And now for something completely different

I've heard some very good music on the onboard radio station in the ICE trains: the new Zauberflöte which I mentioned some months back, Til Brönner (Miles-ish breathy-whispering jazz trumpet), and recently Chris Rea's retirement-from-touring live album The road to Hell & back. He's been a name on the edge of my consciousness for decades, but for some reason I never listened, assuming that I wouldn't like. Duh. Anyway, better late than never; and I do like it very much. This album (double CD, bound up like a little hardcover book) is - may I speak plainly? - just bloody brilliant. Bottleneck slide guitar of the finest kind, great songs and that famous rasping voice. Blues and/or guitar-hero fans will swoon at this. It's all great, but the standout tracks are "Where the blues come from," the ten-minute jam of the title track, "Somewhere between Highway 61 & 48," "Let's dance" (of course), and for my money the best of show "Work gang" which changes gear from semi-acoustic to bell-like ringing guitars and then changes up again to a roaring, whistling slide solo. Wow. Music for hyperventilating to.

I walked down to the river today, to give myself a break from the computers and to enjoy some sunshine. Winter is coming on slowly but surely, most of the trees in the Schloßgarten have turned colour and some are already bare. There will be photos sometime soon, but I'm struggling with work and also have a backlog of shots from Toronto still. At least the series down at the Beaches must be posted, great work if I say so myself. To be continued.

I have just discovered something wonderful! I was editing this post on Burton and uploading photos to Flickr on Alberich, and wanted to get the photo's URL into the post, so did the logical thing and copied it ... ah, but how to paste it in? Wouldn't it be great if one could share a clipboard across the network, if one could "copy" on machine X over there, and then "paste" on machine Y over here? Well, if the machines involved are Macs, the answer is slightly yes: it's not really a shared clipboard but it is definitely cut and paste between two computers.

Connect the computers via network, and on the "copy" machine mark the desired text. If you now click and hold in the marked area, you can move the whole marked block as an object. Put it down on the icon of the other computer's desktop. Now switch to the "paste" machine, find the block on your desktop, click and hold on it, and put it down where it belongs in the document you're editing. It's a Mac, it Just Works.

Twelve down, eighteen to go.