January 2006 Issue

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A Happy New Year to all Members

As members will understand, the new year has not been a very happy one for me. I am going through a bad phase and hopefully things will get better. To top it all, my Rover car, having done just 27,000 miles is in need of a new engine. I had to have a new engine fitted after just 7,000 miles and now I have trouble with this one. Although the engine has done such low mileage, the car is 5 years old and I am told that the problem has probably been caused by this low mileage. What has all this to do with computing? Nothing, I just wanted to get it off my chest.

Many thanks for the kind letters received after the death of my dear wife. Things come very hard for me after 59 years of marriage. I suppose my wife having looked after me so well for so many years has spoilt me and until she died I had no idea how to use the washing machine or how to cook, still I am learning.

I have not had a lot of time to use my computer, in fact I have not been at home that much. I have spent quite a lot of time with my son and his family. My granddaughter, aged 13, thinks that I am a wizard on the computer, at least she did. Probably not any more as she now has her own computer and she can show me a thing or two. She bought herself an Ipod and downloads music from the internet. She has a program called iTunes with which she can download all the tunes you could wish for at 70p per time. These she then copies to a CD. I didn't want her to be able to do something that I could not (I had to save face somehow) so I downloaded the program myself. It took 3 hours to download but I can't use the program because my internet connection is not fast enough. Apparently you need broadband to download the tunes.

I can use the program to play tunes that I have on my hard drive but I can do this anyway with Windows media centre. Ah well!

Membership

Most of our members have renewed their membership although we have lost a few. I quite understand why some members have left as we do not offer as much as we did in the past. There is so much on offer these days for free that some feel the club is not necessary. Fortunately we have a solid core of members who enjoy meeting once a month for a chat and to help each other.

Most members will not know of John Evenett a member who died in December. John was a very good friend of mine and although he did not come to our Cantell meetings he was a regular at Wyvern.

John lost his wife about 4 years ago but remarried again just last year and has been busy setting up a new home. John was also a very keen caravan club member so he did not have the time to come to our Cantell meetings although he always intended to and kept up his membership until his death.

Nigel King and I had two excellent holidays with John in France, with John doing most of the driving.

John had many interests and was a member of several clubs where he was very popular. We send our sincere sympathy to his wife and family.