|
Sunday 30th December 2007
21:17 GMT |
The
temperature has been fairly mild today. It has
been this way because of
the wind. That wind is coming from somewhere
warmer than it would be
here, but there is a twist in the tail. The wind
itself feels qiite
cold when it hits you. Since I last wrote on
Friday morning it has
remained dry as far as I can recall, and it
doesn't feel*
like any rain is due for some time yet.
( *
This is a sort of general feeling. If I were to
rely on the specific
feeling in my lower back I would say that rain is
a certainty)
The
last two day have actually been quite good in some
ways, but behind
every silver lining remains a cloud. On Saturday
Aleemah visited. I met
her at Catford Bridge because I still have not
renewed my season ticket
for work, and it was not worth buying a ticket
just to go to London
Bridge and then come straight back again. Our
first port of call was,
inevitably, the pie and mash shop where Aleemah
had her pie and mash,
and I had double egg and chips. Then we called
into Tesco where I
bought a brand new vacuum cleaner.
My new vacuum cleaner
was a Tesco special and cost just £29.99. It is
shiny red and consumes
1.6KW of throbbing power. I have yet to try it,
but I am fairly
confident that it will suck up all the dust I can
throw at it. I
sometimes wonder why any one would pay £179 (and
that is the discounted
price according to one TV advert I saw today) for
a hideously ugly, big
and bulky, Dyson vacuum cleaner. Maybe a
Dyson would last longer,
who knows ? I do know that I will never buy
an Electrolux vacuum
cleaner again. They are so unreliable. My last
one, which I still have
not done a complete post mortem on, only lasted 24
years, and in that
time it needed two new beater bar drive belts.
They just don't make
them like they used to ! They way I sometimes feel
lately does suggest
that my shiny new red vacuum cleaner will outlast
me.
While Aleemah was here we watched two films.
One was called Pandaemonium, and the other
was the 1997 version of Lolita.
Both films were sort of good, but then
again, were not really
exciting. Aleemah had requested a bit of a fry up,
vegetarian style,
for her dinner. Unfortunately this meant that
I had to buy in
several ingredients that I would have preferred
not to have in the
house because of their potential for high calories
and/or high fat
content (not to mention chloresterol). I bought
some hash brown,
tomatoes, eggs, fish cakes (Allemah's version of
vegetarianism only
rules out dead land animals, but not dead fish),
and I already had some
baked beans in the house. She enjoyed her fry up,
but it did leave me
with surplus eggs and hash browns. The hash browns
I could have just
left in the back of the freezer, but the eggs
would have to be used up
fairly quickly. So later on, once I had seen
Allemah off on her train
back to London, I cooked my own dinner. It was the
same as I had cooked
Aleemah, but with the addition of some chilli
sauce on top. It was very
nice, but after double egg and chips for lunch,
and some other naughty
snacks, I did feel quite dreadful when I went out
today.
Today
I went up to the West End to have a drink with
Nigel. After all that
food yesterday I found myself feeling really
knackered just walking to
Catford Bridge station. I really don't know how I
managed it without
having a heart attack, but somehow I did make it.
I met Nigel outside The Dominion theatre in
Tottenham Court Road, and we headed to a pub
called The Intrepid Fox.
The Intrepid Fox has a long history as a rock/goth
orientated pub, but
some time ago it moved to it's current location. I
never, as far as I
can remember, visited the original, but I had
drunk in the new premises
some time back in the past. It has probably had a
dozen changes of
management since I last drunk in it, but still it
does not open on a
Sunday. So we walked down Denmark Street, crossed
Tottenham Court Road,
and went into the Royal George pub. The George
was an old hang out in the days when we used to
have to wait for the Marquee Club, The Borderline, or The Astoria to open their
doors when going to gigs at those places.
It
is curious to note, that while researching the
links to those three
music venues I discovered that The Marquee Club
has been reborn yet
again. Nothing much seems to be happening there
yet, or at least
nothing that I recognise, but their new web site
is to be found here.
The
George was very quiet when we got there. In fact
we were the only
customers in there, and by the time we left I did
not notice more than
a dozen, or so, other customers. One scary thing
was the barmaid. She
looked so young. If I had come across her, naked,
on a porn web site I
would be seriously worried about getting arrested
for viewing child
pornography, and yet there she was serving behind
the bar of a pub.
Apart from someone working in the kitchen, she
seemed to be the only
member of staff on the premises ! Before we got to
the pub Nigel could
not remember it, but once it came into sight the
memories came flooding
back to him. It amused me to hear that one of his
last memories of the
place was lying unconcious in the gutter after a
particularly heavy
drinking session that evidently ended in there. I
must admit I can't
remember the last time I had a drink in there, but
I guess it was at
least 5 years ago, and maybe a lot more than that.
We
had just three drinks in there before we headed
for home. Once upon a
time I would have walked back to Charing Cross
station from there. It
is all downhill, but not today. I split up with
Nigel in the tube
station. he went for The Central Line, and I went
for The Northern Line
platform. It didn't take long to get back to
Charing Cross, it is only
two stops, but it was just late enough to have
missed my next train
back to Catford by five minutes. That meant a 25
minute wait for the
next train (luckily it was not yet early evening
when it would have
been a 55 minute wait for a train). I passed the
time by going outside
for a fag twice, and by visiting the toilets, a
food stall selling
sandwiches, and finally the hot pasty stand. The
three pints of Stella
Artois I drank on an empty stomach had both made
me feeling starving
hungry, and desperate for a pee. I was so hungry
that I ate one of the
pasties I bought on the train regardless of the
fact that I know it
stinks out half the train. Maybe I might remember
how hungry I felt
next time someone pisses me off by stinking out
the train with a pasty,
or something similar.
When I got home I sat down in front
of the TV and topped myself up with pasty and
sandwich as my hangover
started to build. It was not a serious, or at
least painful hangover,
but it took away my will to do anything other than
be a couch potato.
Eventually I lay down on the settee and fell
asleep for an hour, and
maybe more. I woke up feeling all bleary eyed, and
tried to watch a bit
more TV. Being a Sunday afternoon there was very
little on to watch,
but one of the channels were showing some films.
Eventually, at about 7
pm I decided I would get myself some dinner
together. It was then that
I used up the left over ingrediaent I had bought
to make Aleemah's fry
up. So it was another very unhealthy meal. In an
ideal world I ought to
fast tomorrow, but I know I'll never manage that.
Even worse, is that
it is possible that Jodie may pop over. If she
does it will mean two
things. First I will have to rush out and buy her
some sort of Xmas
present, and secondly it will almost certainly
mean that I will be
opening a bottle of beer or two. That will make me
feel hungry again,
and the temptation for a big filling dinner may be
more than I can
fight. In fact there is no "maybe more" about it.
I know it will
trigger off bad hunger pangs and I will eat more
than is good for me.
So
tomorrow I ought to go out and see if I can find
Jodie a xmas present,
and then I ought to give my new vacuum cleaner
it's first test drive.
After that I can sit back and relax until Jodie
turns up (if she does).
Even then I doubt it will involve much more than
sitting down relaxing.
Still, only a few more days and I an get back to
work and get a little
more exercise in and consume less food (at least
until I get home from
work in the evening). Maybe I might even survive
this extended holiday
and make it through to my goal of staying alive
until my next birthday
in June (by which time I will definitely have
lived longer than my
dad's 52 years). |
Friday 28th December 2007
11:27 GMT |
The
sky is grey and overcast this morning. It looks as
if it will be a bit
of a gloomy day, but so far it does not appear to
have rained. It does
look like there could be some rain later though.
Yesterday was quite
similar. It was grey for virtualy all the day, and
towards the end of
the day it did get a bit windy. I have not yet
been outside so I am not
sure if it is windy today. It doesn't seem to be
from what I can see
outside at the moment.
I concluded my experiment of
installing Mandriva 2006 on what I shall now refer
to as my test PC.
When I finished with it I had a good installation
that would do most of
the things I would have hoped for it. It did feel
a little slow in
operation compared to Kubuntu or PCLinuxOS 2007. A
bit of careful
pruning, and stopping some redundant, or unwanted,
processes did help
to speed it up a bit, but I am not sure if that
sppeded it up as much
as it should have been able to do. At some point
in the future I may do
some timed tests to see which is the fastest linux
distro, but that
will only happen if I am suitably bored one day.
On my last spare 10 GB hard disk I tried to
install Open Suse
10.1. That failed immediately because for some
bizzare reason it took
my LCD monitor out of range, and all I could see
was the message from
the monitor telling me the input was out of range
on a black
background. I am sure if I had a CRT monitor
connected it would have
worked OK. So abandoning Suse I tried Freespire.
That too failed, although this time it was because
the CD I had burned
quite some time back had become partially
unreadable. So I moved on to
Linspire. Linspire is actually a commercial
distribution. Under the
terms of the various Linux licences they can't
actually sell the
software, but you have to subscribe to use their
one click software
repository. Of course there are ways around that,
but as yet I have not
bothered. Linspire installed, and worked OK, but I
am currently
downloading a fresh version of Freespire (which as
the name may imply,
is a free, community supported, version of
Linspire, which in turn was
originally called Lindows until Micro$shaft
threatened to sue them for
using a name that the terminally mentally
retarded, when drunk, might
possibly be confused with Windows in the same way
that the words horse
and brick are often confused). At some point today
I will probably
attempt to install Freespire 2.0.8 and see how
that runs.
One
surprising thing happened last night. I got a call
from Kevin to see if
I was interested in having a drink at about 8.30
pm. Having been
almost, but not quite, teetotal for a week (or was
it a fortnight ?) I
agreed, and we met in The Ram for a couple of
pints of Winter Warmer.
After that we adjourned to the London and Rye (the
Catford Wetherspoons
pub) to try some of their winter/seasonal ales.I
suspected it was going
to turn into a long night, and it did ! We rolled
out of there at a
little after midnight, and I drunkenly staggered
home having thoroughly
enjoyed myself. I paid for it this morning when I
woke up after having
only four or five hours of sleep with a terrible
hangover. At one point
I did wonder if I was going to lose yesterdays
dinner out of the wrong
end, but after a while that feeling went away.
After feeding the cats,
I went back to bed and eventually fell asleep, and
didn't wake up until
11 am.
As I write this it has just gone midday, and
to
my great surprise we have just had a few minutes
of sunshine peeping
out from between the dark grey clouds. It is now
probably time I got
washed and dressed. I have things to do, and some
of those things are
some preparations for Aleemah's to visit tomorrow.
Among them is the
question of my blown up vacuum cleaner. Within a
few hours I may be
able to answer the question of whether it is
fixable, or I go out to
Tesco, armed with about £40 to buy a new one. I
still feel a bit
hungover even now, so anything I do do today will
not be done in a rush
! |
Thursday 27th December
2007
08:49 GMT |
It
seems very damp with lots of grey clouds in the
sky this morning. I
think it probably rained overnight judging by the
puddles I can see.
This is rather different from yesterday which was
a rather fine day
with blues skies and lots of weak wintry sunshine.
Despite the sunshine
being weak and watery it did warm the air up a
bit, and it felt
pleasantly mild outside. I doubt the air
temperature got into double
figures, but the lack of any wind helped to make
it feel warmer than it
really was.
I spent much of yesterday morning playing
with
one of my spare PCs (specifically the one with the
450 MHz Pentium III
processor, and it's collection of different hard
disks). The day before
I was experimenting with Caldera Open Linux, but
in the end, although
it worked, and worked well, I was not too happy
with it. Being so old
it was hard to add any modern software to it
(particularly Firefox)
without encountering all sorts of problems (dependancy hell).
So I moved on to Mandrake Linux 9.2. This
installed OK and worked well,
but I became a little over enthusiastic in
removing unwanted packages
(applications, etc.). I am sure I was not helped
by some dodgy
scripting in the package manager. In attempting to
remove a lot of
superfluous GNOME bits and
pieces the package manager decided to remove a lot
of KDE,
and the package manager itself ! With no package
manager it was rather
difficult to use the package manager to restore
itself. In a desperate
attempt to fix the problem I tried upgrading to Mandriva*
2006 (the new name for Mandrake Linux). The
upgrade went well, but it
did not cure my problem. So I have just this
morning installed Mandriva
2006 from scratch. I will try and be a bit more
careful with my pruning
this time !
* Note: 2016 - Mandriva may not have a working web
page any more. This new link
provides some info and further links.
It wasn't until almost midday that I finally
washed and dressed. I then went out on my
scavenging hunt. It seemed
very pleasant outside, but in the end I did not go
far. I walked a
large figure of eight around some of the local
roads, checking in all
the usual places stuff gets dumped. All I saw was
a PC monitor in
someone's front garden, but I have spare monitors
and that one didn't
interest me. The last bit of my route took me to
the high street. I
wasn't expecting to find anything there, but I did
fancy calling in at
the 99p shop if they were open. They were open and
I got some more
catfood, and a big jar of rather tasty pickled
bell peppers.
I
tried a few of those peppers and that got my mouth
watering. I had not
eaten anything else up to that point yesterday,
and decided it was time
for lunch. I have been attempting to reduce the
amount I eat lately,
and that is a little difficult when I am at home.
The answer is to try
and make sure what I do eat is not too bad for me.
With this in mind I
cooked up a virtually fat free chicken and leek
curry. I haven't cooked
anything like this since I was on a diet some
years ago now, and it
wasn't bad. It was rather a big meal though, but
being virtually fat
free (any fat coming from the fried onions that
were in the ready made
curry sauce), and being sugar free, it should have
been sort of
healthy. If I had stopped there for the rest of
the day, or maybe just
nibbled on some fruit, I would be able to claim
that I had eaten very
healthily, but later on in the evening "the
nibbles" overcame me and by
the time I went to bed I had also eaten a couple
of packets of crisps
and some Tesco "value" chocolate chip cookies.
Maybe I'll do
better today, although I may well be going
shopping in Tesco later
on............... |
Wednesday 26th December
2007
09:44 GMT |
I
was surprside to wake up and find the sun was
shining this morning.I
haven't seen a weather forecast for several days
now, but when I spoke
to Aleemah yesterday she said that it would be
raining again today.
There is a fair amount of thin broken cloud in the
sky. So maybe that
will thicken later on, and it will rain again.
Yesterday was pretty
miserable. It rained for a lot of the time, and
when it wasn't raining
the sky was dark grey.
Yesterday passed without incident.
I started off eating very lightly. In fact I had
fruit for breakfast,
but as the day wore on I gradually consumed more
and more food. The
positive view of that is that there is now less
unhealthy/high calorie
food in the house. Many of the goodies that I
bought in the run up to
xmas have now gone, and today I may well do a
little better at avoiding
stuff that is too tempting to ignore, and yet is
stuff I would prefer
not to eat. It is even possible that I will do a
little exercise today.
That exercise will only be a a short walk around a
few of the favourite
places where stuff gets dumped. There could be
some slightly sodden
goodies to acquire, although with all the rain
yesterday maybe no one
went out to dump anything. I believe that in some
circles this is known
as "dumpster diving",
but there are no dumpsters around here. Instead
there are a few quiet
corners where stuff is just quietly dumped in the
middle of the night.
There
were many things I thought I might do yesterday,
and I don't think I
did any of them. I passed some time reading some
ancient (1959 !)
comics. In an obscure corner of the internet I
found some scans of a
couple of Batman, and a Superman comic. These were
from an era when I
used to read those comics. Maybe not quite 1959
editions, but probably
not that much later. When I was at Primary school
(aged between 7 and
11) there used to be a little shop that sold
sweets, individual
cigarettes (for the slightly older boys), and
comics. Most, if not all,
the comics were second hand, and maybe they were
aquired from American
soldiers serving over here. I'll probably never
know where they came
from, but I do remember that there were stacks of
them from all
different years. There never was a current
edition. You just looked
through the piles and took out anything you hadn't
seen before. There
were all sorts, but it was definitely the Batman
and Superman comics I
loved to read. So it was a bit of a nostalgia trip
to see three of
these old comics even if they were reproduced on a
computer screen
instead of real live paper.
Another thing that took up a
fair time was experimenting with Linux
distributions. I have a computer
here that uses a crappy motherboard, a 450 MHz
Pentium III processor,
and has 256 Mb of ram. Mounted in the machine (at
the moment) is a 10
GB hard disk with Windows on it. That is currently
disconnected, and
hanging outside the machine is another 10 GB hard
disk. In fact it has
had several 10 GB hard disks hanging outside it.
On one of these disks
is a fully working installation of Kubuntu. On
another is PCLinuxOS
2007. I had previously tried to install that some
time ago, but
something went wrong. Yesterday afternoon I had
another go at
installing it, and it worked perfectly. I then
spent a fair bit of time
customising the installation to perfection. With
that done I
disconnected that drive and connected up yet
another 10 Gb hard disk
that I intended to have another go at installing Fedora 8.
I had tried Fedora 8 on this PC before, but the
installation went
totally wrong. For one thing it wanted to install
the boot loader onto
a removable Syquest drive - which is not bootable
! Having got a nice
new version of Fedora 8 on a magazine cover disk I
thought I would try
that instead of the version I downloaded. Once
again it was a total
disaster. I was up until almost 3 am this morning
trying to get the
installation to work. I don't think I like Fedora
8, although it may
well be fine on a PC with different "innards".
This morning I am trying something new. I am
installing Caldera Open Linux
on the hard disk that I previously tried Fedora 8
on. This is from a
magazine cover disk dated June 2000. So my harware
is roughly the right
age for it. Linux was pretty primitive then, or at
least as a desktop
system it was, but a quick trial installation
proved that everything
could work OK. There were a few problems, but now
, armed with the
fresh knowledge, I am trying it again for real, or
I hope for real.
Very
soon I must get washed and dressed. Knowing I
would have no visitors
yesterday, I did not even bother to wash, and wore
the same clothes as
I had been wearing on Xmas eve. Today, because I
intend to go out for a
short walk, and it is possible I might bump into
someone, or more
likely visit the corner shop, I ought to have a
proper shower, and put
on some fresh clothes. What I do later today
depends on if I find any
"garbage" that I might "recycle". Mostly my day
will be split between
reading, computers and TV - so no change there
then. |
Tuesday 25th December
2007
06:36 GMT |
A
VERY MERRY XMAS TO ALL WHO DID NOT GET A XMAS
CARD FROM ME
(which seems to be quite a lot of you -
sorry !)
This
year we are one step closer to it being a white
xmas. The one closer
step is that it is precipitating, but instead of
being frozen, the
water is falling as water. Yes, it's raining !
It doesn't make for much
of a sparkling sort of day, but it has good
points and bad points. The
good point, and there is only one, is that it
has meant that it is a
little warmer than it otherwise could have been.
The bad points are
that it is going to be a gloomy day, and also it
means that any PC's
(or potentially other interesting stuff) that
are dumped today will get
rather wet. I have this theory that among the
presents that will be
received in the neighbourhood will be new
computers, and that some old
computers will be abandoned on the street. I had
thought that I might
go out scavenging tomorrow morning and see if I
can find my first 1
GHz, or over, "free" computer. So far the best I
have found on the
street was a 500 MHz PC, and from a skip at
work, a 700 MHz computer.
It was as far back as last summer that I was
predicting that I ought to
be finding stuff in the 1 GHz range, but so far
that has not happened.
I was hoping I might get lucky tomorrow.
Yesterday was
mostly overcast, but like I assume today will
be, almost mild (although
that is mild, almost cold rather than mild,
almost warm). I cannot
recall the sun shining at any time, although it
did get fairly bright
during the day.
I was fairly lazy after my visit to Tesco
early yesterday morning. I thought it might be
unfair on the neighbours
to start hoovering very early in the morning
(any excuse !!), and so I
just did a bit of tidying up between reading
some of the magazines I
had bought last Saturday. I finally got around
to the hoovering some
time after 10 am, and maybe nearer 11 am. Before
I used the hoover I
checked the bag inside. I thought it might need
changing, and I was
right. It was worse than that though, the bag I
had put in some time
ago was not meant for my model, and had a few
significant diferences.
My previous attempt at using one of these bags
had been 100%
successful, but that success had obviously made
me careless. Most of
the fluff and muck had ended up outside the bag.
So I cleaned all that
out as best I could, and fitted the correct bag
from a packet I had
bought after I realised that the last lot were
wrong. I hoovered the
front room and the downstairs hallway, and then
I hoovered my bedroom,
and started on the upstairs hallway. As I got to
the top landing a load
of smoke, accompanied by a bad smell, belched
out of the hoover. I
switched off immediately and concluded that my
hoovering was over for
the day.
The smoke that came out of the hoover did
not
smell like burning motors in my experience. I
think that it was caused
by fluff and other muck getting into the fan
motor. The sound of the
motor did not appear to change as the smoke
billowed out, and I am
wondering if the motor may have survived. I will
not be buying a new
hoover until I have conducted a post mortem on
the old one. I think
there is still a chance that it could be
repairable, and that is one
task I ought to tackle during my days off work.
It could
be argued that it was good timing when my hoover
"exploded". Very soon
afterwards I got a phone call from Aleemah
saying she was at London
Bridge and would be in Catford in about 25
minutes (my weekly
travelcard ran out on Sunday and we had agreed
that I need not buy a
ticket to meet her at London Bridge as usual. In
fact she had suggested
it). That gave me about ten minutes to try and
air the hall and
staircase to reduce the smell of the exploding
hoover before going out
to the station to meet her.
Our first stop would
normally be the pie and mash shop where Aleemah
likes to get some lunch
in, but the pie and mash shop was closed. At
first I thought we were
just too early. It was only about 11.45, and for
some silly reason I
thought that they may not open until midday.
Considering that a lot of
their trade comes from doing breakfasts it was a
particularly stupid
idea of mine. A closer examination showed a note
posted on the window,
partially obscured by the shutters, saying they
would not be open at
all over xmas, although it did not specifically
mention xmas eve. So we
went to the Centre Cafe in the Catford Centre
and Aleemah had lunch
there. I just opted for a diet coke because I
had already eaten a
couple of packets of crisp for breakfast, and
eaten far too much the
previous night.
After eating we walked back home passing
Tesco's on the way. Once again the place was
heaving and people were
packed in tighter than on a commuter train. I am
very glad we did not
have to go in there at that time. Aleemah had
brought a DVD of the film " The Thirteenth Floor"
with her and we watched that. It was quite
enjoyable, but I did guess
what the outcome was going to be some time
before the end. Later on we
watched a documentary about the science fiction
writer Philip K. Dick.
That was sort of interesting too. All too soon
it was time for Aleemah
to make her way back to North London. I saw her
off on the train at
Catford Bridge, and went back home to do
something about the increasing
hunger pains I was feeling. I hadn't eaten all
day, and food was most
definitely on my mind. I ended up eating rather
more than I had
intended. After watching some TV I went to bed
to do some reading. I
guess I probably turned out the light, and may
have been asleep by 10
pm.
I woke up again at some time after 2.30 am
this
morning. This time it was not my shoulder that
was aching, but my head.
The fresh air and the little bit of exercise
from walking about
yesterday had totally cured my stiff shoulder. I
don't think it was the
headache that woke me up, but the need for a
pee, or maybe something
now unknown. So I went downstairs and took a
couple of aspirin, and
while I waited for them to work I turned on the
PC down there and
checked my email and did a bit of web surfing. I
had one email to reply
to. So I wrote, and sent that off, before
getting back into bed
sometime near 4 am. I then slept until Smudge
woke me up saying that it
was past breakfast time, and where was her
breakfast ! This would have
been about 6.30 am. I think I need to go back to
sleep soon and try and
get in at least a few more hours sleep. It seems
unlikely that I will
be going for a lunchtime drink today. I was
going to meet Kevin in The
Ram, but he thinks he will be too busy. So in
theory I could sleep
until some time this afternoon, but I know I
will probably get up again
in a few hours time. |
Monday 24th December 2007
08:00 GMT |
Last
night's fog completely lifted overnight, but the
sky remained cloudy,
and there is no frost this morning. It is not even
exceptionally cold.
The clouds seem quite patchy this morning, but I
am not sure if the sun
will come out later. At the moment the sun
is still far too low
on the horizon to properly illuminate the sky so
it is difficult to
tell if the clouds I am seeing are at different
levels, or whether blue
sky will be visible between the lower clouds.
I managed to
get to Tesco's at 7 am this morning. It was quite
easy because I was up
stupidly early. I first got up at about 3 am
because my left shoulder
was very painful. This is a legacy from propping
myself up in the
corner of the settee to do a lot of reading. My
back support was very
uneven doing this, and a bit of a cool draught
from the nearby window
was probably playing on my partially unsupported
shoulder. It is also a
legacy of a lot of inactivity. This is just
none reason why these
eleven days away from work are not such a good
idea. With nothing to
do, and few places to go, I can expect many more
aches and pains before
I return to work next year.
I took a couple of pain
killers and played on the computer downstairs with
the heater on full
blast. After about 90 minutes I went back to bed
and slept very
uneasily until my alarm woke me at 5.30 am. I had
plenty of time to
change the sheets on my bed before having a hot
shower, and then
getting dressed. With the heater on in my bedroom
I felt quite hot by
the time I was dressed and ready to go out. It was
(briefly) fairly
nice to go out into the cool air. I reached
Tesco's a few minutes
before they had even opened the doors. When I got
inside I found a lot
of the shelves stripped bare by the ravening
hordes who had been in
there yesterday, but I still managed to buy
everything I wanted. I am
now fully provisioned until, and maybe beyond,
boxing day. I'll still
be going there on the day after boxing day to see
if there are any
bargains to be had. I could probably buy xmas
decorations at half
price, but I won't. I am more interested in things
like special packs
of booze, or other stuff packaged specially for
xmas that is often
available for half price.
When I got back from Tesco I
felt very hot again. Lugging four very heavy
carrier bags full of stuff
does warm me up a bit, and I was still hot from
the bed making, hot
shower, and bedroom heater when I got to Tesco. So
I have come up to
the front bedroom to write this. There is no
heating in here at the
moment, and at last I am beginning to feel cool.
In fact I am beginning
to feel cold. So maybe it is time to do some
hoovering and empty the
cat litter tray before Aleemah comes here in about
five hours time.
That ought to be long enough for a bit of
cleaning, and a sit down too.
I might even be able to grab a nap. Fortunately
the pain killers, the
heat, and that little bit of exercise have reduced
the pain in my
shoulder down to just a mild annoyance. |
Sunday 23rd December 2007
19:05 GMT |
Just one
word sums up today's weather - FOG
! Since first light there has been fog (or maybe
mist - I never was
sure what the dividing line between to two were).
Visibility has
remained fairly constant all day at around a few
hundred metres. I
suppose it is warmer than usual, but only by a
degree or two, and no
wind has helped that, but it is damp out, very
damp.
Yesterday
the weather was cold and damp, but there was no
significant mist, nor
was there any rain. I thought it would be a rather
pleasant day after a
rather glorious red and gold sunset on Friday
night (or was it last
night - I can't seem to remember !). Despite it
feeling damp the day
was fairly bright, although I cannot recall any
significant sunshine.
I
had a text message from Aleemah yesterday morning.
She apologised that
she would not be over because she was feeling
unwell. She felt better
during the afternoon and we had a long chat
together. We arranged that
she will visit me tomorrow to exchange Xmas gifts,
and to watch a
mystery DVD together.
With no visitors I should have got
productive and done something useful, and in a
very minor way I did. I
went out and did two lots of shopping. The first
time out was to the
99p shop, and WH Smith's. The 99p shop was quite
quiet by Saturday
standards, and uncannily so being so close to
xmas. I found out the
reason a little while after spending £25 on
assorted magazines in WH
Smith's. On the way home I passed by Tesco's. The
walls were beginning
to crack and pure oxygen had to be piped in to
support the
25,000,000,000 customers who had managed to get
inside. The back of the
queues at the checkouts started somewhere in
Bulgaria. I didn't fancy
doing any shopping in there yesterday ! My second
shopping outing was
the Kentucky Fried Chicken where I bought an
unfeasible amount of
chicken and chips that did me for lunch, dinner,
and supper. I then
spent almost the rest of the day either reading
magazines or surfing
for porn (human porn, computer porn, electronics
porn, railway porn,
and any other porn that seemed to take my fancy -
porn being apparently
all there is on the internet according to some).
Now it
was my intention to get to sleep early so I could
get up nice and
early, and get ready to be knocking on Tesco's
front door when the
opened at 10 am this morning. Except it didn't
happen like that. I just
woke up very early , about 5 am, fed the cats,
checked through all my
spam e-mail (apparently I really do need viagra
!), checked out a few
favourite web sites, and then went back to bed
again. I woke up again
at 9.45 am. It was far too late to get washed and
dressed and out to
Tesco by 10 am, so I didn't bother. I spent the
next few hours just
lazing around, mainly reading, and researching
some linux stuff on the
internet. At 3.30 pm I thought I would take a
chance on the crowds
having thinned out a bit in Tesco (being as the
close at 4 pm on a
Sunday). I was mainly wrong. The place was still
packed, but the queue
at the cigarette counter was surprisingly short.
So I stocked up on
fags, and stopped off at the local off licence for
a couple of bottles
of Diet Coke (Tesco diet cola being one of the
important things I
wanted from Tesco). I also bough a couple of
probably crappy DVD's from
their "two for £5" box.
Tesco's is opening at 7 am tomorrow
morning. So tonight I really do have to try and
get to sleep early so I
can get there when they open. Although I have an
assortment of food in
the house, it would be damn handy to stock up on
just a few more
things, or it will be tinned hot dog sausages for
xmas dinner (although
I may well stick to tradition and order a gigantic
Indian takeaway
tomorrow night, and have reheated curry for
dinner). It is now a
quarter to 8 pm and I do feel tired already. So
getting to sleep should
be easy. It should be, but maybe it will not. The
damp weather, and a
lot of sitting around has left me with a few
unwanted aches and pains.
My left shoulder feels rather stiff at the moment,
and all the crap
unhealthy food I have eaten recently has left my
liver (or something)
aching.
It is curious that the only medication I am
being
offered at the moment is Viagra. Once upon a time
I got very little
spam in my inbox. Maybe it is pure coincidence,
but it feels like ever
since I bought a couple of things from
amazon.co.uk I have been deluged
in spam. Every second spam email is offering
viagra, and most of the
other spam seems to be split between fake Rolex
watches, and "pump and dump"
share offerings. Sooner or later these spam emails
should dry up
because I never actually read the messages in the
normal way. For the
benefit of anyone who does not understand why I do
this I shall
explain. Many of the messages contain coded links
for pictures that are
sourced from an external web site. These
codes uniquely identify
you as a recipient, and then the spammers know
they have sent spam to a
valid email address. Using Thunderbird,
the email client, you can highlight the message
with one mouse click,
and then use the edit menu to view the message
source (or something
similar for Outlook Express users). The message
source opens a plain
text box that shows all details of the message,
including exactly where
it came from. No contact is made with external web
sites using this
method, and the spammers have no idea if the
message was ever read.
Eventually, although it could take years, the
spammers drop your e-mail
from their lists - or so the theory goes. People
who use web
mail services, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc, are not so
lucky. They can either
let the web mail provider attempt to detect the
spam with variable
results (including mis-detecting valid email as
spam, and automatically
deleting it), or they have to delete it themselves
if they believe it to
be spam. Some webmail providers do block, or have
the facility to
block, images in emails, and so opening the spam
email could be safe,
but I prefer my method.
It has taken nearly an hour to
write this. In that time I have noticed that the
fog is definitely
lifting. If we are left with clear skies it could
mean a thick white
frost in the morning - just fine for waiting for
Tesco's to open in the
morning darkness !
Late breaking
news.....
LINUX PCs now
available from TESCO !!! (here and here)
|
Friday 21st December 2007
19:39 GMT |
I
may
not have much time to write anything tomorrow, so
I thought I would
write something tonight. I want to continue, and
expand the rant I
started this morning.
Brothels : they will always exist no matter what
the government or the
"won't somebody think of the children" evangelists
try to do. I have
never been to a brothel, nor do I think I want to
visit one, although I
am always curious about what goes on behind closed
doors. So maybe I
would like to visit one, but not to use their
services. I definitely
think they should exist, and do so legally. I have
been considering
some of the reasons that people are against them.
I think we can
discount the loonies who think that women should
not enjoy, or be in
control of sex, and are not qualified to judge the
use of their own
bodies. These people are not worthy of
consideration. Then we are
left with the nimbys. People who say "not in my
backyard". Why do these
people say that ? Some want to protect "innocent"
children from the
horrors of an in built biological urge. Presumably
the idea of a
brothel in the neighbourhood would indelibly
corrupt these children in
the way that other dens of vice (pubs, betting
shops, curry houses,
gyms, football stadiums etc) don't. Then there are
those who think it
would bring great disruption to the neighbourhood
with queues of
rampant men trailing around the corner in the same
way that pubs get
mile long queues of drinkers waiting for opening
time. In fact brothels
should be just like pubs, or even better in pubs.
All the bars in wild
west movies had an upstairs brothel, and that
seems to be the ideal
place for them.
What I find truly amazing is that the
government have not latched
on to the money making possibilities of legal
brothels. Somewhere out
there on the cold streets of London, or in seedy
massage parlours, is a
whole army of workers not paying income tax, and
they are not going
away because the workers need their income, and
they have a never
ending supply of customers. I suppose the
government thinks it would
lose votes by doing the sensible thing, buit would
it ? This current
government, and probably all it's predecessors,
have done all sorts of
things to enrage the voters, but still they cling
to power and every
year increase their totalitarian grip on society.
Maybe the big problem
is that they don't realise that no new legislation
is required, just
the repeal of a few old bits of legislation. The
health and safety
militia already has enough powers in the health
and safety at work acts
to make sure that the workers in the brothels work
in a safe
environment, and their bosses can be hung drawn
and quartered if one of
them so much as snags a fingernail. Perhaps the
members of parliament
have some sort of grievance with prostitutes and
they do not want them
to work safely. Well I guess they do have some
sort of grievance - they
don't pay income tax, and hence the MP's cannot
draw so much wages, and
the prostitutes probably charge them too much with
the threat of
blackmail if they do not pay up. It would be
enough to make any man
bitter and twisted, but members of parliament even
more so.
I was forwarded some interesting facts this
morning. I have no
idea of how truthful this really is, but to me it
sounds highly
plausible. Stand by for a bit of copy and
paste.....
Can you imagine working for a company
that has a little more than 600 employees and
has the following statistics?
29 have been accused of spouse
abuse
7 have been arrested for fraud
19 have been accused of writing bad
cheques
117 have directly or indirectly
bankrupted at least 2 businesses
3 have done time for assault
71 cannot get a credit card due to bad
credit
4 have been arrested on drug-related
charges
8 have been arrested for shoplifting
21 are currently defendants in lawsuits
84 have been arrested for drink driving
in the last year
Which organisation is this?
It's the 635 members of the House of
Commons
This is the same group that cranks out
hundreds of new laws each year designed to keep
the rest of us in line!
I am
indebted to Iain for supplying these most
probable facts. |
Friday 21st December 2007
06:56 GMT |
I
was expecting another frosty morning, but it must
have clouded over
last night, and the temperature has stayed above
freezing. There were
still isolated pockets of yesterday's frost
hanging around in the
shadows that survived until well into the
afternoon, but I think that
had all melted by the time I left work to go home.
It seems like today
it will be grey and cloudy, but I don't think it
will rain. This is all
in total contrast to what is happening in Canada.
I was left the
following comment (using the comments link on the
left hand side of
this page) bu Mike who lives in Canada :-
Bill,well we had a total of 20 inches
of snow and to add insult to
injury we got another 6 inches last night.the
weather is too warm upon
the weekend rain for a few days.O by the way I
get 2 days off christmas
and boxing day.Hey Bill just think what your
place could look like with
an 11 day cleaning binge....well have a pint for
me ...mike
I
managed to leave work in time to get the early
train home last night.
Before getting home I bought my fags from
Tesco, and bought some other
stuff from the 99p store on the high street. A
lot of the stuff in the
99p store is rubbish, but some things are a
bargain. Recently they had
cigarette lighters with a built in blue LED
torch selling for less than
the price of a blue LED at any electronic
wholesalers I know of, and
they do some pretty good cat food. (They also
do some really appalling
cat food !).
When I finally got indoors, and after
feeding
the cats, I cooked myself up a rather tasty
liver, onion and peas
dinner. I haven't had any liver for
ages, and it was really nice.
Once my dinner had settled a bit I put up my
Xmas tree. I originally
bought that tree back in about 1987, and
although there quite a few
years when I didn't bother with putting it up,
it has served me well
since then. Even better, or maybe even more
miraculous, is that the Xmas tree lights I
bought as early as Xmas 1983 (the first year I
moved
into this house) have still only needed one
replacement lamp in all
that time. This year, as most years, they have
worked first time out of
the box. I have no idea why they should be
this robust, but I reckon
they were a very good buy. I seem to recall
they cost about about £1,
and came from Woolworth's in the days when
Catford had a Woolworth's on
the high street.
With the Xmas tree up, and decorated, I
went to bed. I was in bed
by 9 pm, and asleep very soon after that. I
slept well until about 1.30
am this morning. Then I had one of those
annoying times when your mind
suddenly become active, and you can't get back
to sleep again. I laid
awake thinking about a news story
I had read. It seems that a member of our
beloved government is
continuing the tradition of sticking ones head
up ones bottom and
pretending the real world does not exist any
more. In this particular
case it is MP Harriet Harman who wants to
outlaw paying for sex. I
assume she actually means paying for sex with
real money, because most
men pay for sex in one way or another - visits
to expensive restaurants, holidays, even
marriage ! Apparently the idea is that it
will stop human trafficking in the sex trade.
This is already illegal,
and so are brothels. So how is this new law
supposed to change anything
! If the government know where all these
brothels are that use sex
slaves (of the real kind as opposed to the
kinky kind) why don't they
shut them down using existing laws ? If they
don't know where they are,
how will new laws help ? When will governments
ever learn that the more
you drive something underground, the worse it
gets for the people who
suffer by it, and the harder it is for anyone
to do anything about it.
There are things that humans have always done,
and always will do.
Amongst these are sex and drugs. By trying to
impose draconian laws on
them it just makes it impossible, or at least
tricky, for any one who
actaully needs some sort of help to get it.
As with drugs, so it
should be with brothels - legalise them both
and bring them into the
open where useful, and intelligent controls
can be brought on them.
They will always be there no matter how far
politicians stick their
heads up their own backsides. |
Thursday 20th December
2007
08:18 GMT |
Clears
skies
last night have lead to the temperature dropping
as low as
-4° C, or that was what I overheard someone on the
train say. It
certainly is cold this morning. There is a thick
white frost outside,
and I would not be surprised if some of it, where
it is sheltered from
any direct sunlight, may stay all day. There is
also a mist this
morning. It is not at ground level, but floating a
few tens of feet up
in the air. That is blocking any sunshine, but the
sun should break
through later this morning (I hope).
After my late start to work yesterday I made
up my time by going
home late. I managed to time it to arrive at
Waterloo with a few spare
minutes to grab a fag, and then catch the 17:41
train (which used to be
the 17:39 before the timetable changed on the 9th
of this month). I do
like this train. It is the one that runs non stop
from Waterloo East to
Ladywell, and the stop after Ladywell is Catford
Bridge - where I get
off. It is a bit of a shame that it doesn't quite
do what it is
advertised to do. According to the platform
information, and the
information on the front of the train, it is
described as fast to
Ladywell. Well, for some of the time it does go
fast, but it also slows
down a fair bit, and can get caught at signals and
come to a complete
stop. If it could truly run fast it could get me
back to Catford in
about 10 minutes, or maybe less. It is timed to
get to Catford Bridge
at 17:59 - a journey time of 18 minutes. The train
I prefer to get, the
16:29, takes 20 minutes to get to Catford Bridge,
and that stops at
both London Bridge, and Lewisham stations.
When I arrived at Catford Bridge I made a
split second decision
that I would go home via Tesco. Having got there I
totally forgot to
buy some fags, and it was to get some fags that
made me decide to go to
Tesco in the first place. Other stuff could have
waited, but it was
useful to get in some advanced supplies of stuff
that I may well need
when the shops are unavailable - either closed or
just too jam packed
to get into (or out of if you do get in !) So now
I have one slightly
used bag of cat litter, and one unused. Twelve
cans of catfood (but
I'll still need more of those) and an assortment
of biscuits and
nibbles. What I don't appear to have bought much
of is proper food. I
have a good selection of canned food, and a
freezer that it very full,
but doesn't seem to have much in it (well there's
only so much you can
do with large bags of frozen peas and sprouts !).
Ideally I should be
making some vegetable extravaganzas to use up a
load of half used bags
of assorted frozen vegetables. Then I could get in
some other varieties
of stuff like meats and fish.
The main thing I did when I got home last
night was to watch the final two parts of James Burke's "Connections". It was a good
series, fascinating in some ways, but with
hindsight it was not actually the series I wanted
to watch. I
am sure James Burke did another series that was,
at least in part,
studio based. I haven't got a clue what it was
called, or whether it is
available somewhere, but I will do some research
soon. Some
simple research shows that there were three series
of "Connections",
but I wonder if the series I really wanted to see
was called "The Day
The Universe Changed", although "The Burke
Special" is also a strong
contender.
Tonight I should be leaving work on time,
and I really must go
and buy those fags in Tesco tonight. I am not
totally sure what I am
doing tonight yet. One thing I will not be doing
is going to the old
radio pirates drink in Barming (Kent) . It would
be nice to see many of
my old mates, but at around the time it just gets
into full swing I
will already be heading for bed. Plus, to a lesser
extent, I don't
always feel terribly sociable at this time of the
year. Big gatherings
can often leave me bored at the best of times, but
when I am tired
(because my body tells me I should only be awake
during the hours of
daylight), it does get worse.
Tomorrow is the winter solstice. One thing I
am confused about is
does this mean it is the shortest day, or the
longest night. If it is
the longest night, is it tonight, or tomorrow
night ? Assuming it is
the day with the shortest hours of daylight, does
this mean that both
tonight, and tomorrow night are equally the
longest nights of the year.
I am sure a competent astronomer could answer
these questions easily,
but to me they remain a mystery. Anyway, happy
Yuletide. |
Wednesday 19th December
2007
09:20 GMT |
I
needed
to wash my hair this morning, and I had a bit of a
stomach ache,
so I did not leave to catch my train until 7.45
pm. It was the 07:56
train that I caught. By that time it was light,
and that made for a far
more pleasant journey, or perhaps a potentially
more pleasant journey.
In practice I had to stand all the way from
Catford Bridge to Waterloo
East, and that was not that pleasant due to the
return of a slight
amount of back ache. There was a hint of a frost
when I left home, but
now the sun is out. It is still a bit cloudy, but
the clouds are well
broken, and the forecast is for a fair amount of
cold wintry sunshine
today.
I have been reconsidering what "Charles
Dickens" said in his
comment to me. On thinking about it, and in
particular, checking my
bank balance this morning I have concluded that
maybe it is a blessing
that for eleven days I will see very few people,
and it is highly
unlikely that I will be going out anywhere. My
bank balance is still in
the black, but I will need to be quite frugal to
keep it that way by
the end of the month. Before "Charles Dickens", or
anyone else suggests
it, I do not have a credit card, and have no
intention of borrowing
money by any other means to fuel false revelry.
Just call me Mr Scrooge
! Bah, humbug indeed !! |
Tuesday 18th December
2007
08:15 GMT |
This
morning
there is hardly any wind, and that means the
close-to-freezing
air temperature does not feeling so bitingly cold
as yesterday. It is
very cloudy this morning, but it is dry and there
is no rain forecast
for today. In fact I think some sunny intervals
may have been forecast,
although at this time it seems highly unlikely in
this gloom. Yesterday
seemed like a very cold day. the wind, although
not very strong, was
enough to force the cold air into every nook and
cranny. During the
afternoon it really did look like it could have
snowed. It was
certainly cold enough, and the sky took on that
strange look, almost
tinged with green, that suggests snow. however
there was no snow, no
sleet, nor even any rain.
One thing that contributed to a warmer
journey into work was that
both my trains, and the bus I caught, all had the
heating on. In fact
the train from Catford Bridge to Waterloo East was
possibly a little
too warm. Going home last night I found that the
bus I caught to
Clapham Junction station had no, or very little,
heating on, and the
train from Clapham Junction was heated, but one
window would not shut
properly and that left a bit of a cold draught
blowing about the place.
My train from Waterloo East did have the heating
on, and it was
pleasantly warm all the way back to Catford.
This morning my train was actually on time
at Catford Bridge, and
because it was not so crowded it managed to make
normal progress
without the driver struggling to close the doors
at each station. I
think that a lot of people are now starting to go
away for Xmas (or
maybe are just skiving off work). Even the roads
around Wandsworth,
traditionally always very busy in the rush
hour(s), seemed to be a lot
quieter than usual.
I managed to get my early train from
Waterloo East last night.
Although it is timed to be two minutes earlier in
the new winter
timetable there has been one change that makes
life a little easier
when it comes to catching it. Instead of it
departing from platform A,
it now departs from platform C. Platform C is a
few seconds closer to
reach from Waterloo mainline station, and it also
has one other great
advantage. It is an island platform, and the other
half is platform B.
Platform B is the platform with the gents toilets
on it (the ladies is
on platform C). So if I need to have a pee, pass
wind, or even worse,
on the way home I don't have to do the wearying
dash under the subway
to get from platform B to platform A. That in
itself can save a minute
or two, and is enough to save me from a train ride
with my legs
crossed, or buttocks clenched, on such occasions
as the need arises.
Last night was one such case. Although not
desperate, I stopped for a
wee and enjoyed my ride home more than if I had
not been able to do
that. (If riding in a smelly, almost, but not
quite, crowded railway
carriage can be called enjoyable).
So I got home early last night, but took
very little advantage of
it. On the whole it was couch potato time. I sat
in front of the
TV watching a DVD, because live TV has very
little to offer even
with a Freeview box and cable TV, and did little
else. That little else
was to write a couple of emails. By 8.30 pm I went
to bed and finished
off a book I had been reading. I did not pay any
attention to the time
after that, but I am sure I was fast asleep by
9.25 pm (and quite
possibly by 9 pm). That means that I managed a
full eight hours sleep.
I did not wake until 5.25 am, just beating my
alarm clock by five
minutes. I wonder if I feel better for a full
eight hours sleep. It's
too early to tell, but if I don't fall asleep
while reading some stuff
on the internet, like I did yesterday afternoon,
then I will be able to
say it was good for me.
It seems I have ruffled a few feathers by
suggesting that I could
very easily be bored stiff for a lot of the eleven
days I have off over
Xmas ;-
Name:Charles Dickens
Email:
-----------------------------------------------
Eleven
days off and he is still fucking moaning. Count
your blessings not your
woes. Give from your heart and you will get it
back in abundance.
Well
Mr Charles Dickens, except for the word
fucking, sounds a bit like a
Christian in his choice of words, but
obviously not of the puritan
variety. A puritan would applaud my suffering
over a boring Xmas
holiday. I would consider becoming one myself,
but apart from loving
boredom and general suffering, they also do
that terrible praying and
stuff. For now though I will stand up for my
rights to be a moaning old
git. I am over 50 years of age and I am now
licensed to moan ! So I
re-iterate. One day off work is great, It is a
change and a chance
to recover from anything that had gone on
previously. Two days off
work allows you to do something on day one and
recover on day two.
Three days off work and I begin to wonder what
I am going to do on the
third day. Seven days off work... well even
God got bored shitless on
day seven and put his feet up. As for eleven
days.... what the fuck I
am going to do with eleven days - eat myself
stupid ????
If you would like to comment on this, or
anything else I have written,
I have revived the comments link that takes to
a commenting web page
(thanks to the generosity of Iain). It is up
in the left hand side of
this page. Just click on comments, and I get
an e-mail with your
comments. Whether I copy and paste it here is
purely my decision, and
if I get around to it it - so there ! |
Monday 17th December 2007
08:08 GMT |
The
temperature this morning, according to the thing
outside the Arndale Centre*
in Wandsworth is a mere 2° C. So it looks as if we
avoided a frost
by a mere two degrees, but that is no excuse for
both the trains I
travelled to work on having no heating on ! It was
dark when left
home, and with the amount of cloud cover, it is
almost still dark now.
Although to be fair, there is now just about
enough daylight to read by.
(* The
Arndale Centre is
now called "Southside". A name that conjures up
the image of some
violent gang battleground in New York. Quite
appropriate really.)
The sun did shine for some time yesterday,
but as we are now very
close to the shortest day of the year, it did not
feel like it shone
for very long. I think the sunshine did raise the
temperature a bit,
and it may have just managed double figures. This
was rather a contrast
to a report from a friend of mine in Canada where
he was being deluged
in thick snow - at least 10 cm (or was that inches
?) at the last
report, and the same amount forecast to fall on
top of that.
I had a quiet sort of day yesterday. After a
visit to Tesco at
precisely 10 am, when they open on a Sunday, timed
to get ahead of the
seasonal crush, I did very little. In some ways it
was a repeat of
Saturday. One difference was that I managed to
curtail my appetite - a
bit. I couldn't actually say I ate sensibly or
healthily, but it was
not as bad as Saturday. In theory I should have
felt healthier this
morning, and in some minor ways I might have done,
but the legacy of
two days of sitting around meant that I felt very
stiff when I first
walked out the house. The cold trains did little
to help those stiff
limbs, but gradually I "thawed out", and things
are working better now.
Just five more days of work, including this
one, and I am away
from work for eleven days non stop. I think I am
only looking forward
to every second day of that. It is great being
able to get up, potter
around, and then go back to bed if I still feel
tired. It is also great
to be able to go out shopping in daylight, and
choose a time when the
shops are less crowded, but doing it two days in a
row gets boring. It
needs the tedium of having to go to work to make a
day off seem
worthwhile. As usual, I think Xmas is going to be
mostly boring. |
Sunday 16th December 2007
08:37 GMT |
I
think the sky was fairly clear overnight, but
surprisingly there does
not appear to be any frost. Last night's sunset
was very red, and that
means we should get good weather for today. The
sun is still below my
visible horizon as I write, but the sky looks
clear, and it should not
be long before the sun shines down. Yesterday's
gloomy skies seemed to
be little more than a very heavy mist high up in
the sky. By the
afternoon it evaporated and for a little while the
sun broke through.
It was too late in the day though. It seemed
disappointingly too soon
that the sun began to set just as there was a
chance of the sun
beginning to warm the day up. If the sun does
appear soon, and the day
remains clear, then there is a slight chance that
the temperature could
rise to double figures - just !
Nothing of any great
significance happened yesterday. I spent some time
watching
documentaries on the TV, and some time listening
to an audio book. The
book was very good, but I did find that I had a
tendency to doze off as
I lay back to listen to it. I may be forced to buy
a paper copy of it
sometime.
One thing I may do today is to dismantle my
new
laptop and see if I can spot any clues as to why
the power management
system is not working. In an ideal world I will
spot a dry joint and be
able to repair the problem today, but I fear that
a more realistic
prognosis is that I may be able to identify the
chip that does the
controlling and then not be able to find a
replacement. Even if I can
find a replacement it will be a bastard replacing
it because it will be
a tiny, fine pitched little device. I would almost
ceratinly have to do
it at work where I do have a barely sufficient
bench magnifying glass
to aid me in my squinting. |
Saturday 15th December
2007
08:01 GMT |
It
is terribly gloomy outside this morning. Maybe
when the sun rises some
more things will improve, but right now it looks
as if it could snow.
It won't snow of course, it is not really cold
enough, but the sky has
that sort of look to it. I am not exactly
sure what the outside
temperature is, but I am reasonably sure it is in
single figures. So
maybe any rain that may well fall today could
potentially fall as sleet.
I
haven't written too much here for the last couple
of day, or to be more
accurate I have not written anything at all ! I
have had too many early
morning distractions, and couldn't be bothered
later in the day.
My plan now is to go to Tesco before it gets
insanely crowded,
and when I come back I will write some more. Stay
tuned ! |
Saturday 15th December
2007
09:23 GMT |
I
am now back from shopping in Tesco's. I managed to
get in, and out
again before the really insane crowding took
place. Xmas has it's pros
and cons, and shopping at this time of the year is
definitely one of
the cons. On the way back I noticed that the roads
have been recently
salted. It didn't look fresh enough for it to have
been done overnight.
So I assume that it was done for the couple of
really frosty mornings we
had recently, and in particular, Thursday when the
frost stayed all
day. The other, although very less likely, is that
snow really is
forecast for today. The sun should be well up now,
but still the sky
hangs heavy and grey.
Wednesday night was a good night, an
exceptionally good night in fact. As is usually
the case on a Wednesday
night, I met Kevin for a drink. We also had the
pleasure of Iain in the
pub too. Now normally I would only stay until
about 9 pm, but with no
work in the morning I was going to stay until
around 10 pm. 10 pm
approached and I announced that I would finish my
last drink ( a Jack Daniels and coke) and make my
way home. However I was persuaded to
accompany Kevin and Iain over to the Wetherspoons
pub for "one" more
(not that I really needed that much persuading). I
lost track of what I
had drank towards the end of the night, but I
think that "one" drink
was at least one pint of ale, and one, or more,
shorts. We stayed in
the pub until "throwing out time", which was a
little while after
midnight. I decided that some dinner would go down
well (not really
having eaten since the morning), and went into the
local kebab shop for
a salmonella special (chicken kebab with chilli
sauce). I then made my
way home thanking several local deities on the way
for the dark alley I
visited just behind one of the high street shops.
Upon arriving home I
set about eating the kebab, which was now cooling
off and starting to
get greasy, and tried to watch a DVD. While I was
eating my
concentration was OK, but as soon as I finished I
lost any sense of
concentration and gave up and went to bed.
I awoke at 5.30
am on Thursday morning with a bit of a thick head.
So I fed the cats,
tried to drink a fair bit of diet cola, surfed the
net for a little
while, and then went back to bed where I slept for
a few more hours.
When I finally got up again I think I spent quite
a lot of time trying
to work out if I could dual boot Mac OS X and
Kubuntu Linux on my new
laptop. I had assumed, rather naively, that
Kubuntu would see the OS X
partition, and add it to it's boot menu.
Unfortunately it didn't. By
the time I had come to the conclusion that I was
wasting my time it was
time to go out again. This meant a bus ride into
Forest Hill to have a
lunchtime drink with Ivor and Iain, and a bit
later on, Kevin. We had a
pleasant drink in The Railway Telegraph until Ivor
announced that he
really ought to be going home. I had not intended
to get wildly drunk
in the afternoon and took advantage of a lift from
Ivor. Kevin and Iain
stayed in the pub, but did say they too would be
leaving after their
current drinks. Whether they did or not I have yet
to find out.
Later
that afternoon I watched my DVD again. I was quite
surprised as to how
little of it I remembered from Wednesday
night/early Thursday morning.
I didn't do anything significant for the rest of
the evening. My time
being basically used up with watching TV, eating,
and fiddling with the
laptop.
Friday was a day of rest - almost. I want
shopping
about mid morning and was surprsised that Tesco
should have been so
busy at that time. I bought my New Scientist, and
a load of
sandwiches/snacks and gorged myself while reading.
Although I had
thought that I might go out and do some more
shopping I found myself so
stuffed that it would have been actually painful
to walk very far. So I
just stayed in and pottered around.
Today may well be a
little like yesterday. I am not seeing Aleemah
today so I will be
having some breakfast very soon. I will try and
stuff myself a little
less that yesterday, but I doubt if I will want to
go out for the rest
of the day. Breakfast really kills me like that.
It is possible that I
could manage to get out for a beer tonight, but it
is highly unlikely
to happen, and even then I would need four or five
hours notice to stop
me eating anything further until the drinking is
over. I have several
documentaries to watch, and I still have eight or
nine unread books
that Aleemah gave me. So I reckon today I will be
soaking up that old
multimedia experience (I don't see why paperware
can't be considered
multimedia - it's what ever happens in the brain
that counts). |
Wednesday 12th December
2007
06:56 GMT |
It's
bloody cold this morning ! After clear skies
overnight, the temperature
has dropped to below zero, and there is a thick
white frost. Today
should be similar to yesterday. There could be
some mist about, but
when that clears I hope we will see some sunshine.
Despite any
sunshine, the temperature is forecast to only go
up to about 5° C.
I
was cold when I got in last night, and I got in
very late. I left work
a little late and then arrived at Waterloo East
station too late to
catch even the 16:55 train (unless I rushed like a
mad man - which I
couldn't be bothered to do). I caught the 17:17
train, and then came
home via Tesco. I finally got indoors close to 6
pm feeling cold and
tired. This prompted me to cook a huge hot dinner.
I looked around the
fridge and decided that it would be a good time to
use up a few bits
and pieces, and I ended up with a huge fry up. It
was very nice, but it
has left me feeling a bit horrible this morning. I
feel sort of stodgy,
and I think I will have to visit the toilet once
more before I go to
catch the 07:30 train.
I didn't really do much last night,
but tonight there brings the possibility of some
boozing. I have the
day off work tomorrow so I can stay a bit later in
the pub. I doubt I
will stay to 11 pm, but maybe 10 pm before I come
home, have some
dinner, and then go to bed. Tomorrow morning will
be glorious. I will
be able to get the place warmed up before I wash
my hair, which I am
desperate to do. It is very yucky at the moment,
but I am not going out
into the frosty air with wet hair today ! |
Tuesday 11th December
2007
08:29 GMT |
The
forecast
of clear skies overnight was correct, and this
morning there
is a frost. It is not quite as thick as it could
have been, but maybe
there was not enough moisture in the air to form a
really thick
coating. As I left home this morning I could see a
definite glow in the
clear sky of the western horizon. By now I was
hoping that glow would
turn into sunshine, but it seems to have got
misty, and it is still
fairly dull outside.
Once again, my train was late arriving at
Catford Bridge station,
and was even later arriving at Waterloo East
station. The driver of the
train confirmed, several times, that the service
was now running as an
eight car train instead of a ten car train.
Towards the front of the
train people were crammed in like sardines. In
consequence the driver
was having real difficulty closing the doors. So
at each station we
were delayed more and more. The driver was really
good with his
announcements telling us what was going on, and
strongly suggested that
we put in official letters of complaint about the
overcrowding, and
subsequent delays. He even suggested that the
short train was not the
result of any shortage of rolling stock, and that
sufficient complaints
would result in the reinstatement of a ten car
train. My journey into
work was further delayed by the 07:37 train from
Waterloo (mainline)
station being cancelled. I had only just missed
the 07:33, and had to
wait until the 07:45 train. It was obviously not a
long wait, and in
fact it gave me time to have a fag mid journey. So
I guess every cloud
has a silver lining.
I was quite amazed that the extra memory I
had ordered for my
laptop on Sunday afternoon was actually delivered
here, at work,
yesterday. I fitted the memory into the laptop
soon after I got home,
and noticed an immediate improvement. It was not
just quicker, but it
seemed to correct a very minor problem where some
warning/advice
windows were popping up off centre on the screen.
In fact the shutdown
dialogue was half off the screen and the shutdown
button could not be
actuated with the mouse.Fortunately the already
highlighted button
responded to Enter
on the
keyboard. All that messing about stopped once I
had increased the
memory, and I would say now that Apple's OS X is
now working just about
perfectly on the laptop. There is still one more
thing that would make
it a little better, and that is if the wireless
network card was
recognised. I am not sure if I will ever be able
to get that working,
but for an experiment where I was not sure if
anything would work, I am
very pleased with the result. I assume, and I may
well test it tonight,
that the installation of Kubuntu that I have on
the other hard disk
will also run with extra smoothness now it has
over 1 GB of memory to
play with. In fact I am expecting it to be really
quite fast. The
ultimate experiment, and one that I will probably
do in the new year
when I hope to have enough spare cash to buy a
bigger hard drive, will
be to see if I can get a triple boot system
working where I can select
OS X, Kubuntu, or Windows. In theory it might
work, but I'll just have
to see. Before that it would be useful to try and
sort out the power
management system that stops the laptop working if
the battery is
installed. If I can fix that, and get it
triple booting, then I will be well and truly
happy (for five minutes !) . |
Monday 10th
December 2007
08:33 GMT |
There
was a fair amount or rain overnight judging from
the size of the
puddles when I left home for work. It was raining
fairly lightly
shortly before I left, but for most of my commute
into work the rain
held off. The heavy clouds meant that it was
almost still dark when I
arrived here in Wandsworth, and now, some 30
minutes later, it is still
exceptionally gloomy outside. The forecast
suggests that it will
brighten up this afternoon, and that most of
tomorrow will be sunny.
It was the first day of the new winter
railway timetable today.
My normal train has been retimed from 07:56 to
07:54. However the new
timetable got off to a flying start with my train
finally arriving at
07:59, some five minutes late. That meant that we
had lost our slot,
and got further delayed as we made our way towards
London. We arrived
at Waterloo East at least eight minutes later than
normal, and I got to
Waterloo mainline station just a little too late
for the 07:33 train
that I would normally catch. Fortunately the next
train is just four
minutes later at 07:37, and my journey into work
was not delayed by any
serious amount. One other factor affecting my
journey into work was
that the train from Catford Bridge got more
crowded than usual. I am
not sure if it was a shorter train, but I do know
that we picked up
more passengers at Lewisham station instead of
losing them when they
change to the Docklands Light Railway. I think
more people got on at
New Cross too. That is also a place where a few
people used to get off.
Maybe this was all due to the train being shorter
than usual. people do
choose their position on the train to suit where
they get off (near
certain exits etc.). If the train was the wrong
length we may have seen
passengers get on who would normally get into a
different carriage, and
those who would often get off at intermediate
stations may have been
getting off from different carriages too. You
think that a shorter
train would affect where everyone got on the
train, but you have to
remember that at some stations, like Lewisham, all
length trains stop
at the same point because the main exit is at the
front of the train.
At other stations, where the main exit is in the
middle of the
platform, there are designated stopping points
along the platform for
different length trains. It is all terribly
complicated, and just one
of the weird things, probably unique to the South
Eastern rail network.
I had a very informative dream last night.
It was definite proof
of a split personality. I was at Victoria railway
station trying to
move across the concourse amongst the crowds. The
crowds became so
thick that I got deflected from where I wanted to
go, and virtually
pushed onto one of the platforms I didn't want.
Now the very weird
thing was that I both experienced the pushing and
shoving, and
witnessed it as well. I watched myself being
deflected as well as
actually experiencing it. This split personality
certainly explains the
voices I hear in my head from time to time......"you need a bigger
hard drive"..."why not get more RAM" ....."kill all the humans"......."The robots will
prevail"........."They ARE out to get
you"...... |
Sunday 9th
December 2007
13:35 GMT |
Today
is
a wet, miserable sort of day. It is very like
yesterday when it
rained for a great deal of the day, and I can't
recall a single ray of
sunshine breaking through the clouds. One subtle
change today is that I
think the sun did break through the clouds for a
few seconds, but it
was only literally seconds ! I think today maybe
be slightly warmer
than yesterday, perhaps by half a degree, and the
wind seems lighter as
well.
I had a very pleasant day with Aleemah
yesterday. We
watched the film Blade Runner, which was pretty
good. I seem to have
got into the bad habit of not seeing her back to
London Bridge station
when she goes home in the evening. The roots of it
go back to when the
smoking ban was introduced. This made me less keen
on travelling at any
time, and rather less keen on occasions like
accompanying Aleemah back
to London Bridge when it means a lot of hanging
around on the station,
by myself, doing nothing but waiting for the next
train going back to
where I had just come from. Then when I was ill it
provided the perfect
excuse to not go all that way with her.
Since the evening have
become so dark I am even less inclined to go with
her. Last night was
no exception. I did offer to go with her if she
wanted me to, but she
said that she was perfectly happy to travel by
herself, and so once
again I was "off the hook".
After Aleemah had gone home I
decided to continue my experiments with my new
laptop. I decided I
couldn't wait to get a new hard drive, and made
the decision to wipe
out the hard drive with Windows XP on it, and try
and see if I really
could install Mac OS X on it. It turns out that I
could. Everthing
installed OK except I could not get the built in
wireless network card
to be recognised. Then I made a big mistake. I
allowed a system update
to take place. This overwrote all the special
hacks to allow operation
on non-Apple hardware and rendered the
installation useless.
Starting
this morning I did a fresh installation, and this
time I turned off
automatic updates. Everything is working fine
again now (although I
still have not got the wireless card working). I
am using it right now
to write this, but I have identified one problem.
It is the same
problem I had with the iMac before I increased the
amount of RAM in it
- very slow typing. In fact I am going to order
some RAM right now ! |
Saturday
8th December 2007
07:53 GMT |
After
fairly
clear skies overnight, it is very cold this
morning. It doesn't
appear to have been cold enough for a frost, but
it feels like it was
within a few degrees of one. The forecast for
today is for heavy rain,
so I guess it will cloud over fairly soon. I
have to admit that
saying that the sky is clear at the moment may not
be strictly
accurate. The sun is still below the horizon at
the moment, and there
is not enough light to tell if the sky is actually
clear or whether it
is just light grey cloud from one horizon to the
other (or as much as I
can see of it through this window).
Yesterdays strong, but
warm, winds died down during the morning, and by
the afternoon they had
changed direction bringing in cold air. As I left
work, and headed to
the bus stop, there was a bus that I could have
caught, but decided
that I didn't want to run for it as it would waste
the fag I was
smoking, and besides which there seemed to be a
lot of aggravation with
the local schoolkids happening on it. I was still
some 20 - 30ft away
from the bus and I could see these rowdy
schoolkids jumping on and off
the bus. As I got a little closer the driver
suddenly shut the door and
drove off. That did not worry me. There are two
bus routes I can take
to Clapham Junction station. One is a double
decker bus, route 156. The
other is a single decker bus, route 39. The single
decker bus is
usually faster, and it stops at a bus stop that is
before the station.
The traffic is often slow going past the station,
and being able to get
off a few hundred yards earlier can save a few
critical minutes.
Usually the 39 is very frequent, and I expected
one along after the 156
within a few minutes, but last night I waited ages
for it to arrive.
The wait was as much as fifteen minutes, but
seemed longer because the
wind felt bitingly cold.
I was due to meet Aleemah at 4.30
pm outside her office some five minutes walk from
Victoria station, but
I did not arrive at Clapham Junction station unto
about 4.20 pm. I then
headed for platform 12 where I thought I would
just make the next train
to Victoria station, but I missed it by seconds.
The next train would
have been a few minutes later from platform 14.
That would have meant a
walk down under the subway to change platforms,
and I doubt I would
have got there in time to catch the next train. So
I had to wait until
4.34 pm for the next train from platform 12.
I ended up
meeting Aleemah about twenty minutes late, but I
had kept her informed
of my progress and she was OK about it. The main
reason to meet her was
to collect some books that her office was throwing
out. Originally she
said that there were four books, but upon meeting
her I discovered she
had eight books for me - two fairly heavy carrier
bags full ! I had one
more "thrill" in store when we boarded a "bendy bus"
to Waterloo station. I had never been on one of
these buses before.
Some say they are good, but I was not impressed.
For a start, once you
are deep inside it seems impossible to see out to
see where you are
going, and secondly it did not catch fire as bendy buses are supposed to
!
Upon our arrival at Waterloo we went into
the Hole In The Wall pub.
I had pretty much guessed that even relatively
early on a Friday night
it would be busy, and it was. Initially we could
not find a seat until
we invetigated the beer garden (although courtyard
would be a better
description than garden). Out there we found
seating space, and they
had one of those huge propane heaters to take the
chill off the air -
and of course you can smoke out there !!! We only
had one drink there
before heading into Waterloo station so that we
could find somehwere
for Aleemah to eat (I decided to wait until I got
home to eat). Aleemah
chose "Bonapartes cafe-bar". Their food was
apparently OK, but it is
most definitely not the place to go for a drink.
Most of the beer
dispensers were dry, and I ended up with a bottle
of Becks for an
outrageous £3.20 for a 330ml bottle (I think you
probably pay less than
that for a six pack in Tesco). After I finished
that I went to
investigate the bar for myself (Aleemah went to
the bar the first time
so she could oversee the ordering of her food).
Apparently the tap
dispensing Becks "vier"
did have beer in it, and so I ordered a £3.20 pint
of that. It was
pretty horrible, and I left the last half pint
when we left, and vowed
never to visit Bonapartes again !
We left that terrible
place and Aleemah headed off down to the Jubilee
line platforms for her
tube home, and I went over the link for my train
form Waterloo East
station. We had timed our exit to allow a bit of
spare time before the
next train back to Catford (Aleemah's Jubilee line
trains are every few
minutes, while mine were at 20 minute intervals).
I had time for a
desperately needed pee before getting on my train
(Bonapartes does not
have any toilets - which is possibly illegal in a
place selling food,
although they are next door to the 20p a go public
toilets).
I
arrived home starving hungry (and really needing
another pee). I was so
hungry that I ordered a "kebab of death" to be
delivered. Fortunately
my wallet had not been bled totally dry by the
extortionate prices in
Bonapartes. While I was waiting for that to be
delivered I conducted an
experiment. I tried an installation disk that I
had acquired to install Mac OSX
onto standard Intel or AMD powered computers. On
all my other PC's it
had failed right at the beginning, but on my new
laptop It went all the
way through to the bit where you set up the
partitions on the hard
disk. I stopped it at that point because I did not
want to overwrite my
very succesful Kubuntu installation. One day I
will get a spare hard
disk and try it for real.
After stuffing my face with
kebab I read one of the books (actually more like
a big pamphlet) that
Aleemah had given me. It was all about the lesson
learned from the
failure of the Beagle 2 Mars lander experiment
(and is downloadable here).
It was a fascinating read, although littered with
abbreviations that
often needed to be checked in the appendix at the
back of the report.
The rest of the books will have to wait for a
rainy day to be read
(although we are getting plenty of those !).
Today I am
meeting Aleemah at London Bridge, and then we are
coming back here to
watch the film Blade Runner ( and do some eating
as well). So I really
ought to get myself washed and dressed so I can
start on clearing the
place up a bit.
One thing I have been meaning to do here is
to show a picture that has been doing the rounds
in emails (thanks Bob).
 With the disks containing the
lost government data still not found I guess the
picture is still topical.
More info here, and here (essential reading !),
and check out the related links at the bottom of
each page. |
Friday 7th
December 2007
08:16 GMT |
The
main weather feature this morning is strong winds.
The wind was very
strong overnight too. When I first left the house
there was some fine
rain, but the wind was so strong that it just blew
it all away. Since
arriving in Wandsworth it feels like the wind has
dropped a bit, and a
lot of the sky is a nice pleasant blue. Later on
this afternoon it is
forecast to rain again. Yesterday's weather was
just plain dull and
wet. I don't think it rained all the time, but it
was certainly grey
all day.
I never made it in to work yesterday. I had
a bit of an upset
stomach, and couldn't face commuting in such
circumstances. Had I been
feeling really keen I could have made it into work
very late, but I had
another distraction. On Wednesday I received my
new laptop computer. It
is rather nice, although it does have a fault on
it. It is an Acer Travelmate 290 which
has a 1.3 GHz mobile Celeron
processor, a DVD reader/CD burner, 256 MB ram, and
a 40 GB hard drive.
The fault may be in the laptop, or it may be a
fault with the battery.
As yet I cannot ascertain which it is. The
symptoms are that it will
not power on with the battery inserted. There is a
lot of communication
between the computer itself and the battery, and
either could be
signalling some sort of fault condition. My first
steps in resolving
where the fault lies will be to try and find
someone else with an Acer
laptop to try my battery in their machine. This
particular battery is
used in hundreds of different Acer models, so
practically anybody who
has an Acer laptop could try it for me. One small
clue that it may not
be the battery is that when I was given the laptop
the battery did have
some charge in it, and it would work the laptop. I
suspect that it may
have been charged in another machine. In which
case it is the laptop
itself that must be faulty, but I want to confirm
this before diving
into uncharted waters.
I didn't hear from anybody about drinking on
Wednesday night
until about 7.40 pm, some ten minutes after we
would normally meet up.
By that time I had already put some dinner on to
cook, and was deep
into installing Kubuntu Linux on the laptop. So I
didn't go for a beer.
Installing Kubuntu
with only 256 MB of memory was a very slow
process, and it was made
even worse by the DVD drive probably having
trouble reading the
installation disk (possibly another, although
minor, fault with the
laptop). Things picked up a lot once I had managed
to partition a spare
20 GB hard disk, and ger a working swap partition
on it. I ended up
using the pre-release version of Kubuntu "Gutsy Gibbon" which is a CD.
that installed remarkably simply, and worked a
treat - even down to the WiFi network connection
(although I am only using simple WEP
security on my WiFi point). I am very pleased with
how well it all
works. It is the first time I have used (and
possibly even seen) Linux
on a laptop, and found that everything just worked
"out of the tin",
although I have since customised lots of bits of
it to suit my personal
preferences.
Tonight I had hoped I might see Patricia,
but two things stand in
the way of this. Firstly she has lost her mobile
phone so I cannot
easily arrange a meeting, and secondly Aleemah has
some more books for
me that she wants me to collect after work. One of
the pair of books
she gave me last time is a good read, and maybe
the other will be too.
So there is a good chance that tonights books will
be good as well. |
Wednesday
5th December 2007
08:05 GMT |
It
is a foul morning. It is dark, gloomy and raining.
The only positive
aspect is that it is unseasonally mild. I paid
attention to the weather
forecasts on TV last night, and the forecast
overnight temperature was
up in double figures (just). I suppose if I wanted
to be optimistic I
could add that the rain is not as heavy as those
forecasts suggested it
might be. Maybe the really torrential downpours
will happen later,
although there are supposed to be a few sunny
intervals this morning,
before the rain falls heavily again at about home
time ! It was dry
going home last night, although a little windy. It
was also very mild.
I first noticed how mild it was when I got off the
train at Catford
Bridge. The wind was both cooling, and yet seemed
to be carrying some
warmth with it. I guess that was the big
contradiction. Without the
wind it would be cold, but with the wind it was
mild, and yet the wind
was just carrying any accumulated heat away. It
is, of course, that
same wind blowing from the south west, from
more equatorial
regions of the Atlantic Ocean, that is carrying
the heat and the
moisture that is now falling on us as rain.
I was looking forward to getting home last
night to consume huge
portions of a stew I made from Sunday's left over
roast on Monday
night. I thought it would be realy excellent
because it was beef stew
and I added a whole pint of strong beer to it.
That should have given
it a nice yeasty taste, but sadly the beer was too
hoppy and just gave
it a bitter taste. I was really disappointed about
that, and ended up
throwing most of it away. Luckily I had called
into Tesco on my way
home, and had bought more than just the fags I
wanted. So I ate a bit
of this and a bit of that, and finished up quite
stuffed. One item that
I ate was some rye bread. I was sort of persuaded
to buy some by my
German workmate who often has it, and just the
other day was declaring
how nice it is. Bread was not traditionally made
with rye flour in this
country because of the dangers from the spores of
the Ergot fungus which cause all
sorts of nasties
if ingested. However the Germans, who
traditionally are good chemists,
maybe recognised that the fungus contains a
precursor to LSD, and were,
in actuality, a bunch of wild hippies in the
middle ages. Anyway, the
rye bread was actually quite nice in a chewy sort
of way. I don't think
I'll be adding it to my normal repertoire of
shopping, but now and then
it will make an interesting change.
Apart from eating, nothing much happened
last night. I was in bed
just after 9 pm, and fast asleep very soon after
that. I awoke at 4 am
this morning, and didn't really manage to get to
sleep again. After one
visit to the toilet for a pee I realised there was
going to be more to
it than that, and had to get out of bed again. So
I got up, fed the
cats, and played with the internet until it was
time to shower and go
to work. I suspect I am going to feel a bit
tired this afternoon
after getting up so early. Hopefully I will find
the energy if there is
any drinking to be done tonight, but I know I'll
be wanting to get home
from the pub quite early. A few pints of Winter
warmer should give me a
good nights sleep, and I am aiming to not wake up
until 5 am tomorrow
morning. |
Tuesday 4th
December 2007
06:56 GMT |
It
is
dry this morning, but apart from saying it is
rather cool, I can't
add any more to that. The forecast is for a very
dull grey day with
more rain, and winds. It will be another 30
minutes, at least, before I
can see what is happening in the sky. Yesterday
did have some sunny
intervals, but overall it was a very cloudy day.
Yesterday
afternoon I checked the new timetables for my
trains to and from work.
The new timetables come into effect on the 9th of
December, and first
affect me on Monday the 10th of December. I can't
say I am happy about
the changes, small though they may be. The one big
irritating change is
that the 16:31 from Waterloo East to Catford
Bridge (and ultimately,
Hayes) has been retimed to 16:29. I struggle to
get the 16:31 so making
the train just two minutes earlier could well have
a big impact on the
time I get home from work. It would not be so bad
if the next train had
also been brought forward, ideally by at least ten
minutes, but it
remains at the same time of 16:55. SouthEastern
say that one of the reasons for changing the times
is to try and get a
more regular timetable throughout the day. This is
obviously why my
preffered morning train has been retimed from
06:56 to 06:54, and the
07:54 has been retimed to 07:56 ! soon after that
the trains settle
down to xx:00, xx:15, xx:30, and xx:45, and then
once the rush hour
starts they are all over the place again.
My "loose brain"
gave me very little trouble yesterday, and I don't
think it will give
much trouble today. I think it is even getting
better, but it is still
there. The only significant time I had a brief ,
five second, burst of
verigo was after I had gone to bed. I got into bed
with no problem, I
turned to my left with no problem, then, getting
bored with laying on
my left I turned over. as soon as my right ear hit
the pillow the
"bottom of the bed fell away". For a few brief
seconds it was like I
was almost weightless, spinning in space. I guess
you could learn to
like it if you wanted to be an astronaut. I don't
particularly like it,
but I can almost override the effect by just
knowing what is going on.
I once read in some book, almost certainly some
sci-fi novel, about
first time astronauts, in the weightlessness of
space, feeling bad
because it was a sort of inheritance from our less
evolved days when it
was a danger signal that a monkey was falling
out of a tree. I
haven't explained that as elegantly as I read it,
but what I read was
in the form of dialogue between a novice spaceman
and an old hand.
It
seems to have taken so long to write that last bit
that I now will have
to get the 07:54 train, and not the 07:30 train as
I intended this
morning. Well actually I intended to get the
06:56, but washing my hair
seemed to delay me so much that it was pointless
trying to rush for
that train. It looks like I will have to stay late
at work again, but
at least it is not a Friday.
One thing I have just
remembered is about toilet rolls. On Monday of
last week I mentioned
that I urgently wanted to go to Tesco after work
because I had just
started on my last toilet roll. I also said that I
did expect that roll
to last a fair time, but I was worried about
having an accident with
it, like it falling into a wet bath and going all
soggy. To complete
the story I can reveal that the toilet roll
survived unscathed, and
finished last Sunday night. So there was little
reason to panic in
reality, but then again you never know........
Tonighyts
panic is to pop into Tesco on the way home to buy
some fags. Now this
is a more tangible panic. I am now smoking my last
pack, and I have
serious doubts as to whether the remains of that
pack will last the
day. I was going to go to Tesco last night, but
being a Monday I just
wanted to rush home. I think the reason why I am
finding these dark
evenings so depressing this year is that I still
have not made the
transition from BST to GMT. I realised this
morning that I am still
waking up at 4.30 am most mornings, and that is
equivalent to 5.30 am
BST - the time I set my alarm to get up to. |
Monday 3rd
December 2007
08:58 GMT |
This
morning has started out fairly bright and sunny.
The forecast suggests
there will be sunny intervals all day, but rain
will return tomorrow.
Just after I finished writing yesterday the rain
started. Shortly
before I was going to go to Tesco the rain became
torrential for a few
minutes. When I actually left the rain had
dwindled down to a light
shower. I think it had mostly stopped by the time
I had finished
shopping and staggered home with five very heavy
bags of shopping.
My experiment with aspirin yesterday, was
inconclusive. It didn't
make the dizzy spells any better or worse. So I
have concluded that it
is definitely an inner ear problem. I did make
some further
observations about the effect though. The very
worst effect is when
either lying down, or getting up from lying down.
If I turn my head to
the right, and then lay down quite fast, the
dizzy, vertigo, feeling is
quite pronounced, but if I keep my head straight
the effect is quite
minor. If lay down gently then there is no
affect at all provided
I keep my head straight. It is similar getting up
again. One time when
I woke up in the night I forgot what I was doing
and sat bolt upright
very quickly while swinging my head around to the
left to turn on the
light and glance at the clock. That produced a
very strong wave of
dizzyness, but as usual it only lasted five or ten
seconds. One
possibility is that my brain has come loose in my
head, or there is a
stray not or bolt in there, but I can't rule out
cancer, aneurysms,
ebola, gangrene, brainacitus, polonium poisoning,
or senile dementia as
the cause. It is getting no worse, and possibly
even getting better, or
I may just be modifying my behaviour to take
account of it, so I'll
continue to ignore it until such time as something
disastrous happens. |
Sunday 2nd
December 2007
08:21 GMT |
This
morning
seems to be very gloomy. Maybe it will brighten up
a bit later,
but I fear not. I wouldn't be surprised if it were
to rain later today.
Yesterday remained fairly sunny until maybe early
afternoon. From then
on it clouded over, but I don't think we ever got
any more then a light
sprinkle of rain at one point. I didn't see the
rain, but I did notice
that it looked as if there were a few odd splashes
of water outside.
Yesterday's sunshine, although very nice to see,
did not generate any
warmth. My front porch usually traps the heat of
the sun, but a rather
cold wind just blew any heat away.
I had a rather relaxed
day yesterday. The only major breakthrough I made
was to wash, and
disinfect the floor around Nelly's litter tray
(and the litter tray
itself). I have to confess that it was the first
time in ages that I
have done that, and that it has made the house, or
at least the back of
the house downstairs, smell a bit sweeter. Doing
that, and a load of
washing, was actually my only major contribution
to doing all the
housework that I thought I might do. I didn't even
go out to do any
shopping.
It's hard to tell where all the time went
yesterday. Several hours can probably be accounted
for in giving
telephone support for computer problems. I did try
and watch a film
called "The Astro Zombies", but it
was a really bad film (but actress Tura Satana
was rather interesting !). The film itself was a
sort of cross between
a slasher movie, and a mad scientist sci-fi film.
Maybe with a few
beers, and perhaps a couple of mates, it could
have been more
entertaining, but I realised I was falling asleep
as the end of the
first hour approached. So I put the film on
indefinite pause, and had a
nap.
Another diversion yesterday was reading a
book about satellites. It was called Something New Under The Sun
by Helen Gavaghan, and was a present from Aleemah.
So far I have read
the quite long preface, and the first two
chapters, and it is an
interesting read. One criticism of the book,
although without reading
further this may not be valid, is that it seems
totally US/USSR
centric. I have a dark feeling that Britains only
100% British launch
vehicle, and satellite, will not get a mention.
That satellite was
called Prospero X-3 and it was
launched by a Black Arrow launch vehicle
on the 28th October 1971.
My
feelings of dizzyness continue this morning, but
only in very
specialised circumstances. It is when I get out of
bed that the
momentary feeling of vertigo happens, and I think
it is worse after I
have been sleeping on my right hand side. I still
think it is an inner
ear problems, but I have been reminded that a
blood pressure problem
could also cause this. So I have started an
experiment. A little while
ago I took a coule of aspirins. These should lower
my blood pressure.
So if the problem is caused by low blood pressure
it will get worse,
maybe to the point of blacking out, or if it is
caused by high blood
pressure it should cure the problem to a greater
or lesser extent.
Nothing seems to have happened so far, but it is
probably a little too
early for any change in my blood pressure to take
effect. My original
idea is that I would go back to bed and try and
sleep for a bit, but
with 10 am, and the opening of Tesco, approaching,
I will get washed
and dressed soon to take advantage of Tesco being
reasonably uncrowded
for the first 30 minutes of opening.
I am not sure what
else I am going to do today. I suspect that more
reading will take up a
fair amount of time, but I may do a little more of
the housework that I
meant to do yesterday. |
Saturday
1st December 2007
09:00 GMT |
I am rather stunned to find that this first day of
December has started
off bright and sunny. From where I am sitting the
sky looks to be 100%
blue. This is a complete contrast to last night
when it was pouring
with rain. That rain seemed to continue through
the night, and the wind
was getting quite strong. I am sure the forecast
for today was for
continuing rain. Maybe that was wrong, or maybe
I'll just have to enjoy
the sun while it lasts.
Yesterday was not a good day.
Firstly I did not get my hoped for laptop. It is
still very possible
that I will get it sometime during the next week,
but I was hoping to
be able to play with it this weekend. Secondly I
heard from Aleemah
that she doubted she would be able to see me
today. In anticipation of
getting the laptop, and for several other reasons,
I suggested we make
today a definite no, and try and meet up at least
once during the week.
The worst thing was that having got to work an
hour late I stayed an
hour late to make up my time. On any other day of
the week it is not
nice, but on a Friday night it's pretty horrible
having to stay late.
To make things even worse I just missed a rather
good train from
Waterloo East station. The train I missed, the
17:39, is fast from
Waterloo East to Ladywell station (the station
before Catford Bridge).
Of course fast actually means it doesn't stop at
any stations, and not
that it is quick ! It would have been a nice train
to catch, but I had
to wait nearly an extra 20 minutes for the 18:01
train, and by then the
rain was bucketing down. I left the shelter of the
station canopy a few
moments before the train was due, and then got
totally soaked because
it was actually a few minutes late. I also topped
up the soaking as I
walked from Catford Bridge station to home. I
arrived home dripping
wet, and not too happy !
It was around 6.30 pm when I got
home and of course the first priority was to feed
the poor starving
cats. I was starving too, but I had the money for
the laptop in my
pocket, and I couldn't be bothered to cook. So I
ordered a Japanese
takeaway. Apart from the bento boxes I had not
really tried any other
Japanese food. So I ordered one of the set meals
(for two !). The set
meal was meat based rather than fish or
vegetables, and I have to say I
didn't rate it too highly. It was good in bits,
but overall I would
only give it a "fair". I didn't really do much for
the rest of the
evening. I watched a bit of TV, spent some time on
the phone giving
computer advice, and spent a fair bit of time on
my computer. Although
it was not much it seemed to keep me up until
midnight. That is very
late for me, even for a weekend, and I was soon
asleep.
Despite
going to sleep so late I still woke up early at
around 4.30 am. So I
fed the cats, wrote a long and detailed e-mail,
and explored the
internet before going back to bed almost two hours
later. I didn't get
any really good sleep then, and I am only awake
now because I got bored
of waking up every 30 minutes or so, and then
having to try and get
back to sleep. I expect I may be taking a few naps
during the course of
the day.
My "dizzyness" seems to be continuing (I
still
can't think of a better word than dizzyness even
though it does not
adequately describe the sensation I feel). Most of
the time it is
totally ignorable, but while tossing and turning
in bed this morning it
was quite apparent everytime I turned my head from
side to side. I
suspect it is a problem with the semi-circular canals
in just one ear. If it was both I probably would
lose my sense of
balance, but with just one operating out of sync
with the other, my
brain is still receiving good data from one ear,
and I think the other
soon catches up with the same data. Hopefully it
will improve sooner or
later, but for the time being it is more a mild
annoyance than any sort
of real problem.
Today, with no Aleemah here, there are
some tasks that I really ought to do, but also
some leisure activities
that unless I am concientious about the tasks that
I should do, will
end up getting priority. There are the usual
household chores common to
a Saturday morning, but I want to go a little
further than normal. For
instance I want to try and get all the washing up
done instead of just
sufficient, plus a little spare, for the day. Then
I want to see if I
can wash some of the kitchen floor. Maybe I'll do
a little more
intensive hoovering today. For leisure, I think I
want to go out and
buy a few magazines to catch up on my technical
reading.
I
have added a couple of extra web pages to this
site. Just to show what
a geek I am, I have made a map of my internal
computer network you can
find it here. The pages
were made using Open Office draw,
and then saved as web pages. They are a little
different to most of my web pages.
|
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