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.

New month, same old idiots

So bye bye March and Hello April... We start the month with a a visit to the local doc with my son. A swift check over and we're told he has a cold (which we already knew)... so that was time well spent.

I don't know if it's the weather but so far today, I have just seen idiots on our roads. Where I live, there is a generally poor standard of driving skills. We are surrounded by farmland and long roads with little traffic. I think this gives people the impression they can drive how they like, with absolutely no regard for anyone else. I do take extreme exception to dangerous drivers particularly when I have my son in the car with me. To give an explicit example, I was driving back from the doc's along a road that up to very recently had a 60 mph limit. It has since been changed to a staggered 50 mph, starting at 40 mph for the first few hundred yards. I am a stickler for safe driving, so imagine my anger when some blithering idiot decided he could drive as fast as he wanted and overtook me. The road is marked with think red stripes with white speed symbols and the lamp posts also display the new speed limit. 

The other idiots this morning included a woman who didn't know her right from her left and indicated right whilst turning left and someone else who thought that because he had a big car, he didn't have to give way when the law required otherwise. Unbelievable...

I've managed to leave my poorly son at my parents for a couple of hours. They have my sister's kids there today so he's very happy playing with them and didn't even notice the fact that I'd left.

Whilst there, they asked me to look at their VCR. It had been making a strange noise. True enough, it was and I deduced that a drive cog had worn out. They are still in the dark ages when it comes to technology and believe me, it is not a good idea to bring them into the 21st Century. I've tried. So imagine my horror when my father produced a DVD recorder - the same machine I had a year ago taken a month trying to teach them to use. I recall actually making myself ill at the time, it was that stressful. They simply cannot get their heads round the fact that a recordable DVD is not the same as a tape and cannot be re-wound and taped-over. DVD's have to be finalised and erased if you want to use them again. No, I think the simplest thing to do is to find a replacement VCR - they understand them and it means less stress for me. I should have hidden that bloody DVD recorder when I had the chance...

OK, that's off my chest.

I'm off to work on my model railway later. I'll get some more photos while I there.