Monthly Archives: July 2008

When I wasn’t sick

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I was going to start this post with the phrase ‘when I was young I never got ill’, but then I remembered that this wasn’t true. When I was young I used to get heat-rashes which were never really well explained, but if I experienced serious changes of temperature I would get a very itchy rash on my wrists and arms which lasted only about 20-30 minutes. Sometimes it would reach my shoulders and neck. I took antihistamines while I was younger, and continued buying my own and taking them while I was at university, and then eventually I just got bored and stopped buying them, and found the issue had gone away. I also had a reaction to the test at school for the tuberculosis antibodies, although I’d never had an infection personally, I did have to take tablets every day for a year to make sure (and I never had to have the BCG). I actually have a scar from the ‘flower prick’ test they used, I have 6 holes in my arm which have slowly migrated away from my wrist towards my elbow. Oh, and I broke my arm as well. Other than that though, I wasn’t at the doctors all the time, as far as I remember.

So anyway, then I went to university and I didn’t register with a GP, spent four years at University without going to the doctors, and then I moved around a bit, for a few years and never registered anywhere either. So that would make no GP visits from around 1987 to 1998. In ’98 I had Bell’s Palsy, and had no choice but to finally sign up with the GP. Then there was another long gap until I was diagnosed with diabetes, and since then it feels like I’ve been in every other week.

So I was going to write this great blog post about how I wasn’t really sick until I found out I had diabetes and since then I’ve been to the docs’ all the time, and how interesting that was and maybe it was because when you’re 20 you’re invulnerable and you just ignore being ill. But as I wrote, I realised that it was only actually 10 years where I never used the services of a doctor and the whole blog post idea came crashing down around me.

Still, I guess when I was in my 20’s I really did just ignore not being well, or maybe I was never not well and hence there was nothing to ignore.

And this all started because I was back in the doctor’s surgery today for a couple of things that have been bugging me for a few weeks. I moved our 27inch CRT TV around a couple of times, and I’ve had abdominal pains since then and discomfort, GP suggests it’s pulled muscles, and I have a cream for my foot.

A cream which I have to keep in the fridge! I’ve never had medicine that I have to keep in the fridge before. Because I knew I was going to the docs today I put my regular prescription in, and then the GP prescribed the cream (and some antihistamines, which is what prompted me to write this), so I got carrier bag of medical supplies from the pharmacy. I feel all grown up and adult now that a trip to the pharmacy results in an huge bundle of drugs.

I guess I should be happy that we have a free health service and that diabetes means I’m exempt from prescription fees.

Why do I blog?

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I was chatting to a friend, saying I was on a blogging spree, and that I’d thought about blogging about why I blog, but had felt it was too self referential. So she suggested I should blog about the fact that I’d decided not to blog about blogging 🙂

So here I am, blogging about it.

I’m not sure why I blog. I accuse myself of vanity sometimes, thinking that anyone might actually care to read the random shit that I’m thinking about. But maybe even if I was the only person here, I’d still blog. People write diaries after all, with no intention of anyone else ever reading then. But then, why am I not writing a diary, or a private journal, why do I choose to blog publically?

Maybe it’s a pretense at keeping in touch with some friends, since I am clearly unable to keep in touch any other way. I guess allowing comments adds the illusion that it’s a two way keeping in touch process. To some extent it is a way of letting my friends know what I’m up to, but then, what I’m up to is pretty much the same as 10 years ago, and it’s not much, so I could get away with posting a boilerplate entry every 10 years.

Since I started using bulletin boards and the ‘net I’ve always made ‘diary’ style posts, somewhere, at some time. Even when I haven’t been blogging I’ve made posts in forums or other locations which have basically been reflections and blogs. I thought about taking some of them and re-posting them as blog entries on here, just to keep everything in one place, but I’m not sure of the overall value. Most of them are ‘of the moment’, and I’m not sure anyones going to trawl back through the stuff here just to find a forum posting I made in 2004 which might have been a blog entry had I been blogging at the time.

I like to pretend I’m creative and that in some way blogging is my creative outlet. I pretend I’m actually just too lazy to write a whole book so I blog to fill the need, and that if I wasn’t lazy I’d write a book (the reality is that I have loads of ideas for the first two paragraphs of a book and then nothing else).

Maybe I just like inflicting my random thought processes on the world, in the hope that I can shape it to more closely resemble how I think it should be. Maybe I’m blogging my random thoughts so that I can understand how I think the world should be. I think that’s probably it, that by writing my random thoughts, pretty much as they come to the front of my fingers really helps me understand my view, because I don’t always know where this stuff is going. I never knew I was going to write this paragraph for example until I was three quarters of the way through it.

So I guess I’m exploring, how I feel and what I think, about the most trivial and pointless things in life, and then pushing it out onto the internet, home of the trivial, land of the pointless, so that people with the misfortune of knowing me may feel obliged to sit through it and wonder why the hell they just wasted 10 minutes of their lives.

Welcome aboard.

Risotto

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Actually cooked some food this evening, real food, from scratch.  Risotto, throwing in some random stuff that I hoped would be nice (shallots, grated parmesan, two leeks, smoked pancetta cubes, garlic, chestnut mushrooms and shiitake mushrooms).  Turned out really well, such a simple thing, but it’s so good that I actually felt like making something for a change.  Of course, I’m still making batches of The Soup, made some more last week, although this batch is so thick I can’t really put it into a cup, so I just eat it from the plastic container.

It did get me wondering about the actual difference between a soup, stew and broth though.  I read about, and there are some differences between soups and stews.

Soups,

  • can be eaten hot, cold, cooked or uncooked depending on the ingredients
  • usually thin and plentiful liquid content
  • soups are usually made in a reasonably short amount of time
  • usually eaten as a starter / appetizer in a multi-course meal

Stew

  • almost always eaten hot
  • thickened liquid, more like a gravy
  • often ‘stewed’ for longer, as the name suggests
  • more often eaten as a main course due to their more hearty content

Based on that, I’ve been making lentil stew, not soup.  Takes about 6 hours to make for a start and it’s now so thick that it doesn’t pour, in fact, if you dollop it onto a plate it retains it’s shape (not all batches are this thick).  Lentils, potatoes, leeks, shallots, swede, gammon or ham, carrots all stewed for a few hours.  I guess I could blend it after all that and put more water in it and it would be a soup!  But then of course it wouldn’t be as delicious and hearty as it is with all the lovely big lumps of vegetables.

A broth on the other hand is the liquid component of soup, or a soup made from boiling ingredients which are then removed.  I think.

So anyway, back to my risotto, the suggested portion size was 75g of rice per person, but I only really knew how much liquid to use for around 300g of rice (so four portions).  So I thought I’d make that much and freeze some.  Whacked in random amounts of everything else until it looked about right, and then we ate it all.  Mostly because it was delicious and mostly because Grete left some, and mostly because I was hungry.  But here’s the thing, what do you eat with risotto?  I would have eaten less if I’d been able to work out what to have it with rather than just eating a huge bowl of it.

Oh, and a few hours on my blood sugar was fine, so it looks reasonably good GI/GL (which I suspected), but I’m getting a bit peckish now.

And another thing, what fresh herbs would you have put into that?  I’m not really clever with fresh herbs and what works well, so what would have gone with mushrooms, leeks, pancetta?  Not too overpowering, but some subtle hint of taste would have been nice.

Hans Reiser leads police to Wife’s body

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I dunno how many of you followed this case.

Hans Reiser invented and developed a filesystem (the part of an operating system that handles how files are stored on disks) called ReiserFS that was efficient and robust (so it was quick, and it didn’t lose data very easily if your machine crashed).In 2006 his wife disappeared, and eventually he was charged with her murder although they never found a body. In 2008 he was convicted by jury of first degree murder.

While sad, the case was interesting because Reiser is a notorious ‘geek’. Many other ‘geeks’ initially thought he couldn’t have done it and his social skills (being a geek) would let him down in the case. The case against him was pretty circumstantial, but that evidence was also very compelling. His mother’s car had a front seat missing and the floor was soaked as though it had been washed, and he was never able to clearly explain why, for example.

Anyway, today he led the police to where he buried his wife’s body.

What really makes this case stick out in my mind is that it highlights one of the most confusing elements of law for me. A legal case is supposed to be fought so that the accused (who is presumed to be innocent of any actual crime) can fairly explain the truth, and the victim can fairly explain the truth (or someone on their behalf) and then a jury can decide how much is true and if any actual crime was committed and what punishment should be provided.

But our legal system appears to be guilty people (let’s be honest, how many of us think when someone is up in court that they’re actually innocent really, unless we know them) lying about their actions in order to hide the truth while the prosecution tries to build up enough insinuation, evidence and accusations that the jury feels compelled to find them guilty.

I dunno, just feels a bit wrong. Clearly this is a naive view of law, but sometimes I can’t get my head around it.

Blogging choices

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I’m happy running my own web software (like hosting my own WordPress stuff such as onelinemoviereviews or full blown CMS stuff like BookThing or forums like the TNT Website, and Wiki’s such as the TNT Wiki), I’m happy writing my own little bits of web software (like the original blogging stuff I wrote over at my earlier site which I won’t link to out of desperate embarrassment over the content), and I’m happy using hosted solutions from other people (like Blogger, or LiveJournal). I constantly vacillate between the options mentally, although I haven’t allowed that to reach the real world since I moved over to Blogger a while back.

With fully hosted services you let someone else worry about the storage, up-time, security and in the case of most of them these days, they’re free. You pay in flexibility. I have whatever features Blogger has, or if I moved to LJ, then whatever features LJ has. When you host your own stuff, you get to worry about the cost and security, but you can throw as many features in as you can find plugins for your various bits of software. When you write your own software, then you really get to worry about security, and if you’re like me you implement 1/10th of what you dreamt of and get bored really quickly.

So I guess I won’t make the mistake of writing my own stuff again, and I’m here to stay with either a hosted service or a self-hosted solution. I like the idea of moving to WordPress self-hosted, but I think I like it because I’m geeky and interested in that sort of thing, and I wonder if it’ll truly enhance, improve or change my blogging experience at all? Maybe I’ll get bored really quickly and want someone else to patch and update the software. Maybe eventually I’ll get tired of paying however much a month I currently pay to host 4 or 5 websites of my own and rue the day I stopped using Blogger. Is Blogger worth sticking with? Should I move back to LiveJournal or consider WordPresses free hosted service? And then of course I realise that I go through blogging spates, like this one, once a year or so and soon it won’t matter because I won’t be writing anything on the blog anyway.

It’s a truly trivial thing to think about, maybe my soft western life is so easy that the only thing I have to be concerned about is how best to feed my vanity through blogging solutions. Maybe it’s an extension of my work and I just like working out the best way to solve computing problems. Maybe I should get out more.

Maybe I’m just pining over the ‘current mood’ option in LiveJournal posts …

Pop goes the GPU

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Saturday we got back from breakfast, mooched about a bit, played some Lord of the Rings Online and then poof, monitor dropped into power save mode. I say poof, when of course it was entirely silent. The graphics card just decided to stop outputting a signal. I powered off, and on again, and the machine just constantly cycled through the DVD drives. A few more power recycles and it clearly booted up, but no video output.

Blurgh. I hate computers. I mean my entire job is computers, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it when my own break. I relaxed in the lounge, watched some TV, ate some home made soup to calm down. It’s frustrating when things go wrong, luckily I have plenty of spares. I powered off one of the other machines, and swapped the graphics card in and the dark machine powered up fine. I guess it could have been worse, could have fried everything around it when it went. (Please note, for the geeks among you, I did carry out extensive pre-removal testing to ascertain which device had failed, I knew it was the graphics card).

Novatech are pretty good with returns, but this is the second card (same type/model) that’s failed, since Grete’s died about 8 weeks ago (different fault, bearing went in her card fan) and that makes it doubly annoying. Anyway, got a returns number and we’ll pop it in the post tomorrow. For now I’m ‘limping’ along on an nVidia 8500GT, which feels like slumming it despite the fact that it’s about 10 times better than what I was using only 8 months ago.

I do like Novatech, been using them a long, long time (~1992) and I was pleased they let us return just the graphics card, and didn’t force us to ship the entire machine back despite it being pre-built by them, but this is the third ‘annoying’ thing in the last 8 months. It’s great they have good customer service, but I wish I didn’t have to use it so often recently.

In unrelated news, our LCD TV has started to vibrate and make a disturbing noise when the TV sound plays a certain low frequency. The background music in Without a Trace sets it off and one or two bits of recent NCIS episodes. Argh, technology, it sucks.

Decent Television and Sky+

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Sky+ has really totally changed the way we watch television. We spend a lot of time on the computers, and that meant we used to not watch much TV. We taped a few things we really wanted to see (like Buffy), but even when we had Cable we only really watched a few programs, most of the stuff on TV just passed us by. We moved house, and ended up with Sky, and I started catching an hour of CSI or something before bed, because on Sky you can be sure that at least one channel is playing some form of CSI around 11pm, but we still didn’t really watch much TV.

And then we got Sky+ and honestly, it totally changed how we watch TV. I’m sure any good PVR with a scheduler built in will do the same. We watch CSI (all 3), Criminal Minds, Without a Trace, Grete watches a whole bunch of other stuff like Moonlight, Heroes, soaps. I record stuff I love like Time Team and Michael Pailin stuff and just catch up with them when I can. It’s just so useful being able to record good television and watch it when you want, rather than trying to arrange your life around a TV slot.

Which brings me to good television, I’m sure that I miss loads of quality TV, afterall we don’t have time to watch everything. But we do love our crime drama, CSI (Vegas is still the best, New York is ok, Miama is almost like a pantomime), Without a Trace, Criminal Minds (sometimes it’s hard to watch, but rewarding), Bones. We finished the season two DVD of Without a Trace, I think we’re watching season three on Sky at the moment, but we’ll probably get the boxed set and catch up. I’d love to get all the CSI’s but there’s so many of them, and since we’ve seen them all it’s harder to justify compared to Without a Trace where we hadn’t seen a full season until we got the boxed sets.

OpenID?

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OpenID looks interesting. I’ve enabled comment posting for ‘registered users, including OpenID’ whatever that means.

The Fugitive

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I want to say two things before I start, I’ve seen this movie at least twice, maybe three times before writing this review, and I love Tommy Lee Jones. Ok, so that’s out of the way.

The Fugitive is a who-dunnit thriller in which Dr. Richard Kimble (Ford) is accused of killing his wife, before making a run for it and being chased down by Marshal Samuel Gerard (Jones). There’s a decent back story, a good underlying plot and a couple of twists to keep you interested, but this movie is good not because the story is engaging, but because Jones brings the chase to life. Ford puts in a solid performance, playing an understated role and giving Kimble a totally believable appearance. Jones gives us an overblown chariacture of a US Marshall and steals every shot he’s in as a result. Despite the size of the performance Gerard still feels real and his energy keeps the story moving forward when the other scenes are determined and rather more slow paced.

It’s a tight cast, and if anyone’s ever spoken to me about books and movies you know I prefer a small tight focussed cast. It works well, Kimble’s involvement in what turns out to be the reason for his wife’s murder slowly becomming more clear through his research, while the US Marshalls slowly catch up with him. At the outset, in their first interaction Kimble tells Gerard he didn’t kill his wife and Gerard replies, “I don’t care!” The US Marshall is just doing his job, and plans to capture Kimble and let justice run its course. However, as the story moves forward, Gerard can’t help but consider the circumstances around the original murder, and that just makes later scenes where Gerard ‘just does his job’ even more profound.

This is an excellent high quality 90’s movie, with a solid script, good story and top quality acting from everyone involved. It’s a role that Tommy Lee Jones looks like he had a lot of fun playing and for me, the movie is about Gerard more than Kimble. I really recommend this one.

Tendonitis of the Thumb – Most Popular Internet Topic Ever

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My blog isn’t very popular on the Internet, as a whole. I’m obviously not surprised, it’s virtually free of content, it’s about me and my life rather than world changing events and it’s well, a bit crap. But I’m also a geek so I check the web site stats every now and again, and track them using Google Analytics, because I can.

And it turns out, if you want to write semi-popular Blogs, you should write about Tendonitis of the Thumb.

I did (here), and it’s the most read page in the entire blog. Weird, but true. In the last month it has accounted for 44% of the page views of the entire blog. It’s the top landing page for the blog, and it shows up on google somewhere between the top 5 and top 20 pages if you search for “Tendonitis of the thumb“. Today, it’s number 7 in the list.

So if you do want to write popular web pages, I recommend writing about ailments, and sore thumbs specifically.