25 October 2025
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Well done to the Charnwood Training Band, who played well at Hathern Baptist tonight. I’ve seen some photos and you can see the shiny bell of my tuba in the back row… I was right that I only need to polish that bit!
24 October 2025
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In recent weeks, I’ve been making use of some clip on lenses to supplement the close up use of my most recent spectacles. The glasses are better from arms length away but, without the extra lenses, work less well close-up. On Tuesday night I mislaid the soft case I had been using and that seemed like a good reason to hunt down a 3D model to print.
This one was from CherrysCollection on Makerworld. It prints in one piece, including a functioning hinge and spring clip. In day to day use I am putting the lenses in the end of an old sock to prevent them bouncing around but running off a fitted liner it might be a good application for the TPU filament (a rubbery plastic) I bought a couple of months ago but haven’t got round to using yet.
23 October 2025
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This Saturday evening sees Charnwood Training Band performing at Hathern Baptist Church. Doors open at 7:30pm, tickets are £5 for adults (children go free) and we’ll be playing from about 8-9pm. Tickets can either be purchased in advance or on the door. In the concert, Jane will be playing clarinet, I’ll be on tuba and I’m also doing a short ukulele medley in the middle to vary things up.
Often my role in concerts with the various levels of the Charnwood Concert Bands is just to turn up and play. However I’m also both the rep for the training band and a member of the Baptist church so I’ve got some additional organisation duties. Either tomorrow or Saturday during the day I’ll be going over to figure out how to fit 20 or so musicians in the room and still leave room for a decent-sized audience. Tonight, though, I’ve been having fun with getting some slides together to accompany the performance.
Since a lot of the music is from movies, I’ve relied a lot on images of movie posters but I’ve varied it with some scenes and characters too. Not all the pieces fit that bill so I’ve been able to branch out in other directions too. I’ve aimed to keep the formatting reasonably consistent but with a little surprise every now and then. Although the slides are not the main focus, I don’t want them to be too boring compared to the music (which, by the way, was sounding rather good at our final rehearsal on Tuesday).
22 October 2025
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I’m not going to be at my regular church this morning but playing and preaching at St Theo’s. However, I decided I would still head over for the band rehearsal this evening to support the team (and also because we were planning on looking at a couple of new songs). Someone else will be playing bass on Sunday; I was going to take my electric guitar but since they couldn’t make it, decided to take my four string bass rather than the six string bass I normally use there.
The downside was that, until I got to the church and started unpacking, I forgot that the amp head I normally bring to pair with the speaker I keep there was in the front pocket of that other bass. D’oh!
Fortunately Sunday’s bassist is our regular lead guitarist and without that extra instrument in the mix, it was quiet enough for me (and others) to hear what was needed just through the main sound system. It isn’t that he plays massively loudly but it is a whole extra layer of often quite dense sound. Kind of quiet is fine, as long as there isn’t too much other sound to mask it out.
21 October 2025
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Yesterday a lot of companies had issues with their websites. The reason was that lots of companies use Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deliver them and AWS itself had issues. I am not an insider but I suspect AWS has a lot of kludges at its data centres and one of those failed leading to a cascade of other systems being unable to cope. Amazon is unlikely to release details but, for the outside world, the result was that a whole bunch of websites went dark or failed to operate in the way people rely on them to. If each company tried to maintain its own web operation or relied on a much wider network of different providers, this kind of mass outage would be less likely to happen but there would probably be a lot more total downtime because running that kind of thing isn’t simple and the engineers are often strongly encouraged to get things done without time for proper planning.
The problems stack up when people expect things to be at their finger tips when they want them. For example, if someone was a Lloyds bank customer and needed to transfer some money yesterday morning, they might have been delayed. Sometimes a delay can be crucial and the opportunity for a transaction might pass. How we guard against this when so much is outside of our control?
To be more resiliant is to take steps to be less reliant on things that you can normally take for granted. For example, if I am working on something that I need to print off before I use it, I will try to allow myself plenty of time because printers can jam up or run out of ink or paper. It won’t matter if I’ve got time to deal with it but if I’m expecting to run out of the door with the ink still wet on the sheet, I could hit a delay that will throw all sorts of other things off. When I injured my arm earlier this year and couldn’t play bass for a few weeks, it could have left the concert bands in a hole for several summer gigs; fortunately I was able to bring a range of other musical skills to bear and continue to play as part of the team even though I had an enforced break from playing electric bass.
When I was a teenager, I remember that the standard terms for things bought by mail order was “allow 28 days for delivery”. Nowadays, next day delivery seems to be the standard. You can even pay more for same day delivery and I often find that regular deliveries tend to arrive in the next day or so anyway. Perhaps it would do us well to slow down a bit, putting plans in place and then picking them up when the pieces are ready? Perhaps it would help us not to carve away all contingency planning so we rely on a single thread? Perhaps we should take time to prepare to weather storms rather than relying on outrunning them?
20 October 2025
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For tonight’s dinner I wanted some roast potatoes but I decided I would experiment by adding some of my beetroot powder (dehydrated beetroot blitzed into a magenta powder). I added some into the oil I preheated in the oven, which just cooked to a dark brown by the time the potatoes went in. I also added some more part way through the cooking. Initially that looked promising but the colour had largely gone by the time it came out.
I’d count both of those as wasted powder but I have an inkling that I might get the effect I want if I add the beetroot much nearer the end of the cooking time. It might even work to sprinkle it over the potatoes after they come out of the oven, when they are still covered in scalding hot oil. More experiments to come but, even if I didn’t get the colour I wanted, at least I got the roast potatoes which weren’t any the worse for my less-than-bright idea.
19 October 2025
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I had another go at chicken parmigiana today. The recipe I found to guide me was a bit different to the one I used last time but I think it is the kind of dish where you can play pretty fast and loose with any recipe. The main reason for trying it again was that I’ve got a lot of tomatoes that need using up and, the way I do it, this uses a bunch of them. The notes I jotted down to help me were:
And, as you see, I did remember the mozzarella this time around.
18 October 2025
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We were a bit thin on the ground at this afternoon’s sing around session so I got to do more songs than normal. I started off on the ukulele, putting in some practise ready for next Saturday evening’s gig with the Training Band, where I will do a little uke and voice spot in the middle. For that, I will perform what I’m referring to as my “Wonder Woman Medley” – Ain’t She Sweet, Five Foot Two and Yes Sir, That’s My Baby but now slightly trimmed down and with the intro to I’m Leaning on a Lamp Post to start it all off. That worked well, both for testing the medley in public and for testing the uke I’m planning to take along.
When my turn came round again, I’d switched back to double bass. My first offering on that instrument was gospel blues tune You Gotta Move. Next time round, the previous contribution had been in D so I switched into D minor and led Wayfarin’ Stranger. Then it came round again and I played Make You Feel My Love, noting the extra long line cliché (where the bass note descends in semitones for an extended period). On my final go, I led with Divin’ Duck Blues (Sleepy John Estes by way of Taj Mahal), a boisterous blues that was easy for others to join in.
Other bookings for the hall mean we miss the next couple of expected sessions so it is likely to be back again at the end of November.
17 October 2025
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Last time I tried growing leeks, the returns weren’t spectacular. One or two of them would have qualified as small leeks and the rest didn’t get much beyond spring onion size. I wasn’t planning on trying again this year but then a neighbour gave us a tray of young plants. Technically it isn’t the right time of year to put them out in the allotment but they stand half a chance there and probably a better one than sitting in pots until I get a suitable space clear in the polytunnel.
If they don’t get destroyed by winter weather, they will probably be inclined to go to seed next summer… but there’s a small probability that I’ll find a window sometime in the spring to enjoy them at the table. Meanwhile, I do need to get on with two crops that definitely appreciate a late autumn or early winter start: garlic and broad beans.
16 October 2025
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I was looking back on my blog to remind myself how I did score scanning last year (when I took on the Christmas music library for the training band). It looks like the point I reached was to fire up my old MacBook to do the main PDF handling. That route would probably still work although I’ve not booted the machine up for some time and I don’t want to rely on it so I did a bit more looking round.
Co-pilot, the AI increasingly integrated with Windows, suggested using a built in method to “print” all the image files to a PDF. I tried that and remembered both that I’d tried it and found it wanting last year. It failed to let me put the files in the correct order and cut off some of the edges. What did work was to use Powerpoint and drop each image on a fresh slide set up to the size of A4 paper. That allowed me to save a PDF file that was in the right order and not too huge.
I might dig back and see if I can figure out what Ghostscript code I used to reduce the file sizes last year but there were some trade offs in quality so I might stick with what I’ve got – 6.5MB isn’t too bad for a 15 page score.