No.18 - 16th January 2008

Webmaster letters previously published on DTELS.Org
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Steven Cole
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Joined: Mon Dec 06, 2004 5:41 pm
Location: Exmouth, Devon, UK
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No.18 - 16th January 2008

Post by Steven Cole »

It?s a New Year!
Goodbye old year, welcome the new. One of the problems of being an engineer is that you often squirrel items on the off-chance that they might come in handy one day, or that you might get round to repairing them. As the years go on, I now find there is a greater chance of them just gathering dust. So, I?m now having a New Year clearout! This has extended to some serious housekeeping on the computer, pruning all those unwanted files, folders, archives and programs that just clutter the disk and slug the performance. During the last five years of using a digital camera, the reality is that my hard drive now has around 20GB?s worth of irreplaceable as well as junk files. Although I have long backed up to a second drive, MTBF?s and a common PSU still make this a vulnerable approach, so I have now taken action to purchase a standalone USB hard drive, which can be kept away from the computer. I guess I am not alone in this respect!

January Update
There is quite a bit of reading material this month and my thanks particularly go to Brian Hill for sending in his H&S and TVP articles that appear in Personal Recollections and the informative article covering the work of the Mountain Rescue Service. The latter is another reminder that this was one of the many other emergency service organisations which the Directorate supported during its existence.

Thanks also go to Roy Hodgkinson for two further items relating to Billinge and recruitment in 1957, and to Fred Cornish for his Personal Memories and pictures of a snow bound winter in Cranbrook Region during 1986/87. They very much took me back to the days when I was based at West Mercia and Inverness when having to contend with deep drifts, treacherous driving conditions and long walks to get to the sites.

On a different note, I have made changes to the index pages in About DTELS, Post DTELS and Personal Recollections. I hope this helps you to more easily find the topics in those sections.

Personal Recollections
I am really grateful to those of you who have already written in with articles. Please do continue to send in your personal memories and add them to the growing library, they make interesting and informative reading. As previously mentioned topics can range from funny, sad, informative, perhaps detaining the work of a specialist group, time spent in central maintenance, field services or working on past projects. If writing your thoughts in a MS Word type document or email is not practical, how about an audio recording on a cassette tape or ideally .mp3 or .wav format?

and finally...
Please keep spreading the word about the site, there is a definite increase in the number of visitors month on month as more people become aware of its existence. Thanks to all those who continue to write to me. Please keep visiting this site and I look forward to chatting with you again in Mid-February.

Regards

Steven....
16th January 2008
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