A morning stroke

 October 2024

No, this isn't pornography. On the morning of Sunday 29th October 2024 I was playing a game (Assassin's Creed Origins if you must know) when I blinked and .. my vision went wonky (technical term). Basically I lost the bottom left half of my sight, so, for example, if I held a fist down at the bottom left I couldn't see it. I also couldn't really see the screen because anything from the middle of my sight to the bottom left had disappeared.

Since the problem was in both eyes I immediately went "It's a brain fart" and did all the tests you are supposed to do for a stroke .. speech, lift up both arms etc. Everything seemed normal except for my sight. 

I thought "bugger" and started getting dressed to go to A&E. However, as I did so my sight started clearing and after an hour it had cleared. It seemed the problem had gone away (as an engineer I HATE intermittent problems with a passion). With the mindset of "well if the problem has disappeared then it can't be diagnosed" and "A&E is for emergencies and it's clearly not an emergency" I decided not to go to A&E and just have a rest (I do remember going back to the game and looking at the location I was in and going "This is weird, the place looks almost the same but not quite", so maybe my brain was still acting up).

I spent the rest of the day resting. Warren came back in the evening and I didn't mention it at the time, but the next morning I casually mentioned that I'd had ths brain fart and ....

.. 20 minutes later we were in the car going to the Eye Clinic (Warren's logic being it was a vision thing to start with so let's try the Eye clinic first). We arrived at 9:30, registered, went for triage (I did say to the nurse "the problem has gone away but my partner said I should get checked out" and she nodded in agreement (bugger, looks like Warren was right)).

About an hour later I get called in for an initial inspection then get told to wait. I had already noted there were three streams .. Red, amber and green, with Red being "Eyeball dropping out" and Green being "Not a problem". I reckoned I was in the green priority and noted that there was up to a 5 hour wait "That'll be me", I thought. This was now 10:30.

At 4pm I just check I hadn't been forgotten or missed The Call. The problem was that Warren had gone back to work at 10am, I was on my own and had forgotten my hearing aids and the system seemed to be that a nurse would come through, whisper a name, whisper it again then go back to her station to get another one if no response. The problem with this was if you had gone to the toilet or gone to the cafe next door (where you couldn't hear the whisper) then you missed your call.

Thankfully it turned out I was still on the list. At 7pm I got called for an inspection, with drops put in my eye to dilate the pupils; an hour later I went in for a proper check up. As far as they could tell they couldn't find anything wrong with my eyes ("Told yah!") and referred me for a CT scan with Sandwell Hospital. Warren comes to pick me up and we return home with me quietly humming "Starry, Starry Night .." because that's what the eyedrops do.

When the NHS wants to move fast they move fast. The next day I get a call from Sandwell at 11am "This is the TIA* Clinic .. can  you come in for an ultrasound appointment at 12:20 and a consultation at 13:00?".  I reply in the affirmative and at 12:00 I'm at the hospital negotiating the labyrinth on my way to the ultrasound. I find the place and I'm laid down and rather than check for any babies they sound out the vessels in my neck (apparently this is to measure the thickness of the blood vessel wall and more importantly, the velocity of the blood). 

After the ultrasound I then go off for the consultation that involves the works .. ECG, blood pressure, heartbeat, blood sugar. I then wait around for the consultant who first of all tells me that although I'm overweight (yea yeah) everything looked fine .. normal blood pressure, blood vessel healthy, no fatty build up except around my waist, etc etc. He then asks what happened, I tell him and half way through he nods. I finish my account and he tells me it's likely I had a mini stroke but they'll do an MRI to confirm. In the meantime he loads me up with pills (aspirin to thin the blood, clopidogrel to stop platelets clumping) tells me this will reduce the risk of a repeat and sends me on my way.

The next day I get a message "Can you come in for an MRI at 12:15?". Again, the answer is "Yes" so I troop in, get asked some VERY person questions that basically mean "do you have any bits of metal on you or in you?", lie on a flat table, 'almost' go to sleep (it's rather relaxing and loud buzzing noises make me think I'm in a plane or a car and send me to sleep) and 15 minutes later I'm away. 

At 15:30 I am phoned by a triumphant consultant "Yup, I was right, the MRI shows signs of a stroke"; we go over what he's already told me (take the pills, check your blood pressure, try not to eat too much cholestererol) and signs off.

So here we are. I count myself lucky this was such a mild stroke but I also am fortunate that Warren immediately had me off to the clinic to get looked over. Left to my own devices I'd have just gone "Meh, it was a brain fart"; 1 in 3 mild stroke victims go on to have a major stroke within the year. The consultant has assured me that the clopidogrel prevents this happening (although of course nothing is absolute).

*TIA 

From the Mayo Clinc: "A transient ischemic attack (TIA) is a short period of symptoms similar to those of a stroke. It's caused by a brief blockage of blood flow to the brain. A TIA usually lasts only a few minutes and doesn't cause long-term damage".

Pond Repairs

Nov 2015

Over the past couple of weeks I've been learning a few lessons.
a) Moving Koi from their home is a pain.
b) YouTube training videos make things look deceptively easy.
c) G4 sealant bonds very well to concrete, brick, mortar and skin.
d) I'm getting too old for this.

To set the scene.
We have a pond in the garden, full of koi. The picture gives you an idea of the pond ... it holds 4000 litres of water and a number of koi, each of which would easily serve a family of 8.

The pond is a quarter circle of about 1.6meters radius and is 1.4 meters deep, with half of it below ground. It's a brick and concrete construction (base is concrete, walls are brick) with a lining of fibre glass. It's about 12 years old.

Correction .. it was 12 years old.

In August one of the slabs covering the top of the walls came loose and dropped into the pond. We thought nothing about this until we noticed the water level slowly dropping. We did a visual check of the bottom of the pond where the slab had hit (bit difficult to do with 1.4 m of water in the way plus some rather curious koi) and established that the slab had punctured the base in two places. Normally this wouldn't be a problem .. the fibre glass should be bonded to the concrete and as long as the concrete hadn't cracked there shouldn't be much of a leak .... but there was.

So, we had to drain the pond. This is not easy. For a start the occupants object to being left high and dry (or even low and dry). They react like .. well, like fish out of water. So they had to be found a temporary home. In the end we rented a show vat (basically a thick vinyl swimming pool) that could take the fish and about 1500 litres of their home. We also had to redirect the water going through the filters (for those who don't know, keeping koi is basically maintaining a sewage farm - they go to the toilet in the water and you have to process that water back into something fit to breathe - nice).

We managed to do all this, the fish were rehoused (reluctantly ... chasing a koi around a pond with a fishing net is not as easy as it sounds) and we were ready to drain the rest of the water from the pond.

Once the water was gone it became clear that the fibre glass was not bonded to the base .... or to the sides. The entire base had lifted, and the sides gave off a hollow noise when knocked. We then found a few more holes in the base and stepping on the base was like stepping on glass ... the base shattered. 

We managed to find someone to repair the pond .. the sort of repair where the guy stands there, sucks his teeth and says "well I could do a bodge job but ...". In the end we went for the full repair .. that hollow sound in the walls worried me.

Sure enough, when it came to removing the fibre glass from the walls we found that the walls had been rendered in plaster, not concrete, and unlike concrete which is relatively waterproof, the plaster had turned to mud. We also confirmed that none of the fibre glass was bonded to the underlying base or walls and had pulled away, and that the lining itself was not fibre glass mat but a kind of spray on finish .. very VERY thin. Small wonder it had cracked when the slab hit it.

The discovery of plaster instead of concrete set us back. The walls had to be rendered in concrete, and we couldn't find a builder to do it quickly. With the fish in a tank a quarter of the size of their normal home and only running on half a sewage farm we couldn't wait three weeks for someone to come in and do it  .. so I said I would do the rendering.

I know, I know .. but at the time it sounded sensible.

Now, my previous experience of wall rendering was .. well .. nil. Nevertheless, I watched a few YouTube videos and it looked really easy. So, I got my mortar mix (yeah, I chickened out .. I know it's 5 parts sand to 1 part cement but didn't want to buy in bulk) and started the job.

It wasn't as easy as it looked.

For a start, all the YouTube videos showed how to do it on a straight wall. The front wall of the pond was curved. Secondly they had had years of practice in smoothly applying the render. This compares to the years months days experience that I had.

By the end of the day I had got the walls rendered. It didn't look quite like the videos. However, a bit of studying that night suggested that the first render wasn't usually smooth .. they allowed it to partially set and then cut it back and smoothed it off. I hadn't had that luxury .. the cold weather meant that the render took a long time to set.

The fibre glass guy came round and reckoned it was good enough to line ("Just don't try doing the walls of your house", he said), so he arranged to come round on the Monday.

They duly turned up and did the works .. bonding sealant on the walls, followed by two layers of fibre glass matt and a tissue layer all soaked in resin and finished off with a black resin coat. The only downside is that we turned the entire neighbourhood (and their cats) into glue sniffers

The final result looked great .. a bit lumpy (someone should have shot the renderer) but OK.

They left me to finish off the top .. reseat the slabs on the walls and this time make sure that they couldn't get knocked into the pond. Once again, I learned on the job ... my excuse is that the spirit level had been sniffing glue all day and its bubble was all over the place.

The final touch was to waterproof the mortar bedding the slabs so they didn't leach lime into the water. I used a product called G4 bond for this .. really good stuff. I carefully painted the mortar with it, trying to avoid drips. Unfortunately there were some, so I wiped them off with a sponge. This had the effect of spreading a thin film of G4 onto the fibre glass (and because I wasn't wearing any gloves .. a thin film onto my hands).

I can attest that firstly,'clear' G4 is more a milky white when it sets and secondly, it dries to a nice hard finish that bonds really well to the substrate .. in this case my palms and fingers.

It took two days before I could peel the bulk of it off.

Still, the fish are back home. They are not dead yet and fingers crossed, the pond isn't leaking.

Operation Leg

pre-op leg

I've been hinting on Facebook about having had an operation on my leg, and after a chat with my sister (Bill, what's happened?) I decided I might as well write it down properly. If you want the short version, follow this link (not for the squeamish). For the longer version, read on.

Around November of last year (2012) I started having problems with a pain in my knee. Over the previous months my leg had swollen a bit (see pic) but I didn't think much of it .. I thought it was a side effect of gym and a habit of being right handed and favouring that leg for doing the hard work.

So I turn up to the doctor's surgery and the doctor takes one look at my thigh and says "Oh that's not natural". "Damn", I think, "there goes all those hours in a gym". They arrange for me to go and see a consultant.

So around January I'm off to see a consultant, who recommends an ultrasound. About a month later I attend the hospital where someone rubs some cold goo over my leg (why can't they warm it up?) and then proceeds to investigate my baby (weird place for an alien to set up shop, but there it is). Eventually he says "Well, you've probably got a fatty lump (thanks mate, you're not so trim yourself) but it's so big I can't capture it all" (Insults AND compliments in the same sentence!). So they arrange for an MRI.

Another month or so passes and I'm booked in for an MRI. I turn up and am given a backless gown to get into (very attractive) before being taken into the MRI room. The MRI is a big machine with a tunnel in it .. they strap you in, give you some headphones and a panic button, then push you into the tunnel and leave. I wonder what the headphones are for and they start the machine up, which proceeds to shake itself to bits. Well, at least, that's what it sounds like. So, you're stuck in a VERY narrow tunnel with the machine buzzing loudly around you and I'm just waiting for Dr Frankenstein to come in and shout "It's alive" before they switch the noise off. Phew!! Then they start it again. After about 30 minutes of trying to destroy the machine with me in it they finish and let me go, saying they'll be in touch.

Another month or two passes (we're in June now)  and I'm called in to see a consultant who finally tells me (and shows me) what I've got .. technically a lipoma (fancy word for fatty lump), probably non malignant, that stretches the length of my thigh (about 28 cms).  He shows me the MRI scan (see pic) .. those of you with a discerning disposition can tell which one of those prime pork steaks is the one with the lipoma.

It's one of the biggest he's seen (I blush), I've probably had it for several years for it to get that big and why hadn't I been in earlier? I discovered I was going to get that question a lot.

Although it's probably non malignant he says it should be removed before it goes bad, and that there was a darker patch he wanted checked out. So he takes a sample of my leg (local anaesthetic and then a tube punch to withdraw a couple of slivers of fat) and packs me off, saying that if it's non malignant they'd operate in about 6-8 weeks time.

It turns out the sample is OK so I wait. The original cause of me going in (the kneecap) has actually fixed itself by now. At about the 8 week mark I ring up and they say that if I want it there is a slot on the Friday. So I'm booked in for August 30th, with dire warnings about not eating or drinking on the day of the operation.

Come the day and Warren takes me to the Royal Orthopedic Hospital at the crack of dawn (OK 7:30). We saunter into the ward, get told which bed I'm in and wander down there to sit and wait. The ward is small .. 4 beds, two of which are occupied. We then get a succession of nurses, all asking me how much I drink, smoke, how many drugs I'm taking and what I'm allergic to? (Answer, being asked the same question three times). I sign a form allowing then to give away any odd body parts they find in the operation (who wants a lump of fat?) and then the doctor and surgeon turn up. The doctor asks me why I left it so late and the surgeon, who is a cheerful American lady says "that's a big one" and proceeds to draw all over my leg. At least they get the right one. She says I'm number three that morning (or maybe number two) and they'll call me when I'm ready. In the meantime I can sit on my bed and wait. Warren, having checked that they're not going to kill me, departs.

I get to know the others on the ward .. Clive is in his 80's and is in for a tumour that's growing in his shin (it sounds like he's been in and out of hospital for several years as the tumour travels around his body). Paul is in because of a large growth in his back that's pressing his lung.. worse than mine because it's a true cellular growth fed by blood vessels. He said he's had it for several years and had only gone to the doctor when he started looking like a hunchback .. looks like I'm not the only one to leave it late.

Come lunchtime I'm still waiting. They waft the food by me (bastards) refusing me anything to drink (no eating or drinking on the day of operation). About 1 pm they get me into my support stockings, paper pants and backless gown (sexy!) and tell me to wait.

Finally at 1:30 they come and get me .. this sort of hospital takes you, bed and all, to the surgery. I get wheeled in, the anaethetist asks me why I left it so long to get the lipoma out, I ask the surgeon if she could remove some of the fat around my belly as well (no), they stick an oxygen mask over my face and inject me in my left hand telling me that it will make me sleepy. (No it won't, I'm still wide awake, when is it going to take h....).

Three hours later and I wake up. My throat is sore ("that's because we rammed a tube down it") and it feels like someone has run a sharp knife the length of my thigh (Oh, they have). I'm wheeled back up to the ward and connected up to a drip and a drain. I ask about the drain and I'm told that I have a big cavity (OK that's insulting), and they expect me to drain quite a bit of blood which they'll feed back into me (Yes, this does sound like a vampire movie). They hand me a cardboard bottle ("you can't get up so you'll have to pee into that") and then bring me supper, Hooray!!. The food is surprisingly good (maybe because I haven't eaten all day .. lamb hotpot plus rice pudding). Aware that I'm not able to get to the toilet for at 24 hours and have to store it somewhere I resolve not to eat TOO much.

The rest of the day is a succession of pills (mmm morphine!!), food, lots of water, blood pressure readings and the occasional injection of antibiotics (oh, and a few cardboard bottles). Warren visits with essential supplies (box of melon slices) and takes a photo of me in my sartorial elegance. At night everyone in the ward snores .. not loudly but none of us can sleep on our sides (connected as we are to various tubes). The snoring is occasionally interrupted by a nurse coming in to inject antibiotics (or suck blood ... that may have been a dream).

Saturday is bed bath (self administered) and I'm allowed to change out of my gown into normal shorts and T shirt. They inspect my drain ("You're not bleeding as much as we expected") and allow me out of bed and into a chair (the drip has disappeared but the drain remains). The physiotherapist turns up and gently strokes my thigh. "How does that feel?", he asks. I suppress the obvious answer and we explore the level of numbness I've been left with after surgery. The surgeon had warned that the size of the lipoma meant that they'd have to cut through some nerves and true enough most of the area around the thigh is numb. The Physio instructs me in the art of using crutches and going down stairs in a controlled manner and then leaves with a parting shot "Off work for 2 weeks, limited exercise for 6 weeks". So much for "Back at work on Wednesday".

In spite of being told I would be out Saturday my drain is still sucking fluid slowly, so I'm kept in until Sunday. I've finished my book but manage to avoid watching TV and losing my brains as well (Paul has control of the remote and seems to favour Judge Judy and the X factor). I manfully avoid having seconds of the evening meal (chicken curry ... THAT'S going to make the night air interesting) and Warren again visits with more essential supplies (shaving stuff and cleaning stuff).

Sunday the drain is removed (oooowwwwww!!!), my dressings are changed and I take a photo of the 33 staples in a nice piece of rolled pork (warning - not for the squeamish). I'm out by lunchtime.

Post Op. 
A week follows of morning TV and channel hopping. I'm not really mobile until Wednesday and have to sit with my foot up. I escape the house on Wednesday to try the crutches out but realise that getting back to work is going to take longer than I expected. A discussion with my boss reveals that if I have a sick note that says I am off sick for two weeks then I am off sick for two weeks... all sorts of legal reasons I can't go in to work. So it's daytime TV and gradually getting back the use of my leg.

After two weeks the staples come out ... all 33 of them (or "Ouch, Ouch" 33 times). New bandage applied which I left on until it started peeling off on its own accord.

3 1/2 weeks on the scar is healing although I have 66 pin prick scars to pick where the staples were. There is still a dead area to the right of the scar .. maybe a party piece will be to stub cigarettes out on my leg, although that does mean I'll have to take up smoking.

Muppets

I've got fed up fighting my way down the platform at Birmingham New Street. This is the letter I sent.
 

Sir/Madam

Use of Platform 1

As you are probably aware, Virgin train services to and from London now arrive and depart from platform 1

You probably also know that this is one of the most heavily loaded trains to use Birmingham New Street, with a large number of passengers needing to get on and off the train.

It has also been arranged such that when the train arrives from London it stops at the extreme end of the platform so that the nearest available exit for all passengers is the single west end staircase (platform 1 only having two stairwells and no escalator).

To further complicate matters building work has resulted in a reduction in the width of this platform so that passengers have to squeeze through a narrowed gap to get to the aforementioned single staircase (and squeeze through any passengers waiting for the train). The arrangement of the London trains is such that the bulk of the passengers are in Standard Class at the front of the train and therefore have to squeeze through this gap.

The icing on the cake is, of course, that the train has stopped as far from the lifts as possible. Since the usual reason for someone using the lifts is that they are disabled or have heavy luggage or children in prams, this suggests a particular well thought out bit of planning.

Such an arrangement must, I feel, have been made by Kermit the Frog (or for the sake of equality, Miss Piggy), since only a complete muppet would have arrived at a solution that maximises the discomfort of passengers. The alternative conclusion, that Birmingham New Street is trying to maintain its reputation for being one of the most uncomfortable stations to arrive at, seems at odds with the changes that are taking place at the moment.

At the risk of disagreeing with Mr Frog (or Miss Piggy) could I suggest that the previous arrangement whereby the London service made use of platform 2 was restored? This then makes three exits available, one with an escalator, and if the train stops where it used to it would not require a major hike to the lifts.

If platform 1 must be used then perhaps the train could stop at such a point that makes best use of the stairs and lifts available?

Regards

Mucus

I must warn my gentle readers that this article is not for the faint hearted. It contains some fairly disgusting themes, and the reading of it should especially be avoided when eating .. particularly if it's a meal of thin porridge or potato soup.

 You see... I've got a cold. A real cold. One of the runny, filled up with mucus and dribbling out the overflow type cold. I NEVER get this type of cold .. Or at least, I haven't had one for about 4 years so it's really a new experience for me. Usually I get the achy head-sore throat-hacking cough type cold but never the liquid variety.

 Having a liquid cold does bring back some memories. I'd forgotten what it was like to have your entire life ruled by mucus, both waking and sleeping. To have the sum of your existence wrapped up in a tight ball of half used tissues. To experience the delights of having to search in said ball for a nose sized area that was at least half dry. To experiment with different types of absorbent paper.  And because I'd forgotten what it was like I've decided to write it down in deathless prose (or random scribbles, depending on how much of a critic you are), and consign it to posterity. Besides which, it's one way to cheer me up, to get it off my chest so to speak.

 *hack* *cough* *phlegm*!

 That's better. 

 I'm learning new things each day (and night). One of the characteristics of having a nose threatening to emulate Niagara Falls is that you don't sleep too well at night, having to wake up every few minutes to empty said nose into the aforementioned damp rags. You do have time to think, to ponder to ... oh excuse me another waterfall to empty. 

 One of the things I ponder in the early wee hours is the nature of paper. You become an expert in paper in this state. Not the writing type paper but the absorbent kind.  When I was young you didn't have paper hankies, you had the proper sort. The cloth ones. Then it really was an exercise to both find a dry spot on the handkerchief and to find new and ingenious ways of drying the thing out between blows. Putting it on the radiator in the school common room was generally frowned upon. You could get away with hanging the latest effort from your pocket but then you looked scruffy ... not a problem in my case since it went well with the rest of my attire. How the more fashionable of my school friends managed it I will never know. Perhaps they didn't get colds.

 Nowadays of course it's all paper and cloth handkerchiefs are a thing of the past. However, this in turn has its problems. The pack I have sitting in front of me is one of those nice packs with balsam impregnated tissues. These are the Rolls Royce of tissues, soft, super absorbent and smooth on the nose. Unfortunately the pack only contains eight of them. Either the manufacturers don't get the kind of colds I currently have, or else they are sadists. 

 As an aside, you are often encouraged to drink plenty of fluids. I now know why that is. After you have emptied the contents of Lake Eirie into your super absorbent 8 pack of tissues you definitely need to replenish the liquid you have lost.  

 But I digress. The problem comes when you run out of the aforementioned 8 pack. You are then reduced to other things. Newspaper is no good .. not absorbent. You can at a pinch use kitchen towel. These seem ok but has a texture akin to sandpaper so after a few uses your nose and its environs look like somebody has taken a sandblaster to your face. What you should not do, and I want to pass this wisdom on to future generations (and myself in two weeks time when I've forgotten it), is to use toilet paper.

Let me explain.

Toilet paper is a very carefully designed item. Without going into details of its actual use, its life cycle includes being flushed down a waste disposal system. At this stage it must begin to disintegrate. That's right, toilet paper is designed to separate into a liquid mush on contact with water .. Or at least a few seconds aft contact after it. Now I must draw your mind back to Niagara Falls. The first blow is ok. On the second the paper has done its absorbent duty and commences on the next stage of its life cycle. The one after that? Maybe we shouldn't go further, but the result is that if you can't throw it away you are forced to return a gooey mass to your pocket that you know is going to combine with your keys and coins into  rock hard solid bit of artwork. You COULD try and sell it to the Tate gallery but my recommendation is that it is thrown away as soon as possible before it welds itself to your pocket.

I do hope you have enjoyed these pearls of wisdom. I need to go and blow my nose

Kinected writings

We've got kinected. For those who don't know what I am speaking about all will be revealed in the fullness of time.

The kinect was a Christmas present. It's an xbox accessory but it's taken me until now to recover from the trauma of using it.

For those of you who are ignorant of such matters, the kinect is intended as an all body controller. No, not that sort of controller, keep your fantasies to yourself. You use your body to control what goes on on the screen. The system consists of various cameras and clever software that can 'see' a person and respond to the way that person moves. It's clever enough to make out limbs and head, so can construct a kind of 'stick' figure of a person. When setting it up you can wave your arms (and legs if you feel so inclined and can manage it without falling over) and watch the stick figure doing the same.

OK, that's the basics. How about the detail?

Well, first of all it's an American toy, designed for rich American households. The unit needs to be mounted above or below the TV and the victim (sorry, player) should be at least 6 feet from the unit. Ideally (to allow 2 people to play) it needs 8 feet.

8 feet? Directly in front of the TV????

For the foreigners amongst you, English building regs nowadays specify how to build the kind of box a sardine would be ashamed of. You'd be lucky enough to get a room with 8 feet of dimension and that would be before you had put the TV in with the sofa directly opposite. In many houses the TV is in the corner with sofas and chairs squeezed around the edge and a nice glass coffee table in the middle. We'll come back to that later.

8 feet???

The adverts for the thing show a nice bright clean family, fresh out the washing powder ads ("wash your clothes in BRIGHT and keep the colors FRESH!") playing with the kinect in a room the size of a tennis court. The ceiling is lost in the clouds. OK I exaggerate but it doesn't exactly reflect the Normal British Household.

We managed to get 7 foot of space by sticking the unit to the top of the TV with gaffer tape (duct tape to foreigners) and pushing the sofa back and glass coffee table over. Even then the backs of our legs were dangerously close to the fire so our game was accompanied by the faint smell of burning cloth (or roast pork if we had shorts on)

OK. That's the area sorted out. What about the games?

Well the games (as you can imagine for something that uses the body as a controller) involves a lot of arm waving, leg waving and throwing of the body around.

You've heard of the problems with the Nintendo Wii? This games machine uses a hand held stick to control the game. Excellent for things like tennis games or anything that involves swinging a piece of sports equipment around. However this has its dangers. There are stories of people taking their lights out with a well timed overhead tennis shot, or worse, letting go of the controller at the end of a particularly forceful power shot and smashing the TV.

With the kinect you have a body to fling around.

I predict several stories of people who have flung themselves on to the coffee table in an attempt to save a virtual football. Or giving the wife a black eye in an attempt to stop a projectile going past.

And so on to the age gap. As you will have gathered by now, kinect games are somewhat physical. Kids jumping around, whapping balls, jumping over obstacles, swerving to avoid oncoming posts .. this is all par for the course. However, I am no longer in the first flush of youth (no I'm not, don't laugh), and the first game (a river rafting game if you must ask) had my heart rate in the 200s. I can predict a few heart attacks at the family party I can tell you.

As you can imagine, the kinect does not lend itself to the most dignified of activities. In fact I would suspect that some of the aforementioned heart attacks will be among the spectators as they kill themselves laughing watching the participant try and make himself like a goal keeper.

The humiliation doesn't end there though. You will recollect that this thing is a glorified camera.

Yes it does take pictures

Usually in mid jump.

Not a pretty sight

In fact I can envisage the kinect being cited in divorce cases on the grounds of unreasonable behaviour when the wife posts pics of hubby trying to jump up and stop a particular difficult overhead ball.

That's all for now. I'm gonna try and shoot some particularly harsh rapids.

But I'm not sending you the photos.

10 f.....g hours

10 Hours it took me., 10 HOURS. I'm sure my MAC/Linux owning friends will laugh, but that's the time it's taken me to restore the Windows OS on a computer ... 10 HOURS.

We had a series of power cuts one night. By the time it had finished I couldn't power up my old computer .. it would start up, and then flash a blue screen of information for half a second at me before restarting. Not being a superhero I couldn't quite catch the fault so after a few reboots and trying various things I decided to repair the system, which meant taking it back to its original XP base (it's an OLD computer) and then bringing it up to date with the latest security patches.

I started at 9pm

I finished at 7am.

The original XP base was, I think, 2001 .. that's the date on one of the files. I was doing a repair, not a rebuild, which was part of my mistake. The first attempt at repair failed as there was a corrupted database (Secedit.sdb) that needed to be rebuilt before certain dll's could be copied. Once that was done the repair worked and I was able to start up OK. No auto reboots.

So .. I had an original XP system that was about 8 years old. Slightly vulnerable to all the hacking that had gone on in those 8 years. Now I needed to patch it. MS in its wisdom does not allow home users to get a copy of the latest service patch (XP is at SP3) and apply it. They allow businesses to do this, but not home users. So, you have to connect the ***** to the internet and run windows update, which asks you if you want to apply SP2.

No. I want to apply service pack 3, but that apparently is a bridge too far so I have to apply SP2. I do so.

The computer failed to boot. The blue screen informs me I have error A0. A bit of digging suggested that there was a driver that had got problems

After some swearing I realised I had replaced the original keyboard with a USB version. Reverting to the old serial one fixed the problem.

Lucky I was still jetlagged. It was now the early hours of the morning and Windows was just getting into its stride. "Isn't it nice that we can spend some quality time together?", it asked. I swore at it.

So .. SP2 installed, now for SP3. Windows update asked me if I'd like to install SP3

I said yes

So I download it, apply it and it tells you that it wasn't able to install.

I swore very slightly. .... So I tell it to apply all patches to SP2

It gleefully tells you that there are 91 patches and would I like to apply them and it would only take 1 hour.

That is 1 hour to download

Then it installs them

Slowly.

I didn't want to leave the system because I KNEW that half way through it would maliciously have a dialogue box asking me if I wanted to do some inane and pointless exercise.

I was right ... half way through it politely asked "Would you like to install IE7 yes/no?"

*Sigh* .. YES

It installed IE7, then tried to install security patches for IE6, looked at me and decided that wouldn't be a good idea and passed up on that although it did tell me that it was sorry it hadn't been able to apply IE6 security patches .. I could almost hear it sniffing.

At 6 am it finished .. I rebooted, then was asked if i wanted to install SP3.

I said yes warily.

At 7am it announced I had a nice healthy computer, wasn't that fun and would I like to start again. (I'm making that last bit up)

I went to bed.

SF Hols - Grids

You gotta love the americans. Their strict adherence to the grid pattern for their city layout leads to some interesting situations. San Francisco is a good example of this. The city does have flat bits (for which the grid pattern works well) but they also have a few hills. These hills aren't your little pimples either. They are dirty great steep sided mounds of rock.

In England, the streets would follow a winding path up the side of the hill, keeping the gradients nice and smooth so you could get your horse and cart easily up to the top. (You do own a horse and cart, don't you? You don't? What century are you living in?)

In SF they do things differently. They have adopted the very roman approach of just taking the road up and over and to hell with the gradient*. This results in some pretty interesting climbs .. even for the modern car. What makes it more interesting is that the 45 degree slope is crossed at right angles by other roads, so the road has to flatten out to accomodate the crossover before continuing its downward plummet (sorry, descent). One road I walked (breathlessly) up must have had delusions of being the percussion section of a band, since on a regular beat you would hear what sounded like a clash of some hung over geriatric cymbals. On closer inspection I found it was a junction where any car going over the speed of 1 mph took its rear end out with an expensive sounding scrape.

At some points the road builders had taken one look at the gradient, sworn at the twon planner, resolved to bring him out and bury him under the sidewalk and just given up, replacing the road with a set of steps. Once they've managed to accomodate the necessary gradient they have then continued with the road further on as if nothing had happened. This is fine if you are on foot, but if you are in a car life must be one long series of exciting detours.

Of course, the layout does have its upside. You want a car chase? Have it in San Francisco; one long series of death defying slopes, dead ends and cable cars to negotiate. Walking (puffing) around SF I expected any moment a car to emerge from a side road trailing cop cars and performing air jumps at each crossover.

Hasn't happened yet, but one can hope.

Alternatively, I could rent a car and try it myself.



*Except for Stockton where they chickened out and put in a tunnel. And Lombard, where they'd clearly had a bit too much to drink at lunchtime.

SF Hols - Ice Cream Desert

From San Francisco

Well, here I am in the city of so many films, car chases, disasters and general mayhem. Familiar though it is, it's still a bit of a culture shock. How much do you tip the bell boy, how do you use public transport and where's the bloody ice cream vans?

The latter is important. For my first day I wanted to walk to the Golden Gate Bridge. This is a 5 mile stroll through some touristy areas (fishermans wharf) but also through some pleasant parks (fort mason, beach area alongside chrissy field). And not an ice cream van in sight. In fact, the place was so devoid of any sort of van/kiosk I was wondering if I was on some private estate and was going to be escorted off by some guy with a gun and a rotweiler (I must have been watching too many films).

Distracted though I was by the total lack of Essential British Sustenance, the walk was enjoyable. At Fisherman's Wharf some nice person asked me if I'd like to donate some money to help the American Homeless (uncharitably I said I had enough problems supporting the English homeless without helping the Americans out as well). I watched some people swimming in the Bay's Aquatic Park, tested the water and realised that eccentricity isn't a completely English preserve. I took about 20 photos of the Golden Gate Bridge at various distances (subsequently honed down to about 5). My arms got totally, horribly sunburnt; so much so that the American Lighthouse Association approached me to find out if I'd be willing to stand at Fort Point and wave my arms. All this ... and I still didn't get an ice cream ... I had to settle for a fruit melon medley, which although nice and healthy, Is Not The Same.

Finally, I got to the Golden Gate Bridge, after a walk of 6 miles and 5 hours. If you think that's slow, then you have to factor in the hunt for the occasional ice cream van and fending off hoards of amorous lobstaers who thought my arms were sending out mating signals.

So .. been there, done that .. what else is there to do?

SF Hols - packing a dilemma

I've got a problem.

It's one I haven't had before.

And I think it's serious.

It's about the packing I'm doing to go on holiday.

You see, the way I do my packing is I first construct a list of things to take (2 shirts, two polos, t shirts, power cables for all the electronics I'm taking, etc etc). Then I throw the stuff on the bed. Nearer the time I might iron one or two bits .. with the emphasis on the 'might'. Then, on the day of departure I stuff 'em all in a rucksack and I'm ready.

Not this time.

You see, previously collecting the stuff on the list was easy, because it represented the contents of my wardrobe. But now ... the list says '2 shirts'. WHICH ONES????

The thing is .. I've acquired too many clothes. I've become a fashion victim. I don't have 2 shirts. I've got 6. I like them all. Which ones do I take? Decisions, decisions.

I have a friend like this. He packs not only the stuff he's going to wear, but also the stuff he might wear given the right circumstances. It must be pointed out that the 'right circumstances' includes alien abduction and attending Prince William's wedding, so basically its the entire wardrobe. He's the one travelling 20kg overweight. I'm the one trailing behind at 12 kg.

But I digress.

So, I have to make a decision. Which Shirt? When I've decided that it's Which Polo? After that, it's Which Trousers? actually, at this point we're back to normal .. trousers and shoes are easy to pack since I basically keep on growing out of one and wearing out the other (and I'm not going to tell you which is which).

So the bed is now full of clothes. I've more power cables than I've ever had in my life and will probably bring SF to its knees when I plug in the netbook, iPhone and camera charger, but I'm all set.

Now .. where's my passport?