Bigbro's foray into the scary world of blogging
25 03 2006
I'm glad to see that Norman Kember has thanked the soldiers who rescued him from captivity in Iraq. It's only polite - when someone does something for you, it's really rather rude not to thank them. However, I am astounded that the BBC managed to generate a full 24 hours of news coverage regarding the fact that Mr. Kember had not yet specifically thanked these people. He generally thanked various people and all involved in his rescue - he did not specifically NOT thank the soldiers or any other party - his wife thanked everyone on his behalf, including the soldier - he provided intelligence information to these soldiers regarding his captors and, as far as I can see, helped them as best he possibly could. There is a good chance that his mental state is not at its best and in fairness, he probably has more important things on his mind than to remember to thank each and every individual and/or group involved in his rescue within the first 24 hours of being released.
But yet the BBC see fit to create a news frenzy because the poor guy, having just been rescued from 4 months of captivity did not specifically thank the soldiers involved in his rescue. I hope the moron in the BBC who decided this was a newsworthy story never has to suffer through the mental anguish of a day's captivity - never mind 4 months!
I sincerely hope that each and every BBC news reporter, anchor-person and director who repeated this stupid piece of non-news to the nation is made to apologise in person to Mr. Kembel and his family. And perhaps in the future they will have the decency to find some actual content for their reporting.
I have lost a lot of respect for the BBC news team in the last 24 hours.
</rant>
posted at: 22:36 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry
Clearly there is some further problem with my fileserver than the stick of faulty RAM. After several years fault free service it has decided once again to just die. Looks like I'm going to have to take the whole thing offline and let memtest86 run through the remaining RAM (1.25GB - *cry*) to see if that's the issue. Alternatively, the only significant change made to the system between stability and instability was the addition of a PCI IDE controller, which I suspect might be faulty (given that only one channel works on it!) I'll order another from aria.co.uk and see if it works better - and then see about returning the faulty one to them.
My pathalogical hatred for computers that don't just work is coming along nicely...
posted at: 18:08 | path: | permanent link to this entry
The work I put into the template for Lilypond has clearly paid off. I was able
to put this together in about 20 minutes - it's another of the tunes I've been
learning on the whistle and is one of my favourite polkas, especially played
really fast.
I've written it out in G, which is the key I've heard it most usually played
in, though I play it in D on the whistle as well, which allows it to be used in
some other polka sets.
I've been playing with Lilypond over the past few days and have just finished writing up my first piece of lilypond music. I've been looking for a better, more powerful method of notating traditional music than Finale Notepad and abc. Further experimentation with abc2ly (a convertor that translates abc format to lilypond syntax) has been quite disappointing. It doesn't appear to respect key signatures and often generates lilypond output that can't be processed by the lilypond interpreter. I'll look at this in more detail in the near future, time permitting.
I've written up my first whistle piece for the year, Shoe The Donkey, using Lilypond. I'll add more pieces over the coming days and weeks.
