May 2008 Issue

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Ken's Chat

I mentioned last month that I did not use my computer a lot these days. Most of the interest I had was for making a database for my thousands of records and CD's but this task was finished some years ago and, as I do not add a lot to my record and CD collection, keeping these up to date does not take long.

I don't want to go over old ground but to a large extent my hobby was ruined or at least made redundant because tracks that took me years to get can now be downloaded from the internet so the fun has gone out of it - it is too easy.

I still had my hobby of collecting films, mostly recorded over the years from TV, or so I thought. I now find that this has been taken from me because Virgin are advertising the fact that they have hundreds of films available to record so there is no need for me to eagerly wait for the Radio Times each week in order to find if there are any films to be shown that I wanted to add to my collection.

In times gone by there was always a new computer program to learn as publishers were bringing out new ones all the time as they improved on the earlier versions. Today the only improvements to programs are to add features that nobody, or at least me, would ever need to use.

What am I left with? Well there is my income tax details, gas readings for the gas company, a diary, addresses, telephone numbers and notes - all very exciting.

All right, I am old fashioned and beyond it (Oh Yes?). There is always the internet. I have frequently expressed my dislike of this but I am not really against it and I am aware how useful it is. However I do not want to get hooked on it as time is running short for me. No it is not the internet that I am against, it is the programs that have to be installed to keep viruses and junk mail etc from being downloaded. These programs have slowed my computer down so much that most of my work is done on an old computer of much lower specification to my main one.

This is not connected to the internet and in spite of its low specification is three times as fast as my expensive high specification main one.

I am sorry to keep harping on about much of the same thing but not using my computer so much does not leave me much to write about.

On a different subject but along the same theme I am reminded of the early days of Hi-Fi. I was in on the very early days and in fact made a tape recorder before commercial ones were available and I hadn't even seen or heard one. I remember that I lived behind my shop at the time and had just about finished late at night when my wife asked when I was going to bed. "Just a second", I told her, I just have to solder this wire and then I can test it "I won't be a moment".. I soldered the wire and said "Testing-Testing" etc into the microphone. My wife was waiting at the bottom of the stairs when I switched the recorder to "Play". We waited - nothing. "Ah well" I said "I will have another go tomorrow". I went to switch off when the thing started to shout "Testing, Testing" to me. I can't tell you how excited I was, even my wife was impressed and we stayed up half the night recording. Quality? - it was lousy but it still worked.

I remember several of us were very involved in improving our Hi-Fi systems and we would travel miles to listen to someone's system. We held many demonstrations at the School of Navigation. Numerous weird loudspeaker designs were made to get the very best sound possible. I remember one friend constructed columns made of concrete which stood in a special room he had constructed for his Hi-Fi.

On one occasion we travelled miles to see someone's speaker system which consisted of huge horns built into units that stood about eight feet high.

To this day, I have a Hi-Fi system costing well over a thousand pounds when bought many years ago, with two large speakers dominating two corners of my room, much to the annoyance of my long suffering wife. What do I use mostly nowadays? A portable player with MP3 which cost about a hundred pounds and sounds terrific.