Buy me a coffee, please?!

The Other Half has long berated me for not selling my software, or otherwise attempting to monetise this site. I have long resisted doing so -but as buying new music or new computers to test and develop things on is getting expensive, I've finally relented, in a modest way: I've just opened an account at 'buy me a coffee', a trustworthy site that takes donations from grateful members of the public and sees them on their way to creators. I've labelled my account as 'buy me a music score', as that's what I'll probably end up doing with any amounts of cash I get from it, though a newer desktop PC is on the wishlist, too!

There's zero obligation and I'm not going to promote it heavily, but if you value anything I've produced here and can spare a fiver or so, I'd be grateful (and it might just keep the Other Half quiet, too!). Check it out at: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/absolutelybaching [...] 

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Sorted. Sort of.

The photograph you see at the left was taken on April 30th, 2023 -about four days after we've physically moved into our new house. You'll note that one of the rooms cannot really be walked into, since it is jam-packed with boxes and belongings! The rest of the house was never quite that bad, but it was pretty bad: there were 150+ boxes and on day four I think we'd unpacked about 4 of them 🙂

Around three weeks later (on May 24th, to be exact), the room destined to become my music room looked like this: [...] 

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I'm back...

Well, it took a couple of days longer than anticipated... and my new "server room" is currently (and temporarily!) the laundry, but if you're reading this, you'll have worked out that I am indeed back on line and things are working OK.

In ten or so days' time, electricians are supposed to be turning up to electrify the loft space. I have no idea how long that will take. Once it's done, the server will be taken offline for as brief a period as I can manage, allowing it to be hauled into its final, permanent location in the loft. That will be fun: the new loft lacks dedicated loft stairs, so it will be a matter of balancing precariously at the top of a stepladder whilst holding on with one hand and balancing a very heavy server in the other. Fun times ahead, then! [...] 

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Whoops...

The icon at the left kind of describes what just happened to this website.

You'll recall I moved it to a rented 'cloud' server in Hungary a few weeks back? Well, the 'cloud server' turned out to be a bit of a 'mushroom cloud server'. I went to bed Monday night with everything working just fine; I woke up in the morning to discover the entire site was inaccessible. I couldn't even ssh into the server. I did the usual thing: turned it off and back on again, using the control panel web interface the company provides... still no joy once the server was back up running, however. Heart sinking, I contacted the help desk. I explained the problem carefully, including all the steps I'd taken so far to try to fix the issue. Their response was, "We just turned your server off and back on again. Try it now." Not what I would call a support desk's most considered response. [...] 

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Offer accepted...

Well, that turned out quicker than expected!

A house was viewed about a week ago in south Lincolnshire (about due east from the current home, close to The Wash and thus within striking distance of all things East Anglian). An offer was made ...and accepted within the time it took to drive half-way back home! [...] 

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Moving on...

After nearly six years living in Nottingham, we've decided it's time to move on. Our house has, in fact, already sold (but the English system of house purchase means that "sold" doesn't have a really good definition: either party can pull out, for any reason, right up until the time money hits your bank account!). We therefore find ourselves now doing frequent day-trips to Norfolk and Suffolk, our preferred new counties of potential habitation. Unfortunately, we haven't yet found a suitable replacement for the place we are shortly to be required to move out of, so further day-trips are required.

That, in turn, means little time is presently available for software development, so the new Niente is likely to be delayed a bit. Sorry about that. [...] 

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Bye-bye, Last.fm

I've long been an advocate for registering the fact you just played concerto X or symphony Y with a web-accessible store of data, such as Last.fm. I've been doing precisely that with everything I've played since January 8th 2008, so Last.fm have a record of about 14 years of my listening history. The thumbnail at the left shows you that's quite considerable: 202,000+ "scrobbles" (i.e., a record of the completion of a 'play') have been received in that time,

My top 'plays' as recorded by Last.fm are (in descending order) Britten, JS Bach, Vaughan Williams, Handel and Sibelius -which isn't so hugely different from what has been recorded on this very website since June 2021[...] 

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QEII

Like everyone else, I expect, I had been aware that Queen Elizabeth II was in declining health and was unlikely to last much longer (though I personally had my fingers crossed that she'd last until her centenary, at which point she would have beaten Louis XIV to the title of longest-ever reigning monarch: that's the competitive historian in me, I guess!) I was nevertheless taken aback when the news broke that the decline had been faster, and more terminal, than anticipated.

I am neither ardent monarchist nor fervent republican: I just think the Head of State mostly does ceremonial duties and therefore the person performing the ribbon-cutting doesn't really matter. On the other hand, if you elect Heads of States directly, they tend to become Presidential and centers of power in their own right -which doesn't suit the Westminster system very well at all. Plus, certain Presidents (mentioning no names, but the French and US ones spring to mind) tend to behave as quasi-monarchs anyway, so if you're going that route, what's the difference?! Appointing former political leaders to the ceremonial Head of State role also doesn't sit well, I think: they have a past, and past allegiances and loyalties to mates, and one of the nice things about a hereditary Head of State is that they owe no-one any favours. It's quite a nice check-and-balance to have, in other words, where the ultimate referee of the constitutional game is beholden to no-one for their position. [...] 

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Tragedy! (Averted :)

As expected, Monday and Tuesday turned into absolute scorchers and in a land almost entirely devoid of real air conditioning units in domestic settings, it was pretty nasty and definitely uncomfortable. The thermometer on the left is decently accurate and, although that shot was taken with it in the sun, when it was placed in the shade, it was still showing 37°C.

And that was outside! Inside the house, the temperatures just kept rising and the decision to shutdown all my servers in the loft for the duration turned out to have been wise, I think! [...] 

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