Frustrations

I've had a frustrating couple of days.

I got an email that Leeds university are seriously considering closing down their botanic gardens. Now this sounds dumb - I don't see how you can teach botany without plants, but then it's no dumber than trying to do astronomy without telescopes. That's their business. What upsets me is that those gardens were a large percentage of my father's life's work. The person who emailed me about it said he was "only pleased that Trevor did not live to see it happen."

Not the best choice of words; I'd much rather my father was still alive. But I know what he meant.

It's some consolation that someone's writing a history of the gardens, and wants details about my father.

Then we had a family funeral.

The two things together really brought back memories of the time just after my father died. Not good, obviously.

My friend F suggested that it would cheer me up to go into town and take photos of the living statues. It sounded worth a try, so I went.

The statues were great, and broke the circle of depressing thoughts. The still photos are on the other blog.

I got through the funeral OK.

And this morning I tried to edit the video. At that point I found out that the PC only had MovieMaker version 1 and I needed version 2. But I couldn't install it until I got Service Pack 2. And I couldn't do that until...

So I decided to do this video on the laptop, and sort out the PC later.

Using a new programme is frustrating at the best of times, but eventually I got it done and saved itto disk.

The save hung at 21%.

I went into town to get more photos, and was surprised to see a completely different set of statues.

I got home, tweaked the edits, andsaved the project again.

The save hung at 21%.

I tried a different format.

The save hung at 21%.

By this time the steam was rising from my ears. Luckily Theresa was around, and she eventually worked out that it was reading the video clips from the card reader, not the disk. As soon as the buffer ran out, of course it went at the speed of a moribund snail.

It took a while to persuade the programme to look in the right place, but eventually I got it saving to the web. It saved the whole thing (which took about 15 minutes) and then announced it didn't have the details for the web server. So now I'm saving it yet again as a local file.

Fingers crossed.