(Saturday 25th August 2007)Well done Rosie for a spectacular time in this year's Cheviots Challenge - 5 hours and 5 minutes! Sadly due to my achilles problem I had to give this a miss, having done it every year since 1998 except for 2001 when everything was cancelled due to foot and mouth.
(Tuesday 14th August 2007)I hate parking metres so much!! The one at the Freeman hospital "robbed" me of 40p change today, and the useless "help" button stupidly suggested I went to the Cashier's Office on level 2 to get a refund. Not only would that have taken me into the next hour with the parking charge, but I don't suppose the Cashier was about to believe without any proof that I'd just been done out of my change!
David has revamped his excellent Mac site, appleresource.net. A great place for all things mac, David is without doubt the most knowledgeable person I know regarding macs and this website is well worth a visit.
(Saturday 11th August 2007)Back from a very pleasant week at Embleton anyway, unspoilt by having to rush home for ultrasound scans etc! We also had the good luck to catch the best days of the summer so far - hot, sunny days, as good as it gets up there. When the weather's like that, there's no better place to be. Now I'm just wanting this operation to happen as quickly as possibly, as the waiting is a strain and the more time to recover before New Zealand, the better.
(Tuesday 31st July 2007)Well, Derek and I are supposed to be enjoying a holiday at Embleton next week, but everything is up in the air at the moment. The specialists think I've as near as dammit totally ruptured my achilles tendon (though how I've managed to walk around so well since doing it is a mystery to them). I'm going to have surgery, which is now being fast tracked to take place ASAP. The surgeon wants an ultrasound scan of my heel first, but other than that, it's not going to be long till I'm in hospital. Afterwards I'll be in plaster for 3 months and then will need another 3 months of intensive physiotherapy before the foot will be healed. Realistically I can aim for February and New Zealand as targets. I'll need muscle grafted from the same leg to help join the two ends of the tendon as at the moment there is a 6cm gap. Coincidentally, it's the same surgeon who did my foot operation four years ago! I intend going into work after an initial period of maybe 2 weeks off, as I think I can manage with a plaster, and anyway I can't afford to be on Statutory Sick Pay from now until Christmas. Wish me luck!
(Thursday 19th July 2007)Things are really looking up - when Barbara and I turned up at Dad's on Tuesday afternoon, we got a wonderful surprise. We're flying to New Zealand FIRST CLASS! We'll have to slum it in Business Class to Dubai as the plane for that leg of the journey only has two classes, but the rest (and the majority) of our journey will be first class. Emirates only start flying from Newcastle in September and have the major advantage in allowing us to miss out Heathrow. It's straight to Dubai, then an overnight stop and on to Melbourne where we stop briefly before the last leg of our journey (still 3 hours) to Auckland.
(Monday 16th July 2007)Things are looking up. My pain relief is finally being managed by the pain clinic, and what an improvement! Not only are they able to prescribe the stronger opiates I so desperately need, but I'm finding them approachable and it's easy to phone and speak to the consultant to discuss dosages etc. After collecting a rather nonsensical script today, the dates and initial dosage inconsistency were quickly sorted out, and I'm so relieved to be shot of the nightmare that was my previous prescription. In addition, I had an unexpectedly quick call from the physio department about my leg - seems I've partially ruptured my achilles tendon and I'm being referred to a specialist ASAP with view to a surgical repair, which is looking like the only way I'll get back to any walking in the cheviots. It was a depressing thought to imagine I might never do another Cheviot Challenge or stand on top of Cheviot again, so this has given me real hope. I've been managing to swim a bit more without too much of a problem with my shoulders - it's just a pity the City Pool will be closing from next week until September, which is yet another obstacle to overcome to try and get back to full fitness!
(Saturday 14th July 2007)Any programmers in Delphi out there? The BCS is looking for a Delphi programmer in the north east. Email me if you can help!
(Friday 13th July 2007)Wups :( apologies Naomi, in trying to stop a certain IP address viewing the site, she got accidentally banned. I've removed that particular PHP script, sorry Naomi you are a most welcome visitor!
(Tuesday 10th July 2007)Celebrated Dad's 81st birthday last night at the Loch Fyne restaurant on Gosforth High Street. A treat for any seafood lover, nobody ever tucked into a whole dressed crab with more enthusiasm than Derek!
(Friday 29th June 2007)Back from a great holiday in Shetland - Anne and I had Derek and Dad with us this time. Stayed at Elsie and Ivor's as always, and found there was almost too much to do! Far from being a remote and boring place, which would be many people's idea of life in Shetland, we found they had big plans for mid-summer celebrations, focussing around the solstice which was when we were there. It was certainly amazing to experience so much daylight - you only really knew what time it was in the evenings by looking at your watch. We had planned to climb Ronas Hill on the 21st and experience the "simmer dim" as it's known locally, when sunset turns to sunrise without it ever getting really dark. However, my leg injury made that plan impossible - we then tried to get on a Storm Petrol watching boat trip, which set off at 11 pm and got back around 12.30 am. Sadly, this trip is booked up for months in advance as presumably there are only so many days when it's light enough to watch Storm Petrols come home to roost at midnight. We ended up just watching out of the window from Westayre and you could definitely see signs of daybreak from 1 am onwards, and at no time would you have ever needed a torch to see your way around outside, even in a place with absolutely no light pollution and which I've seen completely pitch black at other times of the year! The most northerly bus shelter had been redecorated since we last visted, and here's a picture of the four of us on Collafirth Hill, which would have been the starting point for climbing Ronas Hill.
(Tuesday 18th June 2007)Had an excellent birthday yesterday, which included a meal at the Falcon's restaurant and a signed card from them, plus a couple of signed photographs of senior squad players. It was good to get the whole family together, in fact after two daughters both had their flights here cancelled on Saturday night, I was really pleased when we did manage to get everyone assembled! Poor Louise had her flight delayed on the way home too, so arrived at Bristol too late to catch the last train back to Bath. The bad luck didn't stop there either, as Rosie was caught up in a minor car accident on the way back from the restaurant, but there was some good news - Philip and Jill announced their engagement! To see some photos of the occasion, click here.
(Monday 11th June 2007)Looking back to our swimming session yesterday, I couldn't help but think what a difference no regular coach and just a session left at the poolside is making. It suits me just fine at the moment, but really! Two guys in the top lane were doing their own thing, the bloke in the next lane down seemed to be following the session, Judith in the lane next to me got out after an hour, Barbara and I were doing an extremely modified version of the session and the two men in the bottom lane were hardly doing any swimming at all!
(Sunday 10th June 2007)Well, I'm a shadow of my former swimming and walking self! Having managed to inuure my sore calf yet again while walking normally downstairs on Friday, I now find it's affecting my ability to kick and flex that leg in the water, which was never a problem since I originally tore it at Easter. I had felt something go "twang" and taking the bandage off today, it's very swollen and bruised on both sides. I'm being referred for physiotherapy as nothing much has healed in what is now two months. The trouble is all this takes time. Like my "urgent" appointment at the Pain Management clinic to which I was referred in April - my GP had to chase this up yet again on Friday but at least I now have an appointment in July. Already struggling with sore shoulders from my arthritis which severely limits my ability to swim properly, this leg is looking like the nail in the coffin for both walking and swimming until it improves a bit!
Still, I have my birthday meal to look forward to next Sunday, followed two days later by a holiday in Shetland. Climbing Ronas Hill to watch the summer dim on June 21st will be severely out, but we'll still have a great time, as I love Shetland and I'm looking forward to showing Dad the islands and introducing him to our distant relatives there, as well as one of our customers at work who I always call in and see. The birthday is beginning to feel a little ill-timed though, as I feel like I'm approaching 80, not 50!
(Thursday 7th June 2007)Having spent the last few days completely reinstalling Vista from scratch on the laptop (and incidentally ditching the XP partition), I've learned that a backup image isn't failsafe. In this case, the XP install was damaged when I "shrank" the partition without realising that Disk Management didn't do non destructive resizing. That left Vista with no way to boot and I got the dreaded "NTLR is missing" message. The acronis backup image restored perfectly - but I still had boot manager issues. Eventually I decided the easiest thing was just to reinstall - at least it gave me the opportunity to give Vista more space. I decided I could manage without XP as I was hardly using it.
(Tuesday 29th May 2007)The planned trip to New Zealand just gets better and better! Now travelling business class, Dad is accompanying us and Gillian flying in from Australia to coincide with our visit over there. Shetland in two and a half weeks time is almost being overshadowed.
(Saturday 19th May 2007)Just took a photo of a beautiful rainbow outside our house right now. Very spectacular and worth getting a bit wet for!
(Friday 18th May 2007)A very Happy Birthday to Louise down in Bath! It's a shame we don't see more of her, but here's hoping she has a really good time tonight.
I'm still doing very badly on the exercise front. As if coping with sore shoulders wasn't bad enough (my consultant is now 100% sure this is the arthritis and not just some injury), I have two other injuries which are not arthritis related but are putting any form of exercise out of the question. There's my torn calf muscle which I seem to continually tweak as it refuses to get better, and more recently I managed to stab myself in the ribs with the wooden pointed end of our shoe rack, retrieving a bottle top that had fallen under a wardrobe. Walking for exercise is out of the question, and I've struggled with swimming for what seems to be a long time now. First my inflamed wrist, then sore shoulders and now my very sore right side which swimming just pulls and makes worse. All I can do is sit it out and hope things improve before we go to Shetland next month. At least all this extra free time is meaning I get to do more on the computer and go to bed at sensible times when I have 5 am starts for work.
(Monday 14th May 2007)I'm really exited to be going to New Zealand in January/February next year. Thanks to Dad for making it possible, it will be the trip of a lifetime. I can't wait to see my cousins who were about 10 years old when they emigrated (about a year older than me) and we haven't seen each other since. The youngest is living in Australia so it won't be possible to see Gillian, but the twins and Uncle Austin will be there. I can't believe it's actually going to happen!
(Thursday 10th May 2007)Well, an update to the previous rant .... I today heard from help@computer.org that the credit card I used to join this organisation had been declined (no idea why, there was plenty of credit on it, but I could have entered some of the details incorrectly I suppose) and my membership has been cancelled. Whether they were ever going to let me know this I'm not sure, since they apparently just disabled my login and didn't even bother to email me or tell me my membership was cancelled - and this is quite some time after joining. The email alias still seems to work too. While I can no longer accuse this organisation of taking my money and offering nothing in return, I'm still not very impressed with them over the way they've handled this matter which seems quite extraordinary. Surely if someone's card fails you get in touch and offer them the chance to re-input the details or use another method of payment? You don't just disable their login and leave them thinking they must have forgotten their password?? Seems I'm destined not to find any interesting computer courses I can study ...
(Tuesday 8th May 2007)The IEEE Computer Society is a total rip-off! Persuaded to join this organisation from an advert sent to all BCS members, I was attracted to the many free online courses, having had no success finding evening classes to study anything interesting relating to computers. All went well at first and I paid over a sizeable sum of money, but reasoned it would be worth it. I started an online course, then the next time I came to login was told the session had expired and I'd need to enter my username and password again. No problem I thought - I knew my username, in fact the welcome email had confirmed my username, and the password would be one of a few I keep for these sort of logins and something I could easily remember. However, nothing worked. In the end I emailed one contact address who did reply but told me I'd come through to the wrong place. So I emailed help@computer.org, the help email address given in the welcome email and never heard a thing. I did however, receive a follow up survey from the original place I contacted, so I filled it in, commenting on how badly I felt their help service had responded. There was a section where you were asked if you would like someone to contact you, and a place to enter contact details, so I lost no time in completing that. Needless to say, I'm still waiting to be contacted and I'm not holding my breath. So all I've got for the fee I paid is an email alias of @computer.org - the free online courses are inaccessible and so is the rest of the member area as I cannot find anyone willing to either remind me of or reset my password. If anyone else gets one of these invitations, I would advise staying well clear!
(Thursday 3rd May 2007)Thanks to Michael for providing the router and the help, I now have wireless in my home. The new Linksys router is connected to my Speedtouch via cat 5 cable and is providing a wireless connection for my laptop and wifi for my phone when needed, acting as a kind of switch or hub. The main desktop PCs are still using a wired connection.
(Thursday 26th April 2007)Well, my long awaited upgrade copy of Vista Home Premium arrived at last for the laptop and I was delighted to find that the key activated the clean install I'd already put on as a dual boot with XP. So now I'm back to the familiar problems of a printer that won't install, a mouse which will only work from one usb port and usb keys that just don't work at all. Otherwise *grits teeth* everything is just fine. At least if I reinstall Vista I can do so from my OEM copy and just activate using the upgrade key, keeping the XP partition untouched.
(Wednesday 11th April 2007)I'm not having a great time trying to exercise right now. Apart from the constant recent problems of a sore wrist and pool closures curtailing swimming activities, I also managed to pull a muscle in one shoulder, which meant a week off. Deciding to try dog walking/running at the local cat and dog shelter to keep up some sort of fitness with Darlington gala in mind, I wasn't prepared for how much these dogs pull, and after two days of exercising dogs of varying shapes and sizes, had managed to yank the other shoulder. In addition, I've pulled a calf muscle through running on muscles that hadn't done any running for quite some time. Great! I'm now hobbling around with the original injury healed nicely, but a shoulder I can't swim on and a very sore right calf - and Darlington gala still in serious jeopardy.
(Thursday 29th March 2007)Well, last night's BCS talk on wireless networking at Northumbria Uni was certainly interesting - and guaranteed to put anyone off installing a wireless network if wired was an equally good alternative. From the live demo of WEP cracking to the measures needed to ascertain and increase signal strength and deal with connectivity issues, it made laptops and wireless sound like bad news all round! Not even the commonly used WPA is as secure as many people think ...
(Monday 19th March 2007)Happy Birthday to Philip and Rosie! A bit late, but not as bad as Louise, who sent Rosie a 21st card (she's 22). This is what an Oxford education does for you.
(Friday 2nd March 2007)Enjoyed a tough walk in the Cheviots yesterday. Sidetracked from our original intention of doing a moderate 5 mile climb up to the Girdle Stone, we ended up visiting Chattlehope Spout which is a wonderful waterfall and well worth the walk. However, it also involved something of a rock climb and crossing near impossible streams, which were well flooded. I couldn't get over the ludicrous notice when we finally scrambled to the top of the crags, "This walk crosses rough terrain. Walkers are advised to wear strong, watertight footwear". What can you do about it at that point? When the only way down involves walking across the kind of terrain you've just struggled over - it's not like you can say "oh right, I'll just pop back home for my boots"! And to see "walkers welcome" notices after wading knee high across a slippy, rocky fast flowing river was almost patronising. "Walkers welcome (but surprising, as few manage to make it this far)". A bridge would have felt more welcoming!
(Wednesday 28th February 2007)First impressions of Vista, which is working nicely as the sole operating system on my main PC.
(Saturday 17th February 2007)I hope the photopage displays a bit better now, having felt like I worked most of the day on it! Can I hell work out how to put the sitemeter and email/home page links at the bottom of the page ... but at least the photos all display properly and look reasonably tidy, both in 17" monitors, and 22" and 15.4" widescreen monitors. I haven't been able to test any others (can't be bothered to get my old laptop out either!). It works in Firefox, Internet Explorer and AOL OpenRide .... and I'm now sick to death of it!
(Friday 16th February 2007)I realise the photopage doesn't look symmetrical any more - not the top line of photos anyway. I'm trying to make it work in 22" monitors as well as 17" in whatever browser people choose - no easy task and I may end up just listing them one after the other. Either way, I've decided it can wait, I'm in no mood to grapple with it tonight.
To read more archive weblogs, click here which will take you to the previous archive, which in turn contains a link to the one before that.