All posts by stymaster

My blogging and website-bodging alter-ego. Not that much of an alter-ego. Apparently it's 'Absolutely obvious it's you'.
Life

Cut Up

I’ve been for surgery fun again! In my continuing tour of West Midlands hospitals!

Just over a year from my almost-certainly-cancer diagnosis in January 2023 where the consultant at Walsall manor Hospital told me that

You’ll find things will start to happen quite quickly now *

I got my pre-op checks at New Cross and to my surprise got a call just a few days later, which is how I found myself being dropped back there at 06:35 on a Saturday (with thanks to Mike, my excellent neighbour).

I’d been stressed since getting the call- not overly about the actual procedure, as that is largely what it is and I have little choice but trust in the skills of NHS staff- but more about anything stopping it going ahead: over a year is a very long time to be waiting. I find hospital appointments in general stressful, partly because of the logistics: I’m one of those people that cannot stand being late, and at most West Midlands hospitals, parking is a challenge, even on the occasions that driving there isn’t excluded by the treatment. Hospitals also, to me, with the possible exception of the QE in Birmingham, always have the air of chaos barely glued together by organisation- of many small microcosms operating semi-independently- and most of them are difficult to navigate if you don’t know them- in fact, I feel a dedicated post on that coming up.

Timing wasn’t ideal, given recent events (some of which I’m not putting public here, but suffice to say that 2024 did not heed my warning and life’s trials have continued to arrive), but I wasn’t going to be turning it down. The timing wasn’t good in particular for my other half, who at one point had 3 family members in different hospitals (admittedly one as an out-patient). The start of 2024 has been, shall we say, “intense”, as was the close of 2023.

I’d thought my fears were going to become true when the anaesthetist dropped the news that my potassium levels were low (this is bad, apparently, and caused by medication for the other health conditions I’ve found myself with), but getting patched in early to some IV drips sorted it enough (but I still had to take a supplement after surgery, which I can assure you tasted not, as the registrar suggested “a bit strange” but more “absolutely fucking rank”). Happily the stress of “will it happen or not” didn’t push my blood pressure over the threshold either.

So- off to theatre (darling!). A few hours of being inflated, poked, prodded and cut. Back out, and surprisingly low pain levels- except for my shoulders (it seems this is a side effect of the inflation I referred to above- and it has now, 5 days later, is almost gone). The actual wound sites (multiple, but small) don’t really hurt a great deal.

2 nights/3 days in- longer than expected and hoped for (when I was still in my late thirties it went so much smoother), but it’s done now, and seems to have gone well. We wait and see. Back home with my better half and kittehs (return journey courtesy of my excellent brother-in-law). Feeling OK now apart from being wiped out and having to stop the cats from standing on my stomach.

A while of watching YouTube videos (On The Buses isn’t being repeated this time I’m off work) and/or listening to music while resting.

*For the record:

Spotted on a CT scan for something else: December 2022. Confirmed January 2023. Rescanned and on waiting list March 2023. It didn’t fucking feel fast, I can tell you.

Rants, The stupid it hurts

Twenty

I’m starting to draft this well before the date, just to get some initial thoughts down.

Another year gone: anniversaries of this blog coincide with the end of the year, because, twenty fucking years ago(!), i started using a little-known bit of open-source blogging software, fired up the might of an old Pentium PC running Debian, and changed some firewall rules.

Every year since then, I’ve remarked on that and tried to sum up the last 12 months. It hasn’t always been good.

So, last year was one of those, and I gave 2023 a stern warning. It didn’t listen, of course, and 2023 proceeded to be somewhat of a twat. It was worse for others, of course- but some of those others are good friends and family.

While in 2022 we avoided deaths both human and feline, 2023 saw us lose 2 humans from extended family, one close, and for a moment looked like it might give us a double-tap result with things looking shaky for another close member. It wasn’t to be, though, so the count is only one down in closer family. We have lost someone else in more extended family, but neither of us have seen him in well over 30 years (but having seen his will, it’s rather a shame I never met invisible uncle Geoff, the legend).

Those events, and others I won’t go into have made it a stressful end to the year, though we did get away to the sun, something that looked doubtful at one point- and in fact, we had two good holidays this year.

So then, a summary of 2023? Health issues continue- for us, for family, and for good friends alike. We continue to age, we lose people. Conversely, we persist. We have cats (thank fuck for cats), we have friends (similar) and family (likewise) who are there and who we are there for. We have a warm, safe home, we have a stable income, we have (albeit reduced) family and the friends continue to be the type of people you want around you and we try to reciprocate. The health issues are either accepted, or slowly being dealt with. Too slowly, of course, but this is the NHS after 13 years of Tory control, so waiting is normal.

Talking of which, the country, of course, is still fucked.

Only the dimmest (and I include in that the architects of it) now think Brexit was a good move (and forgive me while I quote Stuart Maconie again, writing about how the North East voted for it in their droves):

what becomes apparent is that the large Brexit vote was not so much anti-EU as anti-Westminster, with Mackem after Mackem repeating the charge that London politicians of every stripe were cossetted, out of touch and self-serving but barely mentioning the European Union

Now that’s a fair comment, but for fuck’s sake people, fix the right problem. We all know things aren’t right, but this made it worse.

Our economy is in tatters, our NHS is broken, our social care is struggling, our politicians are largely inept and corrupt, but we seem unable or unwilling to do anything about this, preferring to blame a few desperate people from other countries, and we still continue as a country to vote in these fuckers, and to accept a deeply flawed political system because that’s how it has always been done.

It’s funny to look back on 20 years of blogging. When I started, I was soon to change job, and I’m still in it, the new organisation seemingly suiting me. Blog posts have got longer, as social media takes the short stuff- even if Twitter is now practically dead. I was in my thirties back then, and the world is a different place now. How the actual fuck did I get so old? Mid-fifties? Fuck. Better than the alternative though.

There’s fewer people blogging now: I was a relatively early adopter, before the peak in 2008 or so, and I’ve no plans to go anywhere, as long as I can keep annoying the right people. Some have left us, sadly, some have decided it has run its course. The good thing is that WordPress, the little-known bit of software I thought was cool back then is now powering a lot of the web, so that would be one of my good choices.

2024? I’m fucking well watching you, you fucker. I’ll switch my gloomy music choice to Gift, specifically Giving Ground for this year.

Now I know you will not see
The madness we have seen

Vodka and slimline tonic, please, for health reasons (because obviously switching to spirits is the healthy choice) but light on the tonic, please, we’ll still be needing a drink. I’ll stay up to make sure 2023 has gone. Black clothing is still de rigeur, obviously.

Life

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas everyone. A new variation on Christmas for us. Work was finished some time ago, Christmas Eve saw us drop in on family nearby, then our tradition of Indian food and a few drinks, but with my lovely sister-in-law joining us.

Christmas day was lunch cooked here, but served in Pelsall, which actually worked superbly; something I’m unbearably smug about, then a drop by at my niece’s place to say hello, and then back with our kittehs and a drink by mid-afternoon.

We’ve had nice gifts from good friends (we agreed as a family to wind back Christmas gift-giving) and each other, some decent food, and a low-stress day: I’ll take that.

audio, Life, music

Bogus Dago Blues Band

I had thought that there were zero meaningful hits for this on the Intertubes, and thought to remedy it, but then another search revealed Martin Dale, the man previously known as Klink, as a solitary web hit.

Bogus Dago was a blues band that Mark was part of in the early-mid 90s. We, as family members, saw them play several times, and at one point in the nineties, I’d regularly wear a t-shirt promoting them because I kind of liked the design.

It was nice then, when my dear sister-in-law found (a) a unused band t-shirt in time for Mark’s funeral and (b) a cassette.

A cassette J-card for Bogus Dago.
A scan of the original cassette J-card for “Go Mango”

As I’d sold our only cassette deck over a year ago, I had to call upon a (young) colleague who has discovered the cassette revival, and with a bit of fiddling I captured the over 30 year old tape to .wav, broke out mhWaveEdit, split the tracks out, encoded them to FLAC and tagged them, then burnt a CD with functional CD-Text, as well as MP3s and the aforementioned FLAC files with embedded album art by cropping and stretching the scan of the cassette J-card.

The surprising thing is that the 30-plus year old cassette, on nothing more exotic than a TDK D60, played back from a mid-range 1980s Sony Walkman sounds OK-ish- there’s a bit of wobble as the treble drops out once in a while, and there’s hiss- but it’s by no means awful. The concept of producing your own CDs at the time was not within easy reach- now it’s actually a dying technology, its time having passed, but at least Bogus Dago Blues Band now have a CD release (and potentially a digital download, too)! Does this make me a mastering engineer? (no, it doesn’t. I’ve done no post-processing, so the audio is pretty much as-is off the cassette)

Sample track (track 2) here, a song credited to the band:

Another One Knocking – Bogus Dago – Live at The Frog July 1st, 1994

I can’t currently find where The Frog was and if it still exists, so if anyone knows, let me know. It’s reasonably likely to have been in the Dudley/Brierley Hill/Stourbridge area, as the band played there a lot.

I’m pretty sure this isn’t the gig on the tape, but here’s the band performing in 1994. Mark’s in the white t-shirt, playing bass.

Bogus Dago Blues Band, performing in 1994.
Bogus Dago Blues Band, performing in 1994. Photo copyright Jane Bush.

Martin sings a version of the song on his Youtube channel:

music

Dark Swansong

Continuing the occasional series of music reviews, I decided to look back through my Amazon wishlist (where I save stuff that is interesting but I may or may not buy), and saw that an album in there was reduced by some margin, and even better was now £6.66: the price of the beast.

How could I resist? Well, I couldn’t. It’s the style my learned colleague refers to as “those wailing women”, more kindly referred to symphonic metal/gothic metal. The best known example is probably either Within Temptation (though, like the Sisters of Mercy, they eschew the goth tag) or Nightwish, but what I’d chosen was Tristania‘s Darkest White.

This should have come off my wishlist into a basket years ago: it’s a cracker: the crashing guitars and drums, the “wailing women” along with 2 types of male vocals.

Sad they’re no more, really, this being their last album back in 2012 🙁

Life

RIP Mark

Today (I’m writing after the event, but will fudge the date to the correct one for his funeral), we said good bye to another family member. Extended family, for me, but very much family, part of my life since I was 18, which was obviously some time ago now.

These types of posts are always difficult: obviously, when someone leaves us you want to recognise them, celebrate their life, recognise their achievements, their caring, their efforts and their contributions, but I always want to avoid the kind of gushing post that claims someone was perfect when clearly we all are not. I’m far from it, and when I am gone, I hope that people recognise me accurately (and I hope to have been good enough to have at least some positive things to say).

So then: Mark, the man I called brother-in-law, though to be completely accurate, he was my sister-in-law’s husband. Biker, metal enthusiast, father to two wonderful people I am proud to be related to, husband, quietly enthusiastic cat adopter.

My first conversation with Mark was when I was clearly being checked out for suitability by him and my now sister-in-law in late 1987, and my last one was mere hours before his death, almost 36 years later, analysing which particular aspects of Strictly Come Dancing we loathed the most (for the record, it’s the mangling of music by the orchestra, and the clapping along). Being married to sisters gave us endless opportunities for spotting family traits and, obviously, taking the piss.

Mark was someone you could rely on to help if he could; someone who when I was unable to drive and he could, took me to and from hospitals at the wrong side of Birmingham. We worked at the same organisation for a while, him in Health and Safety, me in IT, and he was very, very good at that job: H&S gets bad press (from idiots), but if it is applied properly and sanely by someone who is qualified and knows what they are doing, it isn’t obstructive and it is for everyone’s benefit- and that’s a lesson I largely learnt from him. His knowledge and experience stays with me, years later.

I also got my first pillion ride on a bike with a good amount of power (a GSX1100F)- I’d ridden pillion before, with my old man, but a Jawa 350 with over 100BHP less was a different experience.

Rest in peace, Mark. We’ve already raised a glass to you and will continue to do so.

General

Looking Back

I’ve read a couple of books lately that while quite different, seemed to mesh.

The first was Rule Nostalgia by Hannah Rose Woods, a look into why, particularly in the UK, nostalgia for previous times is so powerful, and why our country in particular seems to continually look backwards and cling on to anachronisms, looking for a golden age. One of the interesting things is that people have always done this

Tangentially related was Stuart Maconie’s The Full English, where Stuart does a modern recreation of J B Priestley’s English Journey.

It’s interesting that the first book identifies the particularly damaging nostalgia- that misty-eyed view of empire tied together with English exceptionalism, where we English are assumed to be superior just by being English- all looking back to a time of

widespread ‘nostalgia for a time when life was easier, and Britain could simply get rich by killing people of colour and stealing their stuff’

One of the book’s main points is that nostalgia is highly selective, so we’re expected to accept the duality that the post-war years were a time of austerity and everyone pulling together, except that actually they were

an age when the country had rebuilt itself into prosperity through massive government investment

So we invoke all the “Keep Calm and Carry On” bullshit- a slogan that never actually saw the light of day during wartime- and align it with austerity, when actually, this was never the case. Of course history quite often means a certain variety of history:

I am not sure what is more frightening: that fact in itself, or the enthusiasm with which politicians and right-wing newspapers warn that historians who seek to debunk these foundation myths and dispassionately examine the past are sinister Marxist ideologues seeking to undermine the freedom of ‘Western civilisation’ as we know it. It sounds a bit fashy to me.

So any dissenting voice- one that suggests that (for example) our Empire was built upon trade from behind a gun and by exploitation is seen as unpatriotic and “doing Britain down” in the same way that Brexit would be a huge success if we’d all shut up and just believe. It’s all a basic refusal to acknowledge that we past we’re looking back to isn’t as it was presented anyway, and it’s long gone.

Meanwhile, Stuart’s book starts with:

As I left, Britain had no HGV drivers thanks to Brexit, empty shelves and a collapsing gas industry thanks to rampant idiotic privatisation. There was no petrol in the pumps, no pasta or loo rolls on the shelves and rumour had it the army was about to be deployed on the streets. While in Norway I caught their most popular TV satire comedy show, their equivalent of Have I Got News For You. In it there was a long riff about Britain’s malaises greeted with hearty gales of Nordic laughter. It concluded with one contributor saying, effectively, ‘well, England’s had a good run. But it’s over for them now.’ It was hard to disagree.

and continues on the rose-tinted view of a simpler life in the country that’s received wisdom in the UK (and predominately England):

bucolic simplicity tends to also involve quite a lot of back-breaking physical labour, starvation wages, bullying aristocratic bosses and rapacious landlords. If we think that Laurie Lee’s Cider With Rosie describes the ultimate Cotswolds idyll, it’s worth remembering that there was quite a lot of disease, poverty and sexual abuse mixed in with the cider and snogging. As Lee puts it, ‘Manslaughter, arson, robbery, rape cropped up regularly throughout the years. Quiet incest flourished where the roads were bad; some found their comfort in beasts; and there were the usual friendships between men and boys who walked through the fields like lovers. Drink, animality, and rustic boredom were responsible for most.

and tempers his love of the Cotswolds with

But then I remember the snobbery, the innate conservatism, the private schools, the forelock-tugging, the foxhunting, the parson and squire, the agricultural subsidies, the unearned wealth, the Range Rovers, the pink trousers, the preponderance of wankers

and here is where I felt the two meshed: the imagined perfection of older times, tied in with the overarching desire for some English people to be told what to do by a posho. Over to Stuart again:

England regularly retreats into stupidity and deference, still in thrall to the vain, the dim and the laziest loudmouth in the workshop. Jeeves is dead. But on shining Southampton Water and the misty Fens, in the busy streets of Birmingham, Bradford, Liverpool and Manchester, in ancient, secretive Lincoln and newborn, futuristic Coventry, we are still bowing and scraping to Bertie Wooster and his private club. The personnel may change. Some of them are asked to leave, having been particularly obnoxious or useless. But the club remains, and it remains members only.

For a country that has been here for a thousand years, we are still taking our baby steps towards adulthood.

What is this illusion, this phantasm of greatness these people chase? Is it the one where we trampled on the lives and rights of people all over the world and exploited them to death? Why do we yearn for some imagined greatness when right now England can’t feed its kids, heal its sick or run its trains? How about forgetting about being great? How about being happy? How about being competent?

The whole thing is rotten. The political classes, the broken first-past-the-post election system that skews our allegedly democratic process, the unelected House of Lords, the ridiculous ceremonies and titles instead of actually, you know, running a country. The politicians with outside, conflicting interests, the corruption, and yes, an unelected, billionaire head of state. The continual looking backward, the glorification of war, the racism. The endless privatisation of things that should be public, and in general, the constant boot-licking in search of a non-existent golden time.

music

Back to the 80s

It’s odd, having lived through the 80s, to see the revival of it, and the spinning-off of 80s culture and re-interpretations of it, and one that’s currently grabbed me is Synthwave/Retrowave/Outrun asthetic.

If you’re of a certain age you’ll know Outrun, the 80s arcade game:

… and there’s a whole culture that embraces this look, perhaps with a bit of Tron and Miami Vice along the way. The band GUNSHIP are an example, and to see just how much the Outrun game influences this, one of their videos imagines what the Outrun couple do at night:

The whole thing is like a re-imagining of something that almost existed. It’s an interesting subculture, it has produced some good music, and I can’t help but wonder where it came from. We’ve seen a 80s culture revival triggered by Stranger Things, but this pre-exists that.

music, Technology

Android Bluetooth “Feature”

I’ve been though a few pairs of bluetooth headphones since this, progressing to Cambridge Audio Melomania 1+ (which got washed and are no longer available…) and Lypertek Z7 true wireless ones (the Z7’s have a weakness, broke, and got refunded under warranty), and I ended up with What Hifi award winning (but budget-level) Sony WF-C500s, which work well and sounded pretty good, but while listening on the balcony on holiday, I noticed that they were using the inferior SBC codec paired with my Motorola G50 5G.

The previous headphones supported APT-X, so this hadn’t been an issue.

Poking about in Developer Options, HD Audio and the ability to select AAC was greyed out.

Android developer options screenshot

It seems that in their “wisdom” Motorola maintain a whitelist of devices that are able to use AAC, and if the device isn’t on that list, it reverts to the inferior SBC codec- the cited reason being stabilty issues. Deselecting the “Bluetooth AAC Whitelist” option and cycling bluetooth off then back on enables you to turn on HD Audio and use the AAC codec. Why this is buried in Developer Options is anyone’s guess.

I suppose the question is “did it make any difference”? I told myself I could tell the improvement with AAC, but that could be confirmation bias 😉 .

Life

Sunshine

We went away: the first time I’ve left the country in 4 years.

This was booked well over a year ago, and circumstances were looking to conspire to have us not go: my current health issues resulted in a resounding “Ha Ha Ha fuck off” from travel insurance companies, a family member was in hospital, and we suffered a family bereavement I’ll come to in another post.

As it was, we thought “fuck it, we need a break and we’re not wanting to lose a shitload of money”, so we went.

An early start, and the joy that is BHX. Is BHX ever not a shitshow? (spoiler: yes- our return journey was fine) Security was chaos- random shouty people, disorganised and some downright fucking rude. Seriously, is it wasn’t for it being only 40 min away, I’d avoid BHX.

Anyway, that shitshow dealt with, expensive ‘spoons breakfast, and it was on to an uneventful flight, off at Fuerteventura airport- a paragon of quiet efficiency by comparison- and on to a coach. I’ll say one thing for Jet2, they ‘re organised: everything was clear, smooth, and worked.

We got to our hotel, centrally located in Corralejo:

and checked in. The room overlooked the busy main street:

View of Main St, Corralejo, from our hotel balcony. It's a busy street with bars, restaurants and shops
View from the balcony

which was initially a concern, but the soundproofing was good: with windows closed the room was quiet.

We’d been to Corralejo before- though I had never stopped there. In many ways it’s another Canarian resort: bars, restaurants, sunshine, warmth- and this was, to be honest all we needed. t We spent the 10 days doing, essentially very little, eating, drinking (too much), relaxing, reading. I sat on the balcony watching people and listening to music.

At one bar we saw the world’s angriest speaker:

A very angry-looking speaker
A very angry-looking speaker

We had some fantastic food- and nothing less than at least good. In fact, there was only one disappointment- a terribly low cat count compared to 4 years ago, with only two spotted, so we missed Mingo & Fanty, who were being cared for by my wonderful nibling, safe at home.

The return home came in one way too soon (I could get used to sunshine, no work, and eating out whenever I like), and about right (missing my house and cats). The return journey was uneventful, with even BHX and HM Border Control co-operating, but by fuck, it was cold.

I have to make a few comments on the Brexit fuckup after my comments last time. I said:

The happy fact that the Brexit uber-fuckup hasn’t happened yet means we still got to wander through passport control in seconds, still got to use our phones and bank cards, and basically had less to worry about.

and to be fair, the phones and bank cards still worked seamlessly. We did have slight delays at passport control, where previously we’d just walk though, but they weren’t bad. Of course, at present there’s no visa requirements, which helps, so while we’re still a laughing stock, our economy has tanked, and the full process still isn’t done, at least we didn’t suffer unduly on this holiday.