This is a photo that I took in Wales in March, on the Pembrokeshire coastal path.



The camera (actually a Samsung phone) was only about 20 - 30 metres above sea level when this was taken. But I wondered if I'd be able to see the curve of the horizon if I compressed the pic sideways, like this (image is cropped but shows the whole breadth of the first image):



Although it's tempting to blame the curvature present in the image on lens distortion, I don't think that's the case here. The horizon was actually slightly below the centre of the image, so any barrel distortion would tend to suppress the curve, not exaggerate it. However I have no idea how to do the maths for the degree of curvature you'd expect to see from that elevation. So I suspect that is just an exaggerated view of the Earth's curvature.

Anyone any thoughts?

Back 25 mins later, or less.

Got this pic last night, from NW Leics. The phone sensor has made it look a lot more obvious than it was to the naked eye, but it's nice to have a record.

Soon you'll be  able to talk to a business DB in natural language, do searches based on content, etc. Larry Ellison, the man being interviewed here, will be 80 in August.

Finally got round to watching Living on Amazon Prime. Set in 1953, it's a touching tale of an elderly bureaucrat at County Hall who learns that he doesn't have long to live and sets out to make the most of his remaining time.

It's a heartwarming, touching story but the 1950s mood, enhanced by a beautiful orchestral soundtrack and some stunning photography, is immaculate. It's like time travel. The sets, the decor, the hairstyles and clothes, and importantly the language and manner of the characters. Nighy's performance is note-perfect; gently understated and fragile.

I especially loved the County Hall scenes - the portrayal of the stultefying bureaucracy of the time (surely exaggerated) gently leans into the surreal; it reminded me of Terry Gilliam's Brazil.

Must admit I'm a sucker for period pieces set in the recent past. I can't abide Wuthering Heights, Far from the Madding Crowd, Pride and Prejudice and all that nonsense but give me something set in the '40s or '50s and I'm in.

I've reached that watershed moment when you start to think seriously about retiring. I'm at a confluence of two factors contributing to this: firstly we paid off our mortgage last week and secondly my job is becoming more stressful and annoying at the same time.

So I'm writing this post partly to straighten things out in my head.

I can't draw the state pension until November 2026. I also have three company pensions, none of them particularly lucrative and although I could draw on them before 2026, I'm determined not to - to give the overall pension pot a chance to grow a bit. I'll obviously get a bigger yearly wedge of cash out of all of them if I leave them alone for now.

However - I do have a substantial chunk of savings. I've saved pretty diligently this last ten years or so and I also inherited some money. I could live off savings, modestly anyway, until November '26 and still have most of them left in 2.5 years time once I start living off my various pensions.

So: knowing that I could retire right now, at a pinch, makes it very tempting to do so.

Against that: every month I stay in work is another £2Kish I can add to my savings, now that I've paid the mortgage off. And of course it's one fewer month I'd be draining them when I do retire.

Then again: why not use my savings for electricity bills, Tesco, car maintenance and the rest for a couple of years? It's not like I have other plans for them. No wish to move to a bigger house. No desire to own a Porsche or a boat. I have no desire to be, as my wife occasionally puts it, "the richest man in the graveyard".

Another option is to quit my job and do something lower paid and less irritating and demanding for a year or two. Maybe I could start a YouTube channel and get some income off that, or get occasional writing work. Or do occasional short contract IT work.

So there are a lot of variables and considerations to this. Another thought is that I do get a sense of purpose from my job. It does occasionally provide me with a bit of pride and satisfaction.

If you've retired - did you experience a lasting surge of joy at being released from having to work for a living? Or did you look out of the window on a rainy Monday afternoon with no job to go to and think: "is this it?"

I heard this morning that Eric Moody died last week.

Eric was piloting a British Airways 747 over Jakarta in 1982 when the engines started to misbehave. Shortly afterwards all four of them flamed out, choked by an ash cloud from a volcano that the aircraft had flown through, transforming it into a glider.

Famously, Moody announced to the passengers that there was a "small problem".

Fortunately by the time the 747 had descended to 13,000 feet twelve minutes later the air was oxygen-rich enough to overcome the choking effect of the ash buildup over the critical flow areas, so that the engines could be restarted. They were returned to Rolls-Royce in Derby to be stripped down to their component parts and examined.

After they landed, the flight engineer is said to have kissed the ground. When Eric asked him what he was doing he replied that "the Pope does this".

"That's because he flies Air Alitalia", came the reply.

1. My Generation [December 1965]

Well well, what a very good record!

Because they were at this point part of the same British R&B movement, comparisons with the earliest Rolling Stones material are irresistible. Or I couldn't resist them anyway, but I found this first Who album much more convincing.

To be fair Mick, Keef and friends had already put out three albums in eighteen months by the time the debut Who long player arrived and the times they were a changin' pretty quickly. But this record is so much more powerful, so much more dynamic, so better endowed with catchy hooks and most of all so much more original. The earliest Stones albums consist mainly of covers whereas most - and mostly the best - of the songs here were written by Townshend.

The throbbing, driving bass, the rattling, insistent drums, Daltrey's big, throaty vocals, the crashing, stabbing, ringing rhythm guitar - it all adds up to what must have been a pretty devastating statement of intent for 1965. But it's not only powerful, it's tuneful as well - there are some lovely vocal harmonies and memorable melodies. It hints at power pop as well as R&B.

It's not a sophisticated production job by any means but it's well recorded. The copy I listened to was remastered for the Japanese market straight from the master tapes supposedly; it sounds big and full.

To the best of my knowledge I'd only ever heard My Generation and The Kids are Alright, famously banging tunes of course. But I also especially liked The Good's Gone, which reminds me of The Byrds and the sprightly, uptempo A Legal Matter which Pete sings, and which to be fair borrows from the Stones' The Last Time.

I must say Daltrey's impersonation of a black soul singer on Please, Please, Please is uncanny. You'd honestly think it was James Brown or Little Richard.

Nicky Hopkins tinkles the ivories on one or two tunes, to great effect - including the remarkable The Ox, named for Entwistle of course, an instrumental piece. Hard to know how to categorise this one but whatever it is it's rock music of a sort. Not R&B. Prototype heavy rock over a hyperactive tribal drum part. Townshend's manic, feedback-laden, growling, distorted anarchic guitar predates the first Hendrix and Cream recordings by over a year. Remarkable.

.. if so, is it usually a quartz analogue? A quartz digital? Handwound? Automatic? A smartwatch? Or do you just prefer to use a phone? Or something else? Or do you typically just use a clock occasionally?

https://www.aston.ac.uk/latest-news/aston-university-researchers-send-data-45-million-times-faster-average-broadband

Aston University researchers have sent data at a speed that is 4.5 million times faster than the average home broadband.

The rate is the fastest ever sent by opening up specific new wavelength bands that are not yet used in fibre optic systems.

As part of an international collaboration, the academics transferred data at a rate of 301 terabits or 301,000,000 megabits per second, using a single, standard optical fibre.

.. so in a sense that would be 37.625 terabytes of stuff going down the wire every second, but - not all of that would be "payload" or actual transferred data, some of it is protocol overheads. Another consideration is the speed of the hardware attached to the network, I have to wonder how much data they sent across. Even the fastest regular commercial computer memory has data rates measured in GB (not TB) per second. You certainly can't transfer information to a storage device at even a tiny fraction of that speed on a conventional computer.

I also wonder what the length of the fibre cable was; one end of a lab to another probably.

Even so - absolutely staggering.

It's not often I know what I was doing 50 years ago exactly, but half a century ago exactly I was watching Eurovision '74 with my mum and my little brother, as we had done for years. Certainly since Sandie Shaw won in 1967.

The UK was represented by Olivia Newton John, but I was so blown away by the Swedish entry - Waterloo of course - that as soon as they'd appeared, I was rooting for them to win. Which of course they did.

Shamefully, the UK jury did not award any points to Sweden.

ABBA released a new album a few years ago and it was huge news in the popular music world. Only two years ago the ABBA virtual reality concert experience opened in London and it's still a huge money spinner. The trailer for it on YouTube got more than four million views.

The BBC have shown the entire 1974 Eurovision show tonight I believe, originally broadcast from Brighton and introduced by David Vine. I didn't watch it because I've just got back from a birthday party at a club in Ibstock. The DJ played Queen's Don't Stop Me Now toward the end of the evening and two girls in their 20s were dancing their hearts out to it - and what's more they sang along to every word. Yet it's a tune that charted in the '70s.

Imagine music from the 1920s being so current in the 1970s. Kids dancing to it at parties, concert halls selling out tickets for it. It's impossible, isn't it? What happened to popular music culture; why has it stopped dead in its tracks and stagnated for decades?

Quite tempted by one of these:




I do already have a headless guitar (a Steinberger) but I'm especially intrigued by the fanned frets on these - which presumably improve the intonation as well as making chords a bit more comfortable.

The basic headless concept is not a gimmick - having the tuners on the body is a much more stable proposition. And it looks like these use a clamping system at the end of the neck, so you don't need to buy special strings. I don't really like the zero fret, though.

I'll be taking the site down at 2pm this afternoon for a snapshot prior to installing a new forum feature - a dislike button. This has been under testing by the developers for several months and there's now a beta version. It's free to use, so I thought we'd give it a try.

The really impressive thing is that it ties into the forum suspension / ban system, so that anyone receiving six dislikes over a minimum of three disliked posts submitted in any four day period will have their account suspended for a week automatically by the software. Ten dislikes over a minimum of three posts in four days will cause a ban but I can reverse this manually if appropriate.

For full disclosure I should say here that administrator dislikes count double, but please be assured I will use this judiciously.

I listened to Different Stages for the first time in many years while out on a bike. This was quite a nice experience in a way, because I had very little idea what was on there so it was a bit like being at a gig, when you don't know what the band are going to play next.

It's a good live album in some ways - well recorded and has a decent live atmosphere, unfolding like a concert. But, understandably for its place in the Rush timeline it contains a lot of the '90s material, which in large part is lukewarm corporate rock. All of the first five tunes fall into this category for me, which is obviously not a great start.

But - I loved hearing the live version of The Trees. Although recorded in 1997, it took me right back to that small proportion of my teenage years that I spent at Newcastle City Hall.

The long version of 2112 similarly is great, even allowing for Geddy's vocal melody detours. It was of course understandable that he wasn't going to hit the high notes by this time. It's a shame Alex chose to play a little instrumental piece in lieu of Discovery, which is supposed to represent experimenting with a guitar.

Much more good stuff on the second disc. The live version of Test for Echo is very good and the clunkers are fewer in number than on the first disc. But I really could have done without Resist and the drum solo.

In general Alex' guitar sounds a bit fizzy and cheesy at times on these '90s recordings. I'm not fond of the overdubbed backing vocals (or backing tapes) that are audible here and there.

The third CD, recorded on the AFTK tour really sounds very good - so much so that I wondered if some of it had been redone in the studio, but it does sound very authentic. I really liked the bass sound especially and the guitar sounds so much better than the toppy fizz that's sometimes evident on the other two discs.

In the end - it's just the wrong time in the band's career for a really good live album. The stuff that was current mostly isn't great, and the stuff that's really good was already available elsewhere.

Going anywhere nice? We spent a long weekend in Pembrokeshire (a few pics below). Back to Montenegro in September. A weekend in York in August.

I find myself oddly fascinated by this news story about the collapsed bridge. In an odd way it reminds me of the Concorde disaster in 2000 .. I can't stop thinking how unlucky the folks who were caught on it were, to be on a bridge that had stood for nearly half a century at the moment when it collapsed.

All done now

The debut Rush album was released on Moon Records on 18th March, 1974.

Strictly speaking the band's recording career had already started a few months earlier when Not Fade Away / You Can't Fight It was released as a single; nonetheless those early tunes were quickly forgotten in the scheme of things, whereas some of the first album songs held down a spot in the band's set for their whole touring career and are undoubtedly classics.








The album had a difficult birth but I'm sure everyone reading this knows all about that.

It was the last of the studio albums that I got round to buying after becoming a fan. I listened to it for the first time on Christmas Day 1979, even though I'd already seen them seven times. Music was more expensive than concert tickets, in those days. I was very familiar with some of the tunes from All The World's A Stage, of course.

To me it's the shorter, punchier tunes that are most successful - Finding My Way and What You're Doing especially.

You'll recall that Giles Martin used AI demixing software to separate the instruments on the Revolver master tapes, so they could be polished and remixed.

Well .. that technology is now available to the masses. Perhaps a gimmicky stereo mix on an old Beatles tune, with John's voice in your right ear and the drums in your left annoys you. You can fix it! Maybe you don't think the guitar is loud enough on Signals. Or perhaps you'd like to take the voice off an old Abba tune to make a karaoke mix.

Judging by the video the results are very clean. I foresee lots of fan remixes of all kinds of music.

Greenwich

I live too often for the past, I know she'd say.
But I return there anyway.
A ghost from the future, in 1996.

The view has changed. And so has she. She's long gone
But I don't ever change. I stay the same; it's what I do.
I don't move on.

So I sit there on the grass, and I can see
The corpse of summers past, looking back, right through me.

I have become a cluttered box of orphaned dreams,
Forever left unspoken.

If I could touch them, hold them in my hands
Each wretched one of them would still be broken.

And I'm too bitter now to face the memories I pursue
I still can't live with what she did.
And what she didn't do.

₁₉₉₈