Abi

03:11 pm: And just as I had feared, I have Really Bad migraine today, which is not being budged by painkillers. Shouldn't even be looking at screen now, really.

I started taking some nutritional supplements about at the start of March. I wonder if it's them. The internet has lots of people with anecdotes about them causing migraines/headaches. I think I'm going to stop them.

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09:57 pm: Kapow!
As I mentioned in the last post, I went to Kapow! at the weekend, at the Islington Business Centre. I enjoyed it - people were quite friendly and chatty, there was lots of indie and small press stuff to buy. I went to just a couple of panels - the Cup O' Joe and AvX panel, which overlapped a fair bit.

Got various comics signed by various people (Cornell, Quesada, Granov, Quitely, Gillen, Ross, Weston). Had brief chat with Jonathan Ross where I thanked him for (eventually) apologising for his stupid joke earlier in the year - what he said in response makes me believe he really does get why it upset people so, and why those complaints deserved to be taken seriously.

The most exciting bit, though, was me getting a sketch by Chris Weston (of Dynamic Man from The Twelve) - the first I've had done at a con. I have framed it and should put it on my wall.

MCM Expo is this weekend. It'd be mad to go to that, as well, wouldn't it? Hmm.

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09:22 pm: I've been on the amitriptyline for a fortnight now. Since I've started I managed a full (short) work week of the 8th-11th, was really migrainey the 12th/13th, and then the next week was incapacitated on the Wednesday and worked from home on the Thursday. This weekend was really good - I managed to go to the Kapow! Comic Convention both days, and it was the first non-migrainey weekend I'd had in quite a while.

I am a bit nervous about tomorrow, as it's a Wednesday, and there seems to be something about Wednesdays lately that's setting them off.

I was supposed to be increasing the dosage from 10mg/day to 20mg/day now, but I've decided to delay this for the moment, as I'm finding the drowsiness in the morning side effect quite problematic.

On other fronts - I have tried a little bit to improve my environment at work, but it's quite tricky. I have invested in some noise-cancelling headphones, which show quite how insanely noisy the office is, and I've been listening to familiar music a bit, which is helping a little. I have failed to get my eyes tested. I really should do this. Perhaps this weekend, although this weekend will be busy, what with my lodger moving in on Thursday. (Oh, I didn't mention that, did I? I am renting out the spare room! I have lived alone now for over five years, so it might take some getting used to...)

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05:57 pm: defining 'redefining'
I've heard from some equal marriage opponents that they are opposed to "redefining" marriage. What does that mean, exactly? Redefining the word? I'm sorry, that's not how language works. Parliament or whatever doesn't get to change the meaning of the English language word "marriage". That has already changed, by the mere fact of lots of us having talked about the concept of equal marriage, without a single jurisdiction needing to have changed its law to recognise such status.

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10:58 pm: The Epping Ongar Railway (that is, the heritage railway that operates on what used to be the Central Line east of Epping), re-opens the weekend after next (26th/27th May). There will be steam trains and stuff. Anyone want to join me? I'm tempted to try for the first weekend, but the second weekend (2nd-5th June) might be more sane.

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09:02 pm: local government pedantry
Hi.

Your article at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-18004439

asserts that "Parish councils were abolished in 1963 after the London County Council was replaced with the Greater London Council", and furthermore that "The power for London boroughs to establish parish councils was re-established by a 2007 law."

This is incorrect. There were no parish councils in London in 1963 (which should read 1965, anyway, as that's when the Act came into force), either in the old County of London (which had not had them since 1900), or in the other areas which joined with it to form Greater London. As far as I can make out the last parish councils in what is now Greater London survived until 1934 in Hendon Rural District, which became the parish council-less Harrow Urban District.

The second sentence is also wrong, in that it implies that there have ever been parish councils in London boroughs. There simply hasn't.

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01:16 pm: migraine clinic
The Migraine Clinic was useful. They've gone through triggers and told me some stuff I didn't realise before. In particular, I hadn't realised lie-ins are a common trigger. I am now going to try getting up when I wake up, damn the clock, and see what that does. I have also decided to try sleeping in the (darker) spare room, see if that helps with regularity of sleep.

I apparently should not have been on the paramax in the first place, at least not 4 daily. It is more commonly used for an attack, not as a preventative. Instead for that I am to take amitriptyline. For attacks I am going to take domperidone with ibuprofen. Apparently the anti-emetic component of this actually helps absorbtion of the painkiller part due to its effects on the stomach - that's why ibuprofen usually doesn't work for me, because it just isn't getting absorbed.

He asked whether I'd had a head scan done - I was able to show him the results of the MRI I'd had done in September. He definitely thinks I should push to see a neurologist based on that.

I should change GPs. But I also need to get a script for the amitriptyline (I had a private prescription for 28 days). So I think I'll make one last appointment at the existing one to get that, and then find one in Leyton/Leytonstone to register with (any recommendations?)

I am now back at the office for the first time since I get sent home on Wednesday.

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10:48 am: So, there's a managerial elite of board members and chief officers that controls all the publicly quoted companies in the UK. We're told that they are so good at managing, that they are worth what would be otherwise ludicrous sums. If they weren't being paid $BIGNUMBER or if they had to pay very slightly more in tax, they may as well not bother getting out of bed.

This may seem disingenuous on their part. But let's take it at face value. They have been paid enough previously to now be independently wealthy. None of them ever needs to work again, at a practical level. So, they can take it or leave it. In that case, wasn't it a massive mistake to pay such people - whose talent is such that the country would be screwed without them - enough money that they could quit after a year, in the first place? Shouldn't they have been kept at wage-slave levels to induce them to work, like everyone else?

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07:17 pm: I worked from home today, for I think the first time since I started. I avoided triggering the background headache into something worse, and was in fact really productive - got lots of stuff done.

Spent the morning setting up my build environment and the VPN while tidying up a patch I'd been working on for several days, and then spent the afternoon investigating various bugs. Going to try go in to the office tomorrow for our Sprint Review.

Meanwhile, the London Migraine Clinic called me back today, and I'm going to see them Tuesday morning.

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07:44 pm: another horrifying thought is
Back when I first saw the neurologists ten years ago, they thought that I was getting medication overuse headaches (aka rebound headaches). Back then I was only taking the painkillers because of the headaches. Nowadays I'm also taking them to deal with joint pain. What if I have to choose between medicating the joint pain and not provoking the headaches?

Of course, thinking this is not helpful for my stress levels. Which are also a contributory factor.

Why can't I turn my stupid brain off?

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07:13 pm: migraine watch
I got sent home from work due to migraine again. Off my food and felt nauseous at lunch. I restarted paramax a couple of weeks ago, which contains the anti-emetic metoclopramide. I've been trying to take this four times a day, but I've sometimes missed it on account of really needing codeine instead and not wanting to take too much paracetamol. (And in any case, it has über-drowsy reaction with codeine).

But I am not sure it is helping anyway. And I was getting akathisia a couple of weeks ago when I had to be sent home the first time, and I appear to be getting drowsiness symptoms. Perhaps I should stop it now and then go back to spot use migraleve, perhaps I should persist properly and try to stop the codeine entirely?

Work have tried to reassure me, and there's some talk of just sending me to a neurologist. I'm sick to worry with it, still. But I've now done what I should have done years ago and self-referred to the City of London Migraine Clinic

I've not sorted my glasses out yet. I might try doing that at weekend if I feel up to it. If not, then soon. I have ordered a thermostatic valve of the sort that I believe ought to fit on my bedroom radiators - it may arrive tomorrow and I will try installing it.

I have people coming round soon. I hopefully am going to be OK with light company and TV watching. I had planned to cook, but I don't think that's likely now.

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12:26 pm: the Spectrum and me
The ZX Spectrum was launched 30 years ago today. I was not even three, so I don't remember exactly, but we had one by 1983, and it was the best £125 that my parents have ever spent. This was a hefty amount of money to them at the time (by RPI it's £375 in today's money), but they saw that it was the future, and found it. I am profoundly grateful to them.

So, I was dabbling with programming from a very early age. Somewhere, perhaps, there is still a programme listing I wrote out in longhand with very wonky childlike letters testifying that I could programme before I could write. And there was a fair bit of playing games, too. Some of my earliest memories are related to the Spectrum. When we sent it away to get upgraded to 48KiB, and the shop lost it and we got a brand new one. Happily playing in the garden while counting in binary (ugh, can you believe I used to say zero-one-ten-eleven-hundred? I am cured of that now). Playing Atic Atac, which has probably led to my life-long fear of mushrooms. Watching TV coverage of the 128 KiB and being upset that it wouldn't have a joystick. Being really upset when Amstrad bought out Sinclair. (I hated Alan Sugar 20 years before it was fashionable). Helping my father with his football orrery. Learning about machine code and trying to hand-assemble bits of code despite being 9.

I never did anything big on the Spectrum itself - we moved on to the SAM Coupé when I was 11 (that being an attempt to provide an upgrade path for the Spectrum), and my juvenilia is largely for that, in the native BASIC with the odd routine in Z80 assembler. Later we got a PC and I started writing VB and then when I started sixth form college Turbo Pascal. Maybe some of those things would have happened without the Spectrum. But such early exposure had a profound influence on me and how I think.

Can kids today get that experience and come to grok computers? I am a bit worried that this was only possible in a short window. The Raspberry Pi is all very good as a learning platform, but I think it was the excitement at the roll-out of computing, and the future possibilities, that was the real reason so many of us got so into it, rather than the kit itself. That can't be recreated artificially, can it?

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06:52 pm: So, there was an article going around about the possibility for 3D printing to make easy-synthesis kits for various chemicals - they have in mind pharmaceuticals and detergents. The printer can even be coaxed to spit out the feedstock itself. This will probably happen, although I don't know about their timeframe. The New Scientist article on the topic notes the applicability to illegal drugs. I quote:

Potential health dangers from allowing people to print their own legal or illegal drugs would be minimised, says [Lee] Cronin [of the University of Glasgow], as his team would only write software for specific end products that would be difficult to modify into making other reactions. "We would have pre-evaluated the reactions in the lab so no one would be allowed to hack."

Yes. Really.

Any attempt at stopping this is utterly doomed. The moment you put the general-purpose hardware in millions of people's houses, you lose control of the ability to restrict what they do with it. Sorry. It will get hacked, and it will be no more possible to stop them from printing illegal drugs than it will to stop a computer playing a pirated movie.

And if you think the attack and attempt to roll-back general-purpose computing from the entertainment industry is savage enough, then just you wait until the War-on-Drugs lot decide that general purpose computing hardware that can be used to drive a fab is drugs synthesis equipment. Ouch.

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01:48 pm: If someone [I believe an actual person, rather than a spammer, apparently a child] has signed up for an online social networking account and mistyped their email address, so that I am recieving emails for it, what can I do about this to tell them please not to, while still staying on the right side of ethics and law?

On a technical level, I could probably use the reset password link to take over the account, but I'd have grave doubts about doing that and I have no idea what their actual email address is to change to it, so I'm not sure whether that would be any use anyhow.

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11:26 am: creepy but handy
It's London. The distant future. The year 2012.

Some friends gather at a house to play D&D. Two of them are catching a taxi there for the first time, and don't know the way, so they find out where their host is at the moment on Google Latitude, and use the "get directions" feature so they can tell the driver where to go. Their hostess knows they are nearby and hears car doors opening. She opens the door to see them looking around trying to see where the door number is.

Shortly afterwards, the hostess is bemoaning that she ran out of codeine. They use the internet to find a nearby Sunday-opening pharmacy, and make plans to send someone out to get some. Then they check the location of people again, and notice that another friend, who is on the way, is at a junction right outside the chemist, probably waiting for a bus. A phone call is made, and codeine is acquired, with no more than say 5 minutes delay to that person's arrival.

(If you want to add me I'm abigailb@gmail.com)

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05:39 pm: EasterCon

• Enjoyed the program.
  
• Managed to get a really nasty migraine on Friday evening. This was probably partly because of travelling Friday morning and then not eating properly before going to panels. Attending a panel in Room 41 (really hot and sticky room) also didn't help.
  
• Bit socially weird. Really did not know very many people there, and the people I did were generally flitting between things and being busy. People I didn't know all seemed busy talking to people I also didn't know. This led to not an entirely positive social experience. Thankfully, squirmelia, hazyjayne and damerell were around for much of it, which kept me sane.
  
• Despite this, I've signed up for EightSquaredCon.
  

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07:20 pm: Today's Google Maps fail
Google Maps has decided to randomly rename lots of railway stations in London after nearby bus stops. We also have a bonus triplication of the caption for New Cross station!



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05:59 pm: The proposed new law [...] would extend those requirements to social networking sites

Er, including internet forums? Including the MUD?

I look forward to seeing them try.

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04:57 pm: Those crazy bastards
They appear to have totally updated Cryosphere to version 2.6, more than six years in the making. It doesn't yet have the web interface that I wrote 2 years ago installed on it. But this will happen.

This is quite weird.

Writing new MUDs was a perfectly reasonable habit when we started in the late 1990s. MUDs are tailor-made for bored students to write (none of this stuff with needing artwork, we were perfectly capable of writing adequate prose and good code) and perfect for them to play, being low-bandwidth. It had become a bit more eccentric in the early 2000s, when we did the big scenario rewrite and world-building. But there was a certain community out there. Now? Well, it's basically retrogaming, isn't it? Except not the fashionable sort. No 16-colour sprites for us, you see. As we hurtle through our 30s, Cryosphere is still there. Our hosting has gone from an account at CSLib to now a server somewhere in Germany that none of us have ever seen, and which we share with ElvenMUD. The same people log in from day to day, and for whatever reason use it to coordinate social activities with each other. There doesn't seem likely to ever be a mass inrush of players, even if one day we finish the world and the trading aspect of the game. It's reached a steady state.

We're having a 15th anniversary party in the autumn. In 2015 it will have existed for half my life. Will it still be there in 2022? Will our children and grand-children maintain it as a curiosity?

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06:13 pm: This is... wrong tool
Found out about this read-your-credit-report service called Noddle, which looks quite interesting. Had a go with it. It asks me for my previous addresses during the last 5 years.

Unfortunately, it makes you enter the postcode for these and look them up in the Postcode Address File. The Postcode Address File contains data about all the valid postal addresses in the UK at the moment. It is regularly revised (perhaps not often enough) with new developments. And when stuff gets demolished, it will get deleted from the dataset.

My last-but-one-flat was so demolished. It doesn't exist in the PAF any more. Neither, as far as I can make out, does the entire postcode or anything at that street number. And so when I come to the field to enter my address in 2007-2009, the system simply won't let me.

I pointed this out to them on twitter, and they apologised, but seem to have missed the point a bit. They say

we use it [the Postcode Address File] in order to ensure that addresses entered are current and valid.

But they're asking for historic data, not current data! This isn't the first time I've seen websites make this mistake. Most of you won't have come across this problem, as demolition of residential accommodation is fairly rare, so it doesn't look like there'll be mass consumer pressure to get them to fix it. But if you care about systems being correct, this might annoy you anyway.

There's another post brewing about the misuse of postcode areas as if they were some kind of useful geographic system, but that's another matter.

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