Yesterday we gave a rhythm & timing workshop at a salsa weekender in Garforth. What a buzz! Got the dusty timbales out and got to whack ‘em properly, had a play of the bongos and the various cowbells. Gareth brought his formidable congas and we gave a one-hour class explaining the rudiments of salsa rhythms and how to listen out for them in relation to the salsa basic step.
Even though the afternoon was spent pulling up the kitchen floor to find it even more rotten than the bathroom floor, I’m still on a percussion-high today!
BBC Radio 4’s You and yours, a supposed “consumer interest” program, just had the most tenuously consumer-related item. They had a mobile phone industry representative on, complaining that when they sell handsets at highly subsidised prices, people buy them, then sell them on the global market at what is still a good price, but also represents a profit.
Does this drive up prices in the UK?
Uh, well, no, because the UK’s highly competitive. But it does remove value from the market that could be passed on to the consumer.
In other words, some of the money that mobile phone companies would be ripping off the consumer (he said could be passed on, not would be) is being ripped off them by some enterprising consumers.
What measures can they take to prevent this getting out of hand?
They can limit the number of handsets that can be purchased in one transaction, and also limit the rate at which handsets can be bought with a given credit card. Oh and they sim-lock phones so that the consumer is unable to change networks without buying another phone.
It doesn’t sound to me like the “box breakers” are the problem for the consumer, but rather the phone companies.
How the BBC cares to justify this as “consumer interest” I don’t want to know, in case it gets me so mad that I go out and find the first person in one of those shirts that are stripy but with a white collar, and strangle them with their tie.
The Rooster in my village.
Oh, what a din he made!
Oh, what a dinner he made!
For some reason 34sp told me I couldn’t still be sweavo.34sp.com any more. So I picked a domain named after my current favourite song. Here’s an entry to help you remember it. The song is a Cuban son, one of the forerunners to salsa, and sort of a latinized blues. Really beautiful:
Por el camino del sitio mo un carretero alegre pasó
En su cancion que es y muy sentida muy guajira alegre cantó
Por el camino del sitio mo un carretero alegre pasó
En su cancion que es y muy sentida muy guajira alegre cantóMe voy al transbordador a descargar la carreta
Me voy al transbordador a descargar la carreta
Para cumplir con la meta de mi penosa labor.A caballo vamos pal monte, a caballo vamos pal monte
A caballo vamos pal monte, a caballo vamos pal monteYo trabajo sin reposo para poderme casar
Yo trabajo sin reposo para poderme casar
Y si lo puedo lograr ser un guajiro dichoso.A caballo vamos pal monte, a caballo vamos pal monte
A caballo vamos pal monte, a caballo vamos pal monteSoy guajiro y carretero, en el campo vivo bien
Soy guajiro y carretero, en el campo vivo bien
Porque el campo es el edén más lindo del mundo entero.A caballo vamos pal monte, a caballo vamos pal monte
A caballo vamos pal monte, a caballo vamos pal monteChapea el monte, cultiva el llano, recoge el fruto de tu sudor
Chapea el monte, cultiva el llano, recoge el fruto de tu sudor
I’ve been feeling this song lately, especially the “Yo trabajo sin reposo” part. Plus my surname translated into spanish is Carretero. So soy carretero - I am the cart-driver.
Having learned that bash (or readline) uses emacs-like keybindings to move cursors around, and having problems going to start-of-line or end-of-line by pressing HOME and END when sshed to the Mac, I googled for emacs key bindings and stumbled upon Emacs Makes You Retarded. If you can’t be bothered to read the article, basically the guy says that once you learn how to get by in an idiosyncratic system, you’ll tend to prefer it over clearly more sensible systems, simply because your brain-finger-results path is so much lower-resistance in the system you are used to. I guess this is why hostages fall in love with their captors, and why people stay in unhealthy relationships.
These poor sods are stuck in a world of ctrl-a for start-of-line (never mind the HOME key) ctrl-e for end-of-line (END anyone?) and odd sequences of multiple keypresses to achieve such things as saving and loading.
Although I’m heading the other way (I want to know what these arcane key sequences are because they’ll solve the problem of moving the cursor on my Mac). I philanthropically conceived of a wonderful piece of rehabilitative code:
demacs: detox for emacs users.
It’s emacs, but it also supports sane keypresses - where keys that are found on nearly all keyboards actually do what they say on the caps - and supports shortcuts that are more consistent with Windows (or consistent with a fond memory of how Windows used to be consistent)
Here’s the clincher though: all the emacs bindings work, but they each have a 0.25-0.5 second delay on them, and they all display the “better” key in the status bar or somewhere nice. So you can have your old habits and work just fine, but you are constantly motivated and educated to change your ways.
This is not really a new concept: I seem to remember Microsoft did it in Word ages back; whenever you pressed a key that a WordPerfect user would have pressed, it would do it, but nag you at the same time.
The irony is, you could probably implement all of this as a set of emacs macros, only anyone who knows enough emacs macrology to do it is unlikely to think that HOME and END are a better idea anyway.
Dammit, I didn’t manage to get my “vi-sexual” joke in.