I have just spent the better part of the day trying to get rid of two old software products from my PC. I find that "upgrade from version x to version y" actually means "install version y alongside version x" which then means a lot of problems when you try to uninstall the older version, particularly if the install / repair / uninstall information goes missing somewhere along the line. I tried all sorts of ways around the problem but in the end used the FIHACOCASA method (F*ck It...Have Another Cup Of Coffee And Start Again). Coffee is truly amazing stuff when you have it in strength and quantity, isn't it? It's like a sugar rush but without the diabetic problems that I would suffer. I save sugar for the absolute last resort when I need a huge surge of energy and I don't mind the consequences. Coffee on the other hand, makes my pupils narrow to pin pricks and my extremities shake; it makes me sweat and just jop with nervous energy. I learned to love it whilst revising for my GCE examinations almost forty years ago. It's when I am in the throes of a caffeine binge that ideas for doing things crop up the most. I am not saying that they are good ideas. In some cases they are particularly bad ideas but they are ideas at least. There is nothing worse than just sitting there, thumb in bum, brain in neutral when you need to be taking some course of action! So I have sat here delving through the guts of my machine, stripping out registry values and cleaning up after these two older versions of products with a large cafetiere of hot coffee by my side for most of the day. My PC is clean now but... and it is a big but... my caffeine levels are so high that I am unlikely to want to sleep tonight. I suppose that I could try another substance to bring me down to ground level again... alcohol... but I am not sure what a system full of coffee topped off with a gutfull of ethanol is going to do to me - apart from make me want to dash to the loo and empty my bladder every five to ten minutes. If anyone out there can give me any hints on how to nullify the effects of lots of real coffee then I would be most grateful. Now if you will excuse me, I need to top up the caffeine levels again. I will leave you with a Pixar short that played alongside Disney's film "Brave" earlier this summer. La Luna. Hurricane Sandy is hitting the USA as I type, poor devils. Unfortunately, whenever a storm of that intensity hits America, it has a habit of travelling across the Atlantic, weakening as it goes and eventually giving the good old United Kingdom a bit of bad weather too. That's why I decided to go out fungi spotting once again today. It was a glorious, sunny day and just right for a foray into the woods at Nymans. The only problem with nice weather is that it tends to bring lots of people out. Normally that isn't so bad but at the moment it is half term holiday for the local schools which means that Nymans runs special events for parents and kids. Again, I don't have a lot of problems with that but today the world was full of screaming, wailing, grizzling and shouting brats. It doesn't seem to worry their parents who seem to want to talk on their mobile phones all the time but for me who likes a bit of peace and quiet it is painful. Still, once in the woods, I could leave the beaten track and find some yummy fungi to shoot and leave the little horrors to do their own thing (including dropping sweet and crisp bags - do their parents not care about littering?); except that today was different. Wherever I disappeared to there seemed to be some noisy, noisome and nosey brat intent on trampling what I wanted to photograph. I found a particularly scrumptious looking Stagshorn behind a stand of branches. Occasionally I would pop up to stretch my legs because kneeling down in damp loam and leaf mould at my age is asking for stiff knees later on in the day. As I bobbed up at one point, I scared the life out of one pack of disgusting brats which instantly turned me into an evil doing, kiddy fiddler as far as their parents were concerned. Hell's teeth, you would have thought that I was Jimmy Savile reincarnated given some of the comments being made. There's another thing. If someone leaves the main path and squats down behind a bush, don't you naturally assume that they have been caught short and need to go to the toilet? Doesn't that mean that you should try to ignore it and summon your children, dogs , aged grandparents or whomsoever and guide them to somewhere else so that the poor unfortunate can relieve themselves in peace? Certainly not. Not if these pitiful excuses for parents were anything to go by. So not only was I pretending to be Jimmy Savile, I was obviously exposing my nether regions to the little darlings as well. One lady got most huffy and didn't even calm down when I showed her my camera gear and the object of my desire, a delicate fairy ring champignon fungus. I am surprised that nobody ran back to the main garden office and reported my deviant activities. It doesn't matter because I managed to get some smashing fungi pics again and the disgusting little "darlings" will be back at school before the main crop of fungi comes out next week and with luck the brats and I will never meet again - except in their nightmares! Right. Time to go and cook... mushrooms aren't on the menu...
Perhaps it is just me and maybe it is because my Father-in-law is being denied his prostate cancer drugs but I when I read this article this morning I started to see red. Actually, it might only be a pink tinge around my peripheral vision but it can only be the start of worse things to come for the elderly and the terminally ill. Having scanned the article linked to above a couple of times, I decided to check out details of the Liverpool Care Pathway and see for myself. At first sight it seems to be a reasonable idea that is meant to help afford the terminally ill the support and grace that they deserve in their final days. Reading between the lines I am not so sure. Following the link to the Daily Mail's article made me even more unsure. I realize that the Daily Mail cannot be said to be the bastion of untainted press releases but it does rather make one think, doesn't it? If health care trusts, many of whom are in financial straits, are being offered cash payments to pass the terminally ill onto a sure pathway to death rather than giving them the drugs that they meed to prolong their lives then surely that is tantamount to making euthanasia legal by the back door. Whilst I can appreciate that for some terminally ill patients, this may be the way that they want to shuffle off this mortal coil, for many others it won't be. Predicting the point at which someone is guaranteed to die is about as exact a science as predicting the weather and we all know just how wrong the Met Office can be at times, don't we? As I say, it may be because my dear old Father-in-law has had his drugs withheld that I am getting a bit hot under the collar but I don't want to see doctors being given the power of life and death just for financial reasons. It would rather stop their objectivity, do you not think? It would certainly make a mockery of their Hippocratic oath. I wouldn't want to have my diabetic drugs withdrawn just because of some financial gain. Where would doctors stop? "I'm sorry Mrs Snodgrass but we are going to withhold your child's whooping cough vaccine because I don't think that they are strong enough to last the winter" wouldn't go down too well, would it? I must admit that when my time comes to leave this world of pain and sorrow, I would rather be helped along than not, but that doesn't mean that I want to be treated like some sort of "30% off everything this week" special offer. I don't want to be part of the "knock one off for fifty quid and we'll throw in another terminally ill patient for free". If you want to get rid of me then a bottle of Scotch and a large container of sleeping tablets will do me nicely. Either that or a few quids worth of overdose of anaesthetic like we do to our beloved pets when they fall too ill to cure. Grant me the dignity to go that way rather than condemning me to die of pain, thirst, hunger and pneumonia in some dank hospital corridor and all for some thirty pieces of silver. Today is a fasting day again - they certainly come around quickly! To take my mind off food and to make full use of the extra hour brought about by the clock change, we went for a decidedly muddy walk around the woods at Nymans looking for fungi. There isn't a bewildering array of them just yet but some of the more delicate varieties are popping up on rotting tree stumps. So with a large mug of steaming coffee in hand (Mexican this time), I am going to leave you with a few pictures that I took this morning and a nice bit of music to watch them by. ![]() Don't bother. I don't want one. It has been a day of nothing and everything. For instance, to comply with Health and Safety regulations where I am working from home now, I needed to buy a fire extinguisher and install it near my workstation. This meant a trip into town to a local ironmongers. It might just have been my imagination but the local town was filling up with masses of people, milling around and getting underfoot. I couldn't understand why. Yes it is the last weekend in the month but it isn't pay-day for most folks until the middle of next week and if anything next weekend should be the busy one. Then it dawned on me. It's "C" word time again. You know... Christmas. The shops are already starting to blare Christmas music out of their doors and are trying to tempt the punters in with displays of festive things. Look people... it is not even November yet. We haven't had Halloween or Guy Fawkes night. Can we chill out and not refer to the dreaded "C" word until December the first at least? If you start getting the kids excited now, they are going to be hyped up little whinge-bags for another eight weeks until the big day is over. I have a theory that it is the women folk of the world that prolong the agony of Christmas. They are the ones who do the majority of the preparation and shopping for Christmas. They bustle around, inviting family you don't like over to spend the day, preparing huge amounts of food that nobody can eat all of. If it were left to us men folk it would be "Meh! Whatever!" and that would be it. So come on ladies, stop trying to make us all enjoy ourselves when all we want to do is relax and have a beer in the comfort of our own homes without having to entertain and pour gallons of expensive booze and tons of over-rich grub down the throats of people who would probably rather not be there except that one strange Uncle (Jimmy Savile?) who is trying to get as pissed as possible for free and climb into whomsoever's knickers that he thinks he can get into... and grandma who doesn't like the lady of the house because she doesn't bleach her net curtains every day and just can't cook a Brussels sprout to save her life, let alone roast a turkey... we never had turkey in the war, you know... we made do with a black pudding with a pheasant's tail feather stuck in it...as for Christmas cake, do you know what we had? We had eggless, flourless, fruitless cake with no silver sixpences in... OK! That's my gripe over... it's the last that I am going to say about the Yuletide period until December. So what else have we done today? Well, Donna was in one of her "WE can do this" and "WE can do that moods today so I sighed and knuckled down to one or two of the tasks that I have been meaning to get around to. It meant that I didn't get my afternoon nap which might explain why I am a bit grumpy at the moment. Donna was, of course, right. There were things that needed to be done in the garden that required fine weather and whilst it might be bitterly cold at the moment, the sun was shining. I decided that this was the time to replace the felting on the shed roof. It has been showing signs of wear and tear (for 'wear and tear' read "cats trampling over it, tearing holes in it") so I whipped out the relevant tools and set to with a will. I peeled off the old stuff and removed the old nails, got out the roll of new felt and I think that you can guess what happened next. Yes! The heavens opened. Just when I needed a shower the least, I got it in spades. This means that the unprotected, wooden shed roof got a good drenching just before I was due to put the new waterproof layer on. Realising that it was a bit of a lost cause expecting the roof to dry in time before the next deluge, I mopped it off with my old garden coat and put the new felt on and hammered it down firmly. It was a good thing that I did so because the heavens opened again straight after the last nail was driven home. I doubt if the old shed will last more than a few more years but at least it will be dry inside. Somewhere snug for me to hide in when the "C" word gets too much perhaps? A bit of a boring day but there you are, we can't all live exciting lives like Indiana Jones, can we? Now for a video clip. My Mum said that we should watch this wildlife program. Who am I to disagree with my Mum? ![]() Those unread books? I've found a use for them! ...is nothing but a block of wood. I can't remember which famous person said that but it has me cringeing in my boots every time I hear it because... I am guilty! Whilst cataloguing books last night Donna picked up several tomes and prepared for singing out the titles for me to type them into my books database. I was embarrassed to find that several of the titles that she called out were books that I had bought at great expense as reference books and had never read them! The really embarrassing thing was that there were quite a few such books. Most of them were Adobe Photoshop reference books complete with CD (unused!) at the back. These books don't come cheap and quite often they get superseded by improvements in technology but it is a crime not to have even opened them, once they have been brought home. So I took one with me today so that I would be able to peruse it whilst Donna was having her rather unpleasant series of tests done. Brave girl, she put up with it all and as a reward I am going to to treat her to a curry with all the trimmings tonight. After over twenty four hours of starving herself and being purged, she must be ravenous. Following the hospital visit, we drove over to the coffee and tea emporium that I mentioned to you a couple of weeks back where I went berserk and bought umpteen different varieties of coffee (at the moment I am slurping on a huge mug-full of Guatemalan Maragogype Coffee also known as Guatemalan Elephant coffee because of the size of the bean. It is absolutely scrummy and full of flavour). The most expensive one I have is Jamaican Blue Mountain Coffee which works out at eighty pounds sterling per pound weight. It is arguably one of the finest coffees in the world but at that price, I will be keeping it for special occasions (i.e. when no one else but me is around!) After our splurge at the coffee mill we returned home with a short visit to Sissinghurst Castle where we had a picnic and a walk around the gardens and then the journey took us via Royal Tunbridge Wells in the rush hour. Don't ask me why but the GPS had set it's mind on going that way when we could have come down the A272 in a lot less time. The wonders of modern technology. Where was I before getting carried away with coffee and the like? Oh yes. The Adobe Photoshop book I hadn't opened for a few years until today... It was fascinating and chock full of information. This one is definitely a keeper so the charity shops have dipped out of at least one brand new, unread book! Have a great weekend and don't forget that it is clock change weekend and on Saturday night / Sunday morning you will need to put your clocks BACK an hour to Greenwich Mean Time. Lighter mornings and darker evenings coming up! Have a great weekend. ![]() Working From Home? Donna has been at home today. That's not surprising really as she is preparing for a CT scan tomorrow and the consultant wants her to arrive with an empty alimentary canal. So they have asked her to take laxatives which has meant that she needed to be "close to home" - there's no way that she was going to do her daily commute on a tum full of laxatives, believe you me. She was at a bit of a loss for something to do whilst waiting for these drugs to work so she decided to do a Health and Safety Assessment for me, now that I have managed to get this working form home job. This involved all sorts of fun things including an assessment of the area I will work in i.e. my study. She noted that my study chair is slightly defective and asked me to hunt out the receipt so that we can take it back to the store from whence it was purchased and get a replacement. I groaned when she said this. I don't know about you but we have a large filing cabinet, the top drawer of which is where we store receipts and instruction booklets for goods purchased. It is a mini black hole for these items. Anyway, I decided that I would tackle that task whilst she knocked up my Health and Safety documentation. As luck would have it, I managed to find the chair receipt fairly quickly but I decided to take the bull by the horns and get rid of redundant items at the same time. This is to me what cleaning the Augean stables was to Hercules. In his case he diverted a river to do the cleansing; in my case it took time and a document shredder. It was a little treasure trove of history in there. A regular time capsule. There were instruction booklets, receipts and guarantees for pieces of equipment that had long since bitten the dust and had been scrapped and replaced. Disturbingly some of the receipts had faded so that there was no record of what the item was, when it was purchased or for how much. I guess that in future I am going to have to scan receipts and keep a note of them on my PC. anyway, back to the task in hand... There were electricity bills and council rates demands going back over the last twenty years. That gave me a good insight into how much services have increased in price over that time. Then there were the vets bills for treatment for our cats. They were sad to read in places. There was the prescription for the drugs that prolonged Palomides' life but which eventually killed him and there were the bills for each time when the vet had to come out to put our babies to sleep when great age or infirmity had finally claimed them. There were happier times too. One item that I couldn't bring myself to shred was a bill of sale from the Cats Protection League for an eight week old tabby kitten which we had rescued. Poor Fenice. When we first saw her, she had a big bulging stomach, little stick like legs and an even smaller stick like tail but she grew into a fine figure of a cat. Ah happy memories... It took me a long time to do the task, as much as anything because I stopped to read all this history but in the end I had produced a whole bin bag full of shredded documents and had a huge pile of non-sensitive documents to be put into the recycling bin. However, I think that I might need to throw one more instruction booklet out and replace it with another in the next couple of days. Yes. After all of this hard labour the shredder seems to have given up the ghost and I might have to buy a new one. Actually, it might have just overheated so I am letting it cool down overnight and will check it again tomorrow. It doesn't matter which way you look at it, this was a job well done but I am sure that inside a couple of years I will have to do the whole thing again. Deep joy! Swimming pools - a thing of joy or just going to prove how stupid we are as a species? WARNING! STRONG, DEFINITELY NSFW LANGUAGE! ![]() Arr!! Wot be this Aerosmith? Why be moi ears a burnin'? I couldn't settle to any serious programming today. You know how it goes - you just lose it sometimes. If the muse isn't with me then I find that I can't get down to it. So I sat down and decided to make another playlist of oldies to throw into the car for travelling purposes. That is more than creative enough for me and gives me plenty of opportunities for learning new tricks. It starts off with searching for a free copy of a particular song that is rippling through my brain, downloading it and then seeing if anything else comes to mind. Sometimes you strike pay-dirt with your google search and you find a safe website (I use a plugin called WOT for Firefox to help me detect naughty websites - it is also available for Chrome and Internet Explorer) where some kind person has put up a list of tracks just like this little lot here where you can listen to a lot of tracks from 1980 including the one that I wanted originally. The fun bit then is finding out how to save the tracks that you want. If you aren't a Firefox user where you can get an addon to help you then you will have to right click on a track and select "Save target as" or "Save Link As" or whatever method your browser uses and select somewhere to save the file. Sometimes you can't find the track that you want or the variety of websites you are led to are very naughty indeed and want to put malware on your PC. In those rare cases I resort to finding the artist on YouTube and downloading the YouTube video which tends to be safe to do. Then, thanks to the wonders of modern science (and a bit of software that I purchased some time ago) I split the video from the sound, throw the video away and then save the soundtrack as an mp3 file. Learning all about this has been great fun. Once I have a folder full of yummy golden oldies, I virus check the complete folder (yes, I am still paranoid about nasties infecting my PC) and then play the contents to make sure that all is as it says it is, modifying the mp3 properties to what the title of the song and the artist is if something is amiss. If they are all good then I pop it onto a memory stick for the car and make sure that I print a list of the files off so that I have a hardcopy playlist should I need to refer to it - I might have a rapacious maind for trivia but I can't remember everything. How do I do print off the playlist? Well there is a little trick that you can do but it involves going into DOS and knowing the command to print the directory listing contents to a text file which then needs little more than minor editing to make it usable. Ask me if you want to know. It is finding out about these little tricks that I really love. It is the difference between making using a PC easy or difficult. If it is too difficult then people either don't bother to make full use of their kit or they will struggle. Me? I am the laziest scumbag on the face of this earth and I like to make life easier for myself. The silly thing is that being a lazy scumbag, I find myself using methods of working that make me more productive than many! I can't abide to see people beavering away industriously and spending the whole day doing something that can be done in ten minutes. I realize that they are just doing their job and filling their day but it is just such a waste of time. I suppose that it is a love hate relationship with life that I have got going on here. If I can do my day's work in ten minutes then I don't see why I shouldn't be allowed some time off work for good behaviour! Time for downloading some good music perhaps? Seeing as some folks might think that makes me a bit of a pirate (even though I keep me hard earned music to meself!), I thought I ought to have a Popeye cartoon... ![]() Click for a larger version. I sometimes rant on about the unpleasant people there are in the local area and it makes me out to be a real grumpy old so-and-so even if the people in question deserve all the opprobrium that they can get. That is why today I am going to talk about some of the nicer people and how I first noticed them. You can picture the scene, I am driving back into the village at the end of a day, there are lines of hot cars with equally heated drivers in them, getting impatient, sounding their horns, doing silly things like trying to cut people up. I'm lucky because I only have about a couple of hundred yards to go before I can turn off, put the car in the garage and get indoors. Anyway, I am whiling away the time deciding what to talk about when I first noticed the little pool of love to one side. Actually, it was three little pools of love all together. There on the pavement waiting patiently to cross the road is a gentleman with a Labrador, a mastiff cross and a small yipper of a hound of indeterminate breeding on their respective leads. The gentleman is quietly biding his time and his three pooches are sat at his feet, not tugging at their leash and they are all looking up at "Dad" with big soft eyes and tongues lolling. They are in love. They are showing their love in the way that only a dog can. They are either just off for a walk or they are returning, it matters not which. These dogs love this man. A little further on is a lady with a slightly overweight beagle waiting to cross the road as well and there is this same little pool of love. This time it is love and devotion. I wouldn't want to be the person who tries to attack this woman because overweight this dog may be, it looked well prepared to protect its owner should anything untoward happened. As I sit in the traffic and think about the fuming cars ahead of me, I am reminded of the lyrics to Roy Harper's song "Watford Gap"; "The traffic jam is rattling like a five-mile cornered snake with fuming pieces falling off and steaming in its wake" and I realise that I have seen these little pools of love all over the place; wherever nice people have dogs, I suppose. Then there are the other paddling pools of affection and devotion. They are much smaller - about lap sized - that's where the cat lovers come into the equation. If you are ever feeling very depressed, a pet cat will often come and give you love, comfort, a nice purr and make you feel better. My problem is that almost every animal is capable of giving you this unqualified love but there are some horrible people out there who make their animals lives a misery. These are the people who I rail about. For heaven's sake they even mistreat their own families in a lot of cases. I really don't want to know that sort of person. If they can't accept what is given to them willingly and unreservedly and without any hesitation then they don't deserve to breathe. This is jolly good fun and deserves to be number one in the hit parade, don't ya know? "Just Like A Chap." ![]() My best computer code looks like this! For those of you who didn't know, I have been trying to get a job for a couple of years now and just a few weeks ago attended an interview which seemed to go well. Suffice it to say, I landed the job and even though the pay won't be fantastic, the hours and conditions are - I will be working part time and doing most of it from home. The only problem now, is coming up to speed with the technology. OK, it isn't ultra modern - we are talking Active Server Pages here (or ASP as it is known) and the technology is some years old but it is a bit of a change in direction for me. Not only will I have to deal with a visual basic language structure, I will need to take a stab at html and JavaScript too. All of this is going to keep me busy as you might imagine. A couple of weeks ago, I made sure that I had a personal web server on my PC so that I could start to play and today I got down to some serious programming. It has been very taxing even for someone like me who can program relatively easily. It's partly because I am a little rusty and partly because of my age where things take a bit longer to stomp into my skull but mostly it is because of the dreadful error messages that come out of ASP, JET and a few other things. I spent the best part of the morning sweating over a file permissions problem and then the rest of the afternoon debugging my lines of code; Line by line, letter by letter with only error messages like "error '80004005' /firstasp/SQLTEST2.asp, line 26" to help me. Thank goodness for the Internet is all I can say even if some of the "helpful" people on the various ASP forums weren't that helpful and were more intent on proving how clever they are. It was all getting a bit much for me at one point but then suddenly there was that light-bulb moment. "Zingo!" and all of a sudden the first bit just fell into place and gave me the results I was expecting. I heaved a sigh of relief, I can tell you. Hard work on the brain it may be, but it is nice to be back in action again. Tomorrow I shall move on to make the data-entry portion of my little application smarter and make the extract portion even smarter still. I am going to enjoy this job! Talking of enjoyment, I mentioned that I was going to watch "Iron Sky" yesterday. I did. I hooted with laughter. It's tacky, tasteless and very tongue in cheek. There are so many spoofs on other films built in, some great chunks of Wagner and... well, if you have a slightly warped sense of humour, you just have to see it. Now for a jolly, public service announcement. This is what happens if Polar Bears really drink cola like they do in the adverts. Feel free to pass it around as it is a bit scary and there is a moral to the tale. When I joined the Civil Service and found that I was being posted down to Gosport to work, I took a one hundred mile day trip down there on my old motorbike to size up the area, find the building I was to be working in and to pick up some local newspapers so I could start scoping out potential lodgings. On that day the skies were very grey and I knew that I wasn't going to love Gosport all the while it was the colour of battleships. Today was a similar day. Everything was grey. The skies were grey, the roads were grey and my father-in-law's face was grey. It has turned my hair grey watching him lose his will to survive. I tried to think of jolly colourful songs to try to cheer myself up but failed. "Whiter shade of pale" became "Greyer shade of pale", "Big Yellow Taxi" became "Big Grey Taxi". What it did to "I can sing a rainbow" just doesn't bear thinking about... ("Grey and grey and grey and grey, grey and grey and grey - I can sing a greybow..."). Thinking of grey skies and the like, I found a copy of "Iron Sky" on DVD in a charity shop yesterday. I think I shall watch that to try and brighten my outlook up. Apart from that I'm not feeling too cheery so I'm not going to write much. I hope to be more colourful tomorrow. I am fuming. Compared to our grandparents we live in an enlightened age. We accept that the social welfare in this country is going to look after us from birth until death, particularly the National Health Service. This is truly a cradle to grave scenario that should be available to everyone. The thing is, we can't dictate when the cradle event is going to happen nor should we be dictated to when the grave event is going to happen however it would appear that a certain doctor, or set of doctors, are currently trying to force the "grave" issue. I am speaking with respect to my father-in-law. He is gravely, nay terminally, ill. Cancer is not pleasant and his has metastasised (spread) from the original site to other areas thus making it inoperable. We have known for some years now that he is going to die of it but under the auspices of the National Health Service we rather expected that he could expect palliative care until the end of his days, whenever that day comes. Five years ago, his then doctor and consultants started to withhold treatment from him however with the aid of some cash, a visit to an expensive private oncology consultant, some skilfully written letters by said consultant, treatment recommenced and father-in-law has survived these past years. Starting a few weeks ago, his doctor started messing around with his medication and not issuing the correct instructions for use. These drugs caused him great pain and discomfort but his doctor refused to see him on an emergency basis. Donna, being the stalwart lady that she is, phoned the surgery and wouldn't take no for an answer and father-in-law got an appointment in double quick time. The doctor was greatly miffed that Donna had taken this line of action and has started to create problems. It looks as if we are going to have to go through the expensive consultant method once again. Basically the National Health Service is going to withhold the cancer drug that keeps him alive because it weakens his bones. He is unable to see his doctor to convince her that he needs this drug because she is going on leave for a fortnight and won't see him. None of the other doctors can see him during that time either; they are writing him a death sentence. They are trying to put him in his grave rather than treat him up until the point of his death. This means that Donna and I are going to go down to see them tomorrow so that we can arrange things to make sure that these poxy National Health doctors do their duty. It isn't up to them to determine when Ben should die - the power of euthanasia is not within their remit. Nor should they be allowed to bin their problem patients or tell us when Ben is to die. If we can, we will arrange another visit to the private oncologist as soon as possible and then hope that his magic letter writing skills will shock these piss-poor excuses for doctors to their senses and start them doing their jobs properly - to adhere to the Hippocratic oath. You can guarantee, as sure as eggs is eggs, that if they were greatly miffed last time Donna kicked up a fuss, they are going to be veeeeeerrrry upset when they start seeing headlines like "Local doctors refuse elderly cancer sufferer his drugs and treatment" appearing in the local newspapers. Trust me, I will make it happen.
![]() Not the best combination of beer and glass! It has been a grim and rainy old day today. Certainly in West Sussex it has. Thankfully I have had several diversions which have helped me to pass the time. The first and most important of which is that I have secured the job that I went to an interview for three weeks ago. Now that has made my weekend and I am almost tempted to break open the champagne that I have had chilling in the fridge for the last four months - I think that it might be cool enough by now. Secondly, it was my great pleasure to bump into Planehugger in a bookshop in Burgess Hill today. We had the chance for a cup of coffee and a tea cake whilst we had a chinwag and laughed at the morbidly obese, track suit wearing people waddling down to the nearest McDonalds for their next artery-clogging, heart-stopping snack. Well, I did. I can't imagine Planehugger doing that as they are far too nice a person for that. Anyway, seeing the grey, drizzly weather in Burgess Hill made me think of what I could type about tonight. When you think of songs you always think of the romantic lyrics that come out of them. Lyrics that you just couldn't translate into British place names; "It Never Rains in Southern California" just wouldn't work as "It never rains in Burgess Hill" nor could you imagine "Twenty four hours from Neasden" instead of "Twenty four hours from Tulsa". What about "Cumberland Dreaming" instead of "California Dreaming"? or "Hotel Renfrewshire" instead of "Hotel California"? I can just imagine "Get Your Kicks on Route 66" renamed as "Get YOur Kicks on the A66 (On the A66 westbound between the junctions with the A685 and the A6, there are currently delays of 10 mins due to roadworks . Expect disruption until 8:00 pm on 31 October 2012.). It doesnt have quite the same ring does it? "The Girl From Ipanema" has nothing on "The Girl From Ipswich". I'm not saying that everything foreign is romantic and nothing British is but I think that when it comes to such like, we have to leave the shores of Great Britain and move to some of the more exotic places of the world. As for Burgess Hill, without the pleasure of meeting Planehugger or going to the fleapit cinema there, I will give it a miss in future! Having mentioned the "artery-clogging, heart-stopping snack" above, I think that it is only fair to put out a link to a new method of performing CPR in the case of Sudden Cardiac Arrest. Please click here and watch it. It is so simple and you could become a life saver. After that serious bit of info, have a nice little film called "The Green Ruby Pumpkin" ![]() One of the rooms at the National Liberal Club I'm a little later publishing today's blog because I have just got back from a day out in London. Normally when I go up to town it is because I want to go somewhere specific or because Donna has arranged something for us to do. Today it was a little bit of both. I wanted to visit a few bookshops to see if I could find some books on ASP programming (not a chance - Foyles, Blackwells and Waterstones were just a load of tosh) and then the highlight of the day was a trip to the National Liberal Club for one of their Kettner lunch / lectures. Today's lunch menu was escalope of turkey in a wild mushroom sauce, new potatoes and seasonal vegetables, bread and butter pudding with cream and coffee with mints. The subject matter of the hour long lecture was the life, times and scandal of John Profumo. Not only was he married to the beautiful and glamorous actress Valerie Hobson (star of many British films) he was carrying on with anything in a skirt as far as one could gather. However it was his fling with a couple of call girls (Mandy Rice-Davies and Christine Keeler) which caused such a political furore back in 1963 and was one of the likely causes for the failure of the Tories to win the general election in 1964. The problem wasn't so much that Profumo (Minister for War) was bonking Christine Keeler senseless, it was the fact that Christine Keeler was also bonking Captain Yevgeni Ivanov, a Russian Naval attaché and spy at the same time and there was talk of the possibility of defence secrets being leaked to the Russians. It could have caused a national security crisis and it was Profumo's stolid denial of this affair that caused such a furore when the truth finally broke. He left government a broken man and spent the last forty years of his life doing good work for charity at Toynbee Hall. It was an excellent talk (the lunch was more mediocre) and afterwards we had a guided tour of the National Liberal Club given to us by a gentleman known as "The Professor". All in all, a very good day (apart from the lack of programming books!). No time to write any more as I want to get something to eat and a glass of beer. See you all tomorrow. Have some Rita Hayworth "Staying Alive" My life is ruled by numbers. I have a digital alarm clock which wakes me up at some ungodly hour of the morning. My mobile phone spews telephone numbers at me, my PC keeps me up to date with spreadsheets full of digits, I program using integer fields. The microwave and cooker are run by numbers. As I child I used to paint by numbers and I suspect that as a part of a grand master plan by an omnipotent being or beings that my life is still being painted by numbers - there's just a lot more grey in it now than there used to be! Don't get me wrong, I like numbers. For a large part of my working life numbers have been very important to me (if like me you were a COBOL programmer then you'll need to know the difference between a PIC 9(4) and a PIC S9(4) COMP SYNC). I watch these numbers on a daily basis like a hawk. I notice patterns and whether a number is palindromic or not. HH once told me that whilst watching a boring film with a friend that she got interested by watching the number counter on her video player and seeing patterns that appeared. When you get down to the nitty gritty and stop using base ten numbers and move to binary (the wonderful world of zeroes and ones) then there are lots of patterns that come out. As I say, numbers rule me - for instance, the number of calories I can have on a given day. It is easy to become obsessed by numbers. Whether you come first, second or third in a race is all important to some people. How many zeroes are in your bank account matters to a lot of folks - I have lots of zeroes. The trouble is that they are all after the decimal point! Today however there were some very impressive numbers that ruled my life. In fact these numbers could mean the difference between life and death. Today was the day when I got my diabetic test results back for my annual check up on my diabetic lifestyle. These numbers were... interesting... to say the least. As the culmination of eight weeks on this fasting diet I was pleased to see that all of the vital indicators (more numbers) have dropped significantly. For the first time in the eight years since I was diagnosed, the headline value for how well my diabetic control is, my glycolated haemoglobin count (HbA1c) fell below the 6% mark. Effectively it fell through to 5.7% (or 39 mmol/litre to use the new international standard). This doesn't mean that I am no longer diabetic - I wish it did. Effectively if your doctor discovered that you had this high a level, they would warn you about lifestyle changes to stop you becoming a diabetic, but for me it is a significant breakthrough. It means that if I keep it up, another set of numbers will become important - how much my diabetic drugs can be reduced by. If you couple this with a large drop in my cholesterol and triglyceride levels, an improved Fasting Blood Glucose level and a stable almost text book blood pressure level then you can see why I am so pleased today. GIVE ME THOSE NUMBERS! YAY! Right - that has got that out of my system. Have a fun cartoon to round the day off with. |
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May 2015
AuthorPaul Everest - Shining wit (at least that is what I think they said) |