in the classical fashion

I have decided to make the switch to classical music. I am fond on grand gestures, and hence from now on I will just listen to classical music. 

I have always had a wide-ranging taste in music, from Beethoven to the Beatles, from Edith Piaf to Neutral Milk Hotel. And while there is some music that I perpetually return to, overall I rather like to progress through the world of music, exploring and trying out new things. 

While you can mix in some different types of music, I cannot really manage my iPod on shuffle, with classical tracks appearing. They are at once too dense and too sparse to play in amongst pop, rock and jazz. So the solution is to just switch wholesale to classical. The benefits of this are that it is easy to build up a vast amount of classical music quite cheaply, you can buy virtually the entire works of some composers quite cheaply and there are plenty of 100 best style compilations, many remarkably inexpensive. My natural inclination is towards the music of the twentieth century, partly because I feel that I ought to take an interest in it, and partly because much of it is actually quite challenging to listen to. On a constant diet of classical music it is nice to have a mix of the more melodic and the more dissonant. 

I have sought to add in to my collections the composers that people I respect really rate, so Schoenberg and Mahler are in there, while I have also discovered a fondness for Vaughan-Williams. By mixing them up, the dramatic sounds more dramatic, the discordant more discordant. I have yet to find a fondness for Stockhausen, but I suppose anything is possible. 

There are a few issues with classical music, it does not entirely lend itself to playing on an iPod, because for many people the most important item of the metadata is who composed it, but classical MP3s seem to have avoided any consistency whatsoever on where the composer data is held. Another challenge with classical music is the the volume can shift dramatically, which is fine in a quiet concert hall, but where you are listening on headphones it can vary between inaudible and deafening. While headphones on a busy train mean that you miss little of the subtlety of a lo fi track, you do miss out on the depth of many classical tracks. 

Perhaps my headlong dive into classical music will prove shortlived, but for the moment, I press on in the classical fashion.

A short story - The sense of trees in the mist

If I could live off of all the white wine and canapes, I would never have to buy food again. Similarly, as a well loved national treasure, if fame and adulation paid the rent, then I would be a rich man indeed. As it is there are always the commissions for articles, or conference appearances, and they pay well enough, but I have never produced a work that is a set text in a million schools, so I bumble on, almost a household name, but too poor to run a car.

And so I found myself, on the train, sitting opposite this adoring student, young enough to be my daughter. My year long stint as a University composer in residence had come to an end. It paid okay, and it raised eyebrows and attracted welcome column inches when I had stayed at student digs to save a bit more of my money. In amongst the students I felt like Methusalah, but we all need to challenge ourselves. 

She wore a woollen hat that looked vaguely peruvian, on someone else it might have looked affected, but to be fair she carried it off well. Her coat was a rough felted material and her eyes glittered with the joy of youth, when there are so many wonderful things still to be found and the idea of a familiar routine seems remarkably far distant. She had a small black rectangle, probably a phone that buzzed and vibrated, but she ignored it lapping up the fact that she was sitting opposite a national treasure. 

I was still trying to make some progress on my latest composition, “A sense of trees in the still of the mist”. 

The University had made quite a fuss over my posting, so at least in that University town I was very nearly a household name. The student opposite was certainly awestruck and gushy. She asked me about what I was doing, as I scribbled my musical notes on the blank manuscript paper with a Staedtler mars lumograph HB. I have a felt wrap of such pencils, all sharpened to a ridiculously long point with my Mitsubishi KH-20 desk sharpener. The tip of the pencil scrapes along the paper with a satisfying friction. Unfortunately the notes in my head falter and repeat themselves, but with far less conviction.

I talked her through how I like to compose, creating fragments on individual sheets, then collating the sheets to form an initial structure, then going back and amending the individual fragments that I had started with. A huge amount of hard work goes into writing something that sounds effortless. 

She asked about the title of the work, and I explained that it was about knowing that something was there when you could not really see it, about how you can be close to something really solid and important but only just be aware of it. Truth be told the title was a bit unwieldy so I was still not firmly wedded to it yet. 

As a National Treasure I am forever meeting people, so I have a store of amusing stories and observations that I can charmingly deploy. But I was getting tired and I don't like travel and travel does not like me. So silently I wished that I could tell her that being a National Treasure is a rotten plinth to be placed on, and anyone sensible would be far happier being an accountant with a pension and children, but instead I told her all my ideas to improve the world,
Mens black shoes with a dark purple metallic sheen
Restaurants where the staff divide up the bill for all the different members of a party
And a myriad of other ideas, 

She wrote them all down diligently in one of her spiral ring university jotters, though if there was any way to make a penny out of any of these ideas then it would take a smarter, or at least more practical man than me. 

She left a couple of stations before me, so I stood up to shake her hand, and she leant forward enthusiastically to give me a hug and a gentle kiss on the cheek. I watched her little knitted bobble hat vanish into distance, and thought that if I had had a daughter, then I would have been very happy with one just like her. 

Two stops later, I gathered up my ancient barbour jacket and various canvas bags and rucksacks, full of my assorted paraphernalia, my moleskin trousers, woollen jumpers, brogues and undergarments. My sister was at the station to greet me, her car was blue last time, but this time it was an unpleasant green colour. I don’t really know much about cars, it looked pretty much like all the others, towards the estate size, though they don’t seem to look quite that boxy nowadays. 

My sister was always the practical one, the sensible oldest child, always keeping a watching eye on me. For all her good sense, she had a dismal choice in men. Her husband was a sullen lump with no sense of humour and a permanent scowl. He always seemed to be heading out to the pub whenever I arrived, and seldom had much to say. I suspect that he resented having anyone else in the house, which although understandable enough is rather petulant in a grown up. From time to time she had black eyes and a tooth had vanished one Christmas, but she never said anything, for good or ill about him. Perhaps he was one of her fixer up projects. She was forever taking on old properties and doing them up, or renovating a beat up arm chair, unlike her choice in men, her taste in material things seemed to be immaculate. She could spot the potential in anything and had the rare knack of turning a profit while remaining true to the spirit of a thing. She could take something covered in pigeon poo and rust, and turn it into something you would quite happily pay a fortune for. I hoped that her husband was out. There was a good chance, he roamed the country doing jobs, I was never sure what, reappearing unexpectedly. 

She drove me up the country roads, grinding the gear stick like a farmer with a Landrover, a green tunnel of hedge piping us through tumbling fields and rambling copses. The road dipped down, as if readying itself for what it knew was to come, and the car reared up, tackling the steep incline to her cottage. For an instant we held our breaths as the car ascended, and then resumed chatting in hushed tones. She was happier than I remembered her being of late. I think that she had hoped that I would make a bit more of myself, although there was clearly considerable kudos to be had being related to a national hero, she knew me well enough to know that it was a precarious existence. 

We dined well, her husband was away, she did not say any more. She untied her hair, flinging back her head laughing at some old stories that we had told each other a hundred times. She seemed more carefree than I remembered of late. It suited her, she deserved to be happy. I nagged her at the lack of foraged foods from her cooking. Living out in the country she could have dined well on what could be gathered from hedgerows and fields. The autumn was upon us and the brambles were bursting on the vine. 

I crawled off to bed with a pleasantly warm feeling and curled up in an enormous feathery duvet that seemed to stretch like an ocean around me. Together, the duvet and me, curled up like two cats in a basket and I dreamt of dark trees shrouded in a still mist. 

The morning is always better in the country, the light is better the air is crisper. I made a pot of coffee and shrugged on my heavy moleskin trousers and a checked shirt. I left the manuscript paper on the kitchen table with a pencil and headed out. I had looked for a trug for gathering mushrooms in but had to settle for an old biscuit tin. I left the lid behind and headed out with it. My feet followed the path that felt most familiar, like the sheep cut a track across the hills, our feet follow each other, even across the different times. The path was metalled with worn smooth pebbles, with low clumps of pineappleweed. They are supposed to give off a delicate fruited scent, and thrive on being trodden on. They seemed to me to be an appropriate emblem for a small country, pervasive and unnoticed. The lowering hedgerows separated out and a small field lay before me. 

A patch of ground looked pretty much like any other, but a rim of redshank flowers, tiny pink towers caught my eye. The redshank appears on broken soil and vanishes the next year. 

There was a cluster of wavering little peaks, difficult to tell but they looked like the scarlet caterpillar fungus, no use to me, a poisonous fungus that can kill. Like the north American hebeloma syriense it would grow where corpses are. Its mycelium stretching like an underground empire gathering up its resources, only being glimpsed as the mushroom raises itself from the ground.

I stood silently, and my eye traced an outline, roughly the height of a man, and slightly wider than a man, some disturbed soil around the periphery as if a turf had been cut and reinstated, surrounding somewhere that a poisonous fungus had chosen to grow. 

The dew on the ground was still heavy, and there were bound to be better mushrooms to be found, sure enough before long I found some chanterelles at the edge of the field, just past a pile of soil, that was slowly being overgrown by grass and weeds. The tump of soil was about the volume that a man would be, a man like my sister’s husband. 

I gathered up the chanterelles in the biscuit tin and headed back up the path to her cottage. As I went I tried to remember the latin names for the trees, shrubs and flowers I saw. For some reason today felt like a good day, of course I was not going to say anything to my sister, but my little wander and forage had done wonders, I rushed back to pick up one of the pencils with the long tapered point to jot down the musical notes, one after another, for my latest piece of music. Music can be so eloquent, while holding it true meaning close. For once the notes seemed to be flowing like they had never flowed before, and I could tell that this would be something very good indeed.  

I felt sure that my sister would not mind using the chanterelles in our meal or if we opened an extra bottle of wine that night with dinner.   

secure email options

Following on from recent leaks and media coverage, there has been a lot of hipster geek interest in encrypted emails and services offering more privacy than Google. Initially Lavabit looked like the answer, Edward Snowden used it, and if anyone knows about secure email it is likely to be him. Well Lavabit closed down, and now no one trusts any of the US or Canadian email providers. 

Looking around there seem to be numerous alternatives, the following seem to have a good few favourable mentions, 

Neomailbox 

http://www.neomailbox.net

$49.95 per annum, based in Switzerland. Looks to offer what you would expect it to, as well as an anonymous surfing service that will mask you IP address for the same amount again.

Countermail 

https://countermail.com

$59 per annum, based in Sweden, has the coolest gizmo of the lot, you can have a USB stick for when you need to access your account. This does look hardcore, for people who are really serious about their encryption. 

Mykolab

https://mykolab.com

$64.92, or thereabouts, the pricing is complex. Based in Switzerland, Mykolab recently offered a lite version to attract those looking for a Lavabit alternative. The main focus seems to be calendar and contacts management for businesses, with the encryption as part of the overall package. Interestingly one of their FAQs, is 

“I heard Swiss internet is routed via the UK. Isn't that worse than the US?”

Swissmail

https://secure.swissmail.org/generalmail/swissmail/info/en/email_service.asp

$35 per annum, unsurprisingly based in Switzerland. The service seems pretty basic, with a website that looks like something from the dawn of the internet. It does not offer anything special for encryption, but is easy enough to get set up. 

Most of these will offer a free trial, to see whether they work for you before you shell out any actual money. 

As far as I can recall, the most expensive Lavabit account was $16 per annum, so none of these would have been plausible contenders while Lavabit was about. 

Also worth keeping an eye on is the Wuala (pronounced like the french voila) by the French firm LaCie, which offers encrypted cloud storage. There is not much point in encrypting all your email if you are just backing up all your data to some US based servers, like Evernote, Dropbox, Apple iCloud, etc. There does seem to be a real opportunity here for canny European firms, or anywhere else that can convincingly claim to protect your privacy. 

geeks experience a disturbance in the force

In geek terms there would appear to be a disturbance in the force.

In the world of RSS feeds, 

I moved from GoogleReader over to the Older Reader, obviously I was not alone, apparently their subscribers went up from around 10,000 in March 2013, to nearly 400,000 in July 2013. Probably a good problem to have if you are charging, but a bit of a nightmare for a free service. Their blog is wonderful reading,

http://blog.theoldreader.com

I would hesitate to guess what proportion of Google Reader subscribers joined The Older Reader, at a complete guess a quarter to one third, which would put the total number of people using RSS at just over a million worldwide. Off the top of my head that is surprisingly low, being in a house where two out of four use RSS. Perhaps RSS is a generational thing, with not much take up amongst the under thirties and the over sixties. 

Anyway, The Older Reader has increasingly been subject to outages, which their site endearingly responds to by having random photos of kittens. There were major outages when they moved material over to a new server rack and solid state drives started failing. Then they announced that they were shutting down altogether to all but original customers and a few limited exceptions. This week it has been announced that they have got support by a bigger player, and all their data has crossed the Atlantic from Europe to somewhere in America. Not sure where in Europe or where in America, it does seem a little cryptic. 

Of course there are alternatives to The Older Reader, inoreader gets a mention, and was  recently added to the possible subscriptions within the iOS app Feeddler. Not sure how any service would cope with an additional 100,000 subscribers within a month though. I am still running NetNewsWire but as it does not offer syncing between my laptop and iPad, it is not getting much use. 

Secure emails services diminish 

The other disturbance in the geek force has been that lavabit the super secure email service, as used by Edward Snowden, has just closed down altogether, presumably following interest from the NSA that lavabit are not allowed to talk about. It might re-open, but the clear implication seems to be that if you do not want the US government to be able to read your emails then do not use an American company for your emails. The similar privacy respecting email service Silent Circle also closed down in advance of a presumed visit by the NSA. 

Various issues arise, 

Should anyone worry about the US government reading their emails ?  

Well as Cardinal Richelieu said 

“If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.”

And seeing as he was an adept Machiavellian figure he ought to know.

On the face of it, if there are appropriate checks and balances, and responsible American officers in law enforcement, after due appropriate judicial process, can eventually obtain access to my emails, then it is not a worry. On the other hand, if just anyone who wanders into any office of the American government, can just browse through anything that anyone anywhere has written, print copies and leave them on a bus for fraudsters and crackheads to read, then it is of concern. Particularly if it is possible to just go on a fishing expedition, doing searches for anyone who has ever mentioned chernobyl, or used pgp. 

What does this mean for the future?

I cannot imagine that businesses or governments outside of America are terribly comfortable with the idea of Americans browsing through all their emails. As above, the best option seems to be to wholly avoid using American companies. There is not a huge choice, but a quick web search suggests the following Swiss providers, 

Mykolab https://mykolab.com

Swissmail http://www.swissmail.org/Swissmail/home/home.asp

Both are commercial services, the Mykolab offers more eyecandy and more functions, but is pricey, Swissmail looks like a throwback to the eighties when we used to code pages by hand, and does not offer too much, but is a lot cheaper.

In the end, you pays your money, and makes your choice, free services with big brother looking over your shoulder or pay for some privacy. 

Rather than worrying about how private your email provider is, you could use something like gpgmail (for mac) so that mail is encrypted when it leaves your laptop, and decrypted by the recipient. There is a certain amount of faff involved, with public and private keys, and you both have to be using pgp so it is not for the casual user, but in fairness, if most of your emails are to a handfull of people, it is fairly easy to set up and once set up, can be fairly seamless. Just how secure it is depends on how paranoid you are. If you want to commit details to memory and enter them every time you read an email then it is so secure that someone could steal your laptop and still not read your emails. In espionage terms, where the effort involved in accessing information is too big, you resort to nicking laptops, installing keylogging software, tricking targets and the like. The sort of measure that you would use for serious targets, but not for a fishing expedition. 

dysfunctional patterns

For some reason we now seem to be rather uncomfortable with patterns. I am reading a book on the Arts and Crafts movement, and it is full of splendid concoctions by William Morris and Charles Voysey. Other art movements seems similarly endowed with a real sense of style and swagger. 

Although the culture of today probably has an air of austerity about it, a slightly joyless feeling that we should all be guilty about our crimes against the environment or about the financial excesses that we are currently paying off, there is much to be grateful for. I am perhaps in a lucky position, luckier than many, but it seems to me, that an awful lot of things that I might have longed for a few years ago have now come to pass. In sports, Britain hosted a much admired Olympics, British athletes compete at Wimbledon and in the Tour de France with real panache. The economy is at least on an even keel, a great many businesses are operating well. Politically Britain is coping well with diverse views, there are no riots in the streets, basically the state is operating reasonably well, the celtic fringes are adopting a slightly more socialist tinge, but rather than creating tensions, things are managed with a good humour and tolerance. 

But perhaps more than ever, we don’t really seem to have a firm national vision of where we have come from or where we are going. Arts and Crafts was mostly about the past, except about when it was about the utopian future, Bauhaus was about the future, as was modernism. Some movements are about an imagined elsewhere, for example the Victorian Japonisme, or the modern minimalist wabi sabi aesthetic. 

But the prevailing taste seems to have no strong vision to it at all. Shopping for clothes, the retailers are differentiated, but no so much so as to be radically different. The surf bum stock from Fat Face is not much different from the outdoors look or the Gap casual, or even terribly far from much of the formal (Charles Tyrwhitt) or country wear. None of it would look terribly out of place in John Lewis, a place which offers a pleasantly bland middle class taste that is unlikely to offend. 

An inoffensive functionalism seems to have taken over from taste, we are happy enough to pull wheeled suitcases, wearing clothes from Gap that could be expensive, or could be cheap, you cannot really tell. 

I don’t think that taste and fashion should change to celebrate luxury or go all punk. But it should regain some strength of feeling. I like things that show that a degree of effort has gone into something. Things that have a degree of authenticity. Things like living in a converted industrial workshop, while retaining the old fittings, the Drew Pritchard / Salvage Hunters aesthetic of found objects, the hipster delight in the odd and distinctive, fonts that are an optical illusion, the timorous beasties patterns that look all very tasteful until you realise that they are scenes of urban decay. 

Perhaps it would be no bad thing if people were to save up for clothes or furniture, designed just for them, rather than buying more and more bland disposable items. 

We should perhaps try to care more about a few possessions, rather than care less for very many, and not be so afraid to stand out from the crowd.

RSS Readers post Google Reader

Well that was easy. After some vexation about what to do after GoogleReader was decommissioned, and about half an hour to fix myself and another half hour to fix things for my wife, blogs continue to be read much as before. 

I used Google Takeout to obtain a copy of all my feeds, and I am now using four RSS readers. 

Perhaps best to start by saying that I am running a Mac and an iPad, so this is probably of no interest to non-Apple-users. 

Firstly I am running the Beta version of NetNewsWire, which I downloaded from their site. It loaded easily enough and just imported all my old feeds. As far as I can tell it either retains the flags for what is read etc on my laptop, or on a NetNewsWire server somewhere. The Beta is free, but I might just stump up and pre-pay for the full commercial version.

Secondly I am running OldReader within my browser for when I want to browse my blog feeds on my laptop. The account is free, and took minutes to set up. 

Thirdly I am using Feeddler Pro on my iPad and this is synced to OldReader.  So to keep in sync, I just use Feedler Pro and OldReader in my browser. 

Finally, I am also accessing my blog feed via FlipBoard on my iPad, which looks lovely, but does tend to crash pretty often, so only really doing this because it was so easy to set up. 

This combination, particularly Old Reader and Feeddler Pro, seems to offer all the features that I want, I am not heavily into sharing or social media, so others might feel that this set up is too limited. Instead of using favourites I now tend to send any blog posts that I particularly like to Evernote, which should offer a degree of robustness whatever happens in future. 

I will just run with these four and see how things pan out, I am not entirely convinced that all the current players in RSS readers will still be about in a few years, so keeping a surplus option or two ticking over is probably sensible.

Good to see that blog postings continue to be posted at pretty much the same volume they were before. Hopefully most everyone else found the transition relatively painless and are still managing to read all the blogs they want to, in a hassle free manner. Blogging is a wonderful thing, and deserves to prosper.

so farewell then google reader

We are steadily counting down the days until google reader is retired by Google. I am not a technical whizz, so my thoughts on what will happen once google reader is retired are worth no more than anyone else’s and are indeed based on the sort of cursory web-search that anyone can do. 

I suppose we should all be intensely grateful that Google were willing to support google reader for so long, it provided a basis for a myriad of RSS readers, allowing countless developers to earn some money, while Google did the heavy lifting running all the servers, and only to find any ads they did try and insert stripped away by the RSS readers. 

At time of writing there is talk of a few possible alternatives to google reader, but as practically all the RSS readers are simply a front end that goes above google reader, and details of any alternatives still seem sketchy, the demise of google reader might even signal the demise of quick easy blog reading. Personally I subscribe to a couple of dozen blogs, some fairly mainstream, some entirely esoteric, and they all have their own little place in my affections. I have edged away from regularly reading magazines or indeed quality newspapers, knowing that much of my casual awareness of what is happening in the world is now far more effectively provided by blogs. 

This does demonstrate one of the fundamental principles of the internet or business, better to buy a poor product that is obviously under development, than a better product that is not being updated. As soon as something starts to sit on the shelf, taking in money, but unchanging, it is a warning sign to the consumer. Don’t put too many eggs in this particular basket, it might not be there before too long. The writing was on the wall for google reader a long time ago.