On 9th September 2015 my Mother would have turned 116 had she lived to this time. But also on this day Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will become the longest reigning sovereign of the United Kingdom, by surpassing the length of reign of Queen Victoria. The exact moment of the day this will happen is not known as the precise time Queen Victoria ascended the throne is not known for certain. Perhaps the exact moment will happen on 10th September in Australian time, but one thing is certain: the Queen is already the Commonwealth of Australia’s longest serving Head of State.
The featured image for this post as seen on the left was taken by David Secombe, who was working as a stills photographer for the BBC during the filming of the documentary Elizabeth R in 1991. Over the course of eight months Mr Secombe, son of the late comedian Sir Harry, documented the Queen’s working life in pictures for a BBC book and for publicity for the series. The photo and several others by Mr Secombe appeared in this article in The Telegraph of London this week. I bought a VHS tape of the series and the book when they were released.
The video below is from The Times a few days before the event and I downloaded the file to my computer. The video starts with a photo showing the coffin of the Queen’s father, King George VI, draped with the Royal Standard, and continues with photos taken every year during her reign from 1952 to the present year, It runs for 3 mins 18 secs
Hi John,
I did notice your Mum’s birth-date coming up whilst updating your family tree (which is more like a few big forests now) … but you beat me to the punch in your anticipated Post on QE’s long service achievement!
I got an “Error loading this resource” message when I tried to play the video in Chrome … not sure if it’s my ol’ veedub PC setup or something with the link?
Cheers, Ralph
Hi Ralph,
Thanks for your comments. They are very welcome.
I’m sorry the video was a problem for you, but I wondered if it be an issue, as it was a 720p HD video with a 62MB file that had to downstream in only 3 mins 18 secs. I have now replaced that video with a copy I rendered myself in Vegas Movie Studio in a format better suited to general internet streaming.
As you probably know, YouTube overcomes this issue by allowing viewers to select a setting that works with their setup, ranging from 144p to 1080p HD. Unfortunately, according to what I’ve read, the popularity this year of Netflix, Stan, Presto and other TV on-demand streaming networks is slowing down some ISP services, mine included.
Thanks for your feedback. It is both appreciated and very helpful.
Regards,
John
Thanks John,
That video was well worth the wait. Sorry to put you to some extra effort on my part … my first attempt tonight only got to the 7 second mark before I got the same error message but a “reload” of the Chrome browser page got everything playing as it should (well with the usual stutters on my ol’ veedub PC … new one by end October, I hope!?).
Have saved all the other new videos from jthonline.com for later playing on my new PC as this ol’ bus will not handle anything “HD” at all … so that’s something(s) to look forward to.
Thanks for the heads-up on streaming dragging down general ISP performance (hadn’t heard that aspect before). I am ‘distressed’ by all the talk that music CD’s are as good as dead as just about everyone downloads iTunes files etc. these days. AND, worse still, DVDs are just about heading for the same death due to video streaming platforms.
As I completely failed to believe the rumours of the death of the 360kb/1.2mb 5.25″ floppy media (still have a few hundred blanks if you know anyone who want ’em) with the advent of the “pocket-sized” 3.5″ diskette … I am loathe to stick my neck out again to discount such increasingly loud viewpoints. Now it is as much as I can bear to accept that there is no place in my new PC configuration for a 3.5″ floppy drive … so I have to review all my ’00s of diskettes before I get rid of my ‘ol PC. Urrrrrrrgh!
Keep up the good work, Ralph
Hi Ralph,
Thanks for your comments. But I wouldn’t be too sure your download speed issues are the fault of your old computer or will improve when you get your new one. I think some of the problems are with WordPress and as well, perhaps I’ve added too many images and audio files. Also, while the embedded videos are just a few lines of text behind the scenes, they are links to other sites. I hope to improve things not only for the viewer but for myself – the WordPress admin is on the server and I have to use a browser to create pages and posts, etc. So when I go from one part of the admin to another, the browser has to download a new page each time. It has been painfully slow lately. In the worst case I might eventually have too look at replacing the theme I have been using this year. Perhaps it’s too complex for WordPress to handle, both for the admin at my end and for viewers – bearing in mind that none of the posts and pages exist as HTML pages, like the JTHonline pages do. The WordPress pages shown in a browser are HTML pages, but they are created by your browser on the fly as needed from a maze of PHP and CSS files and a MySQL database on the server. The theme I’m using greatly adds to that complexity.
Regarding your floppy disks, I was at a Harvey Norman store today and asked whether they sold USB external floppy drives and the young lady told me NO! She recommended that you copy the content of all your floppies to an external flash drive or other drive before you dispose of your old computer.
Regards,
John
Thanks John for that last bit of advice about floppies … somehow I missed your reply message until today.
Never mind, by the time I actually buy a new computer … all data will be obsolete and we will all be using ESP instead!?
Sighhhhhh, Ralph
P.S. I only have old IE8 to use, apart from an old ver. of Chrome, but in IE8 our ‘user icon’ pics are distorted virtically (for what its worth).
Hi Ralph,
With old browsers, I wonder if there is content you don’t get to see and don’t even realise is there. I’m thinking particularly of HTML5 features.
A sigh from me too,
John
P.P.S. our ‘user icon’ pics are not distorted vertically in Chrome. Cheers, Ralph