Hi Bottleneck,
I dont recall seeing any PM from you - but then I only have space for 50 PM's and my box is normally always full. I'll be the first to admit that I'm the worst when it comes to having to write anything. I have a truly terrible hard time to be able to express my thoughts into words - then forget being able to spell them.
Its been a constant hardship and has effected me since my very first school days. Now with Internet being so entrenched in our daily lives, not being able to express ones thoughts into word or even spell them becomes so debilitating.
I hated to attend school as I was at the very bottom of my class (not being able to read or write), yet I remember building a crude B/W television from an old Russian Mini CRT I found sticking out of a skip in Streatham high street the summer before I attended secondary school it had no AFC and kept drifting off station as it warmed up, would loose Sync on "Dark" pictures (No PLL to keep its timebase going when it briefly lost Sync) - yet it worked... I learnt a lot about driving a CRT that summer I really learnt about televisions. I still remember the White Dot that would remain in the centre of its screen once it was switched off for a few minutes like a fading star
.
Yet still I was considered "Stupid". I was really a classic case of a Child who thought very differently, and really did not fit within the standard teaching model and desperately needed special education. What I cannot understand is how you can have a child who before secondary school had self thought himself to build his own two way radios, televisions, computers & robots etc yet could not read nor write well and yet nobody stopped for a moment to think that it was just a little odd?
My school years still haunt me today - I can truly say they where the darkest days of my life a real shame really, as I often hear how our "childhood years" are when we where free and happy....
I remember my great "Break" in learning to spell (and thus read) came when I built a speech synthesizer for my ZX81 using the GE SPO256 speech IC, during the evenings of my first year of secondary school - it was a "phonetic" based speech system - which I had to "split words into sounds - thus I learnt my basic spelling skills by programming this Speech synthesizer to speak. Even today I only "read and spell" by recognizing words rather then being able to break a word into "phonetics" to spell it out.
When I encounter a "new word" I dont recognise, then by reading the first few and last letters I understand its basic sound and then by understanding its context within the sentence I can guess the word
Im still that bad
Really, its very hard for me to write Pls. take this into consideration if I dont answer, I have over 1200 unopened E-mails in my folder
I atleast try to keep my input here on this forum "up to date"...
John
