Whoopee!
I've finally got myself some new video editing software...
... and it goes without saying that I paid too much for it...
I have had, so far this week, a fairly busy time.I had been feeling unwell for quite a long time and this limited my activity.
In fact I was slipping back into my old valetudinarian ways.
It really started last Thursday when I noticed a particularly unpleasant smell.
Now, smells are always around, it's just that we don't usually pay them much heed.
I suppose that the reason that I noticed this particular odour was because of the rise in temperature
that occurred. The previous days temperature had been something like 12 degrees Celsius which is a little below average for this time of year. However, come the morning and it had risen to 20 degrees Celsius by about 11 o'clock in the morning and look set to carry on rising.
For some persons the temperatures mentioned may cause some people to shiver-but believe me, any temperature above 20 degrees Celsius usually manages to get a mention either in the newspaper or some other broadcast media-try to remember that I live in England...which is on an island that has a maritime climate which means, as a rule, that it rains a lot.
The sky was blue from horizon to horizon, the birds were singing fit to burst and I felt rested- all was well with the world.
I even managed to get out of bed without difficulty-which was a pleasant change.
Emboldened by what seemed to me so far as a 'good day', I opened the bedroom window and breathed in deeply.
It was then that I came into contact with the smell.
At first I thought it was blowing in off of the fields on the other side of the road-the farmer must be 'muck-spreading' was the thought that trudged through my mind.
Not more than half an hour later, as I pottered about the house, I became aware of some activity immediately outside of my house. I went out and was greeted by the sight of a sludge gulper lorry and two men trying to open a manhole cover. This they did and the sight that greeted our eyes was not one that was very pleasant!
This particular manhole provides access to the wastewater drains of a number of houses, mine included and as a rule fulfils it role adequately. However, for some reason it had failed.
It was full, almost to overflowing with the results of much digestion-amongst other things. It was brown and smelled awful.
One of the blokes proceeded to get a set of rods and attachments, with which he made busy. It soon becacame apparent that whatever was causing the blockage wasn't going to move.
After a quick exploration of the drain from another point lower down along the line the object that was blocking everything was discovered and retrieved.
It turned out that it was actually a drain clearing rod that had been left down there when someone had tried previously to unblock it.
This raised the question as to how long the damned thing had been down there. I hadn't used any rods on the thing for about twenty years, probably longer. A mystery.
It is probably no coincidence that since this episode I feel more energetic...in fact by Monday I even felt like taking a trip out somewhere. So it was ho for the wide blue yonder, of to horizons new and all that sort of thing... .
As I rode on the train to Nottingham I toyed with the idea of going somewhere that I hadn't been to before, but settled for a stroll round that place.
I made a bee-line for the John Lewis store ( the shop for "nice people " ), mainly to look at all the stuff that I can't afford and which they don't make in my size anyway.
After a rather nice meal of fish, chips and mushy peas I wandered of to look around the other shops.
At one of them I brought a circular polarizing filter for my video camera. Feeling pleased with this I made my way home.
Got home and discovered that the filter was the wrong size-bugger!
So on Tuesday I made another trip to Nottingham and got a refund.
I thought that I might as well take a look around some other shops that sell this type of kit and was frustrated that not one of them had that particular sized filter in stock.
In a mad attempt to resolve the matter I even went to the Sony shop to see if they had any in stock.
I forgot to mention that my camera is made by Sony.
No luck there.
To tell the truth I had no expectation of anything from that particular company.
As I headed along the street I noticed a store belonging to the PC World group-and having nothing better to do I went inside it.
It was strangely deserted, perhaps two, maybe three other customers were there, drifting about in a fairly random fashion and the staff seemed to be disinclined to badger them, which is unusual for an establishment like PC World.
I found myelf standing next the stand that had all the video-editing software on and it was there that I found a copy of Pinnacle Studio HD-which I brought immediately.
When I got home the first thing I did was to install it on my PC-I was happy.
As I looked on the internet for reviews of the software I noticed that the price that I paid was way in excess of the prices shown-about twice the price.
But then I thought, " So what ? "
I've got a piece of software that is fairly reliable in doing what it is supposed to do, it ain't the fastest bit of kit available but it it does turn out some fairly impressive work-just so long as you are prepared to put the effort in in the first place.
