Yes.  Please understand, I did not send you that stuff to create any sense of obligation.  Really!  I wanted Natasha to have those books, and I felt so bad for you opening up this package with brightly wrapped stuff in it NOT for you that I sent you a couple of little things.  You do NOT need to send me anything.  I have so much stuff it bothers me, and certainly don't need any more.

Don't worry I would not send you any junk, only if I saw something small that I thought you would like and you would not see otherwise.

Good.  I don't send presents with the expectation of reciprocation.  Few people understand that, and I'm glad you do.

That's nice.  Your parents will be happy, I'm sure.  Does an English turkey dinner include stuffing for the turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, haricot bean casserole, cranberry sauce, etc., or do you do it in lemon butter or something?

Well yes, the former, but hold the bean casserole and add roast potatoes and brussels sprouts.

Here's a picture of Natasha posing in her new party dress. 

I am currently vetting a series of children's books for my niece and nephews.  They are designed for nine years and up, but I think I will have to give them to them early.  They are called "An Unfortunate Series Of Events," and they are written by someone whose nom de plume is Lemony Snicket.  They are very funny, and I love them.
I am impatiently waiting for "The Lord of the Rings" to open.  I was obsessed by those books when I was around ten, and, of course, cast my own movie.  I want to see how this version compares to mine.  It looks perfectly beautiful.
Re:  movies.  I saw "Little Voice" the other night and could not tell what kind of accent everyone was speaking in, especially Brenda Blethyn.  Are you by any chance familiar with that movie, and do you know where it was supposed to be happening?

Wasn't that the one with Jane Horrocks ('Bubble' from AbFab)?  I never did see it.  Horrocks can do an impressive range of accents.  She is actually from Rossendale, just a few miles from here.

Yes.  I'm very fond of her.  I think she's just as cute as can be.

Yes, and I have an inexpensive Epson color printer (a 777i) that, when loaded with glossy photo stock, produces beautiful prints.  The pixels are not at all visible, and the prints look even better than they did on the screen.  Ain't technology grand?

Yes, we do quite a lot of that.

The thing that annoys me about the digital cameras is their speed, or lack thereof.  I press the button and sometime in the next century the flash goes off and the picture is taken.  Frequently the picture that appears is not the picture I thought I was taking.  Very bad when taking pictures of animals, as I am prone to doing.  Maybe I should switch to pictures of rocks.

That can be a problem, although I seem to learn to anticipate.   I can't take decent pictures of the cat because whenever she sees me trying she comes and rubs against the camera or my legs, so I have to walk backwards while waiting for the shutter.

My cat is about as active as your average roast potato, but he will often be in an exceptionally adorable position and the click of the button makes him move.

Ah, yes, a pain.  About the only thing that I like about them, other than the convenience of not having to scan photos into the computer, is the large viewfinder window.  When taking pictures of still things, it's great for assessing what the image will actually be.

Not having that feature is what makes this camera so cheap.  That's why I had to make a viewfinder window on the PC.

Ah, I gotcha.  Surely that limits you, then, to shots that are near the PC?

Only for close-ups.  It has an optical viewinder like a cheap film camera, but that doesn't work if you get close.  It also has a cute reverse viewinder, a convex mirror on the front, so you can see roughly what you are taking when doing self-portraits.  When taking 'ordinary' stills or movies in daylight at 2m-infinity, or stills by flash at about 2m, it is fine hand held.  Of course I am always pushing the envelope, so I have a 500W floodlight (a cheap outdoor 'security lamp') which helps with indoor movies, Wow!  Fancy! and a selection of closeup lenses that I can blu-tak to the front for macro, made from old spectacles and binoculars, and a strap-on rechargeable battery pack, without which it would be completely uneconomic to use.  For macro work it is not usually to inconvenient to move the object to the computer. The only bits missing are that my laptop is too old to have USB, so I can't upload to that, and the offline movies are in Quicktime format, which I can't convert, edit or compress.

Can't help with the Quicktime problem, but there are relatively inexpensive USB converters available.  I have one on my laptop and another (another kind) on the iMac, as it didn't have enough USB ports for what I wanted to do.  They are about US$35.

Hmm, so far I haven't seen PCMCIA to USB converters here.  I don't know why not, it would seem a logical thing for older laptops that don't have USB built in.  Maybe I should look on the net.  I see ones the other way around, that connect a laptop to a USB port on a desktop for networking, but they are passive, not powered, so won't work a camera or other USB peripheral. It's not a great hardship though, there aren't many times when I would use it.

When attached to the computer, its only advantage over the webcam is that it can take high-res stills, and then only by unplugging the computer.  The webcam does better movies.  Natasha has been doing some more stop-motion
animation with that, she has written an eight-scene plot based on a pantomime; made two sets, scripted, filmed and voiced one and a half scenes (OK, I filmed the half-scene myself to try out an idea), using her toy dogs as characters.  Wow again.  How creative. I have improved the stage so we now have a 2' wide space with five 20W lights and a DC power supply to prevent the lights flickering out of sync with the camera.  I put a preamplifier on my sound card so that we get decent quality sound from a microphone.  I always had the problem that microphone input always sounded awful, across several sound cards and microphones.  It seems that sound cards aren't sensitive enough, so you only get a full electrical level if the average microphone is acoustically overloaded.  I also rigged up a gantry so we can fly things.

Not to sound too elemental, but did you try putting a "sock" over the mic?  I have noticed that a lot of folks with sound problems on their computers could improve them with a little cap of foam.
My dad is a primo sound guy.  Would you like me to hook you up with him as a long-distance consultant?  He loves doing stuff like that, and will bore you for hours with instructions if you let him.

Thanks but it is a solved problem.  There was just a creditbility gap between the microphone manufacturers and sound card manufacturers.  You could only get full volume in the PC if you got real close to the microphone, or shouted.  When you did that the microphone distorted the sound because it mechanically overloaded.  I figured this out years ago and bought a cheap pre-amp, but it had the wrong connectors.  So I bought the connectors but stuffed the whole lot in a drawer and forgot about it because I always found a work-around, like recording voice over the phone.  So when this need arose I soldered the connectors on to bits of cable, found an extra mains outlet to plug the pre-amp into, and it all worked.  Because YOU ARE A STONE GENIUS. Then I decided to put my FM radio tuner card through it too, because that was not loud enough either.  I had to make up an attenuator to get the radio and the microphone to the same level.   Super, it all worked.  Because of the way various pieces of software work, like the tuner control, I have to keep the master volume in the software audio mixer set high and adjust the indvidual channel levels for comfort.
That was sweet except for a few odd bits of software (games, telephone answering and so on) that break the rules and fudge the settings to their own defaults whenever they start.  That was until I got a Christmas card from C on ASCB .  That is one crazy woman. Whenever I read her posts/mails I think of a bag lady shouting at passing cars.) 

I kind of think so, too.  That S person is craaaaaazy.  I have to bite my tongue every time I read her posts and remind myself to be as kind as possible.  Crazy people get sick and scared, too.  What is it about WebTV that attracts so many weird people?

 This had a sound clip with a javascript which jammed the synth volume to maximum before it started.  When I opened it, around midnight, I feared the noise was going to wake Natasha!  She (C) did sort-of apologise for that.

The advantages for me are a) low running costs, once I'd fixed the battery problem, and b) not having to wait for films to be processed.  I am a lot more prone to experiment if I can get the results right away rather than having to wait for results the next day.  I used to process my own films, but that was still expensive and very time consuming. I still have the equipment in the cellar.

You could probably sell it on eBay if you are so inclined.  When we were clearing out my grandfather's darkroom, we made a pleasant boodle on what I thought was out-of-date processing equipment.

The enlarger is a rather heavy-duty one, which I would hate to part with, I'm sure it must be useful for something, although I admit I can't think what.  Mmmm.  Doorstop?   More to the point I never feel just that short of cash, either there is enough, or else I am so short that it would be a drop in the ocean. Overdrafts come in quanta of thousands in my mind.  The rest of the lab gear is not worth much, most of the setup cost was in fitting sinks, plumbing, benches etc.  The copying stand already got recycled as our animation stage.

Do you have any laboratory glass?  Flasks, beakers, etc.?  Thanks to an article in a home decorating magazine here, people are buying them like crazy to use as vases.

Nah, they get broken.  Most of what is left is plastic.

Ah, too bad.