For those of you who may be curious to know about the person behind jtonline, here is a little bit of info.  My name is Julian (aka Jules), I am a heterosexual male and I was born in June 1966.  My family consists of mum & dad, two older brothers and an older sister.

A few hours after my birth, I was taken into hospital for an operation, having been diagnosed as having spina bifida.  Spina bifida means ‘split spine’. The backbone usually provides a protective tube of bones with the nerves (spinal cord) running down the middle.  In spina bifida, the bones do not close round the spinal cord and the nerves can bulge out on the unborn baby’s back and become damaged.

I’m fortunate in that I basically have some dexterity problems and no paralysis.  For more info., check out http://www.asbah.org  ASBAH is the leading UK registered charity providing information and advice about spina bifida and hydrocephalus to individuals, families and carers.

My family and I moved from Surrey to North Yorkshire in the 1970’s.  After leaving comprehensive school, I worked for Austin Reed, then Harry Hall, followed by a few years training at York ITeC, which led to a job with the CLA.  In 1988 I moved to a village in rural Herefordshire with my parents, and in May of that year I got a job with an IBM business partner and worked my way up to Administration Manager.  In 2003 I moved a further 20 miles or so and bought myself a two bedroom flat.  A year later I changed career and obtained my current position as a Customer Associate with a leading U.K. electrical retailer.

I’ve been surfing the Web on and off since April 1997.  I became Virgin Net’s first voluntary Discussions Forum Moderator in July ‘98 and continued that until March ‘02 - I then ran my own forums for a while.  I have published various versions of the jtonline.info website over the years, and a couple of sites for local businesses in my spare time.

My interests include tropical freshwater fishkeeping, my Seat Ibiza, computers & the Internet, gadgets,  photography (although I’d like to be better at it), watching TV & listening to a variety of music.

I recently bought myself a PVR (a digital Freeview box with an inbuilt hard disk drive) it’s a Humax PVR-9200T (Duovisio)

The loft aerial system needs a little attention because I can’t always get a signal on a couple of the Freeview multiplexes, but the box itself is pretty good.  There are some nice features that have changed the way I watch and record TV programmes…

Twin tuners so I can record two programmes simultaneously and watch a third;
Time shifted recording - pause, rewind etc a live programme;
Easy to use on-screen displays, to name but a few.

Minor gripes are that, out of standby, the 160GB hard disk causes a bit of a rumbling noise in the box, and this noise is exaggerated by the fact that the vibration is picked up by the wooden shelf in my TV cabinet which then acts as a kind of soundbox.  Careful placement of some felt pads under the feet of the Humax box and also between the shelf and it’s support pins seems to have fixed that little issue now.  The other thing is the fact that the EPG is slow to populate with programme details and every time you put the box into standby mode it forgets everything in the EPG.

There are some interesting articles on the box in the forums at Hummy.org.uk