Week 11

They say flowers never clash but these bright orange polyanthus flowers look terrible with yellow daffodils. I hide them in an out of the way corner so that they can be looked at by themselves.

I had to use the gamma correction feature in Paintshop Pro 5 before the flowers showed anywhere near their real life colour.

The trAce server is back on line. While it has been down I have been trying to do a few screens for showing on the lap top computer at Albany. I need to produce the actual posters as well. I am not straining myself over this as I reckon the only people about in these poster sessions will be those who have come out of the main sessions for a break and are waiting for a space in the the Jacuzzi.

Someone asked me the other day about my digital camera and what I thought of it.

The digital camera I own is pretty primitive as I have had it for over a year but it has brought me untold pleasure. It only has a resolution of 360 dpi but because of that it will store 96 pictures. I can alter the focus for close up and 'normal' but the close up function gives more satisfactory results. It advertises itself as being able to take pictures by candlelight but that is somewhat of an exaggeration. It will however take recognisable photos in very poor light. When I got myself into a muddle over wiring my computer I took photos in the gloom of my study of how I had connected the DVD and monitor cables to the back of my system box, then e-mailed them to Support and received an e-mail back showing me how I should have made the connections.

One drawback the camera will not work well with fluorescent lighting which has ruined photos of some family functions. Another annoyance is the batteries run out fast. Downloading a full cache of pictures to computer uses up a lot of battery power so I use the optional extra mains lead whenever I do that.

The Software QV-Link was provided with the camera mainly for downloading to a PC's hard -disk. It does so in x.cam format. It also includes applications for viewing and manipulating the pictures once they have been down-loaded. The compression in .cam format is good and the pictures look great on screen unless where there is a lot of green in the original scene. Then I have to fiddle with the retouch options that are part of the QV-link package.

Unfortunately the .cam format is not recognised by Paint Shop Pro 5 or any other Photo Viewer/Editor I know of. That means that if I want to send pictures to people without QV-Link (i.e. practically everyone I know) I have to translate them. Translated into Bit map images the pictures are as good as in .cam but are roughly ten times the size in terms of memory- not very useful when sending over the net. I generally use JPEG with high compression but often ruin the picture doing so. Certainly the pictures I put in my journal and Personal web-site would be very much better if I didn't have to worry over downloading times.

When I am rich I will upgrade to a more advanced model. Nowadays most digital cameras have a resolution of over 1000 dpi and often give you a choice of resolutions. Many of them save to a disk you can just slot into your computer which would save a lot of hassle although my present computer is a lot less temperamental about it than my old Compaq 120mhz. I am not sure what other refinements are now available. I would love to have a zoom function. My garden foxes move off if I approach closer than 20 ft, but even at 20ft my shots produce just small fox dots on a vast landscape.

All right, so my pictures are not great quality but I look at low resolution photos on my screen more often and with greater pleasure than I do higher quality photos in a photo album. I will still try to remember to take my 'proper' camera to Albany with me though so I can scan them in when I return.

I did it again! Most other people going to Albany have centre stage roles but they also have a small walk-on part, the poster session I mentioned last week. Quite rightly they are concentrating on their star roles. I, whose only task is to hover round my home-made posters for one hour at a time when people with conference stamina are attending serious sessions, I am acting as if the whole purpose of this 1,500 person international conference is the poster session. Perhaps if the swimming pool is uncomfortably full a few people may wander in to look at the posters.

Anyway I made the mistake of asking those with experience of American conferences what they were doing about their posters and caused a major panic plus a wonderful example of cross-cultural incomprehension. Simon, who is keeping his cool about the posters, informs everyone that only A4 size is needed. Wails from America. What is A4? Quite right too. A4 is a metric size. This is an American conference - their default paper size will be 'letter', measured in inches. and slightly larger than A4. For a poster they may choose the longer 'legal' which, I suspect, is the equivalent of our old foolscap.

You would think that two countries sharing the same printers and word-processor applications could come to an agreement on how they cut their pape