Ugh (by alaric)

Well, I survived the long bank-holiday weekend on very little sleep, but I started to become so tired I kept dozing off in chairs...

Then on Monday I began to feel the beginnings of my immune system getting busy with something; shivering cold even when wrapped in duvets, no appetite, endless thirst, coughing, aching, and so on.

I seem to be over it, but I'm still rather weak and I seem to be needing an awful lot of sleep!

Eyes (by alaric)

As I've mentioned before, I have a lazy eye.

To recap, this is because I have really bad vision in my left eye - I'm astigmatic - and have been that way since I was born, so my brain didn't properly develop to use the blurry vision that eye gave; it just focussed on my right eye. Having very different vision in each eye is called Anisometropia; when this causes a lazy eye, it's known as refractive amblyopia.

Anyway, we are of course concerned that my eye badness might be a genetic trait, so we want Jean checked for it so that if she is also anisometropic she can be treated and not develop amblyopia.

So we raised this concern with the health visitor, and she arranged an appointment with the orthoptic screening clinic. A letter duly arrived telling us to attend the "orthoptic service filter screening clinic" at Stroud general hospital this morning.

Sarah and Jean (with Sarah's father driving) set off this morning, only to find that Stroud General Hospital has an orthoptic filter screening clinic every third Friday of the month - last Friday - but their database knows nothing of Jean anyway.

Bah.

This makes me inordinately sad. I'm a bit prone to rolling in self-pity about my eye - I know it's only a minor thing, I can see and drive and stuff, but for whatever reason I'm easily upset about it. And I'd hate hate hate to think that I might pass it on to Jean.

However, while researching it for Jean, I come across:

To quote Dr. Leonard J. Press, FAAO, FCOVD: "It's been proven that a motivated adult with strabismus and/or amblyopia who works diligently at vision therapy can obtain meaningful improvement in visual function. As my patients are fond of saying: "I'm not looking for perfection; I'm looking for you to help me make it better". It's important that eye doctors don't make sweeping value judgments for patients. Rather than saying "nothing can be done", the proper advice would be: "You won't have as much improvement as you would have had at a younger age; but I'll refer you to a vision specialist who can help you if you're motivated."

Every amblyopic patient deserves an attempt at treatment.

Treatment of Amblyopia

And:

Anisometropic amblyopia: is the patient ever too old to treat?

I've spent years having opticians take one look in my left eye, shake their head sadly, and tell me nothing can be done. 🙁

Anyway... enough wallowing. We need to find out how to get Jean tested, that attempt having failed! Prevention is better than cure.

Integrated Life Management (by alaric)

I used to keep a todo list in OmniOutliner, with the help of an AppleScript that sucked up completed tasks into monthly archives, so I could easily tally the Time Spent column to generate invoices/timesheets for hourly-rate work.

However, then one client set up their own task management and timesheeting app, so suddenly I had to juggle their system for that client's tasks, and my own system for tasks relating to other clients, my internal projects, and personal tasks. Without one integrated list, it was then hard to produce a single prioritised list of what I should do next.

However, there was trouble even before then; lots of little requests to do work come in by email. I either do them there and then, reply with a reason why not (such as asking for more details), forward the message to delegate it - or flag it as a todo and come back to it later. However, those flagged todos tend to get lost amongst the drifts of spam and old emails. I really wanted a button in my mail client to turn an email message into a todo item. Most ideally, I'd want a RT instance, to manage correspondance relating to a task. But again, that would not be integrated with my todo system.

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Liquid Explosives (by alaric)

Here's an interesting technical analysis of all this talk of taking explosives on board planes in liquid form.

http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200608/msg00087.html

Where it really gets interesting, though, is towards the bottom. The author argues that stopping people from taking nail scissors and liquids on board planes is pretty stupid, since a clued-up terrorist could still hide plane-destroying materials in any metal object (sintered iron and aluminium = thermite, basically indetectable until it becomes a fireball), hide bombs in their body cavities, form hard plastic explosives into the shape of any object, convert a soft drinks can into a knife with just a couple of minute's work, etc.

The techniques developed by prisoners to improvise weapons from what they have to hand, or to smuggle and hide drugs, should give us some inspiration of what an organised terrorist group should be able to manage.

So should we give up and cower in fear? No. The fact that the terrorists aren't managing to make planes fall out of the sky can probably be put down to one of a few possibilities.

1. There just aren't enough people willing to die for their cause; motivating intelligent people to be suicide bombers is hard
2. Real security is provided by proper police work - identifying terrorists and tracing their networks to identify all the people involved in a plot, then arresting them - and that's working. Causing all this disruption at the airports in the name of security is pointless; once somebody's decided to down a plane, if they managed to recruit suicide bombers and get the materials and get them to the airport, the opportunity to actually stop them has already passed.

I'd like to see more money spent on actual policing - and less trivially-avoided, expensive, unpleasant, liberty-destroying measures like mass surveillance, laws against cryptography, and airport/train station/port screening. Sure, have an impressive-looking police presence at the airport to deter the weak-willed would-be bomber, but please, don't strip search me and make me spend an eight hour flight without my laptop.

A weekend away (by sarah)

Ok this post has been hanging around to long now - I will endevour to sort phots out later - this is going live like it or not!

Two weekends ago now lots of fun stuff happened which never got blogged about due to the 'jinx' stuff so I thought I'd best catch up on writting about it 🙂

First off there was Thursday, after the business stuff was done and sealed in London, we went to Charlee's perants house to meet up with her and Andy as me and Jean hadnt made it into zone one due to the heat! This was a very pleasant evening were I got given a wonderful purple top with sparkly beads and got to take photos of more cats! Plus I was impressed with the techno garden set up 🙂

Jean really loved it 🙂

Friday was the Front Wire Summer party in Guilford - so off me and Al went to that, it was another nice day with the added bonus of the trapoline!

I found some strange statues in the garden called Paul, Al and Seth!

I was very happy at this party surrounded by geeks doing sport!

Saturday saw us in Romford market buying stupid quantities of bombay mix! as we havent found anywhere that even comes near the fruit and nut stall. We also bought all the prizes for the village feast tomboler whilst we were at it. Then off into London again to meet up with people - a loo stop at Ikea which closes at midnight! resulted in me getting the alien rainbow knives, forks and spoons I saw at the beginning of the pregnancy and wanted to wean Jean with 🙂 I still cant imagine who would desperatly need furniture at 11 at night though?!

Sunday saw my Dad's thing at Rainham Methodist church were Jean made some friends! Followed by a flyby visit to more friends and a charity tea and cake session. (sorry this is probably boring to anyone whos not family). Then of course we picked Mini up and had a lovely everning with Earl and Rime - they have a great roof space where you can see loads of London with funky pigeons and pipes everywhere 🙂