The Nice People Thread, No.16: A Universe of Niceness.

PasturesNew

Jackmydad wrote: »

Easy to check with the satnav these days.

You speak as if everybody has one. I've not even ever SEEN one yet!


I was only going 35 miles last week, to a place I'd not been to - but I knew it was "that sort of way" waving a finger in the air ..... and I knew I'd find it easily enough, even though it was a tiny spot in the countryside. Ditto returning, "I live over that sort of way" ... and I found it.

I hadn't even googled the map/route, as I just knew "it's over that way"... and if you keep heading in that general direction you eventually see a sign of some sort that looks right... and I did.

Jackmydad

PasturesNew wrote: »

You speak as if everybody has one. I've not even ever SEEN one yet!


I was only going 35 miles last week, to a place I'd not been to - but I knew it was "that sort of way" waving a finger in the air ..... and I knew I'd find it easily enough, even though it was a tiny spot in the countryside. Ditto returning, "I live over that sort of way" ... and I found it.

I hadn't even googled the map/route, as I just knew "it's over that way"... and if you keep heading in that general direction you eventually see a sign of some sort that looks right... and I did.

I've only got a simple one, a basic Tom tom, bought about three years ago.
It does give the speed though.

vivatifosi

Super excited over in Herts.

First Eurovision semi final tonight.

If anyone is interested, watch out for these entries which have the public interest

Israel
Czech Republic
Cyprus (current favourite to win the whole contest)
Belgium (my favourite this semi, but may not get through)
Estonia watch for the dress
Finland ex X Factor UK
Belarus has thrown the whole kitchen sink at it
Ireland (may not qualify, going for gay vote)
Bulgaria , represented by a bunch of Americans

Enjoy if you are planning to watch 8pm BBC4.
.

GDB2222

vivatifosi wrote: »

Super excited over in Herts.

.

I'm super excited here in London to discover that SheWees come in two sizes. If you have the smaller size, do you have SheWee envy of someone who has the bigger one?

Cakeguts

I am going to start this by saying I am not a nice person I am a trouble maker. Well that is what the people who are perpetuating this little problem will call me. As usual it boils down to money. I think it also includes a large dose of ignorance and a large dose of people who are not ignorant not correcting those that are.

I run a music group as a volunteer that helps people to have a better quality of life through playing music with others. So if I hear someone on a course making a terrible noise on something a noise so bad that no one else will want them in their group my immediate reaction is to try to find out why it is happening because I know about the theraputic advantages of playing music with others. So over the years I have heard some of the most peculiar sounds you can possibly imagine coming out of a particular instrument. One in particular sounds just like someone adding water to a frying pan when it spits. I have no idea how they make this noise. There is another one that I have heard music students at college make that sounds as if someone has pushed a large wodge of felt up the end of the instrument and made the sound muffled. In none of the cases has anyone ever offered the person playing an explanation for these strange noises or even helped them to stop it from happening. I don't hear noises like this on any other instrument only this one. The instrument is the oboe. So if I were to go to a meeting of oboe and bassoon players which I did recently you would get the same mix of ages and experience but the bassoon players would be much more advanced players and they wouldn't make any strange noises. The oboes would make you want to rush out of the room with your fingers in your ears.

I couldn't understand why there was such a difference in standards between the two instruments. It is a problem because the lessons cost roughly the same on each instrument but if you learned one you would get a lot further in a short time than on the other even though the one that you would get further on is the more difficult one. This difference in levels was apparent everywhere I went and I just couldn't understand it. I am finally getting there. The problem in the oboe world appears to have been caused by one dominant person who had trouble learning fingerings but came from a very well connected musical family. What appears to have happened is that there are a generation of oboe teachers who believe that fingerings on the oboe are difficult and have to have a lot of attention paid to learning them. However when you consider that a bassoon has a bend in it and so the fingerings on one hand are actually upside down compared to the other and also are not logical you would think that it was the bassoon where you would need to concentrate on fingerings but because they were not influenced by this very well connected teacher who found fingerings difficult they start from a different perspective.

The bassoon players start from how to make a sound and most importantly how to make a sound that doesn't send people running out of the room with their fingers in their ears. When they have got that they start on finger patterns but the sound is the most important thing. The oboists start on how fast you can move your fingers over the keys and they don't bother about what it sounds like. The end result of this is that if you have a sound production problem on the oboe you are not going to be able to find anyone who knows how to fix it. I was lucky. I didn't have any of these teachers who are students of the dominant teacher who couldn't learn fingerings so I started from the same place as the bassoon players. I was told when I started the oboe that it would take me roughly 20 years to get to a certain point. I did it in 10 and I never made any strange noises along the way. What I learned from this experience was what the bassoon players already know. If you start from the sound production as being the most important aspect you start off correctly and you don't make strange noises but not only that your control of the sound is always round better and your control of how you play is better. If you start off with lots of fingerings and not worry about what it sounds like you get stuck in a certain place with not being able to move forward because you don't have control of the basics of how to make a sound.

This just shows how one person in the right place at the right time can cause terrible problems if no one asks questions. Luckily it is only oboe lessons and not a nation.

However if the oboe lessons cost £30 an hour this wrong information is not being provided on the cheap.

How I finally got to the bottom of all this was because I accidentally bought a beginners oboe book. I was told that the book was difficult and you had to play it if you wanted to become a professional player. (which I don't but thought it would be something of a challenge.) When it came it was obvious to me that it was the kind of book that someone who had been playing for about 2 years would need. That got me thinking about why some people thought this book was difficult and others thought the same as me that it was easy. This is what I realised. If you start from the same place as the bassoonists you will find the book easy because you have control over how the notes come out of the instrument. If you start by not worrying about how the oboe sounds and only concentrating on the fingerings you will find the book hard because you are having to learn the basics of sound production in order to play it.

At this point I am so grateful that all of my teachers knew how to teach the oboe.

There is just one other thing that I don't understand and that is this. There is a book of 48 studies for the oboe that was written by a clarinetist to teach other clarinet players how to play the fingerings on the oboe. It was written in the 1800s for players who had to play both. This book is used without question by a lot of teachers. I didn't play it because I realised what it wasn't. I now know that it is a glorified fingering chart for clarinet players in the 1800s. This is roughly the same as using a guide to servicing a threshing machine for servicing the engine of a Mercedes car and not asking why.

LydiaJ

Pyxis wrote: »

You see, I can 'sympathise' in a way with the Licence people. (Please don't beat me! )
(Oh, I'm all right, this isn't DT, it's the NP thread! Phew!)

The reason being that I would imagine the percentage of people defaulting on paying for a licence far outstrips the percentage which doesn't have a television...

Personally, I think that the BBC is worth every single penny of the licence fee. And more probably. The quality of progs on BBC4 is outstanding imo.
As regards the 'threatening' letters, well, to innocent people, they may seem a bit heavy-handed, though not that much, but to someone who is skiving, they may provoke a response.
But then, I've usually responded and told them the position. Now that you can do it online, it's quick enough to do. It was more of a pain in the past when you had to post the form off.

The only letter I got which was a bit heavy was when I hadn't been to the flat for a while, so hadn't had the first letter; it was a bit more alarming than the first one, but tbh, all you have to do is respond to it!

After all, people like me, who pay for their licence, are subsiding people who watch TV and don't pay for a licence, so I can't really have sympathy for those people!

Edit.....as regards the frequency of the letters, well, to be fair, the TV situation in a property can change overnight, so it's understandable that they need to keep asking.
If the property is unoccupied, you give them a length of time for it being unoccupied, and then you don't hear from them again until the end of the stated period.

I agree with all of that. But I think the question about "when do you expect the property to be occupied?" is badly phrased and oversimplistic. The big thing with designing forms is to anticipate as many as possible of the circumstances of people who might be trying to fill in the form, and make it clear what they should do.

If I were designing that page, I would put a much longer instruction, and aim to get a crystal mark for clear English for it. I'd say something like, "We need to know how long you think the property will be unoccupied. If you know when the property will be occupied, please put the date here. Otherwise we will check again in 6 months."

Pyxis wrote: »

I once attended a special music thing at Oxford, and stayed in a Hall. It was quite interesting, being back in a student room!

To be honest, I would have liked to have been in one of the old buildings, even though they aren't en-suite, just for the experience!
It would have been one of the very few times I would have been prepared to toddle off down the corridor in the middle of the night, hopefully having remembered to pack a dressing gown!

Breakfast was in an old refectory, which was nice. The long benches at the refectory tables were a slight challenge, if you weren't on an end, but they did warn you about that! Purposeful movements were the key!

Oxford, being Oxford, calls everything by different names from most other places. The collection of buildings is called a college, not a hall. Unlike in "normal" universities, it isn't just a place where students live - it provides quite a lot of their teaching too. The room where you eat, with the long tables, is called the hall, usually referred to without the "the", as in "Are you eating in hall tonight?"

Even the old buildings are getting en-suites for rooms that could be used for conferences. In my college in the 80s, they were creating them out of a bit carved off the bedroom, plus the space freed up by removing the coal bunker. Our rooms could only be heated by plug-in convector heaters, and the chimneys had been blocked up, but nobody had got round to removing the built in coal bunker (or the coal still in it) in each room in the old part of college.

PasturesNew wrote: »

Wouldn't do it in the cold, wet, wind though. Nor somewhere overpriced. Nor somewhere "in the middle of nowhere". Nor somewhere "grim and a bit pointless".

I have hideous memories of a sleepless night in a small tent on a very windy hillside, wondering whether the tent was actually going to blow away. (It didn't. )

michaels

PasturesNew wrote: »

You speak as if everybody has one. I've not even ever SEEN one yet!


I was only going 35 miles last week, to a place I'd not been to - but I knew it was "that sort of way" waving a finger in the air ..... and I knew I'd find it easily enough, even though it was a tiny spot in the countryside. Ditto returning, "I live over that sort of way" ... and I found it.

I hadn't even googled the map/route, as I just knew "it's over that way"... and if you keep heading in that general direction you eventually see a sign of some sort that looks right... and I did.

Except of course you have an android phone so you do have one.

LydiaJ

SingleSue wrote: »

One of their letters put Josh in a panic. He was in first year at uni and in halls, no TV and not even watching on Iplayer (even though you could at the time without a licence) and they all got rather threatening letters as a first contact. Having Aspergers meant that he thought he was doing something wrong because of the tone of the letter and he was about to pay out for a TV licence even though he actually didn't need one and thinking he was going to prison.

I had to contact them and they said they had to make the tone serious even if there was no wrong doing to catch the ones who weren't paying but couldn't quite get it into their heads that some in our society would be so scared by the tone of it that they would buy one when it was not needed (a nice profit maker) or feel so scared that it could trigger them into doing something silly (which was how Josh felt, he thought he was going to prison by the tone of the letter and knowing he couldn't cope in prison, was going to end it all).

They didn't care.

Poor Josh. Glad you found out about it and were able to explain things to him.

michaels wrote: »

Except of course you have an android phone so you do have one.

I'm out of date, then. I thought PN had an un-smart phone.

Does the android satnav measure speed? If so, can someone tell me how, please?

Pyxis

Cakeguts wrote: »

I am going to start this by saying I am not a nice person I am a trouble maker...............

...............I didn't play it because I realised what it wasn't. I now know that it is a glorified fingering chart for clarinet players in the 1800s. This is roughly the same as using a guide to servicing a threshing machine for servicing the engine of a Mercedes car and not asking why.

Thank you, Cakeguts. I found that extremely interesting.

I think we've exchanged some posts about music on another thread a while back.

PasturesNew

I couldn't even point to a picture of an oboe or a bassoon.

They are "things you blow"... but that's the limit of my knowledge.