not working – mercuryvapour.co.uk

If only I could travel back in time 20 years

I wish I had a time machine. there’s only one thing that’s starting to come to light now, and to be perfectly honest, I’m the only person who probably knows about it. As you know, I’m a music lover. I’m done with trawling the charity shops for good CDs though. Now I trawl the charity shops for obscure CDs.

You know the type. A local band, usually consisting of a few ex-school friends or work colleagues. They get together and form a band. They record some tracks, they burn a few copies, print out a lovely case, and even stick a fancy paper label on there using one of the many, many CD labelling kits around at the time. They give some to their mates, maybe give some away at gigs when they do something at their local pub.

They eventually drift apart, and the bands get forgotten about. These burned CDs occasionally end up in charity shops, and I happily hoover them up. I’ve found some absolute pearlers of songs amongst them, some of which I intend to go through and document here in the future.

Anyway, that’s a story for another post. What I’m writing about here is that a lot of these CDs are now sadly unplayable.

Remember a few lines above where I mentioned that the bands / individuals will stick labels on the disks to make them look nice? Well, it seems those lovely labels are robbing future listeners of the opportunity to hear their music.

I, thankfully, haven’t found too many examples of this over time, but I know I’m going to find more, and it means that some songs are lost forever. No matter how small a band is or however long they’ve lasted, if they liked their music enough to put it onto record it, put it on a CDR and distribute it to a few people, then it simply deserves to be listened to by future generations… or, me.

Anyway, this all came about several years ago. I found a CD in a charity shop. It was a home-burned one, meaning it was all inkjet printed. They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but you can certainly do this with CDs. I wanted to hear this.

The CD had one of those Inkjet label maker things on it. They were in every staionery store throughought the land in the 2000s. I put the CD in, attempted to rip it, and “nothing”. Or rather, It did eventually rip, but my CD drive sounded like it was having a nervous breakdown, and must have took an hour. I attempted to play it, but the sound was completely garbled. If you loaded it into Audacity, you could see the shape of a song there, but zoom in and the whole thing resembled a square wave. I tried this particular disc on many CD players. It was able to recognise it as a CD (the table of contents is stored in a very small area, only a few bytes at the beginning of the disc) but playing any of the tracks was a complete failure.

This CD was by a band called “Beckett”, and for all I know, this could have been the only copy ever produced, and now it’s gone for good. There are plenty of bands out there with the same name, but none of them appear to have the same tracklisting as what this CD contained.

Anyway, Last Saturday, I was in a charity shop, and picked up this.

It’s called “What’s In A Box” by a band called “Serving Suggestion”, released in 2002. It was 99p, and factory sealed. Enough for me to take a punt on it. Fast forward 8 days, I rip the cellophane off. I hope the image above just shows how pristine this thing was. Also, note that there’s none of your inkjet muck here. The case was professionally designed and printed.

The actual design of the case is clever. The disk was printed like a pizza…

Lift the CD out, and the underside of the inlay had a greasy mark printed, where the CD sat. It actually gave me a giggle.

I slapped the CD in, expecting to be greeted with some South African early 2000s indie tunes. After a minute or so, I got nothing. I took the CD out and examined it. From the naked eye, it looks absolutely pristine, after never being played before…

Ignore the dust, my phone loves picking up stuff like that. After a quick wipe, there was nay a mark to be seen, but I couldn’t be arsed reuploading the photo.

I turned the disk over, and realised that yes, this bloody disk had a paper label. It wasn’t apparent at first, as this was a nicely presented CD, but the scientific method of trying to lift it with my nail proved once and for all at this was, indded a paper label…

And, if you view the data portion in just the right light, you can see the issue… the bit where the data is stored has taken on a leapord-skin appearance, and is no longer a uniform shade.

It’s especially prominent to the left of the image, with that leapord-skin blotching. You can see where the lighter data section clearly had dark blobs on it. I can only assume that, over time, the glue on the label has reacted with either the dye on the disk, or the foil layer, or a combination of both. It’s sort-of like a “modern day” equivalent of the CD Bronzing fiasco that happened in the late 80s / early 90s. I don’t expect for this post to actually resonate with anyone, but I know there will be millions of people out there that will have used these CD labels and have precious memories stored on CDRs. Maybe it’s time to download the data from them before they all rot.

EDIT: I did try this disc on another machine, with different software,in the vain hope it’ll make any difference. Unfortunately, it didn’t. I’ll probably end up just binning this CD, but all is not lost. I’ve scanned all of the artwork in, and there’s a Discogs entry for this particular disc, and the artwork isn;t very good, so I’ll replace mine with that one. the case will go on to replace a damaged case.

A sad death to report.

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.

Goodbye my trusty friend…

Oh, I can’t believe this has just happened. In fact, I have a little lump in my throat as I type this, but I have broken my trusty little Acer camera, which has been the stalwart of my photography since winter 2006. Over those 4 years, it’s not been far from my pocket, capturing the entirety of my trips to Edinburgh, Paris and Berlin over those past 4 years, along with many thousands of other images which have resided mainly on my flickr account since then.It’s even seen uses in situations where my main camera is a bit too bulky to carry around

Unfortunately, as quickly as it came into my life, and filled it full of wonderment, it exited, and has already left a gaping hole. I was taking some random photos earlier, mainly of a delicious curry I’d made, complete with incredibly undercooked chillies, when the batteries ran out. “Gah”, I thought as the lens retracted, and the power went off.

I slapped it in my trouser pocket, and proceeded to take the charger upstairs with me. As I bent over, to plug it in, I heard a shuddering crack. Knowing that there was only one thing my pocket, except for my keys, I knew something had gone horribly, horribly wrong.

And, indeed it had. My faithful little Acer, had, for some reason, switched itself back on and the lens had fully extended while in my pocket. I’d say that I’d accidentally switched it on with my massive penis, but these jeans are quite thick and the “on” button is quite small, meaning that any accidental button pushing with my enormous phallus is highly unlikely.

I removed it from my pocket to find the lens jammed in partially, After switching it off and back on, the lens motor sounded particularly unhealthy, and the lens got stuck halfway. I was presented with a “lens error”, and the camera switched itself off.

I’ve enjoyed using it, and have put it through probably more than it was designed for. The case is scratched to hell and back. The lens cover itself would occasionally get stuck when opening, The screen’s cracked, and there’s dirt on the sensor, as shown here…

The dirt is that little dark patch on the left, in case you didn’t know, or are thick. As can be seen in that photo, however, is that even after that amount of time, it still takes a good picture.

The batteries are on charge, so hopefully after a small amount of charge, it’ll be good to go again. It’ll be a sad day when it finally enters that little bit of drawer space in the sky.