Author Archives: tony

I’ve blessed my case with an offering of blood

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Case fan has been noisy and getting worse (two big fans in the case, one front, one back, it’s the front one that’s been going).  Bought a couple of new ones a while back, but found that I could get by, by tapping the fan and the bearings would settle down so I never actually put the new one in.

But the last few days the tapping has only fixed it for a few minutes, so I finally got around to replacing it tonight.

Not as easy as I’d hoped.  Had to remove the hard disk cage to get to the back of the fan mountings.  The existing fan was wired into an adapter plugged into one of the power cords, all of which was nicely cable-tied together by the folk who built the machine, with about 50 other cables.  So I had to cut the ties and then sort out all the hanging wires and remove the fan.  Lucky for me I bought a fan with a 3-pin to 4-pin converter, because I needed it.  Picked the quieter of the two I bought, and lined it up to screw it to the front of the case.

The screws are self tapping into the plastic, but they’re not easy to put in, and while putting the second one in my left hand slipped and I dragged my thumb over some sharp metal on the case.  Nice 1 inch long, 2mm deep gash on my thumb.  I didn’t get a photo, we dressed the wound pretty quick.  Nice big splodge of blood in the case, I think I got most of it.

I was tempted to check my blood sugar since there was so much spare blood hanging around.

Finally got the screws in and the case sounds nice and quiet.

Dentist

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Grete has more patience than me, and she’s arranged an appointment for me with the dentist on Friday.  So now I get to blog about how I hate dentists, and my irrational fear of not being able to open my mouth wide enough.

Hey, I said irrational.

Texture is everything

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When you can’t really taste food, the texture becomes doubly important.  And you begin to realise how much texture and taste interact to form the overall experience.

Melon which is over-ripe and soft is ok as long as you can taste it.  When you can’t taste it, it’s like eating soft mushy nothingness and my brain decides the best response is a gag reflex.

Don’t worry, soon I’ll get better and you can stop reading this junk.

loooooong day

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My team leader is on holiday, the other UK team member doesn’t work Mondays.  Not much choice today but to work despite the cold and the tooth.    We had a long running issue with one of our complex systems on Thursday and Friday.  The on-call guy got it in the neck all night Friday and all weekend.  So I worked from home today and spent the whole day on calls assisting with problem diagnosis.  Until 8:30pm.

I tried calling the dentists to arrange an appointment.  I hate medical receptionists.  We went to this surgery a few years back (5) so they have us on the books.  I needed to explain that, and then explain that I had a damaged tooth and needed an appointment.  She was exhasperated and told me I could see my regular dentist on Friday.  I asked if she had anything sooner, but she said I had to see my regular dentist.  It’s been five years, how regular can my visits to that dentist be.

But no, she can’t deviate, I have to see my regular dentist, he has no free slots until Friday, despite the piece of tooth sitting on a plate in front of me.

So I mumbled something about finding a different local dentists and hung up.

It has been a miserable, miserable day.

mouth

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eating with only one side of your mouth is very hard work, requires a lot of concentration not to move the food around.

i never knew that before.

cold blargh

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felt ok (drunk but ok) when i went to bed, at around 3am i woke up with a streaming nose and a sore throat.  looks like while i was drunk, a bunch of cold viruses mugged me overnight and set up shop in my nose.

bastards.

was awake on and off until 6:30am when i just had to get up and check my blood sugar (it was fine) and temperature (it’s a bit low).

not sure when i stopped being drunk, when and if i had a hangover or not.

anyway, cooked a huge fry up for our friends which we had around 10:30am, don’t tell any doctors, but it was delicious.

now we’re all just mooching on a sunday afternoon, and i’m mostly sniffling.

Now it’s 1:12am

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Welcome to Daylight Savings Time.  It appears that I was so drunk, I decided to do the dishes before I went to bed, and in the mean time, the clocks went back.

If I was less drunk this would seem more normal but at the moment it seems pretty surreal.

Bed with me.