Tuesday, August 16, 2005

This week I have been mostly listening to

In no particluar order

Edith Piaf
Blue Oyster Cult
Thelonius Monk

Allez mes enfants.

But it's only chicken pox...part 2

So wednesday night, thursday night, friday night all pretty much without sleep. And I'm still feeling like shit, and the spots are just multiplying (still it's only chickenpox). By saturday I'm really not happy. I'm not sleeping, I'm not getting any better and by this time my breathing is getting bad. It's now really hard to breath and this is now the reason I can't sleep, because if I am in anything other than an upright position I can't get enough air in.

As a lifelong asthmatic I'm kind of able to deal with the lack of breath, I know what to do, what is the best position to be in, how to slow stuff down, talk a word at a time, all the things that asthmatics do (as an aside I can always spot asthmatics on TV becuase of the way the mix talking and breathing) so I'm coping, but getting increasingly worried and manic as you can imagine.

Anyway, I survive Saturday night and come Sunday morning I'm up with my kids, but thinking this is *really* not good. So, not for the first time, I'm surfing the web looking for chickenpox and complications, when eventually I come across a British National Health Service (NHS) site that says, if you are having difficulty breathing with Chickenpox call your Doctor. So I do!

So a Locum Doctor arrives (actually quite promptly) and does his thing, result not so good. He's not happy with my condition so sends me to the local Hospital's Emergency Department in an Ambulance. And I have to say, I am deteriorating now and finding it increasingly difficult to breathe.

Next stop Hospital. I go in the ambulance, Elaine (my wife) gets a cousin in to look after our children (thanks Pat) and follows by car.

From here on in, things start to get more and more fragmented in time and space, hazy and indistinct. Although there are some really clear bits in the mistiness.

I am wheeled in via a side entrance (because I'm still infectious) and put in a room in the ED. I'm put on a bed/trolley and am seen by a succession of people who to my recollection take no notice of my protestation that I can't breath (and I'm a fucking expert and I know it's not right!) and take blood and other measurements. By now I'm desperate and screaming and crying because I know I'm so bad, and eventually they decide to admit me because they think my liver is not working 100%. I don't care why they admit me, I just know I need to be in Hospital and if my liver has to be dragging on the ground behind me to get me in, that's fine by me. And this is odd, because I generally don't like being in Hospital, if nothing else it is terminally boring AND full of sick people, but at that point I would have done nearly anything to get admitted because I thought I was so bad.

So admittance is fine, forms and an x-ray really and then on to a Medical Assessment Ward. All fine, except that the Hospital Porters (let me see, ah yes, employed by the Hospital to move patients around) refuse to push the wheelchair I'm in because I've got chickenpox. A pox on you Hospital porters, it's your job. I mean, what is this, we only push the well ones around? You work in a Hospital patients are infectious, if you don't want the risk don't take the job, and lets face it I didn't have SARS or Ebola! Fortunately Nurses take their jobs more seriously and a Nurse pushed me everywhere. And thinking back, the x-ray was tough, I couldn't stand or hold my breath or any of the things the radiographer wanted, but she managed somehow.

What a result that Sunday was, in Hospital, with an Oxygen mask, private room (infectious!) and blessed, blessed sleep. Things were looking up at last.

You may wonder why I am going on about this at such length and in such stultifyingly dull detail. You may be right, on the other hand it may all become clear in later posts. Either way it's clearly important to me, and it is "my2p" after all.

To be continued........

Friday, August 12, 2005

Mini Book Review

I went on Holiday to Greece earlier this year and had a fantastic time (thank you Club Mark Warner!). Whilst there I did the usual thing of bringing some books with me to read, and then lay by the pool reading them (just imagine the scene - the sun, a cooling sea breeze, the beach 3 yards away, the bar 2!). Idyllic.

After a few days Elaine commented on why I was reading two books at the same time (not simultaneously though) and was a bit surprised to find that it was because one of them was so good.

I'm not sure about you, but when I find a really fantastic book, and this is probably more the case when I'm on a weeks holiday, you don't want to finish it too quickly. Rather you want to take your time and savour it fully. Well Joan Didion's book "Where I Was From" is one of those books.

Part history of California, part personal family history, part political analysis, part social history and part autobiography - all woven together in a sort of timeline and with a point. This book gives a fantastic insight into why parts of America are how they are. And gives a good background to the phenomenon known as "The California dream".

It's not a "heavy" book, and is beautifully written in a very personal style that draws (or drew this reader) in to Joan Didion's life.

And her analysis of what happens to the people in the tract towns of the Sacramento Valley when the federal funding dries up has real resonance, for me, with Blair's Britain and what could be in store for us here.

I can't recommend this book highly enough, I'm just looking forward to when I feel I can read it again.

Tuesday, August 09, 2005

Migrating Web Sites

Today it is with sadness that we mourn the passing of one of our older web servers CF5LIVE. It has served millions of pages to millions of visitors in it's long and illustrious career. However, following a disk problem yesterday we moved all the sites away from it and shut it down for good.

The server was commissioned in January 1999, and has been working non-stop since then with only 2 hardware failures, a disk failure (mirroring worked perfectly) and a network card working loose. So overall the downtime would be about 2 hours in 6 1/2 years! Not bad. I wonder how many servers built today would have such a long operational life.

Still, on the positive side it's one less box to maintain (and its dev and test brethren), one less thing to worry about (after 6 1/2 years stuff breaks). Our last NT4 box (whew!), and all the sites have been ported to later releases of CF.

Onwards and upwards.

Monday, August 01, 2005

sata_sil problems

We have been having some problems with one of our internal email server here at Pancentric Central (www.pancentric.com). Silly data corruption errors that happen with some regularity. Not such a problem you'd think except they tend to take out the whole disk!

It seems that the problem is related to using Maxtor or Seagate SATA disks with a Silicon Image SATA controller.

We are resorting to an old config until we can get this fixed properly. Google for "sata_sil errors" if you get anything like the error below

write error - auto reallocation failed

hth

Hacking Biometrics

Of course it's the Register, but it is still a good note on why Biometrics won't work.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=25014

But the database will be useful though........