Re: Nine months today!

jef@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

"Ian" wrote
... it looks as if I have been a non-smoking gentleman for just nine
months...

Well played, old boy! Keep it up!

Oy, less of the old!
No, on second thoughts, and looking at the age number coming up in February,
'old' is unfortunately appropriate. I suppose I'll get used to it in
time, and stop thinking I'm 23.

Can you enlighten me, Ian, as I'm a little unclear about specifics..?
You have difficulty with your vision such that you use a screen reader. What
is the percentage of sight that you have?
None at all, now: the last tiny traces of light perception went West
about five years ago, certainly after I'd arrived here and that was
exactly ten years ago.

Can you see onscreen graphics, or are you limited to just the print that
your text reader will handle?

Text only, and preferably plain ASCII text, though my mail reading
software can display html reasonably well. Other formats are just a
mess of garbage on the screen, code I suppose.

I, too, have visual deficits. I'm essentially a one-eyed person.
The right eye is there, but it's pretty much just for show. Sight is minimal
to non-existent.
Peripheral vision and depth perception are a trial-and-error proposition,
but I see well enough to do most things, and certainly to create and view
onscreen graphics and photos.

Indeed? I didn't know that. I went some ten years with a dead left eye,
it looked normal but the retina was busted, from the pile-up I had in
July 1970.
As I was driving a forklift truck for a living, the loss of depth
perception was serious, and after a couple of months trying to do the
job with one eye, I packed it in. I could do the job, but far slower
than I had been.
I had been greased lightning on that machine!

Do you have (or are you capable of) posting or sending a digital photo of
yourself?
I'm curious (and I'll bet a lot of us are) to see what you look like.
Maybe an old snapshot of you astride a crotch rocket when you were a
dangerous youngster? "Portrait entitled "Rocker On A Norton" or some such
thing...
If the technology's beyond you, but you do have a decent photo, I've been
known to scan photos for people and mail them back, if you'd be comfortable
with that. Ask around. You'll get at least a couple of character references,
here.
Just a little food for thought, eh?

I've probably three photos of me about somewhere. I was never one for
being photographed. But I had someone take some pictures of this house a
few months after it had been built and I'd got everything squared away;
one is me reclining in a rocker recliner at the little ornamental gas
fire in the sitting room, the other is me in the garden chair on the
concrete bit outside the front door.
And there is one of me on the balcony of my cabin on the Diamond
Princess, leaning nonchalantly on the rail,
with a Hawaiian port as background.
The ship photographer took it, for a shocking high cost.
And - oh horrors! - in all three I have a cigarette smouldering in my
left hand!
There used to be one of me in my twenties, sitting on the Norton,
facing the camera, but it was taken from too far away so I am just a
tiny black-clad figure. You can't even see the facial details.
I have no way of transmitting pictures or anything else but text
messages (I'm living in the Dark ages in the computer department!)
but I did send the liner picture to the chap in Wales who is doing these
Black Book of Horror stories series, to scan and send on to another
guy who is doing a nonfiction book about the Pan Book of Horror so he
can include it in that book, along with pictures of the other authors he
has got in touch with.
So I could maybe ask him to send you the image, if he still has it; I
know he has the photograph because he said he would have to get a frame
for it, which i thought was flattering.

We'll sort out some way of getting it to you.
--
Ian.
Ft Worth, TX

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