Quantum leap

Whenever I hear someone talking about "a quantum leap", I get the urge to say "You mean something so small you need expensive laboratory equipment to detect it?"

Open in new window

I've said it before, and I'll say it again (and will probably say it again and again) ...

Webmasters, please do not make links open in a new window. New windows are almost as irritating as popups (which I block for almost all sites). If I want a new window, I will open one, but I hardly ever do, because it is not the 1990s, and these days we have things called tabs. If I click with the left mouse button rather than the wheel, that means I want the page to open in the same window. Really.

Warning messages

I just love Linux error and warning messages. Today I installed Eroaster, since K3B was behaving quirkily. When I clicked on the "copy CD" command, the following message came up:

Directly copying a CD might not be a good idea if your computer is slow, the source CD is scratched, the magnetic radiation of your heater is too extreme, or if your wife has had a bad day. So everything you do here is at your own risk!"

OK, the "wife" part was sexist, but it had a grain of truth in it as well.

Nazi Bach

Recently my satellite provider opened up the digital radio stations which had hitherto been unavailable on the "Standard" package. One of my favourites is "Popular Classics", which I thought would serve a sickly diet of "The Nutcracker Suite", "Peter and the Wolf", "Bolero" and suchlike, but turns out to be mainly baroque and early classical. The baroque music is nearly all "authentic" (to the extent that any twenty-first-century performance of an eighteenth-century composition can be authentic) but for some reason, today they're playing lots of Bach with full symphony orchestra and piano. It's not just the instruments that are modern(ish); the style is what one of my old teachers called "Nazi Bach" (i.e. every semi-quaver drummed out with equal weight and Teutonic precision). It makes me feel rather nostalgic for the days when Bach was not something you were supposed to listen to for pleasure, but was regarded more as a kind of mental calisthenics.