Domaine du Joncier is a Rhône producer in the AOC of Lirac, actually in the village of Tavel, owned and operated by Marine Roussel since she took it over from her father in 1989. The Lirac Le Classique is a blend of Grenache, Syrah, Mourvèdre, Cinsault and Carignan. The label describes Lirac as a little-known gem of a region, opposite the (reknowned) Châteauneuf-du-Pape area.

I bought this bottle from Waitrose for about £7.50 — my most expensive purchase yet, choosing the 2007 due to that vintage’s excellent reputation in the southern Rhône. Due to the relationship between tax, duty, fixed shipping and packaging costs and the wine itself, it can be very beneficial to spend just a bit more than rock-bottom prices on wine.

The label promises “berry fruit and spice characters with a deep flavour and long complex finish”. I certainly got that, although I found it too complex for my liking. It did not taste at all unpleasant or artificial and was clearly a high-quality product; but it didn’t seem to have a clear message or signature taste. Maybe my palette isn’t highly trained enough yet, but I preferred the simpler Châsse Du Pape reviewed previously.

Quite strong at 14.5%, partly due to the Grenache content. Probably worth a punt if you’re after a classy, complex wine, as it’s clearly intended for drinking properly rather than as a casual beverage. I may try another bottle in the future once I’ve come by a bit more experience.

The road marking that you requested has been included in a package of minor works at the junction which is included in the forward programme works for this area.

We are also carrying out a safety review at M42 J6 and I have forwarded your email below and photographs to the engineer carrying out that work.

Hopefully this page won’t be needed for much longer…

This is the account of a still-ongoing personal quest of mine, to get a short stretch of white line painted on the roundabout where the M42 meets the A45 to the east of Birmingham at junction 6.

As a quick summary, the lack of a line encourages traffic to stay in a lane when it should (according to road signs and lane marking text) be spiralling outwards, to the detriment of traffic to their right who need to spiral outwards at that point. It causes daily frustration, aggression, congestion and delay.

I’ve sent several emails to the Highways Agency and Amey Mouchel (who are responsible for that junction) with no effect other than a polite content-free reply. Here’s the latest missive I sent. If this junction’s poor design affects you too, feel free to write to the same people.

to: enquiries@ameymouchel.com,
cc: ha_info@highways.gsi.gov.uk
date: 4 November 2009
subject: M42 J6 lane markings

The chaos continues at this junction. A reminder of my previous complaint:

At the south to west quadrant of the roundabout, the lane text and road signs make it abundantly clear that M42(N) traffic should move outwards from lane 3 (inside) to lane 2 (middle). Anyone in lane 2 at the south traffic lights should be either moving to lane 1 (NEC) or exiting to the A45(W).

However, the white lines do not encourage this behaviour. Many drivers heading for M42(N) take up position in lane 2 on the south section and stay in that lane, causing chaos at busy times as sign-abiding drivers attempt to merge in from lane 3 in the short west section.

All that’s needed to fix this problem is an extra white line making it clear that the right of way lies with traffic changing from lane 3 to lane 2; and that staying in lane 2 is not correct behaviour. This is exactly what happens in the east to south section where there are no such difficulties.

The attached image shows the problem from the air, together with my proposed solution.

If there’s someone else I should be contacting to get this change implemented or at least reviewed, please let me know.

and the image — click to open a large version in a new window:

There is a Highways Agency webcam covering the patch of road at the top-left of my image. Check it out on this BBC site — around rush hour, you should regularly see the inside lane blocked by someone attempting to move to the middle lane, but unable to do so due to someone else incorrectly staying on the middle lane from the previous section.

I bought this bottle from the Co-Op in Lichfield: it cost around £6 if memory serves, which it usually doesn’t these days. I’d imagine many people buy this due to the fame of the similarly-named Châteauneuf-Du-Pape wine, which sells for rather more than this one.

La Châsse Du Pape, like its Newcastle cousin, is a Southern Rhône wine. The Rouge Réserve is a blend of 60% Grenache, 35% Syrah, and 5% Cinsault and Mourvèdre. It’s sold by Maison Gabriel Meffre under the Côtes du Rhône AOC, as it doesn’t meet the requirements for the winery’s local and more specific Gigondas AOC because the wine is blended from several Rhône vineyards’ production. It has an alcohol content of 14%, due to the high proportion of sugar-rich Grenache. More details can be found on their annoyingly Flash-heavy website.

I chose a 2007, as that year is meant to be one of the best for Southern Rhône wines specifically, due to particularly good local weather — and because it was what was on the shelf. The bottle and label are good quality and evocative, with a crest both moulded into the glass and printed on the plastic cork reading SOLIS TERRAEQUE VINUM FRUCTUS, which means something like “wine, the fruit of the sun and the earth”.

This wine accompanied a Mediterranean chicken dish with olives and tomatoes (chopped and sun-dried), which I cooked from a recipe out of the well-written Readers’ Digest Healthy One-Dish Cooking book. Unprompted, a family member commented how nice the wine was, which is a good sign.

It’s a complex, heavy, fruity and strong wine. My best attempt at describing the general impression on the nose is “fertile”: like the smell of the countryside without the manure overtones. The bottle promised spicy and vanilla tastes — I could detect the former but not the latter, although a quick sniff of a bottle of vanilla essence as a reference did help to understand the suggestion. I wonder if I would have made the link without the label text, though...?

Irritatingly, the remainder of the bottle had to languish in the fridge for three days before I could finish it. As with the other wines I’ve tried, the fruit tastes diminished significantly and the alcohol “kick” became more pronounced. I really must get some half-bottles or marbles for storage to avoid drinking half the wine when it’s past its best. Interestingly, a significant taste like the aftertaste of very dark chocolate developed in the last glass.

I’d certainly buy another one of these (update: I have), and if this is typical of Grenache-based wines, I’m looking forward to the next two in the queue: Salduba, a Spanish Garnacha varietal (update: very good for under a fiver from Waitrose, didn’t give it enough attention for a review); and Domaine du Joncier Lirac Classique, another Rhône blend.

Apparently, a listener complained that it was hard to absorb, and this triggered the team thinking. One experiment was to read the national forecast in the style of the shipping forecast, one area at a time. This devastatingly simple idea cuts straight to the core of the problem with the old-style forecast: attention span.

The information being presented is essentially two-dimensional: spatial (which is a single dimension, as the regions are effectively a list) and temporal (the time of the forecast). Being an audio broadcast, the data flow of the delivered forecast is one-dimensional (time), so a route must be planned through the 2D data set to stream it to the listener.

With the old format of presentation, the listener is taken on a journey through time-of-day in discrete blocks (morning, afternoon, evening etc.), with the major weather phenomena described, usually in some sort of regional order. The time “axis” is only traversed once. We can represent this as below, with the delivery of the forecast following the red path. I’ve taken the part of a Middle-dwelling listener, with the bits I care about highlighted in green:

If we unwrap the ground covered by the red path, we get a sequence of information showing where the listener does and doesn’t care about the data. I’ll call this a care-now map, as that definitely won’t get confused with any other type of diagram. Here’s the old-format care-now map:

Suddenly, it’s clear why I find the weather forecast so hard to take in! It’s asking for many little snippets of my attention — by the time I’ve realized and started listening, they’ve moved on to the next region.

The new format, however, is much more logical. The listener is taken through the forecast time span multiple times, once per region, with regions combined as appropriate if the same weather conditions apply. Here’s the path taken through the data: it’s orthogonal to the old way:

…and the care-now map:

Much better. I can ignore the bits I don’t care about, and listen to the bit I do want to hear in one continuous section. Well done to whoever came up with this idea, and I look forward to this new format extending to all radio weather forecasts.

My wine reviews are written from the point of view of a rank amateur with no formal training, based on a sample size of one bottle of unknown storage history. These notes are primarily for my own records and future reference and are published here for interest only.

Château Tassin is a red Bordeaux produced by the Gonfrier brothers operating out of the Château de Marsan (which doesn’t look much like a château from the air). This particular example is a 2006 bottle I picked up from Sainsbury’s in Leamington, sealed with a Gonfrier-branded plastic cork.

The vineyard is in the Premières Côtes de Bordeaux subregion of the Entre-Deux-Mers region, and the wine is sold under that AOC. It seems that other vintages may be sold under the Bordeaux Supérieur AOC, which is a pan-area designation indicating older vines than the generic Bordeaux AOC — in this case, 26 years average age.

Château Tassin is a blend of 60% Merlot and 40% Cab Sauv. The producers describe it in a PDF document on their website thus (translated):

Château Tassin has a deep ruby appearance, a round body and ample courteous tannins which extend agreeably.

Tasting notes

This wine was indeed quite tannic (mouth-puckering) — I don’t think I have enough experience to identify “courteous” tannins from presumably-rude ones. The initial smell and taste was more artificial chemical than natural fruit, but not in an overly-unpleasant way. It suggested alcohol hand gel (seemingly a beverage in its own right), minus a bit of the clinical bite of that stuff.

The prime natural taste was of red grape skins (not that surprising for a drink made from red grapes, I suppose) with a hint of cherry acidity but not a cherry taste or smell — just as well, as I’m not a fan of cherries.

The wine also had a curious “hot” aftertaste a bit like whisky, more pronounced on a glass two days after opening. The overall effect was a bit superfluous and uninvolving, as if the true taste were avoiding my senses and slipping down unnoticed in the liquid. Curious.

Not a total waste of money, but I don’t think I’d buy another. However, all the vintage charts agree that the best 2006 red Bordeaux wines are a) not as good as the 2005, and b) not yet ready to drink. Even though this wine falls into the category of cheap, mass-produced supermarket wine, perhaps it just needed more time to mature.

Interesting lyrics. The key message is ambiguous and contradictory, but is focused on the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The end of each verse is variations on:

And your Jesus really died for me
I guess Jesus really tried for me

…with an “outro” of:

Jesus didn't die for you, what do you want?
(I want perfection)
Jesus didn't die for you, what are you on?
Oh Lord
(Jesus really died for you) Ohh
(Jesus really died for you)
(Jesus really died for you) Ohhhhhhh

It’s not clear to me who is meant to be taking the two halves of what appears to be a dialogue: is it Robbie versus the world, or the church versus Robbie?

This isn’t Robbie’s first involvement with Christianity. He courted controversy in a stunt with Derren Brown in 2006, and he has a tattoo of the crucifixion.

To be honest, I don't think it matters which way the dialogue is intended. The truth of the Christian message of salvation through faith in the free gift of Jesus’ crucifixion is powerful. If it is true, then accepting it is of paramount importance to your (eternal) life. If it is not true, then the Christian faith is worthless, although a lot of the important moral guidance is still good.

Ignoring the question, however, is logically a crazy path to take, yet most of the population (at least here in the UK) seem not to even consider their eternal destiny. If quizzed, most people would profess that there’s probably someone up there, but they’re “not religious”.

If this new song with its overt yet unresolved message triggers at least one person to consider the Christian message, then it’s a great asset for the church in taking its mission to the people.

Update: Having heard RW perform this at the Royal Albert Hall as part of Children In Need, I found the “outro” of Robbie and the choir singing “Jesus didn’t die for you” to an audience of thousands of fans highly disturbing. Whilst my comments above are still valid, I really do not like this song now.

Other commentators

• wannabepriest
• the blog of kevin
• metamorphe
• freelancetheology.com

Image of Robbie Williams by catzi, available on Flickr under CC attribution licence.

This was on a Philips ultrasound sensor elastic strap in the maternity ward during the delivery of our latest offspring. Apologies for the photo quality, as I only had a phone with a terrible quality VGA camera on it, but you get the idea. Why would Philips put a logo of a forlorn-looking lamb on their equipment?

It was only later, when I saw the strap in a different orientation, that the penny dropped:

What a happy chappie.

Well, actually, no. I like the stuff, and it’s in my nature to get right to the bottom of any field of expertise that piques my interest. So I’ve been reading up, and it’s a fascinating subject riddled with history, tradition, competition, one-upmanship and bluffing. It is an art and a science rolled together, and the end result is generally good.

Wine has a few unique characteristics as a product:

• it ranges from quite expensive to eye-wateringly pricey, often with little correlation to quality
• there is lots to learn
• wine gets better with age, to some extent. Some very old wines are still drinkable
• appreciation of wine is — by nature of the senses of taste, smell and sight — very subjective
• although it’s not completely established, it appears that drinking moderate amounts of wine, particularly red, is good for you
• over the years, a veritable lexicon of recondite vocabulary has built up around it: “pretentious bouquet with notes of truffle, a long finish and slow legs”

I’ve begun my informal studies with French wine, learning about the regions, the terroirs and the AOC system. Once I’m up to speed on the basics of French wine, I’ll expand my horizons to the rest of Europe and the New World wines of America and Australia/New Zealand.

I intend to start building up a collection using an old modified fridge or freezer as a cellar, botched to hold the interior at the recommended 12°C. However, as a cheapskate with a family and a whole load of other interests vying for my already-stretched income, there won't be anything expensive or posh in it. I just need to buy bottles slightly faster than they get consumed to put together a varied collection, perhaps using something based on this selection as a starting point, so if visitors call unexpectedly, I always have an appropriate bottle on hand. If anyone wants to send an ‛82 Pétrus my way as a reference point, I’d be grateful.

I’ll be posting notes from my mostly supermarket-bought bottles here, partly for your interest, dear reader; but mostly as an archive for my reference so I remember what I liked and what I didn’t.

One promise to myself, friends and family: I won’t become a wine bore! If you’re reading this, I assume you’re interested in the subject; but in Real Life, I’ll keep it to myself unless explicitly asked.

2005 Les Perdrigolles Crozes-Hermitage

Produced by the Cave de Tain group, I bought this 100% Syrah (aka Shiraz) red from Morrisons in Coventry for £7. Crozes-Hermitage is an AOC in the Northern Rhône, close to the famous Hermitage area. Wine Spectator gives the Northern Rhône 2005 vintage a score of 94 (out of 100), and a recommendation to hold (that is, don’t drink it yet). However, that typically applies more to the higher-end wines. Mass-produced supermarket wines are allegedly more suitable for immediate consumption.

So, I ought to try to put together some classical tasting notes, I suppose. This is tricky without much of a frame of reference, but I have to start somewhere.

The 2005 Les Perdrigolles has a real wooden cork, so I immediately had a sniff for the telltale damp cardboard smell of corking — all OK.

It is not a particularly strong wine at 12.5% alcohol, so it’s easy to drink. The label on the back of the bottle claims it is “spicy, medium-bodied, full or rich fruit flavours”, and I’d agree with that. Dark and smooth were two words that sprang to mind on first tasting.

It went well with the child-compatible meal of spaghetti bolognese (label suggests pairing with Mediterranean cuisine, and Bologna isn’t that far from the Med; although my recipe isn’t particularly authentic…), complementing the tomato and pasta nicely without overpowering it, or being overpowered itself. A glass enjoyed by itself a day later was also pleasureable, although I did not have time to let it warm up properly from fridge temperature. The fruits were definitely muted, whether from being slightly chilled or opened too long I don’t know. The final glass of the bottle the following day was allowed to warm up and was much less “vivid” than the first, so I suspect oxidation. I need to heed this advice and either get some marbles or some half-bottles.

Recommended from a wine novice: it didn’t suffer from the flaws of many relatively cheap supermarket reds of excess tannins (the stuff that makes your mouth pucker) and other artificial chemical smells and flavours. I might get another bottle for my “cellar” once it’s operational and see if a few years improves it — although my taste memory won’t last that long to allow a fair comparison…

Well, it’s technically possible, just not with any readily-available equipment. Let me try to convince you.

First, the photo that started me on this quest of trying to comprehend what was going on. I think this is a snapdragon, but I’m open to corrections.

Yeah, it’s blue. It was violet in real life, but blue on the camera screen and blue when I transferred it to the computer. The camera was properly set up: a Minolta DiMAGE A1, shot RAW, converted with the correct profiles. I also tried straight JPEG and a variety of other cameras, cameraphones and camcorders. Blue every time — yet the flower appeared violet to me, and others described it as “deep purple”.

Violet is not purple

First of all, let’s get that out of the way. The colour we call purple is made by mixing blue and red. Violet is a different colour altogether, although because of the way the human eye works, many people see them a being very similar. Some people, particularly those with very slight colour vision deficiencies like myself, see them as distinct hues.

Here is the full range of “pure” purples as far as your computer and monitor are concerned, which is a combination of a vertical gradient from black to pure blue and a horizontal gradient from black to pure red, showing all 4096 of the 16.7m colours your computer can display that have no green component:

There are a lot of purples in there, and some colours that may appear close to what you consider to be violet. Another graph is needed, this time of the sRGB gamut. As you may know, the picture on your screen is made up of red, green and blue dots. Mixing differing amounts of those colours gives rise to the wide variety of colours you can see. For example, if you turn on all the red and green dots and none of the blue, your eyes see yellow.

This graph shows the CIE1931 colourspace (the sail-shaped thingy) which is a representation of all the colours the human eye can see. This was prepared with a lot of experimentation. The line around the outside represents the spectral colours: those with a single pure wavelength, like you get in a rainbow. Colours within the sail are non-spectral: a mixture of wavelengths. The triangle shows the range of colours your monitor can represent. The points of the triangle are the colours of the red, green and blue dots on your screen, and the colours inside the triangle represent the complete range (gamut) of colours your screen can make by mixing those colours. Obviously, the colours in the diagram outside the triangle are only indicative, as your screen, by definition, cannot show them accurately.

You’ll notice that a large proportion of colours are outside the triangle. This means that your screen cannot display many cyans, greens and oranges that your eye can see. For a demonstration, see the Eclipse of Mars optical illusion.

Another colour that isn’t within the triangle is violet. Spectral violet is the far left (most anti-clockwise) part of the perimeter of the sail by the 300 marker, with some non-spectral violets just inside it. The red-blue mix purples above are all to be found on the bottom edge of the triangle at varying brightnesses.

Your digital camera sensor works in a similar way. Each of its millions of pixels is actually a monochrome sensor, but there’s a colour filter array (CFA) in front of it, that puts a red, green or blue filter in front of each pixel. At some point between pressing the shutter and viewing the picture, the individual red, green and blue pixels are combined into a colour image.

The camera’s gamut is again represented by a triangle as above. Typically, the vertices of the triangle are wider than sRGB, so the camera can record more colours. If you then get the photo out as an sRGB file (which you do, unless you know that you don’t), this wider gamut is compressed, losing data.

However, the “blue” corner of the camera’s triangle is still not violet. Any violet light gets through the blue filter and stimulates the monochrome pixels, but the information about the wavelength of the light is lost. During image processing, any stimulation of the pixels under the blue filter is assumed to be blue — so no violet in your photo.

Some cameras may record it as purple rather than blue if the red filter is designed to partially let through violet light, but my camera records violet as pure blue. No consumer camera has the ability to record violet properly, though.

Please don’t send me photos claiming that they contain violet. They don’t. Some people perceive violet and deep purple as similar or the same, but others (me included) do not.

A bit of research led to this post that taught me these are probably spoofed IP addresses conducting a DDoS on the Facebook servers. What happens is that the perpetrator sends the request to many DNS servers, seemingly coming from the victim — who then receives all the answers. In an improperly-configured DNS server allowing external requests for domains outside its jurisdiction, a fairly length reply is sent; correctly-configured servers send a “refused” message. Either way, the poor victim ends up having to deal with a lot of network traffic.

I wanted to block these. There is no circumstance in which an external address should be querying my server for the root domain, and I want to block this on principle. It is worth noting that my decision will have very little effect on the victim, who is being hit by thousands of responses from many servers.

The solution on the above-mentioned post is to use iptables with the u32 module. However, getting this to work on my Slicehost server proved too non-trivial for me to bother with, so I devised a simpler solution.

Having done some packet logging with iptables, I determined that the packets I wanted to drop were shorter than valid requests. This doesn’t come as a surprise: valid requests will contain one of my domain names whereas the DDoS packets were requests for the root domain “.”. This rule works for me:

…which drops packets up to length 51 (IP packet length, I think). The command line to get this rule to happen is below; you’ll need to adjust it to match your chain names, as I have a separate chain for processing inbound UDP packets like these:

You should check the 51-byte limit works for you, blocking all external root requests but nothing else. This isn’t foolproof and infallible, but it works for me for now. Facebook China, contact me to find out where to send the reward for lightening the load on your servers ;-)

An article from my old site that’s popular with the search engines. On dropping an iPod Shuffle into the toilet, and learning something as a result…

Long drop

After riding to work I used to get changed in a cubicle in the gents’. Unfortunately, one day I forgot that my iPod Shuffle was clipped onto the waistband of my Ronhill Bikesters, and on removing my T-shirt, the Shuffle pinged off, danced around the seat in one of those slow-motion moments immediately preceding disaster, and fell into the water.

Fortunately, the facilities had been cleaned the previous evening and didn’t appear to have been used in the meantime, and the device must have been under for no more than three seconds. I whipped it out of the water, shook it vigorously, and wrapped it in paper to take up any water from the gaps around the switches and from the socket.

Flat

Once the Shuffle had dried out for a couple of hours, I risked turning it on only to find the battery indicator in the red, sometimes not illuminating at all. Not a big surprise: the water had probably discharged it, I thought. Things were fairly hopeful, as it would still play music through the headphones.

The problem

At home, I plugged it into the iTunes PC (running Windows 2000 at the time, now running Ubuntu Linux), but it wouldn’t charge — the expected orange light didn’t come on. I tried all sorts of things, with an increasing concern that I’d trashed my first iPod after less than a month, eventually solving it by plugging the dock into the (Windows XP) laptop.

The solution

Armed with this clue, I found out this piece of quirky behaviour: to get an iPod to charge under Windows 2000, it must be enabled for disk use. The only disadvantages of this setup are:

1. you must manually disconnect the iPod within iTunes before unplugging;
2. you cannot see the charge status on the Shuffle, as the LED flashes orange to warn you not to unplug it without disconnecting.

Luckily for me (the Shuffle was a Christmas present from my wife) it works perfectly now. I guess my warranty with Apple has gone (…wait for it…) down the pan (!) as a result of writing this article.

It started with this photo. We were going for a nice walk around the village of Rowsley in Derbyshire, when I spotted this sign fixed to the front gate of a private house. Intrigued by its history, I took a quick photo and enjoyed the rest of the walk, followed by a nice cup of coffee and a cake at the Cauldwell’s Mill cafe.

After uploading the photo to Flickr, I noticed the very subtle LNER lettering at the right-hand edge of the sign, indicating its origin on the railways. A quick search established that there were a few of these signs about, so the obvious thing to do was to set up a group for them.

Thus was born the Forty Shillings Fine group on Flickr. Every so often, I do a quick search to find new pictures of such signage, and invite the photographer to add their image to the group. Maybe one day, someone even less popular at parties than myself will find a valuable use for this collection of photos…

I am not a trainspotter nor a railway enthusiast (other than having an appreciation of the engineering involved in early steam engines). I do not own a model railway and am not able to answer questions on engines or railways. If anyone has one of these signs they no longer want, let me know!

This photo is a derivative work of this shot by Ben Harper, used in accordance with the photo’s licence.

Referring to the tables in the music theory page if necessary, we determine that, for G#m7, these notes are G#, B, D# and F#. The (#5) in the chord name indicates that the fifth is to be sharpened a semitone to Dx (D double-sharp), which is the same as E on a guitar.

So how do we work out a finger pattern? Let’s draw a grid and put marks where notes in this chord lie:

   0   1   2   3   4   5   6
E  |---|-x-|---|-x-|---|---| E F# G#
B  |---|---|---|---|-x-|---| B E
G  |-x-|---|---|-x-|---|---| G# B
D  |---|-x-|---|-x-|---|-x-| E F# G#
A  |---|-x-|---|---|---|---| B
E  |---|---|---|-x-|---|---| G#

Here, an -x- marks a potential finger position. We want to ensure as many notes from the chord as possible are present: if notes are omitted, the chord can become ambiguous and not sound as intended.

Now we need to work out a compromise between easy fingering and including the important notes in the chord (arguably, all of them!). Looking at the grid above, the most obvious shape is this:

   3   4   5   6   7         
E  |(1)|---|---|---| G#
B  |---|-2-|---|---| E (=Dx)
G  |(1)|---|---|---| B
D  |(1)|---|---|---| F#
A X|---|---|---|---| 
E  |(1)|---|---|---| G#

Note that we start on fret 3 now, not the nut, and that the A string is not played. In the absence of a bass player, I’d probably pluck the bottom string with my thumb; if I had a bassist or someone else playing the low G#, I’d probably just strum the top four strings. As this does not use any open strings, it can be used anywhere on the neck for arbitrary m7(#5) chords.

That’s an extreme example of a very complex chord that you are unlikely to ever need—unless you need to play the Bee Gees’ I Could Not Love You More. Here are some simpler “real-world” examples:

Amaj9

The chord theory page tells us that this is root, third, fifth, major seventh and ninth, and conveniently provides the notes: A-C#-E-G#-B. The first thing to notice is that three of these notes correspond to open strings.

Let’s assume a five-string chord, starting on the open A string, as a variant of the standard A chord. As this could be simple, let’s work it out without the chart. Working up from the open A string, there’s an E on the second fret of the D string, a G# on the first fret of the G, and the B and E can be left open. That gives us:

   0   1   2   3   4    
E O|---|---|---|---| E
B O|---|---|---|---| B
G  |-1-|---|---|---| G#
D  |---|-2-|---|---| E
A O|---|---|---|---| A
E X|---|---|---|---|

Pretty easy to finger. The disadvantage is that it omits the third (C#), which gives the chord its major feel. In practice, this doesn’t really affect things. If you were really bothered about this, you could soon work out:

   4   5   6   7   8    
E  |---|---|-4-|---| B 
B  |-1-|---|---|---| E 
G  |---|-3-|---|---| C#
D  |---|-2-|---|---| G#
A O|---|---|---|---| A
E X|---|---|---|---|

This is a bit harder to finger, but includes all the notes.

Dmaj7/G

We’ll start from the basic open D chord that most people know:

   0   1   2   3   4    
E  |---|-2-|---|---| F#
B  |---|---|-3-|---| D
G  |---|-1-|---|---| A
D O|---|---|---|---| D
A X|---|---|---|---| 
E X|---|---|---|---|

Turning this into a Dmaj7 chord requires a C# (see chord theory page if necessary). It’s easy to see what to do here:

   0   1   2   3   4    
E  |---|-3-|---|---| F#
B  |---|-2-|---|---| C#
G  |---|-1-|---|---| A
D O|---|---|---|---| D
A X|---|---|---|---| 
E X|---|---|---|---|

OK—now we need to get a G in the bass. We could turn this into a three-string chord without the open D and with an open G string, but that would be a weak-sounding chord. The lowest G is the third fret of the low E string, although it’d be hard to get a finger there from the shape above. The solution is to use a partial bar:

   0   1   2   3   4    
E  |---|(1)|---|---| F#
B  |---|(1)|---|---| C#
G  |---|(1)|---|---| A
D O|---|---|---|---| D
A X|---|---|---|---| 
E  |---|---|-3-|---| G

The A string is not played here—I use my right thumb to pluck the string whilst strumming the top four with my fingers. The A could theoretically be played open, but the small interval (tone) between the low G and low A would give a very muddy sound.

Ebsus4

Eb is awkward with standard tuning. The standard E-shape for Eb major (without the sus4) would need the bar at fret 11, which is highly impractical for general use. The A-shape is at fret 6, so let’s try that.

   5   6   7   8   9    
E  |(1)|---|---|---| Bb
B  |---|---|-4-|---| G
G  |---|---|-3-|---| Eb
D  |---|---|-2-|---| Bb
A  |(1)|---|---|---| Eb 
E X|---|---|---|---|

The sus4 replaces the major third (G) with the fourth (Ab). There’s only one G in the chord above, so to go up a semitone is pretty easy.

   5   6   7   8   9    
E  |(1)|---|---|---| Bb
B  |---|---|---|-4-| Ab
G  |---|---|-3-|---| Eb
D  |---|---|-2-|---| Bb
A  |(1)|---|---|---| Eb 
E X|---|---|---|---|

An alternative for long-fingered players would be to turn the open D into a four-string Eb:

   0   1   2   3   4    
E  |---|---|-3-|---| G
B  |---|---|---|-4-| Eb
G  |---|---|-2-|---| Bb 
D  |-1-|---|---|---| Eb
A X|---|---|---|---| 
E X|---|---|---|---|

…and raise the G as above:

   0   1   2   3   4    
E  |---|---|---|-4-| Ab
B  |---|---|---|-3-| Eb
G  |---|---|-2-|---| Bb 
D  |-1-|---|---|---| Eb
A X|---|---|---|---| 
E X|---|---|---|---|

Cm6/Eb

This isn’t even close to a standard chord, so we’ll have to start from scratch. Cm6 is C-Eb-G-A, and we want the first inversion with the Eb as the lowest note.

Let’s mark out possible finger positions again:

   0   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8
E  |---|---|-x-|---|-x-|---|---|-x-| G A C
B  |-x-|---|---|-x-|---|---|---|-x-| C Eb G
G  |---|-x-|---|---|-x-|---|---|-x-| G A C Eb
D  |-x-|---|---|---|-x-|---|-x-|---| Eb G A
A  |---|---|-x-|---|---|-x-|---|---| A C Eb
E  |---|---|-x-|---|-x-|---|---|-x-| G A C

The bottom E string is no use, as an Eb in the bass would be on fret 11. I’d try this for a bar chord:

   4   5   6   7   8    
E  |(1)|---|---|---| A
B  |---|---|---|-4-| G
G  |(1)|---|---|---| C
D  |(1)|---|---|---| G
A  |---|-2-|---|---| Eb
E X|---|---|---|---|

Again, as a bar chord, this can be used for any m6 first inversion.

A four-string version of the chord is:

   0   1   2   3   4    
E  |---|---|-4-|---| G
B  |-2-|---|---|---| C
G  |---|-3-|---|---| A
D  |-1-|---|---|---| Eb
A X|---|---|---|---|
E X|---|---|---|---|

Like the standard F chord, this is not a bar chord (no bar) but it also isn’t an open chord (no open strings), so it can also be used in any position.

This is a big table, but it’s quite logical and there are a lot of patterns (G7 is G plus dominant seventh; G9 is G7 plus ninth (octave-and-tone); G11 is G9 plus eleventh (octave-and-fourth); G13 is G11 plus thirteenth (octave-and-sixth)).

Self-test question 1

What notes are in the chord of C major?

Reveal…

Interval:          root   third   fifth
Semitone interval:  0       4       7
Note:               C       E       G

Self-test question 2

What notes are in the chord of F#m7?

Reveal…

Interval:          root   minor third   fifth  dominant seventh
Semitone interval:  0          3          7          10
Note:               F#         A          C#         E

Self-test question 3

What is E-G#-B-D#-F#?

Reveal…

British courts are being told to dole out harsher penalties for poor driving (PDF). In an interview primarily focusing on the cost of international text messaging, BBC Radio 4’s PM programme interviewed eminent linguist (and txt advoc8) David Crystal and discussed texting whilst driving which is explicitly called out in the new guidelines as being dangerous.

He said something along the lines of “it’s taken a few years for us to realize it’s dangerous to text whilst driving”. I’m certain this isn’t the exact meaning he intended.

The actual fact is that it’s taken us a few years to realize that there are people out there stupid enough to not realize that texting whilst driving is dangerous, and it therefore needs banning in law.

Juggling whilst driving is also dangerous, but there’s no explicit law against that — yet…