I want a device which consists of a pair of lower legs and feet, jointed in the right places, modelled exactly on my own lower legs, but made of metal. When I buy new shoes or boots, I should be able to put the boots on the metal legs, turn the device on, and have the legs spend a few hours automatically running on a treadmill.

Then I'd be able to break in new footwear without getting all the bruises and blisters on my own feet. It would probably be faster, too.

(I'm at work in my old shoes today. I doubt I'll be ready to wear the new boots on a regular basis for a while yet. Ow.)

I woke up this morning with a fragment of a tune running round my head, and no idea where it came from. I've just managed to identify it, thankfully, but it's been driving me mad in the two hours between then and now; and there's another tune fragment which I've been trying to identify for months if not years.

What I'd therefore like to do is to post the tune in my diary so that all my readers can see if they know it; but I don't know of any sensibly standard way to represent music in ASCII. I could sing it into a microphone and post a link to an MP3 (or, probably more usefully, synthesise it programmatically into an MP3, which wouldn't require recording hardware and also wouldn't involve my poor singing voice complicating the issue), or I could write it down in musical notation and post a link to a picture; but both of those solutions strike me as woefully wasteful of bandwidth given that the actual information content of the few bars I can remember ought in principle to be no more than a line or two of text. I could enter it into some sort of sequencer program and post the file saved from that, but that suffers from standardisation problems: it would limit my audience to people with the same sequencer program.

If only everybody had a Spectrum, I could post a sequence of BEEP commands which would play the tune, and this would actually be a more standard low-bandwidth approach than anything else I'd thought of. It even briefly occurred to me that you can get Spectrum emulators for most operating systems… But that's not a good idea either, because the trouble with Spectrum emulators is that you can't cut and paste into them, so it would be a matter of everyone manually typing in the BEEP commands I posted.

I must be missing something obvious. Is there no sensible way at all for me to post a few lines in a text-based forum and have the majority of readers be able to cut and paste that text into something which will convert it into a possibly recognisable tune?

The following tune has been wandering occasionally around my head for some months if not a year or so, and I've no idea what it is, and it's really bugging me that I can't remember.

It took me some faffing to get this into a suitable format; I actually ended up with several suitable formats. So here we go. I've got a MIDI file (very small to download, and Windows Media Player ought to cope): http://www.tartarus.org/~simon/20051107-name-that-tune/tune.mid. Just in case that doesn't work for everyone, here's an MP3 version (larger, but ought to get the job done): http://www.tartarus.org/~simon/20051107-name-that-tune/tune.mp3. And finally, for those without sound or who prefer to do these things visually, here's the tune written down:

(I don't have absolute pitch, so I've transposed it into C for minimum sharps-and-flats hassle. People who do have absolute pitch should not take this as indicating anything whatsoever about the key the real thing is in.)