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Archive for August, 2008

Well August is lurching to a close, the late summer Bank Holiday has been and gone, I guess thats about it for summer.

My personal measure of the seasons is whether or not I need to put the light on in the bathroom in the mornings. And today was the first day that I needed the light to shave by. The next logical step will be having to turn the car lights on to get to the station, the clocks will go back and then ultimately (all too soon) it will be dark on leaving the house and returning home. <sigh>.

Never mind; the soothsayers are predicting a nice September, which is always pleasant.

And we managed three barbecues this summer, thats three times as many as last year, but nowhere near the numbers of a few years ago.

Ive started doing some decluttering in my den, not much you understand, but its a start. I think the CDs may get boxed up and put in the loft, as I cant remember the last time I actually played one.

I also have a pile of DV Video Cassettes, recorded on various video cameras over the years, along with my most recent DV Camera. Ive offered the camera to Gaz, my son, as hes shortly to become a proud father, and thats probably what video cameras are for, more than anything.

But of course I need to download the video from the tapes before I bid farewell to them; and this is where the space thing comes in.

Ive just ordered a new external hard drive to download the videos, its a MyBook by Western Digital, its costing less than £100 and it holds a terabyte of data. Thats a million megabytes, enough (according to WD) for 75 hours of DV Video or a million minutes of music, which is just less than two years non stop music. Or a pile of floppy discs 2km high.

Those stunning capacities, caused me to cast my mind back to my first PC, an IBM XT which had an impressive 10mb hard drive. My first new PC, back in about 1993 was a Gateway2000 DX2 66, with a massive 450Mb  hard drive. It was bleeding edge for its day, the most powerful 486 processor in those heady pre-pentium days. In fact, as I recall the first peniums were actually slower than the DX2 66 processor. I later (94 or 95) upgraded it with my first 1 gigabyte hard drive which cost £150.

If we go even further back, the first mainframe I worked on (an IBM370) used winchester hard drives with 70mb capacity.  

I now have a memory stick in my pocket with 8Gb capacity which cost less that £20, and a 1Gb card in my phone which is smaller than the nail on my little finger!

Of course once the drive arrives I will have to transfer the content over, which will have to happen real time and then maybe, just maybe, Ill get round to editing the content and burning back out to DVD.

But thats another story, for another time.

While nobody would ever accuse me of be a sports fan, or even a sports follower (with the exception of Formula One) this weekends olympics coverage has been gripping.

The weekend marked Britains best ever performance in recent olympic times, and as I type this Team GB are third in the medal tally, second only to China and the USA. This may not last as the schedule now brings in events that were less strong in, but this morning, on the train, the newspapers were full of proud, patriotic copy.

Okay, so inflation is on the rise, along with interest rates, ( real prices are rising faster than inflation) and this is likely to be the wettest August for nearly a century, but for one brief moment the nation had something to smile about.

And I recounted the cranes… between Liverpool Street and Stratford stations (a distance of about five miles) I counted fifty construction cranes of various sizes.

As even the casual reader may have determined, Im an avid reader. I devour books, and with the joys of about ten hours a week travelling on what used to be known as British Rail Im getting through a couple of paperbacks a week.

Last weekend I picked up a Dale Brown book. Ive read most of his books over the years, and for the most part Ive enjoyed then. Dale (as opposed to Dan) Brown is a former US Air Force pilot, and his knowledge and descriptions of air-borne warfare are probably second to none.

But…  and its a big but… his novels have been following a parallel Dale Brown Universe that is similar to ours, but increasingly different. The problem comes when you write about a fantastic new aircraft (such as the EB-52 Megafortress in 1987s Flight of the Old Dog) then youre committed to using it in subsequent novels.

By the time you get to 2004s Plan of Attack – which is the book Ive just finished – then the world his characters inhabit, the aircraft they fly, the weapons they use and the airforce they serve is so far removed from real life that they might just as well be flying monkeys scouring the skies of Oz for the Wicked Witch of the West.

On Friday, while much of the world was watching the opening of the Beijing Olympics, I attended the Great British Beer Festival (GBBF) at Earls Court in London.

This was the 31st GBBF and (I think) the 19th or 20th Ive attended.

This was a fairly poignant afternoon, as my good mate Jon Cheese had attended the GBBF with me in the past; Jon died at the end of August last year, and last years GBBF was the last time my son Gaz and mate Paul had seen Jon alive.

The afternoon became doubly poignant when we learned that Michael Jackson (The Beer Hunter – not the other one) also passed away last August. In fact he died on the same day as Jon, from a heart attack. They were both 65 – well Jon was three weeks shy of his 65th birthday, but whos counting.

Jon and I had met Michael on a number of occasions. Jons wife Jan arranged for Michael to give a tutored beer tasting at Hornchurch library, and a most enjoyable evening was had by all.

At least we know who Jons drinking with, in heaven.