Peter's Hospital Diary

I was just looking at the blog and realised it is ten days since I last posted!

The cold seemed to stay stable for the rest of that week, and at the weekend, I went up with University friend Faith to Harrogate, where we stayed with Dina (Faith’s flatmate) and had dinner with the other girls from her flat (Barbara and Barbara, and their other halves, John and Rod. A really good evening, fantastic food (thank you Dina and Chris) and once again I was struck by how fortunate I am to have such enduring and deep friendships. I was reflecting on that in the sense that we went off to University to get a degree and to ‘grow up’ a bit – no-one really explained that it would be a time when such long-lasting friendships would be formed. We talked about it and we all hoped that our children will be as fortunate in their University experience.

On Sunday we went over to visit Jane (and dental student from those far off days, who is suffering from a bit of ill-health. Another group of remembered faces, reminiscences and relaxing company – and a superb tea prepared by Jane’s husband, Paul. Faith and I drove back late Sunday evening, feeling decidedly stuffed, and then I went back to Corsham!

I was at Shrivenham last Monday for a ‘project day’ when we were discussing the final year project for the MSc. I am still undecided about a project so I might defer for a year while I think about it. It also partially depends on my contract – it expires in March, and if it isn’t renewed I will have more spare time, if it is, then I think the dissertation might be difficult to fit in. Then it was back to Chippenham where I met a crowd from the office for a Chinese.

The rest of the week was busy. A silly o’clock start on Tuesday for a day trip up to the wilds of Lincolnshire – not much fun as we had sleet and then sun glare off the roads on the way back, with roadworks throwing up muddy spray.

Wednesday was in office, as was Thursday morning, but then it was another trip down to Feltham for more meetings. I arrived back in time to nip out for a curry with another group from work! I think I might have slightly overdone things though as the cold seemed to come back and I felt quite rough on Friday morning.

But the weekend was good. I cooked on Saturday evening (pre-valentines day!), and after a couple of days relaxing, I felt better for my return trip. So I hope that the cold is on its way out!

I have been having problems with e mail. My e mail provider for my main e mail name has had a few short sharp ‘phone calls from me. It still isn’t resolved, caused by their installation of a ‘new, improved’ server which I think is severely mis-configured.. I’m still reviewing my options – self hosting is one of them, but I need to investigate spam filtering first.

So on that note… Onwards and upwards!

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Having been (gently) taken to task about updating, it is time for an update on last week!

The ECP was uneventful, and becoming almost routine. However I was supposed to see the consultant dermatologist on Monday after the first session – only to find that the appointment had been moved. I was on a large kit – takes more blood over fewer cycles, but the risk that people with low blood pressure (like me) can feel faint. Fortunately I was OK! This was also the first session in the new day centre, on the second floor at St Thomas’s. Nicely fitted out – but the views aren’t as good. The old ward on the 12th floor is being refitted as a swine ‘flu isolation ward.

I had a meeting locally on Wednesday before heading back to Corsham for the rest of the week. I stayed up on Friday night before heading over towards Milton Keynes to visit Bletchley Park – home of the WW2 codebreakers. I have been before but this time I was in a group of like minded people and it was, as before, an excellent day out and highly recommended! Best of all, the ticket is valid for a year – and there is too much to see in one visit!

I hope you all remembered to put your clocks back on Sunday morning! We ‘celebrated’ with the first open fire of the season on Sunday afternoon – but it was good to wake up in twilight this morning!

Onwards and Upwards!

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A busy weekend with some long awaited jobs completed! A leaking towel rail in the bathroom has been replaced (this started leaking about 6 months ago, and has been isolated, but yesterday I finally got round to removing it and replacing it with a new one. And also on the heating theme (in time for autumn, I replaced a motorised valve that may not have been seating properly. I’m not quite convinced – the symptom was hot water from the domestic hot water heat exchanger was flowing back into the heating system, and the only way I could see that could happen was if the valve was faulty – time will tell!

Today I replaced a blown lamp on the car foglamps (again in preparation for autumn) after getting the wheel stud freed by the tyre fitters so I could remove the wheel to get access to the back of the front buper. This afternoon I was playing wit the server – trying to get the operating system back to a consistent state. (You may recall that when I did a major update, it updated some of the files, but not all, so I have a sort of ‘hybrid’ system!) I did succeed in getting the install disc to boot from a compact flash card (the server does not have a CD/DVD drive) but the only options presented were to do a full install, not an upgrade, which would have meant a lot of work restoring the coinfiguration and backups, so I will leave it for the moment until I can spend some time to back it all up and then start again with a clean installation.

Olivia stayed last night – so it was an early start when she woke at 6 o’clock and came padding in to climb into “the big bed” where she promptly fell asleep for another 2 hours! Quite the toddler now!

So on all fronts… Onwards and upwards!

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Not in its entirety, but for late August it was pretty chilly! However it was an opportunity to catch up on some of the little jobs that have been accumulating – the first off being a recent fault on a shower pump, that keeps cutting in and out. I suspect it is a control board, so I have ordered the replacement parts to fix for next week. Next off was the central heating, where there is a sticky control valve. I freed it up, but it still isn’t working correctly, so a new one is (or soon will be) on order.

My car also came in for some attention, a wash and I wanted to replace a foglamp – which means removing a wheel and the wheelarch liner – but I couldn’t get the wheel off, so that will have to wait until I replace the front tyres, and I shall tighten the wheel nuts by hand.

Finally I intended updating the software on the webserver (and in fact it was down for a large part of yesterday) but the new server doesn’t have an optical disk drive, so upgrades will be from a USB type device (actually a Compact Flash memory device that is treated as a hard drive) but that took ages to prepare – so that didn’t get done either!

However, there was a bit of socialising – out with friends Marion and Martin on Friday, to a new Indian restaurant in the village (very tasty too – thank you) and on Sunday I was out with fellow blogmaster Mark for a pint and some chilli nachos – and from that you may gather that my sore mouth is getting better!

Today is also the first day of a contract extension, so more good news, and on Thursday and Friday I shall be having my next session of ECP! And I jumped on the scales on Saturday – just over the 11 stone mark!

So in all ways… Onwards and Upwards!

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A very sociable week starting with a leaving ‘do’ for someone at work on Thursday when we descended on a Chinese restaurant in Chippenham. An excellent evening, but the highlight of the week was a reunion dinner on Friday (last night) for those of is in a year group at the Royal Naval Engineering College – more years ago than I care to remember! I have seen some of the people there in the intervening years, but it is the first time that I have been to a gathering of so many, since I left the college. It was a splendid evening with much reminiscing and catching up. The really amazing thing is that very few of us had significantly changed in appearance, and even those who I had lost touch with were pretty much instantly recognisable!

It was a late night/early morning, so I have been doing a little recuperating today, However I have managed to fix the little snag on te webserver. It seems to have been running OK, but I have now got the graphical software (Gnome) pretty much back as it was, and once that is sorted I will look again at upgrading it.

Monday and Tuesday will see me up at St Thomas’s again for the next course of ECP, followed by my (slghtly extended) two monthly check up.

Onwardfs and upwards!

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More updates – this time on the server – and not all sweetness and light!

To recap, the new server has been running Linux, to be precise, Fedora 10. The Fedora Project has just released a new version, Fedora 11, and it is possible to update that on the fly. However, with 1374 of the 1,420 files updated, the system froze, and when I restarted it, the same thing happened, so I now have a hybrid system – some old, some new. Interestingly it isn’t stopping it from running any of the server applications, but I can only log into it remotely, or via a command line interface, the graphical side just will not run.

It seems that there is a problem at the Fedora servers too, so I am a bit stumped – I suspect I may have to reload the software at some point. However as it is all working for the time being, it isn’t too urgent.

To cap it all, last night the main incoming switch tripped – luckily the freezers were still cold, but all the batteries in the uninterpretable power supplies had flattened themselves – I thought the house was quiet when I woke up!

However back on the home front, I had a 3C weekend: cleaning, cooking and coursework! Felicity came home this evening after two weeks away, so yesterday I was doing coursework, today some cleaning and tonight some cooking so she had a meal on her return. In the process I evicted a few alien life forms from the fridge – for those Torchwood addicts, I’m not sure if the 456 were hiding in there…

Tomorrow I have a meeting in Portsmouth, so I shall be returning to Corsham after that!

Onwards and Upwards!

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Where is the time going? Half way through the year already and it doesn’t seem 5 minutes since I was gingerly driving up snow covered roads on the way to work, and now we are swltering in the heat!

Must be the heat confusing me as the next ECP isn’t for another 2 weeks because the six weekly regime has started. I’m really not looking forward to London in this heat – if the heat wave continues.

Last weekend was busy – crossing the border into Wales for my brother-in-law’s ordination at Newport Cathedral, then back to Corsham on Sunday afternoon. I shall be back homefor the weekend, although Felicity is away at the Henley regatta, so I must start the next lot of coursework!

On another note, I expect you, like me, get a few e mails with subject lines containing “Urgent – please pass this on to all your friends immediately” or similar lines in the subject line. The e mail then goes on to describe something that “happened to friend” or “has been verified by Microsft/some-company/some police force” and so on.

These e mails are almost invariably hoaxes, so before forwarding them on, it is worth taking 30 seconds or so to enter the subject line as a Google search. This will usually bring up several web sites that will verify (or otherwise) the authenticity of these e mails – so far I have never seen a genuine one! They are just another variation of the old chain letters that used to circulate by post.

Onwards and upwards!

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An update is long overdue, but first, as it has been quite a while since I posted a picture of Olivia, here is one taken a couple of weeks ago. She is very much a little girl, now aged 21/2 years old, and very mobile, very determined and quite able to make herself understood, with a vocabulary that is increasing daily!

I have had a busy two weeks since I last posted, finishing off some coursework for the last University module I completed, and last week, back at Cranfield for another module, with an exam at the end of it. I have also had some results from last year’s work, and while one result from coursework was disappointing, I had made up for it in the exam, so I passed it, and I think I have enough credits for the PgCert, so I am now working towards the PgDip.

Last week’s course was quite intensive, but the exam seemed to go well, and I should get some results in about six weeks. I am now waiting for the coursework!

I have also been doing some computer stuff at home, and I have built a new server for the blog, one that will use less power and be a bit quieter. I moved the webserver onto it this morning, and it all seems to be working well! The pictures show the internals as I was building it, the main feature being nodedicated processor cooling fan, and only one small case fan that just switches on when required. The other picture shows the two disc drives (2.5″) in a RAID 1 configuration, which also consume less power.

Healthwise things have been a bit mixed. While I have been feeling well, and putting on a bit more weight, I have had an occurrence of the sore mouth, coinciding with a meal out with some very tasty chilli nachos about 3 weeks ago. I have been taking some medication that I have used before, and it is much better, but yesterday I had a letter from Guy’s confirming what I had thought, that I had a slight infection, and suggesting some other treatment to clear it up properly.

And there is another milestone tomorrow when I go up to St Thomas’s for the last planned session of ECP. It has certainly made a big difference to my health, and the GvHd seems to be under control. However if it does flare up again, there is always the option to have another course of the treatment.

So really on all fronts, it is ‘Onwards and Upwards’!

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Not momentous, but it is five years ago today that broadband came to my village after 6 months of campaigning!

For those that don’t remember, prior to 2003. broadband was limited to large centres of population, and those of us that lived in the sticks only had dial up internet access either through a normal line or ISDN.

The criteria was demand – the more people that asked at BB, the better the chances of getting it, so people started drumming up support to get interest registered in the hope that their exchange would be enabled. A smart team at BT capitalised on those efforts with support, a forum and promotional material, and working with BT, the campaigns eventually changed the BT policy so that all exchanges were enabled – and mine was one of the first under the new policy.

One of the highlights of the campaign was being invited to the BT Tower in London for a reception, the pictures show the view from the top, and me with the then head of broadband marketing. A good evening!

It is hard to realise at a time when as I have nearly 8Mb/s at home, and I am writing this connected through a high speed mobile network that then 512Mb/s was considered fast. We have come a long way, and I am quite proud to have been a small part of it!

Onwards and upwards! (in speed among other things!)

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Hard to believe that this time last week I was 7,000 miles away, looking at snow covered hills! I have pretty much got over the time zone change – I always find travelling forwards across time zones more tiring, but I have had a few fairly restful days. I am back at work tomorrow, although I shall be in London for three days having the next session of ECP and also a haematology check up. However the feeling of well being induced by the trip has continued!

The weather down here has been hot – we had a BBQ yesterday and this afternoon – almost too hot sitting out in the sun!

If you looked at the blog this afternoon, it was down for a while while I did a disk change. (One of the disks in the RAID array was reporting a fault) so I have installed a new drive (and a cable which looked a bit suspect) and I will test the disk later. I think it is probably OK and it was the cable at fault. (It took a bit longer than expexcted – because I was called to do the BBQ just as I had started taking it apart!)

Still, all back online now – time to take a backup!

Onwards and Upwards!

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