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So, I’ve had the last two days off, but I’m still trying to defeat the cold that won’t die. I’m still a little snuffelier than usual but it’s the cough that’s the killer. The cough that appears if I so much as consider going outside, and having lain in bed all night, the moment I get up I get an onslaught of coughing. It is, to put not to finer point on it, tedious beyond words.

And I’ve been thus relegated to the sofa. I mean, I’ve done some exercises, and will probably do some more in a bit, but I’m not really up to working on the house, which is upsetting, because the house is so close. So close I can taste it. And it also gives me something to use the nervous energy on. I suppose some of the nervous energy could/should go on studying the CRNE prep guide, expensive as it was, that’s sat upstairs. But most of it goes into thinking about how we really need to finish the house to get it ready to sell*.

One of the things I’d like to do is put some storage under the stairs in the lowest/shortest section of the triangle. My thought is that I could go to ikea and buy some of their storage boxes, and build some shelves to put them on, then hack out the space under the stairs (currently just boxed in with tongue-and-groove wood) and make a little tri-box-ultra deep storage area. So I’ve been pondering it, and was even thinking of designing it today with the thought that this coming weekend I could go get the wood and make it.

Only I realised I can’t. I can’t because the Minor’s in bits in the garage, and I don’t want to spread wood dust around the garage while the minor’s in bits. So I need to get the bits to do the minor – or at least, the bits to get the back axle serviceable. Which is only slightly painful (or quite painful). The actual new diff, I think I’ve sourced (thanks to the ever awesome WibblePuppy for reminding me to actually go try the forums in a more enthused way than I had been) and is not too painful. But then there’s the new bearings, new seals etc. Which again, not too bad… but then there’s the new seat bases (because I’d quite like to be comfortable again), and a headlining, and some trim panels. And then there’s weeping and gnashing of teeth. And quite possibly the battery is dead. And car batteries are not as cheap as they once were.

But still, once she’s on the road again (all she needs once fixing is another MOT) that should mean that I can slip her outside while I attack wood – thus protecting her paint – and more importantly at the moment, not filling her axle case with wood dust. Then I can start on the shelves. Which is kind of the final stage of the hall – which now sports such exciting features as ‘a light’ and ‘sockets attached to the walls’. Shelves, plaining the door down, mounting the phone on the wall and trim then onward to Kathryn’s office, and finally the fixy jobs in the kitchen (there’s a bit I didn’t paint, there’s the filler where the kitchen building bloke knocked chunks out of the plaster, there’s the scratches on the paint where I fitted the shelves, and there’s the trim in there. I sense that again, we’re going to finish the house just as we are ready to move.

We really suck at this!

In other news, being ‘ill’ does mean that I’m allowed to not work on the house. So I’ve done some agency-nurse joining stuff, I’ve listened to Not Your Kind Of People twice. Did I mention that I love music.

Oh, and I forgot to mention (anywhere) but there was a new Dead Bug Jumping out on Sunday (iTunes link). As a side point, can I voice my distress at Michelle Shocked’s recent outburst of homophobic hate speech. ’nuff said.

* Also it would be nice to live in a house that was finished. Just for once. For once in say, 7 years.

So. Finally. After several iterations of fiddling our payphone is now working. It presumably dates from the 40s, but it could have been installed any time between the 30s and the 50s. Given the cable being cloth covered, not the (later?) curled plastic cable I’m assuming it is 1940s. It probably has date codes in it, had I thought to look whilst I was faffing around with it, but I didn’t.

It turns out that the diagram that was used by someone to indicate wiring had a connection in it which isn’t appropriate to my payphone. And I’d added that connection in (it is an original GPO Telephones diagram). I’m not sure in what setting that pin should be linked, but not in our setting.

Another kind soul posted the original GPO Telephones wiring diagram – which revealed to me the error in the other diagram (I say error, but it may be appropriate for some setting other than just connecting it up to the regular ‘phone network). Having carefully unwired it, tested the capacitor in it, and the hook mechanism, I wired it according to the diagram from the GPO and it just worked.

No mess, no fuss, just connected it and it functions exactly as intended. Pay-on-Answer for dialling out, and dialling in works just as it should too. I now need to dig out some more of the change for it as I’ve only 4d, which whilst it does seem to work, doesn’t give one the choice of payment options. I’ve also no idea how long a call can last on 4d. I’m assuming there’s some kind of limit to it, and that you have to pay more eventually (given that there’s options for penny, six-pence, and shillings – but I’ve not actually tried it to see how long I can talk on that first payment. Nor do I know what happens when you run out of payment. Do you just stop being able to talk to the other person or does it generate some kind of clicky/peep type noise? This site I think indicates that the 6d / 1s options were for operator type calls, and the single penny (well, actually 2d, 3d or 4d depending on at what point this phone was removed from use) was for local calls. But since I dialled my mobile from it, clearly it’s not restricted to local calls. Interesting).

Anyhow. I’m rather pleased with myself.

In other, other news, I got my GSI Outdoors Javagrind. Now, I’ve not thought of myself as having discerning enough tastebuds to tell the difference between my Krups blade-based coffee grinder and the Javagrind (or any other conical burr grinder). See, my ‘discerning’ over coffee has come in stages. First I stopped drinking ‘instant coffee’ except in exceptional circumstances, because it became apparent to me that ‘instant coffee’ is a hideous abomination with no right to call itself coffee. Then I became good enough at coffee drinking to realise that I had favourites among the supermarket coffee shop aisles. Then I started drinking Two Day Coffee, and realised that all other coffee is hideous acidic bitter crap. Well, not all other coffee; Batdorf and Bronson Coffee was also delicious. But in general, a lot of the coffee that I have when I’m out I find to be acrid nasty stuff best smothered by making it into a Latte, and perhaps adding a shot of some syrup or other, such that I can’t really taste the coffee that much.

But I don’t really think of myself as being terribly picky, nor as having enormously sensitive tastes in this arena (yes, you can all laugh now, given the aforementioned pickyness). But the javagrind presented a solution to a different problem: I tend, with the Krups grinder, to manage to sprinkle coffee liberally about the place. Whenever I take the top off it, a little shower of coffee would make good its escape, landing upon the counter or the surface thereabouts, leading to endless battles trying to not have coffee everywhere. With the javagrind, I can grind it straight into my cafetière, thus avoiding this whole transferring mess.

But I didn’t really expect much of a difference.

Okay, I didn’t really expect any difference.

I thought, I’ll have my coffee and it’ll taste much the same as it always does.

Apparently, I was wrong.

I am stunned at how different it tastes. As in, ‘good lord, that tastes entirely different’. It was very, very nice coffee. But now it’s very very very nice coffee. The few more bitter notes have disappeared pretty much entirely, it’s much smoother. I feel like an arse for rambling about it, but really, I’m quite startled that just grinding it more evenly would make so much of a difference.

Of course, you know what this means. I have to try cold brew coffee.

And that, my happy souls, is it for today.

So, this may only be a cold, but it’s done a fair job of kicking my ass. I suppose I’ve not actually had a cold for quite a long time by my standards. I don’t think I’ve had an actual cold for a very long time – and I say this because some of the cold-flu medicine had expired, and I had to chuck a bottle of nightnurse (well, it went to the pharmacy) because it had expired too.

So having a cold, and having it kick my arse, is probably fair. I spent yesterday fairly much immobile on the sofa with my head embedded in the cushion because more than that seemed unreasonable. Today’s been an improvement. I feel lightly woozy at times, but otherwise not too bad. I have absolutely no intention of cycling to work, but am debating going in tomorrow. It’s whether to say stuff it and have tomorrow off sick to get really properly better which will mean spending the whole day feeling monumentally guilty (and they might well say ‘well, don’t come back on Sunday either’, because they say things like that); or instead go in tomorrow with the remnants of lurgy which will undoubtedly make it drag out for ages. The decision is, of course, complicated by the fact it’s a night shift which – having just adjusted back to UK time – is going to be f’ing evil.

Anyhow. So feeling somewhat better as I am today I decided to make an attack on the other Nook. See, as I mentioned before, we have two Nook Simple Touches. Mine, which is rooted, and Kathryn’s which, after today, is more-or-less rooted. It is rooted, but isn’t quite as ‘nice’ as mine. Why, I have no idea.

I used TouchNooter on mine, followed the instructions carefully (because I’m paranoid and don’t want to turn it into a brick, even if it’s a relatively cheap brick) and lo, with some patience* it worked exactly as it says on the hypothetical tin.

Kathryn’s Nook was not such a pushover.

The install bit of it appeared to go as expected, but then it didn’t want to reboot, and when it finally did decide to respond to my plaintive poking of the power button it rebooted back to being a standard nook. Several resets/retries/re-writings of the SD card later, one exciting trip where it became clear that it was getting some of the rooting suff on there, but it just wasn’t quite working, and I sucked it up, reset it and brought it home as a standard Nook.

Today I set to on it with the TinyNoot rootkit instead of TouchNooter, and after some fiddling I’ve got it sort of rooted. But for some reason neither would the Amazon app store work – at least – I don’t think it was working – but I need to play with it more. Nor could I install Google Marketplace. The irony being I actually do want to install pay-for apps and pay-for them. Well, potentially. Except that as previously stated, nobody loves Android 2.1. I’m surprised that Barnes and Noble haven’t offered an upgrade for Nook Simple Touch that puts a newer version of Android on there. But anyhow, they haven’t, so Android 2.1 is what we’re stuck with.

Installing software on Kathryn’s nook is, at present, arduous. Thankfully she only wanted Instapaper (well, she wanted Pocket, but Pocket is Android 3.something I think, and Read It Later is no longer available. Rant follows) – well, InstaPaper’s Android 2.2, but InstaFetch which is a somewhat aged InstaPaper compatible app, that’s Android 2.1. So that was easily….well. Okay. By Easily, the steps involved were:

– Find a site offering the install package (‘apk’) to download rather than trying to install it directly.
– Download it (most of these sites are hideous spam filled sites that just direct you through a never ending sequence of adverts with multiple pop-ups).
– Download the Android Developer’s Kit.
– Find out how to use adb
– Connect to the Nook using adb-wireless
– Realise Kathryn’s nook, for some reason, isn’t running as Root. Switch to root.
– Install files upon said beast.

So that wasn’t too bad. gReader, now that was a pigging pain in the flipping arse. Not as much as my unsuccessful hunt for the APK of Google Market (which, after several unsuccessful hours I had to give up on), no. But in the end I resorted to:

– Connecting my nook using adb
– Listing the apks installed on it and grabbing the right apk (use the ‘shell’ function of adb, make sure your nook is running as root (‘su’), change directory to data/app, list directory content, nab relevant apk name, use adb pull to copy the apk off it)
– Disconnect my nook / reconnect Kathryn’s nook using adb
– Install the file on Kathryn’s nook.

Thankfully this worked as the temptation to have a screaming hissy fit was approaching.

I’ve still no idea what’s different between the two. I’m intrigued by the fact that the install on the nook is apparently not the same between any two nooks. They’re all special little snowflake different. Meaning you can’t just copy one and dump it on another. Which is quite the strangeness. I suppose it makes them harder to root.

Still. It is, at present, working.

Of course, it’s only working as long as google reader works – although I’m holding out a leeeetle tiny bit of hope that greader (which is what is currently on the Nooks) will become Feedly compatible. I’m hoping that when they do this, they will keep Android 2.1 compatibility too.

However, all of this dancing around mulberry bushes has led me back to one of my pet frustrations about the modern software world.

Back in the old days, when all this was fields, and I was typing this on an archaic hamster powered desktop with a monitor that generated enough heat to warm a small apartment building, you could actually, fairly easily, get hold of old versions of software.

If you wanted the previous release of something it was usually available on that things website. Before that, when new versions came out they actually had to send you physical disks with differently aligned magnetic particles on, so if you were wise, you kept the old ones. Before that, the idea of ‘different versions’ of software was a bit advanced. But seriously, there was this phase where if you needed version 2.1.13.2b instead of 2.1.13.2d because 2c and 2d had something that you used that was now broken, you could usually find it.

Now I have to trawl sites that I don’t particularly trust to find apks that I suspect of being filled with malicious turds but painted to look like the thing I want, and obviously, there’s no easy way to check that they’re what they say they are without opening the tin.

This makes me unhappy.

This makes my crappy Android devices even less popular with me than they have the potential to be. This makes the iOS devices that we have running versions of iOS prior to current less useful. Because even when applications exist that did run on them, when they’re superceded by a version that no-longer runs on them, there’s no “download for an older OS” button. The play store in particular infuriates me for this. Android appears to update approximately every 2 minutes. There are more flavours of Android than there are blades of grass, and whilst it seems like 2.2 is one of the cut-off points, there seem to be many other cut-off points.

I understand it more from iOS. I understand that by choosing Apple products, I am going to have to deal with enforced obsolescence, and with minimal product support once they’re more than a few years old. I know that my MacBook despite looking almost exactly the same as Kathryn’s MacBook Pro and sporting a very similar spec, is nearing persona-non-grata. I know that my iPhone 4 is considered old hat and not worth properly supporting despite the fact I only got it 3 years ago. It annoys me, but it’s a decision I made.

With Android I didn’t expect it so much. Perhaps because I’m sat outside the ecosystem, and occasionally nose at it and assumed it would be more like most of the open source things I’ve toyed with or worked with over the years. But it does, in fact, drive me spare everytime I go near it. Our ‘Superpad’ is shit, not because it’s an interminally badly built piece of crap, nor because it’s underspec’d so far as to be woeful, but because virtually everything you might want to install on it pops up with an inexplicable ‘you can’t do that’ which appears to be related to the Android version. And you can’t update the Android version because it’s tailored to the hardware so closely that each manufacturer needs to make their own special snowflake version. It’s also shit because the app-store doesn’t work on it in the way that it works on other devices – in that I can’t log in from my laptop and say ‘Hey, install that on my Superpad’. And since the search is a bit unreliable about pulling up apps, it’s hard to rely on it. Feh. Anyway.

So yes, Android developers, please, please, please make the old APKs available. Or at least make what I’m going to call ‘transitional’ apk’s available – i.e. those where you stop supporting a previously supported Android version (and I full expect the ‘WE NO LONGER SUPPORT THIS VERSION’ tag).

Rant over.

* It really did take a day for the android store to work, and it’s still ‘odd’ in that I can’t search for apps – but if I log in from my laptop I can ‘see’ the device and tell it to install things.

So, sorry for the prolonged radio silence. We went on HOLIDAY! To AMERICA! I caught LURGY! For the FLIGHT HOME! Okay, done with the all-caps shouting now. Yes, we went over to see my best beloved’s family and friends, and to delight in the gorgeous sunshine that Washington State provides in March*. I’m not going to go over what we did each and every day for two reasons. One, I have a hopeless memory and we crammed the holiday pretty full of exciting goings-and-doings-and-seeings. Second, because y’all don’t want to hear about each and every family-type-thing we did with Kathryn’s Awesome Family**.

Anyhow, so among other things, we wandered around the delightful Olympia eating out at some really stunning restaurants/cafés/assorted eateries. Kathryn has oft lamented the absence of the Lemon Grass Restaurant’s Honey Walnut Prawns from our life, and having tried them, I can understand. They were quite, quite excellent. We also headed out to a great Thai restaurant which had, I think, the best Pad Thai I’ve ever had. The quality of food we ate, both home cooked and from restaurants was fantastic throughout. And I’m using far too many excited adjectives, so I’ll try and tone it down a bit (ha).

(more…)

At least, my brain should be saying that. It’s so far been gleefully uninterested in sleep. Topics which have come up today:

1. My performance in a Senior Staff Nurse interview (thanks for the additional answer to the question now. It’s a bit late. Thankfully I had a good answer at the time, but two would have obviously been better).
2. Moving to Canada. See, we got notification through today that they’ve got and now checked all the documents, which means we can move to them assessing me to see if I can take the exam. A process which can, frustratingly, take 8 weeks. Why 8 weeks at this point is potentially a little frustrating is that the cut off date for booking the CRNE exam is… the 10th of April. In 3 weeks time. Which is less than 8, y’see. The next exam after that isn’t until October, which is a long way away and throws all the plans off by 4 more months and means trying to sell the house in winter which is bad and 4 months is a lot when we’ve both got back from the US to the UK and gone ‘oh god, we really, really, really would like to move now’.
3. Sub-worry related to Canada: Finding a job and interviewing
4. Sub-worry related to Canada: Moving our stuff, packing up the piano, and ‘how to stop the Morris Minor sliding around inside a shipping crate’. Now Brain, I feel we really must have a talk about this. The practicalities of moving Rebecca to Canada could, perhaps, wait until I am (a) allowed to get a job there and (b) am, say, maybe applying for them, or even (c) actually have a job there and we’re preparing to move. Until then, perhaps we could leave the specific practicalities of how to correctly load and fix a Morris Minor in a shipping container as the vague ‘car goes in shipping container’ which has done so well up until now.
5. Then of course we were also treated to my Brain’s newest invention, a book about my experiences in the last days of the free for everyone NHS. A book that mainly requires my friends telling me which of the tales I’ve regaled them with amused them the most, and me interspersing them with the tales that depressed me the most, which generally go quietly into my brain or at most to my best beloved. Of course, the oh-so-delightfully creative brain then tried to map out some sample chapters. Yeah, thanks.
6. And I think this was perhaps the award winner for me. A while ago I started penning a little story on my iphone. I was travelling somewhere, and bored, and idea that’s knocked around in my head formalised sufficiently that I was able to scrabble down a chapter or two. I’m sure it’s not great, indeed, given past experience it’s probably terrible, but better out-than-in as they say. And then as has happened in the past, I got stuck. My heroine was trapped (undiscovered, but trapped) and I wasn’t sure how it was going to resolve itself. Also, whilst various scenes and such have formed unbidden in my head, and despite my crappy visual-synthesis-failure brain* I’ve managed to get them down and actually, even thinking about the opening sequence makes it pop into my head, so mmm, it’s clearly there, wanting to be let out, but…err, what was I saying, oh yes, (late night stream of consciousness it is then), the other thing was, I’d no clear idea what the, shall we call them ‘baddies’, uhm, baddies were after. I knew our heroine’s ex had it, and had absconded. I knew that various people were after it for different reasons, but my oh so helpful brain had decided not to let me in on the secret of what it was. This is not unusual. When I’m stressed, my brain will often obfuscate and hand me lots of other things to be slightly stressed about and it takes me a long time to unpick things. Anyhow, I was stuck, my heroine was also stuck (rather more uncomfortably, as it happens, making me feel rather sorry for her) so I left it waiting for the answer to come.

   The answer, of course, came now. At 2 in the sodding morning. The scene unspooled in my head, jumping back occasionally to make odd corrections, tweak descriptive language, try and rein in the worst excesses of what you probably all already know is my tendency to use 10 words where one would suffice. Or 20. Or overly complex phrases like ‘Her hand alighted on what had been, at least at some point in recent history, a bacon sandwich’. Although I quite like that phrase and it adds a degree of levity to a rather tense scene. Although I fear it also breaks the tension, which I’m not sure if I (or at least, the bit of my brain that has some idea about what’s happening) want(s) at that point.

   However, phrases like that mean that getting from scene-where-she’s-stuck to scene-where-she’s-trying-to-work-out-how-to-escape-the-police-without-actually-running-away are taking a long time. And also, my brain is an asshole for waiting until two in the sodding morning (did I mention it did this at two in the sodding morning) to unleash this, and apparently, possibly the answer to what they’re looking for. Although it’s not wholly important right now, beyond that it could be ‘written down’ either on paper or on computer. It is not a physical object, like, say a refined Bain Marié that never lets the eggs for your hollandaise scramble.

   Anyhow, it’s now past three AM, and I’ve been up about 30 minutes typing this. I’m unsure if I should have spent the 30 minutes typing the story, to make it get out of my head, but since the story showed no signs of abating, it was just toying with a few situations before we get to the police station… And now, even as I try and persuade my overtired (and still ill) brain that I should actually be sleeping my brain seems to be studiously ignoring me. Although the fever which I find harder to deal with at night has been driving me to the brink of insanity. Or at least, it would have been, if I’d’ve not had a story to think about…..

* I’d not really noticed until I was trying something from Homeland, visualising a window and then blacking out each of the panes, to try and attain some peace and calm, but my brain is terrible at that. Making an image actually form in my brain in a kind of ‘I can imagine that’ way takes much more work than I think it should. I assumed this is related to my appalling facial recognition abilities. Spacial awareness is generally pretty spiffy though. Odd.

So I had to step away for a bit before writing this. Obviously, the universe, on discovering I wasn’t nearly so stressed having got my university results, decided that perhaps I should be more stressed, so as to maintain stasis.

So, according to HMRC, 2 years ago, and 1 year ago, I didn’t send in my tax return. I did, I’d like to point out, send in my tax return. Both times. But for whatever reason they didn’t arrive, or at least, did not get processed. What also, it seems, hasn’t arrived have been:

A letter in 2010 saying ‘please will you check what’s going on with the adjustment to my tax code’ (which they didn’t adjust).
A letter in 2010 saying we were moving.
A letter in 2011 saying we’d moved.

Also lost by HMRC: A request for them to adjust my tax code (2007, I think).

This is because as an ex mafia boss in witness protection*, all my government tax affairs are handled by one specific office in Wales, and indeed cannot be accessed from outside that office. According to HMRC they are infallible (presumably like the Catholic church) and all mail that goes to any other office were I to, say, foolishly send something to the office indicated on, say, the letterhead of say, my tax return, is perfectly sorted and forwarded to the correct office. This process has never had any form of problem for any other person in the entire history of the HMRC. This I know, because the woman I was speaking to declined to accept that such a possibility could even exist. That I could mention such a possibility suggested such foolish naïveté on my part as to mark me as some kind of inexperienced soul who had no idea of the incredible efficiency of HMRC and little understanding of the world in general.

Things that haven’t arrived here, for example, have included several “We didn’t get your tax return” letters, and much to my amusement, one half of a pair of letters informing me of an adjustment to my tax code. Specifically, the adjustment to my tax code because they’d finally after only 7 years of chasing, applied the ‘professional subscriptions’ allowance to my tax code. This I know, because when she was talking to me she referred to one of the two letters, specifically the one I didn’t receive, leading to me saying “No. The letter says my tax code is THIS” and her explaining how yes, one of the letters said that, but following actioning my claim, I’d had another letter which said “this”. To which I explained that no, I hadn’t.

She explained at this point that they’d both gone out on the same day** and thus both must have arrived. I presume that there’s some kind of tax-elf who applies some kind of binding charm to the letters so they are inseparable. However, clearly, some kind of evil tax-wizard is breaking those charms, because only one of the damn letters arrived.

So now, now I have to wait for the interminable second class post for them to send me two new tax forms (because, and I know I’m a moron for this, I didn’t copy the tax forms before sending them). Now, I’m going to set a reminder on my calendar because… if they’ve not arrived in 10 days, I will need to ring them and hassle them to send them again. However, one thing that has come out of this is I now have a number to ring them.

Previously, all I could ever do was ring the HMRC generally and they would ‘forward a message to contact me’. Now, this seems needlessly complicated, and suggests a level of paranoia on their part appropriate to my history as an ex mafia boss***. But that was the way it was last time I tried to ring them (back in 2010). However, according to the woman I spoke to this has never been the case. Oh no. No. I could always just ring them. I must admit that I got very, very short with her. I ended up apologising at the end, although to be honest, that she basically said that I was wrong about this (I guess this is a step up on calling me a liar) really did rile me somewhat. This is because it drove me spare at the time. I’d ring the normal number, they’d say ‘oh you need to speak to the magic office, I can get them to ring you’.

I would invariably explain that I needed them to ring back that day, not some random other day. They would invariably say they would ring another day. I would then say that I work in a hospital and can’t just ‘answer my phone’ like office workers might. They would say there was nothing they could do about that, but that they were ‘open until 6’. I would then explain that nurses, strangely enough, work beyond 6pm. I would get no-where. They would ring whilst I was at work and leave a message with no contact number. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Eventually I would give up and write to them.

Apparently that doesn’t work either.

Lord knows what I do now, but apparently I can’t lodge an appeal until they have the paperwork for the tax years that they are missing. Right at this moment, I really, really hate the HMRC.

* This may, or may not, be the exact reason.
** This, I presume, is an example of the awesome efficiency of HMRC, that they send me two conflicting letters from the same office on the same day.