Went to a new NHS dentist today. The obligatory checkup. Guy seems okay – he reminds me of an actor whose name I can’t place – and he informed me that I need 3 fillings. That’s a 50 minute appointment. I indicated that I found injections and anaesthetics to be a Good Thing. He said that the one he uses is that good he can remove teeth 2½ minutes after giving it. That’s some drug…. on 20 November I shall find out….
The XP Event Viewer had – until a couple of days ago – got Application, Security, System and Antivirus areas. Because of something else that happened and I went looking in there I now see that Internet Explorer is listed here. Why?
The conspiracy theorists are likely to have their say as Schumacher crucially suffered a puncture to the left-rear tyre on his Ferrari after being clipped by the front wing of Giancarlo Fisichella’s Renault.
Ferrari technical director Ross Brawn pointed an accusing finger at the Italian as he said: “I think he clipped Michael’s tyre as he went past him and screwed our race. (Planet F1)
Conspiracy? Hell no. Justice in some other form? Hell yes. I can’t be alone in thinking that F1 just got better. I’m partly surprised the stewards didn’t Black Flag every other car. It’s a polarity thing with that guy – and I’m definitely not at his party. Still, next season should be better… once DC gets that “This year the title is mine” nonsense out of the way. Again.
I bit the bullet and installed Gallery again, imported all the images from Zenphoto(s) and nuked all other photo dirs. I really like Zenphoto because it’s light and there is nothing there I’m not using. But having just one cache directory for all the albums wasn’t working – I had a problem with something a while ago and going into that directory caused problems due to the number of files. Less files and more zp installs? Possibly…. but Gallery is now where all my online photos. The hiding of albums seems useful and I’ve yet to get link in there that leads out of there – later maybe.
And ages ago I pondered how to organise my images. I just bought ACDSee 9 after checking out trial code. And now I being careful in trying to create as many if not all of the categories I’ll need to classify the images I know I have. It’s pointless charging through adding willy-nilly because it’ll be just as much a mess as it is now, if not worse. So that’s not the quickest of tasks – especially as I’m looking through pictures while pondering and they take me off on other tangents too.
Good things are pictures.
Last week the Consultant Neurologist stopped Jacq’s Interferon. We’ve still got some in the fridge but it’ll not be used. As expensive as it is it will almost certainly land in the bin. The stopping of the drug is not a problem in itself – the day following the injection made her feel terrible and her otherwise poor mobility was reduced greatly. The problem is that this event brings things with it.
It’s a realisation of just how much she has deteriorated even in the last year. It’s a realisation of how much our daily lives are affected, how much it affects the girls, that things can never be better only worse, that this house poses problems because of the stairs, that she feels guilty about x y and z and thinks I feel a b and c when I don’t but I can’t explain what I do feel because right now it’s me who has to be the strong one and all this comes as a shock to us because we both deal with it differently but in the same way – we block it. And an event like this makes discussion happen. And when you have to have a discussion one person in the couple isn’t quite as ready / prepared / thought-it-all-through as the other. So things aren’t even. And I’m sure we both saw the same news item and we both didn’t discuss it with each other because what was almost a theoretical discussion that was comfortable because of distance has become something more firm.
Take the spectrum of emotions. Take out almost all the positive stuff. J has one mix. I have another. But she can’t/won’t/isn’t able to reveal and release it. Neither can I. So it hangs uncomfortably. It has done for a week now which is – for us – a hell of a long time.
The cloud will move somewhere. We can’t banish it over the horizon any more though. There are large parts of the future neither of us want to happen. But they will. Crap.
Exactly as it came out of the camera (only lower quality).
I don’t like busy desktops, so this is just fine.
The original in blue by Bryan Veloso will surface soon no doubt but I quite like my deviation too.
Uninstalling something else, I noticed this:
It’s not that big at all but it’s a strange sum.
Is Winamp still ‘it’?
I was checking and updating programs and it struck me that all I have used for music is Winamp for ages. I try different browsers, different editors, different graphics stuff, readers – many programs but the one solid thing in there is Winamp. That is no criticism at all – it does what it does and very well but is there anything different out there?
I just d/’d the Last.fm player-thing that seems to do little except say “This feature is only for Subscribers” and display similar artists. Which I can find at Last.fm anyway and I much much prefer the funkiness of liveplasma so I can’t see the player-thing lasting much longer today – there’s no real point to it is there? I have tried the Last.fm radio and spent so long hitting ‘next’ (or whatever it was) it became redundant). Pandora ….. no… even when it can be ripped.
So – is Winamp still the mutt’s nuts?
8:30pm. Me, P and Winston go out for his evening walk. We take him off the lead where the blue dot is at the bottom. It’s a path/cyclepath with grasses and bushes/trees either side. As it’s dark we play hide and seek with the dog to help wear him out a bit. All this happens on the orange part on the left. We are on/off and over that path constantly and it’s only 7 feet wide. We can see everything that might pass. Nothing did. We played for about 20 minutes.
As is normal we then headed over the roundabout. There are no houses here, no buses, it’s just a series of road intersections and crossings. We get to the other side and about where the orange line stops are some barriers we pass through.This is a daily walk and I always let Winston off the lead. So I did. Me and P started walking and I get to the point where I can see round that slight curve (it’s where I saw a stoat a few weeks ago). I’m looking downhill. I see a person where the red dot is. You can tell when someone is walking to you or away can’t you? This person was coming toward. Winston was ahead of me and I wanted hom closer and on the lead so I turned and told P to hide. She ducked behind a huge rock that is there (there are several to prevent “travellers”) and I called to Winston that P was gone. I’d looked away for a matter of a few seconds. And the person had gone.
To get from where they were out of my sight they would have had to run. Or hopped straight into the undergrowth. They were not moving away from me, of that I am absolutely certain. We always walk down to the bottom curve – there’s a gate there – and tonight we did the same. Both me and P had seen this person, we both thought they were coming at us and we both knew there was no way they could realistically have got out of our sight. But we didn’t see them. It was one of those “Someone is watching me” moments. I talked loudly. I kept a good grip on the dog lead and worked out the arc of my swing. I walked confidently. I wished I’d remembered my mobile. I watched every move Winston made – but then Great Danes aren’t known for their sleuthing noses. And I constantly looked behind us on the way back. Really odd. Spooky.