Why can’t a computer be more like a car?

B received an email from X today.  It began ‘good morning!’, which isn’t X’s normal greeting, and contained a link.  Because they’d met yesterday at an emotionally charged event, B unwisely clicked on the link.  Very smart AV software warned her that this was a risky site, which had already tried to put a virus on her computer, and advised her to clean – mop it up and bin it.

At this point, B phoned me, because she’d had a similar problem last year which was even smarter.  The link didn’t just download its viral software, it also fairly accurately mimicked the AV system’s response: and if you accepted the spurious advice, it went ahead and installed the virus!  Well, you have to draw a line somewhere, I said, so go ahead and clean.  She did, and it seems to have worked.

What happened here is that, somehow, X’s address book had been stolen and used by criminals to disseminate their warped misanthropic excrement.  Why those people feel it’s necessary or appropriate to waste all that effort and brainpower is a question for the psychiatrists, not me.

When I get in my car tomorrow, I don’t expect it to behave any differently from today.  I don’t expect anyone (either BMW or someone pretending to be them) to have changed the layout of the pedals or the way the lights or the indicators function, overnight, without asking me.  Nor do I expect my next tank of petrol to behave at all unlike the previous one.  Until computers and their operating software (the car), and applications (the petrol), subject themselves to similar principles of self-regulation and quality control, IT will continue to be an infantile industry.

Just as a debating start point for tomorrow’s G8, can’t spam detection be lit through the same Prism as everything else seems to be?  That’d be a damned sight more helpful use of all that wasted effort, machinery and petrol.

The Book book

Or ‘The book Book’.  Either way, a brilliantly simple idea, thanks B. 

Instead of – or rather as well as – keeping a notepad beside you, on which anything from possibly-to-be-used-in-future-blog-post-quotes-from-newspapers, via debugging instructions or memorable song lyrics or transient phone numbers to data concerning books can be jotted, instead you can maintain a separate notebook (it should preferably be hard covered, A4) in which you write anything you like or dislike about books you’ve read, recently or in the past, or want to read in the future, or feel you should read, the main rule being that there are no rules, at least I think that’s how it’s meant to work (there may be a few others about inordinate punctuation and sentence length, also about the importance of strictly confining the scope to books, resisting the temptation to extend it to music, films, and other media –  otherwise running the risk of going full circle and ending up with a notepad beside you, on which anything from possibly-to-be-used-in-future-blog-post-quotes-from-newspapers, via debugging instructions or memorable song lyrics or transient phone numbers can be jotted, or even data concerning books), but I'm not sure about that, a bit more analysis might be needed, so don't wait up. 

Like I said, brilliantly simple.

Confusing blackbirds

I’d intended to write about a great idea (the book book – maybe tomorrow), but instead I’ve just amused myself for five wasted minutes in the garden, whistling imitations of my three or four local blackbirds’ songs.  (I’m a good whistler.)

They’re good whistlers too, and seem to be conducting conversations, across a range of a few hundred yards.  After my abject failure to transliterate the strange bee/donkey/ventilator Sound, I’m not going to go there: if you want to hear them, get your own blackbird-equipped garden.  (I should, in this day and age, be possessed of the means to record, store and upload soundclips, but I'm not.)

I know, it’s territorial marking and mating invitations.   So I’ve probably caused untold disruption – in fact, they seem to have gone quiet while they think about it – and I can expect them down the chimney any time later.

 

The Sound - on Bees, Badgers and Donkeys

I don’t mind a mystery, and I always rise to a challenge, but I’d prefer it not to be at 11.45 p.m. after a good dinner of seared cod and Jersey Royals followed by lashings of sumptuous conversation. 

Very soon after I got to bed, I noticed The Sound.  It was somewhere in the interstitial internodes between a terminally failing bumble bee trapped behind a Venetian blind, an irritated but bored lapdog in next door’s conservatory, and a constipated badger.  (I hasten to qualify that I can just about imagine the first two, but made up the third; funny the tricks your mind plays ‘round midnight.)  It went, roughly, “Brzz.  Brz-brz-brz.  (Pause.) Brzzzz!”  Or sometimes “Urmph-bzz.  Umph.  Bzz-umph-bzz.”  Then it would seem to be one side of a half-heard one-sided conversation between a one-sided drunken couple somewhere down the road: “Whad-umpya-bzzrfr?”   “Burmmm…”

I got up to look behind the blind and out of the window, and of course saw nothing.  And heard nothing either: whatever higher power was inflicting this mystery/challenge on me was several jumps ahead.  Eventually it seemed to stop, or I fell asleep, or both.

I raised it, just as a conversation point, like you do, over breakfast.  Opinions varied between worker bees in the soffits, a ventilator outlet flapping in the wind, and the donkeys for the next day’s Derby across the field.  The bees seem to be the most rational explanation, but I have a soft spot for the stabled donkeys.

The experience reminds me of when I was kept awake for hours in St Jean de Luz, in about 1992, by incessant thumping music from just outside the pension.  After an hour or so, assuming it to be some inconsiderate kids, I leant out of the window and shouted, in English, “For fuck’s sake, put a sock in it, will you?”, with precisely no effect.  Next day I discovered I’d been swearing at a disco at the sports field half a mile up the road.

Road Placidity

I see the police are to be given powers to impose spot fines of up to £100 on tailgaters, middle-lane-hogs and the like.  Well, jolly good show, I say!  Here are a few other offences I’d add to the list:

·         Failing to raise a hand in recognition of someone giving way to them at a row of parked cars.

·         Pretending to make a gesture of thanks while in fact raising the middle finger of the left hand.

·         Blowing the horn after ten seconds when a driver lets a waiting vehicle out from a side street, thereby delaying the offender by twenty seconds from catching up with the half-mile tailback 200 yards ahead.

·         On the motorway, overtaking at two m.p.h. faster than the overtaken vehicle, and then reducing speed in front of them to two m.p.h. slower.

·         At a roundabout, not signalling left or right until actually turning left or right.

Any more, anybody?

A proportion, say 50%, of the fine should be donated by the state to the victim of these crimes, with the proviso that it must be spent, within six months, on something they wouldn’t otherwise have bought.  Should kickstart the economy.

The same principles should be applied to shopping trolleys.

Caravan Diaries, last weekend

On the way back from Porthgain to Wiseman’s Bridge (or Wisemansbridge as some have it), we stopped off at Narberth to pick up some essential supplies, mostly Schweppes tonic and yogurt.  Also fruit: some delicious cherries, and two ‘flat peaches’, from a wonderful shop called WiseBuys.  Have you come across flat peaches?  No, nor had I.  They’re very small, as peaches go, and, erm, flat.  And also delicious.  If your local fruitier doesn’t stock them, instruct him/her to do so.  They could be the next cranberry.

I wanted to show Narberth/Arberth off to B, so we wandered around a bit.  At the top of the high street, I noticed the bookshop.  It looked closed from a distance, but we approached anyway.  It’s open.  For reasons lost in time, the sign above the door reads ‘BOOKS Animal Kitchen BOOKS’.  If that doesn’t entice you in, what will?

The proprietor is there, just as he was a decade ago when I last visited: and I mean ‘just’; sitting behind the counter, reading a book.  “Look around,” he suggests.  “They’re arranged in categories.”  I am in no doubt that this is true, but it would take me some hours to analyse the non-Dewey system being applied, so we just wandered around in awe.  The shop measures maybe 200 square metres.  The aisles are elbow wide, if you’re slim.  And the books tower to head height, those that aren’t in floor level cardboard boxes.  There must be thousands of them. 

It’s impossible to choose one, so we drift back to the entrance.  On the way, B spots a book about Afghanistan that interests her, so picks it up.  As we’re about to pay, I see a copy of the ‘Tao Te Ching’, in poll position on the counter.  I read this when I was in my twenties, and had been thinking only the other day that I should read it again.   I reckon he assessed me as I walked in, thought “he’ll buy this, maybe,” fished it out and put it there. 

Back at the caravan, we finished cleaning the algae off the walls and the weeds from the patio, and planted up a couple of pots.  The television has packed up again, so we missed the weather forecast.  “The TV is hidden and nameless,” as Lao Tzu almost pointed out.

The Great Jimmy Gatz?

In preparation for not watching the latest cinematic attempt to turn perfection into something less, I reread the novel.  If you haven’t read it, either look away now or carry on reading – like Nick by the end, I don’t really care either way.

So, applying the rule of five:

1.      What’s great about him?  He and Daisy are in a child-child relationship, mediated by a controlling parent/child (Tom) and several powerless adults (Nick, Jordan, even Myrtle).  He’s an infantile manipulative wimp, who collapses under the least pressure.  He cheats even when he doesn’t need to.  He doesn’t even bother to make an appearance until page 54 (out of 188).  So what’s to love?

2.      Answer: precisely those flaws.  Scott proves – and remember, this was 1923 – the fragility of America.  Bubbles are designed to burst.   The genius is to condense that fragility into a single person, conceal him behind his own defences, and then prick him in such a way that you end up not even sure if there’d been a bubble in the first place.

3.      The strand of the novel.  It opens with ‘In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice …’ and ends with ‘borne back ceaselessly into the past.’  Although the peroration is impersonal, I like to think that Nick himself is being borne back; indeed, that the story is his as much as Jay’s or Daisy’s.

4.      Indeed, the more I reflect the more I think this is a fictional autobiographical narrative.  But then I have to admire Nick Carraway’s skilful ducking and weaving in and out.  Now you see him, now you don’t.  We don’t know what happens to him afterwards (did he marry that Midwest girl, who never gets a name?)  The others all end up either dead or gone; Nick himself fades away, in the last chapters, like a green light in the fog.

5.      The words.  Oh, the beauty of the sentences!  We all know the famous quotes, so just a couple of examples of perfection:

(page 101): ‘The rain was still falling, but the darkness had parted in the west, and there was a pink and golden billow of foamy clouds above the sea.  “Look at that”, she whispered. And then after a moment: “I’d like to just get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you around.”’

And (page 159): ‘He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him.  But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.’

Oh, and all right, maybe the most poignantly banal phrase in literature, where Nick makes his peace with Tom, despite himself: ‘I shook hands with him; it seemed silly not to, for I felt suddenly as though I were talking to a child.’