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[JF]

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Recently my wife has been suffering from hot flushes. I swear I'll never
make jokes about them again because they're not funny. She wakes up,
thrashing and sweating and can't get to sleep again. So she reads,
eventually does fall asleep and I have to disentangle her from her
reading glasses, cover her up because she kicks everything off the bed
including our cats, Dylan and Thomas, and turn off her light. This
usually wakes her up again. Reading to her worked but that stopped me
from me reading my books.

In exasperation I bought her a Creative Zen I-plod thingy. A gizmo about
the size of bar of soap containing a 20 gigabyte hard disc. I dumped
into this all the serials and book readings I could copy from the BBC's
BBC7 'listen again' website. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc7/listenagain).

Fifty-year old Paul Temple serials; Hercule Poirot serials with the
incomparable John Lomax as M. Poirot (whose voice David Suchet copied);
book readings by Nigel Anthony and Martin Jarvis; all twenty hour-long
episodes of the Barchester Chronicles; ninety minute plays, Bert Coule's
Sherlock Holmes adaptations, and so on.

Bugger me, it worked. Her first listening was Stephen Thorne reading
"The Kraken Wakes". Twenty 30 minute episodes. She never did manage to
hear a complete episode in one go. Martin Jarvis's readings of the
Discworld series have turned her and the cats into Terry Pratchett fans,
and she's reliving all the Jennings adventures.

The downside is that when I ordered the I-plod from Amazon, I rather
foolishly imagined that copying files to the Zen was simply a matter of
plugging it into a USB port on the front of the pooter and the OS would
go 'blink!' and the Zen would be recognised as an additional drive.
That's how everything else works including my camera. I reckoned without
Creative's ability to turn simple operations into dog's dinners. The Zen
came with its software on a CD-ROM. Megabytes of the stuff and the end
result was a file handling inter-face of the most unbelievable
complexity and was incredibly difficult to use. It was about as
user-friendly as a cornered rat. Luckily someone suggested a website
with the improbable name 'red chair' which provides a tiny driver so
that the Zen behaves normally as an additional drive. Quite why Creative
created their quite horrible and needlessly complicated software is
beyond me.

I've borrowed the I-Plod on occasions. The ability of readers such as
Nigel Anthony and Martin Javis is remarkable. After a while one thinks
one is listening to a play.

As a footnote, I caught up with Charlton Heston's Walt Whitman readings
of over twenty years ago in which I was involved but missed when they
were first broadcast. Another story there! His reading of The Great
Gatsby is well-worth hearing. What a talent!

--
James Follett

[Blue Hornet]

Charles Riggs wrote:

[Sara Lorimer]

JF <jf@NOSPAMmarage.demon.co.uk> wrote:

[JF]

In message <1h5rzh7.1dby3kl1pz1gteN%que.sara.saraDELETE@gmail.com>, Sara
Lorimer <que.sara.saraDELETE@gmail.com> writes

[Sara Lorimer]

JF <jf@NOSPAMmarage.demon.co.uk> wrote: