Wednesday 21st of March, 2001
A couple of e-mails in my inbox this morning announce that my songs are to be Track of the day on Garageband.com on the same day. I find this faintly implausible.
A sign in the valiantly persevering newsagent on Lambeth Walk says "We reserve the right not to serve anybody" although it strikes me that if they exercised that right they'd go out of business even more quickly than they already are. The Walk is suffering under a certain amount of blight - most of the shops on the side that has not been demolished are shut down, and what remains are a ragbag collection at best - the newsagest, an opticians, a camera shop, an ad hoc general store. The greasy spoon is long closed, although I notice that nocturnal visitors have successfully managed to work the protective metal cage over the front loose, so those big plate-glass windows are not long for this world. There are also occasional stalls selling things like fruit and veg.
A sign at the entrance to what was the shopping precinct says that "Business as usual continues during the building work". I suppose this must be the usual business.
It does annoy me that the response of those in authority to people who are attempting to defend their homes and community is to run the area down until it becomes indefensible.
Work becomes a sort of blur - carry on with the Secret Project, which looks increasingly like fun. Because people who need to brief me keep going into meetings, I find myself faced with longeurs - I have a nice long chat to Denise who is in the training room, and get briefed on the cover for the Nick Sharratt book I've been working on there. Jacky, the designer, will be scanning his line artwork for me.
I e-mail the scans and so forth from Ben's Mac at Walker's to myself here. This will cause a bottleneck, I can tell, just too late to do anything about it clogging up my inbox on my ISP's server. Darn.
Returning home, I find an e-mail in the queue before the Bottleneck that informs me that due to a clerical error I was eroneously informed that my songs were to be Track of the day on Garageband.com (along, reading between the lines of the email, with everbody else on the site - quite a clerical error). So I was right about the implausibility. I am not, repeat, not to be Track of the day on Garageband.com. So no change there.
Also a couple of nice e-mails to reply to.
I finish reading The Truth, which is eminently satisfying and one of his best for a long time (or was I merely in a more receptive mood?) and made me laugh loads. Hurrah.
A second attempt to download The Bottleneck is thwarted by my modem inexplicably disconnecting itself, which usually happens when I actually need it to work. The file is colossal - it must be several megabytes (because it was dispatched from a network, there was no hanging around at the other end - I didn't know how big it was). I ought to have instructed the person who did the scanning to save them as compressed TIFF files, which are usually very small indeed. Oh well...
Finally, on the third attempt, the Bottleneck downloads. taking about half an hour. I must remember to give clear instructions on file compression in future.
Go round after that to some links that Ben's e-mailed me and download plug-ins and VSTis for Cubase.
And then unconsciousness beckons.