Post 1,100 plus one

Well, we do make a bit of an anniversary this week given some twenty odd years and One Thousand and One Hundred posts ago we started this this blog following on and for a time duo-posting with a blog on the long gone Friends Reunited website.

It's pretty amazing that after all that time we still find things to talk about even if we start on some things but find they drift away cos either we've moved on or rather like MiniDiscs one minute they're the hottest thing around and no they're no longer a thing with no new machines and discs being made.

I've just portable recorder around for legacy discs I made at the time.

That grown up thing Politics as as messy as it ever was both domestically and especially internationally that is leading to shortages of oil pushing up prices while the impact of "Global Warming" has lead to rising food prices due to shortages and both fed into a unresolved refugee crisis.

Photography was also a thing in the early days of the blog as we wrestled with blogging which is an electronic publishing based thing and the world of analogue film images as while some photographers had at least embraced auto focus cameras if not digital cameras of some sort I didn't have digital camera until mid 2008 and then a fairly basic compact for the blog.

My photo set up remained very much as it had from the mid to late 1990's, film based, focused by hand with collection of quality fixed length lenses with anything likely to go to the blog a good week later being scanned to a cd at the processors with the 7 1/2 x 5 prints.

Technically extremely good but with that lag between taking that image and being able to use it on a blog or email to a friend.

While there's no need for it, often digital images never see light of day as prints on photographic paper printed on quality printers. 

Today most blog images come from a digital camera whose native resolution is beyond what most displays need, sometimes the Nikon D3500, other times the Sony compact with its built in zoom lens when the system camera might be too intrusive on the event.

I miss the "in the moment" feel of setting the camera by dedicated controls, the ease of focusing by hand and winding on of the traditional manual  focus film camera, engaged directly with "the decisive moment" in a way that you don't get especially with viewfinderless compacts.

In someways it feels full circle to be owning a new to me manual focus camera but I think separating out the needs of the blog from what I get what my emotional needs are of making permanent memories matters as much as blogging has created a twenty odd year history of things I did, the interests I had and the live as lived.

It's not one or the other I need, it's both.

Difficulties and the acceptance of difference

 Well Blogger seems to having issues this week with it's image uploading tool which appears to upload the image into image library associated with your account and the blog in question you were trying to post it on to but doesn't add the image from that to the published blog entry.

That makes the business of making a blog difficult as while you can and I have at times done whole text based entries, generally speaking an image or two does actually aid the whole post.

Until they get around to repairing the tool the only real workaround is adding it to the image store for the blog and then going to select an image from the blog and , having scrolled down to the last entry clicking in that to post.

One thing I did enjoy Wednesday evening was watching a Youtube video by a close friend of an associate of mine that I've spend time off and on some twelve years with for the fact they just introduced the topic as it applies to her life, just where people hold different views simply setting out her thoughts and getting on with it.

We're all going to have opinions on things from something less serious such as which goes first on a scone, the cream or the jam to matters around just how may present or in this rather momentous week in British foreign policy how you feel about things between Israel and the Palestinians and we've all a right to them.

We should be able to respect them even if we disagree with those opinions without saying "You're doing this all wrong" refusing to talk to each other.

When it comes to how you may live out  your life  as a person born of a different gender than you feel there really isn't a single universal true position. 

To any and all in that situation, be yourselves and good luck to you.

Reversing back...

It's been an odd week, as my BFF reminded me on Tuesday having the bank holiday can cause you to get the day's all wrong in your head apart from the rain as you see the resumption of schoolchildren making their way to school

Sometimes you feel more reflective and past incidents aside I do enjoy a slow steady session on a swing and that's when thoughts can go back.

I was watching a BBC Archives clip on you tube from the iconic Blue Peter program in 1967, so I don't recall personally seeing it although I'm very confident it would of been on our tv then showing a driving simulator that shows a route and has controls that related to your then common place manual transmission car that Val and John took part in challenges to see how well they did.

I did try when I was sixteen driving a modified automatic car which proved interesting in while I could  start it, operate the foot pedals the problem area I had was predicting anything coming into my lane and general hand to eye co-ordination was an issue showing some issue that would compromise my safety and that of other road users.

From that it became obvious that unlike some disabled people driving a modified car funded through payments for my mobility needs wasn't really an option.

Thus in some ways the notion of the A.I. controlled car as in a Taxi you can summon was you need to get from A to B  in a area of poor public transport has an appeal although the lack of human does mean you don't get the social interaction that can include say help folding/unfolding a wheelchair or getting shopping bags out.