Hello All,

Just a short note to offer considerable apologies to everyone who has posted topics over the last couple of months and not had any response from me.

I'm in france at the moment, and although I managed to bring out a laptop and install a French ISP account, it's a dial-up job from a very rural location with a lousy 900B/sec (yes Bytes) - 1.2kB/sec connection speed.

As you will appreciate, I practically fall asleep waiting for the IHC homepage to load even let alone see any photo's, so it's difficult to pass helpfull comments along.

What it has brought home to me (having the luxury of a reasonable broadband connection in the UK) are the problems almost certainly suffered by visitors to the site who are in a similar situation - using a poor to mediocre dial up account.

If you aren't using IHC to host your photo's and using your own website etc, could you please please help us all to help you, by keeping your images to around 100Kb or less, or better still, small file size clickable thumbnail images so that an individual can select just those images they wish to peruse rather than several megabytes of images all dumped on one page.

Big images on a dial up take an age to load and costs the user on a pay per minute basis, so if that page doesn't load fairly quickly, people walk away (including me I'm sorry to say).

Apologies for the lack of brevity in this message, but it's an important point I'm raising if you would like help.

Best regards to all, and hopefully will be amongst you all again next week from a BB connection.

John Woolsey (France).

Been wondering what had happened to you, appréciez vos vacances

Merci beaucoup Terry, actually I'm looking forward to getting back to the UK for a rest, no such thing as 'les vacances' where we've been for the last 12 weeks.......... but hopefully there will be next year!

I did manage to restore a mid C19th longcase clock movement for a neighbour for kicks though, I may just post piccies of it, quite a spectacular result on that little job ....... and it helped keep me away from the Pineau!

Best regards
John

Hi John

Listening to you & Terry talk makes me want to come over for a vacation, have always wanted to go over but other than the service in Germany I have never made it.

Tom

You know Tom, talking about vacations, most folks here are so laid back anyway they're horizontal most of the time - and not alcohol induced either.
As for me, I'm dubbed 'The Grafter' by our neighbours because I haven't learned the trick of relaxing and falling into the 2 hour luch break routine yet.

If you like peace and quiet, bird song and blindingly clear light that makes you want to paint what you see, you'd love this department!
We drive maybe 8 kilometres each way into town and see maybe three or four cars on the way, and hear maybe half a dozen cars at most passing the house on an average day.

Just the place to restore clocks and watches totally undisturbed!

Then we get back to the moving car park that the UK has become!
Must admit that at £1.20 GBP per litre for gas now, traffic has actually reduced a tad.

Nice to have broadband back again though!

Best regards

John.