As some folks know, Lisa’s operation is tomorrow. She’s going to be in hospital for a few days, and at home on bed rest for at least a couple of weeks, probably more. I thought it would be a nice thought if people wanted to send her messages, to all do it in the same place. As such, I introduce http://www.sheepeatingtaz.co.uk/lisa/ if you go to the site, and fill in the message and post it, all messages will go into the system. I will give Lisa the website address tomorrow when she comes round, and is starting to feel a bit lonely. I’m sure it will cheer her up if she gets messages from people.

Please, forward this link on to anyone who knows Lisa. I’ll also be posting the link on Facebook and twitter to try and get the word out!

• 2 Motherboards
• 5 different sticks of RAM
• 3 Graphics Cards
• 2 Cases
• 6 Hard Drives
• 9 operating systems (including a phase where I was triple-booting for some reason)
• 5 Optical Drives (1 CD-ROM, 2 CD-RW, 1 DVD-ROM, 1 DVD-RW)

In fact, I think the only 2 original components are the floppy drive and the sound card! I’m not sure how long the current setup will last, as when I was rebuilding, I pulled the ground wire out of the connector for the power switch (from the front of the case to the motherboard). As a result, I now have to result to hotwiring the thing by holding the wire inside the connector and simultaneously pushing the power button to get it to boot!

All Fun & Games!

At 4am on Tuesday morning, Lisa woke up with incredible abdominal pains. She wouldn’t let me take her to hospital, in case ‘nothing was wrong’. Her being curled up on the floor unable to move didn’t inspire me to think ‘nothing was wrong’, but I digress. She did let me call NHS direct, and the guy on the end of the phone went through his symptom script, and couldn’t give a diagnosis. He arranged for one of the nurses to call us back. About 10 minutes later, the nurse rang, went through the same sript, and still couldn’t come to any diagnosis. She said she would get Lisa’s GP to call us.

About 20 minutes later, a local nurse called (not the GP) and advised to take a couple of whatever painkillers we had, and she would call back in an hour or so to see what effect they had had. The 2 500mg Ipruprofen had no effect whatsoever, so the same nurse came around to do an examination. The examination could not determine what was wrong, so she advised me to take Lisa to A&E.

Now, Goole Hospital no longer has an A&E department, so I was given the Choice of Hull Royal, or Scunthorpe, and given a letter to hand to the staff when I got there. We opted for Scunthorpe, and took off. On arrival at Scunthorpe, Lisa was then examined by the Triage nurse, and admitted to A&E, when the doctor suspected a twisted ovarian cyst, and diagnosed some Morphine. This was the first time Lisa had been able to stop crying for 3 hours. Fairly soon, she was admitted to a ward, and we were to wait for a non-A&E doctor to come and examine her. After another 4 hours, and several requests for more painkillers, a doctor arrived, and recommended an internal examination. This examination revealed nothing new, but did open up a couple of other possibilities: Kidney Stones or a Kidney Infection, and allowed Lisa to have some Painkillers.

A couple of days later, and Ultrasound scan was requested. The ultrasound revealed that there were no kidney stones, but the presence of a fairly large ovarian cyst (about 4×5x8cm). The cyst was not twisted or ruptured however, so the cause of the pain had been narrowed down to an infection. Antibiotics were produced, and the pain began to subside. As a result of this, Lisa was allowed home this weekend. She does have to go back to the Hospital (at Scunthorpe still) tomorrow, as she has an MRI scan scheduled (for ‘early in the week’) to check that there is nothing nasty (apart from the size of it) about the cyst. If not, she will be booked for an operation to remove it at Goole hospital in approximately 4-6 weeks.

And there we are, the full story so far.

I’m going to try and get people set up with Twitter, as I really like the fact that you can recieve the updates via SMS as well as send them. I’m going to start using it more, not just for emergencies!!

Today is shopping day, and the cupboards are bare. I’m having baked bean toasties instead

I have one of these from Ebay (cost a couple of quid):

I have one of these from my box of cables:

I have one of these in my living room:

Should I be able to link the 4 together and view the laptop output(Ubuntu) on the TV? If so, could someone drop into the comments a link to how to make it work? I tried the Screens and Graphics option from the Control Centre, but it broke X. I’ve read things about xrandr, but read more about how it doesn’t work.

I’m hoping it can work, as it would help me with my MythTV testing.

This means I can play my Cosby Show DVD’s (STILL only available in Region 1!) as well as my, erm, Recorded (from MythTV, obviously) media. If it had a hard drive I could install MythTV on, it would be perfect, but it will do as a stepping stone while I work on building a silent front end for the living room.

It is now Tuesday, and I have just had an email from Tiscali, warning me about my usage. Apparently, I have been flagged as having ‘extraordinary usage during peak hours’.

I’m not overly bothered, as I have been over using it slightly in th elast 4 days- 3 dist-upgrades:

• Laptop from Gutsy to Hardy Alpha (more about that later!)
• Lisa’s desktop from Edgy to Feisty
• Lisa’s desktop from Feisty to Gutsy

Which meant (because of the number of packages I have installed) there was circa 5 gig of transfer of the last 4 evenings. Suffice to say, that won’t be a constant usage level!

After reading that back, I realise that considering “I don’t have much time for telly at the moment”, I watch a lot of telly.

Oh Well

A couple of times, I’ve had to hold my tongue. The best example is that there was a whole module entitled “Troubleshooting Issues relating to Internet Explorer”. I was disappointed to see the contents of the module weren’t (wasn’t?) http://getfirefox.com.

Just for fun, here is one of the questions from the module “Troubleshooting Issues relating to Office”:

You recieve a call from a user who did not activate Office, and now he is running the Office programs in reduced-functionality mode. The user does not want to activate Office because he is worried that his personal information will be made available to other vendord.

How should you respond?

Now, the answer is obviously that I should tell them not worry, Microsoft will look after you etc etc blah blah blah. I do find it quite interesting that Microsoft are trying to use their ‘trainees’ as advocates for their software and practices.

Comedy responses to the above question welcome in the comments. They will give me something to read when we get onto “Troubleshooting Issues relating to Outlook Express”…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qEWhrjYg_o

Blacklisting the gspca webcam module has restored my laptop’s boot speed.

http://www.sheepeatingtaz.co.uk/images/gutsy-20080203-3.png

It will take some more time to discover why, or even where I need to file a bug. On the plus side, I don’t use the webcam, so it’s not going to impair my use of the system.