Update

It's been a while so I thought it was time I emptied the crumbs out of the keyboard and did a bit of a catch-up. Actually, when was the last time you tipped up your keyboard? Forget the 5 loaves and the 2 fishes, mine had embarrassing amounts of detritus within. It's a Logitech Wave and whilst I love it, it isn't intelligent enough to cope with the equivalent of several packets of crisps, 3 beef sandwiches and the occasional Ryvita drifting around and, eventually, enveloping its buttons. My compressor I use for model painting was brilliant and, after some high-pressure squirting, my dirty qwerty soon became the pride of Bertie!

The illness within Bassett Towers over Christmas has finally passed and I can begin to get on with some of the tasks I promised myself in 2009. These include:

1) Finish my Round the World flight

I've been sadly lacking in this for a while although it wasn't for lack of desire. I was contacted by another cyber aviator who is also performing the said trip and it's nice to know that there is company out there. Mind you, I'm not saying I'm competitive but I suddenly panicked about being overtaken and have now fitted air-to-air missiles to my Mooney just in case! Chris' blog is well worth a read as he actually appears to know what he is doing a damn sight more than me. I did spend a fraught day sorting out my PC last week as my 2nd 300GB drive, which I use purely for flying, was getting a bit full. I stripped out everything, saved most of the downloads to disc and reinstalled the basic "best bits" to optimise the performance so, hopefully, I shall be flying again next week.


2) Put all the videos of the kids when young onto DVD

This has been a slow and painful process which started several months ago and also stopped several months ago as it was such a pain in the butt. Of course, when I started again this week, I had totally forgotten just how it was done but I am now well over 2/3 of the way through the pile of VHS cassettes. It involves capturing the video and then editing, saving as Mpeg-2 files, converting to a DVD format and then trying to work out how to put more than one VIDEO_TS file onto a DVD. On the good side, it's great to see the kids in their early years once more and also realise that I have enough filmed evidence to tease them for many years. On the down side, I thought I looked so cool some 17/18 years ago, however.....................eek! I really should have gone to SpecSavers: glasses that were so wrong, eyebrows like bloated caterpillars and very little evidence of my distinguished silver threads. I've decided that maturing looks more than compensate for the loss of the astonishingly quite well-honed body of my 30s (if I say it enough times then surely I'll believe it one day?).


3) Address myself to becoming proficient with Photoshop CS4

Master Bassett has paid for a year subscription to PhotoShop Creative magazine as part of Daddy's Christmas pressie and I now have this arriving on my doorstep each month. It has so much in and i really want to buckle down and become as good with PhotoShop as I possibly can. Incidentally, just to prove I am not the only loony in the family, the magazine arrived addressed to: Bertie Bassett, HappyTown, followed by the proper address. You stupid boy, Pike!

4) Do an OU course on web design

When I was of that particular age, my parents never encouraged me to even consider university and I therefore left school at 16 and did as they "suggested" by joining the Civil Service. In later life, the desire to learn has become increasingly attractive and I have considered doing a degree. Part of me knows that I could and would achieve it so there isn't much of a challenge in that respect so really it's down to what degree course I would like to do. Part of me also knows that I get bored easily and therefore do I really want to commit to a long-term project? As I was browsing the OU website, I saw this and I have decided that this is for me as a start. Practical knowledge which I can use on the website I have had for several years and never really used. I'm sure some of it will be things I know fairly well but it will be a good exercise and a solid grounding for future courses.

So, that's a bit of a catch-up on events.

The only other bit of fun I have to mention is something I started before Christmas when I began experimenting with voice recognition software. I show below the actual dictated segment - good luck!

Because it seemed to be writing a lot of blog at the moment, I decide eat that I would try some speech recognition softwarethis is my first attempt at using it and I thought I would committed down as a block so be there for posterity I make no alterations were edits to it all stop paragraph I'm actually dictating this at normal speed just to see how will react but because under in my flying around the world blogs at the moment there is can be a lot of them and also apart from anything else my desk is cluttered up with flight yokes controls throttles keyboards joysticks and various other paraphernalia, I really can do with a method of actually putting words on a screen without having to find space keyboard. You may well find that there are going to be so rude words as I'm watching Liverpool losing at the moment as I'm dictating this and therefore it could be quite fun whether it recognizes new or should I say rude words I'm not quite sure that Will Wilson find out. Anyone just watching what this is doing and it seems to be fairly reasonable considering I just had a couple of minutes serve talking about Sir Alex in Wonderland so they could work out auction it is almost a goal and where was I yes Alice in Wonderland voice recognition purposes am say it is picked up really rather well which is quite good so their way half I forgot all about punctuation are met,:; there are some in register make me try remember why is not intelligent enough to keep within punctuation are not quite sure? Anyway to be lovely talking to you. This merely confirms that when I dictate or when I write it still comes out is total nonsense!

Perhaps I have stumbled on the secret of Professor Stanley Unwin :D

That's it for now. Vaya con Dios