I could hear them talking about me when I put out some food for the birds this morning.

“Oh, look, it’s the nice man, the one, who always brings food”, chirped the chaffinch and flapped her eyelashes.

“Regular as clockwork. He is a very nice man, he is”, confirmed the collared dove, who had moved down south from Yorkshire, and the sparrow gang broke, as usual, into ritual excitement.

“But can you trust him? I mean, really trust?”, pondered the woodpecker, pecked another piece from the fat feeder and flew off. Not that woodpeckers fly. They wobble. Their mode of movement is a kind of hop with subsequent slow descend, only in the air.

Gives you a warm heart, doesn’t it? Not too bold then to assume that the birds would show a little gratitude and if not that, then at least familiarity. With the colder weather gripping Britain, as the newspapers like to put it, I wanted to write a post about feeding the birds. When the sun came out briefly, I grabbed my camera, the seriously heavy tele lens and some extra bird food. The idea was to obtain a close-up of a bird on a feeder, which would be illustration for my blog post. Preferably a rare bird.

Out I went, put down the bird food, put myself and my camera in an inconspicuous location and waited. Five minutes, ten, fifteen, then I was beginning to feel the cold. Did the birds put in an appearance? Oh yes, to look at me. From a distance. Would they go on any of the feeders? Oh no. Would they sit still just long enough for me to focus? Of course not. A man with bird food – great. A man without bird food – not great but okay. A man with a camera – mass panic.

The wildlife suffers particularly badly in the cold weather. Food is not plentiful at this time of year, which means that finding the little food there is requires extra energy, as does keeping warm. Extra energy requires extra food, which is not plentiful at this time of year …

If you have an outdoor space, however small or large, whether in town or in the country, please show sympathy for the birds. It is easy to do, does not take long and is not expensive. Buy a little wild bird food at your local garden centre or a few fat feeders. You will be rewarded with visits and beautiful vocal performances from these exquisite creatures; so long as you do not get out your camera, that is.

Do not forget that birds need water, too. If you do not already have a birdbath, put out some flat dishes – the larger variety of the saucers that go under plant pots are ideal – and fill them with water. Remember to remove the ice (water freezes even during the day) and refill with water.

If we want to go on living on this planet, we have to care for our environment and the wildlife.

Click on the photograph to see it bigger.

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I love occasions that mark the course of a year and enable me to re-connect with nature. These waymarks in the cycle of a year give life a different and perhaps more relevant rhythm. The solstices and the equinoxes are tremendously attractive to me, as are other significant times, such as Hallowtide, May Day and – today – Candlemas. They all occur when one season is either at its peak or about to turn into the next. They are celebrations of what is and promises of what is to come.

The beautiful sounding Candlemas is a Christian festival that is celebrated on 2 February – its origins differ from its current meaning. Christianity has taken many nature-based events, renamed them, moved them slightly and given them a different denotation. The pre-Christian Feast of Lights is a pre-spring celebration, which fell on 1 February. Blazing torches were carried through the streets (1) and across the fields to purify them and to prepare for new life (2).

The Feast of Lights – how appropriate for a photographer. To me, this time of the year means that winter is over but he will not give up the reins to the maidens of spring without a fight. In the past, the weather on Candlemas Day was said to be a forecast for the year ahead:

If Candlemas Day be fair and bright
Winter will have another flight.

If Candlemas Day be shower and rain
Winter is gone and will not come again.

In the US, our European Candlemas has become Groundhog Day, when the groundhog is said to emerge from his winter hibernation. If he sees his shadow on the ground (compare above, “fair and bright”), he will return to his burrow and winter will last six more weeks. If he does not see his shadow, then spring is about to arrive. (2)

In Austria and Southern Germany, Lichtmess (Candlemas) was in the past the day when farm labourers were paid – for a year; in arrears. Changes in employment for the year ahead were sealed with a handshake, also on Candlemas Day.

Finally, in pagan tradition, Imbolc is celebrated on 1 or 2 February and has similar meanings that refer to the impatiently awaited arrival of spring.

Looking out of the window as I am writing this on the morning of Candlemas Day, it looks as if winter were to stay with us for another six weeks.

Bibliography
(1) Hole, Christina (1976) A Dictionary of British Folk Customs, Hutchinson & Co Ltd
(2) Jones, Alison (1995) Dictionary of World Folklore, Larousse plc

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Elga is not the girl in the photograph at the top. Elga is an acronym for an integrated health information system that the Austrian government is planning to introduce.

Elga is an acronym for an integrated health information system planned by the Austrian government. Click on the picture to see it bigger.

The Austrian doctors’ professional organisation (similar to the BMA in Britain) is opposed to the plans. They argue that the vast amount of money would be better spent on actual healthcare. The costly – to the tune of 23 billion Euros, they say – failure of a similar system in Britain is mentioned in an advert that was running in all daily newspapers when I last visited.

The advert shows a naked, middle-aged woman. She is not glamorous, she is not retouched and she wears the signs of ageing proudly – a wrinkle here, a bit of saggy skin there. She makes us feel good about our own bodies, which are equally imperfect. The notion of perfection is of course redundant and only exists in the minds of the cosmetics producers and the fashion houses. The image visualises a common Austrian and German expression. Literally translated “something that costs your last shirt”, meaning that you could lose everything.

In the same week I came across a Viennese district magazine, very similar in purpose to the magazines that local councils in Britain send to every household in their areas. Page one of this particular issue featured a prize draw for an erotic wall calendar – see image above.

Can you imagine in Britain a naked, middle-aged woman prominently displayed in the Guardian or the Independent or the Times? Can you imagine an image of a young woman clad only in stockings and gloves in the Wiltshire, Oxford or Hackney Council magazine? Neither can I.

This photograph was not accepted as an advert in a local magazine because it was deemed not family friendly. Click on the photograph to see it bigger. Photograph by Wolf Kettler.

I once had an advert declined by the publishers of a local magazine because they felt that the photograph that I wanted to use was not family friendly. The photograph was of a fully clothed young woman. I am glad to say that I did get my way in the end but I never found out why this photograph was so offensive.

What is it, I wonder, that makes opinions in Britain so hostile towards the naked body? The British are not prudish per se. At least I think they are not, although I have to admit to finding it strange that nudity in this country is always seen as something devilish, funny or embarrassing, never normal.

Does nudity not play a natural part in everybody’s life? Are we living in a morally oppressive society that is obsessed with what is considered proper at any one time? Or perhaps the enjoyment of the naked human body is seen as something morally improper and therefore intolerable.

We are born naked and we were created by people, who were presumably naked at the time – both of them, in the same room and at the same time. How shocking!

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Let’s talk about trains. I am not pondering on the British government’s go-ahead for a high speed railway or that it will only connect a very small number of cities with London. I am not considering why the project will be funded publicly when future profits will presumably go into the private operators’ coffers. I am not stating my bemusement at the fact that in fourteen years’ time we will have trains that only reach the same speeds that certain trains in Europe already achieve or exceed today.

No, let’s talk about the convenience of public transport and let’s call it public even though it is no longer public. The hop on-hop off concept is alluring, except that in Britain we are being discouraged from using public transport in such a chaotic, disorderly way. We are being punished if we board a train without a ticket and this is effectively a punishment for using public transport. Of course, we have long become accustomed to the fact that train tickets bought on the day of the journey are substantially more expensive than those bought in advance. There is no good reason for this practice, apart from what they call optimising profits from a “public” service.

In a perverse way, though, the restrictions make sense: If the train operators do not allow passengers to purchase tickets on the trains, they can do away with attendants completely. It is a variation on the cheap-cheap-cheap theme, which has been plaguing us for years. We can get cheap but we cannot get service or quality, which ultimately means that cheap becomes very expensive for the consumer but is very profitable for the providers.

Perhaps it is all a historical inevitability. Rail travel first became big in Britain and yet today we have one of the worst rail networks in Europe. Or take workers’ rights and working conditions. Karl Marx started his movement out of Britain and yet today working conditions, working hours and pay must be among the worst in Europe.

Other countries take a different approach to rail travel. They encourage passengers to use public transport by making the act of purchasing a ticket easy and flexible. When I visited Austria recently, a small ad in a newspaper caught my eye. It read “Buy your tickets on the train without the premium”. Now there is an idea.

British train operators should see this as a lesson in customer service.

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I could not quite believe what I read in the FAQ on a fellow photographer’s website. The photographer answered the not unreasonable question how long clients’ photographs would be kept in a conundrum of technical excuses along the lines of “oh, everything is so difficult with digital images and we will run out of space sooner or later, so we will chuck out your photos and if you want something from two years ago, tough”.

Personally, I aim to keep all my work indefinitely. I think it is good service to do so. True, clients do not often come back for reprints after lengthy periods but it happens and in any case, a lack of disk space is no good reason to throw out my work. If you want in twenty years’ time and perhaps as a retirement present a life size print of that nude portrait that we will make next month, I want to be able to help.

The other photographer’s statement about the difficulties in storing digital images was bewildering. Technology is supposed to make life easier for us. If you run out of space, you just add another hard disk or replace the current one with a larger version. This is where my new Drobo says “hello, pleased to meet you” and my heart says “I am off now”.

Simply put, a Drobo (short for the company name Data Robotics) is a sleek little cabinet that houses a number of hard disks and groups them together so that the computer and its user see them all as one huge drive. At the risk of making myself look old, I have used computers that ran on one floppy disk, I remember when hard disk drives were first fitted in personal computers and a time when a 20 GB hard disk was magical. Now and with the help of my Drobo, I can store an unimaginably large quantity of photographs or, should I wish to pursue another career at some point in the future, run the financial affairs of a small country.

The Drobo is not a unique concept. There are many products from various manufacturers, such as LaCie, Certon and Western Digital, that do the same – group disks together to make one large drive and store everything in duplicate. If a disk fails, replace it with a new one and everything is rebuilt automatically. Run out of space and add another disk or replace it with a larger one. Technologically though and, as it turns out strictly on paper, the Drobo has advantages over its competitors, all to do with mixing drives of different sizes and rebuild procedures in case of disaster in the form of incompetent assistants, fire, earthquakes or a cup of tea that has found its way to where it should never have gone. Not to mention the vengeful ex, who is intent on destroying your life’s work.

The Drobo has also some disadvantages, which are serious enough to make the rivals look like a lifeboat crew when you are about to drown out at sea. Annoyingly, but not surprisingly, the manufacturer keeps quiet about the less lovable characteristics. After all, if you knew about the product’s faults, you would not buy it, would you?

The energy saving Sleep feature

Computers putting themselves to sleep after a while of inactivity is standard these days. Great for your electricity bill, probably great for the computer’s life span and great for the environment. Unfortunately, when my Drobo goes to sleep, he is not inclined to wake up again easily, no matter how much I tickle him under his chin. (Yes, it’s a he and not an it.)

I remember the first time my Drobo went to sleep as if it were yesterday. Granted, it was only last month. He should have woken up and stood to attention, ready for action, in the same way as the rest of the system. Alas, there was no gentle whirring of a hard disk, no sparkle of a light, not even a flicker of an eyelid. There was not a grain of doubt in my mind: My Drobo was seriously ill, possibly struck down with a rare disorder.

When I said “my Drobo is always so sleepy. He does not want to wake up” to the Drobo support people, they suggested trying this, trying that and trying the other, none of which made any difference. He would perform whilst awake but if I let him go to sleep, he would sink into deep unconsciousness.

“Is my Drobo suffering from narcolepsy?” I asked after nearly a month and wondered whether I should feed him amphetamines.

“No, it’s not that”, the friendly support person reassured me. “It is a known issue. There is nothing you can do except unplug and re-plug it every time.”

Unplug and re-plug? Some technical solutions have a distinct stone age charm. It took them nearly a month to let me in on the secret. A month, during which I spent hours trying, well, this and that and the other.

The Drobo people told me that they were “hoping to resolve soon”, which of course means that there might be a fix next month, next year or never. I believe that this is what is called not good enough.

I should know better but I could not help myself and voiced my disappointment on twitter – and received a prompt reprimand from somebody, who claims to be the Senior Director of some department or other at Drobo. On his twitter account he says that Drobo is “the coolest storage on the planet”. If it worked as it should I would agree.

“Please enlighten me .. what Drobo functions do not work”, he demanded.

So I did, enlighten him, that is, and this was the end of our brief encounter. I expect that he did not want to be enlightened in so much detail and I have to face up to the fact that I was a mere fling to him; a one-tweet stand.

Data restoration

One of the attractions of a drive like the Drobo is the ease, with which data can be rebuilt in case of something really bad happening. As it is composed of a number of disks and the data is stored in clever duplicate on another, if one disk fails, you can simply swap it for a new one and the drive rebuilds the data automatically. If you are of a paranoid persuasion, you can have it keep three copies, including the original.

I met a fellow Drobo user on twitter, who told me that the rebuild procedure in case of a hard disk failure seemed to take a rather long time. He was in the process of rebuilding 2.5 TB of data and the process had been running for eight days (!) already. Estimated time to completion: 15 days. When he raised the subject of long rebuild times with Drobo support, he was apparently told that “some of our customers are waiting for weeks”.

Backup

Whilst my Drobo should be a pretty safe method of storage, it still needs backing up. For day-to-day operations, the RAID concept with its automatic second copy is good enough for me. Periodically, however, I like to have a full, extra backup of everything. Ideally, this backup should be kept off-site.

When I first installed my Drobo, I needed a quick way of testing it and decided to run a backup using the Windows Backup tool. After that, nothing worked. Drobo support told me that their drives are incompatible with Windows Backup. Not a big deal because I had never intended to use Windows Backup. I was lucky because I had not yet transferred large amounts of data onto my Drobo. Lucky, because I was told to reformat it and set it back to virgin condition. I do not blame the people at Data Robotics for the incompatibility but they could have prevented the situation if they had mentioned it in their documentation.

Did I mention the backup programme Acronis True Image from a different manufacturer, which is one that is recommended by Drobo? It works a treat except that it has disabled the built-in card readers on my PC. Also a known issue, about which the manufacturer keeps quiet. I have yet to hear back from them but I think that I already know the answer.

Conclusions

Manufacturers of computer equipment and software have the annoying habit of assuming that everything that is wrong with their products is the result of their customers’ awkwardness and that every customer is overjoyed to spend hours troubleshooting the manufacturers’ mistakes. Oh yes, these people are very generous with your time!

Just because I use a computer does not mean that the manufacturers can expect me to be an expert with enough time on my hands to sort out their shortcomings. My car manufacturer does not expect me to be a mechanic.

I would be in favour of legislation that requires manufacturers to state any known technical issues and incompatibilities clearly, in plain language and in poster size print before you can buy their products.

I love the concept of the Drobo and I do run my fingers across the slick chassis once or twice a day (he is ever so handsome to look at), to which he will usually respond by saying “I am sorry, it’s not my fault”.

“Yes, it is”, I reply firmly.

The rest is routine. Drobo sheds a tear or two, goes to sleep and I gently unplug and re-plug to wake him. Then we make up and the world is a happy place until the next time he gets sleepy.

I would love to love my Drobo but as things stand, I can’t.

Updates

To present a fair picture, I will post updates until the sleep issue has been resolved:

18 Jan 12: Met a fellow photographer on twitter, who had to replace an existing 2 TB hard disk with a 3 TB disk because he was running out of space. Initial estimate for the rebuild was 31 hours but he estimates this process to be completed within about 26 hours – a much more reasonable time frame than the 15 days I had come across before.

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Quicken 2004 and Windows 7 are not natural bed fellows. Here is how to make them work together:

1. Before you install Quicken 2004 on a Windows 7 machine, right click on the start.exe file on the original Quicken installation CD and select the compatibility tab under properties. Tick “run in compatibility mode” (Windows XP SP3) and “run as an administrator”.

2. Double-click start.exe to install Quicken. Do not (!) allow it to open the programme at the end.

3. Manually copy the files mfc70.dll, msvcr70.dll and msvcp70.dll from your old installation to the new programme folder.

4. In the new installation on your hard disk, right-click the file “qw.exe” and select the compatibility tab. Tick the two items from step 1.

That’s it. As always, the procedure has worked for me – use it at your own risk.

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I would like to thank all my clients for their patronage during this outgoing year and wish everybody a restful festive season and much happiness in 2012. Let love warm your life, light brighten your mind and peace guide your way.

Wolf Kettler Photographer will be closed for the holidays from 22 December and re-open for business on Monday, 9 January 2012.

My website incl. the blog will of course be fully active during the holidays. If you need to get in touch, please telephone and leave a message or send an e-mail [contact]. I cannot promise an instant answer but I will respond. You can also still buy gift vouchers through the website.

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Gordon Strong, the author of America Gets It, photographed by Wolf Kettler. Click on the picture to see it bigger.

About a month ago I had the pleasure of meeting and photographing the writer Gordon Strong at the 11.11.11 event at Stanton Drew.

Gordon has just published his latest novel, America Gets It, and it is now available on Amazon. A tale of sex, drugs and egg rolls kicks off when Theo Banks, who handles the security for the pope’s visit to New York, unearths a tsunami of terrorist threats. Every wacko from Nebraska to New Jersey lines up in Times Square for a showdown.

Read more and buy the book on Amazon
Visit Gordon Strong’s website

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When I launched Microsoft Outlook soon after installing the LabelWriter, I was presented with an error message stating Outlook has serious problems with the Business Contact Manager (BCM) and asking whether I wanted to disable BCM. I said no because this is where all my client data lives and I had no idea whether I would lose any if I re-enabled it later.

Outlook then tried to start up regardless for a few seconds before putting itself to sleep.

The problem was obviously caused by my recent Dymo LabelWriter 450 installation. The Dymo setup programme installs various plug-ins for Microsoft Office applications. The Dymo add-in seems to be incompatible with MS Outlook Business Contact Manager.

There are various complicated procedures on the Internet on how to resolve this problem. After all, you cannot disable the Dymo plug-in in Outlook if Outlook refuses to start.

Here is a simpler procedure:

1. In the Dymo programme (version 8 at the time of writing this), click on Address Book > Address Source and select Use Dymo Address Book.
2. Shut down the Dymo programme and unplug the LabelWriter from the electricity (it does not have an on/off switch).
3. Start up Windows Explorer and search for “DymoOutlookAddin” (without the quotation marks) in your PC’s ‘Program Files’ folder. You need to search for “all files and folders”. You should see 19 or so files listed. Delete them all.
4. Close your search results and Windows Explorer.
5. Start up Microsoft Outlook. You will get the same error message – do not disable BCM. Outlook will continue to load.
6. In Outlook, go to Tools > Trust Center and click on Add-ins. You should see “Dymo LabelWriter Addin” listed under Inactive Application Add-ins.
7. Select “COM Add-ins” from the box at the bottom of that screen and click Go.
8. In the resulting list box, select the Dymo add-in and click on remove, then click on OK.
9. Done.

This procedure worked for me using a PC with Windows XP Professional SP3, Microsoft 2007 SP2 and Business Contact Manager.

Of course this means that you cannot use Outlook as the address book for the LabelWriter. Unless you are planning some serious mass mailings, this should not be too much of a problem. The convenience of not having to load sheets of labels into your printer will make up for the lack in functionality.

If you are following my steps, you are doing so at your own risk, of course.

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A TAC Scorpion mixing console, sometimes also called a mixing desk. Click on the photograph to see it bigger.

I took this photograph earlier today when I visited the studios of Ginger Productions, the company of Mr Fantasy Radio; not to photograph anything or anybody but for a chat and a coffee. What a beautiful piece of equipment and by that I mean proper equipment with switches, buttons and knobs. The mixing console, that is, not its charismatic owner.

Friends and readers of my blog will know that I was interviewed by Fantasy Radio last month. It was this exciting experience and listening to the radio almost all day every day that made me a big fan of the concept of local radio.

I had known about the recent developments for some days but was not sure whether I was allowed to spill the news: Fantasy Radio, the local radio station for Devizes in Wiltshire, England, has been awarded a full time broadcast licence by Ofcom, the industry regulator. Up until now Fantasy Radio held only a licence to broadcast for 28 days twice a year.

Fantasy Radio are planning to be back on air full time in early 2012.

More about Fantasy Radio on this blog

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