Let the blog see the rabbit...

My sister has been without an Internet connection for the last few weeks and being the other side of the Thames from me, I have only been able to offer support by phone. The SpeedTouch ADSL Router I had bodged to act as just an internal router/wireless AP was apparently working fine and she assured me the Cable Modem was on. She wasn't getting a connection either wirelessly or using the great long ethernet cable supplied by Telewest when she got the connection, so I was rather stumped.

Today, my parents, great aunt and I have come to hers for lunch and so I had an opportunity to diagnose the problem first-hand. It turns out that the Cable Modem has a Standby button and it had been pressed. Another press later and it was working fine.

Why would you ever want a standby button on networking hardware?! You either want it on or off - there's just no point in having it in a power-consuming non-functional state.

Following recent thunderstorms we've decided to get a second ISP to improve the stability of our Internet connection. We already have ADSL with PlusNet, but every time there's a lightning strike (which has been rather too regularly over the last few weeks), the router loses sync.

Once the connection came back up for long enough, we had a look at what Virgin Media are offering and then ordered the >20Mbit "XL" package. We were going to do it online until we realised we'd be paying the £25 installation fee when we'd had a cable connection from Telewest previously - we changed from them to PlusNet because they didn't do static IPs.

So my dad phoned them up and not only avoided the installation charge but also had the TV package made free and a discount given on the Internet connection too!

This morning's post brought a parcel containing a new cable modem and, having installed a third NIC in my gateway yesterday, it took seconds to get an Internet connection through it once I'd phoned them up to activate it.

Now, I've got the job of setting up load balancing across the two links...

I've neglegted my blog for over a month but certainly not for a lack of things to write.

My parents successfully completed their tandem ride from Land's End to John o' Groats, despite some potentially ride-threatening damage to the rear hub. I suspect one of the reasons I've not been keeping my blog up to date is that I had been doing my dad's (at http://peter.chesspod.com/blog/) and didn't feel like doing even more typing. It's now finalised and includes photos.

While my parents were away, my grandad caused problems for the staff at his old peoples' home. He had been getting steadily weaker for quite a while and this wasn't helped by the fact that he was refusing to offer any assistance when getting out of chairs. Not only did this mean he wasn't using his muscles, causing them to deteriorate further, but it meant that the staff were having increasing difficulty in lifting him until one day one of them injured her back.

As a result of this, the home started using a hoist to get him in and out of bed and he spent all day in a wheelchair. He decided that this was cause to go on hunger strike and after this had been going on a couple of days, Agnes, who is the manager of the home, called me to ask if I could go and talk to him.

I went with Heather and spent a while talking to him. He seemed alright, and we didn't mention food until I took him back to the lounge to find that everyone else was in the dining room. He didn't want to go in, so we left him in the lounge and went home.

Agnes called again on the following Sunday asking for me to go again as apparently our visit earlier in the week had cheered him up. This time, I called Aunty Phyllis and invited her to lunch and she and I went to see him at about 2pm. After talking to Agnes for about 10 minutes, we went to see him in his room, where Sue and Phil were already with him. We spent about an hour there, but grandad was pretty miserable and wanted us to go. He was also quite cross that a doctor had been called - I'm not sure what he was expecting to happen as a result of stopping eating though...

According to the home, he spent the Tuesday shouting and screaming and a psychiatric doctor was called. He admitted him to Southend Hospital on the basis that he needed to be rehydrated before anything else could be done.

Mum and Dad arrived home on the morning of Thursday 26th April - Morphy and I met them at Southend Victoria as they wanted to avoid carrying the tandem up the steps at Prittlewell. In the afternoon, they, Phyllis and I went to see grandad on Stambridge Ward and it was a nasty shock. Grandad had deteriorated a great deal since Sunday. With a lot of effort, he was able to talk to us, but he was screaming in pain and gripping the rail on the side of his bed with both hands. Phyllis was very upset to see him like that and once dad arrived (he had spent about 10 minutes looking for somewhere to park the car), we left pretty quickly.

On the Sunday evening, my uncle Chris phoned to let us know that aunty Kathleen - my grandad's sister - had been taken into hospital in Bath. He had been on the phone to her finalising arrangements to go and see her on the 1st May when she said "Ooh, I'm having a funny turn". Not hearing any more, he called the emergency services and after the police broke the door down, an ambulance crew took her to hospital. She told them not to treat her as she had throat cancer and wanted to die. It turned out that she had a pulmonary thrombosis and she died the following afternoon - the 30th April.

During the following week, my grandad continued to deteriorate. I went to see him with my dad on the Friday, by which time he was heavily sedated on morphine and clearly had no idea we were there. They had stopped treatment by that stage as he has wanted to die for a long time and because he had been dehydrated, had a kidney infection and pneumonia. He died the next day - 5th May.

On the following day, my sister and her husband came to lunch. She was applying for a promotion and wanted my help in preparing some laminated worksheets for a model lesson she had to give. She was going to use the spectacularly ugly Comic Sans font for these as she has to use a "dyslexic-friendly" font. Fortunately, though, a bit of googling revealed some much nicer choices and we settled for a much more elegant but very readable font called "Myriad". Her interview was two days later - on the Tuesday - and that evening, she phoned to tell us that she had got the job.

I had a renal clinic on 9th May, which went very well. I was seen quickly, my creatinine was 149 and they don't want to see me again at clinic until July - all good news. They hadn't got my tacrolimus result back though - it seems the bloods lab had been behind since the bank holiday. They would have called me if there'd been a problem with that though, so it looks like my transplant is finally settling down!

Ted (who died in 1990) and Kathleen

It was Kathleen's funeral on 16th May and we drove up to Bath that morning to attend. We arrived in plenty of time and found a pub - The Forester & Flower - where we had some sandwiches, before going to the crematorium.

Afterwards, we went to The Jubilee for some food and then back to 'Abertawe', Kathleen's house in Tunley - so-called because she had lived in Swansea prior to that. Emptying a dead relative's house of its contents is, as one might expect, a rather strange experience. Having previously done a lot of work on the family tree, I was given the title of "Family Archivist" by Tricia that afternoon and so came away with all of Kathleen's photo albums and diaries.

On Thursday, I started the mammoth task of digitising some of this. The first thing that caught my eye was a photo album and typed account of a holiday to Tremezzo that she took with her husband Ted and sister Phyllis in 1961. I have created a web version of this, trying to make it look as much like the original as possible. I'm pretty pleased with the results.

Since then, I have scanned most of the family photos in her albums, including one of my great great uncles Hector and George. Hector was killed in a mine in Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1932 - something my grandad had mentioned occasionally.

This evening, I started work on Kathleen's diaries - modifying the SUCS Blogs system to allow the date to be set on entries rather than taking it as the current time. At some point, I should improve that code and add it to the SUCS version. We could also do with a new calendar-style view for the archive. 

My parents are currently six days into their 1000-mile tandem ride from Land's End to John O'Groats. They are raising money for the National Kidney Federation, to whom you can make a donation here.

My dad is writing daily blog entries, which I am putting online when he phones them through to me each evening.

I've just listened to "My life in Serious Organised Crime" on Radio 4. Mark Thomas is always entertaining, but this was absolutely fantastic.

Listen again at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/comedy/markthomas.shtml

So yet again, I find myself sitting in reception in Renal Outpatients at the Royal London waiting for blood results.

I had expected my appointment on Tuesday to be the last one here, but I had a call from Vicky yesterday informing me that my creatinine was 177 on Tuesday and so they wanted me to come back and have my bloods done again today.

The bloods were taken at 11:30 and I was told to expect the results at 1. Needless to say, that was 20 minutes ago and I'm still waiting.

Every other time but one that I've been called back for repeat bloods has meant another stay in hospital and the one that didn't should have as the kidney was being rejected at the time. As a result, I have come prepared this time - with all my drugs, some spare clothes and my palm and phone chargers.

After I got the results:

At about 1:30, they got my blood results back and my creatinine was 161, which they decided was enough of a drop to let me go home. They will have a meeting tomorrow to decide what to do next.

I took my dad's D70 out into the garden last night and got photos of the moon throughout the eclipse. The results can be seen in my gallery.

I've blogged before about my GP's inability to create repeat prescriptions for me without errors. I took a repeat prescription request in on Monday and went to collect the prescription this morning, expecting to find that they'd done it all wrong again.

To my surprise, when I got it I found that everything seemed to be in order. I suppose he had to get it right eventually! The doctor had put down every item I'd asked for (even the one his computer said wasn't due until April) and prescribed an 84-day supply of each.

I then cycled straight to the Pharmacy to get the prescription filled (having remembered to take my HC2 certificate with me, so I wouldn't have to pay).

When I handed the prescription over, I told the pharmacist that the GP seemed to have managed to get it right first time, but she soon found an error - he hadn't specified the type of Aspirin.

The ATOM feed from the SUCS Blogs has long mangled "quotes" & it's about time that I put this right.

This blog entry exists to test whether I've fixed it yet...

Edit: And guess what... I have! :-)

This afternoon, the Yellow Advertiser (one of Southend's two free newspapers) came through the door and I had a quick glance through it to see if there was anything relevant to the campaign against the widening of Priory Crescent. As it happens, there was.

Another article caught my eye, however:

Plan on track to ease road jams

A NEW park-and-ride scheme to reduce weekend traffic congestion could be launched at Southend.

The plan proposes people leave their vehicles at the railway station car park and use the train to get into town. The scheme has been suggested by Southend Council leader Murray Foster. He said the new scheme could reduce the amount of congestion around the town and lead to more people using the train service more. Talks with rail managers are expected in the weeks to come. 

Mr Foster said: "We have two mainline stations in the town and we should take advantage of that. This is just in an embryonic state at the moment but I',m hoping it will encourage some discussion on the matter."

Graham Bashford, spokesman for C2C, said the company would be more than happy to speak to Southend Council regarding the scheme. He said: "In principal anything that reduces congestion and gets people on the train is something we would welcome."

A One Railway spokesman said: "We have schemes to encourage people to link buses with trains and we will always look favourably on any proposals of this sort. It is worth noting that this is currently only a proposal has not been presented as a formal scheme. No discussions have yet taken place."

The article is accompanied by a photo of Murray Foster looking shifty outside Southend Central station with a caption reading "PLAN: Murray Foster at Southend Central, the proposed park-and-ride site."

Southend Central, as the name suggests, is in the centre of Southend - it's about half way along the High Street. If people have driven to that station, they don't need to catch a train to get into town! It has a car park run by NCP with a capacity of 140. If you look at a map of the borough, you can see that there are stations every couple of kilometres, meaning that people can easily walk to their nearest station.

The plan make no sense at all, so I emailed Murray Foster this evening:

Dear Mr Foster,

I read first with interest, and then incredulity, the article in this week's Yellow Advertiser on the Park-and-Ride scheme you are proposing.

Surely, the reporter has got it completely wrong. How could it possibly reduce congestion to bring cars right into the centre of the town (and how much closer to the centre can you get than "Southend Central"?) only for the drivers to find that there's nowhere to park once the first 140 cars have filled the car park?

Anyone south of the A13 within the borough is in easy walking distance of their nearest Fenchurch Street line station and those further from a station could cycle or get the bus.

Surely the idea behind a Park-and-Ride scheme is to make it easier for outsiders to come into the town and spend their money in our shops, not get rid of our own residents to the likes of Basildon and Lakeside?

If you are going to introduce a Park-and-Ride scheme, which is a very good idea, the obvious thing to do is approach the Royal Bank of Scotland's offices next to Tesco on the A127 and ask them to allow the public to use their 400+ capacity car park at weekends and then run a regular bus service between there and the Town Centre.

Of course, there wouldn't be so much of a congestion problem to be addressed if the Council had turned down the planning applications for new houses that have been built on the flood plain in Shoebury, something to which I note your friend in Parliament, Mr Duddridge, is strongly opposed.

Yours sincerely,

--
Denis Walker
South East Essex Friends of the Earth
http://www.seefoe.org.uk

I took Morphy for a walk this afternoon in Churchill Gardens. Part way down the path, he stopped dead and refused to move. I had no idea why.

When he did eventually start walking again, he was limping very badly, so I stopped and looked at his paw to find that it was bleeding.

I got him home, carrying him a lot of the way then had a look at his injury and found there was a small shard of glass stuck in one of the pads of his front right paw. I had a quick go at removing it with tweezers, but I had no way of getting a grip on it without making the wound bigger, so we called the vet's.

Luckily, they had space at the evening surgery and asked us to bring him straight in. Very quickly, one of the veterinary nurses had a look at him and a couple of minutes later, the vet asked us to bring him through to their operating table, where they had much better light.

Then, the nurse, my mum and I held Morphy down while the vet dug the piece of glass out with a hypodermic needle.

I was quite surprised how quiet Morphy was throughout the whole incident. He whimpered a bit as the vet got the glass out, but other than that didn't make a sound. Normally, he yelps loudly about any pain at all. 

I'm taking the opportunity to update my blog while on the train up to the Renal Clinic. Hopefully, this will be one of the last couple of trips before I am transferred to Southend Hospital at the end of March.

Originally, I was supposed to transfer to Southend on 10th January, but as they were still waiting for my blood levels to settle down after my rejection episode before Christmas, that didn't happen and the earliest Southend could give me for another appointment was 28th March.

Now that things are improving, I will need to start thinking about coming off Incapacity Benefit and looking for more customers.

After clinic...

Good news today - my creatinine was 148 at the last clinic two weeks ago. Dr Raftery had said he didn't expect to see it that low again following my most recent rejection episode, so I'm pretty pleased!

Well, I've been busy over the last few days working on the SUCS Blogs code.

First, I moved from "RC's nasty horrible database library" which "really needs replacing with something more sane" (his words) to ADOdb, which is the database library the SUCS site uses. This made it easier to do my second task, which was to turn the Blogs system into a SUCS site component.

As part of the work on the component, I created a method of adding RSS and ATOM feeds to pages within the site, so the chckens then wrote a new Planet component to take advantage of this.

To top it all off, I then wrote two new mini-components to list the most recent blog entries (taken from the Planet ATOM feed) and SUCS forum posts, which now appear on the SUCS front page when you log in.

I'm on the train on the way home from clinic.

I saw Dr Raftery today - for the first time in quite a while. My creatinine was 170 last clinic, which is a bit better than it was, but not exactly fantastic.

He told me that my last biopsy had shown a fair amount of scarring on the kidney, which means that he doesn't expect my creatinine to get back to what it had been - 150 and less.

He also said that even looking back, he still wouldn't have biopsied me based on my creatinine levels, which apparently gave no indication that I was having a rejection episode as early as I must have been to cause that amount of damage.

We took Morphy back to the vet's on Friday, and he was satisfied that there was no need to do anything else.

Indeed, Morphy has been much happier and has wanted to play a lot more.

On Saturday, I baked a liver cake (shown right) and he was definitely very happy about that.