No particular subject, though I enjoy painting local landscapes and battlescapes. The former may be made on location or from photographs. The latter are based on Napoleonic scenes, are highly derivative, and are done purely for my own pleasure. I'm still very much a learner, too. I don't do as much as I'd like to, unfortunately, partly as a consequence of an extreme sensitivity to cold/damp due to my disability, and partly due to not having a decent camera! The scans are faulty, to say the least, with distinct shadowing due to my scanner being somewhat smaller than the paper size I prefer.
Watercolour Painting With Jane
Lene's Gallery "The Nature Gallery"
Watercolours from the Netherlands
Jenny has a great passion for Cross Stitch, particularly fantasy works, such as unicorns and dragons. She has completed many designs, with some truly spectacular results and I'll be putting up a gallery of her work as soon as possible! Naturally, she feels that there isn't enough time to do all that she wants to, but then that's part of Life, I guess. She also does "Scoubies" now and is venturing into stamping and card making. Jenny also knits and can do tapestry and rug making. Despite all this, she maintains that she is untalented!
My Craft CDs!
I love science fiction and fantasy in particular, though I do branch out into other subjects. I have a passion for Julian May's Saga of the Pliocene Exiles and her associated books. I also enjoy Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe books, H. Beam Piper's Gunpowder God, some of Anne McCaffrey's works, E. E. Doc Smith's Lensmen series, many of Michael Moorcock's fantasies, Ray Bradbury's short stories, and many others. I also enjoy reading books about the Napoleonic Era, which has led me to fully appreciate the fact that history is, indeed, written by the victors! In recent times, I've become hooked on the works of Alexander Kent, about 18th/19th Century maritime warfare. I tend to dislike many "fashionable" works, or those which tend to be overly concerned with "rules" or "breaking rules".
Jenny is also an avid reader, with a love of Anne McCaffrey's and David Eddings' books,
I don't do a lot of this, now, after a long lay-off to raise a family. I used to write heroic fantasy, mostly short stories, though I did also write a fantasy based on our real world. Most of my writing now tends to be fragmentary, but I hope to eventually rediscover the knack. Oddly, I hate writing seriously on computer, and much prefer an old fashioned typewriter!
I enjoy programming, or attempting to, anyway, though I'm now severely out of practice!! I hark back to a Sinclair ZX81 (yes, the one with a wobbly RAM-pack that used to load programs - written in BASIC - from a cassette) and the days of DOS. Windows was only just putting in an appearance when I lost contact with the world of computing. Then, I used DBase and Turbo Pascal 5.5. I've played around with TP again but tried to figure out the mysteries of Delphi, XBasic, and IBasic. I never could get a handle on C/C+. Of course, learning is not easy with my memory problems, and a lack of money! However, I've now discovered a language that really rocks: Rapid-Q Basic by William Yu. Unfortunately, Mr. Yu is now employed on REAL Basic, which is (again!) very expensive and beyond my reach. However, despite the fact that the author is no longer developing Rapid-Q, it enjoys considerable support worldwide and the various forums can provide some real help (as I've discovered) for everyone from newbies like me to the most experienced and technically knowledgeable programmers. If you want to learn programming, I would strongly advise gettinig hold of Rapid-Q! I'm hoping to look into JustBasic, created by the producers of LibertyBasic, when time permits!
A program that I've written in Turbo Pascal for American Football fans:
This might sound very odd, but I actually enjoy simply exploring software packages. That's how I've built up an array of packages that can actually serve usefully! The vast majority of the software I use is freeware or free-to-use. For imaging and artwork, I haven't found anything much better than The GIMP, though Version 2 is still lacking some useful features that were available in earlier versions. For music/sound/video, WinAmp is, of course, very well suited and so flexible (thanks to third-party add-ons) that it is difficult to see it being superseded as the most popular freeware music package, though you might like to give MusicMatch Jukebox a look, andAudacity is the best sound/music editor I've found!
