Old Dogs and New Tricks

When I was 19, I was working at the Kentucky Fried Chicken in Aldershot. I see no shame in this position - it was supposed to be a fill in for the summer (my first summer job, and I was 18 when I started), but when I failed to get the requisite grades for the Architectural Engineering course at Leeds Uni, in the absence of any other work, I carried on. Well do I remember the day my mother turned up at work with a copy of the local paper, gleeful because she'd found that the Institute of Aviation Medicine was hiring.

"Ooh!" she crowed, "Working for the government! A job for life!"

She called the number for me, requested the application form, and "assisted" me in filling it out. All I had to do was turn up at the interview and blow their socks off - or be less useless than the other candidates.

Thus it was that at the beginning of December 1982 I started my first "proper" job.

I suspect much has changed in working for the government, not least the assertion that it's a job for life. I believe that there is no such thing in England nowadays. But back in the late 70's/early 80's, not only was it an accepted, but also each department had a budget of money and staff. If the department didn't choose to take up either of these budgets and use them to the last penny/person, then it would be removed as unnecessary for the following year. And thus I was hired - the Psychology department had an Assistant Scientific Officer position available, and regardless of whether they had a need for an Assistant Scientific Officer, they had a NEED for an Assistant Scientific Officer. Or me!

And so, on that December morning I started. I sat in the reception office with the lovely reception ladies, and waited to be claimed. And waited.

3 days later I was still there, and so, when an older gentleman approached me to ask if I was interested in computers, I would have answered "YES!" to pretty much any question. Well, following the gentleman was a bit of an exercise in futility, as he had an old PDP-8 which was programmable on the front panel with switches (I believe there was a punched card system, too). And yes, I do know this is how programming started, and I realise I'd have a very exciting addition to my CV if I'd actually been able to learn any of  this, but that's not how the story goes. Just after he'd reluctantly shown me his domain, I was claimed by Graham (and I'm sorry, I forget his surname), who was just testing out the newest Apple II computers, and had a spare!

That's how the story goes. There was a spare office, a spare computer, and a spare copy of "BASIC programming". I found an old, leather, comfy chair, which I dragged into my office and mended with gaffer tape, and shortly after I arrived there, my new colleague also arrived, a fantastic lady called Marilyn.

It turned out I had a bit of a nose for programming, and started writing programs to do things. Of course I started off with the very basic "Hello World" program, and started to expand it using nested loops, ifs, thens, elses and the like. And I loved it.

I was then claimed by one of the Psychology graduates who was doing her Phd., and wanted to run certain experiments. So I wrote the programs to present the experiments, take in the response via a box I built with buttons, analyse the data and print out the results in a format desirable to my psychologist. Obviously this all took some time, but after I'd put together the initial experiment, I started adding on goodies to make it easier to use. Well, easier for me to use! It got to the point where I could lead my victim into the experiment room, explain what was required, press a button on the computer outside in my lab, and have them complete the entire experiment with no further input from me. I learned to knit that summer, too!

Now, while this is a nice trip down memory lane, I'm sure you're beginning to wonder if there isn't actually a point, and whether I'm ever going to get there. Memory Lane is long and rambling, but it goes to the right place.

One of the things I used to do was write little programs to do various tasks. I always felt that I might spend 30 minutes writing a program to do a task which would take me 30 minutes to complete manually, anyway.  I thought that it didn't matter that it would take the same (and sometimes a little more) time as the manual task, because I'd have a program to complete that task should I ever be asked to do it again. Of course my floppy disks were littered with programs I never used more than once, but I never once thought I'd done the wrong thing, because you never know when it'll come in handy.

While I am no longer programming (at all, not even tinkering with macros in Word or Excel), I still stand by my earlier insistence on writing all those little programs. It was a great way to refine my coding abilities, and gave me a desire to play with computers right from the start.

This leads, in its own, winding way, on to my achievement from last night. I know that to many people what I did was pretty mundane. You see, I've never actually edited video before. Well, there was that time I succeeded in taking 9 seconds off the front of the video so that the downloaded subtitles would work, but that, apparently was easy.

It's Remembrance Day here in the UK today, and the school wanted to have a short length of video someone found on Youtube with The Last Post playing over a selection of stills. So far, so good. I use keepvid.com to save videos (there's no internet in the assembly hall) - what could be easier? You mean apart from the one offending still of a soldier sprawled, dead, across a patch of muddy landscape? Yeah, despite the fact that the whole point of Remembrance Day is to remember what happened back during The Great War, The War to End All Wars, you know sometimes referred to as World War I, we can't show a still of a dead soldier.

While I have trouble with this (and I could rant for hours about how adaptable kids are, and how they can be the most blood thirsty little wretches within mankind, that's NOT the point of today's post), I said I wasn't sure about how to edit video, so the music teacher stepped up to the plate. Well, he volunteered the services of one of his mates, who is, apparently, rather good at that sort of thing. But when my memory stick (with, hopefully, the edited video) hadn't returned by the evening before our Assembly, I started to worry, and decided I'd have a go at it myself.

I've always said I can't edit videos, and I've never tried before. I've consoled myself with the thought that I have no art in my soul, and anything resulting would be a soulless shell of a solution. But the requirements here seemed pretty straightforward - replace picture of soldier "having a nap" in the mud with some other image of WWI, as long as said image doesn't have anyone lying down on the job. This, sadly, put paid to my excuses of lacking any kind of artistic talent, so I resolved to push out the other excuse - I don't know how and I can't be bothered. Or is that two excuses? Anyway, after my earlier faux-pas during the week (and no, I'm not blogging that one, it's still too raw), I need to make some kind of amends in the school.

I fired up Movie Maker (on Windows 7 it's Movie Maker Live). It became apparent that it wasn't going to be simply a case of dragging the image over the offending section and smoothing the transitions, so I set to work in earnest. I worked out that you can put a split in a video, and you can drag an image in where the split had been. But the sound stops, and then starts up again after your new image. OK. I need to record the sound, and put that over the whole lot. You have NO idea how long it took me to get Audacity working to record the audio stream from my own PC! Suffice it to say that at least one reboot was required to get that little part working.

So, audio saved as MP3 - what next. Yep, lay that over the video with the new picture in the middle. Oh, the video still has audio, and at the end of the picture, the audio is noticeably out of sync (and we didn't exactly start completely concurrently, either). Er - Oh, apparently you can turn down the audio on the video clip. Great. Both clips - because remember I've split it in two at this point, and removed a section.

Then I felt that the picture I'd chosen (a totally not-death-reminiscent image of some busy soldiers in the trenches - very palatable) was wrong because it wasn't in the same sort of format as the other b&w pictures. And this is the sad, pathetic part (well, one of many!) - I used Paint to put it onto a nice black background so it had a thick, black border. At least by this time I was becoming familiar with Movie Maker, and was able to replace my picture with my new black-bordered picture.

And so I saved it, copied it onto my own memory stick and published it on Youtube! At 36 seconds you'll find the new picture.

I can't think why I've taken so long to start attempting such editing. After all, I've accomplished many things I had no clue about by using the resources of the internet. I've learned a great deal about linux, an operating system I'd never even used until a few years ago. I'm still a noob, but I've been able to become comfortable using it and installing certain things (although Conky still evades me).

I don't want to be one of those old dogs who can't learn anything new! Next time I come across something I don't know how to do, I'm going to launch in with a whoop of excitement.