Never a dull moment

by Colin MY COMPUTER TUTOR

A thin couple of weeks on the computer tuition business. It's taking some time to pick up again after Easter - only eight lessons last week and a record low of three the week before.

To put that into perspective, I averaged 7.5 lessons per week throughout 2010 - that's a raw average over the 52 weeks despite the fact that I actually teach only 46 complete weeks in a year. I've been maintaining an average of 10 lessons per week this year up to Easter, and that's including a halfterm break that I had.

So it's been a bit sparse lately - but am I downhearted? Of course not! Non-contact time (you can tell I was a teacher!) is an opportunity to get out there and advertise....spread the word....stick leaflets through doors!

I'm letting the local Hereford freebie paper carry my advert now, so when I go a-leafletting I target the further-flung villages. I've mentioned before what I look for in a village or street and since then I've developed a shameless research technique! Rather than cast around "in the field" as it were, driving up and around areas to see if they look likely, I first go to one of those websites where you can search for properties for sale. I put in the name of the village or town and ask it to search for houses for sale between £250,000 and £450,000. From the results I can get a hint of the streets to concentrate on!
You can find the postcode for the street, put this into Google and it will give you a map. Drag the little 'street-level man' onto the street and you can literally see the style of houses before you leave the office!

Shameless? Nosey? Yes! But it does save a lot of driving around. The price bracket represents the sort of householders who take my services.

Houses above half-a-million tend to have larger acreages, longer drives, and the occupants have paid that sort of money for seclusion anyway, so you have to consider whether it's worth walking all that way.

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And to bring back another aspect of leaflets I was bitten by a dog last week! I was blitzing a well-known town in Shropshire. Things had gone well - I'd not been rained on too much, I'd had a good coffee and cake and discovered the best chocolate shop in the country. And on my way back to the car I thought I might as well put leaflets through the doors I passed.

So I was criss-crossing a street - to save having to walk up and down it - and remembered a dog barking as I put a leaflet through a door. I crossed over to do a couple of doors....and when I crossed back I couldn't remember if I'd done no.27 or 29 last. So I thrust a leaflet through the letterbox....and teeth closed on my fingers! Yes, I'd done the house two minutes before. The wretched dog was alerted by the first leaflet and had obviously been waiting in hope. It seemed OK for a minute but then the fingers started bleeding and I had to complete that street left-handed. Who wants a bloody leaflet?

Some people do have the courtesy to put notices on the gate or the door "Beware of the dog". One thoughtful person provided a bag, hung from the door-knocker, and an explanatory note "Please put mail in the bag. Dog will eat it". For my part, I always make sure that my leaflets don't poke out of the letterbox, and I often see notices asking for mail to be pushed right through.

I haven't yet seen it yet, but it will make me laugh if ever I do:

"Beware of the dog" and "Please push all papers right through" on the same door!

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The other notice that used to make me pause is "No Junk Mail". I now ignore this...and am longing for someone to challenge me about it! I'd love the chance to retort that I don't deliver 'mail' and that I make a lot of effort to deliver information in person to your door....etc. etc.

Indeed, I have received one answer-phone message about this last year and I must admit that I enjoyed writing an apologetic letter, enclosing a stamped addressed envelope and requesting that he send the leaflet back to me. Heaps of coals of fire!!!

I'm also waiting for "Can you read?" so that I can come back with "Oh sorry, yes. I'll go slowly - it says My Computer Tutor, one-to-one tuition..."

Colin

Emailing Photos

by Colin MY COMPUTER TUTOR

Oh dear! I said in my last post that I'd comment more on photos in emails, but I didn't realise that I'd have to go into this quite so soon. But there's no time like the present and anyway, events have forced me into it.

I sent my brother some of the photos I took of his house last week - on reflection it seems a strange thing to do, sending someone pictures of his own house, reminiscent of "coals to Newcastle". Now I use a mail client - Outlook Express - and yes I'm still using Windows XP because...well, it works and I've got used to it! When I send pictures as attachments to an email, I start from the picture(s) - not from the email - and make use of the Windows re-sizing facility.

I select the pictures and then right-click on one of them for the context menu. Pointing to the 'Send To' option opens a sub-menu, and from there I click on 'Mail Recipient'. (You might find 'Email this file' in the Folder Options panel if you have it open)

Windows then takes over and a little dialog box opens, asking if you want Windows to make the pictures smaller.

Yes, I do!

If you're trying to email pictures which you took on a digital camera, the photos are likely to be in the order of 1-6 MB in size. I wanted to send my brother 11 photographs and they added up to about 40 MB, which for an email attachment is enormous! But taking the Windows re-sizing option reduced each picture to something between 40 and 100 kB, so the total was about 700 - 800 kB. That's still less than one Megabyte!

And off they went - the email spent about 5-6 seconds in the Outbox...and was gone!

I know my brother received them because I eventually managed to read his reply, thanking me for the pictures. I say 'eventually' because I checked my mails this afternoon.....and waited....and waited...and waited as Outlook Express informed me that it was 'Receiving mail...' After 15 minutes I realised that something was causing some trouble, so I stopped Outlook Express and went directly to my mail server. (It's always helpful to be able to use webmail even if, like me, you don't normally like it!) Sure enough, my brother had written me an email - and attached three photos for me to see. They added up to more than 10 MB, and that was what was taking so much time to download.

So I'm writing to him to thank him for the email. But I've had to delete the email from the mail server so that it doesn't block any other mails I might get tomorrow. And of course that means that I haven't managed to download his photos, although I have managed to see the 'thumbnails'.

And perhaps I'd better send him a few tactful instructions as to how to send photos by email.

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I'm not sure if there is an easy solution to this problem if you use webmail. There are pros and cons for using webmail and for using mail clients, and a definite pro for mail clients is that you can easily re-size photos before you send them. Other popular 'mail clients' are Outlook, Windows Mail, Windows Live Mail, Thunderbird, Eudora and Pegasus. I play with Thunderbird for practice but I haven't tried Eudora or Pegasus. I've recently come to the conclusion that Windows Live Mail is better than Windows Mail - although I can immediately think of serious errors in both of those. But, as I'm learning to say in these posts, that will have to be another story!

Colin

A Week of Bank Holidays

by Colin MY COMPUTER TUTOR

It's good to have a break, so I went away on Easter Monday to see my brother in the North of Scotland. Andrew lives in two interesting places - Findhorn, East of Inverness, and Scoraig, which is West of Ullapool. They are about 100 miles apart, and the last 3 miles to Scoraig he has to do on foot!

You can read about the Findhorn Community here.

April Charity

It was my first visit to the Highlands and I was impressed by the grandeur of it all. There were several names that I found I already knew - Dalwhinnie, Ardbeg, Glenlivet, Glenfiddich - yes, I have long had a taste for the Highlands! Which is why a notice in the Findhorn shop caught my eye. It was advertising a Whisky Tasting session in support of John Farrington's fundraising for Child Reach and as yet again I was looking for a charity to support, I made the decision that this would be My Computer Tutor's April Charity.

So there you are...three links to follow if you're interested!

The Bird Spot

Of course the first thing I pack when I go away is a pair of binoculars. I'm not a twitcher or lister - I don't go chasing all over the country after rare vagrants like some do - I just enjoy seeing what's there. I'd always thought that as soon as you cross the border you'll see Hooded Crows. Well, I did see them but I had to go well North of the Border. Perhaps my bird book is out of date...here's a 'hoodie' I photographed at Findhorn:

This is actually a 'crop' of my original picture, taken from about 30 yards away with my digital camera. The pictures it takes come out at about 5-6 MB so there's a lot of definition and I've found that I can take pictures of birds at some distance and then crop them using Microsoft Paint.

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I took this picture of a Great Black-backed Gull at Scoraig - just for fun really, the bird isn't that unusual and certainly not limited to Scotland - but I wanted to use this long-distance technique. This shot was at about 60-70 yards and shows that you can pick up some 'extras'.

I was concentrating on the gull, but when I came to edit it I discovered that I'd also photographed a Wheatear - over to the right.

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I was really thrilled to see this bird while we were eating lunch at a pub overlooking Findhorn Bay. I once saw an Osprey on the River Wye at Hereford and I've seen loads in Florida, often with a fish in their claws, but I'd never before seen an osprey fishing.

And this is what they look like as they try to hover before they dive. The one I saw made two attempts at catching something but he was being pestered by a bunch of gulls at the time so I'm not sure if he had lunch at the same time I did!

I didn't realise that they dived so steeply - the films I've seen give the impression that they make a shallow 'glide and grab'. But there you are...I'm always prepared to learn!

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Photos and Email

Just to make a tutor-y sort of comment in case you think that this blog is drifting off with the birds (Oh yes! I heard my first cuckoo of 2011 at Scoraig last week!)...
Many of my clients want to send photos by email, and still more clients receive photos via email from well-meaning friends and family. This is fraught with difficulty, especially if you're using web-mail. I am doing my best to advise clients not to send pictures "straight off the camera" because, as an email attachment, a digital picture can be enormous. I tell them that as a general rule, anything over 1000kB (1 MB) is going to cause problems.

But it's still holiday time in UK, so I'll save the techy stuff for later.

Colin