The Podcast Kid

 In the matter of podcasts...

<etymological-note>
(a porte-manteau word that preserves in the aspic of common usage, two words neither of which is relevant and the latter of which never was: iPod and boadcast – a recent guest on Armando Iannucci's Strong Message Here {Stuart Lee?} pointed out the inappropriatemess of 'broadcast' [which podcasts aren't], though the historic nature of the iPod had been bothering me for years. Well, not exactly bothering me – I just noticed it and added it  to my mental list of words like 'hang up' or 'tinder-box' or 'fast-forward' or 'the final reel' – expressions that preserve an obsolete technology in current vocabulary.

<tangent>
I was once the proud owner of an iPaq (when PDAs – personal digital assistants – were all the rage). This was  in the '90s, before Apple had bagsied words with an initial i- and Compaq came late to the PDA market. I wonder how Apple and Compaq came to a peaceful settlement; presumably a Cease and Desist order was issued,
</tangent>

</etymological-note>

... I am a relative newcomer, in that  I have stuck mainly to ones that spun off from BBC radio programmes ...

<parenthesis>

on which subject I was initially sceptical when some time ago (at the beginning of the retirement shenanigans) someone on the BBC described Melvyn Bragg as {≅} 'a pioneer of podcasts at the BBC'. 

But I see now that he was, provided that the last three words are borne in mind (which this 'AI Overview doesn't do:)

He realized that he could extend a 44 minute program by overflowing into the new medium. Pretty good for 1998, but not really Davy Crockett-like.

</parenthesis>

There are thousands (millions? Anyway, oodles) of non-BBC podcasts. As I wrote here when I first dipped a tentative toe  in the misinformation-infested waters ...

<tangent>
I've been  listening recently to A Carnival of the Animals – a series of  very short (3/4 minutes each) pieces on endangered animals, by Katherine Rundell. She memorably just said words to the effect of 'There's no such thing as "shark-infested waters", just as there's no such thing as "child-infested schools". They belong there.'. [Just saying.]

<etymological-note>
I wonder if Rundell (or her producer) had in mind the theory (that Etymonline dismisses as 'folk etymology) that carnevale (Italian, 'Shrove Tuesday', literally 'farewell to flesh') has something to do with leave-taking. As the series is about the depradations done to the planet during the anthropocene...

<meta-tangent>
{the period when the Earth's systems have been changed by homo sapiens (sapiens? More like homo gastator ['wasteful/spendthrift'], if you ask me, if not homo <shooting-himself-in-the-foot> (my latin's not up to that – auto-pedal-something I suppose). Perhaps homo exmordens-manum-nutrientem ['biting-off-the-hand-that-feeds-him']}
</meta-tangent>

...it seems to me that this farewell thing is a possible explanation, although as the theme music is an extract from the 'Aquarium' movement of the Saint-Saens work, and the series is about animals,  perhaps I'm over-thinking it. Over-thinkimg? Moi?

.... 

</etymological-note>

    </tangent>

...of the podosphere:

<prescript date="Aug. 2021">
One can get sucked in to a black hole of true crime and unsolved mysteries; there is a lot of dross out there. And there are vain attempts at sticking to a format that must have seemed worth sticking to at some stage: a prime example is British Scandal (not BBC so interlarded with toe-curling advertisements): the  creators seem to think that scandal means "any-old fairly noteworthy thing that caused a bit of a stir once and involved skulduggery of some kind".
</prescript>

There is a way to avoid these toe-curling ads (made worse by being voiced [sometimes] by the hosts themselves), but it nvolves paying to be a privileged member and getting ad-less podcasts (and other perks). But MrsK and I have just changed power supplier, and as it happens our new supplier is giving away The Rest Is Politics Plus membership. But to get it, you have to click on a TRIP+ link, which we didn't do.

I threw myself on their mercy, and after an initial 'Sorry, too late' they relented. So, for the next year I'll get loads of perks (that I'll never use),  but at least I don't have to listen to those HP ads (which, as I said here) underline the pension injustice that I'm not obsessing about, honest.

b

Update: 2025.10.27.20:20 – Added link in last sentence, and typo fixes.

Unconsidered trifles

I've been thinking about something known in a former (Nets&Comms) life as 'the problem of propagation delay'  (the reason for queues at a 4-way temporary traffic light when there's one carriageway out of action, although nobody seems to be going anywhere or doing anything). The reason for this thought process is that for the last 3 or 4 weeks I've been effectively locked out of my O2 account for two reasons: 

• my email is an alias (something that looks like a proper me@cantab.net address, but is really just an instruction to cantab.net to forward any mail received to my actual address). This means that whatever my current address is I just have to tell cantab.net and I don't have to waste everyone's time telling everyone in my address book that I've changed.
• O2 have got some deal going with Virgin, which farms out their password management to something called Virgin Media O2 (VMO2). I don't  know why they did this. I imagine Outsourcing was mentioned by a bean counter somewhere.

Anyway, what it means is that when I try to log in, four nodes (O2, Virgin, cantab.net, and my actual address) are involved – allowing for delays at every stage. So I enter my @cantab address and O2, in the politest possible terms, says 'Not my problem' (or, to be precise, VMO2 sign-in – preceded after a  longish pause, by some false bonhomie along the lines of 

Hang on a moment while we get our ducks in a row

).

I enter my password and VMO2 promises to send me a link by email. They send it, in their own good time, to cantab.net, who look up where I am and forward it to me. I click on the link and get this:

This reminds me of a text  that, since it was written in 1975 (when I had never set eyes on a computer) has been required reading for any first-year student of Software Engineering :

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

<gender-neutral-version>

The Perennially-Putative Person-Period?

<rant>

And while we're on the subject, that's my least-favoured  bit of dead wood: 'period of time'. What else could a period be of? A period of... aubergine? But I keep hearing it. To quote Tom Wossname (...got it: Thomas Paine), 'Lay then the ax to the root'. Period. [Full stop]
</rant>

 </gender-neutral-version>

There are many reasons for software development to take longer than is planned. Many of those involve  the aforementioned 'man-month'...

<prescript>
I've explained before how I feel about uses and abuses of the word 'mythical'.

If they want to say it's untrue (a usage of 'myth' that I loathe [sic, and another thing I loathe is being thought to have got the spelling wrong when I use 'loth' to mean 'unwilling'] with the heat of a million Suns, as my little sister knows to her cost*), they're undermining their own argument... [HD '25: which is irrelevant here, except that it underlines how the 1975 book's title is OK – I just think twice before I say 'mythical'.]

*In the mid '70s I was studying the idea of myth in the work of Borges, and with the self-assurance of a 23-year-old I thought myself the sole custodian of the word 'myth'. Sorry, old bean. 

</prescript> 

...; because if you increase the number of people working on a software development task by n, you increase the output by less than n, as you increase the communications overhead. To take an implausibly trivial example. If you have Tom Dick and Harry (T, D and H), lines of communication are TD, DT, TH, HT, DH and HD (3!). If you double the team, then lines of communication more than double. 

<autobographical-note>

Software development teams such as the ones I worked with often had several dozen members, with umpteen interlocking dependencies and a huge communications overhead (although repeated rounds of redundancies reduced  that – while, naturally, increasing the number and size of the cracks for stuff to fall through.

</autobographical-note>

Harmless Drudgery Sitrep

Ten years ago I wrote this:

<prescript>
...At the end of last year I referred to a growing following, then reaching an average of 35 daily visits. Well 35 schmirty-five. This has been a record month (an average of over 55 visits per day).
</prescript>

Well that 'record month' has just been knocked into a cocked hat.

<etymological-break>
Presumably this is a reference to office-carpet-golf, in which  a hat, tipped-up (or cocked) is used as a target. (This is not the gospel truth, it just seems quite thing-ish to me.)
<etymological-break>

In September 2025 the web site has had well over a thousand visits a day (1014.43 to be precise), the highest monthly total in the life of the blog. And the previous record (21357 – 712 per day) was only last June. Here's the picture for the past twelve months:

Figures courtesy of Google Blogger, though the graphic is 'mine'
(in the sense that I made it, although the  IP no doubt
belongs to some tech-bro)

And finally

While looking into the Member Benefits of the Union Society (of which I became a life member in 1971)  I was... (uplifted?)...to see this:

Tha'sall for now. Just time (before tonight's rehearsal) for some much-needed note-bashing for this:

It will be anazing once we learn it. Don't miss it.

b