Lisboa

I haven't mentioned before (because we hadn't established the blogging rules) that the Lioness invited me to Lisboa "since I was going to be in the area" i.e. 420 kilometres away. So here I am, and very pleasant it is too. She is, as we know, in the middle of chaos and panic due to the continuing exam presentation horror, so we tend to meet for breakfast and dinner and to communicate randomly by SMS inbetween.

It's quite odd to meet a stranger whom one has known for two years, a peculiar mixture of unknown/new and very-well-known/old. We have both remarked on how much like our blogs we are, which I guess proves the validity of the long-term blogging persona (or some such thing). She is a delight to be with, just as witty and chattery as her blog, and with the same huge range of interests. There was of course an exchange of reading matter: I brought her Richard Powers' "The time of our singing;" in return I have been assigned two books to read during the next few days, Nicholson Baker's "The Mezzanine" and Anne McCaffrey's "The dolphins of Pern." (She is a collector of book series, e.g. McCaffrey and Pratchett and Douglas Adams.)

An oddity: Lioness' voice is a half-octave lower when she speaks Portuguese (e.g. addressing the pets: "Udge is a nice person and you will not attack him if he enters the flat when I'm away") than when she's speaking English. I wonder whether this is general, and whether my voice is similarly different between English and German.

A cat is licking my ankle as I write, for reasons that are unclear. This is unusual, but definitely something I could get used to. I can confirm that the animals are every bit as mad as Lioness claims, and also just as friendly.

Lisboa is the biggest city I've visited in quite a while, and so far I like it well. It wears its imperial past comfortably, the grand squares and avenues and the river front are very impressive but still quite nicely scaled. It's an easy city to walk around in, despite the many hills, and the subway system is extensive, efficient and very cheap (0.75 Euros for any trip in the central area—which in practice means all but the three outermost stations). The Porties are much more foreigner-friendly than the Spanish, most people speak at least some English or French and many are quite fluent. (I came to take a perverse joy in asking Spanish service-industry people "Habla usted inglés o francés o alemán?" and getting the answer "No." None of them was ever visibly discomfited or embarrassed.)

I walked down to the river (seems to be my usual first act in any watery city), went up the Elevador (links will be added when I get home, I'm blogging on L's laptop while she and a friend cook dinner: "the patriarchial way") and walked around the hilltop Bairro Alto where I found a group of wonderful used- and antique-book shops, then to the Gulbenkian museum to admire (in particular) the collection of illustrated Korans and Bibles and Books of Hours.

I must say that Portuguese is much less different from Spanish than I had been lead to expect. To my ears and eyes it is very similar to the Galician dialect of Santiago de Compostela. I was able to buy a ten-trip bulk-discount subway pass using my primitive Spanish, from one of the few service-industry people I met who spoke only Portie. I think I would pick up a basic working vocabulary in a fortnight, if I remained here.

Weather is fine: sunny, nice breeze, blue sky and mid-twenties.

By the way, I do know that Lisboa is not in Spain; I am using the tag "spain" as a catch-all for this holiday's posts.

Santiago de Compostela

In the immortal words of Sherpa Tensing, "we've done the bugger."

It's been both more and less than I expected. I have much to think about, and much to do, after this trip: certain things have been put into new perspectives, and certain changes must be made.

More tomorrow.

Portomarín

Nearly done. We are here for two nights, staying in a hotel cum resort that General Franco built for himself to hang out with his buddies (taking a break from pillage, repression and torture). It's a Parador, meaning that the staff are government employees, and it shows clearly in their attitude and activity. There was a wedding in the resort on the 22nd, and the dirty glasses and empty bottles still litter the conference rooms on the ground floor. The Paradores have been uniformly like this: wonderful old buildings in lovely surrounding, but poor and apathetic service. Anyway.

Tomorrow we walk into Santiago de Compostella, 752 kilometres from the starting point in Roncesvalles. (I have walked about a hundred kilometres; the eager ones will have done 150 or so by the end.)

It has rained often and hard during the last few days, the Camino has been very muddy and even washed out in stretches. We are getting the tail end of a storm system that covers most of Europe: the TV news reports severe storms and flooding in southern Spain, France, Germany and Greece, so it could be much worse. Several of us staged a quiet rebellion this morning and have stayed in the village while the others, the enthusiastic ones, went off to do their duty.

One of the younger members, my own age, asked about "my commitment to walking" the other day; I had no idea what she meant. I am on holiday. I am neither a pilgrim nor an athlete, and at this stage of my life am very unlikely to become either. I enjoy the walking, and greatly enjoy being in Spain, but this is just a holiday to me. I do my 8 km or so per day, at a reasonable pace, plus a further few km walking about the cities where we stay each evening, and see no need at all to do more than that.

It is humbling to be surrounded by people who are pilgrims and athletes, who are doing the Camino in the proper way and for the proper motives. We met a Romanian in Léon who was on course to do the whole distance in five weeks; he had twice done over forty km per day on the flat. There are a pair of South African cyclists, very nice people, whom I met in the reception of the first Parador and who have kept pace with us in our bus! We met again yesterday at lunch in a restaurant on the way.

Galicia (where we currently are) is perhaps the prettiest part of Spain: rolling hills, deep valleys, green fields and forests.

In other news I have posted the remaining answers to the music quiz. You did well, my dears, though I am very surprised that nobody got the Pink Floyd reference.

Return of son of Twenty-five: the clues

Well done, my dears, only seven songs remain unguessed. A an encourager, here are the remaining artists:

David Bowie
Elton John
Guns'n'Roses
Led Zeppelin
Peter Gabriel
Pink Floyd
Philip Glass

Answers here or on the original post as you prefer.

León

This will be very short as I am in a smoky Internet cafe without my reading glasses, and the combination of smoke and eyestrain is making me nauseous.

We walked a few kilometres this morning before a terrific rainstorm closed down the walking. We summoned the bus and drove to the lunch destination, which was of course not a picnic as planned, but in a bar which was fortunately empty. It's still raining now on Sunday evening, the forecast is for more tomorrow (a day off in León).

Northern Spain is much greener than I had expected from visits to the south. This is a rich agricultural region with frequent and abundant rainfall, there are good thick crops on large fields everywhere. But there are no farms in the usual English-cultural-background sense: one looks in vain for a typical farmstead. The Spanish live in towns and villages and commute up to several kilometres to their fields. There are many large brick granaries at the corners of fields, some quite old and ornately built.

It is as hilly as I expected, there are drifts of hills and smallish mountains (young in geological terms, with sharply defined ridges and contours) flowing through the countryside, like a huge watersnake emerging and sinking again into a sea of grasses; the hilly bits are sometimes very rough and stony indeed, suitable for vines or orchards at best.

One surprise is the number of storks in certain areas (they seem to like neither windy areas nor stony ground), there can be up to four nests on a single roof. The breeding season is well under way, the chicks have feathered out and are walking about on the nests but not yet attempting to fly. I've never seen a stork close up before, they are truly enormous birds, their wingspan is greater than my height. And the noise! the beak-clattering greeting when one returns to the nest is clearly audible from two streets away. (And the shit! the roofs below the nest are thickly covered in storkshit which appears to be just as sticky and disgusting as goose- or duckshit. Many newer buildings have wrought-iron spikes on chimneys and ridgelines to keep them away. But that's another story.)

Gotta go, my eyes and nose are hurting. More tomorrow.

On walking the Camino

The feeling of being here under false pretences continues, in fact increases. The Camino is full of people doing it for real, walking every inch of the way, carrying all their equipment and belongings on their backs. We are tourists.

I got into an argument with one of our group yesterday morning, as we were buying tickets to the cathedral in Santo Domingo: the ticket agent asked whether we were pilgrims, I replied (in my opinion truthfully) "no," the other woman replied (in my opinion dishonestly) "yes." Complacent, self-indulgent horseshit. A "pilgrim" is one who makes a pilgrimage on religious grounds, in compliance with its terms and usages. Anyway.

I really miss having full-time Internet availability, snatching a few minutes between dinner and bed is insufficient. I've brought my Moleskine along and am writing frequently and at length, but it's not the same: one writes differently for publication even when the audience is really oneself.

This was a good decision, and I am glad to be here.

Burgos

Lots of walking today, some ten kilometers worth between our overnight stop in Puenta la Reina and the lunchbreak. Mostly on the flat, fortunately, as it's too warm for uphill and downhill hurts my toes (pressing against the shoes' toecaps, I'm bruising rather than blistering). There was a moment of excitement at the coffee pause halfway, when we caught up with the bus and found out that my parents had disappeared without trace (they were going to do the final four kilometers, 2 km after the break, but went walkabout from there without informing the driver).

My mother bought a dual-band cellphone before the trip, specifically in order to be able to call me or the emergency services while on the trail; unfortunately the company sold her a phone which was restricted to their own cards, so the Spanish cheapie we tried to use wouldn't work. So we bought a brand-new phone for 40 Euros, damn the expense. We shall give it to the deserving poor at the end of the trip. Mom is confused by the technology: she switches the phone off to save the battery, then switches it back on again and thinks that the "enter your PIN number" prompt means "don't bother with the PIN, everything is fine." so I could not call her after they disappeared. Sigh. (Sis, you don't know any of this! If and when they tell you, act surprised.)

Weather good (cool, sunny with broken cloud, gentle breeze), landscape beautiful (often no sound at all but wind, birdsong and the clicking of walking sticks on stone), food good (mostly fish, what a surprise). I'm enjoying this and might just do some serious walking again sometime.

Internet access is a great problem. Four of our hotels have boasted of WLAN in the rooms; it has never worked except in the two-star Jardines in Bilbao on the first night. This is written on the (singular) public computer in the hotel here, there are four other treckers waiting in line behind me so this will have to do.

Take care, be good.

Olite

Well, there has been very little walking done so far (at least not by myself, others have been more active). Yesterday should have been the first walking day, but it was windy as Hell and even worse the Foehn was blowing. I have never experienced it so strongly, it woke me at 5 a.m. as the wind changed, even before the storm began. I did not do an inch of real walking. Today alternated brilliant blue sky and torrential rain, so there was generally little walking done. I managed three kilometers before saying "this is absurd" and getting back on the bus. We are hopeful that tomorrow will be better.

Had a few hours in Pamplona, home of the famous bull run; tonight in a 15th century castle, supposedly the most opulent hotel/hostel/parador of the trip. Marvellous rooms redolent of wood smoke.

Roncesvalles

Day Zero, tomorrow morning we shall do our first real walking.

Weather wonderful, the sun is approaching the horizon, the sky is clear blue and the air is perfectly clean. There's nothing up here (922 metres above sea level) but walkers and pilgrims—the difference is in the purpose and the seriousness. One learns quickly to spot the real walkers, and we are clearly not them.

So far, very good.

Bilbao

Hello from warm, sunny Spain. Everyone has arrived and settled in nicely; all seem well and happy. No walking yet, we have another day of touristing (and de-jetlagging for my parents) before the fun begins.

I'd not been to Bilbao before, it's a very nice city. (It is a city, with a definite urban flavour, although its population is only 60-some thousand as one would expect of an ancient and honourable city of 360 thousand population (sorry); it even has a proper subway system.) The river helps, of course, bringing interest and activity and the smell of the sea. Bilbao is very densely built along the tight river-valley between mountains, like Stuttgart every view down every street ends in a treed hillside. It's a very three-dimensional city, also like Stuttgart, one is always aware of walking up- or downhill.

None of us is the least interested in seeing the Guggenheim, we will walk around the old town and take the elevator to the hilltop park instead.

The weather is, shall we say, unusual: no rain, but plenty of low-lying clouds to obscure the sun. The temperature is low, only 20° or so, but it's very humid so it feels warm without actually being warm. I shall have to be careful not to catch a cold.

The Spanish are a race of short-arses, pardon my French. Chair bottoms are a good inch lower than one expects, we have all fallen into a chair at one time or another. They (the Spanish) are also determined monolingualists: the Spanish speak Spanish, thank you very much, even the youngish service-industry types whose counterparts in Germany or Holland would speak at least four languages well struggle with bits of English or French.

That's all for now, I have to change hotels today and must repack and check out. (Let me just recommend my current hotel, by the way: the two-star Hotel Bilbao Jardines, in the pedestrianized old town: cheap, clean, very friendly and helpful, free Internet. But be warned that there are two hotels named "Jardines" in Bilbao, the other—allegedly four-star—is a mass-tourism pile of beds that smells of cleaning fluids and professional disinterest. My taxi driver took me there first.)

Return of Son of Twenty-Five

The competition has now closed, thanks for playing.

Yet another music quiz, to keep you busy until I can get back online.

For new players: the object is to name the band/singer and the song of which these are the first lines. The rules are simple: Googling the lyrics when you haven't a clue is cheating, that should be obvious. Googling the title of a song when you can't remember the name of the band, or the name of the album when you can't remember the title of the song, is OK; however if by doing so you discover that you were wrong, then honour would require that you not submit the answer that you found.

Off you go:

1. Cold wind blowing over your private parts
The Tragically Hip, "Lionized" - S'toon

2. Drive! Drive! My baby drove up in a [title]
The Clash, "Brand new Cadillac" - S'toon

3. Hearts are worn in these dark ages
Sarah McLaughlan, "World on fire" - S'toon

4. Here comes Johnny Yen again, with the liquour and drugs and the flesh machine.
Iggy Pop, "Lust for life" - Alan

5. High, higher than the sun, you shoot me from a gun
U2, "Elevation" - Sis

6. (spoken) I am not frightened of dying.
Pink Floyd, "The great gig in the sky"
Hang your heads in shame that nobody got this one! I shall have to post it as a Friday Favourite for your musical edification.

7. I could feel at the time there was no way of knowing
Roxy Music, "More than this" - Anxious

8. I, I'm so in love with you
Frankie goes to Hollywood, "Power of love" - Lioness
Al Green, "Let's stay together"

9. I'm wheels, I'm moving wheels, I'm a 1952 Studebaker coupe
Adrian Belew, "Neal and Jack and me" - rb

10. If I was beautiful, if I had the time
Moby, "Signs of love" - Pacian

11. Oh, it's so funny to be seeing you after so long, girl
Elvis Costello, "Alison" - Alan

12. Now, when I was just a little boy, standin' to my Daddy's knee,
Creedence Clearwater Revival, "Born on the Bayou" - Alan

13. Please allow me to introduce myself
Rolling Stones, "Sympathy for the devil" - Alan

14. Take me out tonight, where there's music and there's people who are young and alive.
The Smiths, "There is a light that never goes out" - Alan

15. The lights are on but you're not home
Robert Palmer, "Addicted to love" - Anxious

16. The wine's all drunk and so am I.
Peter Gabriel, "Waiting for the big one"

17. There's no hold, the moving has come through
David Bowie, "Night flite"

18. This is the day of the expanding man
Steely Dan, "Deacon blues" - Peggy

19. Through the windows of a rented limousine, I saw your pretty blue eyes.
Led Zeppelin, "Sick again"

20. We'll be fighting in the streets with our children at our feet
The Who, "Won't get fooled again" - Alan

21. (spoken) What we've got here is: failure to communicate.
Guns'n'Roses, "Civil war"

22. When I think of those East End lights, muggy nights
Elton John, "Someone saved my life tonight"

23. When the day is long and the night, the night is yours alone
REM, "Everybody hurts" - Anxious

24. (spoken) Will it get some wind for the sailboat?
Philip Glass, "Knee play 1" from the opera "Einstein on the Beach"

25. You say that we've got nothing in common
Deep Blue Something, "Breakfast at Tiffany's" - S'toon


And since this is a musical post, here is tomorrow's Friday Favourite: a hot'n'bouncy number from a little-known great CD. This will be the last Friday Favourite for a while, for reasons that should be obvious.

That's all for now my dears, the next post (God and terrorists willing) will be from Spain. Until then, be kind to yourselves and each other.

Status report

The apartment is nearly as clean as it will get (I'm taking a coffee break between kitchen and bathroom); the wash is hanging out to dry, but there's so much moisture in the air from rainfall that it's taking forever; I just wrote my parents a "see you tomorrow in Spain" e-mail.

It's all getting very real.

I have put together another music quiz to keep you all occupied until I can get back online, which will be posted tomorrow morning. More later, perhaps.

Apple gets it wrong

Or, in which he demonstrates the even-handedness of his backhand slap

Time was, Apple had a really useful, simple "Feedback" page on its website, where anyone at all could tell them what they thought about its products, whether reporting a bug or making a change request or a suggestion. I personally put in at least one piece of feedback a month since discovering the page, and I'm pleased to say that some of the things I reported were fixed (not to be too boastful, they were surely reported by a hundred thousand other people too).

Well, since a few weeks the German-language feedback page requires authorization: you need to enter a user-name (an Apple ID) and password before you can submit your report. As it happens, I already have an Apple ID, but this page won't accept it. (The English-language page is OK, meaning no authorization needed.)

WTF? I cannot believe that this is intentional, I cannot believe that Apple is suddenly no longer interested in hearing what its users think.

On the other hand, I find it hard to believe that the people who used to read these reports haven't yet noticed that the volume has fallen off drastically (not to say ceased entirely); or that they would not ask why this should be. Somebody has screwed up, and several people need their arses thoroughly kicked. Get on to it, please.

Procrastination in action

Or "inaction," as the case may be. There are of course many things which are much more important than blogging, at this point in time exactly forty-eight hours before I leave for the airport; so of course I am blogging rather than doing any of them. My (call it) reluctance is in some way an expression of fear of what I will find buried and half-forgotten in the mess. If I stopper up my ears so as to hear no clucking, can the chickens be said to be home and roosting?

In other news I present for your delectation an editorial from the Portland Mercury:

It's time for the Democrats to face reality: They are the party of urban America. If the cities elected our president, if urban voters determined the outcome, John F. Kerry would have won by a landslide. Urban voters are the Democratic base.

It's time to state something that we've felt for a long time but have been too polite to say out loud: Liberals, progressives, and Democrats do not live in a country that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. We live on a chain of islands. We are citizens of the Urban Archipelago, the United Cities of America. We live on islands of sanity, liberalism, and compassion--New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, St. Louis, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and on and on. And we live on islands in red states too--a fact obscured by that state-by-state map. Denver and Boulder are our islands in Colorado; Austin is our island in Texas; Las Vegas is our island in Nevada; Miami and Fort Lauderdale are our islands in Florida. Citizens of the Urban Archipelago reject heartland "values" like xenophobia, sexism, racism, and homophobia, as well as the more intolerant strains of Christianity that have taken root in this country. [...]

If Democrats and urban residents want to combat the rising tide of red that threatens to swamp and ruin this country, we need a new identity politics, an urban identity politics, one that argues for the cities, uses a rhetoric of urban values, and creates a tribal identity for liberals that's as powerful and attractive as the tribal identity Republicans have created for their constituents. John Kerry won among the highly educated, Jews, young people, gays and lesbians, and non-whites. What do all these groups have in common? They choose to live in cities. An overwhelming majority of the American popuation chooses to live in cities. And John Kerry won every city with a population above 500,000. He took half the cities with populations between 50,000 and 500,000. The future success of liberalism is tied to winning the cities. An urbanist agenda may not be a recipe for winning the next presidential election--but it may win the Democrats the presidential election in 2012 and create a new Democratic majority.

Quite right. The article is less academic and more amusing (to an urban blue-state mentality) than these excerpts suggest, well worth reading.

In other, other news here is a series of wonderful Flash animations of scenes from office life using only typography. Brilliant.

Countdown, interrupted

We are off to a fine start: my parents appear not to have a hotel reservation for the first two nights of the trip, in Bilbao. The hotel in which the rest of the group is booked has no rooms available.

This is a suboptimal outcome.

[Updated] the hotel was correctly booked but the agency didn't send a confirmation slip. Good.

Grey

The weather has broken after six weeks of sun and warmth, today started cool and is now positively cold with high winds darkening grey skies; rain is not far off, and I have the headache to prove it. Ah well.

I went downtown to do the rounds of my weekend stores and people, saying my goodbyes for the next month. I bought a proper trecking backpack, thermos bottle and high-tech socks today, plus some spare laces just in case. I feel a bit of a fraud investing in all this hiking technology as though I were going to go on a proper expedition, when in fact there is a good hotel waiting at the end of each day and a bus to carry the luggage, on which one may sit in comfort if the walking becomes a bore. I have given myself permission in advance to use the bus whenever I feel the desire to do so, or have no interest in walking.

This odd not-wanting-to-go-on-holiday mood that I wrote about yesterday has its own strange tides and currents. At this moment, I want nothing more than to go right now without waiting for Thursday; the thought of spending five more days here seems like a prison sentence. I have absolutely no desire to work at the architects' (though I will on Monday and Tuesday) and claim to be unable to find anything to do on the database (though another part of my mind knows that there is a four-page list of improvements and open bug reports).

I picked up my new/old iPod ("Trixie") from the shop yesterday, and loaded up a first batch of music (plus my addressbook and calendar, natch). I walked around town this morning to the sound of Glenn Gould playing Liszt's solo piano transcription of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, which was just wonderful (the experience and the music both). I had to restrain myself forcibly from laughing for joy and singing along to music that only I could hear. Thank you, Steve.

And, just because I'm in a musical mood, here's a song for Saturday from this CD. Thank you, Emma.

Last Friday before Spain

I've noticed that the excitement leading up to a holiday often tips over into not wanting to go, and realize that I am currently approaching this point. It all seems like such an imposition; such a great effort seems to be required, out of proportion to the anticipated fun.

Why do I worry so much about such absurd things? Why do I anticipate being disappointed?

During the last few weeks I have listened often, usually late at night, to a CD that I bought a year ago and put aside as "too strange." About once a month I would play it, and each time I liked it a little better—which might be simply expressed as having understood it a little better. I have become fascinated by the work, and would love to experience a full eight-hour (!) overnight performance; for the meantime this double CD does well. (There's also a six-hour TV recording of a performance in the Temple Church, where the CD was recorded.) Today's Friday Favourite is a song from early in the cycle. It's not untypical of the whole, I particularly liked the interplay of the three bass voices with the choir. Crank this one up very loud indeed.

Shabbat shalom, my dears.

Useful tools for Macs

I was thinking about certain blogging buddies who have recently switched away from the Dark Side, and it occurred to me that there are probably many clever little tools and tricks that I use daily which they don't know about. Without further ado, here are sixteen seventeen pointers for new Mac users:

1) Investigate the "Services" menu, which is part of every application. Many useful things can be found here, for instance you can mark text in any application (e.g. while composing this blog piece in Safari) and have the Mac automatically create a new TextEdit file and put the marked text into it.

2) Depending on your work habits and the size of your monitor, you may find Stickies useful. This programme puts little yellow (red, green, ...) Post-Its on your screen.

3) Clean up the dock! Dock space is limited and too valuable to waste on programmes that you don't use regularly (especially if you have TigerLaunch installed (see below). To remove an item from the dock, click and hold on it, and pull the item out of the dock into mid-screen, then let go. You can add items to the dock by dragging them into it: existing items move aside to make a place for it. You can also get any currently running app to remain in the dock: click and hold on the item until a context menu appears, then select "Keep in dock."

4) Use the Keychain to keep track of your accounts and passwords; allow the browser to save and recall these. However, if you do this, then you must:

5) Set a really good password (more than six characters, lower-case AND upper-case AND numerics AND graphic symbols) for your login account, and disable the automatic login feature. This prevents someone who steals your laptop or walks into your office in your absence from getting at your online banking or whatever. [Updated] Warning: use only characters and symbols that appear on a standard American-English keyboard (i.e. no ä or ß or ñ characters). If the computer crashes and damages your preferences, it may start with an American-English setup on which such characters are not available or in different positions.

6) You can jump between running applications by pressing Apple-Tab. This is faster and more convenient than clicking in the Dock or searching for the other app's open windows.

7) Learn to use Exposé to reveal all currently open windows, or to temporarily hide all windows to show you the desktop.

Here are a few recommended programmes:

TigerLaunch

This is a configurable equivalent to Windows' Start menu: a simple list of all programmes on your computer for easy access. Unlike the Start menu, it is easily user-configurable: you can add or remove programmes from the list, and specify which folders it should include.

EvalService

A very useful addition to the "Services" menu, it performs mathematical calculations in context, in the middle of your e.g. Word document, so that you need not reach for the calculator. You type e.g. Mark owes me 18*3.5+3 Euros and select the expression, then choose "Evaluate expression" from the Services menu. The answer is appended to the expression: Mark owes me 18*3.5+3 = 66 Euros, you then delete the original calculation if no longer desired.

Menu calendar clock

This puts a pop-up monthly calendar in the menu bar, linked to entries in your iCal calendar.

Net News Wire

A simple and very comfortable RSS feed viewer.

Senuti

I wrote about this previously. It's the opposite of iTunes, it copies music files from your iPod to your computer and (optionally) enters them into your iTunes library. Obviously one would only use this to make a backup copy of the iPod, not to "obtain" music from a friend's collection.

Tea Timer

A very simple timer app, which bongs a reminder at a specific point in time (15:33:07) or after counting down a number of hours/minutes/seconds. I use this daily to remind myself that something's in the oven.

SnapNDrag

Makes configurable screen shots of the entire monitor, a specific window, a region defined by two clicks on the diagonal, or after N seconds (which allows you to take a screen shot with a menu open). It's very useful to me when I'm writing user guides for or answering questions about my software. Unlike the built-in screen shot capability (Apple-3 for the entire monitor, Apple-4 for a region) the results can be saved in one of several image formats, or can even be drag-and-dropped directly into an open e-mail message.

Spam Sieve

A spam filter, in case your Internet provider doesn't offer one or their price is too high. Simple, very effective, good value for money.

Super Duper!

Cheap and effective backup software. The basic version is free; the full version (22 Euros) can be made to run backups automatically at specific times, e.g. in the middle of the night. Ya gotta make backups!

Cyberduck

The Finder has a built-in FTP browser which can display storage areas on the Internet as though they were normal hard-disks attached to your computer, but if you often work with FTP you will want something more controllable. Cyberduck is simple to use, cheap and very effective.

Flip4Mac

Lets you view Windows Media Viewer (.wmv) clips in QuickTime.

Reading list for April 2007

Currently reading
Frank Schätzing, Der Schwarm
Adam Smith, The money game - again

Recently read
Terry Pratchett, Thud
   ditto, The fifth elephant
   ditto, Soul Music

Abandoned
Thomas Bernhardt, Der Untergeher

I don't often abandon books halfway through, in fact it almost never happens. Well, I gave up on Der Untergeher after a hundred pages, during which our narrator thinks about Glenn Gould while entering a cafe (yes, you read that correctly: it took him over a hundred pages to open and walk through a door). It just didn't hold my attention, although the subject matter could and probably should have done: a might-have-been concert pianist reflects on his student days and why he suddenly abandoned his studies and gave away his grand piano. I shall probably try again some time.

Pratchett's Thud is the book of the month. I'd say that it is his best so far: a very intense tale of dwarves, trolls, history and madness. Darkness literal and metaphorical is a presence, almost a character, in the story, as Pratchett describes the dwarves' lives in their deep, narrow, dark mines. Brilliant, highly recommended. ("Thud" is the name of a popular board game in the Discworld, played by Lord Vetinari among others. It's a chess-like reenactment of the battle of Koom Valley between the dwarves and the trolls. The game sounds fascinating: dwarves outnumber trolls by four to one; a dwarf may move any number of squares in any direction; a troll can move only one square at a time. This might sound like a slam dunk for the dwarves, except for the balance of strength: a troll can take up to five dwarves in a single move if he catches them right, whereas a dwarf can only take a (single) troll by "spearheading" a line of dwarves pointing directly at it. The game made the jump from fiction to the high street, I shall look out for a copy when I'm in New York this summer.)

Schätzing's Der Schwarm is an environmental-apocalypse novel of Nature getting fed up and taking her revenge on us—or is it just the natural consequences of our millenia of abuse? Horrifyingly real and all too possible, one reads with a kind of sickened fascination. (Lioness: trust me that this book is not for you; don't even the reviews.)

Next month's list
Last month's list