The first day of a nationwide curfew. I welcome this, like many people, and think, like many people, that it should have been done much earlier, weeks ago, as early as the Irish Prime Minister instigated tough sanctions there. However there are many economic consequences and necessary preparations, so perhaps doing that weeks ago would not have been possible. Even now, many people object to these restrictions.
To me it seems likely now that, rather than gradually infect everyone, the strategy will become global containment; that China will stamp out infections as they occur rather than intentionally, gradually infecting its population with the hope of granting widespread immunity. I hope that world governments will understand this aim and attempt this. It would be an incredible achievement, a first time in human history that a pandemic was stopped in this way. For me, it seems like the best solution, far faster than a vaccine anyway.
People on the news had been flaunting government guidelines. The park, even here, on Mother's Day was apparently very busy with groups. It seems to be a necessary step to introduce and enforce tougher movement restrictions. The graph of daily infections in Britain seems about level. Perhaps we are even near a peak. There would naturally be some growth now, due to those who became infected before the restrictions, but the experience of other countries indicate that these 'social distancing' measures will work, and perhaps, across the globe, rates will die down.
I'm feeling more settled at the curfew and feeling ready to work. I had a shopping trip to make, so did this. It was also a good chance to exercise, something I miss. The streets were very empty, as expected; I probably didn't get closer than 4 metres to anyone at all when walking. Tesco was also very empty of shoppers and new (welcome) restrictions on spacing between customers were evident at the checkouts. Staff were wearing surgical gloves. One entrance was closed to restrict movements. The shelves were a little more full than last time, the produce creeping back. Still no pasta or chicken, but almost all other goods were there to some extent. I hope that too much food isn't wasted, though I fear it will be. If people make less trips the fresh food, like the lovely berries and fruits, might not remain fresh.
In work, I continued to work on Animalia and have remastered all of the tracks now. I spotted a software bug though; I noticed that the delays in Cellular Automaton were not correct, and loaded the original file to find them still faulty. I thought that, over the years, I had tweaked or changed the file somehow, but it turned out that this was a bug.
My last update checked if any parameters were out of bounds, and if so, reset the engine (engine: a sound creating plug-in) to its default values. This was the source of the problem, especially when using parameters based on beat-time rather than seconds, because the tempo can vary, and thus put the beat-time out of range easily, or have it appear out of range when it is in range. A perfectly valid engine was being reset.
The simplest solution is to stop checking things and just import the existing values. This fixed things, but I had noticed that I'd been loading in old files and saving them out again, corrupting them with this bug. The bug has only been in place since Prometheus v1.59 so November last year, so hopefully not much damage has been done. I looked back and the old Animalia files and fixed those, and added a few more features to Prometheus; a feature to delete all of the notes of the current instrument on the current track (useful only for tracks with a mix of instruments, which is rather rare).
Also I've added guide tracks; these are tracks that are always muted, never played, but processed as a normal track in other ways. As the name suggests, they are useful for melodies or other note data that can be used as a guide or skeleton to the general sequence; notes in a midi track for example, or the melody to sing for a song. These aren't played in the final sequence, but are useful to have alongside the music. I can use a normal track and just keep it muted, which I have been doing, but it looks ugly and it can create uncertainty as to whether a track is to be played in the final mix or not.
I've also ordered my author copies of The Burning Circus. I made one change since launch day: The Accident poem referenced Perseus rather than Pegasus (an easy mistake to make!). I think though that one single copy has been sold and shipped with the Perseus mistake. This copy is unique. It will no-doubt be priceless one day, if it survives. It's probably already worth more than it cost.
