recent activities

Hello everyone. Yesterday, I noticed that Blind Planet, where I have published my guide and some other writing was having trouble again. This happens every so often. I have therefore taken the step of publishing my writing to this blog to make certain people can find it fairly easily should they want to. They may also comment upon it directly. Additionally, I posted a review of the new netbook I have obtained recently. This review has been sent to a couple of different magazines and I'm hopeful of getting it published. These netbooks could have some very welcome implications for cash-strapped blind people who want to take the plunge into the digital age but can't spend a fortune to do it. I hope my review will help to alert them to the existence of these nifty cheep machines. I also did another podcast for Blindcooltech where I reviewed all the new gear I've gotten focussing mainly on the netbook.

Finally, I worked up the resolve and fortitude to take another crack at ripping my BBC Sherlock Holmes collection to mp3 format so that I can take it with me on my netbook and play it on my pc rather than always digging into the box with sixteen volumes to find one out of the sixty-four cds I might want at any given moment. It was an absolute chore. I must have spent something like ten hours over the afternoon, evening and well into the next morning ripping cd after cd. This was my third major attempt to get this done. I ended up using Goldwave, my sound effects editor. Both Premier Accessible CD/DVD Creator and Windowsmedia Player failed miserably at the task. I can't for the life of me understand why pirates would go to such utter pains and then post the results up for other people to grab. Had I done this for anybody else but myself, I would have expected a good day's wages for my efforts. It's absolutely mind-bogglingly boring but you can never just assume that a cd has been done completely. It took three or four actions to get some of the cds completely. You always had to check the status report so you could get tracks which weren't saved due to errors. I hope I never have to do this again and will take great pains to make certain I have a backup. I'll also hang onto the CDs just in case. The collection is absolutely brilliantly dramatised and I have no doubt it'll come in handy on my travels. I'm not a big detective fan in general but Sherlock Holmes has always hit the spot very nicely for me. It's that victorian sense of companionship and adventure.

I guess the big TV switch will happen pretty soon now when everything's supposed to go over to digital. That could very well render my $65 TV completely useless. I'd certainly miss having a TV in my room should that turn out to be the case. However, I'm at the same time very curious to see how the switch goes, how qquickly everyone switches over, any backlash, etc. This change is going to effect so many households. I guess that fully accessible channel will be on the air by now. I can't get it with my basic cable but perhaps I'll be able to if there's a cheep way of switching to digital. I'll at least be able to check it out on my parents' TV assuming Rogers carries it. I'm pretty certain they're going to. I know Cogeco does so perhaps, there'll be something on of interest to both Janene and I assuming she has any time for TV now that school is starting up again. It always starts off lightly but that certainly doesn't last.