Tag Archives: Thoughts

Car Accident

I finally got some good news about my car accident from 2020 (https://wordpress.com/post/blenderfox.com/7610)

After just over 3.5 years, the other side’s insurance (Aviva) finally settled and the costs have been recovered. And I expect it was quite a lot of cost too. As mentioned in https://wordpress.com/post/blenderfox.com/8108:

Total costs the other side will have to foot:
Value of my car (written off): £3000
Value of the car next to me (written off): £2500
Value of the car that both our cars got shunted into (written off): £1500
Repair of the damaged car (sole survivor): £1500
Hire car (45 days @ £75 per day): £3375

Total Costs: £11875

And this is not including the other side’s own car, which was likely also written off.

I’m just glad it’s over now

Writing Prompt: Is there an age or year of your life you would re-live?

Daily writing prompt
Is there an age or year of your life you would re-live?

18th. When I could start drinking. Never got totally sloshed, but being able to drink made me feel like an adult (naive, I know)

Covid

So last week, my boss and I had a one-to-one review going over things that had happened since the last review. Generally OK, but he was definitely not sounding right.

Turned out that he had picked up covid, and since I was both sitting next to him and had a face-to-face meeting with him, I decided to test myself, but gave it a day before doing so to make sure if I did have symptoms they would have enough time to manifest properly.

I was clear and tested negative.

However my boss was bedridden for about two days before he started answering some of his slack messages.

Now, over the weekend, his bad luck got even worse, and we found out his dad passed away. So not only is he recovering from Covid, he now has to deal with the end-of-life stuff for his dad.

There’s an expression in Chinese which literally translates to “misfortune doesn’t come alone”

Wishing him a speedy recovery and I’m sorry for his loss.

Updates

It’s been quite a long time since I did any updates on this blog so a couple of updates are in order

House

I’ve now been living in the new place for just over a year. Generally everything is good, we’ve started putting in a lawn and currently letting it get its roots in before we try to cut it

Twitter

Oh, boy, what an absolute train wreck. I’ve tolerated Elon’s presence at Twitter because most of the stuff he did wasn’t far off what Jack was doing prior. But cutting off all third party clients, forcing everyone onto the new TweetDeck (which likely will be paywalled too) has literally driven users away. Twitter has been losing users and revenue constantly, and it is totally unsurprising.

I’ve disabled my two TweetDeck profiles (a professional one, and a casual one) from Ferdium. But I doubt I will be going back any time soon.

Red Hat

Another train wreck of a situation. Red Hat’s decision to first kill CentOS’s stability, then for RHEL sources to only be accessible behind a subscription has pissed of a lot of users, even if it’s not strictly speaking against license.

The only one left in its sights will be Fedora so that leads me onto the next update

Manjaro & Archlinux

I’ve been tinkering with Manjaro more and more lately, with its rolling release schedule meaning I never need to upgrade from a major version to another major version.

It’s downside I’m finding is that some packages, especially those in the AUR are essentially “compile from source” packages which does the build on your machine during the install. This can take a varying amount of time depending on the code. With my RSS reader of choice: QuiteRSS, this build takes a mind numbing 2.5 hours to do, even on a high spec machine.

That’s where I found out about setting up your own Arch repo. I’ve been tinkering with that, setting it up on GCP and fronted by a CDN. This works pretty well, but I still need to find how I can do scheduled builds to keep that up to date, but it looks like I’ll be switching to Manjaro at some point in the near future. Sound works fine, using lyncolnmd‘s work.

Another downside with Manjaro, however is that its btrfs filesystem, my home directory backup, and CloneZilla don’t seem to want to work well together

WordPress & Domains

One final update, I will likely be transferring out the blenderfox.com domain out of WordPress, while I had this registered as part of the blog, I’m finding it much harder to maintain this domain using WordPress’s very limited DNS management tools. I will likely transfer it out to Google Domains, even though there’s talk of them shuttering that service. Secondary service would be AWS.

Speeding

Well, it was going to happen at some point in my life, but I ended up getting a speeding ticket after registering an average speed over 5mph above the speed limit for an average speed zone.

Instead of points, I’ve been offered a driver education course, which I of course am going to have to take. I opted for the classroom rather than virtual.

Not how I wanted to spend my Saturday morning, but I can combine it with some shopping.

Operation Update

Time for a final update on the operation.

The stitches they put in my mouth have finally dissolved just over two weeks after the operation. All I have now is a small white patch in my mouth where the lump was with white lines across it where the stitches used to be.

Operation

Today, I went to hospital to be operated on — something I haven’t had done for over 35 years.

The operation was, quote, “An excisional biopsy” of a lump in my mouth – a lump I have been carry for several years.

The lump has been growing very slowly and I am now biting it more frequently than before, causing a lot of pain.

My dentist referred me into the Maxillofacial department of my local hospital.

I visited there last week to get a preliminary examination. The doctors there agreed it could be removed and scheduled me into a biopsy today.

I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was a bit nervous. Nonetheless, the doctors helped reassure me and the operation started. They offered me a pair of sunglasses to go over my own glasses as the light from the operating theatre’s light is very bright. I chose to use them.

Settling in, the process started with three anaesthetic injections. I felt the first two and they didn’t feel bad. The third one hurt, and the fourth one was tolerable.

Couple of minutes later, the doctor poked around inside the mouth to check if the anaesthetic had taken effect (I didn’t feel anything). They started stuffing gauze in my mouth, and it felt a bit like one of those prisoner scenes in the movies when they did that.

The nurse kept my lip open while the doctor operated on it. I felt nothing at all. This was so weird, I could see them doing stuff, but they were out of my field of vision and I had no idea what was going on down there.

I started to see blood on the gauze. LOTS of it. They swapped out gauze a few times and then I started seeing small thin wafts of smoke coming from there. However, still no pain.

The doctor then started stitching me up. They used 3 stitches and still felt nothing.

I asked for a mirror at the end of the operation to see how bad it was. I had a puffy upper lip on one side and normal on the other. Expected though.

The doctor ran through some after care instructions. I’m supposed to be on a soft diet for 3 days, no hot food or drink for 24 hours, no smoking, vaping or alcohol for at least 3 days, no strenuous exercise for 3 days, no spitting or rinsing the mouth for 24 hours, salt water rinse after meals from 24 hours onwards, and painkiller use when needed to help reduce pain and swelling.

It’s been around 5 hours since the operation and I’m feeling rumblings of pain. Not intense, but I suspect the anaesthetic might be beginning to wear off.

Boiler

Just got my boiler fixed after three days without reliable hot water.

We had two engineers in over two days, and a total of 4 hours where neither could figure out the problem. Then we called in the manufacturer’s engineer (Vaillant)

The outlet sensor was faulty and was registering a temperature of 999 deg C. The boiler kept flaring up then tripping the safety cutoff as a result.

5 minutes, and one replacement part later and everything was fixed.

Stages of Grief

I started this post over a year ago, then abandoned it and though perhaps its high time I actually finished it.

You may recall I lost my uncle to cancer in October 2017 and felt I should write down the phases of dealing with the death

Stage 0 — Normality

This is the normal day-to-day life no indication of any problems in the future

Stage 1 — Terminal

This is where you or your loved one is diagnosed with an illness that cannot (normally) be recovered from.

Stage 2 — Death & Disbelief

Immediately after death, this starts. You run through a period of “this can’t be happening”, “this has got to be a dream” and keep wanting to wake up from the nightmare, even though it isn’t one.

Stage 3 — Guilt & Denial

After you’ve gotten past the “this can’t be happening”, you get to “this isn’t happening” — you don’t want to believe this is true and refuse to believe this is true. Also, you start second-guessing yourself thinking “did I do everything I could to save them?” “could I have done something differently?” “could they still be alive had I picked up on that symptom just a day earlier?”

This stage lasts the longest, and to some, the guilt consumes their lives

Stage 4 — Acceptance

The hardest stage to reach is acceptance. You accept the death and move on. Some keep a piece of the loved one with them — a piece of jewellery, a photo, a locket, a favourite song — something that lets them remember them going forward or when they want the feeling of warm, loving memories.

Where am I on this list? Stage 4. I have photos of my uncle in Google Photos I can look back on whenever I want to remember him. I have pictures of him playing with my cousin’s children; I have fond memories of playing poker with him (and me losing :-) ); I have memories of having drinks with him — he was an alchoholic, but really was loose when drinking. I remember that I also didn’t know him as well as I thought I did. His drinking buddy took the pedestal at his funeral and told about how he donated food from his KFC-style shop to people at the pub.

I really did not know my uncle as well as I thought I did.

This one’s for you, Uncle.

Snow

It finally snowed today. And as usual, gritters were not out in time.

The roads turned into slushy, slippery dangerous skidways, but there were no accidents fortunately.

I had to head into Chinatown to pickup my contact lenses from the opticians. While waiting for the bus, two cars got stuck trying to climb the hill (it’s a notorious hill that has caused problems in the past during snowy, icy conditions, even the police got stuck the last time it snowed heavily)

Since the cars were now blocking the road going up, I decided to go and take a different route to Chinatown, and went via the Northern Line instead of the Piccadilly Line like I was originally planning.

The pavements were slushy and there was not even any sign of gritting. The station pavements were gritted, but presumably by the station staff, and not the council.

Even while coming home and trying to climb the hill to my house, my shoes were not gripping well, and had to take small steps to make sure I wouldn’t fall.

Dangerously incompetent, that’s what my local council are.