My Dad’s Total Knee Replacement

Posted on by
1
Dressings on a total knee replacement

I’ve just been to hospital to visit my dad who had a total knee replacement on Friday. Despite being an NHS patient he got a choice of hospitals and was able to choose a private one which only has 14 rooms. It’s quite a nice place for a hospital really.

Before my dad is allowed out he has to complete a series of tasks of increasing difficulty, ranging from being able to bend his fancy new knee to going up a set of stairs. We went for a limp around the corridors and his leg didn’t fall off so it seems that with constant gentle exercise it’ll start to work properly; at the moment he complains it’s very stiff and uncomfortable – but not painful, unlike the remains of the knee they removed.

Bruising and tape marks around the site of an epidural

He was telling me about the operation. At the start you get made to sit on the edge of the bed with your knees bent up while an epidural is stuck into you. The sensation of this was described as being like hot water flowing down both legs… After this they rolled him onto the bed and stuck the desired leg up into the air. The strange part is that my dad didn’t know this was going on until he saw his leg in the air – supposedly your brain remembers the position of all your limbs, so when the epidural took effect the last position of his leg was all he could sense. This might be like the phantom limb sensation felt by people with amputated limbs.

Once he’s out and has the dressing off I’ll try to get another photo, there’s a rather interesting line of staples down his knee that I’ll ask him to photograph. He did ask to keep the bits of knee joint they removed, but it seems there’s certain rules about disposing of body parts so they didn’t let him.

Where has my Egg VISA card gone?

Posted on by
1

Ages ago I signed up for an Egg.com VISA card for a trip to the US. Since then I’ve used it for various random things before signing up for a Natwest VISA and pretty much ignoring the Egg one. At one point I reduced its credit limit to £300 (the lowest it would go) and put it in a box for safe keeping.

I tried to cancel it yesterday, only to discover Barclaycard now appear to have bought Egg’s VISA card system and that I now need to do all my dealings with them. Fair enough, a letter or something might have been nice, but whatever.

Tried to visit Barclaycard’s website to see what’s going on and it seems I should have received a new Barclaycard because my Egg one is now invalid. Well no, I didn’t.

Do you know how impossible it is to get anywhere with Barclaycard’s customer service system if you don’t have one of their cards? The immensely patronising automated phone system explains three times to me about typing in my “long number from the front of the card” or pressing ’1′ to open an account.

Eventually their system gave up and put me through to a moderately helpful human who was completely unable to find me on their system. Seems I have no account with Egg and no account with Barclaycard.

… then he put me on hold and the line went dead … Oh well, I was bored anyway (have you noticed how when this happens they never call you back? And you never get given any form of ID to contact the same human you had last time?).

If I suffer mind-crushing boredom next week I’ll root around amongst my stuff to see if I can find an Egg card and see if the “long number off the front that starts with 4263″ (I know what a credit card number looks like, I’m not a moron!) is magic enough to work on them.

If not, I guess an admin cockup has worked in my favour! That’d majorly suck if this was my proper VISA card I actually used though.

Nobber stole my bike!

Posted on by
Reply
If I find you, you'll wake up in the river attached to a shopping trolley.

A person pushing my bike down the street after stealing it

Seriously… at 3:55 this morning a male human of indeterminate race, of average height managed to steal two bikes and a lawnmower (the whole lot being chained together in an attempt at stopping this… which worked once before when some other tit broke into our shed).

If you’re curious here is a pair of youtube videos I captured from my CCTV camera. This first one shows the thief happily strolling into our front gate and going around the side. The side where the back gate isn’t which is interesting to know… And this second video shows him pushing our bikes off down the road.

If you want reasonably cheap and not-too-bad CCTV cameras, go on eBay and find ‘dbPower’ PTZ IP cameras. Then make a Linux box work and use ZoneMinder to record images from it. There will be a blog post shortly explaining how to set them up together once a second one has been posted to me.

Building my own computer … from components

Posted on by
Reply

A Fignition computer

Yesterday I told you a little story about how I got my first computer. Thing is, this wasn’t a random chance event where my parents bought me a computer because it might be “educational”; they didn’t even buy it to help me with my homework.

No, you see before computers I was somewhat obsessed with electricity and wires. I was one of those kids who, if left alone with an electronic item would be found half an hour later with the thing in bits. Not just “let’s take the lid off and have a look inside it” but I used to do teardowns on everything just for fun. Well, not everything… I wasn’t daft enough to go poking inside TVs or wall sockets.  I knew what mains electricity was so anything that had a plug didn’t get touched. If it ran on batteries and had screw holes? It was fair game.

What mystified my parents was that I’d put the stuff back together and it’d still work. 80s technology was great, there was so much stuff inside your average boombox. All these little metal things with legs that books told me were called ‘integrated circuits’ and other things called ‘resistors’.

I remember proudly telling my parents that one day I’d make them a computer. I didn’t own one (yet) and had never taken one to bits. I must have been exposed to their general existence though since I did manage to construct one at four years old. I mean, it had a few basic limitations like being made from cardboard and wood but it had wire inside it and a few random circuit boards I’d removed from some unwilling ex-stereo.

Well, on Christmas Day in between playing on my Beeb and digesting copious amounts of food I spent a fun hour or so putting together my own computer – from components, with a soldering iron. The computer is called a Fignition and is a computer kit designed with the same idea as the first 8bit micros – it’s simple enough that one person can understand the technical workings of it. Six year olds can grasp the concept of programming and what ‘RAM’ and a ‘CPU’ do. They can even cope with assembler if it’s reasonably simple. They can’t quite cope with multi-core CPUs, GPU shaders and interfacing things to a PCI-Express slot which is probably why modern computers don’t include manuals that have full schematic diagrams in them.

The Fignition contains an Atmel AVR as its CPU, has proper composite video output, a tiny keyboard to enter code, runs Forth as its OS/programming language and while you can use AVRDude to flash the microcontroller it includes its own 8Kb of RAM and 384KB of storage so you really can sit in front of a TV with just the Fignition and tap away writing software. It’s not something that requires a host PC to make it useful – in fact the only reason to plug it into a computer is to update the firmware. Upstairs on our bookshelf are loads of 80s programming books  full of simple type-in programs. I might convert some of the more interesting ones to Forth and type them into the Fignition.

Christmas 1985 all over again

Posted on by
Reply

In the 80s calculating your biorhythms was what computers did

Sometime one Christmas in the mid 80s I remember stopping over at my grandma’s with my parents. Christmas morning arrived and I was lead downstairs to the dining room where a spare telly had been set up.

Under the telly was an Acorn Electron, its tape unit, some tapes and its manual. And it was all mine :) It was my first, actual real computer and I spent many hours sat in front of it typing in BASIC listings and loading things off tape.

Occasionally I got to go to work with my dad who worked in a school’s supplies company. One of his tactics to entertain me was to sit me in front of some computer they had there. It was a weird computer made by the BBC and all I really paid any attention to was that it had a painting program and a light pen… and that it was somehow similar to my Acorn Electron but had more holes in the back of it which naturally made it better.

Since there was no such thing as the Internet back then (at least not for someone who was about six years old who had yet to learn what a ‘modem’ did) my sole source of information came from books borrowed out the library. The books were great, but they all had one major failing as far as I was concerned – they were all to do with this BBC computer and not my Electron. So I could read all about how to control a robot arm or a toy trainset, and even type the programs in and run them but since the bottom of my Electron didn’t contain a ‘User Port’ or a ‘Tube Port’ I couldn’t do anything.Political Correctness hadn't been invented back then either!

Back in the 80s it was quite fine and normal to allow your kids to mess around plugging stuff into their computers. I remember reading one book that gave me code and a simple diagram to control household lighting from the BBC. It didn’t contain six pages of disclaimers either, instead it merely warned me that mains electricity can kill and that getting an adult to check the wiring before turning it on was a good idea.

Fast forward to this Christmas and I discover some unusually heavy and oddly shaped presents under the tree. I now have a BBC Model B micro, a selection of floppies (that are older than the person who gave them to me) and a 40 track, single sided 100K floppy drive that sounds like reading disks takes serious effort. I already had the Amstrad monitor, and it conveniently plugs into the BBC’s monitor socket. Had I been given this setup when I was five or so I think I might have exploded :)