Rick's b.log - entry 2023/08/27

Hoo boy!

As I came out, I heard a commotion. Lots of honking, and a siren.

Tearing by, at way faster than the expected fifty, and straight over the roundabout, was something that looked like a half-dead Ford Fiesta. I'm not up on cars, so let's just say it was sort of boxy but not like a Volvo, more like a Renault 5 (but since mom had one, I know what they look like).
This was being closely followed by three rozzermobiles.

Probably the most excitement anybody in town has had in ages.

But alas the story ends there. A quick-thinking farmer saw what was coming, so he turned and straddled the road with a tractor and manure spreader.
The car swerved and screeched to a halt as it realised it wasn't going to fit around the spreader and the pedestrian walkway with a solid looking lamppost. For a moment it seemed as if it was going to crash into the back of the spreader...which would have been poetic justice.

The other cars stopped and in short order three people were face down on the ground, plenty of shouting and commotion.

I got in my car, turned the other way, and went on a little detour around the middle of town to get home.
As I went around the next roundabout down, having come at it from a different direction, the tractor had gone, the police had gone, and the crappy car had been pushed on to the (wider) pavement on the other side of the road. It looked like the windscreen had been smashed.

Blatant corruption

Meanwhile, the government, perhaps seeing the writing on the wall and realising that their days are numbered, has pushed through an amendment in order that MPs who decide to stand down or who lose their seats will now get double the winding down pay. Four months instead of two, coming to £17,300.
This is in addition to a £16,876 "loss of office" payment.

Must be awesome to be an elected MP. If you decide to quit (what standing down effectively is) or if you get fired (what losing your seat in an election effectively is), you get at least thirty four grand. That's roughly equivalent to two years of minimum wage, simply for leaving. Plus there's whatever other sorts of severance and bonuses were generously awarded.
As I hope and pray many of those Tory scum will profit from this increased payout in the next election.

And, of course, I can't help but suspect that is why Nadine Dorries finally shuffled away yesterday, two and a half months after announcing her immediate resignation.

And on the theme of corruption, the current Prime Minister is of Indian descent and married to a very rich Indian women and, well, he's involved in organising a trade deal with India to which his wife could financially benefit.

Nice work if you can get it, right?

Meanwhile kids are failing school because their parents can't even afford to feed them properly. Or heat. Or...

Some light gardening

Yeah, me and them damn brambles. Again.

Vide grenier

I didn't go this time. It was really chilly (10°C) this morning, the sky looked kind of miserable, and at about 1pm it chucked it down.

Just another pleasant weekend.

That would be it for the vide grenier, apart from a few die-hards.

Now, if mom was alive we'd have gone in the morning. She would have told me that the thing of my dreams might be there.
Which is all well and good except I don't actually know what the thing of my dreams would be.
And, somehow, I doubt I'd find it in a vide grenier...

Instead, let's look back a year and see how things are now.

That portable CD player/radio... doesn't work. Whatever, I lost €3.

The medicine cabinet has pride of place on the kitchen wall.

The medicine cabinet.

Sufficient for any normal domestic mishap. A very good €5.

Slide projector. I have loaded up some spools of the Israel slides and looked at them, but I haven't yet tried to capture with a camera.

The multicooker hasn't been used. It works, but since my trusty Philips is still going strong, this one is waiting patiently in the back kitchen. Maybe some day I'll have a crack at removing the control board and putting in an ESP32. 😉

Since I didn't go to a vide grenier...

SimpleSeq v0.03

You can also read:

• An introduction to my Simple Sequencer (v0.01)
• Updates for version 0.02

Asides from a bunch of internal changes that I'm not going to bore you with, here's what's new that may be of interest to you.

The software now tracks which MIDI channels are actually in use. This allows for an Overview (^O) which will draw all of the notes in all of the channels on-screen at the same time. It doesn't work so well over ~10 channels, but up until that point, it's a useful way of being able to see at a glance how the music relates, without switching channels.

Part a consequence of this, and some other things, the file format has changed (well, the intro nag told you it might!). So if you try to load a file, you'll see this:

Speaking of loading, the load function has been rewritten to be a lot more bombproof. No dumb crap like "ýýýýýýýýýýýýýýýýý!!!!NULL.POINTER.DEREFERENCE!!!!" (this was because it was trying to pick up a file error from a pointer that File_Open doesn't actually set upon failure!).
Things have been rationalised and made much simpler making a more reliable and solid function.

AutoChord has been moved to ^A, and Delete can now delete MIDI commands as well as just music. It was always supposed to, but the function had a line at the start that bailed out if there wasn't a note at the current editor location. This now checks for both a note and a MIDI command.

Speaking of which, ^Delete can now erase everything in the entire column that the highlight is present within.

This may be useful, as now, if a MIDI keyboard is attached, pressing keys will cause the notes to be inserted into the current column (as semiquavers (or quavers in quaver mode)). The last one added will be given highlight, so you can tweak it or delete it.
If you just want to play something to work out what you want to do, go ahead. When you're done, just press ^Delete and the column will be cleared.

Note that input can come from any active MIDI channel - SimpleSeq just reads "the next command" and doesn't care where it comes from.
At this time, SimpleSeq doesn't handle control inputs, only Note On events. And, a warning for people with larger pianos, it should simply ignore out of range notes (anything outside of C2-C7), but for obvious reasons this hasn't been tested.

The help has been updated to better reflect reality.

And since that's a lot of keypresses to remember, you can now press Menu over the editor grid, to call up a menu for the main functions. Should AutoChord be listed here? You tell me...

Actually, it occurs to me that there's no mention of ^M for inserting MIDI control change information.
Well, some time soon I'll be adding pitch change, so when I do that I can add them both to the help/menu together.

Finally, while F1 will show help, F2 will show information on the current piece of music...

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David Pilling, 28th August 2023, 03:45

I would have gone to grammar school, but in the 60s there were less grammar schools per head in the North than in the South.    Levelling up is in the past. There is a lot to spend money on in London and Scotland.    Amusing to see humans try to control plants. Japanese knotweed make it illegal - ho ho ho.

Anon, 28th August 2023, 12:44

S4 Ep9: "Don't annoy the human." In which Rick goes full Liam Neeson on the Triffids growing in his garden    Next thing you'll be doing a spot of deforestation, Arnie-style, with a minigun.    Remember, "if it bleeds, we can kill it".

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