A clip of aerobatics being performed just over my backyard fence.
Friday 27 March 2009
Wednesday 4 March 2009
Gidday! How's it going?
Gidday! How is it going here? Things could be better!. Camille's mother is living next door to us in her own home. She has been diagnosed with cancer and is now basically bedridden. She requires a lot of care and we are the main caregivers or perhaps more correctly, Camille is the main caregiver. It takes a shitload of her time which isn't great for her work. However, this has to be done and is being done. We all thought The Mother was going to die a few weeks ago but she has rallied since then and appears to be getting stronger. Typical of her really.
Camille is holding up well though is naturally quite stressed by all of it. Her physical health seems good though.
I'm on anti-inflammetries at the moment having tripped while going upstairs and punched my left hand into the banister. Result was a hugely swollen hand. An osteopath friend thinks that I probably gave myself a minor fracture in the knuckle. Pains all up the forearm and an inability to lift things with my left arm are getting in the way a bit. It's getting better though. I also went to see my doctor about it but he was away and I ended up talking to a short, American doctor about the joys of being able to touch type and how it was tragic that it wasn't a required subject in schools these days given the importance of the keyboard.
How do I get into these conversations? Oh, that's right. I initiate them. Yes, I am a geek.
My brother, Spike, isn't in a good way. He was in the Cuba Street Carnival in Wgtn a couple of weeks ago and decided to leap over a barrier and did so. Unfortunately he landed on a curb and rolled his foot 90 degrees. A very badly broken ankle. He then leaped back over the barrier because he decided, "I can't stay here". 12 hours in the hospital A&E. 28 hours waiting for an operation in which he had plates, pins and wires inserted to hold the shattered remains together. Our sister brought him up here this weekend. He gets a bit tetchy from time to time which is understandable when you realise the pain he must be experiencing. He is being ultra careful with the pain medication because he is scared shitless (and rightly so) of getting addicted to them.
On a brighter note, I now have a weather station. This may not sound like much but it is a big thing to me. Camille bought it for my birthday. She admits to having trepidations about it and she now thinks they are coming to fruit. She complains about the heat and humidity and I tell her its only 25.4 degrees with 67 percent humidity and that the humidity was over 90 percent earlier in the day so she should be feeling a sense of relief. This doesn't go down well. Neither does informing her that it isn't that windy when the average windspeed is only 3.2kmh although we did have one gust of 18.2kmh. I can't wait for winter so I can tell her how cold it is - or more probably how it isn't that cold.
I have had a happy time building a mount for it and putting it on top of the garage and then running wires to the temperature gauge which is under the eaves of the side of the garage. This is a major for me as I am mechanically declined and I put the thing together with part of an old aerial stand and some bits of plywood and a bit of 4 by 2. As I said to Camille at the time (via e-mail as she was away), "I got to use my drill, wire cutters, hammer, level, screwdriver, socket wrench and crescent spanner so I'm feeling particularly manly at the moment.".
The base station for it reads the results wirelessly every 2 minutes. However, that isn't good enough for me so I have made a very long cable (between 30 and 40 metres) and have run it from the gauge back to the house and up to the third floor and along the wall to the far end of the house where all my servers are. The base station is attached to our main server and a small program reads the data every 8 seconds and stores it in a database. Next I need to write a program to extract the data from the database, organise it and display it on the internet. There are a number of programs available that do this sort of thing but I want to do my own. Fuck knows why as I have enough to do as is. Still it will be fun writing it
Is there such a thing as being too much of a geek? If so, I think I'm probably past that point.
Update: Spike says, "The weather! I'm also impressed that you've managed to turn it into a tool to annoy Camille. That takes a rare talent ;-)".
Camille is holding up well though is naturally quite stressed by all of it. Her physical health seems good though.
I'm on anti-inflammetries at the moment having tripped while going upstairs and punched my left hand into the banister. Result was a hugely swollen hand. An osteopath friend thinks that I probably gave myself a minor fracture in the knuckle. Pains all up the forearm and an inability to lift things with my left arm are getting in the way a bit. It's getting better though. I also went to see my doctor about it but he was away and I ended up talking to a short, American doctor about the joys of being able to touch type and how it was tragic that it wasn't a required subject in schools these days given the importance of the keyboard.
How do I get into these conversations? Oh, that's right. I initiate them. Yes, I am a geek.
My brother, Spike, isn't in a good way. He was in the Cuba Street Carnival in Wgtn a couple of weeks ago and decided to leap over a barrier and did so. Unfortunately he landed on a curb and rolled his foot 90 degrees. A very badly broken ankle. He then leaped back over the barrier because he decided, "I can't stay here". 12 hours in the hospital A&E. 28 hours waiting for an operation in which he had plates, pins and wires inserted to hold the shattered remains together. Our sister brought him up here this weekend. He gets a bit tetchy from time to time which is understandable when you realise the pain he must be experiencing. He is being ultra careful with the pain medication because he is scared shitless (and rightly so) of getting addicted to them.
On a brighter note, I now have a weather station. This may not sound like much but it is a big thing to me. Camille bought it for my birthday. She admits to having trepidations about it and she now thinks they are coming to fruit. She complains about the heat and humidity and I tell her its only 25.4 degrees with 67 percent humidity and that the humidity was over 90 percent earlier in the day so she should be feeling a sense of relief. This doesn't go down well. Neither does informing her that it isn't that windy when the average windspeed is only 3.2kmh although we did have one gust of 18.2kmh. I can't wait for winter so I can tell her how cold it is - or more probably how it isn't that cold.
I have had a happy time building a mount for it and putting it on top of the garage and then running wires to the temperature gauge which is under the eaves of the side of the garage. This is a major for me as I am mechanically declined and I put the thing together with part of an old aerial stand and some bits of plywood and a bit of 4 by 2. As I said to Camille at the time (via e-mail as she was away), "I got to use my drill, wire cutters, hammer, level, screwdriver, socket wrench and crescent spanner so I'm feeling particularly manly at the moment.".
The base station for it reads the results wirelessly every 2 minutes. However, that isn't good enough for me so I have made a very long cable (between 30 and 40 metres) and have run it from the gauge back to the house and up to the third floor and along the wall to the far end of the house where all my servers are. The base station is attached to our main server and a small program reads the data every 8 seconds and stores it in a database. Next I need to write a program to extract the data from the database, organise it and display it on the internet. There are a number of programs available that do this sort of thing but I want to do my own. Fuck knows why as I have enough to do as is. Still it will be fun writing it
Is there such a thing as being too much of a geek? If so, I think I'm probably past that point.
Update: Spike says, "The weather! I'm also impressed that you've managed to turn it into a tool to annoy Camille. That takes a rare talent ;-)".
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