Happy birthday to what must be Sir Clive,s’ greatest invention, the ZX Spectrum. Originally rubber-keyed and with 16K of memory (I’ve written longer blog posts!), the Speccy went on to be one of the largest selling computers during the 1980s, and to a lesser extent, the 1990s.

But, you already knew that, and as Glen suggested on Farcebook, I should write a bog about it. I’ll base it around my own memory, and quite an extensive one at that.

I remember Daddykins coming in from work with a huge box under his arm. It was meant to be for my upcoming 5th birthday, but seeing as I’d already seen it, I was given it early. Imagine my excitement. I was fascinated by Ceefax (RIP) at such an early age, and to be able to have my very own computer at that age was a dream come true. It was probably this, that made my parents get me the computer. I’d received it with a load of “educational” games such as ‘Learn to Read III’, “Alphabet Games”, “Magnets”, “Make a Chip” and a number of other games. I could probably name them all, but I’d be here all day, and I’m going to the pub in a few hours, that’s not going to happen.

The first game that was bought for it, came on the same night we’d received it. It was a simple, turn based strategy game called “Viking Raiders“. Daddykins had picked it up from the local newsagents. Imagine that, buying a game the same time you buy a paper…

I’[m amazed at such an early age, how much I taught myself about programming, entirely subconsciously. There’d be many times I’d press the Break key and alter games to make them easier. One of these was the afore-mentioned “Alphabet Games”. If you altered one of the lines which conained the graphics of the mouse character and placed it with a load of nonsensical gibberish, you could score a whole load of points more than what you were supposed to. This game also became the first time I had ever experienced tape-tangle. Cassette tapes were never the sturdiest of media, and obviously I know that now, but the noises it made when it went funny, and the sight of loose tape everywhere scarred me for a good few months. I remember having to get Daddykins to load my tapes because I was scared I’d break it again. I’m happy to report that the game still worked, and I’d like to know if it still works, except I have no idea where my tapes are.

Next up on the “games bought” list was a compilation… “They Sold a Million“, with Sabre Wulf, Beach HEad, Daley Thompson’s Decathlon and Jet Set Willy. Each of them classic games in their own right. Only two of the games worked properly. Beach Head suffered from bad mastering which meant the Speccy rarely picked up the signal on the tape, and Sabre Wulf suffered some tape damage, though this was several years into owning it. One of my last Speccy memories involve actually fixing the tape and getting it to play only once.

Of course, it wasn’t long after owning the machine that Daddykins started getting interested in it too. He would often spend a night or so using it to type in program listings from magazines. He also knew friends with Spectrums, and lots of games, therefore our collection of C15s was started.

The permanent home was in the kitchen. It started off on a little white B+W TV, (you know the type if you were a child of the 80s), eventually, the TV was upgraded to a portable colour Saisho variant. This was where Ispent many happy days during my childhood…

Of course, my time with the spectrum was not all fun and games. At some point, during 1987 / 1988, I’d discovered the brilliant colour effects you could get if you pulled the joystick port out of the back while the system was on. I wanted to show this to one of my friends at the time, William. He came over, and I said “Watch this!”.. On went the system, out went the joystick port, flash went the funky colours. He seemed stunningly unimpressed, yet I enjoyed the light show. I’d do what I did many times, and unplug the Speccy to reset it. I did this, and…. garbage. Instead of getting the familair RAM test (black bars, red lines), all I got was yellow garbage on the screen… another power cycle, another set of garbage. I could have cried. In fact I probably did. I was good at crying back then, as Chad often points out on here.

What was I going to do without my beloved computer? Thankfully, Chad’s parents step in and offer my parents their old Commodore 16 while my Speccy was away for repair. Around the same time, Chad also received a Spectrum 128K. It was the superior version of the 48K I had, but with an extra toast rack on the side. I’ve always wanted to own one of those particular machines, but as they were as rare as rocking horse shite (his was the only one I ever saw “in the flesh” for want of a better phrase) I suppose I never will. This meant that the rest of my childhood were spent playing Soccer Boss with his brother, Scott, and receiving dodgy C90s filled with the latest games which I’d never be able to afford, and being mocked by Chad because the cassette tapes I used stunk of cheese. No, they really did.

So, it’s 2012, 30 years ago today, people would have been queuing up to get their hands on Mr. Sinclair’s rubbery offerings. 30 years on, I’m proud to still be a Speccy owner, and although I don’t use my Spectrum anymore, I still have it, and will never part with it. Unfortunately, too many Spectrums will have met the same fate as this one…

Here’s to you, Clive Sinclair, and of course Daddykins, who also shares his birthday with the mahine. Happy birthday Dad!

Bah, I’ve been blogging for less than 24 hours, and I’m already swinging the scythe around. Thankfully, this isn’t the death of an actual person / animal / cellular structure, more an inanimate object. An inanimate object that I loved very much. I’m sad to announce the death of my big Canon camera, or rather the lens that came with it. It met a sad demise at 11AM yesterday morning when it lost a fight with the landing floor.

Annoyingly I was in the middle of preparing for my first proper photoshoot with it. I’d arranged with Gary F, Jamie S and Andy D, to take some photos of the vintage car rally that is brought to Hartlepool every year or so. For many years, I’d wanted to go for many years but unfortunately, other commitments (usually work) stopped me from attending. This year, I obviously didn’t have that to worry about, which meant I had the ideal opportunity to go and point the camera at brightly colured, shiny vehicles.

The morning started out a logistical nightmare to begin with. Jamie S’s car is off the road. Gary was coming to pick me up, but Jamie S also wanted to go. Fair enough. I send a text to arrange the slight change of travel plans.

Text: “Can you pick Jamie S up on the way?”
Reply: “You were meant to send that to Gary, not me”.

Yup. Turns out I’d sent a text to Jamie S, asking to pick himself up. Today was going to be a long day.

So, I go about preparing stuff, dusting down the big camera. Everything was OK. Ship shape, as it were.Gary arrives at the bottom of the long, gravel driveway that leads up to Mercuryvapour Towers. I grab the big camera, and on my way out of the door I think “oooh, I’ll take the little camera too”. I dash upstairs and realise I already had it, it was in my pocket. Gah, wasted trip. On my way out of the SLABJL office, Gary rings me, and in the juggle between answering phone and swinging unweildy camera bag about, the camera leaves the bag, and hits the carpeted, yet still hard, landing floor. “Whoops”, I thought, but the camera has survived harder falls than this. I bundle the whole lot back into the bag, and head off to the car rally. I switch on the camera. It doesn’t “sound” right. And it didn’t automatically focus either. Instead, it would judder around for a bit, the focus would attempt to fix itself, failing miserably. Sigh, the lens was dead. I lugged the camera around with me for the whole 2 hours we were there, knowing I was carrying what I’d class as a “dead relative”. We got back to the car, and I’d take a closer look at my deceased camera.

It wasn’t pretty. I’d tried to zoom in a few times, the lens jammed, I looked through the viewfinder, and was confronted with a broken image, as if part of the glass had shattered. Well, that was that. It was all over… maybe.

I get home, to inspect the damage. The first step was to remove the lens… and something fell out… THIS.

Now, I’m not expecting any help from this blog directly, but I’m a member of a few photography sites which I’ll add this to, in the hope of knowing what its purpose is. All I know is that it fell out. The lens is just the standard stock / kit lens that comes with the EOS 450D. Here’s what the ITPC data has to say about it.

Lens Type Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS

Anyway, something was clearly broken. While the lens was out, I gave the focus / zoom a go. It didn’t jam up. I looked through it, and it appeared to look normal. No broken glass. I took a photo of Daddykins. It worked. Wow. Obviously, my lens was missing a part, yet still “functional”. Or so I thought.

Obviously, I had to try this out a bit more. I’m sure if I’d lost some of my internal connections, I’d act slightly retarted (What, more than usual? – Ed). Shut up. I went out into the back garden, and the results weren’t pretty. The normally “smooth-for-a-kit-lens” auto focus would judder and jolt, rather like a floppy drive hitting a bad sector, the sounds were similar. Your eyes, using the viewfinder might only pick up the centre of the image. It’s not until you view it through the computer that you get the extent of the damage….

.

As my ex-work colleague Spence would say, in his own unique style… “Fuck, shit, piss”. Yup, something was shot. I contacted Andy D and asked if I could try his lens on my camera. I’m pleased to say it passed with flying colours. Or, at least the few shots I’d taken with it appeared to be OK. It means, that the loose part must have came from the lens (unless you know different?) and I’ll have no problems shopping for a new bit of glass.

You’re all swines, every single one of you reading this, right now. Yes, that includes you. You. YOU. Why? Because there’s a good chance you’ve asked me, over the last couple of months, “So, why did you close the blog anyway”? It’s a little hard for me to type about, because it’s something that’s still “ongoing”, however, it involved me having a considerable amount of free time now.

Most of you know the reason I started the blog in the first place. I enjoyed talking about absolutely nothing. Breaking down every little part of my day, from waking up to going to sleep would be documented in minute detail. I found it amazing, both the amount of absolute rubbish I spilled, and the amount of people who actually read it (or at least looked at the photos). Over the past year, I’ve actually been doing stuff. Actual stuff. Going places. Living a life. Blogging took a back seat. Despite the fact I was actually doing stuff that was blogworthy, there was just no time to actually sit at the computer and document it all.

I’ll also be truthful and say that “microblogging” was an influence on my original decision. I could fit into Twitter’s 140 characters what it would normally take 1,000 words and two hours of typing / editing to do. It was realtime too. I could also do it anywhere. In fact, I’d say my phone is what “killed off” the blog in the first place. Imagine being able to tell all your friends, you’re on top of Roseberry Topping, and actually get realtime feedback on this delivered to your phone… I got more satisfaction out of “Xxxx Xxxxxxx likes this”, than a snidey comment from Chad saying how shit my writing is. Some of the times I did document a walk or day out, I’d use foursquare / twitter / facebook or whatever I used, to help me type it up. There was also the flickr photos. It was all too much. I was working 3 days on / 3 days off. It became harder and harder for me to find the time and motivation to sit here and actually type shit that I thought people didn’t read.

Onto the closure. Why DID I stop it in the first place? The first reason was, of course, redundancy. I’m surprised if any of you reading this don’t know my current employment status. Let me just say, it’s not good at all. 45 points (as in P45) to the first person who can explain this complete and utter bollocks to me without referring to using finger puppets and the phrase, “When a Mummy and Daddy love each other very much, they get shafted”.

This was a catalyst, without a doubt. I’m soon to be at the back of the dole queue. If I’m applying for new jobs, I’d hardly want 1,000+ posts available on the interwebs showing my horrid, horrid past.

I knew this was happening in January. I knew I had to start cutting back, and the website was the first thing in the firing line to be culled. Two things led to my decision. The domain was due to expire in March, and my complete and utter lack of afore-mentioned motivation to do anything with the website. Fair enough, the domain was only a tenner for two years, but that’s a night on the piss for me… and by that I mean, a night in front of the computer, with 8 cans of Carling next to me…

Either way, the decision was made for me on the morning of 23rd February. It was just after lunchtime. 12:01PM, Andy The Iridium Fan wanted his images deleting from the gallery.

That was it. The final straw. Andy’s gallery was, by far, the largest part of the site, outstripping the hits on the blog by something like 100-1. Probably because of the amount of dynamic pages it generated. Either way, it was one of the main reasons the site still existed. I didn’t want to kill it, knowing there’s several years of his photos on there, but if he wants them deleted, who am I to argue? Mercuryvapour was now officially a shell. I had no intentions of blogging again, and the gallery was to be no more. There was no point renewing the domain name, and so up went the “Stick a fork in me” posting. I wanted to leave enough time for that posting to be there to allow my “faithful viewers” enough time to read its demise, even if they only check in every couple of weeks or so.

I wrote the post. I pressed “Submit”

I asked a few of my close family and friends what they thought of the closure. I was shocked to find that the majority of feedback was positive, and the word “gutted” sprang up more than a few times. Daddykins gave the strangest reaction. I didn’t know he still read, or cared about the site, but apparently he did, and seemed genuinely devastated at its demise.

The time for domain renewal came. Something AWFUL happened. None of you will care about the reasons, so I’ll italicise the next section, so you can skip it, as it involves webhostingy bollocks… Some time, several years ago when I switched from personal to professional hosting, I’d only just renewed by personal hosting, which I think cost something like £40 a year. I still had 11 months left of personal hosting left, so 34sp, offered to convert the remaining hosting balance to “34spoints”. I agreed, and planned to keep them aside for this very moment.

That meant that I had the domain name for 2 more years for nothing. It meant that if the worst came to the worst, I could host the blog myself. It’d cost me nothing and I’d still be mercuryvapour.co.uk. Suddenly, culling the blog seemed a bad idea.

Right, normal service has been resumed. For those of you still reading, I tried to keep away from it as long as possible. To be fair, it was always going to return from the second I reacquired the domain name. It seems I like typing. Unfortunately, for those of you subscribed to the same mailing lists, newsgroups, and personal emails in general, you’ll notice a sharp increase in the excrement that has spewed from my fingertips over the last few months.

Don’t expect normal service straight away, it’s not going to happen. I’m planning a redesign (by that, I mean downloading a template from somewhere and putting my own images on it) as I’ve had the same template for many years and I want to move on from the past, so expect some downtime. Let me just say that the next few months are either going to be fun, or incredibly depressing. Let’s all guess which one Chad is hoping for.

Look, I’m not back, I just thought I’d post about something I know about. It’s TV theme related, therefore, falls in my mental durastiction (or however it’s spelled) on adding a post on here. It’s too long to mention on facebook, and Twitter would laugh at me if I even attempted anything as lengthy.

The Sky Sports F1 theme is a slightly re-recorded version of “Just Drive” by Alistair Griffin. The original version was available for free on his website after it was used on the closing montage of BBC’s coverage of the 2010 season. the Sky version apparently has a new backing track, and a line re-recorded.. the line “Take it to the edge where I would die a thousand times” replaces dying with living. I’ve not heard it fully, as the first race was 5AM, and I had only half woke up when they played it.

For reference, everybody knows that BBC used “The Chain” by Fleetwood Mac, from their timeless album “Rumours”. ITV, in their short, and disastrous hold of the terrestrial license used “Lift me up” by Moby (alongside Rocket, by Def Leppard for the sponsor advert breaks). I can go back to lurking now.

mercuryvapour.co.uk… November 4th 2000 – February 23rd 2012

The end of an era, and end of an 11-year chapter of my life, which I’ll look back with fondness. Recent turns of events means that I no longer have the means, money or motivation to carry on this site. It’s died the way I never wanted it to. Very few blog posts, probably less hits.

There’s been ups and downs, moments I’ve been proud of, moments I’ve confined to the bit-bucket of time, and long deleted moments where I’ve felt like the biggest arsehole of all time, moments that have shaped my life forever. Relationships have fallen apart because of my warblings on here.

I could go on, I could reel off a credit list as long as your finger. Instead, I’ll say that everything I’ve done on this site was mine. Some of it wasn’t, but those who aren’t mentioned were happy to give their contents to the site, and I shall be forever grateful. If you’ve commented on this site over the years, thank you for taking the time.

I’m not dead, or dying, however (though at the time of typing I think I’m getting a chest infection), and I’ll still be around the normal haunts. Facebook, flickr, email, twitter, you know where to find me. Mercuryvapour will be involved somewhere, but the website, as of now, is a dot. This post, that is all. It’ll sicken me to delete 11 years worth of work, but sod it, it’s over. If I don’t move on now, I never will. It’s probably for the best that the past isn’t on the internet anyway.

Listen to me, tch, wibbling like your average copy of Your Sinclair…