Monday Morning IT Fail. (Part 2,000,001)

This bloody PC struggles with Monday mornings far more than I do and I should prefer to be in bed snoozing instead of here in the office. If I can make it across London to be here to tap away at the keyboard, the least that the computer attached to that keyboard could do, is not daydream while I’m doing stuff.

That is MY prerogative.

More worryingly, I hear rumours that the much anticipated but still delayed IT upgrade coming our way in September - no October – er, November – um, before Christmas at some point (honest, Guvnor), isn’t much better. It seems that some parts of the building actually have the new kit and have been impressed¹ by its performance. Given that the current equipment and software is coming up on eight years old now and that MicroSquash are about to withdraw support for most of the applications and operating system, it is hard to see how an up-to-date system could be worse, but it appears that by skilful application of procurement procedures, our IT people have managed it.

It would have been easier and cheaper to send us all down to Curry’s with a pocket full of shiny shillings, to but an office computer each.




¹I know that I am going against common usage here, but things can make bad impressions as well as good ones and really, given the track record of IT procurement in this place in the last ten years at least, I’d be wary of assigning any positive value to the phrase in this context.

It was Fifty Years ago...

I have just ordered a copy of the soon-to-be published first volume of Mark Lewinsohn’s three-part, definitive biography of the Beatles, All Those Years: Volume One, Tune In. Once all three have been published, if Lewinsohn fulfils his remit, there should be nothing, literally nothing left to say about the Beatles in print.

This volume was supposed to have been published a couple of years ago, with the projected completion date for the whole project, sometime between 2018 and 2020. A meticulous researcher, Lewinsohn has admitted that it has taken far longer than he anticipated and he has stated (I hope, jokingly as he is only just over 12 months older than me) that he may be in his seventies before it’s finished.

The current volume starts in the 1940s and ends with the release of Love Me Do, the band’s ‘breakthrough’ single. At 900+ pages it is as much a social history of post war Liverpool and Hamburg as it is a biography of the group.

The reviews in the Guardian, The Times and the Telegraph were uniformly good and all point out that is a very even-handed treatment, showing the development of the Beatles warts and all, rather than being a simple hagiography. At the same time, it does not unnecessarily indulge in gutter reporting, or belittling the band members in the style of Goldman’s Lives of John Lennon. If it does what it is intended to do, it will present the whole story (in due course), and provide a properly human counterpart to previous books, which in some cases have left the mythology intact and unquestioned.

I can barely wait; I’ve read Lewinsohn’s stuff before, he has a solid track record and I doubt there is anyone on the planet who knows more about the subject than he. Even the surviving Beatles themselves.