Diversions Manifold

Timing in music, comedy and writing is of the essence, so it is ironic that I should appear to be posting this in such a timely fashion after the announcement that a team has managed to reconstruct the sound from the wax disc that recorded Alexander Graham Bell's voice from 1885 . All of a sudden, I have a relevant segué to present my old news in a new, refreshed light. Over the Easter holidays, oh so long ago now, but at least this year still, we managed to park the children with the Großeltern for a happy few hours and to drive to the wholly unremarkable Black Forest town of St. Georgen near Villingen. The town is, sorry to say, not much to look at. But it was the centre of two key industries as they rose and fell in waves; clock making, and record players. I'm not that much of a watch connoisseur, but I have always enjoyed audio and hifi, so when I saw the signs for the Deutsches Phonographisches Museum in St. Georgen , it was always going to be a place to visit.

This blog looks to be in grave danger of becoming an orphan; no writer to care for it, only the occasional glance in from human readers and data mining bots as they continue moving swiftly on to other digital destinations, only Google's server farm keeping it from sinking into the digital abyss. A blogging pause has happened here before, of course, as noted in my Blogging State Of the Union post from October 2012.  I've again not posted here for several months, obviously because nothing of interest has happened to me in that time. Perhaps that's right. The day-to-day has been pretty overwhelming and I've found that whilst trying to keep my engineering blog a little more lively, there's simply not been the headroom, or quiet time, or energy to work on this here blog. But what about the content? Has that been lacking, too? Thankfully, I think not. What have I been up to since Shanghai ? Well, I played in another symphony orchestra concert (Gershwin, Shostakovitc