A Slice Of What?
I mentioned in a previous post that our experiences when eating at the ‘Slice’ restaurant at the Premier Travel Inn, Euston, were less than positive and promised to provide details.
Well, here they are…
Finished The Cardigan…
…and it’s absolutely awful!
So much so that I’ve decided to rip the whole thing out, rinse the wool, rewind and start all over again knitting something else.
Oh well… that’ll teach me to try knitting something experimental.
Uh?
I released a little script I wrote the other day that converts a GMT date to a UTC timestamp. Originally I needed to convert a whole stack of GMT dates to UTC and, once I’d written a script to do it, I figured other people might find it useful, so tarted it up a little and released it as a Quirm Scriptlet.
Within a few days, someone was asking on the Quirm support forum how to convert PST times using this script.
I very nearly replied with Try a different script!
…
Back Again
We’ve just got back from a few days in London.
Travelled on Friday evening and stayed near Euston overnight and then went onto to Ruislip on the Saturday morning for a final Discword Convention 2006 Committee meeting that took most of Saturday afternoon. R, K and I spent the night at a local bed and breakfast whilst N stayed at a friend’s house.
Caught up with friends on Sunday morning then back to Euston again.
Rheumo Update
Quick visit to the hospital today.
Well – 2 hours actually but only about 10-15 minutes of that time was spent actually talking to a medic. Seems my bloodwork has normalised again which might explain why I’ve been relatively free from the really nasty joint pain and had very few ‘flu-type’ bouts over the past 3 months.
Still withholding an official diagnosis but unofficially classing it as ‘mild lupus’. Turns out I should have been on a double dose of the Plaquenil for 3 months not three weeks as I was told but they’ve told me to stick with the single dose for now as, in the longer term, it doesn’t really matter.
Not due back again for another 6 months – fingers crossed.
Stuff
Finished off a series of three articles for accessites.org yesterday. The first is due to be published on October 16th.
Spent the day working on a couple of client sites and doing some paperwork for the accountants. Managed to find time to try out my new, smaller, graphic tablet which arrived yesterday afternoon. It’s a lot less bulky than my older A4 monster, so I may actually use it more.
When You Earn Your Living At A Keyboard…
… try not to drop red hot wax on your right hand.
This tip is brought to you courtesy of some very slow, one-handed typing.
What Happened To All Of The Spoons?
I seem to have hit a distinct spoon shortage.
My guess is that it’s a combination of the lupus symptoms, a mild sinus infection that’s been going on for a while plus a cold courtesey of Son No.2. Sitting and typing isn’t a problem but as soon as I try to do something physical, I’m reduced to a quivering wreck pining wistfully for a nice warm bed. When this happens at 1pm when the only thing you’ve done is a 40 minute trip to the shops, this ain’t normal!
We cleared some of the rubbish out of the loft at the weekend. It almost killed me…
The next time someone wibbles on about the need to take enough physical exercise, I may just have go for their throat. Would this be classed as justifiable homicide, I wonder…?
Finished Wintersmith
Well, I finally finished Wintersmith last night and I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed it. Mind you, the witches have always been my favourite characters, so that may well have had something to do with it.
It seems to me that this book is written for a slightly older audience than the first two ‘Tiffany’ books. Possibly an acknowledgement that the readers of the first book, “Wee Free Men”, are now a few years older? Or maybe it just reflects that fact that Tiffany herself is now 13?
Either way, I enjoyed being able to read the behind-the-scenes goings-on of witch training and the usual rivalry between Granny and just about every other ‘professional’ witch. Even Nanny seemed to have far greater depth than the earlier books (I’ve always found her character to be a little two-dimensional). All in all, a pleasant change from some of the more recent Watch orientated books.
Text Announcements
I was particularly interested in the BBC’s recent article on LAMA (Location Aware Messaging for Accessibility). As someone whose hearing regularly goes from semi-reasonable to profoundly deaf, anything that allows me to see/hear public announcements in train stations would be a godsend. Any sound in an echoing environment is a problem and hearing aids, which tend to make sounds ‘tinny’ at the best of times, just make it worse. I have, literally, missed trains before now because the relevant PA announcement has been turned into a meaningless gabble by my hearing aid.
