Ransen's Blog

"Hells bells!" I thought to myself. "It's Valentine's Day!" And though it is very commercial, you can't ignore it. Not if you're married to an Italian. Not if you don't want to wake up dead on the 15 th . So, just in time, I went to the florists and bought seven red roses. I was lucky, there were no other customers, plenty of roses left. (Seven. That's right isn't it? I mean. Twelve seems such an unromantic number. 12 inches to the foot. And twenty-four! That is even more unromantic. Twenty four hours in a day – boring. But seven is a magic lucky number.) As I handed the florist the money I thought: "It seems only yesterday that I was doing this very same thing, and yet it was a year ago." And when my wife came in that night she was very pleased to see the vase with the seven roses in the center of the table. "They're lovely! But why?" It struck me then that it

I wonder, before they started making things, did primitive humans have an idea of a Maker with a capital M?

On Saturday morning I reviewed "The Glorious Heresies", a novel by Lisa McInerney, on Amazon. Saturday night I went to see "The Revenant". Both struck me as having the same structure. Violence and boredom, tension and boredom. After 50 pages of "The Glorious Heresies" I got the feeling that the rest of the book would be the same. Portraits of the violence and desperation of the poor in Cork, Ireland. Page after page would be the same. I stopped reading because of the tedium of it. After the first 30 minutes of "The Revenant" I began to think that the rest of the film would be more of the same. I was right. Violence, tension, boredom, wishing the film would end. As I sat there I wondered if it was so hard to make an artwork of some kind which is not so... so... violent. It seems to me that it mocks the real stuff happening to real people. Another thing the book and the film had in common was that they were both very wel

Warning: This blog is a mix of technical help to those in the same situation as myself, as well as a gripe/snarl/outpouring/angry rant about of the idiocy of this. Ends with an expletive not deleted. In the 1980s getting a network to go between 2 or more computers was, to me, a chaotic enterprise. The knowledge you needed was baroque and ever changing. So as soon as you understood it the technology would change and you'd have to learn new stuff to do the same thing all over again. So I left networks to the masochists who liked them. Now there's another subject about which I have the same feelings. Code signing. I have to do it once every three years or so and I forget how it works each time, or it changes how it works each time. So I hate the subject. But I thought: If I blog about it I'll have to be clear, precise and informative in the blog. I'll have to really understand it. So here goes... Code signing means adding some bytes to a p

I find myself having the same thoughts again and again. It probably happens a lot, but I notice it most when driving. Here are the top three: Recurrent thought number 1 : On my way to work there is a traffic policeman or police woman at a cross-roads. (I like to emphasise the fact that in the West we have female traffic police, it seems a good indicator/measure of our civilization. End of aside.) Anyway. Back to the cross-roads. The cross-roads have automatic traffic lights, but during the rush hour the police person takes over. Presumably to ease the traffic. But my reccurrent thought is (and I just can't stop thinking it): Surely the traffic police person is the last person in the world who should be in charge at the traffic lights. Why? because they have no overall vision of the traffic flow. They can see maybe 500 meters in 4 directions, but beyond that nothing. Traffic control needs a more global overview surely? Recurrent thought number 2 : When exit

On the morning of last day of the year I fixed a friend's audio amplifier, a Luxman L30. The right channel had gone. We'd bought the replacement transistors on E-Bay. They arrived on the 30th. I'd previously looked inside the amplifier and thought "buggar me this is going to be awkward. I'm going to have to desolder four heavy duty power duty transistors just to get at the circuit board." But I'd said I'd do it and thought I'd better have a go. I was slightly worried about the job and it even disturbed my sleep. In the holiday morning though I uncharacteristically decided to stop watching TV and get on with it. I found the solution, did the job, and got the amplifier working again. (See the end of this blog entry for details). I was so happy when I heard music coming out of both speakers. The evening of last day of the year. The food was nice, the wine was fine, the company pleasant, but after the first hour I was bored o

I saw a program save a file and then show this dialog: That exclamation mark told me a whole history. It told me that the programmer had had a hard time getting the file saving function to work. In alpha and beta releases the program had crashed at various points during the process. The programmer had not slept wondering what was wrong. And he wanted recognition for his work. So when he finally got it to work, he was surprised, hence the exclamation mark. And you, the user, should be grateful that the program has done what it has been designed to do. The correct functioning of the program is so rare that it is worthy of an exclamation mark. Neither Word not AutoCAD tell you that the file has been saved (for example). These programs do what you ask obediently, and silently. It is not a surprise that they work properly. If you ever use a program which puts exclamation marks in its messages, do backups of your data often. And