Weekend

Going to Nottingham fell through. You may recall that Liz's Mum and Partner were going to meet my Mum and Dad for the first time this weekend, except we got woken up at 1:30am on Saturday morning. My parents had just got out of the hospital in Leeds to which my Grandma had been rushed following a heart attack.

Saturday morning She underwent a number of emergency procedures which ultimately led to her suffering from internal bleeding. She was placed on a ventilator on 100% oxygen and her vital signs continued to fall, so the doctor explained to the family that there was nothing more that current medical science could do to save her and that she was going to die. The only question was how quickly.

If she had been kept on life support she would have lived up to another 3 weeks - at the most. He explained that, in his opinion, it made the most sense to simply "remove active care" by which he meant reducing the oxygen level to 40% - about the same content as normal air. That way she would only survive as long as her body was able to sustain itself. She died about an hour after they turned the oxygen level down.

It may take some time to organise the funeral as the hospital has to get a second opinion as to whether she is dead or not, then she will need to go to the undertaker's. With this weekend being bank-holiday weekend it's unlikely they will be able to book the funeral until after that. I will, of course, be going to Leeds for the funeral which will be held somewhere near where she lived. She will be cremated and her ashes will be buried near my Grandad's tree (under which his ashes were buried) - as was her wish.

It's very surreal as she was always very well. Or at least, not ill. She always had some minor ailment or another such as sore feet and aches and pains. She had many problems with her toes and used to take every pill imaginable, but she didn't have cancer or any indications that she was likely to have heart problems in the near future. She was fully compus mentus, although her memory did occasionally fail her (but at age 82 I hope my memory is as good as hers was). Most old people die after a long bout of illness, she merely went from being fit and well to being dead, no warnings.

The last time I spoke to her was a few weeks ago when I was trying to get hold of my Dad, who had gone to visit her. I rang her house but he had already left to go home as snow had been forecast. I had a 10 or 15 minute chat with her during which she asked for my home number. The next time my Dad visited she told him all about my call and she seemed very pleased I'd taken the time to talk, and she even told him she'd got my number and written it in her phone-book (which is more than my parents have done). The night she had the heart attack my parents were able to find this number to ring me and tell me what had happened.

The last person to speak to her was my sister who rang her on Thursday to tell her that my Dad would be visiting on the Saturday - the Saturday on which she died. My Grandma told her to ask him to buy her a paper, and that was that. Suffice to say she never received the paper.

A few weeks ago she confided in my Dad that she had two wishes before she died:

1. See my Sister ride her horse that she is breaking in,

2. Go to my and Liz's wedding.

She didn't manage either.

What Not To Watch

Ladies in Lavender -- 'nuff said.

How Not To Get To Work

I was forced to drive through Reading this morning thanks to a sign on the M4 saying "M4 J10 closed", and no hint of an alternative route. I left at J12, followed the A4 until the signs for the A4 mysteriously vanished. Then I followed signs for the A329(M) only to find I was on the A329 heading towards Wokingham/Bracknell (ie the way I didn't want to go, and on the wrong road too). I turned around, found the A4 again, except it was one-way and heading towards Newbury and there were no signs to the other half of the road going into Reading. After following some weird one-way route I eventually emerged onto the A4 towards Reading and then found a sign for the A329(M) again. I sat in traffic for ages then saw a sign for Sutton's Business Park, which is near where I work. So I followed that, found a roundabout I knew and was able to get to work about half an hour later than I'd have liked to. When I got into work I was completely pissed off, and then I was told what I already suspected:

J10 on the M4 was open and flowing smoothly. *FUME*

PS2

Liz bought me a slim-line Playstation 2, and 3 games for our (late) Valentine's Day :-D I'm rather liking GTA 3, Vice City and I expect to get into Tekken 5 in the near future too :)

On Saturday we did a 6 mile walk, and then about 16 or 17 miles on Sunday in preperation for the Moonwalk in May. Over 20 miles of walking in a weekend is quite impressive in my opinion. It was a good opportunity for me to put my new hiking shoes to the test and they did a very good job, my feet weren't torn to shreds like the last long walk we did where my trainers fell apart halfway through the hike.

Next weekend we'll be doing a 10 mile walk just to keep us ticking over as we will be going to Nottingham for the second installment of the oh-so-much-fun show of "My parents meet your parents". Ie Liz's Mum and partner will be meeting my Mum and Dad. I thought the last one went relatively well, although my Mum embarrassed the hell out of me by getting hammered, so I asked Liz to apologise to her Dad for me and he went off on a rant about my behaviour!

What did I do? I arranged for a good friend of mine who I've not seen in over a year to join us in Loughborough for a drink. Her Dad said "that's no way to treat people who've driven so far to see you" -- we'd driven just as far as they had! Plus we'd actually got there at the agreed arrival time where as they left their house at the agreed arrival time. Also I didn't buy Liz's Dad and his wife a drink while I was at the bar (I'd only stood there for 10 minutes waiting for them to decide) and had bought 3 of us a drink and a plate of chips and was on my way back to the table by the time they'd decided. Plus my parents didn't pay for some drinks which ended up on their room tab at the B&B, which is entirely my fault of course.

Let's just hope this weekend goes better. God knows I was a nervous wreck before and after the last one, and I got sod all sleep all weekend.

A Bloody Good Film

If you've not seen Oldboy then I suggest you go and rent it. It's in Korean with English sub-titles but don't let that stop you. Generally I find Asian language films hard to watch, but I had no problems with this one. It's a very entertaining film, and very well filmed and directed, but I'll warn you now: It raises questions you might be uncomfortable with.

I'm off sick today because I spent all of yesterday feeling sick, having sudden bouts of severe stomach pain, aching muscles, headaches and diziness. I'm feeling a lot better today but I want to make sure I'm completely better before I go back to work.

Bomb Scare

We just had a bomb scare at work. Someone left a large holdall in the showers on the floor on which I work. We were all evacuated into the carpark and then one of the security team asked if anyone had left the holdall in the shower, describing its size and location etc. Nobody owned up, so we were all told to move to the furtherst corner of the carpark, away from the building. As someone pointed out, though, the holdall in question was big enough that - given it was a bomb - it could have taken out the entire Thames Valley Drive Industrial Estate ... so moving to the far side of the carpark was a slightly futile exercise.

For about ten minutes we stood there in the rain waiting for the bomb disposal squad to arrive from somewhere over in Wiltshire (40 minutes away) or possibly from London (also about 40 minutes away) and then, without so much as an explanation, we were told we could go back in again. My guess is somebody owned up to the bag.

The moral of the story is: don't leave unattended luggage in a somewhat twitchy Ministry of Defence building.

The Passion Of The Christ

We watched this the other day as it was being sold fercheep in Tescos. My general thoughts were that it's a good film, but hard to watch. It's obvious why they tagged it as an 18, it's rather gruesome in places. Also I felt it ended at the most interesting part of the story. It should have focussed more on the resurrection rather than the death. Ultimately it's not a bad film, but don't watch it while eating your tea or if you're of a sensitive disposition.

I spent most of Sunday putting up a flat-pack bookcase from Argos. The muppets at the shop only gave us half of it so we had to go back to get the rest of it, and then when I built it the instructions were the most incredibly poorly written pile of rubbish I've ever seen. When I'd finally got it all sorted out it turned out that the holes for the runners for the drawers in the bottom of it had been drilled wrong, and so the drawers didn't close ... so I ended up mesuring it up and drilling them myself. Bloody ridiculous.

Yesterday I was running around like a headless chicken trying to get stuff sorted out at work, even having to go to Bracknell at one point. Some of the people I work with are totally incompetent which cost me a lot of time doing their jobs for them, but I managed to fix one major problem and found what was causing another other major problem. Today I've managed to finish everything that was in my work queue, so I'm feeling good. Now I've just got to wait for some more stuff to get on with.

Search Mars

Google Mars - how fucking cool is that?! :D You can even see Beagle II on there. If only this had been available when they first lost it ;)

Blue Frog Anti-Spam

I stumbled across this the other day. It's a novel idea although I'm not entirely sure of its efficacy. It relies, on the whole, on spammers setting up real accounts on real ISPs and using them to spam the world. However from what I understand, the majority of spam is sent from compromised/zombied Windows machines on cable Internet connections, and you can't really trace the spammer that way.

I've been trying it for the last few days. I've registered 4 of my email addresses with them and have been monitoring my spam. Here are the general results:

My Yahoo address: Normally receives about 10 spams a day. I've been averaging 4 since registering.

Forwarded mail from my domain name: One particular account is particularly prone to receiving spam as it used to be available on the web. Just before I installed blue frog I was averaging about 20 spams a day on this account. It seems to be closer to about 5 now. Thankfully I've stopped receiving those damned "Charity/non-profit website" emails.

My Hotmail Account: Hard to say how much I normally get on this account as I've not used it for actual email in about 5 years. At the moment I'm not receiving ANY spam on this account.

My main Gmail account: Normally about 3 or 4 emails a day. No real difference since installing Blue Frog.

I rather like the way it works, it's very simple and just does its job without asking pointless questions. My only dislike is that when viewing a protected webmail account it shows a little Blue Frog box which I can't turn off. Sometimes it can get in the way and I have to move it ... but that's not really too much of a problem.

The way I see it, this would be very useful for someone whose account has become over-run with spam, but possibly isn't worth the effort for someone whose account only receives one or two spams. Obviously, normal spam-protection measures should be kept in place as this is by no means a perfect solution, and I doubt there ever will be.

VBScript: What A Wonderful Language

I wrote this script earlier to test a few ideas:

For those of you not familiar with VBScript, the "option explicit" command specifies that all variables must be explicitly declared. That is, you cannot print the contents of a variable that has not been declared correctly and within scope. The above code, however, runs without error and displays "3". I see two ways in which this ought to fail:

1. When the script is ran, when the compiler is making its initial checks to ensure that syntax looks correct and everything is declared correctly, the compiler should bomb out with an appropriate error about "i" not having been declared on line 3... because it hasn't; I'm using it without declaring it.

2. At run-time, on executing line 2, a run-time error should occur when the line "i = 3" is evaluated. The VBScript engine should detect that I am attempting to assign the value 3 to the variable i, which hasn't been declared elsewhere...

Yet more proof that VBScript is a toy language.

MS' Documentation

What a joke:

...so which is it? Does it return a value or not? Seeing as they can't even be arsed to list whether the "method" is a sub or a function I have absolutely no idea whether this is the method I'm looking for.