The Anonymous Widower

Visual Basic 6 and a Gammy Left Hand

I program in Visual Basic 6 and despite the language being probably ten years old now, it still does what it says on the tin with all versions of Windows and Internet Explorer up to 7 and 8 respectively.

But also because it is such a well defined language and so easy to use, I can effectively run it one-handed, with just a little bit of help from my gammy left hand for Shift and Tab.  I do all the other typing with my right.  But then the sort of things you need to do with the keyboard in most programs, you can do with the mouse.

Despite my two strokes, I can still do everything I need to do!  I’ve even remembered most of the code I’ve written over the years, so at least that part of the brain works, even if the hand doesn’t!

The first new program will be a 2011 version of my Daisy Presentation Browser.  This program does three main things :-

  1. Allows you to set the size of the browser to improve your presentations based on web sites.
  2. Print clean copies of web pages to a pre-defined size or the maximum available on your printer.
  3. Copy the web page in the browser  to the clipboard for pasting into another program.

My heart goes out to the genius who designed Visual Basic 6 in the first place, without whom I would be seriously suicidal!

October 31, 2010 Posted by | Computing | , | Leave a comment

Half an Hour Ahead and Twenty-Five Years Behind

I was listening to BBC Radio 5 this morning in bed and there was a bit of confusion in a report from Australia about the time of the Australia England Rugby League match in Melbourne.

I don’t know whether it’s still as confusing, but when I flew C and myself and C round Australia, we found that each State had different time-zones.

The title of this post, was the answer I got to the question “What time is it in Queensland?”, when I checked out of Alice Springs for my flight to Mount Isa.

We didn’t like Mount Isa, as we were only stopping for fuel and the guy in charge of it was a drunk named Cliff, who was the only objectionable person we met on that four weeks trip to Australia. 

By the way, Mount Isa makes Scunthorpe look like a garden city!

Whilst we’re on the subject of time, all flying is done to UTC or GMT, so a typical flight resulted in some pretty strange times in the log book.

October 31, 2010 Posted by | Transport/Travel | , , | Leave a comment