Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

I am not an audiophile and yet my life has been touched by music.  One of my older brothers was an audiophile. He loved music and he was passionate about audio systems. He gave me my first lessons in music appreciation and in audio quality. We became close because of it. Coincidentally I was also very good friends with several very talented musicians who went on to make careers out of music. I spent my teenage years surrounded by music and musicians.  It is important to realise that music was more important to young people back then than it is today. Music was the foremost cultural phenomenon of the age. If you were a teenager back then the bands you followed defined you. Despite this I didn't follow any bands and I didn't buy any records.  My brother suffered from serious mental illness. When he was in the grips of psychosis he would use music  as a weapon to disturb the neighbourhood and to deny people from sleep.   I had a complicated relationship with m...

 My father was born a subject of the British King George V. He died a citizen of a free republic the equal under law of any king.  As you might have guessed I am not in favour of hereditary Monarchy. I realise that the British Royal family is probably the world's greatest tourist attraction and the ballyhoo and romance surrounding them brings significant tangible and intangible benefits to  the United Kingdom. Nevertheless the very idea of the royal family underpins a deeply ingrained system of hereditary privilege and power which in my opinion is anathema to a modern twenty first century free country.   There is a proposal that during the coronation ceremony today that the King's subjects watching from home can swear an oath of allegiance while sitting in front of their tellys. Needless to say the notion of people swearing oaths to their TV screens has provoked considerable derision even among fervent supporters of the royal family. There has even been several ...

  I had a life changing experience at a school retreat but not in the way you might think. This was many years ago when Ireland was a very religious country. Our retreat was led by an enthusiastic young priest who played the guitar and wanted to inspire us to change the world. He was actually a nice enough chap and he led us through a couple of days of prayer and soul searching. Then towards the end he put a challenge to us "Do you want to accept things the way they are like a humble mouse or do you want to go out there and make a difference like a a roaring lion". We were young and impressionable and most of us got caught up in the wave and said "Yes we want to change the world. That is what God wants us to do." There was one student though. He wasn't from a privileged background and he wasn't a star in class but he was the lone voice who spoke against the wave of enthusiasm that the rest of us got caught up in. "I don't agree." He said. ...

 This post is about eating breakfast / lunch / any other snack safely at your desk while working. Lets get the elephant out of the room before we begin: Eating at your desk is a terrible habit that is bad for you both physically and mentally. If at all possible you should switch off the computer and go somewhere else to eat. However the sad reality is that many of us regularly do so. In my case my computer is an integral part of both my work and my leisure and eating at the desk is a common occurrence. In fact this became so common during the enforced covid lockdowns that I learned, through trial and error two tips for eating at a computer desk and it is these tips that I wish to pass on today.  Tip 1: Never place a beverage cup between you and your mouse.   I am right handed and the intuitive position for me to place a cup of coffee is slightly to my right about 20cm from the edge of my desk. Unfortunately this is also the default position of my mouse. My first reac...

  For some reason I am chief clothes ironer in this house and it annoys me how much harder my wife's things are to iron than my own. This is despite the fact that my clothes tend to be much bigger and have a lot more material to cover. Reason 1: My clothes are all made out of cotton that can be steam ironed at high temperature. My wife's clothes are made out of a variety of light materials that will melt at anything above luke warm. Reason 2: Male clothing tends to be made up of a number of large flat panels. You just lay each panel flat and iron it. Even sleeves and trouser legs can be laid flat. Women's clothing tends not to have flat panels. It is made up of irregularly shaped pieces of material which are sewn together in escheresque arrangements. It is literally impossible to lie them flat. Reason 3 accoutrements. My clothes are all fairly basic. The only accoutrements you need to watch our for are the occasional button. My wife's clothes almost always have some kin...

 My contributions to this blog have slowed to a trickle in recent years. These days my main social media output is on Reddit where I go by the name of u/liambp (" L ife i s a M ind b ending P uzzle" ). Anyway sometimes I write stuff on there which could equally be posted here so I am going to try a new experiment and copy a post from there to here. If there are no undesirable consequences I may do it again.  The insidious algorithms of Spotify and Youtube know the truth. A quick glance at my personalised recommendations proves that my tastes were formed decades ago. I try to resist this inevitable sign of aging and make a genuine effort to follow modern trends but with a few drinks in me I quickly succumb to the lure of past memories. I have spent more than one Friday night binge watching music videos from the 1980s. When the zeitgeist occasionally rediscovers past artistes (eg Kate Bush/Stranger things) I allow myself a brief moment of smugness because "I was there whe...

 A couple of weeks ago my wife alerted me to the fact that I had developed an occasional odour problem. This surprised and distressed me somewhat. I will admit certain standards loosened during the pandemic  but I thought I was still doing OK on the fundamentals of personal hygiene. My wife was unable to clearly identify the cause so a bit of detective work was required. Eventually by process of elimination I discovered that excessive coffee consumption was responsible for my unpleasant aroma.  I wasn't always a coffee addict but during the pandemic lockdowns I got into the habit of brewing a large pot every morning. My wife sticks to decaffeinated so I got to polish off this litre sized jug of strong coffee all by myself. It fills a large mug three times. The first mug was fresh and piping hot. I tempered it with the smallest drop of milk, less than a teaspoon,  just enough to give some colour. The second mug poured later was stronger and cooler so I would forgo the...

I remember a time when people used to buy media content by the piece. You bought  a book, record, video or game and brought it home to keep forever. I have no great nostalgia for those times because content was expensive and the selection was limited. The advent of the internet and digital distribution shook things up and for a brief few years a lot of people thought that they could just keep downloading everything for free. Nowadays however we are firmly in the age of the subscription service where you can have access to a large selection of titles for a relatively modest subscription fee as long as you keep paying month by month. Subscription services have become utterly dominant in music and video and there are some very compelling offerings in video games and books now too.  These subscription services appear to offer an unbeatable value proposition. The monthly fee offers an enormous library of content and this fee is often less than you would have to pay for a single pie...

I am not an IT professional but I am technical enough to be called upon for computer support among my friends and family group. When it works I love being able to help people out but the experience is fraught with risks.  The diversity of things that can go wrong can be overwhelming and everything to do with computers seems to take much longer to fix than people expect. I have had the opportunity to watch professional support technicians in my workplace and once a problem goes beyond a certain complexity they very quickly go to the nuclear options of re-imaging disks or replacing hardware. Unfortunately these are not popular options when working with a family laptop that has has never been backed up. The biggest pitfall in providing amateur tech support however is the unwritten rule that once you attempt to repair a device anything that subsequently goes wrong with that device is now your fault, no matter how broken it was originally and no matter how much you acted in good faith t...

Ireland is making tentative steps out of a four month lockdown imposed to halt the spread of Covid 19. Given the how utterly bizarre the situation is it is somewhat surprising that I have yet to write in the blog about it. The truth is that while the pandemic is an event of enormous global impact the personal situation it has enforced is rather tedious and extremely repetitive. Thankfully none of my immediate family have caught the illness even though we have friends and acquaintances who were hit hard. For us us life under lockdown has been a depressingly repetitive cycle of sleep at home, work at home, play at home with occasional short trips for exercise or essential shopping. We are lucky I guess,  that we have been able to continue working remotely through the pandemic and indeed we have been very busy dealing with its impact. Aside: My father was born in 1913 and passed away in 1984. He lived through two world wars, an armed rebellion, a war of independence, a civil war, th...

All of our children are over 18 now so in a sense we don't have children any more. We have adult offspring. One of the small implications of this is that they have let us know they no longer want to use the childish terms "Mammy" and "Daddy" when referring to my wife and I.To be honest I think they are most uncomfortable at the way my wife and I have gotten into the habit of referring to each other as Mammy and Daddy at home and in public as many parents do after years of using those names with their kids. There is tremendous joy (and not a little relief) in watching your children mature into capable functioning adults. Nevertheless I am a little saddened to no longer be a Daddy. Daddys are magical mysterious  creatures, Dads are more humdrum every day folk. A Daddy can fix anything using his mystical  toolbox and his magic kisses. A Dad is more likely to break something. Daddys tell the best stories and can always make you laugh. Dads make you groan with tire...

Tobold is annoyed that mmorpgs " evolved into a bunch of derivative and repetitive chores instead of living and breathing worlds" and his post inspired me to record my own thoughts in a comment which I am recording here for posterity:  I am the same age as you Tobold and like you I once thought mmorpgs would be stepping stones towards fully immersive alternative worlds such as those envisaged by William Gibson, Neal Stephenson and Tad Williams.  I think a few virtual worlds did try to go that way including obviously "Second Life" but also a number of titles aimed at younger audiences such as "Club Penguin" and "Free Realms" but none of them ever really took off and in the end mmorpgs became just another type of game to play. I think that Blizzard realised this early with  World of Warcraft and while WoW did offer a large immersive online world the game aspect always came first. This proved a smart business decision because pretty soon afterw...

I was reading an article today about a rather shocking recent  incident where a policeman in Utah abused his powers to arrest a nurse who was doing her job. For some reason this reminded me of a situation I was in a few years ago where I was witness to a much more professionally handed policing incident. Time plays hell with memories so I thought to record what I still remember here for posterity. It started on the top floor of a double decker bus. I was coming home from work and I sat near the middle as I usually do. This day there was a rather loud gentleman sitting several seats back from me who was clearly intoxicated on alcohol or something else. He was determined to engage in loud conversation with those around him as he expounded his opinions in rather colourful expletive laden language. This happens occasionally on public transport and while it is annoying you learn to ignore it or perhaps move seats. I did my best to ignore the loud gentleman although those sitting close...

I have enough background in electrical engineering to be able to say with certainty that there are several absolutely objective criteria that can be used to gauge the overall performance of an audio playback system. Criteria such as distortion and frequency response can be measured and compared with high precision. I can also say with certainty that the build quality of a USB cable in a purely digital signal path has no impact on these objective criteria once the cable meets the minimum standard to ensure that the digital signal is transmitted in the first place. Yet experts who have spent years enhancing their knowledge of audio systems are adamant that they can hear the difference when they use $1000 USB cables:  http://www.hifiplus.com/articles/first-listen-audioquest-diamond-usb-cable/?page=2 Frederic Brochet's famous 2001 study showed that expert wine tasters cannot even distinguish between red and white wine in a blind taste test. http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014...

If a company has a live chat service I will always use it in preference to phoning the company to try and get customer support. I find it is is quicker to get in contact with someone and I find that it is generally quicker to get a problem resolved using live chat. This is despite the fact that the actually chat responses can be slow coming and the support reps are almost certainly multitasking multiple customer queries. I suspect that companies put a higher level of support staff on their live chat lines than on their phone lines because of the savings associated with multiplexing. An added bonus of live chat is that you can keep a transcript of the conversation. Many companies will actually email a transcript but you can usually screen capture it yourself. This can be handy if ever you need to refer back to it.

I used a gift voucher to buy three PS3 games I don't have time to play. I am feeling somewhat perplexed about it even though the voucher was a gift.  Over the years I have paid real money for hundreds of PC games I never got around to playing but somehow this feels worse. Most of those PC games are digital products that can be hidden away in my Steam library causing no offence to anyone. These PS3 games however will sit accusingly under the TV, increasing clutter and reminding me of the fact that they add negative rather than positive value to my existence. 

.. in a 200 year old creepy building with a bunch of teenage girls? Well apparently the school my daughter goes to would. Have these people never seen a slasher movie?

At 51 years of age I have become very settled in my ways. Nowhere is this more evident than at gifting times of year when my wife asks me for gift suggestions. I am very comfortable in my life and its patterns and I don't really need or indeed want anything new. Yes I have my hobbies and interests but over the years these have become sufficiently specialised that I cannot ask an outsider to get me something for one of my hobbies unless I hold their hand through each step of purchasing exactly the right model from exactly the right vendor. In most cases, if I really wanted something I will almost certainly have already purchased it for myself. In my defence I am a very grateful recipient of any gift at all. True gifting is a shared experience that bring happiness to both giver and receiver. Nevertheless I know my wife and family really want to get Daddy "something he wants". I feel ashamed at the pile of unread books and unused gadgets that have accumulated over the year...

I have two teenage daughters and nervous young gentlemen have begun  to appear on the scene. This is actually quite a traumatic period in the life of a father but there are some compensations. For example I am particularly looking forward to having the "Circle of Trust" conversation with one of these young Lothario's.  To kick things off I intend to sit him down, look him squarely in the eye and ask him slowly and purposefully to tell me which is the best Star Wars movie. The safe answer to that question is of course "The Empire Strikes Back". That establishes nerd credibility and an understanding of accepted cultural norms. Either of the other two original trilogy movies would also be an acceptable answer especially if it is accompanied by an analysis explaining why he believes it is in reality a better movie than the usual critics choice. "Attack of the Clones" and "Revenge of the Sith" are clearly wrong answers but somewhat forgivea...

Summer is the time when we have to rotate all of our utility suppliers (gas, electric, waste etc). When I was young we lived in simpler times. There was only one supplier for electricity, There was only one supplier for gas. There was only one supplier for what passed as telecommunications (some arrangement of paper cups attached with string if I recall). Those state owned monopolies generally provided  reliable service but they were inflexible and not particularly good value. You took whatever service they prescribed for you and you paid the price they saw fit to charge. Today all is deregulated and competition is king. Advertisements constantly tout the advantages of one supplier over another and not a week goes by without sales folk calling to our door to encourage us to change suppliers. Living in a large urban area we are blessed with a surfeit of choices for just about every household utility. Competition is actively encouraged by the government and is supported by strong...