07/11/2008 by jim.

It’s a particularly sad day for me. I get back from covering a couple of assignments to listen to a message on my answerphone informing me that the rumours circulating about the closure of the Spalding Target are true and the next isssue will be it’s last.
It’s sad not just because I have lost a client that I enjoyed working for but also because three people who I have come to regard as friends have lost their jobs. As newspapers in general are going through a tough time along with the rest of the economy, they will undoubtedly find it challenging in the job market right now.
Another reason that I feel a real sense of loss is that working for the local press has renewed my faith in human kindness and compassion. Over the last few years I have covered many assignments that have highlighted these wonderful qualities in the population of this fast growing Town. Young people in particular are prone to receiving bad press but contrary to many stories that populate our National Daily papers, the Target gave credit where it was due, to the many youngsters in our Town that play an active, positive and meaningful roll in our community.
Taking photographs for the Target has shown me exactly how much positive energy there is in the population of Spalding and that has been an emotionally rewarding experience for me.
Next Wednesday 12th November, 2008 will be a sad day, not just for me but for Spalding as well.

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13/02/2008 by jim.

In my opinion there has only been one reason to listen to a DAB radio and that certainly is not, the much hyped, Hi-Fi quality.

Most radio stations play content at quite a low bit rate comparable to low quality downloads. The only reason that stations get away with playing such lo-Fi is that most listeners tune in on a glorified tranny radio and you cannot hear the music properly.

No, it’s Planet Rock, a great station that is on most of the time in my house. Now it is up for sale and may well close down - strike one.

Strike two - The DAB standard is changing soon to DAB+ and most radios that have been sold so far will not even be able to decode the new format. Some are supposed to be capable of upgrades via a USB socket but whether the new standard will be supported is dubious.

DAB radio has been a fiasco for radio stations and the whole system is now under threat.

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05/02/2008 by jim.

Once upon a time there was an English car manufacturing company that had the reputation of making faultless cars. That company was Rolls Royce and I was told, for I have never been wealthy enough to own one of their cars, that if you complained to the garage about a fault, the garage would take the car in, look at it and return the car minus the fault and tell the owner that they could find nothing wrong with it. This was, of course, a long time ago but that notion of a problem not existing appears to have been taken on-board by a number of more modern industries.
I have been a customer of Freeserve/Wanadoo/Orange for many years now and in those early days of the internet Freeserve was a hugely successful company. Indeed, it’s success was so large that demand by far outstripped their capability to deliver. My dial-up internet connection would get slower and slower until, exasperated, I would contact them to see what the problem was. I would always receive the same, from file, reply suggesting that the problem was at my end and suggesting a number of things that I could do to fix it. I would then duly go away and spend days checking out my computer settings and just as I started to tear my hair out by the roots, the problem would magically disappear overnight. It is obvious now, but in those days it was not so clear, that Freeserve had finally got around to upgrading their hardware and that it was not my system at all. The annoying thing about it all was that they never told the truth and admitted that they could not cope with the demand.
Another, more recent, company who has adopted this approach is Adobe. Their Photoshop software has become so sophisticated that it needs a pretty fast computer to make the most of it. Recently they introduced Lightroom and also Photoshop CS3 - both very significant upgrades to anything that had existed before. Unfortunately, Lightroom had many problems that saw them release version 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 and then 1.3 in quite quick succession. I visited the Adobe forums on a regular basis to try and find solutions to problems that I was experiencing only to be told, by some very respected individuals in the Adobe world, that it was my computer that was at fault or ,even worse, it was Microsoft’s operating system that was at fault. Anyway, after many updates from Adobe and also many auto updates from Microsoft, the problems appear to have gone away - by magic. Likewise with Photoshop CS3 which caused that dreaded blue screen of death every couple of days, after many auto updates that problem seems to have gone away.
Now I don’t care if the software and hardware designers get things wrong occasionally, systems and software are becoming so fabulously complicated and sophisticated that the odd problem is bound to surface. Just stop telling me that it is my fault so that I waste days or weeks of my precious time trying to sort out problems that do not exist.
So endeth my rant.

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