1st. Morning cloudy and pleasantly cool. Cleared later to blue sky and sunshine. Some of the pea pods are now quite fat. My sister rang and we had a good chat. My niece has had her first riding lesson and my nephew has had a go at quad-biking, which sounds very exciting. I was never offered the chance to do anything that interesting when I was a kid.
Computing – 1970 style
As a child I wasn't really enthusiastic about anything (except reading) until I learnt Fortran in the sixth form and started writing computer programs. We had to do it all on punched cards in those days. We had a card punch at school and once a week someone would lug two heavy boxes of cards over to Imperial College to have them fed into the IBM 7094. That had 32K words of magnetic core memory ("core store"), each word being 36 bits; so that works out to 0.14 megabyte of memory in modern terminology. Not much, eh?
Tribbles
Watched the classic Star Trek episode "The Trouble with Tribbles". It's a very funny story about fluffy little creatures which breed so prolifically that they threaten to engulf the Enterprise. I haven't seen this episode for many years, but I did see the fun Deep Space Nine story "Trials and Tribble-ations" in which clever video editing allowed the DS9 crew to travel back in time and mix with Kirk's crew in this adventure.
Search engine ranking
I really don't like seeing sites with ridiculously long page titles. Take Bravenet for example: the page title is "Bravenet.com Webmaster Resources Website Tools Free Guestbooks Forums Hit Counters Greeting Cards". Come on, that's not a title; that's an advertisement. But I understand why so many sites do it: search engines give a higher ranking to a page which has the search term in its title than to a similar page which only has the search term in its text.
In May I spent some time modifying my pages to improve their ranking, especially for ME-related searches. At that time I had not logged a single hit resulting from a search for an ME-related term. With some reluctance I extended my short, sensible page titles, putting in "ME CFS CFIDS". I also added as keywords some common misspellings of "myalgic encephalomyelitis". (It's easy to misspell!) Looking at my counter log [unfortunately Bravenet withdrew this service in July 2003] I see that in the last six weeks I've had three hits resulting from ME-related searches, including one from a misspelling ("myalagic"). One a fortnight is not a lot, but it's better than none.
Overall I'm logging a hit every 1.5 days on average, nearly all of them from people who are interested in Kai Lung. Rather ironic, considering that the Kai Lung page was an afterthought. Really must put some more Kai Lung content on the site. I feel that the people who come here for that are not getting very much for their trouble at the moment. I'm hoping to put "The Story of Sing Tsung and the Exponent of Dark Magic" on line. That should be well worth coming for, as most Kai Lung fans will not have had the opportunity to read it before.
ME name change
As expected, the ME Association has decided to change its name from the Myalgic Encephalomyelitis Association to The Myalgic Encephalopathy Association. I don't know what the significance of the capital T is, but the change from Encephalomyelitis to Encephalopathy is one that has long been mooted. "Myelitis" in this context refers to inflammation of the insulating sheaths which surround the nerves, and there has never been any real evidence of that in ME. I must say the word "encephalopathy" makes me think of a terminal degenerative brain disease like BSE. I suppose the phrase will become familiar in time. I've changed "encephalomyelitis" to "encephalopathy" on my web pages.
13th. Overcast with intermittent fine drizzle. The hills behind the town are completely hidden in low cloud.
Mystery phone call
The phone rang this afternoon and when I answered it a woman's voice said:
"Is that Mr. Taylor?"
"Yes," I said.
"I'm calling on behalf of WWM," she went on. "About a year ago you filled in a survey and you have been awarded a holiday in a prize draw. So congratulations! I just need to check a few details; is that all right?"
I said, "Ok."
Then she said, "It's stated that you're married or living with a partner...?"
"No," I said in some puzzlement—whereupon she hung up without another word.
I wonder what that was all about. I certainly haven't filled in any survey. Perhaps it was someone trying to get personal information from me to assess whether I was worth burgling. Or perhaps the phone call was the survey and they only wanted to interview married people. One thing's for sure: saying "You've won a prize; I just need to check a few details" would be a most effective way of getting people to divulge information about themselves.
[I've since had a number of similar calls—different voices, same script. One of my carers has also been targeted, and she was asked how much income she received.]
Scanning text
Scanned "The Story of Sing Tsung and the Exponent of Dark Magic" into the computer. It's the first time I've made use of the scanner's optical character recognition software. It had some difficulty with the punctuation, frequently reading double quotes as a full stop and an apostrophe. However as far as words and names go, its accuracy was impressive. It made only two mistakes, misreading "Hia" as "Ria" (in several places) and "a trophy" as "atrophy".
Reading printed text used to be the province of a few specialized machines like the Kurtzweil Data Entry Machine (KDEM). It was too difficult a task for an ordinary mainframe computer—and even KDEM required the help of a human operator while learning a document's typeface. That such accuracy can now be achieved with software running on an ordinary PC is a telling indication of the progress that has been made.
Pain-relieving device
I've seen a couple of ads recently for the eX-Pain TSE, a device which relieves pain by sending electrical pulses to the spinal cord. I thought it might help to control my headaches. It really would make a big difference to my life if I could stop these headaches. From the ads it seemed that I would need to wear the device all the time that I needed pain relief. My headaches sometimes last all day and I wasn't keen on the idea of going around with electrodes on my neck all day. I mean, Frankenstein's Creature had electrodes on his neck, and look where it got him—Hammer horror films. Still I thought it was worth checking out so I went to the manufacturer's website to find out more. The information there indicated that 30 minutes of treatment might produce several hours of pain relief, so I ordered the device on 28-day trial.
For the next three weeks I used the device whenever I had a headache. It did seem to reduce the headaches very slightly, but the effect was so marginal that I didn't feel it was worth the bother of sticking the electrodes on my neck and having to replace them and the battery every couple of weeks. I sent the device back at the end of the trial period.
Another hopeful idea bites the dust.
Cartoon
I've been reminded of this cartoon (from Perspectives, Spring 1992) which I rather like.
No responsibility is accepted for any personal expansion which may result from following this advice.
Doing a Hagrid
This afternoon I made a pot of tea, waited for it to brew, started to pour it...and found that it was just hot water. I'd forgotten to put a teabag in. It really annoys me when I do that. I call it "doing a Hagrid" after the incident in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, chapter 14 ("Cornelius Fudge").
Last month: It was driving me Knuts!
Next month: harrypotter.co.uk
Spider
Found a spider in the marmalade jar this morning. It must have got in at breakfast time yesterday without my noticing. It was dancing up and down trying frantically to get out. Well, who wouldn't after 24 hours with nothing to eat but grapefruit marmalade? I took it to the window and tipped it out, then threw the rest of the grapefruit marmalade away. I didn't like it anyway.
New police strategy
There was an report on the news that one police force has decided to arrest all the criminals in its area. They say they want to get all the criminals off the streets. That sounds like a good idea to me, but what I don't understand is, what were they doing before? Wagging their fingers at the criminals and saying "Don't do that"? It sounds like something out of The Simpsons...
"Hey, boys," says Police Chief Wiggum, "I've just had an idea. Why don't we go and arrest all the criminals? That way there'll be less crime and then we won't have to spend so much time filling out crime report forms."
"Great idea, Chief! But where are we going to put them when we've arrested them?"
"Well, you know those funny little rooms at the back of the station—the ones with the bars? I figured maybe we could put them in there."
"But, Chief, then we'd have to find somewhere else to put the orang utan, the polar bear and the giraffe."
"Oh, yeah," says Wiggum. "Never thought of that."
Plums
My parents are getting loads of fruit from their plum trees. They've been bringing fresh plums, stewed plums and plum jam for me to eat and more fresh plums for me to give to my carer.
29th. Uploaded The Story of Sing Tsung and the Exponent of Dark Magic. I'm pleased with its appearance. I hope my visitors will enjoy reading it.
Seagulls
Saw a herring gull scavenging on the other side of the car park. Seagulls often fly overhead but they don't usually land in the Court. A few minutes later the adult bird was joined by a juvenile, the same size but with grey, rough-looking plumage.
Powerade
Tesco quite often give me an extra item or two free when they deliver the shopping that I order over the Internet. Sometimes these are free samples, sometimes it seems to be accidental. Last week however was exceptional. I got a copy of the Times, a large container of Smash and four bottles of Powerade. Powerade hasn't been sold in the UK before and Coca-Cola, who make it, are trying to promote it here. In this week's delivery there are another two bottles of Powerade. I don't even like the stuff. What on earth am I going to do with it all?
Vermiculite
Bought some Vermiculite (an inorganic substance used as a soil conditioner) and covered the soil in my flower box with it. I heard on the radio that it's 90% effective in keeping slugs away. It moves slightly as it absorbs moisture and the slugs allegedly don't like walking on something that's moving. It doesn't sound a very convincing theory to me, but we'll see what happens.
Computer problems
31st. Both the serial and the parallel port on my computer have suddenly stopped working. As the computer is an old laptop and its hardware limitations have been causing me problems, I think it's time to buy a desktop computer. I'll have to use floppy disks to transfer my files across: without the parallel port I can't use the Zip drive.
Until I get the new computer, no Internet access. Thank goodness my website is in a consistent state. I would hate this to have happened while I was in the middle of updating the site, leaving it in a mess and with no way of putting it right.
Oh no! I've lost the built-in floppy drive as well! I've got no output device left except the screen. Urk!!