little bits of everything

Things I think or know about unicorns. A thread.— Paul Morriss (@paulmorriss) March 31, 2018They seem to be quite popular these days (slippers, mugs, cakes). As well as sometimes meaning something mythical, they also seem to be treated as cute.— Paul Morriss (@paulmorriss) March 31, 2018pic.twitter.com/4dMvbMEH0y— Paul Morriss (@paulmorriss) March 31, 2018They aren't cute. They're horses WITH A SPIKE ON THEIR HEAD. Never mind the four hooved feet.— Paul Morriss (@paulmorriss) March 31, 2018I only recently realised that the unicorn on the heraldic picture with a lion and a unicorn signifies Scotland, in the same way that a lion signifies England. Sorry Wales. (I like dragons.)— Paul Morriss (@paulmorriss) March 31, 2018When I was in primary school we had two houses, lions and unicorns. I was in the unicorns. Unicorns are great.— Paul Morriss (@paulmorriss) March 31, 2018

A few years ago I heard a new song by the Beach Boys. I was never a great fan of their, though I did listen to a whole album by theirs on the way to a chess tournament (as you can imagine that was really wild), and I think Good Vibrations is a great song. However this new song left me distinctly underwhelmed. "That sounds like the Beach Boys", I thought, "what more would you expect?".

I watched a programme on BBC4 recently about how these days there are so many bands that are getting back together, going on tour and sometimes releasing new singles.

Blondie reformed 20 years ago. Do you feel old? — Paul Morriss (@paulmorriss) February 2, 2018
On that programme Stewart Copeland, the drummer with the Police, captured my thoughts about why new songs by old bands are rarely that good. He said that old songs have emotional baggage, like those crazy times on the chess tournament tour bus, and the new stuff doesn't evoke that emotion when you first hear it. So when the…

I don't often go to see gigs, but in 2017 I somehow went to several. I've put photos in to break up the text, but my phone's camera doesn't exactly excel in concert conditions. They started in...
February - Under Construction, the Bailey Sisters
Under Construction is a covers band based in High Wycombe. One of my friends is the bassist and for his 50th birthday he got them to play for the party (and joined in on bass). They have two lead singers - one male and one female - and some very competent musicians. There's nothing quite like hearing some great songs from the 80s and 90s played live. His wife is in the folk band, The Bailey Sisters and they did a few songs too. Traditional folk isn't my cup of tea, but I enjoyed what they did.
March - elbow elbow is my favourite modern band. (Seeing as you didn't ask, my favourite non-modern band is Genesis and I was very glad to see them in 2007.) I bought their Mercury prize winning album "Seldom seen kid&quo…

As I've created accounts on various websites and social media I've avoided using nicknames. (The one exception is eBay, where I feared that a bad sale would mean that someone would track me down, so I hid behind a username based on a work nickname.)

However when I was in my early teenage years we were given a CB radio and when I (briefly) took to the airwaves I chose Sparrowhawk as my handle. I'd forgotten why I chose that, but this piece by David Mitchell (the author) on A Wizard of Earthsea reminded me why. At the time I loved that book, and David's article could explain my love of the book:
Any reader with experience of adolescence will recognise herself, or himself, in Ged’s portrait, and because we identify with Ged’s failings, we worry for him, can hardly bear to look when disaster hits, and afterwards care deeply about his fate. It may reread it now.

This is part of an IBM mainframe that I saw at the Science Museum in London. It's hard to imagine that anyone ever understood what they all meant. I think the reason there are so many lights is because there is so much to go wrong. The lights show when something's working, so no light means failure, or when something fails. These days the FLP BFR (flip buffer?) always does what it's supposed to, so we don't need to have a light for it.

I remember when modems had a full set of lights: TX, RX, DCD, DTR and so on. I also remember using them to try and work out why connections weren't being made. As they became smaller and sleeker they had just a couple of lights to show activity. Then they disappeared altogether.

We need lights for things we can't rely on. Once it's reliable the lights go away. Today I was re-reading the essay from Douglas Adams, "How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet", written in 1999 (I wonder if that distinguished j…

A phrase from the latest blog entry by The Reinvigorated Programmer, What I've been reading, lately part 23, has prompted me to get this post out of the mental draft folder.

Speaking of The Complete Harlem Heroes, a reprint of the strips from 2000AD he says
They are full of panels that, forty years on from my first reading, still reach right back into my hindbrain and yank on my neurons. I have the same thing as I re-read a couple of comic books I have from my childhood, a 2000AD annual from 1980 and a Superman Giant Bumper Book:

I must have re-read that book many times, because when I look at it now can remember imagining a cavern with a laugh echoing round it almost as if I was there. With this picture:
I can imagine the slimy and firm-to-yielding texture of that thing, as well as the force it takes to push it down into that container.

When I occasionally read comic strips/graphic novels it's not quite the same. Is it because my imagination has atrophied with age, or because…