The Imperceptible Immigrant – Page 41

Closer than you think

July 17, 2020 by admin

“The stars up there at night are closer than you think.”

Doug Dillon

‘Twas but a mere handful of posts back that I was bemoaning the sad fact that the Chanteuse and I had been unable to get on with recording the seemingly endless (hopefully!) sequence of songs that I am clearly engaged upon writing at the moment. The latest in a line of tragic circumstances (in this case one that affects everyone – the COVID-19 pandemic!) had put a stop to any prospects of two non-isolation-group souls singing with each other – thus rendering recording impossible…

…unless we could come up with some means of so doing that did not require us to be in the same room (or even the same building)! Well – clearly other people are doing just such things, so it must be possible. Indeed there is a plethora of different technical solutions to the problem, but at first glance nothing that met our preferred and exacting requirements.

What we really wanted to be able to do was to record the Chanteuse’s voice exactly the way that we normally do – with the exception of each being in our own homes rather than together in my little studio. This would involve my playing the track from my DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) – the Chanteuse listening to it on headphones and singing the vocal part along with it – and my recording the resultant performance back into the DAW. I would then need to be able to play the ‘completed’ track back so that we could both listen critically to it.

Clearly the best way to effect such a seemingly complex technical trick – given that we don’t have the budget of an international broadcaster or major telecommunications company – was to use the InterWebNet. But how might that even be possible?

Well, the solution that I eventually found – after trying just about every alternative that we could reasonably afford – comes from a German company and is called SessionLinkPRO. It is a web application that works – joy of joy – using just Google’s Chrome web browser and has a splendidly simple but effective interface that enables two computers – one running the DAW software and the other equipped with an audio interface and studio microphone – to send and receive simultaneous digital audio streams at studio quality. Sweet!

We had our first online recording session this week, finishing off a track that we had started recording back at the beginning of March. Though SessionLinkPRO also offer video links if required we chose to work simply with audio and we were naturally a little worried at first that not being able to see each other – and the inevitable slight audio delay in the round-trip signal – might make the session awkward. We were, however, rapidly into our stride and in discussion afterwards decided that – since we don’t really look at each other whilst working anyway – the task at hand was no more taxing than it normally is.

The proof of the pudding is that – having done the first mixes of the track concerned – it is virtually impossible to tell that different parts of the vocal were recorded at different times and in entirely different circumstances.

Kudos again to SessionLinkPRO – and should any gentle reader be interested in the technical details of the setup I would be happy to furnish them.

Good form…

July 18, 2020July 13, 2020 by admin

…good grief!

Way back in the early days of this journal – May 16th 2012 to be precise – I posted to these pages an entry entitled “A Tough Occupation“. That was the first mention amidst this griffonage of a subject that was to become a major preoccupation over the following three years… my application for Permanent Resident status within Canada.

Should this subject be of the remotest interest to the gentle reader (you might perhaps be engaged upon a similar journey yourself) a subsequent post of May 20th 2015 – entitled “It’s Official!” – not only celebrated the eventual successful outcome of the application but also catalogued all of the prior posts on the subject. Useful – perhaps – should one wish to know just how the long and tortuous process can unfold.

It will not take a degree in rocket science to deduce in short order the motivation for this particular post. It is – after all – exactly one week until the fifth anniversary of our ‘landing’ upon these shores – an occasion that is not without its implications, for once one has been a resident in Canada for five years one may – subject to a variety of other criteria – apply for citizenship. Needless to say this is something that I firmly intend to do.

There are – however – other important things to be addressed first.

I think I was vaguely aware that my Permanent Resident Card was only valid for five years, but in all the excitement of finally being here I did not look too closely at what would need to be done to extend that period. I made the naive assumption that all I would need to do would be to fill out some online application, pay a fee and a new card would rapidly pop into our mailbox.

Nothing so simple!

It turns out that another complex form must be completed (IMM 5444 (09-2019) E) – which demands details on everywhere one has lived since arriving, everywhere one has worked and everywhere one has traveled outwith Canadian borders. The fee must be paid and the receipt submitted, new photos must be taken (in the prescribed format) and signed appropriately by the photographer and copies of primary identification and existing PR card added to the submission. Once this has all been dispatched as directed one can sit back and await the delivery of one’s new card – in nine months time!

What?!

If this weren’t bad enough 2020 also happens to mark the tenth anniversary of my wedding to the Kickass Canada Girl. That is in itself, of course, a significant cause for celebration (on which more in subsequent posts) but another consideration arises therefrom. We took each other’s names when we married and that process entailed acquiring replacement passports. My UK passport thus expires at the end of this year and must also be renewed.

Now – a UK passport can reasonably easily be renewed from Canada (in this age of digital photography) by means of an online application – though the UK Passport Office do their level best to dissuade non-critical applications in these times of plague (presumably once it has become critical they would shrug their digital shoulders and suggest that the application should have been made sooner!). Anyway – I applied – not wanting to be without any means of moving between my birth and adoptive countries.

The problem is, however, that the UK Passport Office requires one to physically return one’s old passport before they will process the online application – thus surely rendering this modernised online version somewhat redundant. As a result one finds oneself worrying lacking in international documentation for an unspecified length of time…

…and I have not yet begun even to look at the citizenship application!

Sigh!

(More) slings and arrows…

July 9, 2020 by admin

…of outrageous(ly good) fortune.

The Girl was recently the (delighted) recipient of a tax rebate!

OK – that is not the entire story…

Since we came to Canada we have done annually that which I (at least) had never done before; use a tax accountant to file our tax returns. In the UK I always (eventually) figured it out for myself and filed online. Here, it just seems all too much trouble to try to work out our (by now) quite complex arrangements, so – for a small(ish) fee…

The slight downside of this is that one never quite knows how things are going to turn out, since the tax accountants are always looking for new and better ways to earn their dollars. This year – for example – The Girl was due a rebate and I had an outstanding tax bill to pay… except that – by the time our accountant was done – I received a hefty rebate and the Kickass One an even larger tax bill. Apparently this was the result of a tax juggling act that saved us a few hundred dollars overall (for which – many thanks!).

Naturally I passed my rebate cheque straight over to The Girl (along with the balance owing) so that she could send it right back to Revenue Canada again. Being a gentleman I also gave her an amount equal to the rebate that she would have had, had our accountant kept things simple.

Anyway…

The Girl likes to cycle. The only problem is that, because we live on the bosky slopes above Bazan Bay and because the topography of the peninsula at this point is just so, it doesn’t matter which way she heads off on her bicycle, she always has to ride up a fairly steep hill on the way home (somewhat in the manner of an Escher drawing!). Naturally this somewhat diminishes the pleasure that she gets from taking the bike out in the first place.

She determined – therefore – that she would investigate putting her rebate towards the purchase of a (nowadays very trendy) electric bicycle. Now – these come in two flavours… the fully-fledged designed-from-the-ground-up electric bike (a pretty heavy beast but with lots of power!) or the traditional bike modified by the addition of battery and motor/dynamo. The latter devices are lighter and less expensive but also less powerful, providing assistance to the pedaling rather than rendering it superfluous.

The Girl had pretty much decided on one of the lighter machines but was still at the sucking-her-breath-in-between-her-teeth stage over the multiple-thousands of dollars that would be involved, when she went for a walk with an old work colleague. At the very point of parting she mentioned in passing her bicycling intentions, only for her friend to announce that her mother had just such a machine that she was in the process of trying to sell.

Well – long story short – The Girl tried the machine – fell in love with it – struck a good deal and carried it away home…

…all of which might very easily not have happened at all!

Lucky! Lucky! Lucky! (again)…

Ennio Morricone

July 7, 2020 by admin

Ennio Morricone

1928 – 2020

RIP

We are fortunate that – in this world and at this time – we are as a civilization blessed with a sizeable number of good composers of film and television soundtracks. A considerably smaller subset of that number may actually be counted amongst the great composers, whose works will outlast them.

There are – however – only a very, very small number who can rightfully be considered and lauded as geniuses…

…and – as of today – there is one less.

Much that need be known about the importance of Morricone’s scores (even those for films that in themselves scarcely merited such adornment) can be gleaned from the widely reported fact that parts of the scores for Sergio Leone’s initial trilogy of ‘Spaghetti Western’ films were recorded before the filming was started; the antithesis of usual practice. This was done so that Leone could use the music during filming as a backdrop against which to choreograph the action.

My personal favourites – which contain music that can move me to tears on any day, let alone one as sad as this – are the scores for “The Mission” (which was a huge influence on me) and for “Cinema Paradiso”.

I leave the gentle reader and the vagaries of Google to provide a suitable soundtrack to this posting.

Lucky break

July 3, 2020 by admin

I have written before in these pages on the subject of luck, though my first posting on the subject was all the way back at the start of 2012. Later that same year I posted this item – entitled ‘Playing the Odds‘ – which posited the notion that much of what we consider to be good luck, or the consequence of remarkable fortune – or even of pure coincidence – actually often turns out to be considerable less so than it at first seems. You will have to go back and (re)read that article should you wish to explore further, as this current entry simply shrugs its shoulders and draws attention to another fortuitous happening – without drawing any conclusions at all therefrom.

I have not grumbled of late in these postings about the pandemic-related difficulties of sourcing all manner of essential requisites – toilet roll (in the early days), disinfectant wipes (ongoing), bleach and other such important and protective items. That is because it is clearly unacceptable so to do in circumstances such as these; there being many who are considerably worse off than are we and whose need is considerably greater.

I have also certainly not complained about the impossibility of acquiring such important items as a decent webcam! Now – you may rightly cavil at regarding such things in the same light as PPE (Personal Protective Equipment), but the fact is that shortly after the lock-down was announced across the world, supplies of such useful devices (required in particular, of course, for video-conferencing) dried up completely. It became impossible to acquire such things anywhere, with delivery dates being marked as ‘unknown’ and prices in online stores being hiked by 300% – 400% (outrageous!). Such are the ‘laws’ of supply and demand.

Now – I have a really old webcam, but the quality is poor and – though it meets my needs for doing online exercise classes – it is an inadequate tool for delivering decent online lectures (such as I will be required to do in the autumn). I tinkered around trying using the cameras on my mobile devices (which may be effected by using such cool software tools as ‘DroidCam’) but whereas these solutions do work reasonably well it is never a good idea to use a device for multiple purposes. It might seem efficient so to do but in practice having to constantly reconfigure and reconnect the gadgets inevitably leads to occasions when things do not work properly, or one runs into a simple conflict of requirements.

I was thus delighted when the Chair of my department announced to us all by email that she was going to try to source some webcams. When I replied wishing her fortune in so doing I inadvertently sent the email to all recipients. I immediately received a reply from someone who – whilst not wanting to be bothered with my (irrelevant to him) message – did want to let me know that he had seen the very device that I was after for sale on Amazon. I looked – and sure enough there was just the webcam I wanted, available in two days (via Prime) and at the original price. Naturally I immediately ordered one and was delighted to receive it the quoted number of days thereafter – on a Sunday!

I figured that supplies must simply be moving again, but when I looked a few days later the prices has soared again to unreasonable hights and the devices were again in short supply.

What to make of this good fortune? Had I not accidentally ‘replied to all’ I would not now have my chosen webcam – at my preferred price…

Lucky! Lucky! Lucky!

Garden shots!

June 30, 2020 by admin

High time for some more shots of things growing in our garden!…

…and possibly some other random images that I have overlooked throughout the last couple of months. Let’s see what I can find…

The Lost Chord

June 25, 2020 by admin

On the first day of October last year – nearly nine months ago now – I posted to this journal a celebratory piece concerning the long-overdue uploading to the InterWebNet of some of the music of Anam Danu – the collaboration between the Chanteuse and I that had started roughly a year earlier.

We had chosen the excellent musicians’ site – Bandcamp – for this initial foray and made available a collection of seven tracks on which we had been working since the 2019 new year and which we had had professionally mastered by the estimable CPS Mastering of Vancouver. If you have not thus far been fortunate enough to have heard the Chanteuse in action I commend to you this offering – the which is entitled “Winds of Change” and which may be located here:

https://anamdanu.bandcamp.com

The October 1st post noted that to the seven tracks already uploaded were to have been added a further three songs – to complete the collection. Visitors to the site will, however, not have missed the fact that – nine months down the line – there are still only seven pieces there.

Unfortunately, scarcely had we uploaded the material – and certainly before we were able to make a serious attempt at publicising the fact – the first of a sequence of harrowing events overtook the Chanteuse. I am certainly not going into any of the details of the months that followed but I will just say that had some budding TV script-writer come up with such a far-fetched narrative they would have been drummed out of Hollywood. All I can do is to offer heartfelt sympathies for all that occurred.

As dictated by Sod’s Law we had no sooner held our first recording session subsequent to these events than the pandemic struck – along with the accompanying lock-down. That pretty much put a stop to any thoughts of further work and the powers that be have made it quite clear that singing is going to be one of the last things that we will all be allowed to do again in ‘public’.

What the rest of the musical world is doing at this point is finding ways to work and to record remotely – thus avoiding the problems of isolation. Because of the sequence and timing of the events that lead to this point we were not able to make any provision for such a course as the lock-down was imposed. I am now struggling to put in place a suitable mechanism for working in this manner – but much new learning is required and these things take time. I will – of course – offer updates on this journal as to how we get on.

The thing is – though we have been unable to record, I have also been unable to stop writing songs. Since we last worked together I have written and recorded the tracks for a further nine compositions!

It would be good to be able to finish some of them…

The Journey Home – 5

June 21, 2020 by admin

Well, here we are at the end of this short retrospective – one year on – of our 2019 trip to the UK and Greece. The Girl and I had a wonderful and memorable visit to Europe – a fine balance between spending time with loved ones and old friends, revisiting a bit of the old country and getting to wallow in glorious antiquity in a part of the world that neither of us had known well.

As is the way of such things, on our return to BC we immediately started thinking about and planning further excursions, little knowing that – along with everyone else – our future travel plans would all have to be put on ice for an indeterminate and possibly indefinite period.

The Girl and I loved Athens and you can read the notes of a year ago and view the photos that I posted here and here.

Finally – a few more images from those taken in Athens:

Good grief!

June 19, 2020 by admin

I have refrained from making public comments regarding the world-wide handling of the COVID-19 pandemic because – with certain blatantly dishonourable exceptions (not to mention a small number of highly honourable ones) most nations and their governments have been muddling through in a reasonable fashion, given the severity and unprecedented nature of the crisis with which we are all are faced.

For Canada Justin Trudeau is considered to have had a reasonably good pandemic thus far, but here in British Columbia the real star is our Provincial Health Officer – Bonnie Henry – whose handling of the crisis has been beyond reproach… transparent, clear and rational.

One reason for maintaining an embarrassed silence with regard to other nations is that my mother country and its bizarre government – whilst having no trouble talking the talk (way too much in most cases) has proved almost uniquely incapable of walking the walk – tripping over its own clown shoes and falling flat on its face at every opportunity.

I have bitten my tongue at most of it, but hot on the heels of yesterday’s schooling of our mendacious Prime Minister and his entire cabinet by a Premiership footballer (yes – you read that correctly!) on the subject of free school lunches for disadvantaged children, comes the latest in the sorry saga of the UK’s Tracking and Testing program. Today’s announcement concerned the much touted tracing App that has been in development since March – the which was intended to alert individuals if they have been in close proximity to someone who is later discovered to have tested positive for the virus. This is about technology (which is, after all, my field) and I feel driven to comment!

When the Tracing and Tracking program was announced back in mists of time with the usual exaggerated fanfare it was described as “world beating”. We would, naturally, have settled for something that just worked – but you take what you can get!

One of the important elements of the program – or so it was claimed at the time – was to have been the App. Now, similar Apps have been – or are currently being – developed across the world. There are two basic models for this tool. One works purely locally to the device on which it has been installed which, if it comes into close proximity to another device belonging to a virus sufferer, alerts the user and advises the best course of action. The second version has a similar functionality, but is also tied into a centralised database, so that all sorts of information may be collected (for what purpose?).

The giant tech corporations, Apple and Google, have collaborated to produce a tool that follows the first, distributed model. Unsurprisingly the great majority of nations have plumped for this solution, since the backing and technical expertise of such behemoths is not to be sniffed at. Of those nations that did not do so immediately many have subsequently changed course and gone that route.

Concerns regarding data privacy were raised about the UK’s choice and computer scientists and other commentators warned back in April that the chosen solution would almost certainly prove impossible to engineer successfully on the platforms for which it would be required (iPhones and Android devices). The UK government – determined to to have its centralised database solution – announced (and subsequently abandoned) a succession of launch dates throughout May and early June. Rumour spread over the past few days that the App would not be ready until winter, further adding to the delay in the full implementation of the Track and Trace program, the which is vital if the UK economy is to re-open successfully.

Today’s (entirely predictable) announcement told of the final total abandonment of the UK government App (which the Health Minister tried to blame on Apple!) and the adoption instead of the Apple/Google offering with which most nations have already been working for the last three months.

I’m sorry – but you simply couldn’t make this stuff up. These people are supposed to have kept the UK and its citizens safe from the pandemic – rather than allowing it to become one of the worst hit countries in the world. They will shortly also have the responsibility of ensuring that the disaster that is Brexit does not deal the economy a terminal blow.

Good luck with that one!

The Journey Home – 4

June 15, 2020 by admin

This time last year we had just returned from the splendid trip to the UK and to Greece that I am re-living vicariously through the medium of this journal.

The timing of this particular post is really quite apposite because – having rounded off our splendid reunion with the UK and headed south to join our cruise ship for the first phase of our Greek visit – it was no longer possible for me to publish posts to the blog, on account of the paucity and cost of the Internet connections on board ship. As a result I unleashed a stream of such postings after we returned to Canada – starting with this one.

I had visited Greece once before, though that time to a different set of islands – the Dodecanese. This time we would be mostly in the Cyclades. For The Girl this would be a first visit to any part of Greece and neither of us had been to Athens – where we would spend a few days at the end of our cruise. Much, then, to look forward to.

Now – with regard to the cruise itself the postings that I made on our return were really quite comprehensive and laden with (if i say so myself) quite lovely photographs. If the Greek islands are of interest to you do take a look around. As for this post – well – I will do my best to dig out any interesting images that did not make the cut first time around. I know that I took plenty – so I am hopeful…

These images are from our visits to Santorini, to Heraklion and Knossos and to Ephesus:

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