Friday

Walking home at sunset, it occurs to me that the Jews were right about that too: it's just obviously the correct and fitting time for the Sabbath to begin. It was a pleasure and a delight to be walking home in the fading daylight, as the shops were closing for the evening and the birds were giving their end-of-day songs.

Speaking of the Sabbath reminds me of something I forgot to mention earlier. When I was in Düsseldorf for four hours between trains last month, I walked around the Altstadt and on impulse stopped in at a church. There was only one other person there, a man in a wheelchair who sat at the back as though waiting for someone, yet paid no attention to me or his surroundings. I sat in a pew near the front and thought about life and death and the whole damned thing, then lit a candle to the memory of AH and watched it burn for a while. I remembered a morning many years ago when I was a student in London, working on a project about the (Roman Catholic) Westminster Cathedral—not to be confused with the (Anglican) Westminster Abbey—and stopped in one morning on my way to college to have another look at the building. I noticed a man going from altar to altar, praying and lighting a candle at each one; he made no attempt to stay the tears that were flowing down his cheeks, literally dripping from his chin as he prayed. I watched him with an odd feeling of awe and respect, and realized that I envied him his belief.

In other news The world is once again spinning around towards Spring, the sun touched the rooftops across the street at 8:15 this morning. I saw a tiny plant growing in a crack in a south-facing stone wall which was already flowering. Photos tomorrow, if I remember where it was.

In other, other news I bought myself another little toy, an Airport Express station so that I can hear my iTunes playlists through proper speakers. It's very nice. Setup was easy, once I figured out that my firewall was blocking the Airport from asking for instructions; and to give Apple their due, this was the first suggestion in the troubleshooting section of the manual. A look at the TCP logs reveals that I've already sent over four gigabytes of music wafting through the air in this way. Dear me, how time flies: a gigabyte used to fill a very large, heavy and expensive physical disk.

I was amused to discover, while configuring the system, that there are three unprotected WLAN networks available from where I sit, so I need never pay excess-volume charges again. Not that I would do that, of course.

In related news Philip once asked whether I could post an MP3 of a song that I had written about. Well, I found a service that does exactly that with exemplary simplicity: choose a file, set its expiry date, click on "upload," note the resulting URL. Here is a test, a 5 megabyte MP3 of my current most-often-put-on-repeat song. Don't delay, it's only there until 22:30 CET on Saturday.

What I haven't yet figured out, is how to tell you what it's called and who's playing without leaving a google-trail here that the copyright police could follow; and I would ask any commenters to please refrain from mentioning any such info. Anyone wants to know should mail me at the address up top, and I'll send you all the details.

[Updated] the solution is obvious: Amazon to the rescue. But please: mention no names.