8:55 PM
I've been playing in a salsa band recently - well, perhaps that's talking it up a little. There's me on bass, Carlos the Columbian on timbales and Alejandro the Mexican on guitar and vocals. And to be honest, we're not much cop right now, but I reckon that with Carlos's enthusiasm and a lot of practice we can pull together something that is at least a lot of fun to play.

Anyway, we've practiced three times so far, but each time we do little more than stick on a CD, play along with a track or two, and chat a little. It feels pretty unproductive. So to that end, Carlos agreed to put together a compilation of tracks for us to play (18 in total) which we will make a more concerted effort to play And I agreed to try and work out the chord progressions and arrangements. So that's what I've been doing this weekend, a complete first to me, and I have to say it's been really enlightening.

In the past, when I've had to learn a piece of music, I've tended to just listen to it bit by bit, playing along, until it gradually sinks in, usually over the period of about a month or so. During that time, parts of the music seem quite alien, I can get lost in verses, choruses and middle eights. The whole piece only comes together in my mind very gradually. When I played with Bone Turtle, Mark would hand out sheets of arrangements which was a real novelty to me, and I wondered where he got the patience to work them out and put them down on paper.

Writing music down is a whole different ball game from learning by ear. It's quite painstaking at first, especially with some of the more syncopated Latin stuff (I'm trying to approximate things out to bar-by-bar chord progressions, and it's not easy when bars seem to start and end in peculiar places). A seeming eternity (probably more like five minutes) of playing and re-playing the first few bars, trying to get them just so. But it's very rewarding once I do, and gradually as I write down an intro, verse, chorus and bridge, everything else starts to fall into place quite naturally. And the incredible thing is, once I do have it written down, every subsequent playing becomes so much easier - there's no anxious wondering, trying to remember which bit comes next (the fact that I got down and dirty with the original piece trying to figure out the progressions also helps in this respect). The whole piece just flows, and I can put much more energy into the individual notes rather than focus on structure. It's a real joy!

(I even sat down at the keyboard - an ancient fan-driven kids toy that I rescued from a car boot sale - and managed to work out which chords are major and which minor. Now that is a major major achievement).

Actually, in many ways the hardest tunes to work out were the simplest ones - one song (Cumbia Suramericana) is the same chord, E-flat (hey, how come no sharp & flat in HTML entities?) all the way through, but trying to count bars and decide exactly where I would decree the bridge ended and the syncopated chorus began was a nightmare.

It's also given me a greater love of the music. I'm especially keen on the aforementions Cumbia Suramericana, and especially especially keen on Colombia Tierra Querida, the music for which I hereby present to you:

Intro:	Gm Am Am Gm     x 2 D Em F-sharp Gm     x 2 Gm Am Am Gm     x 4
Verse:	Gm Gm F D Gm    x 2 Gm Cm F B-flat E-flat E-flat D Gm    x 2
Chorus:	Gm Am Am Gm     x 2
Bridge:	Gm Am Am Gm     x 2 D Em F-sharp Gm     x 2 Gm Am Am Gm     x 4
Verse:	Gm Gm F D Gm    x 2 Gm Cm F B-flat E-flat E-flat D Gm    x 2
Chorus:	Gm Am Am Gm     x 2
End:	Gm Am F-sharp-m Gm

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10:06 AM
I made one of those very occasional and much needed minor adjustments to my home page.

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9:47 AM
<sigh> - I finally finished writing a small Perl script which I started on about a year ago and then put to one side. It reads through a directory of MP3s which I've hand-ripped from tape, and assigns them ID3 tags based on their filename (artist - album - track - song.mp3) using ID3ren.

I could have saved a lot of time if I'd read the ID3ren documentation in the first place - there is actually a template command which does exactly this. OK, so my Perl script lets me zip through whole directories at a time... but I think I can also do this with ID3ren using wildcards. Ah well, such is progress. It also took me about a hundred times longer to write the script (because of my lack of understanding of getting Perl to interact with external commands) than it would have done to type the tags in by hand for the few tracks that I have ripped in this way, but what the hey.

Probably a far more useful achievement: I ripped my first track off a DVD last night - bloody hard work and not an ideal result, but this site was a lot of help.

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9:02 AM
Story to warm the cockles of one's heart, from this week's Popbitch:

In America dollars are known as "Benjamins", in the hip hop world because Benjamin Disraeli's picture is on the $100 bill.

Here in the UK Prince Charles's two boys, William and Harry refer to pound notes as "Grannies" - because they have their granny's face on them.

On birthdays, Charles asks them "Would you like a blue granny, a brown granny or a pink granny?" (fiver, tenner or fifty)

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2:55 PM
Last week I took part in the BBC's national IQ test. IQ tests are something I'm very wary of for a great many reasons, from the very idea on which they're based, through to the often poorly-thought-out implementations. When I was studying Psychology at university, we looked at a number of IQ and aptitude tests. One, which is often used by employers to screen potential employees, involved a series of reading-comprehension sections where you would read a piece (around three paragraphs) and then answer five questions on it, with answers limited to "true", "false" or "cannot tell from the passage". Of the fifteen questions that we looked at, the officially sanctioned answers to two of them were wrong - they stated that something was true or false, when in fact the passage only alluded at this but did not give enough information to categorically decide either way. It made me realise how low the average intelligence must be in human resources departments where they administer this type of test.

So, anyway, because of that I've kinda avoided tests of this sort, and also of course because I didn't want to discover I wasn't in fact as bright as I thought. But a couple of years ago I decided to take an online test, in the privacy of my own office so I could hide the results from anyone else if needs be. I was more than a little pleased to see my result come out at 153 (all IQ tests are designed to represent the average person as having a score of 100, with a bell-curve distribution meaning that much higher [or lower] scores become exponentially harder to achieve. A score of 150 or above is considered genius). So, of course, I didn't hide the results, but told everyone I knew

I ummed-and-ahhed about doing the BBC test - it would be great to be proved as clever as I thought I was by such an august and trusted institution as the BBC, but on the other hand 153 is a hard score to match up to, and if I got significantly less, well, wouldn't I end up feeling crap?

In the end, I had lots of mitigating factors lined up to explain any crapness (I was feeling rather ill that day, and had been in bed most of the day hence not exercising my brain adequately, I did the test in our living room, with the TV blaring at the other end, Anne Robinson reading out questions that I'd completed several minutes before, and Gill and Emma shouting out their guessed answers, as the kids milled about and made kid-type noises).

So I took the test. It asked me first what I thought my score would be - I said 150 (hey, let's be modest after all... I didn't want to end up looking silly or anything). I ran through the test - got a couple of answers wrong because the crappy Flash interface only gave a limited number of seconds for each answer, and when the time was up the next question appeared immediately, with the answer buttons in the same place as for the previous question, so in hitting the button as the last second ticked over I ended up inadvertantly answering the next question (wrongly).

I scored 133. 133??? Even given the mitigating factors that seemed depressingly low, at least compared to what I got last time. So it was with reluctance that I admitted I might not be as bright as I'd thought. Of course, Gill & Emma couldn't understand what the problem was, 133 is a brilliant score, etc etc. I got on the BBC message board and started moaning about the Flash design (as did many others), but still felt cheated. Or perhaps my nail biting has affected me adversely.

So I was relieved (and at the same time annoyed) when I saw how the test was scored. The highest score I could have possibly got, given my age, was 137. And if I'd been 9 months over, my lowly score of 133 would have been boosted to a more respectable 139. So there was no way I could ever have got 150, why couldn't the BBC have told me that at the time, instead of making me look stupid? Jeezus, by this scoring you have to be over 55 before you can possibly qualify as a genius.

Also reassuring was the fact that the highest scorer in the BBC's studio audience (of about 500 people) got 135, and nationwide the highest score was 149. National averages and other results here. Interesting (and a little depressing) to see the inverse correlation between salary and IQ: non-earners scored an average of 107, and this drops with each jump in income down to £50,000+ earners who average at 93. Alcohol drinkers also score much higher than non-drinkers. Shame that there is no data on numbers of respondents etc. which would allow you to judge the significance more clearly.

All of which just reinforced my feeling that this whole thing is a bit of a ratings-grabbing bit of fun, with little real scientific basis (in as much as anything with the phrase "IQ test" in the phrase can ever have a scientific basis).

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10:34 AM
Ooo... I bin banished to the second level of hell:

The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Second Level of Hell!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Level	Score
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)	Very Low
Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)	Low
Level 2 (Lustful)	Extreme
Level 3 (Gluttonous)	High
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)	Moderate
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)	Low
Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics)	Very High
Level 7 (Violent)	High
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)	Very High
Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous)	Moderate

Take the Dante's Inferno Hell Test

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11:00 PM
Just watched Je T'Aime John Wayne on TV - hilarious, brilliant short film spoof/homage to French new wave cinema.

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