There is a polyp in my gall bladder.
The NHS found it while I was having an ultrasound scan at our local hospital in 2008. However, the operator wasn't allowed to tell me the results there and then. Instead they were posted to my GP, which meant another appointment. I didn't even know what the gall bladder was except that it sounded mediaeval, like my humours were out of balance, or something. But with the web at my disposal I quickly boned up on the subject, and learned that theses polyps were quite common, and are usually left alone unless they grow to more then 10mm across, after which they could turn nasty.
My GP told me it was 4cm across. Almost at once I was sure I could feel it in there, growing. I even got an occasional twinge from it. The doctor and I both managed to act unconcerned, and it was decided I would go back for a second scan a few weeks later to have it measured again. If it was growing, I was in trouble. If it wasn't, maybe it was just a gallstone. These aren't fun normally, but it would definitely have got a laugh out of me.
The polyp was measured the second time at 4mm.
"4mm!" I exclaimed, "but my GP was told it was 4cm."
"Yes, it says 4cm on the card, but it's actually 4mm."
I was so relieved I even forgot to inquire about which idiot had written down a simple measurement incorrectly, multiplying my polyp's size at a stroke by a factor of 1000.
Nothing has been done about my polyp since, and I have never again felt it twinge. (Later I found that the area the twinge was coming from isn't even where the gall bladder lives.)
The reason I'm writing about this is that I'd completely forgotten about it until a few days ago. Which is strange, seeing as I how for a few weeks I seriously thought I might have a tumour.
I was reading The Last Night of the Earth Poems by Charles Bukowski when I suddenly remembered the polyp.
if I was
him
I would have written
all this in
short staccato verses
and
started each paragraph
in lower case
but
would that make it
poetry?
Anyway, it makes me wonder, if I could forget something as significant (as I thought then) as that polyp, what other incidents might have slipped out of my memory.
Some people have started recording their whole lives electronically. That would solve the problem of forgetting, only to replace it with the problem of finding time to play your life back again and again to keep it fresh in your memory. Sadly, a lot of it wasn't too interesting the first time through.
Wednesday, 2 June 2010
Sunday, 30 May 2010
Ergonomic Experiences
Following on from my last post, on the subject of recommendations, I can heartily recommend that Evoluent mouse. I developed tennis elbow last year (and not from playing tennis), which has largely disappeared since I moved to using an ergonomic mouse. Ironically, the tennis elbow was probably triggered by me moving from a vanilla flat keyboard to a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic keyboard. Decades of habitual arm positioning were abruptly overturned when I started typing more naturally, and my muscles resisted. Ironically I made the decision to change keyboard when I noticed my wrists were starting to ache a lot.
It's a good keyboard though, and I've bought one for work and one for home use. There was another downside, or maybe it's an upside. Because the keyboard splits the keys into two groups, I had my nose rubbed in just how bad my two fingered typing technique was, so after thirty-five years of keyboard use I've finally had to teach myself touch-typing.
It's a good keyboard though, and I've bought one for work and one for home use. There was another downside, or maybe it's an upside. Because the keyboard splits the keys into two groups, I had my nose rubbed in just how bad my two fingered typing technique was, so after thirty-five years of keyboard use I've finally had to teach myself touch-typing.
AI - Still Some Way to Go
A year or so ago I wanted to know the mass of the planet Jupiter (never mind why: it's a geek thing), so of course I typed "mass of Jupiter" into Google. Up came a list of hits, with Wikipedia as expected at the top. But above all of that was a single result from Google Calculator:
mass of Jupiter = 1.8987 × 1027 kilograms
It was like the Internet had just spoken to me, and I started to take seriously the suggestions from people like Kevin Kelley that our technology could be developing into an artificial intelligence.
So it was refreshing this week when I was browsing through my Amazon recommendations to find the Evoluent left-handed mouse, suggested to me on the grounds that I'd already bought the right-handed version. And even though it's annoying, I'm a little bit reassured when my Windows XP computer at work (though oddly not my home PC, which is also running XP Pro) spots on start up that my external hard drive is missing and so reports that my total disc capacity has decreased, only to next time warn me that it's just gone back up again.
mass of Jupiter = 1.8987 × 1027 kilograms
It was like the Internet had just spoken to me, and I started to take seriously the suggestions from people like Kevin Kelley that our technology could be developing into an artificial intelligence.
So it was refreshing this week when I was browsing through my Amazon recommendations to find the Evoluent left-handed mouse, suggested to me on the grounds that I'd already bought the right-handed version. And even though it's annoying, I'm a little bit reassured when my Windows XP computer at work (though oddly not my home PC, which is also running XP Pro) spots on start up that my external hard drive is missing and so reports that my total disc capacity has decreased, only to next time warn me that it's just gone back up again.
Sunday, 16 May 2010
Comings and Goings in Programming Languages
Last week I wrote my first GOTO statement in around fifteen years. Strictly speaking it was a JavaScript 'continue' statement, but I specified a label after it to let me jump out of a nested loop, so in my mind it's a GOTO.
At University I was taught that GOTOs and labels were a bad thing because they encouraged spaghetti code. That was ironic, as they also taught me BASIC and Fortran IV, which completely depend on those very same bad things. However, looking at some of the code I used to write back then, I saw their point. Later, when I was writing assembly code for a living, and half your program seemed to be jump statements of one form or another, I really had my nose rubbed in how difficult this style of programming could be.
So for many years now I've tried to steer clear of anything that looked like a GOTO or a label. The nearest I got was in a C program when I mistyped 'default' as 'defualt' and the stupid compiler thought I was creating a label in the middle of a switch statement. (Boy, was that bug hard to spot.)
Going back to my 'continue', I have enough years behind me now to appreciate that jumping out of two loops is no worse than jumping out of one via a 'break', especially as the target label was just a few lines above. But in trying to remember all the arguments against jumps and labels, I suddenly remembered a former colleague saying about a computer language that it was the only one he'd ever met that had the equivalent of a COMEFROM statement.
Sadly, I cannot remember what that language was. A search on the web though found a language that actually does have a COMEFROM statement, namely Intercal. There was also a page explaining how one would work in Fortran. This is all quite amusing, but it's odd how much more difficult the idea of coming from is then going to, even though they're logically equivalent.
For another humorous but fairly unusable computer language, I would recommend Shakespeare, the language that lets your program read like a Tudor play. With true style, that implements a GOTO like this:
At University I was taught that GOTOs and labels were a bad thing because they encouraged spaghetti code. That was ironic, as they also taught me BASIC and Fortran IV, which completely depend on those very same bad things. However, looking at some of the code I used to write back then, I saw their point. Later, when I was writing assembly code for a living, and half your program seemed to be jump statements of one form or another, I really had my nose rubbed in how difficult this style of programming could be.
So for many years now I've tried to steer clear of anything that looked like a GOTO or a label. The nearest I got was in a C program when I mistyped 'default' as 'defualt' and the stupid compiler thought I was creating a label in the middle of a switch statement. (Boy, was that bug hard to spot.)
Going back to my 'continue', I have enough years behind me now to appreciate that jumping out of two loops is no worse than jumping out of one via a 'break', especially as the target label was just a few lines above. But in trying to remember all the arguments against jumps and labels, I suddenly remembered a former colleague saying about a computer language that it was the only one he'd ever met that had the equivalent of a COMEFROM statement.
Sadly, I cannot remember what that language was. A search on the web though found a language that actually does have a COMEFROM statement, namely Intercal. There was also a page explaining how one would work in Fortran. This is all quite amusing, but it's odd how much more difficult the idea of coming from is then going to, even though they're logically equivalent.
For another humorous but fairly unusable computer language, I would recommend Shakespeare, the language that lets your program read like a Tudor play. With true style, that implements a GOTO like this:
Hamlet: Let us proceed to scene III.
Social Networking and Me
Just been listening to last week's This Week in Google podcast, much of which centred on the recent concerns about Facebook privacy, as well as Facebook's apparent attempts to own the web. My own experience with Facebook used to be limited to a brief flirtation with it a couple of years ago. I gave up after a couple of weeks: I found I had little interest in giving the world a blow by blow account of my life, and I resented the wash of messages being a Facebook member generated, many from people I didn't even know. The final straw was a suggestion from a woman I'd never heard of that I should give her a slap. So I cancelled my account, or at least I think I did; it wasn't very straightforward.
Twitter and I have a similar relationship. As someone who's supposed to be tech-savvy, I felt I ought to open a Twitter account, but I quickly got fed up with having to repeatedly check for new messages (when I tried feeding them into Goggle Reader, I got someone else's messages instead--something to do with Google Reader not being set up to do logins). I do not share my user name, and have never tweeted. Despite this, I do get followers, though not for very long. None of them are names I recognise, and they all seem to be following hundreds of others without anyone reciprocating.
As someone who doesn't care to share the minutiae of his life with the world, the privacy issues of Facebook and others are less of a worry for me than the time it would take keeping up with all the messages they generate. I already have difficulty getting through all the blogs and podcasts I follow, as well as the music I want to listen to and the books I want to read, not to mention having a bit of a life away from the keyboard. Earphones and mobile devices have helped a lot: I've just finished listening to 'The Age of Innocence' (a novel I would probably never have got around to reading) on an Audible book, all done while cycling to and from work, or pounding the streets delivering election leaflets last month (much good that did). Even with their help though, there's still more content I want to consume than I can fit in to a day.
Despite me not being interested in Facebook and Twitter, in the last few weeks it's started to seem that I can't go anywhere on the web without being asked if I want to tweet about it or share it with Facebook. It feels like there's another layer being built over the web, one made up of the shared recommendations on social networking sites like Facebook, and maybe the time will come when newcomers to the web can be persuaded by the likes of Facebook to only access web pages via their site, in the same way that AOL and CompuServe tried with their home page portals.
Even Spotify, my beloved music streaming service, now invites me to share all my listening experiences. As if there might be someone out there who wants to know, in real time, which piece of music I've just listened to. Actually, I think I will start doing that, purely in the interest of research. I'll find out how long my few Twitter followers can stay interested in a stream of tweets directing them to pieces of music they've likely never heard of.
Or maybe I'll get some recommendations back.
Twitter and I have a similar relationship. As someone who's supposed to be tech-savvy, I felt I ought to open a Twitter account, but I quickly got fed up with having to repeatedly check for new messages (when I tried feeding them into Goggle Reader, I got someone else's messages instead--something to do with Google Reader not being set up to do logins). I do not share my user name, and have never tweeted. Despite this, I do get followers, though not for very long. None of them are names I recognise, and they all seem to be following hundreds of others without anyone reciprocating.
As someone who doesn't care to share the minutiae of his life with the world, the privacy issues of Facebook and others are less of a worry for me than the time it would take keeping up with all the messages they generate. I already have difficulty getting through all the blogs and podcasts I follow, as well as the music I want to listen to and the books I want to read, not to mention having a bit of a life away from the keyboard. Earphones and mobile devices have helped a lot: I've just finished listening to 'The Age of Innocence' (a novel I would probably never have got around to reading) on an Audible book, all done while cycling to and from work, or pounding the streets delivering election leaflets last month (much good that did). Even with their help though, there's still more content I want to consume than I can fit in to a day.
Despite me not being interested in Facebook and Twitter, in the last few weeks it's started to seem that I can't go anywhere on the web without being asked if I want to tweet about it or share it with Facebook. It feels like there's another layer being built over the web, one made up of the shared recommendations on social networking sites like Facebook, and maybe the time will come when newcomers to the web can be persuaded by the likes of Facebook to only access web pages via their site, in the same way that AOL and CompuServe tried with their home page portals.
Even Spotify, my beloved music streaming service, now invites me to share all my listening experiences. As if there might be someone out there who wants to know, in real time, which piece of music I've just listened to. Actually, I think I will start doing that, purely in the interest of research. I'll find out how long my few Twitter followers can stay interested in a stream of tweets directing them to pieces of music they've likely never heard of.
Or maybe I'll get some recommendations back.
Saturday, 8 May 2010
A Tangled Web
We were looking for the power adaptor for my son's mobile phone today. After searching all the obvious places, I reluctantly opened the drawer where anything remotely cable-like gets put to rest once we don't need it. It was a real mess.
This wasn't surprising: it usually is. But this time I decided to sort it all out, and chuck away anything that clearly would never get used again. It took nearly ten minutes to completely untangle the mass of wires, leads, and power cables. How does this happen? Logically, every time I add something to the drawer, it must end up sitting on top of everything else. So how do the leads tie themselves into knots? A mystery that may never be answered.
Anyway, now everything is separated, cables are folded and secured, and I'm deciding what to throw. My AKG wireless headphones, for a start. Plug the base station into my hi-fi, and I could enjoy listening to my CDs anywhere in the house or garden, with just the occasional crackle or hiss. And yet now superseded by so, so many different technologies. Trying hard not to remember how much they set me back 15 years ago. Still, I haven't used them for nearly a decade, and never will again, so out they go.
And why do I have four different sets of earphones squirrelled away (on top of the two sets I actually use)? Well, answered that: two leak sound, one sounds awful, and the fourth only works in one ear. Goodbye to the last two of those.
This illustrates another problem: my reluctance to get rid of something if it could conceivably be used again, even though it almost certainly never will.
One item is almost certainly an old fax cable from my last PC. I no longer fax, and my new PC doesn't have a modem anyway. Still, you never know. It can go back with all the USB and network cables that are so neatly wrapped, they clearly have never even been used at all.
And when did I ever need a cable with stereo connections at one end, and a microUSB connection at the other? I can only think it used to belong to the USB radio receiver I once owned. This would generate gigabyte-sized .wav files if I even tried to record a half hour radio show, and then became completely irrelevant once internet streaming radio caught on. The receiver's long gone, but the cable remains. Well, you never know.
There's our old battery recharger. Why did we buy another one to replace it? I can't remember, and I haven't got the time or inclination to experiment with it, so that one survives another day.
Finally, the sorting is over, the drawer is as tidy as I could wish for, and I'm left with a single power adaptor. Not, unfortunately, the one for my lad's mobile phone.
This wasn't surprising: it usually is. But this time I decided to sort it all out, and chuck away anything that clearly would never get used again. It took nearly ten minutes to completely untangle the mass of wires, leads, and power cables. How does this happen? Logically, every time I add something to the drawer, it must end up sitting on top of everything else. So how do the leads tie themselves into knots? A mystery that may never be answered.
Anyway, now everything is separated, cables are folded and secured, and I'm deciding what to throw. My AKG wireless headphones, for a start. Plug the base station into my hi-fi, and I could enjoy listening to my CDs anywhere in the house or garden, with just the occasional crackle or hiss. And yet now superseded by so, so many different technologies. Trying hard not to remember how much they set me back 15 years ago. Still, I haven't used them for nearly a decade, and never will again, so out they go.
And why do I have four different sets of earphones squirrelled away (on top of the two sets I actually use)? Well, answered that: two leak sound, one sounds awful, and the fourth only works in one ear. Goodbye to the last two of those.
This illustrates another problem: my reluctance to get rid of something if it could conceivably be used again, even though it almost certainly never will.
One item is almost certainly an old fax cable from my last PC. I no longer fax, and my new PC doesn't have a modem anyway. Still, you never know. It can go back with all the USB and network cables that are so neatly wrapped, they clearly have never even been used at all.
And when did I ever need a cable with stereo connections at one end, and a microUSB connection at the other? I can only think it used to belong to the USB radio receiver I once owned. This would generate gigabyte-sized .wav files if I even tried to record a half hour radio show, and then became completely irrelevant once internet streaming radio caught on. The receiver's long gone, but the cable remains. Well, you never know.
There's our old battery recharger. Why did we buy another one to replace it? I can't remember, and I haven't got the time or inclination to experiment with it, so that one survives another day.
Finally, the sorting is over, the drawer is as tidy as I could wish for, and I'm left with a single power adaptor. Not, unfortunately, the one for my lad's mobile phone.
Sunday, 11 April 2010
"Check Printer Cartridge"
I occasionally have a dream in which I suddenly remember some task I'm supposed to do, along with the realisation that I'd completely forgotten about it for a very long time. Usually it's revision for an exam I actually took 30 years or more ago. Shortly after my son was born, I dreamed I'd forgotten to feed him for nearly a month, and couldn't even recall where I'd left him. In a similar vein, I realised today that it's been nearly two months since I added to this blog.
In the search for inspiration, I need look no further than my HP PSC 1510 'all-in-one' colour printer, sat not 50cm away from this keyboard, which has smugly informed me that it needs some more colour ink. I'm just guessing at the smugness, of course, but it seems a reasonable guess, considering its behaviour since I installed a set of W H Smith own brand ink cartridges, faced with the high cost of the HP versions. Right from the start the printer kicked up a stink. It detected the alien inserts immediately, refused to even guess how much ink they still contained, and insisted from thence forward on printing a test page every time I switched it on.
I'm just speculating, but my guess is that they thought that this would make me think twice about buying non-HP cartridges the next time I ran out of ink (an event that was only hastened by all those unnecessary test pages that it produced). Well, that worked. Their victory is tempered though by my new found determination that my next printer won't be from Hewlett Packard.
And so now it's out of ink, and Amazon are quoting around £25 for a replacement set of cartridges. Plus, the printer's paper feed has always been temperamental, to the extent that it's only accepted a sheet at a time for the last several months. Plus, when I recently went to HP's web site and downloaded the latest driver for the 1510, the installer reported that, "A newer version of this software is already installed on your HP All-in-One series computer." (How'd that happen?) Plus, I can get a completely new printer for £70 or so.
Much as it pains me to replace a piece of kit that is mostly still working, the bizarre economics of printers means that I can actually do it for less than three times the cost of its consumables. If I pick the next printer looking at the cost of its inks rather than of the printer itself, it can even make economic sense to.
But now I come to the 'devil you know' situation. There are so many choices available--which to pick? And as Michael McIntyre pointed out, in this age of web reviews, no matter what you're thinking of buying, you can always find a bad review for it somewhere. So for now the printer will still sit on my desk, unable to print, while I weigh up the pros and cons of replacing its cartridges or relegating it to the loft, where it can sit next to a motley collection of other old printers and monitors that still work, but will almost certainly never do so again.
In the search for inspiration, I need look no further than my HP PSC 1510 'all-in-one' colour printer, sat not 50cm away from this keyboard, which has smugly informed me that it needs some more colour ink. I'm just guessing at the smugness, of course, but it seems a reasonable guess, considering its behaviour since I installed a set of W H Smith own brand ink cartridges, faced with the high cost of the HP versions. Right from the start the printer kicked up a stink. It detected the alien inserts immediately, refused to even guess how much ink they still contained, and insisted from thence forward on printing a test page every time I switched it on.
I'm just speculating, but my guess is that they thought that this would make me think twice about buying non-HP cartridges the next time I ran out of ink (an event that was only hastened by all those unnecessary test pages that it produced). Well, that worked. Their victory is tempered though by my new found determination that my next printer won't be from Hewlett Packard.
And so now it's out of ink, and Amazon are quoting around £25 for a replacement set of cartridges. Plus, the printer's paper feed has always been temperamental, to the extent that it's only accepted a sheet at a time for the last several months. Plus, when I recently went to HP's web site and downloaded the latest driver for the 1510, the installer reported that, "A newer version of this software is already installed on your HP All-in-One series computer." (How'd that happen?) Plus, I can get a completely new printer for £70 or so.
Much as it pains me to replace a piece of kit that is mostly still working, the bizarre economics of printers means that I can actually do it for less than three times the cost of its consumables. If I pick the next printer looking at the cost of its inks rather than of the printer itself, it can even make economic sense to.
But now I come to the 'devil you know' situation. There are so many choices available--which to pick? And as Michael McIntyre pointed out, in this age of web reviews, no matter what you're thinking of buying, you can always find a bad review for it somewhere. So for now the printer will still sit on my desk, unable to print, while I weigh up the pros and cons of replacing its cartridges or relegating it to the loft, where it can sit next to a motley collection of other old printers and monitors that still work, but will almost certainly never do so again.
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