Tag Archives: DVD

Saturday 6th January 2018 – I’VE BEEN CHANGING …

… the habits of a lifetime today.

And how!

We started off with another bad night last night. Despite going to bed at something like a reasonable hour I was tossing and turning for ages and spent most of the night watching the clock wind down.

And never mind the alarm going off at 07:30 – at that time of the morning I was up, medicated and thinking about breakfast. And my porridge did go down nicely too.

At about 09:15 I hit the road for the shops and I’ll tell you more about them in due course. But my shopping trip was interrupted by Rosemary phoning for a chat, and we passed a very pleasant half hour or so, with me parked up at the side of the road.

Back here, a late lunch (because I’d been out for ages) was followed by a snooze as you might expect, and then I had plenty of things to do – such as making start on tidying up the paperwork seeing that I bought a binder today.

This was followed by watching Cardiff Met play Aberystwyth in the Welsh Premier League, and then off out I went.

Up to the 3rd floor and Odile’s apartment. She was having a little fête to celebrate Epiphany and I’d been invited, which was very nice of her. Brigitte was there, and Roberte, David, Nicolas and Patrice. We all had a good chat for ages, and I wasn’t the first to leave either.

Not like me to be sociable is it? But then, I was never really invited anywhere before. My reputation hasn’t reached here yet, obviously!

But the shops!

I have resolved to make my life easier and more comfortable, and that includes buying things of a better quality than maybe I might usually do, and also to have one one or two luxuries around the place to bolster my morale.

And didn’t that work in Spades today?

Not that it means abandoning my trips to NOZ of course. IN fact I was there today and another €15 of near-expired food and a few other irrelevancies ended up in Caliburn. And the braderie at LeClerc was hit as well, with a waste bin for the living room and a bucket-waste bin for the bedroom.

But that’s only part of it – and a small part of that.

I seem to only have two towels here and both of them seem to have long-since seen better days. So with LIDL having a sale on and luxury towels reduced to a reasonable price, they had one blue shower towel and one blue hand towel (the bathroom is blue) left, as well as a matching blue bathrobe (my old one is falling to bits).

So they ended up in Caliburn too.

Next stop was NOZ, and then Centrakor for a new wallet to replace the one that was lost.

After that it was to “Happy Cash”, the second-hand shop.

Regular readers of this rubbish will be surprised to hear that I’m looking for a cheap television. I have a DVD player here – the one that I bought in Belgium years ago, complete with hard drive, and I only used it for about 6 months before I moved to France.

It’s been in a cardboard box ever since, and here I am watching DVDs on an old laptop. So I want a cheap TV and the second-hand shop seemed to be the place to go.

No such luck unfortunately, but I did strike gold in a quite unexpected direction.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that when I moved here I went looking for a stereo hi-fi. It needed to meet several criteria, like AM/FM radio, CD, auxiliary input, USB port (for a memory stick or a USB turntable). And how I had been singularly unsuccessful.

And there sitting on the shelf was an old battered LG stereo hi-fi with absolutely everything that I wanted, and as an added bonus, a cassette player/recorder. All powered by a remote control.

A lengthy chat with the manager saw it disappearing into Caliburn for the grand sum of … errr … €49:00.

One very happy little bunny here. I spent part of the afternoon wiring it up and the rest of the afternoon having a nostalgia trip listening to a pile of cassettes from the 1970s. Ohh Happy Day!

And later, having bought a memory stick, I copied a pile of music onto it and it’s running even now in the hi-fi. It recognises 999 tracks, which is quite acceptable

But that’s not all. Ohh no it isn’t!

Still in search of a television, I went, more out of curiosity to LeClerc. They had some televisions advertised at €99:00 and that could have been a possibility. But a 57cm screen won’t go far and besides, no SCART socket – just a HDMI cable, so my DVD player wouldn’t work. And after all of the money that I paid for it (because it was a top-of-the range machine) I didn’t want to throw it away lightly.

But there in the corner in the sale were three or four cheap Chinese TVs – 80cms – much more like it. With SCART and HDMI cable plugs and a USB port. €149:00.

So >copulatum expensium , as we Pompeiians say.

That’s now in the back of Caliburn too and it will be up in here tomorrow.

And if that’s not enough, I lost my carte de fidelité the other week and with this kind of thing it’s important because if there’s a complaint they can track your article.

The girl at the cash desk sent me to the accueil and I had to queue behind another guy. He asked for two tickets for tomorrow’s Cup Match against Bordeaux. I thought they would be sold out but “we only have six left”. So he bought two and that left four.

So badger that for a game of soldiers. I bought two too. And Terry is going to come with me to watch the game.

But shopping did wear me out – the first time for three weeks that I’ve hit the shops. I’ll be hitting the sack in a minute to gather my forces for tomorrow.

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Tuesday 11th July 2017 – LAST NIGHT …

… the computer told me that it wanted to perform a major update.

It’s been telling me that for a while actually, but last night it blocked the screen and wouldn’t let me proceed until I agreed.

And so I set it to perform at 23:59 and left the machine running when I went to bed. When I came round this morning to look at it, it was showing … errr … 21% completed.

As a result, today has been rather a difficult day.

It didn’t start off too well either. I was wide awake at 06:40 and when the alarm went off at 07:00 I was already preparing another mix of muesli, seeing as how I’d forgotten to do that yesterday.

With no laptop, I went and had a shower and sorted out a few other bits and pieces that needed attention, and while I was at it, I came across an 8GB memory card from the summer of 2015 that I hadn’t backed up. I made a mental note …

Round about 11:00 the laptop finished what it was doing, and so I launched myself into a programme of backing up the memory card. I wrote a couple of DVDs with the contents, and then found the 750gb external hard drive that I use to keep the (millions of) photos that I’ve accumulated over the years.

The ones off the SD card went onto there too, only for me to discover that I seem to have backed up this card on there some time in the past.

But while I had the external hard drive coupled up, I went about and did a major backup of the contents of my data folders.

I do a major back-up like this once every year or so – usually just before I’m taking my laptop with me on a major journey. In between times, I back up to a dedicated 64gb memory stick.

And how times have changed – I remember when USB ports became the thing with Windows 98 Series 2, and my back-up memory stick then was all of 256kb – with plenty of room on there for everything too.

And that’s where I am right now – this back-up is still going on some 10 hours later, and it probably won’t be until 11:00 tomorrow morning that it will be finished either.

It hasn’t meant that I’ve not been updating the blog though – in fact I’ve had another good day and I’ve almost finished October 2012. Just 104 “uncategorised” entries to rewrite, which might make you think that it will all be over soon.

But far from it, and for two reasons too –

  1. Many pages are “conjoined” pages – when I haven’t had internet access for one reason or another I’ve made a multiple entry as soon as I could. Since late 2013, when I started the new version of the blog, whenever I’ve not had internet access I’ve been writing up a page faithfully every night nevertheless and storing them up for a multiple-publication later. I’m going back over the conjoined entries and breaking them up into daily pages
  2. It seems that round about August 2012 the blog-host that I used back then (before I brought my blog in-house) started to make up tags and categories that my current set-up recognises. And they show up on a few of the pages from then. So these pages aren’t included in the number of “uncategorised” pages but they need updating nevertheless to meet my new, exacting … "and modest" – ed … standards.
    .

But what is exciting is to look at some of these old entries and what was going through our minds, and see how things turned out. A good example of this is the entry for 17th October 2012.

Here, Krys and I (whatever happened to Krys?) were discussing that we were having all the signs of an early winter. Krys remarked that she was “forecasting a bad and long winter this year”.

Well, the first snows fell just 10 days later – which is astonishingly early, and the last snowfall of the winter was on … errr … 25th of MAY. How about that for a prediction?

storm waves crashing on rocks granville manche normandy franceTea was the second instalment of the aubergine and kidney bean whatsit, and now I’m sitting at the window watching the teeming rain and the storm, with the waves crashing down on the rocks across the bay.

It’s a phenomenal wind that we are having – just the weather to be out there on board a three-masted schooner. I’d really fancy a run-out in this weather.

And I forgot to mention that some blasted English grockles, complete with thermos flask of hot tea, pinched my spec on the wall overlooking the harbour at lunchtime. I had to go and sit somewhere else.

And talking of comments, don’t be shy. If you would like to comment on the entries on this blog, please feel free to do so. Because of all of the spam that seems to be back on the internet these days, they will be “held” until I manually approve them, and then you’ll see your name in lights!

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Sunday 16th September 2012 – HAVING LOST …

… my mobile phone about a month ago, it’s the turn of the dictaphone to go walkabout now.

I picked it up off the floor here and I’m convinced that I put it in my pocket, but when I arrived at Servant, it wasn’t there. No idea where that’s gone.

fcpsh fc pionsat st hilaire football as servant puy de dome franceYes, that’s where we are this Sunday – down at Servant.

It’s a cup match this weekend, so FC Pionsat St Hilaire have fielded something like a makeshift hybrid team featuring half of the 2nd XI

And while I was scrabbling around in Caliburn looking for my dictaphone, I missed FC Pionsat St Hilaire’s opening goal.

fcpsh fc pionsat st hilaire football as servant puy de dome franceBut not to worry, there were plenty of other goals that I didn’t miss.

Their opponents are a Third Division side and Pionsat cantered to a leisurely 4-1 win.

They didn’t at any time look under any kind of pressure, and could have had a bag-full more, missing two or three sitters on the way.

But, uncomfortably, they didn’t look all that convincing either. Last season, they would have demolished a team like this without any trouble at all.

Apart from that, all I seem to have done today is to back up my photographs onto DVD. I keep an external drive with the photos on, and also a portable drive as a fall-back.

I’ve also been copying them to DVD every time I have a fill SD card as an additional safeguard, but I’ve not done that since the second half of 2009 so there are thousands – and I mean thousands – to do.

It’s not helped either by the fact that the DVD writer is a little old and creaky and needs a long rest after each session, and that also some of the DVDs I have here are corrupted. Flood damage by the looks of things.

Anyway, tomorrow I’m off in the morning helping Rosemary with a furniture delivery.

I’ve swapped that for half a day’s work in my garden. It’s the only way that any weeding is going to be done in the near future. 

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Saturday 15th September 2012 – I FOUND SOMETHING SPECTACULAR …

… in LIDL at St Eloy-les-Mines this afternoon.

Rummaging around, like you do … “like YOU do” – ed … I noticed several twin-packs of LED light strips. About a foot long, they consist of about 12 tiny LEDs and consume just 1 watt of electricity.

They are 12-volt and come complete with tiny mains transformer and little movement-detector.

I’ve been looking for something to use as strip lights in the kitchen whenever it might be that I start it, and also for the bathroom over the sink and the bedroom over the dressing table.

You can buy 12-volt flourescents and indeed I have a few here that I was planning to use, but they take about 7 watts and they are big, bulky things.

So I duly bought a pack and brought it home. And after cutting a few wires and so on, I gave it a try.

And blimey!

for just 1 watt, that’s incredibly bright. Now I have to go and help Rosemary on Monday morning so I’m going via LIDL at St Eloy-les-Mines and I’ll buy the rest of the stock of those lights.

That’s another problem solved. Good old LIDL, hey?

There was also a sale on at Cheze – everything in the shop 20% off today. Now I have a few decent tools lying around here that don’t have handles, like a rake, a sledgehammer and a binette – that kind of thing, and so I popped in there today.

So that’s something else organised.

I also bumped into Bill and so we went for a coffee and a natter.

This morning I sorted out the radio programmes for the rock shows that I do for Radio Anglais. I’m now up to November, with records selected and scripts typed and so that will keep me out of mischief for a while.

And then I headed for town.

Back home after the shops, I went through the SD cards and copied their contents onto DVD – something that I’ve been meaning to do for quite a while.

And I’m supposed to take it easy at the weekend.

Phew!  

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Tuesday 6th December 2011 – I HAD TO WAIT …

…. until this afternoon to get the internet connection back and working, but now I’m up and running with my super-duper new laptop.

And it’s taking some getting used to, I’ll tell you. Especially this “85% – 10 hours 25 minutes – left” on the battery indicator.

There are downsides to it, of course. It’s fairly slow – a lot slower than I was expecting. But then, battery life and light weight was what was quite important to me and I certainly have that.

It took an age to upload everything that I needed – programs and the like from off the internet and the external DVD drive (which, much to my surprise, I found quite easily amongst the rubble). But I bet that I’ve forgotten something quite important.

And when I can lay my hands on a 2.5″ external caddy, I’ll take the hard drive out of the old laptop and copy the data over. It’s all there, complete and uncorrupted (I hope).

All of that has taken me most of the day and there has been little time to do much else. As you know, I’m leaving here for the UK in a day or two and I need the laptop set up for then.

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Friday 26th August 2011 – I was up early again this morning …

… at about 08:30 in fact, even though it wasn’t until 04:30 that I went to bed.

Mind you, no-one could sleep with the amount of raid that was cascading down, and the noise that it was making. By the time that I had made my coffee, I reckoned that it was about 8 hours since I had taken the stats, and in that time 27.2mm of rain had fallen. And by the end of the day, we had had over 37mm all told. It never stopped raining and it was as grey as any November or February day that you might mention.

No possibility of working outside and so I started to collect together the tools that I’m taking to Canada. That led to something of a (very insignificant) tidying up on the first floor, and then a much-more-important tidying up up here and finding bits of paper.

But we did have a tragedy though. Do you remember the other week about the impressive media wall that I had built? Well, while I was sitting here drinking a coffee, the whole lot crashed to the floor and there were video cassettes and DVDs all over the place. Talk about chaos.

media corner attic les guis virlet puy de dome franceThis afternoon was spent therefore cleaning a load of old bricks, finding lengths of wood and then making some shelves.

You can see them in the photo – a nice cantilever arrangement at the top as well. That all works quite well and I hope that it lasts until I’ve finished the ground floor of the house and settled in, whenever that might be.

I was also interrupted – and very welcome interruptions they were too – by a series of phone calls. Dave from Hexham rang me and we talked about all kinds of things, including that he plans to come down here later this year and teach me plumbing. That ought to be exciting but I think that he’ll be plumbing the depths a little just there. I’ll definitely be out of my depth anyway.

Also ringing up for a chat were Bill and Percy Penguin. And that was nice too – I like talking as you know, and of course Percy Penguin isn’t mentioned in these pages half as often as she deserves to be.

I’ve also started copying some CDs to take with me to play in the hire car. I’ve done three just now, and having read this blog quite often just recently I bet that you can guess what they are.

Yes, Colosseum Live, Made In Japan and Liege And Lief. Say no more. It just happens that I’m listening to Made in Japan right now.

And it’s still raining as well.

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Sunday 31st July 2011 – While I was having breakfast …

… I was watching the Sherlock Holmes film the Golden Pince-Nez and in it is the immortal line, something like “he’s still in bed. If the weather is really bad he stays in bed until midday”. And that really started my day quite badly because it was the easily the most beautiful day for quite some time and and for reasons that I really do not know, it was 12:22 when I woke up.

No – what happened there I have no idea at all.

Anyway, after breakfast, instead of living in the middle of all kinds of boxes and so on, I revised the media corner and made a pile of impromptu shelves out of old bits of wood and some wine boxes, and now all of the CDs, videos and DVDs are neatly piled up properly where I can see them and where I won’t trip over them. There’s still a long way to go before this place here looks presentable, what with everything I brought back from Brussels, but at least it’s a start. You can’t say I didn’t work at all this afternoon.

barbecue isolde krejci espinasse puy de dome franceThis evening, just by way of a change, I went out socialising, and that’s not something that happens every day. I was invited to a barbecue by Isolde – the girl for whom we did a furniture removal last year. She was entertaining and there were loads of people there, including a huge pile of kids which was nice.

I spent most of the time chatting to Karl, Lou, Jean and Elizabeth – after all, it’s really nice to see them.

sunset espinasse combraille puy de dome franceBut as dusk descended on Espinasse I started to feel homesick like I usually do – I don’t do crowds as you know – and so in the best traditions of the News of the Screws, I “made my excuses and left”.

And I’m glad that I left before it went dark because it gave me an opportunity to photograph the sunset and tonight it was absolutely beautiful. It’s not very often that I really catch it exactly at the right moment seeing that I can’t actually see it from my house.

Tomorrow, if I remember to wake up, I’ll do a load of washing if the weather is as nice as it was today. It really was a glorious day.

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Saturday 9th April 2011 – The weekend is here at last.

And about time too – I thought it would never ever arrive. And seeing as it was Saturday I wasn’t in any particular hurry to raise myself from the dead either.

Once breakfast was over I made a couple of shelves for in here and I now have all of the DVDs nicely lined up. How long they will stay like that though is anyone’s guess. And once that was done and it was midday, I legged it to St Eloy for the shopping. Nothing much of any excitement, except that LIDL was selling soft fruit trees at €1:69 each. I hate goosegogs, and why buy blackberries when I’m overrun with brambles? But there were two blackcurrant bushes and one blueberry bush left, and they have gone now 🙂

fcpsh fc pionsat st hilaire teilhet puy de dome ligue football league franceThis evening Pionsat’s 3rd XI were playing Teilhet and the Goatslayers won 1-0 due to a disputed penalty (I was in no position to see, it has to be said) but there was quite a bit on moaning and groaning from everyone on the field throughout the match.

Pionsat played quite well for the first hour and were unlucky not to have taken something from this game. They need to win games like these to keep their mid-table slot alive

And this evening I’ve been recording all of the CDs that I bought just recently and copying them onto SD cards to play in Caliburn. The SD cards need to be rearranged and so that means an end to the legendary “Help Yourself to Kate Bush” card, which is sad.

Tomorrow I have a double-header. Pionsat’s 1st and 2nd XI are both away, and they are both playing Charbonnieres – Paugnat at Paugnat. The 2nd XI kick off at 13:00 and the 1st XI at 15:00 so I’m going to be out all afternoon even though I have plenty to be getting on with here.

I hope the weather keeps up.

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