Start with Part 1.

Bellows are a mystery to me. Even now. There are plenty of tutorials showing you how to draw lines on paper and then fold them up, but my brain doesn’t find it easy to visualise it. Easily solved, I’ll just make a model.

Start with Part 1.

I just wanted another portable harmonium. Whether that meant buying or building one.

I saw one on eBay, listed as a fixer-upper that doesn’t play. I had to get it. In the best case I would have a harmonium. In the worst case I would have learned something.

The seller was quite open about it not working. I took the gamble, and met him in a car park off the M4. It looked exactly like its photo.

I should be clear that I already have a harmonium. It has three octaves, two ranks (voices) and knee-pedals to operate the swells. It’s small, and folds up smaller. If you saw me carrying it you might mistakenly think I was struggling with a very heavy suitcase.

Long story short

I put Cloudflare and a CAPTCHA on Folk Tune Finder. It’s a pragmatic decision, which ensures that the limited resources of the site are used for the people it’s intended for. It’s an uneasy trade-off that doesn’t align with all of my principles. It does, though, align with the fundamental principle of folk tune finder: helping people to find tunes.

I have been asked to pass on the following message to Three Bean Salad Podcast:

Esteemed Beans,

Your recent episode, “Elevators”, was so flagrant in its profligate use of jingles that I must break my silence and share my top secret research project.

Unlike many, I don’t use your podcast to go to sleep. But I do use it to wake up, and the jingles really get me out of bed. Knowing the exact timings of each episode is crucial for my scientific lifestyle. I have therefore scientifically catalogued every jingle and cross-referenced it against every episode.

None of the below is particularly original. That’s kind of the point.

Paper

I’m addicted to paper. When reviewing documents I prefer to print them out and scribble on them. That’s all well and good in an office located on a planet with infinite trees, but I find myself in neither of those situations.

As a programmer, I also find it useful to scribble things down on paper, point at various scribble marks and ask people questions. I do enjoy making carefully perfected, data generated, diagrams with arcane tools. But scribbling is a necessary precursor.

My son is nearing his second birthday, which makes him nearly two years old. When he was only four months old I decided that I would make him something with buttons. I didn’t have much more of an idea than that, but I ordered one hundred illuminated buttons and started mulling what to do with them. Nothing much happened for a few months; I knew this was a long term plan. But every so often my subconscious would come up for breath, and I would open the drawer and get them out. Just to see how they felt.

None of the regulars I speak to at The Old Pump in Aldershot have a bad word to say about ‘hapless’ Sandra. She’s has been a well-liked member of the community since before it was known as The Old Pump, before when it was known as the Pumping Station and before that, when it actually was the pumping station for Aldershot’s sewage system. ‘Some things never change,’ they mutter into their pints.

Standards are high at the annual Christmas lights event. It’s important that every entry is a strong in order to outperform the competition.

O Toaster! What the hell with thee is wrong?

Thy kind hath served my kind for decades long.

A bond hath formed between two nations great,

That decades bond, though, weareth thin of late.