Not only was yesterday the most depressing of the year, according to Dr Cliff Arnall, of Cardiff university, but NBC canceled the west wing!

I have to say it’s not a great shock (The west wing bit) it costs a fortune to make apparently and it has gone off the boil a bit in the last few seasons, apparently this is because Arron Sorkin, was writing and rewriting everybody’s work until he got arrested with some drugs on him and then later quit.

(the sad day bit isn’t a surprise either because they ran the same story last year)

Last night we added another childgate to the equation and moved one around, with the result that daisy now has that little bit further to wonder.

we’ve only added around 8 foot of the hall from the morning room door, to near (but not to) the stairs) but Daisy loves it she spent a good hour last night testing everything in her new space to see what she could open, pull, move to a different room, so almost immediately, the shoe rack has gone upstairs, and the cupboard under the stairs has been rotated to hide some nice little spaces.

The Cat’s on the other hand are miffed, and they probably don’t fully appreciate it yet, we’ve made most of the house out of bounds for them. Before they had a pretty much free reign of most of the house except the living room, and why would you want to go in there anyway? That little scary person’s in there. The problem with that was they as cats often do when they feel left out, challenged or just wicked; they where ‘marking’ the house. Which was a) smelly and b) not very hygienic.

The moving of the gate was more to restrain the cats then for Daisy but she was getting a bit bored with just one room, and now she can stand at the gate and watch you cook, which will either be cool, or quite hard work.

My Electronics Knowledge is zero point zero plus lots more zeroes with maybe a one at the end. So why did I think I could fix a flaky ccd in a video camera ?

because I was hoping against hope it was just a lose connection, well I’ve opened the camera up (I’m sure I didn’t need to unscrew all 19 screws), and well look.

I mean what can I do with that, It’s still bust, even like this (no, really!), there are no lose bits, other than the ones where I’ve taken screws out, so I think it’s broken, the next step is to screw it back together, and put it away for a day or two and hope that fixes it……. Did I mention I’m a software engineer?

Only a one year guarantee, So another lesson: by electronics through George Henry Lee (John Lewis) they give you an extra year on things like camcorders and 5 years on TV’s. And they are usually quite competitive on electronics.

the manual troubleshooting does help though.

There is No Picture
The camcorder is not getting power, or some other malfunction exists.

gee thanks.

Time to dig out the precision screw drivers, if I had a working video camera I would video this bit for you.

Our luck with video cameras continues, it would appear that our JVC GD-20EK video camera has given up the ghost after two years of very little use. Making it two cameras in three years.

Poor Camera (JVC)

Now admittedly I dropped the first one from a great height onto a concrete floor, to be fair this was a Sony, and it still worked afterwards, it just had an annoying rattle, which for a camera with only a built in microphone is annoying. So after finding out that the cost to fix a 250 camera was 190 we got a new one.

The second time we scoured high and low, and with our 250 budget we got the JVC still with a built in microphone, at the time we looked everywhere and couldn’t get a external mic for 250, in hinsight we should have streached because the JVC has had a slight motor noise on the microphone from day one, very annoying. Also the JVC wasn’t built as well as the Sony, now admitiy the Sony was Digital-8 and the JVC is MiniDV so the Sony was a bulkier beast, but still you can tell the quality difference in cameras.

better (but broken) Sony

Well now, the JVC has gone cranky after no ill treatment, it now just has a black screen and doesn’t pick up any picture through the lens, the screen is working because it plays back, and does all the menus. I even recorded, and just got a black screen with sound. It was working at Christmas, we took around 30mins of daisy opening pressies, and that’s all on the tape but when I picket it up of the high ’safe’ shelf it’s been on since Christmas day it won’t do anything. naff naff JVC camera.

So it’s only two years old, I’m going to check for guarantees, if it doesn’t have one, I’m going to attack it with a screw driver, there is a very good camera repair shop in town, but as he said when I took the Sony camera in, modern electronics are so small, its’ almost as cheap to just buy a new one, then repair it.

I’m not mad keen to buy a new one, if we do it won’t be a JVC; infact the experiences with this camera, (considering was a comparable price to a Sony so you don’t pay much of a premium for the name), was no where near as well built as the Sony, may mean that I will never buy JVC electronics.

and it will have an external microphone, if there is one lesson from all this, it’s get a camera with MicIn!