afog 122
Flashback VI
Towards the end of my second week the trachaeotomy tube came out and I switched to solid foods. When the Dietician first came by I mentioned that I had been under dieticians orders before the accident and that I was find the food to be much richer than what I was used to. Not that I normally live a life of asceticism and self denial but I had purged most of the sugar and fat from my regular meals. So the Dietician was pleased to set up my usual morning and afternoon mini-meals in additian to the usual three.
It was arranged to shift me up to one of the regular Cardio-thoracic wards to look after the ribs but when I arrived the nurses were unhappy with the Bi-PAP machine and after sitting around for a few hours I was sent back to a respiratory ward. Later that afternoon the Ward Sister came by and explained that there was a shortage of Bi-PAP machines and asked if I minded shifting to my own CPAP machine earlier than planned. When we opened the bag we found that Maureen hadn't emptied the humidifier and the mask and tubes were regular mould colonies. After an hour or so of scrubbing and soaking on the part of the Sister my machine was finally pronounced fit to use. Bliss ... Joy ... I slept well that night with my own machine set to the right pressure with a far better humidifier than the disposable hospital units. Ahhh.
Posted on 01 November 2004 at 01:38 AM by Stephen Gunnell
afog 123
Away on the briny shallow
Leece's mum, Ros, came by at 08:30 this morning and picked up Maureen and I for a drive down the coast. One more short detour to collect Poss and then 50 Km down to the end of Kwinana freeway then about 10 Km to Mandurah town center. At the town jetty was the houseboat Rob and Leece had hired for a week's cruising. After a short tour of the boat we motored out to the edge of Peel Inlet and stopped at one of the islands for lunch. After consuming fine barbecued sausages with various trimmings we motored back to town and said farewell to R&L. Various birds were spotted along the way including, some waders that you don't normally get on the Perth waters, a pair of Ospreys with nest, some Fairy Terns, and more Cormorants and Pelicans than you could safely poke a stick at.
Posted on 02 November 2004 at 03:39 AM by Stephen Gunnell
afog 124
Moving in circles
On Friday Maureen and I went for a cruise on the route 99 bus. This bus does an irregular circuit through the Perth suburbs at an rough radius of about 10 kilometers from central Perth.
We each purchased a $7.50 all day ticket and grabbed a local bus to a nearby circle route stop. After missing one bus because the stop we were at wasn't a route 99 pickup point we were off to Fremantle. We spent an hour or so having a light lunch and wandering around central Fremante before getting back on the bus and continuing the circuit. Unfortunately the bus we were on got an over temperature alarm but at this point the next bus, supposedly 15 minutes behind, had caught up and everyone transferred. Now the bus we were on was getting a double load of passengers and sliping its schedule and the next bus caught up and overtook us. Eventually both busses pulled into the Morley bus station which is about 180 degrees around the route from Fremantle. At this point we escaped into the Galleria shopping center for a comfort stop and more coffee. A little more shopping was indulged in and we hopped back on anothe number 99 bus for the trip on to Stirling station. Here we transferred back to a local bus to get home.
Like with the trip to Mandurah my hip was aching by the end of the day. It doesn't like the enforced sitting coupled with mild vibration. Despite that a good outing was had by all.
Posted on 07 November 2004 at 12:56 AM by Stephen Gunnell
afog 125
Some of those 99/98 buses can really be violent stopping and turning corners, you sometimes need to brace yourself.
Posted on 08 November 2004 at 05:18 AM by Alicia Smith
afog 126
Was that the one we followed when we went to Reading Cinema to see Hellboy?
Posted on 09 November 2004 at 12:27 AM by Poss
afog 127
Bus
Many of the newer buses go in for violent maneuvers. The 98/99 busses do go past Belmont forum so you might well have encountered them. I haven't managed to ride on one of the hydrogen fuelled buses yet. I've seen a couple doing CAT duty but always when jumping on for a ride would have been inconvenient. For my money hydrogen fuel cells are probably not the way to go. Too much finnicky infrastructure needed to handle the hydrogen.
Posted on 09 November 2004 at 12:51 AM by Stephen Gunnell
afog 128
I believe it was the one we followed, Poss. It got away from us though, didn't it?
Posted on 09 November 2004 at 05:26 AM by Alicia Smith
afog 129
Buses? We don't need to steenkeeng buses!
Posted on 14 November 2004 at 05:30 AM by Poss
afog 130
Hee hee.
Posted on 14 November 2004 at 06:54 PM by Alicia Smith
afog 131
Ramping up ...
Last Friday the GP gave me a conditional OK to go back to work. The condition being that I stick to half days until the end of the year. One more check-up on the 19th to check the status of my hip and I may b able to ditch the crutches. Waiting with bated breath.
We had an unexpected visit from Joe Blake yesterday. Joe is the man who first exposed me to the concept of recumbent bikes back in the '80s. He was also the person who gave me a test ride on his Greenspeed. A while later his trike was stolen and went missing for several years. Then I spotted the distinctive early model frame in a frame-builders and Joe and his Greenspeed were re-united. In appreciation Joe offered me a bottle of one of his fine home made liqueurs. Time passed and I forgot to collect and then Joe turned up to deliver. Mmmmm thanks Joe.
Posted on 14 November 2004 at 07:10 PM by Stephen Gunnell
afog 132
Good luck Steveg with the crutch ditching! Not long now!
Posted on 15 November 2004 at 12:39 AM by Alicia Smith
afog 133
There's a view up here
I spent most of yesterday climbing the learning curve for WebMake. I've had the program for a while but up to now I had only produced a fragmentary configuration. So ... a few dozen experiments later I have something that works. Along the way I even cleaned up the translation of the QuickTopic message references so that they work. I still have to finish converting all the existing pages and then I can go and update all the links that I have been holding off adding.
E-mailed my ex-boss on Monday and they said they didn't have a position for me c'est la vie. Anyone need a config manager?
Posted on 17 November 2004 at 02:17 AM by Stephen Gunnell
afog 134
Ten day gap
There was a little to-ing and fro-ing about the job. Fujitsu had told Candle that they would be happy to re-hire me back while I was still in hospital so when John said there wasn't any vacancies I mentioned that I needed to talk to Candle and follow up the Fujitsu offer in case they had somthing else in mind. John mentioned this to the on-site Fujitsu guys who queried their office who contacted Candle in a great flap. Turns out they had made the offer without checking with the client. Heh!
At the same time Candle mentioned to me that they had a job for a Change Manager on the books and would I be interested? I did actually give this one some thought as the money was a fair bit less than I had been getting from either Candle or ADI. However after some calculations and a chat with Maureen it seems adequate for our present needs. The problem with the ADI salary was that every year I received a salary increment from the assesment and to a fair extent I priced myself out of the game. And the Candle/Fujitsu/WAPS job was of course priced on a short term contract rate.
So I had an interview on Wednesday which went well and I have another interview with a wider scope on Monday. Looks good so-far.
Went to the last itSMF chapter conference for the year on Thurday. Good speakers and some wine and nibblies afterwards. Caught up with some people from WAPS. I need to have a farewell lunch ... after one of them gets back from a(nother) NZ holiday. I handed back my security pass and key-cards and made arrangements for my pile of gear to be transported back here.
WebMake still needs a bit of tuning. The basic page structures are in production but currently all pages have the same pretty stencil and the page footers are missing. And I haven't written the internal update page to maintain the link register.
Pulled Blood, Sweat, and Tears, my personal RPG rules, out of limbo and started bashing away at the mechanics again. I would like to get these to a playable state but that means writing down the processes and making sure they work.
Along the way we hired a film scanner for a week. I didn't have much success getting it working with Vue-Scan but Maureen was beavering away, mostly happily, on her laptop scanning negatives from her overseas holidays in the 1980's. Now she wants a PCMCIA based USB 2.0 hub to speed up her (hypothetical) next scanning session.
Posted on 26 November 2004 at 09:40 PM by Stephen Gunnell
afog 135
Arabian Nights
After the main horde had departed from the Friday night gaming session, Leece suggested playing their newly acquired copy of Arabian Nights. This was produced by West End Games in the mid eighties. The chief designer was Eric Goldberg at that time probably recently ex the breakup of SPI. In fact a lot of the game components look like they could have been SPI products.
The game feels (and plays) like it was intended to compete with the Infocom text games by being richer and deeper than anything that would fit on a PC of the time. This I think it does admirably. There are a lot of good storylines, the combination of cards, dice, character attributes, and player decisions means that you will seldom have the same encounter and even if you remember a good outcome there is no guarantee you will be able to repeat it.
The characters start in Baghdad and are moved around the map on a network of connections both on land and sea. Travel distance depends on the current wealth of the player. At the end of each turn an encounter card is drawn which will direct the players to a paragraph in the 'story book'. There are a number of possible story links on each card depending on either the location of the encounter or the stage of the game. A dice is rolled and some simple modifiers are added to determine the exact type of encounter ( a Foolish Efreet is not the same as a Vengeful Efreet ) and the player decides how to interact with the encounter ( typically a verb like aid, rob, avoid, examine, etc. ) this yeilds a paragraph entry in the story book which is then modified by another dice roll to keep some uncertainty about the possible outcome. The final entry will have some description to be read out and a range of possible outcomes based on the characters skills.
The whole process plays quickly and is an outstandingly elegant piece of games design. We played for over 3 hours before Leece won. She did extremely well in the first part of the game and then struggled to make her last few victory points. A good four star forgotten classic.
Posted on 27 November 2004 at 07:30 PM by Stephen Gunnell