In the Local, Parting with One of My Babies & Weird Weather

I was contacted by our local newspaper the Lincs Free Press today who want to run a feature on our Blue Skies support group. I had expected them to simply print the photo they had taken at our mental health awareness evening on 1st March but the woman I spoke to wanted to do a larger editorial. This is great as publicity is always a problem with any type of group and I'm hopeful that the group will become known to a larger number of sufferers and professionals across the county.

As an act of charity, I have decided to part with one of my DVD recorders and give this to one of our group members. He has a DVD-Video combi machine and asked me to look at it for him as the discs were failing to load. I disassembled it and found that the tray had become jammed. Being made almost entirely of plastic, it's just a matter of time before it wore out. Sadly nothing is ever built to last nowadays. It is possible to replace the drive as everything inside is modular, but a new drive would cost £200 plus shipping rendering this option void. I feel sorry for him. OK he didn't pay much for it in the first place - just £5 from a charity shop. He uses it to transfer films from his camcorder to DVD.
Over the years, I have collected various items of equipment, much of it obsolete as everything I want to watch can be downloaded from the Internet in a matter of minutes and put straight onto DVD if needed. It occurred to me that I do have a couple of DVD recorders. One I use solely for its inbuilt Freeview tuner, the other I tend not to use. As much as it pains me to part with it, I have decided to donate this to him to enable him to continue transferring his films to DVD. It's a good solid machine, and works well.
My wife will tell anyone that when it comes to giving away equipment, to me, it is like losing a family member. She is right in a way. I do become attached to things and I get used to seeing things in certain places. In some ways it is a comfort. I do though feel good about what I am doing. I know it will be going to a good home and I feel good for being able to help someone.

Is it just here or are we having some pretty wild weather at the moment? As I sign off from this post, it has become very dark and we have a sort of hail storm with tiny snowballs now covering the garden. A few minutes ago we had bright sunshine...

Will My Son Be As Fascinated...?

I remember when I was young having a fascination for things electrical. I was very curious to understand how things worked and on many occasions I would take things apart to see what was inside. This included the 26" family TV set in the lounge which I would remove the back from and poke around whenever I was left home alone. At that time I was oblivious to the enormous voltages circulating just inches from me and on one occasion, I did poke too far and received an electric shock large enough to propel me across the room. Thankfully I escaped unscathed though my screwdriver had been significantly reduced in length.

I was fascinated also by video and I would sit watching schools programmes wondering not how the human body functioned, but how the pictures got from the cassette to the TV screen. I remember hounding my parents so much that they finally gave in sometime around 1985 and I received for Christmas my first video recorder, albeit rented from Granada - as it was then. Having been familiar with cine film (I at that time had a small projector), I had always assumed the video tape to be like film with individual framed images printed on it. Of course, it is very similar to audio tape.
How ancient these things seem nowadays with our DVD's and digital downloads. Despite the digital age we all now live in, I still have a fondness for the past. I miss the fact that you can't now see something working, like tape spools rotating. I miss that.

Sound recording was another thing I had a fascination for. I would create my own sound effects and splice the tape, physically editing the soundtrack by joining the two ends and physically feeding the tape past the play heads. I used to splice the effects together for a local amateur dramatics society I had a brief liaison with  around 1990. At home, I had several machines and many reels of tape and soon I had mastered the art. All the machines and tapes have long gone. I can't actually remember what happened to them, but I would do anything to have one of them here again.

The audio cassette was most people's preferred audio medium during the 70's and 80's. I still, like many people, have boxes of old cassettes. I keep meaning to transfer everything to CD but I've never got round to it and suspect I will go to my grave still not having done it. They will all be left to my son. On a few occasions he has asked me what they are. He is so used to seeing discs for everything that he cannot imagine how music is played from it. He must see everything as so ancient, much like I did with the old formats.
I'm hoping he will grow up with a degree of respect for technology and how it has evolved over the years. Just because something is old does not mean it should be consigned to the history books. Like VHS, it can still perform and it would be a shame to scrap everything that became obsolete. I still have a couple of VHS recorders, and I still use them. I have lots of VHS tapes and it is nice to watch some of the old programmes and home movies again. I did once have a Betamax machine and a great many tapes. Woolworth's were selling them off cheap so I bought as many as I could. Sadly I only have one left and I wish I had a machine I could play it on. My wife would never allow it especially as now they command such a high price on eBay, a sure sign of their rarity.

I have already been successful in introducing my son to vinyl records and he enjoys playing with my horned gramophone. I have quite a collection of 78's which he knows to be careful with. I think there is already an acceptance of sorts. Of course when he is my age, the DVD and hard drives will have been superseded and we will have solid state storage devices with no moving parts.
I hope very much that alongside these devices, there will still be space for the VHS recorder, the reel to reel tape deck and the record deck.

A New Year & New Toys

It's a Bank Holiday here and we're making the most of the last day of the holiday season here in the UK. Christmas decorations are still up but we're taking them down tomorrow. Everything will seem so bland once they're down and it will really hit home that we've begun a new year. Celebrations here were pretty muted. For the first time in ages, my wife and I saw in the new year together. Normally she sleeps through it. My son wanted to see the fireworks and celebrations in London so I put it on a DVD for him. He's been watching it on his portable DVD player - one of his Birthday gifts.

There's much speculation in the media about what the new year will hold. We're told that the outlook is grim and that the effects of the recession will be more harsh than in 2011. For us, our biggest worry is what will happen to our home once our insurance stops paying out for the mortgage in February. No matter how hard I try to push it to the back of my mind, the stark reality is always there. I'm once again reliant on my wife to see us through whatever befalls us. We will have to meet with the bank in a couple of weeks to make them aware of our predicament and hope that they will take pity on us. I try not to worry, but it's difficult.

My support group have their first meeting of the year tomorrow and I'll be attending as normal. January is well known for bringing on bouts of depression as people come down from the high of the festive season to the reality of work, mounting debts and worry. I'm wondering how the members of our little group have coped. I'm lucky - I have a wonderful wife who makes everything right and without whom I would have nothing, be nothing. She puts up with a lot and I don't appreciate her enough. I know this. Depression is a very selfish illness. It affects at different levels, at different times and in different ways. It is a complicated illness. No two sufferers are the same. I am lucky to have her.

A bit of techie stuff and a welcome addition to our family is the Wii. It has in the last few days changed from being just a gaming console to a fully networked box of tricks which can now play DVD's, music, surf the Internet and interact with other computers. I was always aware that it was capable of far more than just game play so set about finding out how to apply 'Wii-hacks' to get it to do things it doesn't normally do. And I'm mighty pleased with the results. The games for the Wii are hugely expensive so the ability to download new free games is brilliant. Another function I find immensely useful is the ability to view YouTube content without the need to navigate the site. You simply enter what you're looking for and the Wii displays the videos available. You point to the one you want to watch and the video plays full screen, and in very good quality. It's all out there on the Internet.
I do need to find some software to assist my son with his typing and word skills. We bought him a keyboard for Christmas for hom to use on the Wii. It has chunky coloured keys and is built especially with children in mind. 

My wife's employer is popping round this afternoon. It's a New Year tradition. She'll want to see all the new toys my son received for Christmas and for his Birthday on the 27th. So of course the house is spotless in readiness. Unlike most employers, she is more of a friend to us and treats us all very well. She is always very generous and always buys gifts for our son. We're very fortunate really...

A Few More Words

A pretty uneventful week. We creep nearer and nearer to Christmas and the pressure is on to buy the gifts that everyone want. I had an appointment with my specialist earlier int he week and he got the impression that my optimism is very low. He recommended I attend a session each Tuesday where a group gathers for counselling. I've agreed in the hope that this may help. I'll find out on Tuesday. It's only a couple of hours so I'll give it a go.
I did make a DVD for Mum as a gift for Christmas. It's a compilation of all the videos I have of years gone by. They feature loved ones who have long since passed and feature my sister and I when we were youngsters. I suspect it's been forgotten that I was almost constantly attached to my video camera. It's a good job I was as little did I know then just how valuable those films would become.
I've stumbled across a vacancy again at a local(ish) school for IT Systems Manager. The money isn't that great and it's quite a distance to drive each day but beggars can't be choosers so I've decided to apply. It's one of those Lincolnshire Council forms and they don't want to see your CV. I'm about half way through it and need to get the application in by the 5th of December. Worth a try I suppose, but I suspect it'll be a 'thanks but no thanks' like all the others have been.

I nearly acquired an electric organ yesterday. I discovered it on my way to collect my wife from work. It was sitting outside a property with a sign saying 'free'. It did look very well looked after, but also very heavy. If I'd had my Chrysler Voyager I would have taken it there and then without a second thought. But as I only have my wife's little Fiesta, there was no chance. I don't think my wife was as enthusiastic as me though. She's always the cautious one and the voice of reason in our relationship. So I suspect it's either still there getting damp or someone has given it a new home.

It's wonderful to see the excitement on my Son's face whenever Christmas is mentioned. We're going to help him to write his letter to Santa soon listing all the presents he would like. He will be 5 on the 27th of December so he receives two sets of gifts. We're also giving him a party on the 18th where he has invited his school friends. It's at the local Fun Farm so everything is taken care of and the children have a great time climbing about and sliding into the ball pit. I'm really keen for him to have the best Christmas yet. It's really important for me that he enjoys himself and gets the things he wants. It will be a struggle this year and the pressure is once again on my wife to provide, but we'll scrape through with the support of family and friends - to whom I will be eternally grateful.

Earlier today we helped him to decorate a plastic tub which we've been asked to fill with sweets for his school tombola this Christmas. I resisted the urge to design it and left it to him while I helped with the glue. Apparently his school has a pantomime and Christingle event which I'm looking forward to. I'm hoping too that they will have a carol service. It always makes Christmas more complete I think.
It's always the little things that make Christmas what it is. Of course, it's different for everyone. This year, it will be all about my Son and his unstinting belief in Santa and the magic that gets his presents from Lapland, down our chimney and arranged into piles on the lounge floor each Christmas morning. Long may he carry on believing...

Hard Drive Trust

I've had it with hard drives. Over the last few years, I've bought nearly twenty of them to store things like photos, MP3's and video. I really assumed they were safe and durable. How wrong I was! So far, eight have failed and everything on them has been lost. They just sit there, ticking or whining. I could open them up but as soon as the cover is off, the drive and contents are contaminated. Not that I could actually fix them, I've seen the inside and it's no place for a novice.
So I'm now placing my trust in DVD and CD. They are cheap and from my experience more durable than a hard drive. Rant over.