Mostly lemon based

Category: General

  • Now, that’s just mean

    So I’ve got Brick back, and the Mac is now at least booting; although I need to reinstall again once I’ve moved some files about (to save them from a more thorough nukeing). But now the Laserjet’s died. “50 SERVICE” is all it says now; which appears to be most likely to be a fuser problem. I know the LJ 4 is hardly the newest piece of kit, and probably barely worth fixing, but I rather like it and it’s vastly cheaper to run than my DeskJet. It looks like it’s about 30 quid for a replacement fuser unit, which is a bit annoying. I guess I’ll take it apart and check first – but the fact it decided to die having sat and been working, rather than failing in first use is quite annoying. Anyone got a spare fuser unit for an LJ 4?

    And this is taken from  Kathryn’s LJ:

    1) One Book that made you read it More Than Once: “Surely you’re joking Mr. Feynman!” – I read this loads of times as a kid and now have a copy all of my own.

    2) One book you would want on a desert island: The SAS Survival Handbook. Is that a bit practical?

    3) One book that made you laugh: I could leave this with Kathryn’s answer(‘The Eyre Affair’ by Jasper Fforde), but I’ll put down Gridlock – the beginning of which made me laugh a huge amount.

    4) One book that made you cry: I *think* Tipping the Velvet (Sarah Walters) did; there have been several but I can’t think of them right now.

    5) One book that made you wish you had written: I don’t know the answer to this one. No book’s ever made me wish I’d written it, I guess…

    6) One book that made you you wish had never been written: While there are many hideous and unpleasant books in the world, none that I have read would I wish non-existence upon.

    7) One book you are currently reading: Theoretically Kushiel’s Avatar is next, but there’s also the Toyminator and Megatokyo 5 hanging about; and Scott Pilgrim (book 4) should be arriving soon.

    8) One book you have been meaning to read: The Well of Loneliness (Radclyffe Hall).

    9) One book that changed your life: The closest to this is a book on the theory of how people deal with bad news and bereavement (Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kubler Ross) which I read because of my course but it coincided with my dad’s illness and death.

  • End of Nights

    So, one week of nights over. I have a good nights group – although sadly two of ’em are leaving.

    Unfortunately, also, I have my usual post-nights malaise. I have a sore throat and feel generally like I have a head-cold approaching. At any rate, here’s a link courtesy of James. I’m going over here to install OS X.

  • Well trodden path

    There’s been loads written about nights in the emergency department in the UK, and quite frankly it’s pretty much all true.

    We get an astonishing amount of dross through the doors, many of whom claim that people have ‘spiked their drinks’ – before explaining that they’ve had 6 pints, ‘a few’ shots, and maybe a few of those drinks consisting of fruit flavour to mask the cheap ethanol. But they can ‘handle their drink’ so their drink ‘must have been spiked’.

    Why they imagine that after consuming 20 odd units of alcohol they’ll be feeling absolutely peachy is beyond me. By the time I was 18 I’d sussed that drinking half a bottle of voddy was enough to make me really quite ill and didn’t do it *that* often; and even despite drinking enough alcohol to float a small navy on some occasions during my youth, my friends were sensible enough to know the difference between ‘pissed out of one’s skull’ and ‘in need of the ED’.

    Oddly though, I’ve had a dramatically non-standard set of night shifts. Monday was dull, to the point of me wishing I could reasonably sleep on one of the (many) empty beds and be woken when a patient came in. Tuesday and Wednesday were unutterably horrendous. Thursday was oddly okay, and Friday – well last night, was interesting.

    At one point (a several hour long point) the number of police in the department actually outnumbered the number of nursing staff. Possibly even the total number of doctors and nurses. In bay one we had ‘drunk so much he was unconcious’ (he’s a regular though, sadly. We had a sweepstake going on his alcohol level (looser to make the tea) – I won :) ), in 2 we had ‘drug addict under arrest’ and in 3 we had ‘drunk and violent and under arrest’. My charming bunch were worked through and discharged, although I fully expect to see number 1 again tonight. I’ve seen him certainly 4 of the 5 nights I’ve worked this week.

    Incidentally, 3 gave me one of the easiest requests to refuse I’ve ever had. He wanted a blowjob. At least it gave me and the police something to chat about – well, quite honestly we seemed to get on quite well. Depressingly though I’m starting to pick up the slang ‘clucking’, the charming gent in 2 was.

    In amongst the dross though are the sad cases. The people who really should be there, and who don’t get as much time as they should because inconsiderate people drink more than they should and fall over (and in one case be so inebriated as to not be able to recognise his own son). A lovely older chap who’d fallen out of bed and sustained a nasty head injury, and I think the saddest of the week, a woman who having recovered from cancer came in with a bleed – and rapidly went downhill.

    We fought and fought, but I’m told she passed away not too long after leaving the department. I love my job, and am pleased to say I knew when to step aside and let someone with more knowledge step in, but even still it was a surprise to see someone deteriorate so quickly – and she was so friendly – that was a hard one.

    Especially, I think, as on the 28th of August 2 years ago my dad passed away from cancer. And whilst my sensitivity to this is not that huge; my mum reminds me of it, and perhaps it affects me subconsciously more than I realise. And maybe moreso this year following Aisling’s news about her mother. So. Yes. Anyhow, that got onto that rather more than I meant to.

    Anyhow, I need to head to bed (once I’ve rung the garage to pay for the car repairs) and sleep for tonight is another night. Wish me luck :)

  • I think the technical term is ‘whoops’.

    So, I managed to stay up ’til 4:30ish, which is pretty good for swinging my bodyclock round. Distressingly the big-sheets of cardboard behind the curtains had too many holes in (or it was too sunny), so I think I’ll have to put a little more effort into stopping light ingress. But still I managed to sleep, on and off, ’til 12:30, which puts me in a relatively good sleep balance for tonight. Or today, as I’m willing my brain to believe that it is. It’s just a very gloomy day :)

    Fortunately, there’s very little in the way of window-dom in the ED in which I work; and thus I am dependent entirely on other cues to know what time of day it is – and hopefully I can force my body into a sembelance of awakeness for the night; but at the moment I’m wanting to go to sleep and it’s only 1630, which doesn’t bode well.

    Body, let me introduce to my old friend Caffine. Caffine, Body. Here, let’s get together.

    Anyhoo, I did this by a process of watching Carry On Films and Red Dwarf. The Carry On Films aren’t really as good as I remember them being, but they’re funny – at least the old ones are. It’s funny though, I’d never really noticed how weak some of the stories are, or indeed non-existent. I thought there was *some* sort of plot to them all, but I don’t really think that ‘Carry on Nurse’ has a plot at all.

    Red Dwarf season 3, which is where I’m up to, is kind of the pinnacle of the series, I think. 3 and 4 definitely were my favourite seasons, although Holly (female) isn’t really as funny as Holly (male).

    Aaanyhow; so, today I kinda mooched about. I discovered Operator Please (particularly ‘Just a song about ping pong‘ (myspace link for those who like pain)). For some reason I can’t stop listening to Just a Song About Ping Pong (although I’m still also very into Remi Nicole’s Rock ‘n’ Roll and Late of the Pier’s Space and the Woods; Axe Girl is also still floating my boat, musically speaking :) ).

    Then I had a genius idea. I’d been debating updating the Mac to 10.4.10, and there was the download glowing at me like some ethereal mac spirit guide, beckoning me to come into the light. But, having checked it’s not really suitable for my AMD based HackinMac, so I hunted out a 10.4.9 update. Oh, I’m so clever…

    Having checked everything; 10.4.9 should run on my Athlon 64+ (which apparently has SSE3, although it’s not listed in ‘About this Mac’). So there I am installing it, and it runs thorough the updater before ending with ‘there were errors in this installation. Try restarting installer’; so I tried. It wouldn’t restart. Suspecting that the poo had already been flung and was preparing itself for a fan-type impact I attempted to shutdown the Hackinmac. After about 5 minutes of disk churning it sat silent with the blank Mac desktop staring at me. “J’acuse” it said, it’s icy blue glow reflecting on the murderer of the machine.

    I lent down, hitting the power button. After a brief pause it restarted, the screen filling with loading messages… fingers crossed I watched and read…

    …and then it started. Firewire failed to initialise properly…. The network card failed to initialise…. The audio wasn’t working *before*; but it was shedloads of not working now. And then we got into about 5 minutes of failures, before the machine decided it was not going to load OS X and would instead like to be dead.

    Whoops, I believe is the technical term.

    I tried to recover it using my original install disk (which, by some thankful piece of good thinking I put in the OS X box! I mean, who’d’a thunk I’d’ve been that organised. OS install disk in the OS box). But no, so now I’m trying to obtain 10.4.9, which hopefully I can install over the borked install. I’m thinking maybe I want to remove the old install? Hey; mac people. Broken mac with a working emergency partition – do I delete everything that’s not work from the other partition before installing? Or do I just see if it’ll install over it? Will it be quirky and unreliable if I do that?

    Anyhow; it gives me something to do for the rest of the week that isn’t watching videos… :-/

    Anyhow, I best get showered and up :)

  • Progressing

    Against expectations I’ve actually done quite a lot of tidying and sorting today. I have pounced on the back bedroom with some vigour and shuffled piles of stuff into different piles of stuff, decreased the box content of the room and, in fact, started to uncover something that I believe was once a desk.

    I have a pile of computing equipment the likes of which I’ve not seen for a while; the Laserjet 4, complete with JetDirect is sat atop my RiscPC which astonishingly can see the network. Of course, OmniClient is being it’s usual argumentative self and I can’t seem to persuade it to connect. And WebsterXL seems to have decided that it’ll connect only to google’s homepage, and nothing else. It’s not helped that the Acorn Keyboard after 2 years of having crap piled on it appears to have finally bitten the dust (sadly :( ) and that after so long on Linux, Mac and Windows I’ve started to forget how to use the RiscPC. To be fair, I only connected it ‘because it was there’. It’s the sort of thing I feel silly for having spent time on, but at the same time it’s such an important part of my formative years that I’m rather pleased to see it still working. I’d’ve quite liked to use OvPro to produce the zine with Kathryn, but it looks like it may take me a long time to get it working properly – if I ever can. I’m tempted to nuke it and install everything fresh… but also I’d forgotten that with only 4Mb of ram it can only do 1024×768 in a decent colour depth. It’s sad really, it was a phenominally advanced machine when it was released, and now it’s put to shame by a cheap PC running an OS it was never designed to run.
    But, on the plus side the Mac went ‘print to a laserprinter on the network? Why of course’. Ahh. Mac, we love you. Turning off DHCP on the white box of internet doom home hub seems to have improved connectivity; now I just need to clear the desk of crap – although we’re pretty good now. Down to last few ods and sods.

    I’ve thrown a bunch of stuff onto freecycle too, and I’ve finally found the singles that seemed to have disappeared when I moved from Ashford to here.

    Anyhow, so that’s been my day really; here’s the results of the chaos decreasing act – the whole computing environment (some of this stuff has moved in from the bedroom, so the mess hasn’t decreased as much as I’d hoped; this shot is also an exercise in adding as many notes to a photo as possible) and the desk. Although it’s not really ‘tidyer’; everything’s actually connected now and there’s the possibility that Kathryn can use the desk with her Mac should she wish to – just by moving the hackintosh keyboard. Also, the Laserprinter is up and running, so resume printing should be a nice simple, and very professional looking affair. Everything’s still kinda dusty though.

    Still, it’s progress for definite.

  • On waking early

    So I tried to persuade my body to let me sleep in this morning; I mean, when I’m with Kathryn I can snuggle up and doze and the morning can slide away. But come 0800 my body work me up and refused to go back to sleep. Refused. By 0930 I was so fed up of lying there that I gave in and got up.

    Gah.

    On the plus side yesterday I generated a scene from a 1950’s hacker movie, as I surrounded myself with type 332 phones (I own 3 type 332s of various ages, and a 232 payphone), having reassembled the best one (well, two, but I’ve not set the other one up for modern usage) I’ve got two “good” phones and a spare phone – although I’ll be very impressed if that one works, considering that the electromagnets are furry (with mould; I’ve cleaned them, but it’s come back). Sadly the one that’s “best” doesn’t have the alphanumeric dial; but it certainly sounds good when it rings :)

    I have, however, discovered that the HomeHub can’t cope with pulse dial, which sucks. I mean, how hard would it have been to make it support pulse dial?

    Never mind eh. I can’t plug it directly in to the BT network ‘cos it’s not ‘approved’ despite being a BT (Well GPO) telephone…

    Anyhow, I now need to go sort out the back bedroom – well, actually, I now need to go connect the waterpipe outside, then I shall go tidy the back bedroom. I’m hoping some degree of sorting in there will make it possible to get some stuff out of the front bedroom, which’d be handy.

  • Slow, but forward.

    Okay, so you know how I said I hated tidying? I do, still, hate tidying. I’ve checked :)

    I suspect the house will be no-where near as tidy as I’d like when Kathryn arrives – this is down to two things:

    1) I hate tidy (did I mention that?)
    2) There’s not really anywhere to put things which makes me feel like reorganising the piles is sort of, well, futile, which leads back to….yeah, item 1.

    *But*. That said, I have made some small achievements.

    The drawers are almost split into two; There’s 4 and some of a silly little drawer for Kathryn now, and 5 and most of a silly little drawer in use by me. The tall-boy-of-jumper-and-duvet-and-sheet storage has been attacked, slightly, and has become the tall-boy-of-Kate’s-Jumpers-Kathryn’s-Jumpers-and-some-other-random-things-of-Kathryns. The sheets and duvet have moved into the cupboard next to the bed. the cupboard next to the bed is now also home to Kathryn’s iHome, a clock, and some other bits of Kathryns on a shelf – the shelf above’s been sort-of-cleared-a-bit, so as we can share it; although it’s suffered from the ‘oh-I’ve-no-idea-where-this-goes’ syndrome which has been affliciting me.

    *and*

    After a great deal of walking this morning, there is a hole in the soil pipe with a 40mm strap on boss (yes, really) attached to it. In a little while I shall pop out and stick the pipe in it (it needed to dry first). From tomorrow, were the water on upstairs (which it isn’t) you’d be able to turn on the tap in the sink and the water would make it’s happy little journey down to the sewer instead of out into the back garden.

    Ra.

    Although in the world’s most annoying turn of events; B&Q did have it in stock (although I didn’t end up getting it from there, which is why mine’s a different shade of grey to the rest of the pipework); but it’s now stocked in a different place in the store – despite there still being a hole for it and a label in the other location. It’s completely out of place in it’s new location; away from all the other soil-pipe related bits, and no one seemed aware that it’s moved. It was just as I was hunting for something *else* that I came across it. I’m debating attacking the back bedroom a bit. By ‘debating’ I mean “I think I should but have less than no enthusiasm for the task”. Pfer. And I forgot to get something important when I was out shopping this morning, which means that I now need to do more walking to go and get it :(

    Gah.

    Oooh, oooh, I could look at the list again:

    – Finish CD organisation.
    – Unpack Kathryn’s books.
    – Remove centre shelf from cupboard, allowing Kathryn’s light to stand on lower shelf.
    – Sort my clothes and clear drawers full of crud.
    – Unpack Kathryn’s clothes.
    – Sort & file paperwork. Write missing letter to NIContribs.
    – Continue work on bathroom (not in order): Mount wood for cistern, Fix sink to wall, Fix toilet to floor, Paint*, Clean floor of excess grout, Commence tiling*, Finish waste water plumbing, Paint bath feet, Fit shower*, Fit bath*, Fit cistern*, Trim base of door and refit*, Sort out lighting for shower*.

    Ooh, doesn’t that look better?

    Hrm. See, ‘tidying the entire house’ wasn’t in that list; but it’s kind of lurking in my head. Fooey.

  • Patience = 0

    Before I commence this evening’s rant-a-thon I thought I ought to share with you some fun links. Lauren waved (the world) at the Retro Encabulator – which is excellent for IT geek humour; and for those of you of an automotive bent, here’s a similar video for the Turbo Encabulator.

    Anyhow, so, today you could tell I’d done a 6 day stretch. 6 days isn’t the worst; someone else is doing 8 and 9 is not unheard of; but after 6 it does start to tell in my patience. And when someone is sucking up all your time and they’re not actually ill? Oh, did I want to scream. Actually, what I wanted to do was to tell the person to pull themselves to-fracking-gether and get out of a bed which could be being occupied by someone who actually needed to be there.

    What really strongly indicated that she was actually not ill was the amazing effect of the placebo. The ambo crew had put a cannula in to give one drug; but before they’d given it they’d flushed it with normal saline (salty water); this apparently improved her pain. Normally I’m very careful to say that when I’m flushing the cannula it’s “just salty water”. Today I simply didn’t say, I explained that I needed to give some drugs through her cannula, and then having got her consent I gave it. I didn’t intimate that it was anything, I just flushed the cannula and then gave the IV Paracetamol.

    See, I understand; sometimes there will be people that I don’t really think are sick who actually are; which is why I’m really careful not to differentiate. I will make mistakes, people will be in pain and not show it, sometimes the pain will *actually* have gone by the time I see them, and sometimes people will be sick and it’ll not be obvious; but I’m fairly good at spotting pain – and people who are in pain tend (though not always) to move in a way which is guarded. I can’t be sure if it’s the IV Paracetamol, the injection I gave, or the Normal Saline which made her able to walk about and not be in such severe pain; but I suspect that three lots of N/Saline’d’ve done the job just as well.

    Thankfully, someone else took her and thoroughly explained the fact that she needed to leave because if she’s got back-pain problems she needs to see the GP because as she’d kept me away from my patients who were actually sick, she’d used up my little reserve of patience and I really wanted to tell her to get out of the department. *sighs*.

  • Spick and Span

    Tidying is never awesome fun; and the enormous job I’ve set myself is, quite honestly a little overwhelming; but it’ll be nice for me to have some sense of order in the house; and it’d be nice to be able to welcome Kathryn to her new home with it being in some sense vaguely clean and also faintly tidy. It’ll never hit staggeringly neat, not with limited storage, and huge amounts of renovation works going on; but there’s a lot of potential for tidying it to a greater extent than it’s at now.

    So; with that in mind, this weekend begins something akin to Tidy Quest; whilst I’m sure I’ll meet almost none of my targets, I at least hope that the house will be clean. Indeed, shall we examine what I wanted to achieve, and what I expect to?

    – Finish CD organisation.
    – Unpack Kathryn’s books.
    – Remove centre shelf from cupboard, allowing Kathryn’s light to stand on lower shelf.
    – Sort my clothes and clear drawers full of crud.
    – Unpack Kathryn’s clothes.
    – Sort & file paperwork. Write missing letter to NIContribs.
    – Continue work on bathroom (not in order): Mount wood for cistern, Fix sink to wall, Fix toilet to floor, Paint*, Clean floor of excess grout, Commence tiling*, Finish waste water plumbing, Paint bath feet, Fit shower*, Fit bath*, Fit cistern*, Trim base of door and refit*, Sort out lighting for shower*.

    Well, the three in the middle in italics I shall achieve, the bathroom, well, I may manage the two in italics; if I’m lucky. I’d go and check if the whatsitsface – part – had arrived, but I’m tied to the house at the moment, waiting for the garage to collect Brick.

    What I shall do though is start sorting through the paperwork that is classed as rubbish – so I can work out which can go straight in the recycling and which is confidential and needs to be shredded…. And I may start on the clothes issue. :)

  • The good, the bad and the faintly annoying.

    This morning I woke up late; fortunately yesyerday SSN (Senior Staff Nurse) switched my shift today from a middle to a late (Kathryn, I meant to tell you last night, but got so carried away with shiny links that I forgot; sorry hon. I won’t be in until my usual after-late-shift time). But it did mean I’ve been on a bit of a mission this morning. Because it was raining last night my bike gear had to go through the tumble drier (I just realised, I spent all winter struggling to dry this stuff – and I’ve got a fracking tumble drier, am I an idiot or what?!) which meant that I couldn’t wash my uniforms. So my plan was to get up moderately early and stick them through the wash. Thankfully I realised that I’d got up too late to reliably be able to wash my uniforms; so I kept yesterday’s aside because they’re still washing. Anyhow, I then had my list: Buy Food, Buy Stamps, B&Q (for the part that’ll be in on the 23rd), Eat. So, off I went on a mission – with only an hour between leaving the house and needing to be cooking lunch (start in 5 minutes) I shot off down the street, à pied.

    Somerfield, as usual only had second class stamps, which is seems to be the norm, and is faintly annoying but on the way…

    I’ve been looking for this seal for the toilet; being as it’s an old design the part I was after was slightly elusive. But then this morning I came across a pile of broken up bathroom bits; and there was a toilet and sat in the hole for the flush pipe was the seal I was after. Having knocked on the door and waited I decided that no; the person wasn’t in, but given the rubbish and smashed nature of nearly all the bits of the pile I decided that it was rubbish, and have taken it for my very own. It’s not in perfect condition; the rubber is a little dry, but I think it’s probably okay. Does need a clean though. I’ll either use it or take it and get a replacement now I know what the part actually *looks* like.

    I then went to B&Q. I hate when people say “it’ll be in on the X” – because it almost invariably never is, unless they mean ‘closing time on the X’ or ‘on the night of the X, when our delivery comes’. And the same was true today. I know it’s early, but I’m working – and that means I can only head over in the morning. I need one part to finish the waste water for the bathroom. One. All the other bits are complete (the flush pipe needs a seal too, but that’s clean-not-waste water ;) ). So far from B&Q I’ve had the “if it’s not on the shelf we don’t stock it” which is possibly true; but didn’t take account of the idea that this part (which is the same as the 32, 36 and 50 mm parts) is not actually on the shelves in the same place as them. I know I’m blind, but some help would have been nice. Then we’ve had the ‘not my department’ bit, and now we’ve done the “it’ll be in on the…”, and it’s not. But wickes definitely don’t stock it. I should go over to plumbworld, really. It’d be cheaper, but I have to drive there (I really should sort out my push bike, but it needs a new crank bearing (possibly two), and new tyres. Anyhow. Yeah. So that’s where we’re at.