dreamer

It's low, way too low. A wide-body jet is circling the town, banking hard and describing loud circles. Its starboard wing points verticaly to earth. Easing out of the turn, it levels then banks to port. It's losing altitude with every second and the engines are screaming now. Somehow the pilot has aligned the doomed airplane with the main street through town and he's aiming to crash land. The plane's wingspan is nearly twice the width of the road. Almost immediately the wings are clipped off by buildings and the fuselage collapses onto its belly. There is a screech of tearing metal as the tube of steel careers along the street, flattening all in its path. There is a brief silence then a spectacular blast.

There's really no need to get dressed. It'll take too long. Anyway, if I hurry no one will see me. I'm not sure where I'm going but it's urgent. I scamper along the pavement, my bare feet slapping on the warm concrete. I slow and walk behind a parked car as a group of people pass by on the far side of the road. They don't even see me. There is no cover for the next hundred yards but I sprint on, confident that if I ignore people they won't register me. Naked running could be the next craze. A car approaches and instinctively I drop my hands to protect my modesty. Heads inside the car turn to look at me and I run on. I think they saw me. Up ahead a couple are walking towards me. I can't avoid them and in fact I recognise them. They stop to greet me and don't mention my nakedness. I feel exposed but carry on a conversation as if this is the most natural thing in the world.

The sun is blazing in a bright blue sky. I'm walking along a road in an average town. I begin to flex my legs then jump slightly, leaving the ground for just a split second. It's a nice feeling. I do it again and find I am not as heavy as usual. I jump perhaps six feet in the air then settle gently back on the ground. On my next jump I flap my arms. It seems a ridiculous thing to try but it actually works. I feel myself propelled higher. I flap again and the upward surge is stronger still. Two more quick wing beats and I'm as high as the rooftops. I can see beyond them to the fields and hills in the distance. I skim the roofs and catch a thermal, suddenly climbing fast. I must be five hundred feet above the ground yet I'm not scared. I glide over the town seeing people scurry about like ants. I dive and pick up speed, swooping between buildings then soaring upwards again. A line of pylons marches across the fields ahead, carrying power lines. I have to decide whether to fly under or over the lines. One sharp flap and I'm up and soaring over them. I feel the warm sun on my back and a gentle breeze in my face. I must do this more often.

vista internet security, fake a/v removal

On my Internet travels I picked up a pernicious virus. Vista Internet Security 2011 is a rogue virus posing as anti-virus software. Immediately following infection a fake Vista Security window appears and a "scan" appears to be taking place. In no time a list of Trojans, Worms and other wicked infections appears.

Instinctively you try to close the window when you twig that it's fake but it won't close. The infection results in no Internet connectivity. Whatever programmes you try to open fail to run and instead the fake scan starts up again.

I tried to open System Restore but got the message the 'execute' file for System Restore could not be found. Heck this is serious. I held down the power switch and turned the laptop off.

Fortunately I found a back door. Michelle has a profile set up on my laptop so I rebooted and logged on as her. I found the infection had only hit my own profile so I was able to use System Restore and roll the laptop back to the previous day. I logged on as me again and found my profile clear and unaffected.

This virus has apparently been doing the rounds for a couple of years and has a number of names, all referencing Internet security and all directing you ultimately to a site where you can buy software guaranteed to remove the infection. There is no removal software and there is no genuine infection in the first place. The whole thing is a dirty scam. Many 'tech' websites are listing umpteen adjustments you can make to your Registry to eliminate the infection but none mentions System Restore, presumably because the virus itself disables it.

It's worth bearing in mind my backdoor method. A second profile on the same hard drive will be unaffected allowing access to System Restore, certainly a safer method than fiddling with Registry Keys.

printer frustration

I seem to be collecting printers. All the same model. I now have three Epson Artisan 725 printer/scanner/copiers... temporarily.

I wanted a new printer capable of producing top quality photographs. Initially I bought an Epson NX510 at Future Shop but that went back when its images were generously supplied with dark horizontal lines. No amount of head cleaning or realignment would stop this. I've had three very good Epsons over the past decade so decided to persevere and climbed the range to the afore-mentioned Artisan after some research.

I got a good price from B&H Photo in New York and a large box was promptly delivered three days later. Exciting stuff! Except that this model too produced unsightly horizontal lines until I used the highest quality settings. The results are great but it is officially now the slowest printer I have owned, despite advertising to the contrary.

After three weeks the printer stopped picking up paper. It clicked, rattled and shook and generally tried its hardest but the paper wouldn't feed. During a thorough inspection I discovered that the CD tray wouldn't descend either. There's a little tray which is supposed to glide out at the touch of a button allowing a CD to be drawn into the innards for direct printing.

By now I'm cross.

The Epson help line is conveniently located three time zones away on the west coast of America. After consulting world maps and time charts I calculated the correct calling time and spoke to a representative. After the usual efforts to identify an easy solution she gave up and announced a "new" one would be with me in the post. Excellent, and what's more there would be a pre-paid shipping label to send the faulty one back.

The "new" one arrived the very next day but my excitement soon evaporated. The box was marked 'refurbished' and had ominous damage to one corner - as if it had been dropped from a fair height. Sure enough, when I opened up the package I found a panel had sprung off the underside of the unit, not a repairable thing. To make matters worse the refurbished unit had clearly seen some action. It was scuffed and scratched and was leaking ink through the new hole in the bottom.

I wasted no time in calculating Pacific Time before grabbing the phone and stabbing the Epson numbers in. Another very helpful and apologetic rep listened to the sad story. I told him even if this refurbished unit had been in working order I would have been heavily down on the deal as the one I am sending back is, outwardly at least, in pristine condition. I want a brand new replacement.

This required the approval of his superiors. It took three minutes to arrange that but he came back on the line all chuckles and reassurance.

Yesterday our FedEx deliveryman came with yet another large box and a face loaded with deja vu. So... now I have three. I spent a while setting the latest one up because I cocked up the wireless settings at first. Uninstall failed but System Restore did the trick and I started again. Hooray, we're up and running.

All that remains now is for me to drive two thirty-five pound boxes to the FedEx office to get them out of my sight!

rock on

These are covers from the first few vinyl albums I bought in the 1970's. I still own half of them and have all of them on CD in various formats. I occasionally play the Supertramp and Mott the Hoople but mostly they just take up shelf space. No matter, I not only listen to music, I collect it for the sake of collecting too.

Lately I have been ploughing through my Excel database and updating values (or at least replacement costs) for music. These days most mainstream CD albums can be bought for a tenner or less (ten Great British Pounds Sterling!) but I have plenty of less common pieces in my collection, maybe a quarter of which are no longer in print or at least not available in their original form.

Remember I'm talking about modern CDs here not crackling vinyl. You'd think the older something is the more costly it would be to replace... not so in the muic world. It's all about supply and demand. Sometimes an album is released with a limited print run and stocks disappear within a year. It's not always lesser-known bands this happens with. Take Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust" an album which has been around for almost 40 years and has seen more than a dozen releases with anniversary editions, remastering, new packaging and bonus tracks. In 2003 EMI put out a Super Audio CD version (SACD) which, as many will know, contains not only a stereo layer but also a 5.1 surround sound layer, all remixed using modern technology. Out of print for seven years, it will now set you back a cool $75.

It is alarming to find albums in my collection like Wizzard's "Eddy and the Falcons" commanding prices of $90, or Supertramp's live release "Is Everybody Listening" going for $40. The gorgeous Mott the Hoople Box set "Anthology" is impossible to find for under $200. The Libertines' 2003 single "Don't Look Back into the Sun" sells on eBay for $50. Ian Hunter's releases sold to a small cult market and I have a dozen or more that show up from resellers on Amazon at over $50 and his poorly received 1981 two-disc set "Short Back and Sides" can't be replaced for under $120. Green on Red's pairing of "Gas Food Lodging" with their eponymous first album will cost $40. Even mediocre reviews and ratings don't matter, it's rarity that counts.

Of course none of this is in the same league as pink vinyl pressings, picture discs or sleeve art printed in reverse by mistake but nevertheless time is passing and the seemingly ordinary is slowly becoming extraordinary.

snow and ice in Charlottetown

This is our apartment building, under siege from the toughest winter in quite a few years. The weatherman, "Boomer" Gallant tells us over four feet of snow has fallen. It has been cold and the deep snow has compacted under its own weight bringing down roofs. Schools have been closed several times.

Here are some more photographs of Charlottetown in the grip of winter. Some of the ice formations clinging to roofs and eaves are spectacular.

The streets have been ploughed almost daily, sweeping ever higher banks to the roadside, filling people's gardens and driveways. Miniature ploughs scuttle along the sidewalks resulting in walls of frozen snow separating pedestrians from traffic. Intersections have taken on an unfamiliar look with mounds of ploughed snow blocking views. You have to poke your nose out quite far to see if it's safe to pull away. Car tyres grind against chunks of brown ice clinging like granite barnacles to wheel arches.

I took this snap of the corner of my laptop screen just before hurrying down to the bins in my shorts and T-shirt. It took my breath away!

borrowing DVDs, permanently

How very satisfying to trudge home through the snow clutching your latest box-set of a solid British drama series. Even better as the Library lends DVDs for free. There are buts coming and they're tricky ones. But what if the set is in high demand so the loan period is only seven days and there are four discs containing twelve one hour episodes? What if you have a busy week ahead just as this treasured series has become available?

Make copies! Not for broadcasting or sharing of course but to allow you that little extra time to view them in. Oh, and it’s useful to have the set handy in case you want to watch it again, right? But DVDs are usually between 6GB and 8GB in size whereas a blank DVD-R holds a mere 4.7GB. What to do? Are we thwarted? Not on your Nelly!

Squeezing lots of video data onto a small disc is certainly possible but you have to shrink the file. I have an interest in solving technology challenges and this is the copying method I have developed. The freely downloadable software DVD Shrink is a good place to start. It compresses the data during copying to ensure it will fit comfortably on any commercially available blank DVD. It’s easiest to choose to rip the disc as an ISO image file.

But to back up for a moment (pardon the pun), it is a good idea to clean the discs thoroughly first. In the case of well-worn discs, deep scratches will be unreadable by a computer drive so you may as well give up at this stage and save yourself the hassle. But light scratching, which will be bothersome to a computer drive, can be polished down sufficiently using a car body scratch remover – the kind that will gently buff away surface scratching.

Sometimes no matter what you do, the disc may be impossible for your drive to read, it may be badly pitted. Or perhaps you want to rip a ‘Region 2’ disc in your ‘Region 1’ drive. Try DVD Decrypter. That has more powerful features, will crack regional encoding and seems less fussy. Europe is Region 2, North America is Region 1 but DVD Decrypter will render the copied image region-free. However, the ripped file you end up with this way will still be far too big, so you will need to reduce the ISO file size in DVD Shrink. Earlier we shrunk an actual DVD but this time you will need to “mount” the ISO file on a virtual drive. Magic ISO will achieve this by treating the ISO file as a playable DVD and will allocate a virtual drive letter to it.

When you’ve at last got an ISO file on your hard drive coming in at just under 4.7GB then you’re ready for the easy bit, the burning. I use Nero or Roxio but any burning software will put the ISO image file onto a blank DVD. I find DVD-R discs are readable by most DVD players. I don’t notice an appreciable loss of quality even though the copied image is considerably smaller than the original.

After all that effort you’re ready to watch. Slip into your old slippers, light your pipe and relax in your favourite armchair... and don’t forget to take the DVD back to the library, you don't want a late fee do you!

making new music

I returned from England a couple of weeks ago with, among many things, a great deal of new music. It came in the form of mp3 and wma files stashed on my external hard drive. This trove came from a friend I visited in Birmingham. He lives in a ninety room mansion but curiously confines himself to a single suite positively brimming with CDs and vinyl.

He and I have exchanged music for years. To sidestep any legal difficulties I prefer to think of it as storing backup copies for personal use (three thousand miles away). Luckily for me he has other friends who are equally acquisitive on the music front and are just as keen to keep copies somewhere safe and sound. This arrangement makes for a vast reservoir of music into which I can occasionally dip.

Usually these exchanges take place under plain brown cover through trans-Atlantic correspondence but this time, after two flights and a two hundred mile drive up the M5, we could hook up USB-wise in person and plunder each other's external hard drives with abandon. The result of this debauchery was a horde of around ninety albums. Plus of course an interesting and entertaining couple of days during my three week trip back to England.

Extreme Virgo tendencies won't ever let me leave it at that. Oh no, the harvest was just the beginning. Now the online work would begin in earnest. First a quick sampling to identify candidates for burning to CDR, then a tidying up of "tags" to be sure all tracks are properly labelled with title, band, album, genre and year. Next comes the job of burning to CDR, a big task but worth it for those albums which I will want to hear on my hi-fi.

Temporary labels adorn the pile of discs at this stage while the printing phase swings into action. This is a time consuming but vital part of the exercise if the CDRs are to be protected for storage on my shelves. Google Images is a happy hunting ground for the cover art and sites like Amazon provide track-listings which I can either copy and paste or transcribe. I paste the images and data one by one into an MS Word template I made many moons ago. Each gets printed on white cardstock.

Next out comes the guillotine and I do some trimming. I've done this so often now that I can slip the card in out and bring down the guillotine arm almost before the card has stopped moving. Swivel it round ninety degrees and slice off the excess, repeat twice more then cut around the folding tabs. Folding each tab is a long process with a batch this size but makes the gluing stage easier.


The tabs are brushed with a glue stick then the whole template is folded into its final shape, a slim CD-sized sleeve. While the seams dry I start on labels for the discs. These I form from a homemade template in DesignPro Lite. I keep the labelling simple just band, album title and year. I pick a background colour to match the cover art and print off the labels, two to a sheet.

I apply the self-adhesive labels with a trusty Fellowes labelling device which emigrated from England with me years ago. Finally I slip each CD into its new case and there it is, a stack of music to play on the hi-fi.