Hullo hullo. Turning and returning after about three months where there didn�t seem to be anything I wanted to report. Just various terrors losses and errors which I couldn�t offer a decent account of . Is it all down to chemicals? Heaven knows.

This month�s Wire has a free double CD, one of which is playing now. The mag has a review of Ulrich Krieger - Early American Minimalism: Walls of Sound II. This includes recreations of Dorian Reeds, Music in Fifths, Amplified Tabletop, Pendulum Music, Reed Phase. I read about this on the way to St Martins and thought - well I never - a reference point. As the reviewer puts it �conceived in the mid 60s when the music was at its purest and most conceptual before it went classical and legit.� Well exactly.

I thought Andrew�s Caela echoed some of this. I appreciated AK�s observations on Gilbert�s Lul. He said he hadn�t listened to the CD of the Tanworth event. Good move.

I also bought a volume of Manet�s apercus together with reproductions as part of the infrastructure for the Lulfest. Manet was just a bit earlier than Monet but stopped sooner. Fried argued - as part of the reaction to that Early American stuff - that you could trace the New York School High Modernist classics back to Manet. The blank areas of paint. Yes, but from here the blankness runs into the purity of EAM. Anyway its all a bygone era - to a member of the blank old generation.

Today the papers had the famous fountain on the front pages. I have only just seen the link to Bruce Nauman�s work of the same name.

I have bought a set of brushes with the aim of getting stuck into acrylics - after all this time. The Wire also has some discourse on �the riff�. One reference is what happens to the riff at the end of Part 1 of A Love Supreme. This methodology is one of the few approaches that retains cogency as far as I am concerned.

Today I wrote about where the Indians seem to be going with automotive software. Software was 4% of the cost of the average car in 2002 but will triple its share by about 2010. TCS, the largest Indian software firm, is well set to ride the wave and is recruiting in the US to expand its customer interface in Detroit. Bosch is set to become the global no 1 in the supply sector and had the wit to start its Indian automotive software facility in 1990.

I had a delve into CMM which is one of the software industry�s attempts to sort itself out I was quite impressed. The problem seemsto be that getting software to go right leaks out beyond this apparently rational approach, software being so slippery. Anyway I bounced a few observations off colleagues

Paul W mailed about the Tao of Leadership. I said yes but the last time I tried that I got made redundant. He also said that these days everyone had Cds - you just had to factor that in. Larry mailed about another artistic exit. His forensic skills are astonishing.

I am sort of getting the hang of automotive immobility after a month. Another five to go.

I quite like cheap claret.