Monthly Archives: August 2009

Twenty per cent

Reply

This is good to write:
Was: 100kg / 220lb / 15st 10lb
Am: 80kg / 176lb / 12st 8lb
I have lost 20% of my weight.

So ……. am I happy yet? No. Do I know when I’ll be done? Yes. Do I have a target weight? No. Do I have a target ‘look’? Yes. Will I tell you what it is? No. Why? Because someone will say it is unhealthy :)
Noticeable effects: arms are thinner, face is thinner, I feel no less heavy. And no, this is not an eating/body disorder.
Biggest problem: knowing when to go buy more trousers. The jeans I could no longer fit into are now a little large. The combats I wear are all too large. I could go to the place in town that sells the combats, try a pair on then buy 4 more in different colours (like I did last time) but as my target has not yet been hit could they also turn out to be baggy? Yes they could- so when do I buy? The matter will be brought into focus in the last week of August just before the rest of Automattic Support fly in for a wander around London. I can’t look a total tramp then can I?

Am I exercising? No, wish I was. I’d be even lighter. Do I feel hungry? Very very rarely. It’s like asking a someone giving up if they want a cigarette – they do but what they are missing is the ceremony of smoking, the actions, the ingrained behaviours. So it’s coming downstairs, looking in the cupboard / opening the fridge / checking the cookie jar. The sugary chewing – that whole tactile thing. So I do not feel hungry but I do want to engage in those actions. Does taking smaller bites and chewing longer work? Yes, definitely. Would it be really really nice to eat the 2 caramel squares in the fridge on the top shelf to the left? Hell yes. So why don’t I? I can’t pretend I didn’t, can I?

Has the ‘diet’ so far been easy? Yep, piece of cake :)

(This covers 21 weeks since I started. 21*2lbs = 42 and I’ve lost 44 so I’m not exactly disappearing)

(btw, Jacq says I do not look ill, just skinnier. No worries)

Money for waiting

2

‘No shows’ cost the NHS millions

“Between 2007 and 2008, 6.5 million appointments were missed in the UK, with hospitals losing around £100 per patient in revenue.” Really? Didn’t realise we were quite so valuable. Certainly aren’t treated like that.

“The Patients Association said missing an appointment was “unforgivable”.” Crap. Utter crap. And anyway, if any of you are Christians of any sort then nothing is “unforgivable”. Pass out rosaries maybe?

As a veteran of these appts along with Jacq:
1. Clinics run late. So what should be a 10 minute appt turns into an epic wait as the consultant or one of his monkeys is running late. give up a whole afternoon for the sake of “I’ll write to your GP”?

2. Clinics run late. Got to one for a 10:30 appt to find the doc was running 45 mins late. wtf?

3. If Jacq can’t move before midday and you absolutely insist she gets to an appt for 11am which means she has to start moving by 9:30 at the latest, and you bully her into that, and you KNOW she may not turn up because she tells you of that risk then when she does not it is THEIR fault.

4. Parking. Been booted from an appt because the parking was so bad we had to park ages away. Why? So managers could park real close or leave their named bays empty all day. Oh – and disabled bays? Have a few more. Especially outside an MS clinic. And that clinic? Automattic doors, no tripping points on the doors. Having to fight every wheel turn of the way is fantastically annoying.

5. I’m worth £100 for just those few minutes? And there is what… let’s say 4 people an hour. That’s £400/hour passing through. Treat it nicely.

6. Targets. At Leicester General Hospital this means you get sat in the waiting area, called through to another waiting area. Both involve long waits. Then moved to a room when you wait 15 mins for the actual (and hopefully qualified) medic. If you are unlucky enough to get the monkey the appt time doubles as they sweat to get every last bit of info to guess at a solution.

The complete cure:
- Give people money if you make them wait. If there is a chance I’ll earn say £25 if you are 1 hour late I’ll be there. If you see me, we both win. If you don’t and someone gets sacked, the NHS wins. And I get free money.

Trusts understand only one language – Money. So make them speak it.

iTunes. Still crap.

2

When the mac mini went wrong one of the steps I took – because I would have been told to take it – was to reinstall Leopard. I have said before that if you go to the Apple forums you will see this advice given many many times. Wonder why.. Whatever. I failed to backup my chronosync and jungledisk settings so I have been looking at how I backup again.

I have 2 music directories – one is mine, the other is J’s. Her music is a backup of what she has on her laptop. So I have music and apps in iTunes. Taken together I do not have room on the HD. Technically I might but according to those most learned of OS X gurus in their forums this most wonderful of all operating systems needs 10% of disk space free to work properly. Who I am to argue? To make backing up easy I want all of iTunes on the ext HD. That’s files, caches, artwork, mobile apps and every last mp3-contained note. All I have to then do is backup one location.

I have tried letting iTunes copy the music in then moving the library. I have tried not letting it copy the music and moving it instead. I have tried 2 “this will work” solutions from the glittering Discussion pyramids at Apple. In one case I got 2 libraries still, in the other I had every track doubled. Literally. Music went from 50gb to 98gb. It takes a fair while to copy that data.. and I’m fed up with the steaming pile of junk.

Plan 1:
1. Clear ext hd1 of music (It’s copying to hd2)
2. Copy all mobile apps to hd2
3. Delete every single iTunes file so it restarts
4. It can do what it wants with mobile apps (because I can’t make it do otherwise).
5. It does not screw with my music, it does not copy a single byte, just imports.
6. I then set up TWO backup jobs because I can’t do one.

Plan 2:
1. Buy another monitor
2. Buy a Dell Hybrid
3. Put all music on the Windows machine
4. Delete iTunes.

Plan 1 is a PITA. Plan 2 is beautiful.

What's been happening

4

I’m leaving asmallorange – been there ages – and moving all bar one site to Dreamhost (it stays at nearlyfreespeech). Just realised while sitting here in bed that instead of using their one-click installs I could use svn for all the blogs. 2.9 here and 2.8.3 elsewhere. Really easy upgrades then. Two sites left to move – bri’s and J’s. Former gets shifted tomorrow and J’s at the weekend (not that it matters to you). Then download another copy of each site as a zip and close the account.

Games – completed CoD4. Excellent, very much enjoyed. Completed Cod World at War. A letdown in comparison. The war footage was good but I bet most playing it had no clue what they were actually seeing. Battlefield 1943 is good fun. Need to do more Dead Space and start Resistance: Fall of Man. I did get FUEL but only because I found a copy for a tenner. Not awesome. Doubt I’ll keep it. Second time playing SOCOM tonight. Need to play it more. Good game but tricky to shoot people.

Mac mini died, apple store fixed it and D’s keyboard was missing a Shift key which was faulty. Cost of replacement was £0.00 which suited her budget perfectly. Suited mine more as I was the paymaster there. As it should be of course. D was 19 last week. Went out on her birthday with her sister. One of her “friends” rang the bar where they were and told them that P was 15 so that got both of them out of it. Which wasn’t nice.

All very mundane stuff.

Please sign this.

Reply

http://lisybabe.blogspot.com/2009/08/save-our-dla.html

The Govt want to save money by taking it off those on Disability and Attendance Allowance. They want to save this by letting councils do the money-giving so when hardship and death result the govt can claim ignorance.

The Social Services do NOTHING for me and J. They have a list of her needs and they have not tried to fill even one. So do we want them to decide what level of help she needs? Do we want them to decide how much more I should do so they save money? Do we want the utterly incompetent social workers to come in and do their “assessment” then do nothing? Do they give a damn?
This is by a very long way the worse thing I have read in a long time. It reeks of Thatcherism and the right-wing trying to squeeze every penny away from the disadvantaged and into their own pockets. It is disgusting on every conceivable level.

It was the rich that fucked this country over and they shouldn’t be looking at the disabled to bail them out. Bastards.

So please go there, read the more dispassionate view and then sign it. It will take seconds and we and many others will be very glad of the help. Thanks.