Visual Acuity

Listening to Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ by Steve Reich

Very sad bit coming up though only sad in one sense of the word.

I have recently had to start using c# instead of vb which has required some ancient area of my brain to start working again. However, there is one bit of c# about which I am happy. It is the increment construct, i.e. integerValue++. It just seems so elegant and right rather than all that mucking about in hyperspace … er …. with integerValue = integerValue + 1. I feel that maybe I should do all my programming in c# from now on, not just the web stuff but windows apps as well. I don’t suppose there is much of an efficiency gain; I just don’t know enough about the deep stuff of compilers to say whether there is any real difference in the processing. Anything you can do in VB you can do in c# so its just a case of what you know and like. C always seems like Zen compared to the western philosophy of VB. Then again, humans always either destroy what they don’t know or give it an undeserved air of mystery. I am sure that after 1000 days, the rarified and spiritual atmosphere of a Tibetan monastery can get a bit mundane. I remember once writing about the idea of staying in a different house every night of your life just to get over the boredom of real-life. This leads me on to something which isn’t quite bathos because bathos is an unintentional lapse into the mundane from the midst of something higher while this is meant. (You can dispute whether the previous stuff is higher discussion later). The family in the Giles cartoons never lived in the same house twice. The punch line of each cartoon was always different but why have a different house each time. I suppose, it would have got boring for both artists and reader the settings were familiar. That is the beauty of Giles, the initial joke (sometimes good – sometimes very poor) was one thing but the real joy was in the depth of the background, the detail in the shops, the impending accidents usually initiated by the hairy friend of the family children. There was always the book that Vera’s husband was reading, the fact that the youngest girl was always acting like mother in training. And of course there was Grandma who must have really been some Central American dictator on the run from justice.