loved the key works by the composers labelled as minimalist: Reich, Glass, Adams, Fitkin, and the chap who mistook his wife for a hat (apologies to Nyman). But that’s so eighties. I’ve not properly revisited the school since then, and there are bound to be some exciting developments. And, yes, I know Stockhausen’s visit to the form, too, and they’re superb. So when I say minimalism, I mean earlier Steve Reich. Of course, BCD–2 is different. Reich’s works often explored changes in rhythm, whereas, for example, the first piece on BCD–2, Enforcement, explores changing colour. Other BCD–2 pieces are more choppy, but they don’t lose the essential element of development by growth and decay. The balance between static and development feels similar to those Reich’s works.
In some respects, I might catagorise BCD–2 as trance, since it certainly contains the same hypnotic essence as minimalism, in a dance music setting. However, trance, the official brand, seems to have had an unhealthy fixation with scams and cons. BCD–2 goes nowhere near such nonsense. For a start, it’s instrumental. It’s techno for its powerful rhythm; indeed, it’s officially minimalist techno. Anyway, whatever, I very much like it, and would like to find other electronic pieces which share it’s elements. As a footnote, I’ve tried the “find other music like this” options on services like emusic and amazon. Those services are blind. 18.8.14 |
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giraffe bus stopif the request comes from Giraffe Bus Stop … the answer’s no
Giraffe Bus Stop? Giraffe Bus Stop?! I like it! Very post punk. Very tempting. Mr Giraffe Bus Stop. No Hyphen, no, no, too posh. What? No, I can’t do posh: my mother was skinny and my father was a dog who got carried away. Right, if that’s your attitude, that’s Mister Bus Stop to you. Mister, you hear? Anyway, where was I? Oh yes. Dammit, what’s the address of Somerset House again? Or whatever it’s called now? I wish they wouldn’t keep changing the name of things. 18.8.14 |
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schueberfouer
Schueberfouer is a rather big annual fair that runs in Luxembourg City in the second half of August. It’s a mixture of funfair and fair, with huge rides and naff stalls, distant screams and sticky things, that rings to me of seaside teenage years. It’s really for the kids, but most of the city will turn up during its two week run. The locals say summer ends when Schueberfouer begins. Well, it’s starting roughly a week after the rainstorms came on the tail of the tail of Hurricane Bertha, so it’s late. 18.8.14 |
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