Current entry Archive April 2002

Behind These Eyes - April 2002

Entries:

6  13  25  27 

Saturday, 6 April

One day when George III was insane he heard that the Americans never had afternoon tea. This made him very obstinate and he invited them all to a compulsory tea-party at Boston; the Americans, however, started by pouring the tea into Boston Harbour and went on pouring things into Boston Harbour until they were quite Independent, thus causing the United States. ...After this the Americans made Wittington President and gave up speaking English and became U.S.A. and Columbia and 100%, etc. This was a Good Thing in the end, as it was a cause of the British Empire, but it prevented America from having any more History.
 
--W.C. Sellar & R.J. Yeatman, 1066 and All That

Well, we're back from the Peaks, where we, um, bought books (including the very very silly one quoted above). And took photos. And had tea. Cream teas, mostly. That pretty much sums it up.

I've been working on processing the Peaks photos but haven't finished yet, so they're not here yet, oh well. On the other hand, I have just finished, and uploaded, Stripe's page. I even did it using the PHP/MySQL database lookup/page generation method I wittered about in the last entry, so I'm quite pleased with myself.

Created at 00:35

Saturday, 13 April

Lots to do, lots to do.

Got up pretty early this morning--probably before 10:30!--looking forward to a day of generally not accomplishing much. But alas! It was not to be. Over breakfast, a seemingly endless litany of needful tasks intruded into my brain, the arrival of each accompanied by a sort of mental "oh yeah, forgot about that".

For starters, there's the tax situation. I don't think I've mentioned before that some weeks ago, Massachusetts fired another salvo in the War to Make Me a Permanent Taxpayer. They sent me a nastygram with a questionnaire attached, the questions being presumably designed to test particular bits of statutes that govern whether or not I'm taxable. It's a really long questionnaire, eight or ten pages anyway. I faxed it off to my accountant, who emailed back saying:

What a bunch of crap.

Now, when someone whose entire career revolves around the tax system, and who therefore is presumably accustomed to its little twists and vagaries, and may even over the years have come to see the logic (I use the term loosely) behind a lot of it, refers to something as "crap", you know it has to be really bad.

There is a happy ending, though; he got into direct communication with the MA tax people and through whatever magic reached agreement with them that they would leave me alone henceforward, in exchange for which I would file a brand-new copy of my 2000 MA tax return. No idea why, this will be their third one, but apparently they want it anyway. So, the accountant has sent a new return for us to sign and file, which I need to do.

Which reminds me, I should file that Treasury form about foreign bank accounts real soon now...

Yesterday our Amazon order arrived, and there was great rejoicing, except they accidentally sent us one wrong book. I emailed to ask, now what? They are shipping us the right book, and asked us to send back the wrong one. So, we need to box it up and send it.

My dad and Verna are coming to visit in the summer (hooray!) so there are flights to be found and booked. I am, it has to be said, not very good at finding flights. I've had a go at it this morning and not been especially successful. So I really should either find a UK travel agent, or get in touch with a US one that used to do all my bookings. That means getting hold of Pete and Mel, as I don't know where she is these days.

Which reminds me, Pete's birthday is coming up quite soon here and although we know what we want to get him, we haven't actually done it yet because we want to check with Mel whether she thinks it won't suit. So, need to do that too.

Mike's mum has been using Freeserve as her ISP since we set her up with the computer, but their connections have become thoroughly awful (like 75% of pings lost no matter who you ping, web sites timing out, even pop fetches timing out), so we've done some research into possible alternative ISPs and made a recommendation, but there's more to be done to actually make it happen.

There's still the dead hard drive in the server. Hmm, I may not have mentioned this before. Back at Mike's birthday, we shut the server down because it's in the guest room now, and the fans would drive any self-respecting guest completely mad very quickly. Upon powering it back on in the morning, it pointed out that one of the fault tolerant drives (ie one of the mirror set, presumably the secondary because the server booted without intervention) had failed. We have a replacement drive, but haven't swapped it yet.

And, of course, there are the usual boring life-maintenance things that never seem to be finished no matter how often you do them--laundry, dishes etc--looming in their usual mountainous piles.

Of course what I really want to do today is play with PHP and automatically-generated photo pages. So, I've mostly ignored all of the above and have done that instead. Actually the PHP bit is pretty well done; I've reached the point where, to go any further, I'd have to delve into the backlog of never-posted photos from some of our plethora of trips, process some of them, and add them. Dunno about this, the processing gets frustrating very quickly. But maybe.

Also I want to read all of the new books that have just arrived from Amazon. This may take a bit of time.

(Much later)

OK, site changes! I finished and uploaded the new PHP version of the My Photos page. Have a look! As an added incentive, I've actually posted some new photos from the recent Peaks trip, as well as some from Germany (most of which were already in the diary, but not all).

Created at 00:25

Thursday, 25 April

I have an excuse this time.

You may recall from previous diary entries (because, of course, you read every diary entry I post, and have from the beginning) that on occasion, I have had trouble with pain in my wrists; or, more precisely, mostly in my right wrist. It comes and goes; if I really overdo it, it can give me trouble for a day or two. But resting up has always made it go away.

Unfortunately, I have just learned that if I really really overdo it, resting up does not make it go away.

The weekend after the bank holiday, I spent the whole thing working on Stripe's web site. Several nights that week and the following weekend, I worked on automating other parts of the photo pages. So, I went more than two weeks driving the hands pretty hard. I can only assume it was because of this, because I gave my hands no rest, but in any event, last week got interesting. It's a bad sign when your hands already hurt on the drive to work on Monday. By the time I got home on Monday I knew I was in trouble.

Something is different, you see. Before now, the wrists have hurt and there has been some tingling when things were really bad. Now they ache, especially the outside two fingers, and it hurts to rest my wrists on anything especially if that little bone on the edge is involved. The elbow has begun to ache as well in a similar way and when I really overdo it, I get shooting pains between the wrists and elbow. Using the computer hurts, yes. Driving hurts, which isn't especially convenient. But now, just sitting and reading hurts. Being a passenger hurts. Just having my hands in normal resting position hurts. This is obviously bad, because activities that would normally rest my hands actually makes them worse! I didn't know what to do to help them improve.

Conveniently, Tuesday morning we had scheduled to have the car in for servicing, so I was not going to work anyway. But Wednesday things were no better. Thursday night, I decided to take Friday off and take the shocking step of seeing a doctor. That's right, seeing a doctor. Voluntarily, if you can imagine.

Of course, not having needed a doctor before now, I hadn't gone through the process of getting an NHS number and a GP. The process of registering with a local GP could not be completed on Friday, so I tried to rest over the weekend while waiting to see a doctor. By Monday they were slightly better for the rest, but two minutes after I got in the car to go to work it was as if there had never been a weekend. This was, to say the least, worrying.

Tuesday night I got to see the doctor. He did all kinds of interesting tests to my hands: hold these two fingers apart and don't let me press them together; push these fingers together and press your hands up; that kind of thing. Interestingly, none of these tests hurt. Because of that, and because of the description of the pain when my arms are at rest, the doctor concluded that I have a thing called ulnar neuritis. This is, apparently, similar to carpal tunnel, but on the other side of the wrists and involving the ulnar nerve instead of the radial nerve. I have been prescribed an anti-inflammatory and ordered to take two weeks off work.

Oh, joy.

Can't read.

Can't work on the computer.

Can't drive.

Can't watch TV (as sitting in that position for any length of time hurts).

Actually, I can do some things; the trick is moderation. I can read for about 10 minutes; I can use the computer for a few minutes also. Amusingly, washing dishes and doing laundry and tidying up don't hurt at all. So I just have to flit from activity to activity, making sure I don't do anything for very long.

Clearly, I am going to go completely mad.

On Tuesday night, we drew up a list of things that we should have gotten done when I was still working at home, but never got around to; you know, things like getting the gas appliances inspected and possibly having someone look at the central heating and maybe getting a gardener and so on. Yesterday, I tackled that list, and got quite a few things done. But let's face it, I'd rather be playing with the computer. Which is, of course, why I'm in this mess in the first place.

So...

Yesterday afternoon, Mike found a place that was selling Dragon NaturallySpeaking and could deliver it the next day. I bought it; it arrived this morning; after a few adventures, I got it installed; and have since I spent most of the day since learning to use it. You might have been wondering why I would type this long diary entry; irresponsible! But in actual fact, this entire entry is being dictated into voice recognition software which is converting my speech to text. My savior! Not only can I type text, I can actually mostly control the computer by voice. I can switch between running applications; I can choose items from menus; I can press control keys and so on. The most difficult thing is editing text that I have dictated; I don't have the hang of that yet. But it's very, very close to "look, ma, no hands". This is not perfect because I can't really use it in the evenings and weekends--I would drive Mike mad, talking at the computer--but it will probably save my sanity during the days.

With any luck, two weeks off work avoiding using the computer (with my hands, anyway) and taking an anti-inflammatory will see the end of the problem. If that happens, I'll consider myself lucky--and warned.

Created at 21:26

Saturday, 27 April

The expected ups and downs with the state of the wrists; but never mind that! How about this new toy!

I still can't claim to know everything about how this thing works, but I'm learning. Hopefully, it is also learning to understand me; at least the accuracy seems to be improving. (Not, mind you, that it was bad in the first place.)

Anyway, this morning I made a new discovery that increases the Cool Factor by several orders of magnitude. I can start any application that is in my Start Menu or on the Desktop simply by saying the name of the shortcut. It doesn't matter how many levels deep it is buried in the Start Menu; as long as I get the name right, it will find it and run it. So, instead of, for example, clicking Start, then Programs, then Accessories, then System Tools, and then finally Character Map, I can simply say "Start Character Map", and it finds it and runs it. This also means that I can run any desktop shortcut without having to be able to see the desktop. I don't have to minimize all running applications and then double-click on the shortcut; just say it and it's there!

This is cool because it's something you can't even do with both hands working, and full command of the keyboard and mouse. Most of the time, using this speech-to-text software is only a limited approximation of the things I can normally do. This is one thing the goes well beyond what I can normally do, and I quite like it!

It also, as it turns out, works surprisingly well with a browser. A browser doesn't seem like something that would be easily amenable to voice control, but they've managed to do it. I don't have the hang of entering URLs yet, but once I finally get to a page, I can click on any link simply by saying its text. (So, for example, if I went to my own site, I could then simply say "Diary", then "Current Entry" to get to this page.) It also has some sneaky techniques for working with edit boxes, radio buttons etc.

I haven't ventured into anything more complicated than simple straightforward dictation of text, such as trying to work with HTML, so constructing a diary page is still a bit tedious; but I expect I will get there eventually, once I manage to construct useful voice shortcuts for the HTML commands I use most frequently.

Also, although I had thought I would be computer-less evenings and weekends, Mike is bravely putting up with me sitting here dictating next to him, pretending that this isn't an incredible imposition. (Of course right now, he's making a big show of grumping, whining and whinging.) We will see how long this lasts before he either goes mad or asks me to shut up. I suppose the Both Principle is a possibility here.

Created at 00:16