6 March 2026
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Listening to More Music

One of the benefits of working at home is that I can play whatever music I want over the air rather than having to wear headphones and keep taking them off when someone pops into the office. It doesn’t mean I’m playing music all the time but it is particularly good when I’m working on something that needs a measure of focus (music cuts out background distractions) but not absolute concentration. I’m still scrobbling all my computer-based listening to last.fm although nowadays it is rare that I actually refer back to it.

Since today is “Bandcamp Friday” I decided it might be a good time to extend my collection with some new material. Since the dark days of COVID, when many musicians were struggling as work dried up, Bandcamp have offered to give all profits on the first Friday of many months directly to the artists. Obviously they need people to buy on other days too but it is an extra incentive to check in. My treat today was a bundle of Scary Pockets albums. I’ve enjoyed a lot of their work on YouTube over the past decade so I know I’ll enjoy having these to spin on demand it is a way to throw a little into their hat.

There are plenty of other artists on there as well, from ones a lot more people will have heard of to those happily deep in obscurity (Peter and the Wulf, with our latest release having had about four downloads in the 15 years since we published it, definitely fit that category!).

5 March 2026
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Clefs

One of our neighbours recently asked if I could help him with a bit of 3D printing to finish off a woodworking project. He had two ovals in the wood at either end of the new shelf over their piano and wanted a couple of clefs to go in the gap. Here is the finished result although, balanced on my mantlepiece for the photo, the dimensions have got a bit skewed:

I did my first draft entirely in the translucent material and the lines matched across both halves. I’ve now made a few refinements – offsetting the lines so the clefs balance better, increasing the side depth and slightly reducing the perimeter size. Most important off all, I took the time to pause the printing partway through and switch to some black filament. The contrast looks great and we’re both very happy with the result.

4 March 2026
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First Scratch

When you get something new, there is a tendency to be very cautious around it. Then it gets its first knock, scratch or dent and, although you still look after it, you feel a bit more relaxed; more willing to use it than simple coddle it.

That happened this morning with one of the websites I am looking after. Despite all my care, the server started displaying an error after I had made a small update. There were a few frantic minutes but fortunately I spotted the problem (a single missing character) and managed to get it fixed. I still need to do a further investigation into where I slipped up, because the problem didn’t show up in testing, but at least with that first scratch on the hood since I took over, I will probably feel a little more relaxed!

3 March 2026
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Warmth is Happiness

I’m told that for chilli seeds, happiness is a warm environment. I had reasonable germination results last year but not many of the chilli plants made it to the point they could be transferred into the polytunnel. I had used a heating system to keep them at about 20°C. This year, having studied a bit more, I’m using a smaller propagator but boosting it to 25°C for the germination phase to try and give them a very positive start. I’m interested to see if that is enough to keep the seedlings – and me – happy with their progress.

2 March 2026
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The Hendrix Chord

Many guitarists will know how to play the “Hendrix” chord even if some of them might be a little shaky on giving it the more technical name of x7#9. It is named after Jimi Hendrix because he used it to great effect on tunes like Foxy Lady and Purple Haze. Both of those songs are in E, so you start with an E7 chord (E G# B D), drop the fifth (B) and add in not just a 9 (F#) but one that has been raised by a semitone, leaving you with E G. That will leave you with E G# D F##. At this point most guitarists will say “but isn’t that just a G at the top?” It sounds the same (an enharmonic equivalence) but it gives you the tension of the way the G# and F## rub together without the new challenge of explaining why you are doing different things to the “same” note in different octaves.

I haven’t listened to a lot of Hendrix recently but I’ve come across two instances in the last few days in entirely different musical contexts where it has been an ideal resolution to what a particular chord should be called. One was a song written by Simon, the guitarist I was playing with last night. He is a “literate” musician but had it down as a dominant 7 chord with a minor third on top. I spotted that it could instead be a 7#9 chord, which fitted coherently with the rest of the song.

Tonight at choir, I found an even less expected context. We were singing I Am Come into My Garden by William Billings, an American composer, published in 1794. There was some discussion about a bar where the altos had an F# and the sopranos had an F natural, an octave higher. The conductor had listened to a recording and was sure that the rub of those two notes was intentional… and then it struck me that a #9 could be the answer. If the sopranos were actually singing an E#, that would place the notes from low to high as D (bass), A (tenor), F# (alto) and E# (soprano). It isn’t quite the classic Hendrix chord since it spans almost two octaves and has 1/5 at the bottom rather than 1/3 but it would be a way to resolve the fact the song features the F# and a note 11 semitones above it. American music, eh!

1 March 2026
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Keeping my fingers in trim

I did another wine bar gig tonight (on double bass, backing up a friend of mine on guitar and vocals). Relatively local but sometimes I wonder why I put in all the effort for this or most my other musical activities. Then I remember that, even when not all the music is what I would choose or if the settings aren’t where I wouldn’t be without the musical role, it all keeps my fingers (and voice) in shape so that, when an unmissable opportunity does come up, I’m fit and ready for it.

28 February 2026
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The Roots of Patience

Recently Jane has watched several episodes of a detective series called Patience (2025-). A detective is given invaluable hints in a case by someone who works in the records department, a neurodivergent woman called Patience. Tonight we settled down to watch something different, a French language detective series called Astrid: Murder in Paris (2019-). A detective is given invaluable hints in a case by someone who works in the records department, a neurodivergent woman called… well, Astrid, obviously.

It turns out that the later series (set in York) is a remake of the earlier one (set in Paris). It isn’t a blow by blow recreation but so far it seems to be worked up from essentially the same script. I think I can make a pretty canny guess about how episode 2 is going to run and who turns out to be the murderer.

To my eyes, the French one feels a lot older. As much as anything, I suspect that is due to how I’ve got used to British standards for filming TV drama. It hits more of the beats I expect whereas the French version is speaking a different cinematographical language as well as a different verbal one. Both are worth a watch for comparison although, for now, I think I’ll stick with the one set in York.

27 February 2026
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Musical Day

I’ve had a musical day today, with a couple of hours of rehearsal on double bass earlier and another hour on tuba this evening. I’ve also spent some time getting my music together for the tuba rehearsal and, with the spare time, I was continuing to update the music distribution site for the band (where I’ve now got the process of adding a song down to less than 5 minutes… as long as all the original parts are in order as PDF files).

26 February 2026
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Bee Keeping

Bee keeping, as in the keeping of bees, is something I’d love to try one of these days although I’m not sure I’ll ever have time and suitable space. However, I have in mind Beekeeper Studio, a database management tool that I discovered today. What it does is give me an interface to the databases I am working on that is a bit more visual than just using a command line interface, without either being too bulky or needing an upfront investment of time or money.

It has helped a lot with the database I was exploring today and I think I might press it into service in some other projects too.

25 February 2026
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Tempted to get some extra value

I was speaking last Sunday at St Theo’s on the subject of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness (a common lectionary reading for the start of Lent). Since I was leading a Bible study tonight I succumbed to the temptation of reusing my notes although hopefully this is an example of temptation not leading to sin.

My musings started with the general theme of how our society approaches the idea of temptation. In short, with a lot of ambivalence: temptation is actively used in marketing and advertising. In the UK, many will remember the slogan “naughty but nice”, which sums that up well. The Bible doesn’t have as many direct references as I expected (about 20 and all in the New Testament in the modern versions I checked) but does have a fair amount to say about it. For example (James 1) temptation is not sin in itself but the potential start of a dangerous progression; we can expect that God will provide us a way out… if we look for it (1 Cor 10:13). We can also find plenty of people engaging with temptation, such as the stories of Adam and Eve (Genesis 3) and Cain and Abel (Genesis 4). Neither of those ended well but King David fell but repented (read Psalm 51 for his words of repentance).

I finally got to Jesus’s experience, where I concluded that although he has been tempted as we are (Hebrews 4), the temptations in the desert are something different. Coming between the heavenly commendation at his baptism (eg. Matthew 3) and the powerful start of his ministry (eg. Matthew 4:12ff), he faced and easily countered temptations that are much beyond what we normally expect to face. These were not the day to day temptations we have but a demonstration that Jesus was God’s champion.

My conclusion then was that the best response to temptation is to stay well out of it, that when we fall, we should step into God’s abundant mercy and that Jesus is a worthy king, who knows the kinds of things we face but has also dealt with things at a level far beyond us.

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