August 12th. 2010 Alan Sargeant

Written by Alan Sargeant, 63 year old retired from Banbury, Oxfordshire

TIMES GONE BY “Diary for a day"

I woke at 8 AM. I do not set the alarm unless I have to be up early The weather today is a bit rainy so no work in the garden I went downstairs made a cup of “decaf” coffee and took my tablets. Back upstairs in bed I drank my coffee and listened to the news and the “Today” program as I have done since it was the BBC Home Service As usual I became irritated at the inability of some broadcasters to distinguish between the first word in the English language and the first letter in the alphabet “At” without the T not “May” without the M. Talking to oneself is the first sign of madness !!

After a shower, shave and a light breakfast I started my daily work at about 9.45 on one of my projects.”The Cropredy Historical Records” The aim of the project is to put all the old files onto Compact Discs as PDF files so that they can be read on a computer. To do this I use two computers to check that the scan of each page can be read clearly and that the contents agree with the index which is a separate file. The software used is Adobe Acrobat PDF , Photoshop CS3 and Microsoft word.

After an hour on the Cropredy project I started work on my German-English technical dictionary. For over 20 years I worked for a German company and I have a great many glossaries and documents, from the time when I was a translator, which I want to put onto CDs. So I work on them for an hour each day The pages are scanned using OCR software, the text is converted to tables which are then sorted alphabetically according to the language. This took me until 12 mid-day I made myself a light lunch and afterwards paid my usual Thursday visit to Tesco I bought the Radio Times and the Banbury Guardian and a few necessaries. I am not keen on the new smaller format of the Banbury Guardian.

Returning home at 2.30 I started the ironing and played a few old video tapes to see if they were fit to put onto DVD., At about 4 pm I went upstairs to work on the “Images of Banbury” project which I had neglected for a couple of weeks. The idea of the project is to make digital images of any slide, negative or photo of Banbury so that future generations have them on CD as a photographic archive Every image has its own record sheet and all the record sheets are in one big Adobe PDF file which can be easily searched. One member of the Times Gone By group had given me 69 images so I worked on those for a couple of hours until tea time.

After tea I wrote a letter to a contributor who had furnished me with a lot of information about a photo he had seen at the Banbury History fair. In the evening I studied the handbook for the machine I had just bought with the idea of putting any of the old video tapes, which were suitable, onto DVD. I finished by watching a programme about the Galaxy C5 giant transport aircraft and “The Victorian Pharmacy” Today I don’t think I spoke to anyone, which is not unusual I Tidied up the kitchen and went to bed at 11.