March 2008 Issue

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Ken's Chat

They say that time goes by very quickly when you are enjoying yourself. Well I can't say that I have particularly enjoyed myself since Christmas, but the time seems to have flashed by between my monthly calls from Bryan Coleman reminding me that the newsletter is due to be written.

Not having done much since Christmas, I really have nothing to write about computing. I have not touched my computer since the last newsletter. I do have an old model on which I keep up a diary and enter a few notes but nothing else much. Looking back on a few copies of the newsletter I note that I mentioned that I am a person who thrives on work - you wouldn't think so since Christmas. For the last 3 months or so I seem to have been living at the doctor's, the nurse's, the medical walk in centre and the hospital. Fortunately there does not seem to be a lot wrong with me, except old age.

I don't use a cheque book a lot these days, mostly using my credit card which I clear monthly. My credit card company credits points for the amount of spent. I accumulated quite a lot and decided to use the points on air miles. I could only find one travel company that would accept the points and they were dearer than others without the points so I cashed the points for credit at Argos. I scoured the catalogue but there was not a lot that I wanted for the points that I had accumulated but eventually settled on a Tom Tom car navigation system. (That's a laugh as I seldom drive out of town). I was told how easy the Tom Tom was to install, which indeed it is, but I did not realize that there was so much more to the system than navigating from A to B. The system comes with a small instruction book but the full instructions come as a text file of 57 A4 pages to be read or printed via a computer. With my memory these days, I will never learn all the things available via the Tom Tom but with my limited requirements they will not be needed.

I have a neighbour that has had a computer for some time but is still frightened to use it. The neighbour is not interested in learning to use the computer and has very little use for it. I asked her what the problem was and she said that someone had set up some simple spread sheets and text files for her but by the time she had managed to find them to work with she had lost patience. I showed her the way to navigate round the computer but eventually I just set up all the files that she regularly uses as icons on her desktop. She thinks that this is wonderful and said that she will now be able to use the computer.

I may have written about it before but I am still thrilled to death about being able to record films, or anything else, on my Sky Plus box. My television and Sky Box are connected to my computer and it is so easy to record anything you want and to edit it on the computer. Wonderful - but it is so easy that the fun has gone out of recording. I now find that I don't use it as much as I did when it was quite a task to do the same thing. What with this and everything available on the internet the fun has indeed gone out of things.