Month: October 2012

Yep. After having yes/no’s last night, I paid them a visit today.

Doctor’s worried too … She got me to make a repeat appointment in a fortnight. Gotta say, I was worried too after what the legs were looking like this morning (I’m saying nothing here in case people are reading in lunch break).

Result ?

More pills, even more pills, more cream and … even more cream. And I need to be using the moisturiser more too.

It seems to be having an effect already though 🙂

I’ve had a bunch of the pills, used the cream once, had a shower and … my legs still look very angry with me (they deserve to to be honest) but my arms look improved already. Fingers crossed that I improve over the next few days, at least enough to wear long sleeves ?

Why long sleeves do I hear you ask ?

Normally at the weekend, at the moment at least, I’d be hibernating inside trying to take it easy cos of this skin thing. This weekend ?

BOOM !

It’s birthday season at the moment. Bionicdwarf’s was last week, Craziequeen’s is in a few days and mine’s in a fortnight. Mine means cakes for people at work on the Monday or Wednesday, I can’t bring them in on my actual birthday because that’s when the next doctor appointment is.

We’re celebrating by making lots of things explode over the weekend. I have the presents wrapped but still need to acquire the fun stuff. Setting off the loud bangs involves being outside though, hence hoping to be able to wear those long sleeves so I don’t completely freeze.

Oh it also means Pizza. YEY !

PS I’ve also had to activate word verification for comments, which is a huge shame. Over the past couple of days, someone’s been trying to sell stuff by slamming lots of spam comments in. I won’t tolerate that and neither will Google (they canned the first account before I could report it). But they appear to be able to get around Google’s spam detection (dunno how, the comments have been near identical). If I have to enable comment moderation, this will be why.

It’s definitely got a lot colder over the last half week or so.

I’m really noticing the cold snap come in. My current state of health is a lot to do with that for a few good reasons :

I think fighting bugs keeps me warm. Kinda like there maybe being a good side to being ill. The fever means you have your own little internal personal electric heater. I think the antibiotics have cleared out all the bugs though (definitely judging by my ankles being bony again).

It’s definitely colder – the car is telling me the temperature is down below 10 degrees C often, last week it was 13-18 degrees C. In work, there are little thermo reactive strips in strategic places on the pillars. Those typically read 27 degrees C (ish – they’re not exactly precise!), today they were reading 23.

Most important is that skin condition, it’s meaning I can’t wear long sleeves right now (although I possibly could have for second half of today – improvement !). I’m actively considering wearing a t-shirt under my shirt tomorrow as a kind of vest. I’ve not done that since school !

Getting really cold at the moment from having to leave certain bits of skin exposed to help them heal. I’ve turned the heating up at home (and have the PC doing work for SETI etc) but can’t do much of that at work. Spookily enough, I think the atmospherics at work are actually helping me at the moment. It tends to be quite a dry atmosphere and that drying out seems to be helping the healing.

I know someone who used to be on the same project as me who’d feel cold on a hot day, she must be absolutely freezing at the moment. Hope she’s ok. Not spotted her for ages, which is a shame cos that Sunshine smile she has brightens up the day.

I’m sparing a thought though for people across the Pond.

It’s just cold over here at the moment, we’re not having to contend with snow (yet) or other adverse weather. Yet there’s Superstorm Sandy battering the Eastern parts of the USA. The USA is pretty huge, for a storm to be battering so much of it says a lot about how spectacular a storm it is.

Nature is a truly awesome power.

And I’ll leave it there – hope the storm over the sea doesn’t have too many lasting effects.

Oh – I’m in a quandary at the moment as to whether to go see the Doctor again. I had genuine improvement today after a scary (messy) evening yesterday. Let’s just say the cream probably made things worse. What I need to do is leave things alone long enough for them to get quality healing. As for the Doctor today, let’s just say GB’s healthcare may be a lot cheaper than other countries but it’s definitely not as accessible as it could be.

But it’s a lot more accessible than a few places I could mention right now !

Still working on my list….. [grin]

PS How on earth did I forget to put Battleship into this post ? It was the inspiration for it!

Lol

One thing people won’t tell you about Skyfall is the truly excessive amount of advertising (and trailers) that we were subjected to before the film started. During those … Bionicdwarf, Cyberkitten and I were talking Worst Films Ever. Not quite sure which trailer or advert started us off on that to be honest but we knew a good idea for a blog post when we saw it.

So here goes … Films that were so Bad they should never have been made. But seeing as they were, all copies need to be gathered up and cremated for the good of humanity.

Firstly – Anything. ANYTHING that Uwe Boll had a hand in.

He’s a German film individual that goes from game to game, turning good games into incredibly bad films. They truly have to be seen to believe how bad they are. Although I wouldn’t wish seeing an Uwe Boll film on anyone. That said, Bloodrayne wasn’t too bad although Bloodrayne 2 was a horrible mess without the any of attributes that made the first watchable.

Star Trek Nemesis. Star Trek was still going before this film came out. Voyager was still running and Enterprise was just starting to look promising. However. Nemesis came out, with an awful script that had all humour removed. The humour was there (it was in the book) but all trace of it was surgically removed from the theatrical presentation. Nemesis killed Trek so bady that they had to start up the franchise in an alternate reality.

Anything “mockbuster”. You know what these are … It’s where they take a successful film and remake it with a subtly different name. Battle Of Los Angeles (i.e. not Battle: Los Angeles) is one of these but there’s been others made, including the Terminators, Transmorphers, Transformers and a few others. Watch for them, avoid them. FOR THE SAKE OF YOUR SANITY !!!!!

Lol

What’s next ? Starship Troopers 2. The first and third Starship Troopers films are fairly ok. They’re very watchable, although they take the original Heinlein book into an extremely right wing direction. Must watch the animated series again, shame they didn’t get the chance to finish it. However, I shall definitely not watch Starship Troopers 2 again.

Twilight. Ok, this wasn’t actually too bad but as a vampire movie fan, I should have been wanting to watch the rest. Must be something about Kristen Stewart. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone as good looking be so unwatchable.

Snow White & The Huntsman. Not too bad a film, just not nearly as entertaining as Mirror Mirror and it suffers from the Kristen Stewart effect.

Total Recall (the new one). Another in a long line of films that are very well made but … WHY ? Why remake a B-movie, with the only script inspiration being to take away the Mars aspect ? The original made more sense. There was no real need to redo this one.

Limitless. Again, well made movie, I just really didn’t like the Drugs Make Winners message.

I think that’s enough for now. Last one – Mars Attacks. However, this one while it was bad, was so hilarious with it that I feel I need to watch it again soon 🙂

PS Healthcheck. Think I’m improving. Ear’s not so bad and I think I’m steadily getting my arms back. Skin feels good too 🙂 Fingers crossed – I’ll be able to wear long sleeves again by the end of this week.

Saw the new Bond film today 🙂

Believe the hype. Instead of being mostly joke as some Bond films have been, there’s a seriously good action thriller here. It keeps you guessing as it goes from action sequence to action sequence.

I suspect I’ll see something new in it when I watch it again. I’m a Bond film fan but don’t actually own many of them (just Casino Royale). I reckon I’ll be watching the bluray of this one repeatedly. They’ve done a good job with this one.

“Too much information” starts here …

Think my condition is improving. But ever so slowly. I’m not leaking as much 🙂 I’ve managed to leave my bad ear alone since Wednesday night, so it must be still healing. The rest of me is similar, although my arms feel like they’re on fire at the moment. The skin there is very dry and cracked. But it’s healing too and not leaking.

Just gotta look after it and protect it while I’m awake and while I’m sleeping. That’s probably something people don’t think about … You move about while you sleep. What happens if you roll over on to an ear that’s not happy and damage it ? Will you set the healing back on your limbs because you’ve unconsciously dragged half healed bits over the bedsheets or the quilt ?

Having to think of things like that so I don’t set the healing backwards overnight.

I think I’m doing ok with it. We’ll see how it goes over the weekend. Gotta say, the sleeveless cricket top I bought has been a godsend, as wearing that means the sleeves aren’t putting that healing back.

There is some definite healing going on, the bits of my legs that originally went bad last year are pretty much back to normal now. It’s just other bits of my legs which are having bother.

Think I figured something out today too :

Pizza = good – HURRAH !!!!!
White bread = bad – meh.

I’ve not reacted to the pizza for early dinner but did start to wheeze after munching the results of the Fryday morning Bacon Sarnie run. I’m learning :-).

I suspect I’ll need to see the doctor again soon but – healing is happening. It’s just happening slowly and I’m having to try hard to ignore the temptation to go scratchy-scratchy.

Fingers crossed for an easy weekend 🙂

I’ve been hitting some massive lows lately.

I’m well and truly fed up with the skin condition I’ve got … I want it gone. It is truly just a skin deep problem, although a fair few people at work have let me know they’re worried for me with it. But even though it is just skin deep, it has effects that run a lot deeper.

It’s very distracting. And that goes for my mind making up false symptoms. Some of those make me very itchy, which ends up causing me to make the problem worse.
I get signs that it’s getting better … and then it gets worse again. That’s crushing.
I think I’ve figured out a cause of the problem, I shift how I live … and then the problem comes back again.

I was having trouble at work on Monday, although I tried to hide that as far as possible. Part of that was lack of sleep, although I think I’ve figured that one out now. But most of it was seeing improvement after the Doc visit end in disappointment as my week off went on.

I think the last couple of changes (laying off the OJ and taking antihistamines) have made a difference but it’s awful, awful slow. And my skin is still very sensitive.

Ok, ok, that’s enough about my troubles. How about those blessings ?

What’s let me turn the corner this week from massive depression to more up & at ’em is a few very good friends.

You know who you are ! You’ve been awesome to chat to over the last few days.

That’s where I count myself very lucky. There’s the work colleagues who I’ve been lucky to count as friends for years, the ones in my work-not work circle (CK & CQ!), there’s the canteen people who look out for me and someone who keeps an eye on me through Steamchat.

They’ve been helping me keep going through these medical issues. And it’s hugely appreciated.

PS If I’m still leaking next week, I’ll go see the doc’s again. Honest.

I’ve felt a whinge coming on for a little while now.

I’ve been with the same ISP since I moved into my current house. That’s like almost 11 years now. (Yep. Long time!). It started out as Telewest Blueyonder before they got hit by mergers, joining NTL to become part of the Branson Virgin Media empire.

To be fair, the service isn’t bad. I started with a 512kbit/s connection way back. That’s been steadily upgraded over the years and is now up at a genuine 20Mbits per second of download. And it gives that speed too on downloads. The upload has improved too and is now double that original 512Kbits/s download (original upload 128Kbit/s, it’s now 1Mbit/s).

Techie talk aside – that’s quicker than my first laptop could send information across wires to the computer next door to it. It’s quick enough to download the latest Bat For Lashes album in about a minute (it’s 120MB on iTunes).

But.

It’s evidently not fast enough to play Youtube videos in high definition. That’s deeply MEH, especially as seeing off buffering was one of the themes of recent Virgin Media advertising. What happens is that when you try to play a fairly recent (as in made in the last day or so), you’ll be able to see a few minutes of video and then you get Whirly Wheel silence as you are forced to wait for the next chunk of video to load.

I tried to keep up with watching the Felix Baumgartner highskydive. Just one problem – whirly wheel silence just took over totally and it was a total waste of time and effort.

It’s not the hardware here. I can play BBC iPlayer just fine. The old hardware was happily handling 3 concurrent streams of BBC iPlayer Olympics in HD. I picked up a new freebie modem/router which will hopefully see that 20MBits/s get upgraded to 30MBits/s soon. That’s not sorted the problem.

What apparently is causing the problem is a local proxy server in the Virgin Media network. What happens there is that you’re not playing the video back from a Youtube server, it’s playing from a Virgin Media server which is intercepting the calls to play the video. And it can’t keep up.

Again – deeply, truly – Meh.

It’s great to have a massive pipe to get the data through. The problem comes in because of something in the way (which shouldn’t be there) taking the data supply back to a trickle. I’d much rather have, say, 5Mbits/s and HD playback than rarely used 20Mbit/s and no HD playback.

Don’t get me wrong – this is not a matter of keeping up with something being streamed live, it’s that poxy proxy server being unable to chuck the video data out fast enough. I suspect with the Baumgartner jump (streamed from Youtube), it was a matter of not being able to send the video data to many viewers.

Hopefully it’s something that will get sorted out soon. But I have my doubts because it appears to be bad hardware and bad decisions in the Virginmedia network itself. Proxy servers are Bad News.

Ok – time to end the whinge …

I’ve stuck with Virginmedia this long because the service has given near 100% availability. It’s almost unheard of for the connection to go down. Sure, bandwidth throttling is annoying but even when that kicks in the connection is faster than the typical ADSL line.

And it was nice to get a shiny new wifi modem router (most capable piece of kit in my network right now), all for free. But it would be even nicer if I didn’t have to click the Youtube videos back to 480p (which works ok) within a minute or five of starting to watch every single video.

Definitely not ready for going back to work tomorrow.

I’m well rested, sure … but I’d like to be in better condition than I am right now.

I have improved (I think!) since starting to avoid orange/citrus from Thursday but … Still got the damaged bits and areas that look like I’ve been dragged around at high speed by something going over concrete. Yep. Still a bit sore.

I think I was on to something with the citrus but then again, I’ve said that before. I don’t think it’s a problem solely with wheat, or I’d have still been worsening seeing as I’ve not gone totally away from wheat. The anti-biotics haven’t completely got rid of the problem, although I think I needed them anyway to clear out some nasties. (Lost a couple more pounds too). One correlation with citrus is that I had quite a few glasses of orange juice on one of the occasions when my breathing flared up.

My breathing hasn’t completely cleared, although it has improved. I suspect the dusty environment here might be contributing to that problem. My left ear has improved though, although it still looks nasty. Right eye’s still poorly though. I can see just fine, it’s just the skin underneath the eye.

It is having an effect though, under the skin. Kinda like being bored of it now and wanting the problem to go away. It’s been with me for far too long now and it’s depressing to think I may have made it worse by going on the orange juice. Since coming off that, the road rash seems to be reducing although I do need to help myself out by not poking at it all the time.

Hopefully time will tell. Or I’ll be back at the doctor’s place before too long hoping for more answers.

We shall see.

What else have I been up to this week ?

Music. Lots of it. Itunes tells me that since escaping work on the 12th, I’ve listened to 1159 tracks, at least once. And I’m listening to more now 🙂 I’ve added a huge amount to the library lately and I’m not quite through listening to it all yet. Still another 131 tracks to go, including the whole of the new Bat For Lashes album.

It’s currently the Torchlight II original soundtrack, which they made available for free a little while ago. It’s not bad, it’s atmospheric like most soundtracks. Can’t say I’ll get the game, I got the first and didn’t play all the way through the storyline.

Gaming. Not done as much of this as I thought I might. I dunno. Games just aren’t grabbing my attention like they used to. I’m enjoying watching people play games more than I’m enjoying the games myself these days. I’m 10 hours into the new XCom game but haven’t felt the urge to go back in. Perhaps I’m on too easy a difficulty level as it doesn’t seem to be challenging. Perhaps I’m comparing the new constricted maps to the earlier randomly generated massive maps.

I’ve mostly been FTL’ing – great game. I’ve beaten that game once but not for a little while. Now there’s challenge, with a lot of fairness alongside too. If you’re interested in the genre and haven’t checked it out yet, here’s another link. It’s definitely my Game Of The Year.

So if not gaming, what have I filled the hours with ?

Lots of telly, lots of book.

I’ve managed to catch up enough on the telly treadmill (what comes from recording 3x 1 hour episodes per weekday for later watching) that I can be a little more relaxed about watching it without running out of space :-). Walking Dead had a promising start to its third season and Hunted is not too shabby.

Bookwise, I’ve read the whole of The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M Banks. Not quite sure what to make of that one. It’s not his best Culture novel, that’s either Excession or Surface Detail. There’s a hefty case of So What ? in here. But – it’s a pretty decent book nonetheless and doesn’t take away from the Culture sequence the way Matter did.

I’m now back to Lucifer’s Hammer. I’ve read that one before but it’s a high enough quality book that I’m happily reading it again.

And … where exactly did I leave Lucifer’s Hammer ? Oh – the comet had struck and the Chinese and Russians have wiped each other out with nuclear fire and it’s over to the Americans to keep things going. Watch out for cannibals …

It's an intriguing start … (I'm at page 153)

I have a feeling that the start is scene setting for later.