[WelMac] Introducing... Me

[John Crook]

Hi all

My name is John Crook.  You will be pleased to know that I am a human 
and not a spam robot.

Many of you will know me as I have been a member of Welmac and WAUG 
before it for about 20 years.

Mostly I've been pretty busy with my work which takes me all around the 
world (last year London, Jordan and the US), so I haven't really had 
the time to get into the mailing list.  I hope however that things are 
easing up a bit and look forward to helping others based on my 
experiences as well as being able to get help with my problems.

I have 3 Macs:

(1)  a G4 desktop 500MHz (the AGP graphics model)
(2)  a PowerBook G4 1Ghz
(3) an iBook (the dual USB "icebook" with a G3 processor)

The latter two machines travel with me so that I have backup of files 
and processing capability for my work.  Primarily the PowerBook is my 
office, and the iBook is my personal machine for photography, and 
genealogy.  I run my business accounts and archiving on the desktop.

I am a very keen amateur photographer and I've been into digital 
photography pretty much from the beginning of digital cameras.  I'm 
currently onto my third and fourth digital cameras.  My main camera is 
a Sony DSC F828 (8megapixels) and I also have a Canon IXUS 
(2megapixels) which is about the size of a pack of cigarettes that I 
use for a slip-in-the-pocket go-anywhere camera. Photoshop is my main 
tool for working on the pictures.

I also do a bit of video dabbling. My video camera is an analog 
machine, but being Hi8 I can get high-quality pictures out of it.  I 
use an external analog to digital converter to get my video into my 
Macs for processing with iMovie.  I haven't gone into the high-end 
stuff for video at the moment as I don't do enough to warrant the 
expense.  I'm quite pleased with the results I can get with this 
set-up.

I'm very interested in broadband developments (in London I can get 
8Mb/s DSL with 256k upload rate and unlimited use for about NZD27.00 
per month.)  I'm using a VOIP telephony service from Vonage (UK).  This 
costs me NZD25.00 per month. An ordinary telephone plugs into a special 
router on my network and allows me to receive calls to my London number 
and make free calls to any landline in the UK and to any Vonage user 
anywhere in the world.  Calls to other countries are at attractive 
rates (US 2p/min  NZ 4p/min).  Lots of nice features that you you don't 
get on an ordinary phone.  And the real delight is that when I brought 
the router with me to NZ, I found that it works just as well here. 
(calls to my London number ring in my study in Lower Hutt).

Anyway, that's enough rambling.  I look forward to sharing in the 
discussions on the list.

All the best

John