Goodbye

We all know that we're a product of our upbringing, and that early influences (and even some later ones) have a huge impact on the way we grow up. I suppose it's inevitable that as we get older the icons who influenced us as youngsters will pass on. Whatever anyone else thinks of the person providing the influence, the fact is that this person has been there, has shown us something.

So today I have to say goodbye to Steve Jobs. Thanks for the start.

It was back in December 1982 that I got a job, my first "proper" job, working at The Institute of Aviation Medicine, a lodger unit at the old Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough. I will never forget my first 3 days, as I sat round in the reception area, waiting for someone to tell me what I was supposed to do. Although someone did show me into the bowels of their very old PDP-8 on the third day, nothing fired me up quite as much as when, less than a week into my job, I was given an Apple II computer and a manual on how to program it, and told I might be able to make something of it. In the new year they sent me on a beginners programming course, but because of the start I'd had in December, I was always a week or so ahead of what we were being taught in the class. This had nothing to do with being a swot, more that using this first PC I found myself fired up to create and improve.

That. Right there. That was the start of my current hobby, life passion, raison d'etre and career.

I remember the first time I saw the iPhone, and I wanted to own one with every fibre of my being - well, until I read the tech specs, that is. But I could quite see, where others (and other phone manufacturers) failed to see, why so many people wanted to have one, and why it was SO successful. It was beautiful. Quite simply the most beautiful phone I'd seen. And despite my continued lack of desire to own one, I've not seen a phone yet that can match the sheer beauty of the iPhone. And the iPad? It took EVERY ounce of strength I had to stop myself spending the capital from the sale of the Big House on an iPad before I'd even found a home in which to house it!

While I've said many times over the years that I'm no Apple Fanboi, much of this dislike has stemmed from the very real fear that if everyone had Apple computers, I'd be out of a job. I remember one single, solitary support call from an Apple user, back at the end of the last millennium, while working at the BP site. Oh, sure, they had Apples, just no one ever needed support on them. EVER! I'd really like to think they were just too embarrassed to ask, since they did bang on so about how completely reliable they were!

Goodbye, and thanks for a large part of my life.

;_;

Holidays!

Inspiration is slow in arriving today. I suspect I may be tired after the drive. This has probably got a lot to do with last night’s supper, which was truly delicious! But there I go, leaping into the middle, instead of starting at a sensible place, like, for example, the beginning!

Yesterday morning I set off from home, with a packed car, to drive to Paris. Tickets booked for the Chunnel in advance, I arrived at the terminal in perfectly good time to check in. In fact, such good time that I was able to go straight round to the loading area, and had only a short wait before the process started.

Once on French soil, I headed down the coast road towards Boulogne. One of the good things about travelling alone is that there’s no one to grumble if you choose to listen to something like, say, the soundtrack from Spirited Away. The downside is that when you get to the payage stations, you have to hop out and scurry round the car to get your ticket. Another upside is that there’s no one to caution you against picking up hitch-hikers. So I did. Pick a couple up, not caution myself against it. To my delight (and indeed surprise) I was NOT murdered, robbed or anything else unpleasant. The couple, from the Czech republic, were polite, and their English was certainly better than my Czech! In fact, they navigated me all the way to Versailles, which was a double bonus, to go on top of not murdering and burgling me.

And so I found my way to Ariane's place in Meudon (just down the road from Johnny Depp's place), and was introduced to her parents. These are very nice people. But as it happens, we were due to be eating supper with Margot's parents. Margot is Lizzy's penfriend. And Margot's mum is scary!

However, supper was really good, but of course there was quite a lot of wine, and it would have been churlish to refuse, wouldn't it? It's very likely that's what the cause of the screaming headache was, this morning. And this is where Ariane's parents get another plus point - paracetomol, pressed warmly into my hands, as I stumbled into the kitchen. Merci beaucoup!

So, tent pitched, limited wifi connection (doesn't like my phone, or windows 7), and not the very best of weather. I must check the forecast...

Long Summer Night of Music and Fashion

I'm sure many of you will remember the "Open Letter to Hawley Place School", written, I note, almost exactly a year ago! In it, you'll recall, I ranted on about the length of school concerts, and the hideous inattention to any kind of detailed planning.

I am, it has to be said, going to whine again today. But my whining will have an element of congratulation this time.

Actually, the hell with it - let's get straight on with the congratulations!

Last Thursday night, I attended the Senior Music Evening event at Hawley Place. And it was fantastic! Really, really great! The quality of music in the senior school is SO far removed from the quality in the junior school, I have to remain amazed that the junior school refuses to reduce the length of their concert. I totally get that the kids in the junior school have less ability to focus en-masse, and thus I expect rehearsals can be troublesome. In addition to which, the usual way on which solo parts are decided, is to throw the question, "Anyone want to do a solo?" into the class, and hope that the children volunteering are not the worst singers in the class.

However, I wasn't going to grumble at past failures, my plan was to praise the lovely evening I attended. Of course I'm always going to enjoy watching Charlotte sing; she sings like an angel, and I'm a damn proud mum! I wasn't able to distinguish Lizzy's voice within the choir, but I was delighted that the single (note that, single) number performed by the Years 7 & 8 choir was clearly well rehearsed and very much in tune. And while, as a mum, I was mildly disappointed that Lizzy didn't get to have a little solo part in the medley, I wasn't the parent put-out by this decision.

Allow me to praise something else I noticed - support by the girls for their friends. As noted, all the performances were extremely professional, with only one performance producing a wince from me, but EVERY performance was greeted with whoops of support from the rest of the girls. I can't begin to imagine how much confidence this imparts in the girls who may be a little unsure.

And so we move on to the fashion part. I know Lottie was a little put-out that she wasn't allowed to wear the sparkly frock she'd chosen for the evening, but only the year 11 girls were allowed to wear mufti-evening dress. Even the year 10 girls were expected to wear a sort of uniform, albeit black leggings, and a red/black layered t-shirt. I get this, after all, there's little that can go seriously wrong with your uniform. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for the dresses chosen by the aforementioned year 11 girls. I cannot imagine a more unsuitable selection of dresses and shoes being worn by anyone, anywhere. No - there was one dress I'd say was classy, if a little old-fashioned, but the rest of them were, frankly, horrible. I very much suspect that my outlook on these dresses has to do with me being old, but, DAMN!!

And then there's the length of the show. At least the problems produced by younger children being able to rehearse their songs only once were alleviated, but 3½ hours is just TOO LONG! Longer than 2½ hours and the performance starts to become self-indulgent. I'd love to be able to get home by 10:30, rather than racing home with two very tired girls gone 11pm.


Still, criticisms aside, kudos to the school for a fabulous show! Watching shows like this encourage me that the quality of music in the school is only going to get better.

QR Codes

I was dead excited today while browsing the DVD section in Tesco. I mean, I'm usually quite excited about looking for movies, so I suppose it's no real surprise, but this time there was an alternative reason for my delight.

For a couple of years now I've been interested in QR Codes, those interesting blocky "bar" codes. Actually, since I watched an episode of CSI:New York, where the codes were plastered round the city for aspiring adventurers to find and photo. I can't remember what information was being colllected in these codes, but I do remember that the very next day I obtained a copy of a QR Code reader for my phone, and started investigating their use.

I was a bit disappointed to find there was not a lot going on with them, and decided to think of possible applications. I had read about someone who had set up a bit of neato software so that he could be browsing videos in his local blockbuster, decide which film he wanted to watch, enter the title in the software on his phone, and have the film bit-torrented by the time he returned home. Now I actually had in mind something a little more, well, legal, you understand, but my thought was that one could adapt this to work in a similar way, but you'd have a account set up, you'd see a piece of media you wanted, photo the code, and it'd be waiting for you - legally, mind - when you get home. I couldn't work out why anyone would want to have the codes on their media, because, after all, they'd want to be selling their media, not letting you browse it and put back on the shelf. But you see where I'm coming from?

And so back to my excitement this afternoon. On the back of the Chatroom DVD was a QR Code, with instructions to follow the code and view the trailor. Which would have been super fabulous if I'd had anything remotely approaching a 3G signal there at the back of Tesco!

Edit: As it happens, even when I had a signal, my phone refused to show me the video, but I suspect that's a limitation on my own hardware. I'm still working on those other uses!

Hoaxes and Google

I know I've written before about my wonderful friends, and their inability to use Google to search for the hoaxes in the emails they forward with such monotonous regularity. However, today's question is this: Why do people start these idiotic lies in the first place?

For me, at least, one of these will cross my email portal (I'd have said door-step back in the day when it was chain-mail), and while there are days when I can't be bothered to look it up, and it doesn't sound too stupid anyway, so I'll accept it at face value for the moment, but I'm certainly not passing it on. Then there are the ones which are so chock-full of patently idiotic claims that I'll be compelled to head on over to Snopes or Google, just to confirm my suspicions.

So it happened recently that I was in receipt of an email telling me that for the first time in, like, FOREVER, this year July has 5 (count them!) Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. This, the email continued, happens only once every 823 years!!! Yes! That's right. Once in 823 years does July have the 5 weekend days. Since I was busy thinking about other stuff, I actually ignored this one, and sent it to trash. I wondered, briefly, if this was true, but mention of Feng Shui dampened my curiosity, so I didn't bother to look.

On to yesterday, when a link on Reddit caused me some amusement, but I still delved no deeper.

Until this morning. I have a friend. No, I'm not boasting! Really, I have many friends, but this one is special. She's one of the ones of whom I wrote last time, one of the ones who will forward on any old crap, and for whom any kind of skepticism is a totally alien concept. She's also a person I love deeply, so we'll be using no names! Let's just say it came as NO surprise whatsoever to find that she'd done the old copy pasta on her Facebook page this morning, exhorting us to do the same, because those who read and don't copy will get NO money!

So, having meanly shown that the last such incident of the 5 Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays in July was none other than 2005, I came away from Facebook somewhat grumpy, questioning why people DO this. It's not as if there's any actual money in it for them. You're not trashing anyone's hard drive.

Maybe it's for the sheer joy of seeing something you "created" all over the interwebz. The delight you feel when you prank someone and they fall for it must be considerably more delightful when it's a whole bunch of gullible people all over the world, and you can see it being spread by these, um, simple people to all their simple friends. Perhaps it's because you want to expose the world as being inhabited by considerably more morons than reasonable, reasoning people. Maybe, just maybe, you're hoping that by exposing all these morons, they'll see the error of their ways, and actually start to do some research.

Sadly, if that's your plan, I've got to tell you: You're going to be disappointed! I've been actively informing my special friend of the stupidity in believing all the crap being forwarded, and while she gaily apologises for the single infraction I've highlighted, she's back to her old tricks before the virtual ink has dried.

I now feel like a grumpy old woman. And you can just Get Off My Lawn!

Why?

It's possible that many of you know I recently (late January, anyway) signed up for Facebook. I was unsure of its utility until I managed to friend an old mate of mine who'd had a stroke a couple of years ago, and although we'd been in touch via email while she was in hospital, we'd ended up out of touch again. Once we'd become FB friends, I found myself able to see her updates, share in her frustration with physio, and rejoice in the delivery of her new, disabled-friendly car (and yes, I know that's horribly un-PC, but I just can't work out how to say it). This alone has made signing up for FB worth it all.

However, I find myself perplexed by companies' insistences that I "follow" them on Facebook. Why? Please tell me why I'd want to "Like", for example, Domino's Pizza on Facebook? And Domino's are not the only ones. I keep seeing signs - Follow us on Facebook/Twitter etc.

I truly cannot see any kind of advantage to me in doing this. It's bad enough that every band/film I've cited on my preferences page puts unnecessary updates on my home page on a semi-regular basis (until I worked out how to stop that nonsense!), but can you imagine how much extra spam through which I'd have to filter if I said I Like Domino's?

I'm going to do an experiment. Sorry Domino's, it's not you! I use a chat client called Nimbuzz on my phone, which I find a particularly useful tool, but every time I fire it up, I'm exhorted to "follow us on Facebook!" as it loads its network and checks to see which of my friends are online. I'm going to "Like" Nimbuzz on Facebook and see what happens. I'm going to see whether this enhances my life, or is completely meh.

I'll get back to you on this...

Australian Pink Floyd

It's late, and I should be settling down to sleep. However, if I can take the time to visit Ocado and beg a load of shopping for tomorrow evening, I think I can spend a moment or two and tell you about my evening.

I think it's somewhat obvious from the title that I went to see Australian Pink Floyd this evening. Being the skint sort of person I am, I've seen many a tribute band in my time, from the not-terribly-good Tina Turner tribute I saw at the Picnic in the Park (no, not Hyde Park, George V playing fields) to The Counterfeit Stones and The Backbeat Beatles, seen at the very same venue, both of whom are pretty good. Actually, I've seen that Beatles tribute band more times than I care to say!

And then there's Australian Pink Floyd (or Aussie Floyd, as they seem to be known). I'd heard good things from my brother when he went to see them last year, but let's face it, he enjoyed our trip to see Jethro Tull, and I wont lie - it was pants. Turns out I don't actually like JT, despite a couple of really rather good tracks. So it was with no small trepidation, along with a certain amount of delicious anticipation, I went to Hammersmith this evening to watch Aussie Floyd at the Apollo. I was confused, because I've been to this venue before, but it was called The Odeon in those days.

I'm thrilled to be able to tell you that the show was truly awesome! It has also taken first place in the "Loudest Show Sian's been to see" competition, beating the clamorous Kaiser Chiefs into second place.

I very much suspect that I was predisposed to enjoy the show because the opening track was "Shine on you Crazy Diamond", which is at the beginning of my favourite album. I sort of hoped they'd finish the set with part 2, but it wasn't to be. The second track was "Welcome to the Machine", another from Wish You Were Here, just before they played the title track, which is, just possibly, my favourite Floyd track of all.

After that, probably because I didn't recognise any of the tracks up to the interval, I wasn't quite so enthralled, but in spite of the noise, I enjoyed listening to something new.

After the interval came the 3D show! Yep, every seat was provided with a pair of 3D specs, and there were some crazy 3D projections shown for us. A gimmick, but it was quite fun for all that. And I was pleased to find that I was recognising many of the songs, which helped.

It's funny; the first time I remember hearing the track Comfortably Numb was actually a cover performed by Scissor Sisters, which is VERY different from the way Aussie Floyd perform it - natch! I like both versions, but I suspect that if pressed, I'd have to admit to liking the Scissor Sisters version a little better!

I will, at this point, make a comment on the audience. I don't think I will ever forget the time I went to see the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra performing something at Basingstoke. We'd taken our seats, the performance had started, and all was quiet - until a woman with high, clicky heels clopped her way out to visit (one presumes) the ladies. I was close enough to the stage to see the look of disgust and anger directed at heel woman by the conductor when she stomped her way back to her seat during a particularly quiet part. That conductor would probably have exploded with annoyance at the constant stream of traffic moving to and from the seats during the show. Let's face it, though, no one would have heard a herd of elephants stomping through, it was so loud.

I think I can give the show a cheerful thumbs up, and say that I'd make efforts to see Aussie Floyd again next time they're in town.

Crappy Music

13 year olds and their music tastes
Can you remember to what you were listening when you were 13? I suspect, in my case, it was Donny/Jimmy Osmond. Now there's no one on the face of this planet who can view me without a look of sympathetic revulsion for this heinous confession.

So when I listened to Rebecca Black's song, Friday, last week (on Friday, as it happens), my initial impulse was to pull off my ears, and gouge out my eyes. It's a truly horrible, repetitive piece of crappy pop that should be consigned to the dustbin of the music industry. It may have been something I'd have enjoyed, or maybe just not hated, when I was 13, but it's, thankfully, unmemorable.

However, and this is where I have to apologise to the girl. I just found out that she's 13. Yep, 13. The writer/singer of this ghastly tune is only 13. Now, for all that the song is a boil on the buttocks of the music world, please tell me what YOU were producing when you were 13? If you're anything like me, you can hang your head in shame and say, "Well, um, nuffink..."

Sure, we've all seen the 11 year old boy (although there's some confusion as to whether he was 11, 12 or 13) who covered Lady Gaga's Paparazzi. That kid's good! But he didn't write it. Mind you, if you subscribe to his channel on YouTube, you'll see some of his own work. He's undeniably talented.

And there are others of a similar age, creating their own works, covering others, and uploading the results onto YouTube for our delight. Or in Rebecca's case, vilification.

So here's my apology to Rebecca Black - sorry mate. And I'm really not being patronising when I say, "Of course that's the sort of song you're going to be writing!" After all, what are most 13 year olds listening to? I'm looking forward to seeing you grow in maturity, and seeing more of your stuff on YouTube. As long as you don't mind when I gag a little and decide I can't actually finish listening/watching. The fact that you're doing anything at all which is productive is fantastic, given that kids are, at this age, consumers first. Very few of them have the drive, let alone the talent, to create anything worthwhile when they're 13. Actually, very few of them have the drive/ability to create anything at all!

Now Music!
I'm going to continue on the musical theme, inspired by an open directory (don't ask) I found, filled with a number of the "Now That's What I Call Music..." albums. I believe the albums were number 20 onwards, but I can't remember, and I'm not going back in there to look!

What struck me, though, was that there wasn't a single track I wanted to download. I'd assumed, not being a "Now That's What I Call Music" fan, that the tracks on these albums would reflect the most popular tracks at the time. In actuality, they seem to represent the pop music of the time, in all its glory (or not, as the case seems to be).

I enjoyed looking through the lists of tracks, wondering when I'd find something I actually liked, remembering that I'd listened to much of this music, but I'd forgotten how much of it was lame/crap/unmemorable. I much prefer to listen to "Best of 80s Pop!" style albums, where the really good songs are distilled into one place.

That said, it's astonishing how the "Now That's What I Call Music" albums managed to contain so very many of the lame-ass songs, seeming to deliberately eschew the ones to which we listen now.

Are scammers really making the effort, nowadays?

This morning I received the first piece of phishing email of the year. I mean, come ON guys, it's already January 24th, and this is the best you can do?

OK, I'll admit, I've not made it easy for you, signing up to Gmail and all. Their filters are pretty damn good, so not a whole lot of your phishing scams come through any more. I haven't had a Nigerian for nearly a year, and that was a paper one (well, to my delight it was TWO) through the actual post. With an actual stamp on it! Now there - that's dedication, that is. I was so pleased, I genuinely squealed in delight.

So back to this morning's mail. An email, so not much effort already. Purporting to be from HSBC. OK - popular bank, I can give you a point for that. After all, not much point targeting Bank of America customers in the UK. Bus since HSBC owns a couple of banks in the UK, there are going to be a goodly number of people who might fall for the scam.

The subject? Well, "New Notification Alert" - it's a bit lame, isn't it? I might have been more panicky if you'd called it "Incorrect Login Attempt Notification".

Grammar? Actually that was pretty good. Look.

Dear HSBC Customer, 

Your Internet Banking security number was entered incorrectly more than 3 times.
For the protection of your account we have suspended access to it.

To restore access please Log on correctly.

Previous notifications have been sent.

 Thank you for choosing HSBC Bank.
Copyright HSBC INC 2011. All rights reserved.

It's just possible they copied from an actual bank letter. Now that shows some initiative! Usually all it takes to see through a scam is a very basic understanding of English Grammar.

But that link - that Log on link was LAME. Seriously lame. No attempt whatsoever was made to make the link look like anything more than

"http://thestorygroup.org/wp-content/FCKEditor/index.html".

Apart from "hiding" it behind the words "Log on". Hover over the link, and there it is. Click the link and your browserwill tell you -





I don't know about you, but that's pathetic.

By this time I was feeling so let down I could barely bring myself to click "Proceed anyway", but, almost out of desperation, in the hopes of a jolly good scam, I pressed onwards. The page to which the link refers isn't even there.

Scammers - I am very disappoint.