manflu – more whinging

December 8th, 2006

Feel terrible. Some symptoms I can understand – headaches? Fair enough, I’m ill. Stomach aches – again, I can live with that. Sweating, dizzy – it’s all bad, but part of the being-ill thing. But my right armpit really hurts. What’s that all about?

Raided the medicine cupboard. Found some ‘paracetamol plus’ – paracetamol plus caffeine. Caffeine? I don’t wanna stay awake, I want something to knock me out and make me better while I sleep.

Found some ‘Night Nurse’ so gave that a try. Ohmygod, it’s horrible. How can anything this foul be good for me?

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too hot

December 8th, 2006

I’m too hot. Sweating. Why can’t I adjust the central heating without getting out of bed? Useless technology. 😉

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manflu

December 8th, 2006

Woke up. Still feeling awful. Am off work today and planning to spend the day in bed.

I’m writing this on my phone from bed, but even so there’s probably something deeply wrong about wanting to write a post about being ill. I guess manflu just isn’t manflu if you don’t go looking for sympathy.

My phone is diverting calls straight to voicemail. The text message alert is silenced so messages will be collected for when I can be bothered to read them. The Blackberry-style feature on my phone is off so emails will also be collected silently until I am better. An alarm is set so if I’m still asleep when I need to go collect Grace from nursery, it will wake me up. And in a minute, I’m gonna start the phone playing some mp3s quietly to help me get back to sleep.

It’s kinda interesting that technology that is normally all about keeping me connected and in touch, is today working to keep me isolated and keep the rest of the world away so I can focus on lying in bed and feeling sorry for myself. Technology is good.

Posted in misc, tech | 2 Comments »

people can be terrible

December 7th, 2006

I went to a Child Protection training session tonight. I’m not feeling too well at the moment, so I’m not gonna say much. Basically, we spent the evening discussing the different types of child abuse (emotional, physical, sexual, neglect), how it can happen, and what you can do to recognise the signs.

It was quite depressing. It wasn’t abstract – we were discussing the sort of stuff that can happen, and is happening, locally. How can people do this sort of stuff to kids?

I wonder whether it has always been like this, or if it is increasing? For example, I don’t remember my schools having a Child Protection Officer when I was a kid, but they all do now. Are things getting worse, or am I just more aware of it?

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Asking for money online

December 5th, 2006

At our last trustees meeting, we decided to give Justgiving a try to raise money for Solent Youth Action. Our page has now gone live:

http://www.justgiving.com/solent/donate

Justgiving provides us with an online fundraising system. It’s a way for people to donate money to us electronically, without us needing to worry about the implications of collecting and processing credit card information. There are fees involved (they’re not a charity themselves, so they naturally need to make money), but we’ve looked into it and think that the fees seem reasonable for what they do.

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What I could see at 5pm

December 5th, 2006

BBC Radio 4 program PM asked their listeners today to take a photo of what they could see at 5pm, and send it to them. The feature is called Window On Your World, and the presenter explains it as:

…a picture of what YOU are normally looking at at 5pm. We … want to see … your view of the world as we come on air

It’s a nice idea! Here is the pic I sent in – this is what I normally see at 5pm, still working at IBM Hursley:

photo of my desk

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Getting noticed on the web

December 4th, 2006

My website is typically a fairly quiet and underused affair. Written while I was at University, it was meant to be an online CV to help me apply for a job. And it served it’s purpose – it got me a few interviews, and on a couple of occasions interviewers would ask questions about stuff that I’d put on my online CV but not had room for on an application form.

I’ve not really got much use for it now, as I’m not looking to leave IBM any time soon. So, it has largely been left to languish. I will update it every now and then with an end date for something – so that I don’t claim to be doing something that I’m not. But I normally can’t be bothered to update it with new stuff, and several projects and side activities have never made it to the site.

I’m explaining this by way of background. I mentioned yesterday about a few emails that I had received about my Windows Mobile wiki note-taking app. I’ve had a few more since, which was surprising as I didn’t think that anyone would have come across my little tool. I’ve got AWStats installed so, out of curiosity, I had a look at my web server statistics to see how many times it had been downloaded, hoping to see perhaps a dozen or so downloads.

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Supporting different languages

December 3rd, 2006

I got an email on Friday from a German guy called Bernard. He uses my wiki note-taking app that I wrote to play with the Windows Mobile SDK (that in itself was a surprise!).

He asked if I’d add support for accented characters to it, as he (unsurprisingly, being German!) wanted to use German characters in his notes. That was an easy enough fix – just add a lookup table to the wiki markup parser which replaces characters with their HTML code equivalent.

Hurrah – I could feel suitably smug for making it a little less English-centric.

A guy called Alex brought me back down to earth on Saturday morning with an email pointing out that when he uses my wiki note-taking app (wow – how many people are using this??), it displays the wrong Chinese characters in ‘View’ mode to the ones he enters in ‘Edit’ mode. Chinese? Eeek… this isn’t something I knew about.

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