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Yes, another week of nights has rolled around, and so you get incessant whining from the Kate creature. Less so, perhaps than normal because I may, potentially, have actually saved a life.

Not solely of course, as part of a team, but for the first time ever (yes, seriously, there’s always been a doctor ready) I hit *charge* and *shock* on a Defibrillator as part of an arrest rhythm. Not only that, but the reason the individual was in the cath-lab and having an arrest just-prior to having her heart’s vessels (hopefully) reopened, was because when he’d rocked up from triage in my bay I’d gone *I’m bloody sure she’s having an MI*.

I’ve not seen an MI for a while, they usually go straight to the cath lab, but this one presented a little oddly (some mild back pain) and her first ECG was ‘unremarkable’. So much so that if it hadn’t been for the vague ‘epigastric’ pain that accompanied the back pain the ECG would have been a one off. That and the fact she looked like shit.

She then said the pain was worse, so another ECG was done, this time even I could spot that it was (a) different, and (b) had some ST-Elevation. ST Elevation is your ‘you are having an MI’ marker, essentially. And so in went a nice big cannula, while the doctors rang the cath-lab which, inconveniently is not right next to the ED. A swift run down the corridor, and I have to *love* the staff nurse who grabbed the defib pads with the defib/transfer monitor, and said ‘hey, shall I come with you’. She would, incidentally, have had those bits of kit on the trolley with her, but he also, when we got there, and I noticed a VF arrest – managing to say something like “Shit, that’s an unfortunate rhythm” while simultaneously trying to shift cognitive gears from a really, really quiet shift to ‘CPR NOW!’ had the good sense to remember where he’d put them, open the pack and was there with me in slapping them on her chest. Me, I was slicing the gown off while one of the docs was doing CPR.

Still, when I left the Cath lab she had a heartbeat and was conscious again, and they were just prepping her for the actual cardiac catheterisation.

So, yay for us. And for once I get to big-up me for checking the monitor* :)

* Normally I’m whining inside my head about what I didn’t do. I have to say, for once, despite not quite being as on-the-ILS protocol as I’d’ve liked, I actually did everything I should have.

9 year old girls in lingerie pictured around a stripper pole.

Just which misfiring neurone in Disney’s corporate brain thought this was appropriate?

UPDATE: I may have been taken in by a Daily Mail outrageathon. I’ll update again should I find out it is fake – currently CNBC are reporting it’s fake – but my favoured source of news (i.e. boing boing) hasn’t updated the story (here).

UPDATE 2:See the update here. So the underwear line is false, the picture is true, it’s not endorsed by Disney, but the company that makes the tutus did link to the poledancing children image… which is just ick.

So, I’ve now got 22 items listed on e-bay. I think that’s about my limit for one sesh, as it were. Otherwise I’m going to lose track of things.

Although I might start listing the chips; then again I’ve no idea if the chips are worth anything – I think John took most of the useful ones, so I’m slightly tempted to throw one auction for a bunch of 1980s chips up. Then whoever wants them can grab them.

Meh.

Anyhow, some things that I’m not selling (‘scuse the lousy photos, but this is what my pathetic digital camera produces) – points for guessing what they are before reading the answers…

So, hands up who can guess what my dad did before he became a ‘good guy’?

Yeah, that’s right, he was a phone phreaker. And quite impressively too; at some point I’ll get some some shots of the incredibly organised system which allowed him to make long-distance calls for the cost of a local call. Somehow, despite it being a big hunk ‘o paper and electronics, I can’t throw it away. The top one is his original piece of kit, simply a dial in a tin, essentially. Which allowed you, when hooked up, to send the pulse dials required to dial your call. The later one is sadly incomplete, but shows off my dad’s engineering prowess, it’s a tone-dial generator for achieving the same thing. He never did finish it though.

Despite being, by the time I was growing up, the most insanely law-abiding citizens I’ve ever met, both my parents have (/had) a mischievous gleam in their eyes – and my dad used to have some highly interesting hobbies – it’s from him I learned to pick locks (although I can’t do that anymore, sadly). From him that I learned lots of tricks for breaking padlocks; and I distinctly suspect his desire to explore didn’t stop before he got on-line.

His desire to explore also gave rise to interesting things like the third shot. That was the complete set of master keys to several buildings in London. We went to his university reunion about 10 years ago and were disappointed to find that while quite a lot of doors still sported potentially the same locks, they also sported keypad or swipe access *grins*.

Apparently, his adventures included making his way from his university, underground, into the bowels of the science museum. He said he never could get into the display areas, the relevant doors locking from the outside.

Anyhow, I’m going to eat lunch and take the motorbike out for a test-run.

My mum’s G-Wiz decided to stick it’s ‘Service’ light on during the very, very cold phase and snow. It has, during that time, been sat in my mum’s garage on charge, so this came as a bit of a surprise. Thus it was that during our little sojurn in the garage of my mum’s house, the MacBook was to be connected to the G-Wiz, for the pokeage of it’s software and with the avowed intention of finding out what ails it.

With this in mind, en-route to my mum’s we stopped off at Maplin obtaining a USB->Serial adaptor. Made by BAFO this item was on offer… and had two (not one) serial ports. How delightfully handily archaic I thought.

Unfortunately, when we got there no amount of poking, prodding, beating with sticks, insulting or denigrating publicly would coax the evil little pile of crap into being recognised as a USB Serial converter. It would go ‘Hey, there’s a Moschip USB Device’ and then not load drivers for it, because they weren’t the right ones. At least, that was Windows approach to it. MacOS just looked at it mockingly before stalking off.

Even remote-James-WindowsFu wouldn’t make it work.

So I took it back to Maplin, expecting a fight – because if you plug it in it goes ‘hey I’m here’ just doesn’t work *properly*. But no, all credit to maplin there was no problem at all. I went into some of the details about what we’d done to persuade it to work, and the guy offered a refund or exchange, and I came away with the Prolific USB Serial converter, which I installed the drivers for and which promptly worked.

Now I just need (a) a very long serial cable, or (b) to remember to take the Mac down to my mum’s again.

Also on the positivity front – Topps Tiles, who when I bought the floor tiles said ‘bring extras back when you’re done for a refund’ – well, it’s been over 2 months since I bought them, and while the lowly store clerk wasn’t sure, the manager said that he’d overlook the over 45 days (apparently on the back of the receipt it states it must happen within 45 days) because it’s a tile they stock all the time. And so we now have the two edging strips we require to finish the flooring in the lounge.

So, big-ups to JLH (who rock), Maplin and Topps Tiles for all exceeding my expectations.

And big downs to the filler which has, for the 2nd time disappeared unused. I have no idea where it’s going, but I really would like to know.

So this weekend just gone we spent, for all values encompassing all of Saturday, disposing of mine, and my father’s history.

I am a horder. I actually have to fight very hard against hoarding urges, my mum’s a horder, my dad was a horder, and well, the genes definitely made it to me. So, since my mum & her husband are hopefully moving soon, the time had come to attack my parent’s attics (the garage has an attic too, because it’s a separate outbuilding).

We set to, and produce vast enormous piles of rubbish.

Seriously.

A good skipload of crap was produced over the day, but not without distinct pain on my part. See, most of those things carry some attachment to my dad, and a good chunk of them fit within my well-drilled-in concept of recycling – i.e. it can be reused. Huge great swathes of salvaged and NOS electronics are now sitting in a big box awaiting the scrap-recycling which is their future. Miles of redundant cabling, piles of books on obscure topics. On top of which there’s lots of salvaged thin sheet metal and mica, and suchlike useful for making *things*.

I also have a vast quantity of stuff to go on e-bay. Already on there is a Telephone operator’s desk, A tilley lamp (from pontypool road station), my IBM 5155, a 180A HP Oscilliscope, and my dad’s punched paper tape reader/writer. The more I think about it, the more I think it generates punched paper tape, but I *think* it worked as a reader too. I should have looked more carefully at it while I was up in the attic. Meh.

Worse, however, is still to come. As I worked my way through the vast cabinet of wonders which constituted my play area when my dad was looking after me when I was teeny small – deciding on things which might be worth salvaging and e-bay listing, and things I couldn’t convince myself to get rid of, and reduced it down to about one box of keep-components, and some books.

Incidentally, if anyone’s after a pile of DEC books (Some PDP manuals of various sorts), or Elliot 401 manuals, give me a shout. They’ll be going on the bay, but it’s going to take me a while to work through the vast huge pile.

Interesting question: is the fact I’ve remained a prolific blogger since 1999* due to my vanity, or is it just habit? This is a question which popped into my head because, well, most of my friends sort of phase in-and-out of blogging, and tend to do a new-shiny-tech-thing (so twitter/facebook/etc) become the current *thing*. I’ve been lurking on LJ since about 2002, and had my own site (on my own server!) from 1999, and actually, had a blog when I was at uni – so probably 1997ish. Wow.

My life has been on the internet for 13 years. How weird.

Anyhow, yes, it leads me to wonder about me. Right, I need to get showered, and put more stuff on ebay, I guess.

* Yes, I do have archives of those posts. No, you may not see them. I used to be a bit too open in my blog :)

So, I’ve spent almost the entirety of the last 2 weeks inside – mostly watching Chuck, House, or doing the development programme from work. The process has paid off, I’ve finished the development programme and am currently waiting for my poor printer to spew forth 150ish pages (plus some references). The poor little duplex unit has not seen so much paper since I was finishing off my university degree.

As a side point, printers are terrifyingly cheap now. 60 quid buys you a fax/print/scanner. How is that sane? It’s only £10 *more* to buy a new printer than to buy two cartridges for mine. Mind you, mine has duplex and theirs don’t. So :-P

Anyhow, the problem is that 2 weeks indoors does not do good things to Kate. Kate now feels mildly unwell. Not awful, just a bit ick. This is upsetting for Kate.

(Page 88… working backwards)

Also, perhaps having fish for lunch, dinner, lunch, dinner, and lunch was not the best plan. In future, remind me to engage my brain before making lunch.

I’ve just gone through the database and deleted an awful lot of spam, and an awful lot of ‘users’. Either President Obama is an avid follower of my antics (as, apparently, is Jon Bon Jovi) or some of those users weren’t real.

I may have unwittingly nuked some real people. I apogise for that, but please re-register if I have. Largely this is based on the idea that I’m not that interesting, so most of them must be fake :)

So, this morning has largely, so far been spent doing lots of online things of the sort which end up lurking in my conciousness, and then piling up, and then I remember that there’s 17 things I wanted to check.

I’ve updated the iPhone to 3.1.2 and jailbroken it, which suddenly made it want to have the proper Vodaphone settings (since voda’ have started offering the iPhone, but the 3G, not my aged 2G). It seems to be perky enough and still appears to work, which is handy. I also had a look at bluetooth headsets. I’ve been contemplating bluetooth headsets for a while, with the idea that at some point, when I have ‘becca back, I’ll want the handsfree capability.

There seem to be a number of voicedial apps for the aged 2g, thankfully. So anyhow, I shall continue to consider that – although I’m concerned about this over-the-ear fitting poking my glasses, which would be annoying.

I’ve also been looking at microphones. Kathryn’s involved in the development of a podcast, and I’m slowly putting together a podcast (yes, really, although whether I’ll get around to actually recording it is, of course, another thing). We did a test recording on the mac using the onboard mic, and it’s non-awful, but not great. So I’d like something better – unfortunately I disposed of the decent Shure* microphones when I shut down the Studio. However, I’m now a bit confused – I had a poke at various advice sites and they all advocated using condenser mics, which obviously mostly want their own power supply… or at least, most of them seem to want one. Which obviously is a bit difficult.

Meh

So I’m contemplating what to do on that front. Recording engineers – advice please?

I’ve also done some general poking, and watched this entertaining little video.

Oh, and found an application which appears to successfully add covers to itunes, which given that itunes singularly failed to find the covers for most of the music I’ve ripped is handy. It is, however, $15 which is inconvienent. Especially because yesterday I terrified myself by creating a spreadsheet in which were the calculations for how much I’d spent on ‘becca so far, and how much was left to come. It wasn’t a pretty spreadsheet (in any respect), and has left me making whimpering noises…

So I’m looking at ‘becca and considering the corners I can trim to try and bring things a bit more under control. The problem, though, is that most things I ‘might as well do now’ since she’s in bits. And I don’t want any half-arsed jobs left. Essentially, the only savings come through things costing less than they are speculated at costing. I’m hoping the new loom will come out much cheaper than predicted. Jonathon is looking for places where things could be cheaper without compromising on quality too much, so hopefully we’ll get all the things I want for a price I can afford :)

Anyhow, I should get back to my exciting development programme from work.

*SM58s, I think.

I know I seem to be becoming more granola as time goes on, but let me just remind my brain that I do not need a pickup.

In other news, possible podcast forthcoming.

So, today has been a day of trying to catch up on the many days where I’ve failed to do anything useful due to an addiction to Chuck. I’d been working on my 52 week (or in my case, 156 week) programme from work last week, and done a fair amount of laundry, but that’s it.

Today the carpenter’s been and gone, and he’s put the final bit of skirting in the lounge; I’m pleased to see that he couldn’t actually do it with a single bit of wood, the curve is too tight, or at least, it’s too tight to do without expending a lot of money on pressure-steaming a bit of wood; so it’s made of laminated MDF now.

The filler’s drying and will get sanded and painted later this week.

I’ve switched it so the AA cover now covers Chester for our trip to France later in the year, booked the Volvo in for a service, arranged the return of our rug (uncleaned, I’m going to have to rent a carpet cleaner), I’ve attempted to contact the vancouver nursing people (but, uh, their office is in Vancouver, and isn’t open at 3am or whenever it was that I tried to ring. Oops). I’ve got a couple of piano quotes, organised some money transfers to pay for more mog works, and emptied the shelves in the office – and e-mailed the builder about the crack that’s appearing.

Over the weekend we went and looked at houses in Cornwall for my mum, I’m hoping that all goes well for her…

And now, back to developing my knowledge. I hope I get the SSN position after all this bloody work.