I finished reading The Crow Road by Iain Banks last night. Well, ultimately I enjoyed it. I did however find it hard work. A couple of things; firstly he jumps around in time and viewpoint way too often for my liking, making it hard to follow at times. And secondly, Banks doesn’t appear to be a particular prosey writer, however, ever now and then he just goes off on one, and it seems more to prove a point rather than to move the story forward. By the end I had enjoyed the journey but I’m not sure if I would read another one of his books.

It’s funny how music affects you;

As I was flicking through the radio channels, I happened upon Desert Island Discs this morning, no honest I did; anyway Robert Fisk was talking to Kirsty Young which I actually did find interesting. Anyway, as I came upon the channel Samuel Barber’s: Adagio for Strings was playing, which is a fantastic and emotional piece. Whenever I hear it, I get the picture from Platoon of Willem Dafoe on his knees, arms raised in the air, with hundreds of Vietnam soldiers running towards him… Fisk then followed this with Winston Churchill’s speach “This was the Finest Hour”, which in itself is a powerful piece of audio. One of his next records was Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major. I never want to like this piece of music, it just seems too commercial and trite, however, I can never get away from the fact that it is indeed a powerful piece of music. So Pachelbel’s Cannon and Adagio for Strings within the same 10 minutes!

Unfortunatley he then descended into “The Lord is My Shepherd” so I felt compelled to turn over, right into “The Who’s” Pinball Wizard. Bizzarely enough, I heard this on Wednesday on the radio. Then on Thursday, I made comment about a work colleague being “deaf, dumb, and blind” to which Mark automatically responded with “but he sure plays a mean pinball”… So within 2 days I heard the same record that I’ve not heard for a while, with also a reference to it in a unconnected event.

However, unlike listening to Adagio and Cannon, hearing Pinball Wizard made me think… what a terrible song it is. I’ve never given thought to how bad a song it is before…

One Day In History

It was another 6:30am start this morning, out for a small run as usual, uneventful even if it was a little harder than the normal run; 5-aside football at 9:30pm last night saw to that.. My calf isn’t pulling as badly as it was on friday so the run was a little easier in that respect, but it’s suprising how much the darkness affects you in the morning.

The trip from Fordingbridge to North Harbour was equally uneventful other than the normal picturesque drive along Roger Penny Way, one of the New Forest high points, before descending down to the belly of hell that is the M27. Suprisingly however, the m27 was pretty smooth running, so I was in work for 8am.

The day in my offices at IBM was frantic to say the least; a server upgrade that should have taken place on Friday is still going very very wrong. I’m only indirectly involved, having inherited development responsibility for an application that needs to be deployed on the new server, so it isn’t impacting on me. The whole process has been an utter shambles!
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