All quiet ...

It's been a pretty uneventful time since my last post, but there have been a couple of developments.

Firstly, Denise's mum put me in touch with a chap that helps run a day centre for oldies in nearby Whitburn to see if I could help them with any voluntary work. I was a little alarmed at first, when I looked the place up, it seems that it's for people suffering with dementia and depression - just what I need ... not! Turns out that there is also a drop-in facility, and it is in this area that they were looking for help, particularly in basic computer training and assistance. I went along for the first time a couple of weeks ago, and was able to make quite a contribution. There were three people needing help, so it was a little like spinning plates; getting one started with something, then the next one, then going back to the first one again because they'd got stuck, etc., etc.

This week there were five of them! Still, it's not stressful - they're very patient with there only being one of me there. I was put in a bit of an ethical dilemma though, as one of the guys wanted to download movies from a torrent site and burn them to DVD. He acknowledges that it's illegal, but I put it to him that it would probably be a lot less effort to buy the DVDs from Play.com or some such. The other thing is that he's got a ripped off copy of the DVD burning software, which I think has expired and locked him out. Tried to convince him that he should get a legit copy of the software at least, which you can pick up quite cheap from the aforementioned retailer. Anyway, it's very difficult to help someone when the problem is on their home computer. I'm not doing home visits, so he'll have to figure some of this out for himself! The local council are doing beginners' courses to tie in with the last government's programme of getting older people on the net, but they're full, so I'm getting some of the fallout. I'm telling them that I'm not doing a course as I'm not qualified, and it's ages since I did that sort of thing; I'll help them out with specific tasks, though.

The other thing is that I now have Skype for my desktop. I got a very good little webcam with a microphone for less than £10! I saw some for up to £175 that didn't seem to have much more in the way of features except auto-focus and really high resolution HD imaging. As I'm only going to be using the 'cam for Skype, there's no point in having a high resolution one because that would generate too much data to be useful over a live video link. I think Skype only transmits at 640 x 480 screen resolution anyway: there's certainly no chance of using HD levels of video clarity. If you have cable broadband you might be able to justify it once Skype starts its HD service, but that's still apparently a long way off.

My cam's focus is set on infinite, and everything down to a few centimetres away is perfectly sharp anyway, and the picture and sound is more than good enough for my purposes