Asus Eee PC 1000 HE

It’s become something of a time honoured tradition on this blog that when I get a new piece of computer hardware, whether it be an iPod, a laptop or a mobile ph0ne, one of the first things I do with it is write a blog post using it. I have to say, of all the times I’ve done this, today is definitely the easiest, on account of the magnificent hardware I’m using.

As many of you will know, I love my iPod, and I’m sufficiently fast at typing on it to make blogging a reasonable possibility, even if it couldn’t be described as “ideal”. The device I’m typing on at the moment, however, is in a completely different league.

That’s right, it’s a netbook.

But not just any netbook. You see, I did my research this time and actually read some reviews, beforedeciding on the model I wanted to buy. Thanks to the recession killing off expensive price tags on consumer electronics, it’s actually the highest rated netbook I’ve been able to find; the Asus EeePC 1000HE.

Those of you who are tech savvy will know that the first ever netbook to appear - the catalyst that sparked off mini-laptop mania – was the original Asus Eee PC. It was so good that it convinced manufacturers and consumers alike that there was a future in ultra-portable computers. Since then, Asus have been back to the drawing board several times, eventually coming up with the gorgeous bit of kit on which I now type to you dear reader.

They really have pulled out all the stops on this model, with a faster processor than before, an easy to use keyboard and (best of all) a 9.5 hour battery life. No, I’m not even joking. Nine and a half hours on one battery.

I won’t bother you with the technical spec, as I know many of you tend to tune out when that happens. Instead I’ll be restrained and just tell you what an amazing machine it is.

It’s a really amazing machine.

There you go. What, you want to know more? Ok, fair enough. The machine runs Windows XP, which, despite its age, remains the best operating system currently on the market. It’s also the only one that will run on this machine, since Vista is so hardware greedy that I’d have to pay an awful lot of money for a machine that’d run that mess of code smoothly. The hard drive is 160Gb, which is the same as the Windows drive on my desktop computer, and plenty adequate enough for what I need, and the…oh sod it!

Look, if you want the technical spec then you can find it here: http://eeepc.asus.com/global/product1000he-spec.html

If, on the other hand, you are asking what everyone I’ve shown it to has asked, ie “Apart from being small, what is it about this laptop that makes it half the price of a standard laptop?” then I shall tell you: it doesn’t have an optical disc drive.

That’s it.

No, seriously, that’s the only thing it’s lacking. Ok, ok, the hardware is slightly slower than you’d expect to find in a normal laptop, but so what? If it was using Vista it’d be a problem, but on XP it flies!

I think the thing that will make or break this machine for most people is whether it meets their needs or not. So, is this machine right for you? Well, if you are looking for a fully functional main computer that you can keep all your files on, watch DVDs, play the latest games and sync your iPod with then no. Granted, it’ll do all of those things apart from the DVD playing, but there are much better machines on the market you can use.

If, on the other hand, you already have a workhorse machine to do all of those things but are looking for a portable computer that isn’t going to run out of battery, break your back or disappoint you with a lack of ports, then absolutely this is the best machine you can get, and, at around £300 from Amazon, you’d be silly not to!

A Lazy Cat - Just Like Me

I am two people, not one.

I guess we all are, really. Not in a split personality way, although some people are. Just in a variable mood sort of way. I doubt I’m really that different from most people, and I don’t pretend to be so, so please don’t think otherwise of me. I know we all have different moods at different moments, but some people seem to do a better job of controlling their moods than others, and I’m not really sure how it is they do it.

The two people within me are quite distinct. They have different views and opinions, different hopes, ideas and plans. They are interested in different things, do different things, behave differently and, ultimately have different futures. The trouble is, I don’t really know which one is the Real me.

Person A is the Mark I’d like to be. He is motivated and enthusiastic. He loves life and loves learning. He has a powerful imagination and constantly dreams of the life he can achieve if he puts the effort in. He wants to succeed; wants to do whatever it takes to be the best. To make it to the top.

He’s the Mark who once wanted to be a lawyer. Now he can’t decide between becoming an IT professional and trying to be the best in the industry, going into management and working his arse off to become a chief exec in some large, global company or starting up his own business, where he’s already the boss, and if he works hard he can make a success of it.

Mark A respects himself and is respected by others. He wants to save up for a yacht and learn to sail. He wants to work out in the gym until he’s fit enough to enjoy exercising. He wants a big house, plenty of surplus income and lots of foreign holidays. He’s a success story; a product of all the best things that life in Britain has to offer. He’s a winner.

Person B is not the Mark I want to be, not by a long shot. The first thing to know about Mark B is that he’s lazy. I don’t just mean a little lazy, he’s digustingly so. He combines a particular mixture of laziness and procrastination that allows him to pass hour after hour whilst doing very little and wastes all the time he could be enjoying himself.

Mark B suffers from a deep set dislike of putting an effort into tasks. He shrinks away from companies whose job adverts say they are seeking “highly motivated types”. Mark B isn’t highly motivated at all. He has no motivation to do anything. His main focus is on achieving instant gratification and he’ll always seek out short term pleasure at the expense of long term gain.

This Mark has very little ambition in life. It’s not that he doesn’t wish to be rich or have everything he desires – far from it. It’s simply that he doesn’t want to have to do anything to get it, and as such he has no life ambition. Given the choice, he’d choose a deadend job with no responsibility, no matter how dull it is and how long it goes on for. Learning is not something Mark B takes much interest in. He is quite happy to have knowledge in his head, so long as he doesn’t have to put it there himself.

If this sounds dull and teenage-angsty then I apologise. I’m not a teenager and I’m not trying to whine, I merely wish to explore an issue that is bugging me, in the hope of embarking on a little self discovery in these words.

The problem is that I really, honestly do not know which Mark is the real one. Yea, I’d like it to be Mark A – who wouldn’t? I’d love to be a winner, I genuinely would. Or, at least I think I would. Surely if I do as much as I say I’d just do it, right?  But Mark B is here too, stealing my energy and drive. When he comes along (which he does at some point almost every day), it’s like I’m a car, speeding along, and then someone puts the brakes on. Try as I might I’m suddenly having the momentum forced out of me and I can’t fight against it.

I think in many ways it comes down to energy. Whilst I have plenty of mental and physical energy, things are good. On Saturday afternoon I was Mark A, and I sat in Starbucks, drinking coffee, blogging away and loving every minute of it. On Sunday though I woke up with Mark B, and although I tried to fight on and get stuff done, I eventually went to bed with a mess of a flat, a pile of washing up and not a single shirt ironed. In fact, the only task I completed the whole day was to wash my car, which took barely 10 minutes. What a waste of time!

I know everyone has their off days. I’m not claiming to be anything special in that regard. I know everyone needs their chill out time, so that they can relax and recover, but that’s not what I’m talking about. At the moment I’m having so many off days, it’s stopping me progressing in life. People say to me “Mark, you’re an intelligent guy, but you’re so lazy. Think what you could be achieving if you just worked hard!” and they are completely right of course.

I’m writing about this here because I’m curious to know if anyone else suffers or has suffered from the same problem, and how they’ve solved it. I can’t believe that it simply isn’t possible for people like me to consistently find the drive to succeed.

I’m  just not ready to be Mark B.

BBC Political Editor Nick Robinson

Back in March I casually mentioned that, because of the economic crisis, Nick Robinson had been replaced by Robert Peston as the BBC blogger of choice on the BBC News Front Page. Well, Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m sure none of you can have failed to notice that Nick is back with a vengeance!

You see, he clearly reads my blog, and as soon as he read my observation, he set out on his daring plan to ensure that the Beeb would put him back where he belongs. Now, obviously it would be reckless of me to suggest that it was Nick Robinson who leaked the MPs’ expenses to the Daily Telegraph, and indeed it would raise the question of why he didn’t break the news himself (not to mention the fact that he’d probably threaten legal action unless I revoked the claim), but if anyone has done well out if this crisis it is he.

Actually, with the exception of Labour itself, it’s hard to find anyone who’s done badly out of the ongoing meltdown in the Cabinet. Thanks to my new job, I now have the option of not only checking the news headlines on my lunch break, but also of listening to the radio in the car and in the office if no one else is around, and the last few weeks have been somewhere between comedy and fantasy every time the news reader starts to speak. You might call me sadistic, but I’m enjoying watching the Government tearing itself apart more than I’ve enjoyed anything in the public domain for a long time.

Those normally prim and proper figures of state, who like to bore us at every opportunity with dull arguments  about dry policy have descended into what can only be described as the thinking man’s Big Brother. Indeed, with the 24 hour rolling news footage, the interviews, the name calling and the unnecessary racism (thank you BNP), the only obvious difference between the current political state and that dreadful show (which I’m reliably informed has just entered it’s 10th season – can it really have been a decade?!) is the channel it’s on, and the fact that Davina McCall has been replaced by a quietly amused balding man in distinctive thick rimmed glasses, barely able to conceal the heavily loaded irony from his voice as he attempts to report on the mess in Westminster with as little bias as is possible in such situations.

Blimey, that was a long sentence. I really must remember to pause for breath. Sorry about that.

It’s hard to know just how things will pan out in the next weeks. I’m too young to really remember the collapse of the Conservative government in 1997, nevermind the hounding from office of Margaret Thatcher earlier that same decade, but I suspect that even if I did, I still wouldn’t be able to give a clear prediction on how long Brown will last. What I can say with certainty though is that, when he finally goes, Nick Robinson will be there to report it, wearing a slow smile that says:

“Blog this Peston!”

Laptop in Starbucks - Not Mine

Wow, over three months since my last post here! Hasn’t time flown by?!

Well, probably not if you’ve actually been waiting for me to update, but in this age of RSS feeds and automation, who actually does that?

I come to you today from a corner of the (relatively) new Starbucks in Cabot Circus. Those of you who’ve been here for too long will probably remember that at one point I wrote quite a few posts whilst sat in one of the branches of Starbucks in Broadmead, either on my heavy old laptop, or else painstakingly tapped out on my old HTC Vox. Well, both the laptop and the Vox have died and been buried (read binned in the case of the laptop, recycled for the phone) and I’m now sat here using L’s laptop, which she has kindly lent me whilst she’s away in the Czech Republic. It’s the mark of a good girlfriend that she knows that the best way to help me deal with the inevitable loneliness of being without her for a week is to lend me a cool bit of computer to play with for the duration.

As I hinted at the start of this post, it has been an unforgivably long time since I last posted. Fortunately, it’s so common for me not to post for an extended period of time that if you are still reading this then you will probably forgive me any period of quietness. It does say something though when L, who has been pretty internet deprived for one reason or another recently is telling me I need to update more often.

On the plus side, my absence has given me far more to talk about than I’d have had if I’d blogged all the way through March, April and May. The main news, if anything that happens in my life can be said to be newsworthy, is that I’m no longer a bar tender in the staff bar of my university. In fact, in every way that really matters I’m no longer at university.

Back at the end of March, I received a phone call from my mum, who’d just been talking to someone who thought I might be a good employee and was I interested in a job? To cut a long story short, I’m now almost half way through a 5 month internship with a company called Data2Impact, who help large corporate and public sector clients to better manage the large quantities of data they are pushing through programs like Excel and Access. It probably doesn’t sound terribly interesting to a layman, but if you are interested in problem solving and programming macros, it’s a really cool place to work.

As an intern I’m gaining a huge amount of experience doing different sorts of work all over the company and loving every day of it. So far, I’ve only come across two draw backs of the placement, and I think I can live with both. The first is that the office I’m based in is in Andover, a full 90 miles from my flat in Bristol, so I spend a lot of time on the road and clock up pretty hefty fuel bills. The second is that I’m getting to do so many different cool things, I’ve no idea how I’m going to fit it all on my CV!

Job Crisis. What Job Crisis?

Sorry, shouldn’t gloat, I know it’s tough out there, and I’m not likely to be spared the difficulties for long, because of the other major development in my life at the moment. Given that everyone who’s anyone knows already, and we aren’t keeping it secret, I’m hoping L won’t mind me announcing here that she and I have decided to live together in September. We actually decided back in January, but as I’ve already said, I’m not very good at keeping this blog up to date.

As I may or may not have mentioned before, L is at university down in Plymouth, and after a year of driving down to see her every weekend, the thought of having to keep up this lifestyle for another two years isn’t exactly appealing. My degree, which has kept me routed in Bristol for 5 years is now all but over (just waiting for the results of my finals – fingers crossed) so, with no reason for me to remain here, I’ve decided to move down to Plymouth, and L and I are going to get an apartment together. The major upside of this is that we’ll be able to enjoy being together and seeing each other every day, without the long hours on the road and the massive fuel bill. On the downside, it means leaving Bristol (which I’ve come to love) and having to look for a new job, as there’s no way I can cope with the 6 hours a day I’d need to spend in the car if I were to commute between my office and my new home.

L has returned to Bristol for the summer now, having finished her year at uni, and it’s been great having her around the last few days. It’s entirely possible that since I don’t have to travel quite as much, I may start updating more regularly. I can’t make any promises, but I do hope to keep you up to date with the massive changes in my life, as well as all the fun that I’m expecting summer 09 to bring.

Thanks, as always, go to all of you for bothering to read me. Perhaps now you could go one step further and be bothered to comment with an answer to the following question: Would you be able to cope with me changing the URL for my RSS feed once again? I’m painfully aware that I’ve changed it several times already during the life of this blog, but I’m thinking of moving the blog over to my main website, http://markglover.co.uk so as to keep everything under one roof, as it were. Your thoughts please…

Hiding Banker

For me, a poor, penniless student with no property, no morgage, no deposit for a morgage, no shares and no capital, the recession has, so far, had very little impact on my life. Perhpas this will change in a few months when I try to get myself the well paid, exciting graduate job that the government promised me I’d get, if only I’d go to university first, but for now I find myself disconnected from the issue that has made headlines virtually everyday for the last 18 months.

In fact, the most obvious sign that there is a recession, so far as I can tell, besides the fact that I now own the bank withwhom I hold such a large overdraft, is the change of blogging hierarchy on the BBC News Front Page. Back in the Good Old Days there was a permanent spot reserved for the blog of the Beeb’s Political Editor Nick Robinson, who’s regular takes on the latest political stories provided us with welcome relief when the news was going a little bit slowly. Now though we are enduring the dark days, and poor Nick has been replaced by the man blamed for the run on Northern Rock. A man who, in all probability, might actually be Satan himself: the BBC’s Business Editor Robert Peston.

Ok, he probably isn’t Satan – if he was he’d be working for ITV – but it’d be hard to deny that he’s loving the current economic turmoil and the massive shove into the limelight it’s given him. I remember glancing at the headlines on the BBC website the other day and spotting the following, amusing little arrangement. The leading article was reporting another major problem with the economy. I think it was a report on another bank admitting massive losses or something, and under it was a list of related stories, as you usually get. It looked something like this:

Bank of Monkeys Reports £4bn Losses

Housing Market Falls Further

Bananas R Us Goes Into Administration

4,500 Jobs Lost At Chocolate Teapots Ltd

And then, at the bottom of the list, was this cheerful entry:

Peston: Good News At Last

That man has serious issues…

Anyway, so we are in a recession, and if Satan Peston is to be believed, it is all the fault of poor banking practices, which I have to say, I’m perfectly willing to go along with. Recently, I’ve had far more to do with my bank than I’m used to; partly because I’m earning less than I used to be, and so am having to juggle my finances a bit to keep in the black, and partly because the Fabulous L and I are spending this coming weekend in Brussels, enjoying our first ever romantic weekend away, and so there’s been a lot of buying of Eurostar tickets and booking hotels and buying Euros and what not to be done, all of which involves banks.

So, what I want to know is this: Why does it take 4 whole days for L to transfer some money from her account to mine via the electronic wonderfulness of the internet, using services provided by banks, who are, after all, specialists at moving money, when it takes less than a minute for a girl in M&S to take a wad of notes from me, count them, tell me what I’ll get in Euros if I go either under or over, count out the Euros and hand them to me in and nice little envelope? *Pants*

It’s absurd! How can banks justify these waiting times, which haven’t changed since coins were first invented, in the 21st Century. It takes less than a second to send enough information down a phoneline to securely authorise a transaction. Less than a second. It is a tiny, tiny amount of data, even taking encryption into account. There is more data in this paragraph than is needed to move money from one account to another, and yet our banks tell us it takes 4 working days. Working days? What are those? I use my money 7 days a week and I expect it to work 7 days a week. I don’t expect it to take weekends off and finish early on a Friday; especially not when I’m having to work evenings and sometimes weekends to earn it!

I tried to visit my bank at 9 o clock one Wednesday morning before Christmas, and found it to be closed. Why? Because they were having a staff meeting, and they were too sodding lazy to come in an hour early to do so, meaning that the bank couldn’t open until 10. 10 in the morning! I know bars that open earlier than that!

*Deep Breath*

I’m sorry, dear reader, that this is fast turning into an insane rant, of the sort you probably don’t want to listen to, but am I the only one who sees the sheer insanity of the situation? The government is worrying itself over bad banking practices suck as risk management, which may be all very well, but how are they able to deal with something like that in banks when the sector as a whole hasn’t even mastered basic customer service skills? How can anyone hope to reform practices that are so complicated even the bankers don’t really understand them, when they can’t even master the art of being open on time?

Why is it that we live in a world where I can spend my money in Tesco at 3 in the morning, but I can’t deposit a cheque at 6 in the evening? Or at the weekends? Or bank holidays?

It seems to me that if the government wish to make good on their promise to overhaul the banking system, perhaps they’d be better off starting at the bottom again and working their way up. At least then they wouldn’t be building on foundations of sand.

Pasta Hut

Well, hello there blog! Been a while hasn’t it?

Yes, yes, I know and I’m sorry. But as I have pointed out in a few of my recent posts, coursework comes before blogging. Or rather came before blogging. For now I’m proud to announce that at around 09:30am this morning I finally handed in the last piece of coursework on my degree course

As you can imagine, I am delighted to say the least. I’ve been working on this year’s coursework for the past two months, and I know my blogging has suffered for it, but I really hope that that is about to change now that it is over, done and out the way.

And so to today’s post, which I’m actually writing, proper old skool style, in Word, rather than in WordPress. Not by choice, I might add, but thanks to a bunch of greedy people using over 150Gb of bandwidth to download stuff from my servers this morning, my account has now been suspended for 24 hours, to let the servers recover. Which, by the way, is really, really annoying on the first evening in 2 months that I’ve been able to justify playing with my various websites.

Anyway, enough about that. What I actually wish to talk to you about today is a visit the Divine L and I made to Pizza Hut in Plymouth the other week. We’d fancied going for a while, especially given the whole Pizza/Pasta thing.

Actually on that note, it probably goes without saying, but that is one of the worst ideas in the history of retailing. Pizza Hut works. It makes good tasting, desirable pizzas at prices people are prepared to pay, in a wide enough range of options to satisfy everyone, save the strictly orthodox members of a cult, sworn to abstain from Pizza. It works really well. There was no need to waste all that money switching to Pasta Hut. Even if the idea wasn’t too stupid to try, the reality helped put aside any doubts on the issue I had.

We were, as I previously observed, keen to visit Pizza Hut to try the new pasta dishes. We’d acquired a 50% off voucher, in order to ease our bank accounts and, upon arriving, we found ourselves stuck between craving a pizza and wanting to try the new pasta offerings.

In the end we settled on one pizza and one pasta dish, to share between us. I forget which pizza we chose, as they are all rather nice, but I think it might have been the Chicken Supreme. The memory of the pasta will, I fear, never leave my memory though, for it was a disappointment from the first sorry mouthful until the last.

As it was a limited edition, we decided to try the Liz McClarnon Signature Pasta Dish. According to the menu, former Atomic Kitten Liz had recently won Celebrity Masterchef. If this is true then I can only assume that the judges had left their taste buds at home that day. Not that it would have made much difference. The dish was so bland that at first I thought I’d accidentally put a napkin in my mouth instead of the £7.99 pasta offering. It was like taking a microwave pasta meal and then somehow extracting what little flavour was left.

The pasta was tasteless.

The mascarpone sauce was tasteless.

The Italian Style sausage was tasteless.

The roasted tomatoes were, yep, you’ve guessed it, tasteless.

How could a meal be so bland? Was it just me? No, L was of exactly the same opinion. The pizza was lovely, but the pasta could have been made from cardboard. I could have been eating the table for all my taste buds knew!

What an utter disappointment, to build one’s hopes up so, only to have them dashed by such a miserable offering. If it hadn’t been for the 50% off voucher ensuring that we weren’t actually paying for the thing, we’d have probably demanded our money back, it was that poor. And L and I aren’t exactly known for complaining about food. Quite the reverse in fact.

Ladies and gentlemen, I implore you. If you feel the need to go to Pizza Hut, please do. If you feel the need to order a pizza, please do. If you feel the need to have a healthy salad with it, please, please do. But whatever you do, please do not waste your hard earned cash on a Pizza Hut pasta, they just aren’t worth it.

/rant

As I write this the snow is falling for at least the third time this week, and it has been forecast to land on Bristol almost every day for the next week or so. I guess when they say it’s the most dramatic snow for 20 years they really mean it, huh?

Today Bristol was hit far worse than before, resulting in the closure of my uni and most of the schools in the area, as well as a suspension of all the buses in the city for several hours. I took advantage of my first ever snow day to get you some decent quality photos of the snow around here, taken on a proper camera this time.

By the time I’d finished applying for jobs and had eaten lunch, the snow in Bristol itself had turned completely to slush, so I decided to venture out of the city and take a walk along the Bristol to Bath cycle path, at the point that it passes the Avon Valley Railway. Hopefully the resulting pictures offer something slightly different to the usual pictures of snow covered cars.

Many, many more photos can be found in my Flickr Photostream, so please take a look if you are interested

I’m hoping to find time this afternoon to write a longer, more interesting post than the one I’m writing now. This is just a little something to keep you going, written quickly in the gap between the end of a seminar and the start of the following lecture.

For those of you living outside the UK/under a rock/in a house with no doors or windows, this week has seen virtually the entire country hit by the worst snow in nearly two decades. Whilst most of the UK’s bloggers will be able to provide you with imaculate photos of deep snow covering everything up to a depth of 10 feet, taken with the latest, most expensive DSLRs, I’m going to offer you a few pictures of the 3 or 4 inches of snow that fell yesterday in Bristol, as recorded by the built in camera on my 30 quid Nokia. After all, I know you choose to read this blog because of its outstanding quality

I took a couple of these as I left uni at around 3pm yesterday afternoon. The rest are taken around my apartment about half an hour later.

Sorry about the quality. Hope you like!

Scalpel

This is a post that I started writing over a week ago and I’ve only just found the time to finish it. Apologies for the delay!

As I sit on this rail replacement coach, from which I write to you on my iPod, furiously trying to turn up my music to drown out some in-coach noise pollution that I take to be Radio 1, I’m driven to wonder why, in an age where most of the travelling public have invested in portable music players it is considered necessary to deafen people with a coach radio on maximum volume? As if pubic transport isn’t unpleasant enough!

You may have noticed that I’ve been suspiciously quiet so far this year. No, I’ve not abandoned you, dear reader, I’ve just been horrifically busy with this and that.

For starters, following the New Year party I attended with L and hosted by some of her friends, I’ve been added to the list of regular invitees to all manner of social events, which has been lovely. Secondly I’ve been virutally overrun with coursework. I’m now a quarter of the way through a series of pieces that will keep me occupied until the end of February, seemingly with not much of a break. It is so bad in fact that I’ve elected to write this post while travelling, as it’s about the only time I can justify a leisure activity.

The other big time consumer though, and the one that I wish to talk about tonight is the surgery I had on my ingrown toenail.

WARNING: The following post describes in some detail a surgical operation and may make unpleasant reading for some people. If you are a minor or of a queasy disposition, please stop reading now.

Ah that’s better, I’m now sat on a warm comfortable train, without anyone playing annoyingly loud music at me.

So first I’ll start with L and my adventure to the clinic and then talk about life post-op til you all drift off to sleep. L, btw has been and absolute star the whole time and I’d have really struggled to get through the first few days without her.

Anyway, it’s the first Wednesday of 2009 and L and I have just got off the bus in Downend, slightly later than planned as we discovered on trying to flag down an earlier bus that we were stood at the wrong (unmarked) stop for that particular bus and the one we wanted was back round the corner. We set off walking to the clinic, which is hidden away on a housing estate.

“Are you sure you know the way?” says L. I assure her that I do and that we just have to turn left off the highstreet and then left again and we’ll be there. Five minutes later we arrive back at the high street.

A little investigation reveals that it should have been a left, a right and then a left. Eventually we arrive however, and I’m quickly shown in.

The procedure is to be carried out by a chiropodist with the aid of two student chiropodists who, according to their uniforms, come from the same uni as L, which I tell them as a means of breaking the ice.

They seem mildly impressed, but not as impressed as when I show them my toe, which has been growing steadily worse for 6 months.

“Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one this bad!” says one.

“Me neither, this is the sort of thing you see photographs of in text books!” agrees his companion.

“Can we take a photo?” they chime together, brandishing a camera phone.

The procedure starts with a spray can. What was in the can I can’t say. All I know is that when they spray it on my foot it feels like someone has dropped it into a particularly chilly part of the Arctic. Apparently this is to numb my foot so the injection of local anaesthetic doesn’t hurt, they explain. Next comes the injection, which really doesn’t hurt all that much.

I lie on the bed and watch them preparing their equipment. It requires a lot of preparation, or so it seems to me, especially for a little thing like a toe. Every now and again the chiropodist comes over to me and pokes my toe to test for numbness. Eventually they decide it is ready and begin covering the area in that orangey brown liquid they always smear on peoples throats before cutting into them on House. House, btw is the single source of my (very limited) medical knowledge.

What follows is so far beyond surreal it could easily be a dream. Every time that that toe has been stubbed, knocked, stepped on or pushed into a tight shoe in the last 6 months it has been extremely painful. Now I’m lying here looking at my foot and seeing the medical students poking it roughly with a scalpel, cutting away the damaged flesh that covers the edge of the nail. I feel the pressure of their movements, but in terms of pain, it might as well have been someone else’s foot. I’ve been under local anaesthetic before, but last time the surgery was on my face (in A&E) and I was too upset to really appreciate what was happening.

At first the synopsis is good. It looks like they can save the nail and just remove the side bits, where they dig into my foot. They proceed with my happy consent and remove the first side. When they begin working on the other side however, I can see from their faces that they aren’t happy.

“I’m sorry” says the chiropodist, “the flesh under the nail is badly damaged and has loosened the nail too much. I think we’re going to have to take it off completely.”

The first time this prospect was put to me during an examination a few months earlier, I remember being quite upset. By now though I’ve had time to think about it and my attachment to the nail that has left me limping for half a year seems to have dried up. I instruct them to proceed.

I’ve always been very much in favour of students learning on the job, as I don’t feel that textbooks are much substitute for personal experience, and I must say I feel very reassured as each of the students in turn gets to have a go with the scalpel on my foot. I’m tempted to have a go myself, as I don’t feel I’m really pulling my weight in this surgery, but feet can be difficult to reach when you have a bit of a belly as I do.

They finish after a time and begin to dress the foot. The dressing, once complete is about the size of a satsuma. I’m silently grateful that I remembered to bring flip-flops, as the idea of putting a shoe on over it is laughable.

I thank the team for a superb job and hobble out to reception where L has been sitting waiting patiently for me.

“Shall I call a taxi?” she asks.

“No that’s ok” I reply. “I feel fine, let’s save ourselves a few quid and take the bus. We could even stop at the pub on the way back and get some lunch. I really fancy a burger!”

Of course, that’s the problem with anaesthetic. You have a massive dressing on what remains of your toe but you feel like you can run a marathon. By the time we get to the bus stop, the blood has soaked through the dressing and onto the flip-flop and I’m beginning to feel the first pangs of what promises to be quite a bit of pain.

The rest of the day is spent with my foot up on a cushion. Poor L finds herself running round like my own personal Florence Nightingale, and I’m extremely grateful for her efforts. She’d make a good nurse, and I tell her this. Repeatedly. She even furnishes me with ample pain killers, after a quick search of my flat reveals that I have none.

The next day it is time to have the dressing changed for a smaller one; a task which is performed by a slightly scary Scottish lady, who tells me in no uncertain terms that I was an idiot for taking the bus and that I’ve probably made the whole thing worse. She also implies that I don’t know how to take care of myself, which seems a little harsh. When she points to the swollen state of my toe as a sign of the abuse that I put it through the day before, I don’t even bother pointing out that the toe is less swollen than it was the day before and that 6 months of walking around on an ingrown toe nail is far worse than a short walk post op.

Since then things have been pretty good. I still have a dressing on the toe, which I change myself after bathing it each morning in warm salt water, and I have to wear a plastic bag on it in the shower to keep it dry, but otherwise life is more or less back to normal. Incidentally, if anyone else is in the same position, might I recommend disposable freezer bags for keeping injuries dry in the shower? They lack the holes found in carrier bags and all you need is an elastic band to hold them in place and they work a treat.

Now I just have to hope and pray that everything is fixed by the time I visit Brussels with L in March, as I can think of few things less fun than walking miles and miles round a city I’m visiting without being able to walk as comfortably as I’d like.

I hope this hasn’t been too yucky a post for you to read. I’m sure many bloggers would file this under Too Much Info, but I like to write about my life, and this surgery has been the defining characteristic of 2009 for me, so there.

I can make my next post a little less stomach churning if you’d like?

Happy New Year

Oh dear Lord! Gerald, come quickly, that dreadful Mark Glover is about to bore everyone to death with another of those horrible end of year summary round-robin-esque posts that make such DULL reading every December. How utterly awful!

That’s right dear reader, it’s the annual End of Year Summary Round-Robbin-Esque post! Yes, yes I know Everyone does them Every year and they aren’t much fun, but this is my blog and I’ll write whatever I jolly well want to, thank you very much. If you don’t want to read it you don’t have to, I won’t be offended, but don’t expect me to take the hint and not write posts like this, because it’s what I do.

So, without further ado:

My 2008 in Summary

The last year, which at the time of writing has approximately 9 hours and 9 minutes left to run, has been pretty good for me, one way or another. Things started slowly enough, with my degree still dragging, and work dragging even more. I was still working full time, and for a few weeks I got to pretend to be in charge whilst my supervisor was off work with a bad back.

At Easter I visited Cardiff for the first time and survived. Unknown to me at the time (although I suspected it) I’d just failed a large chunk of my year through not doing my coursework properly, and soon I’d be going on to fail an equally large chunk of the exams as well. Nonetheless, I was in good spirits when I directed my parents to the Jolly Sailor in Saltford to celebrate my 22nd birthday in June. They’d bought me what must rank as my ultimate gadget of all time, my iPod Touch. I won’t start ranting about it here, but it’s bloody fantastic! At the end of that month I developed an ingrown toenail, which has left me limping for the last 6 months, but should be fixed next week when the NHS chop my leg off.

Darling this just won’t do! If he doesn’t find something to talk about that isn’t a disgusting medical condition soon I’m going to need another G&T!

In July I embarked on a summer work schedule that would see me in work every single day for over a month. It was pretty gruelling, but I hold no grudges as whilst there I got chatting to the girl who I’m now extremely pleased to call my girlfriend, L. Her arrival in my life has impacted my opinion of the whole year, and she dominates the remaining months, both in terms of time and my moods.

August and September were a blur of work and dates that sped by far too fast but left me with enough happy memories for a lifetime. L’s gentle but firm influence helped me pass all my resits and enter my final year of university, my degree finally back on track.

At the end of September L returned to her own university course in Plymouth, and so began the now familiar routine of driving or training the 130 miles between our cities every weekend. It isn’t an ideal situation for many reasons, but we’ve made it work and shall continue to do so in the New Year.

December involved sharing the run up to Christmas with a partner for the first time in my life, and the whole experience was better for being able to share it with L. We spent Christmas itself with our respective families but much of the rest of the holidays have been ours to share.

In a few hours she and I will attend our first New Year’s Eve party together. I predict it’ll be like When Harry Met Sally, but with less shouting.

Gerald, will you wake up! He’s finished talking about his 2008 and now he’s going to be disgustingly optimistic about the year ahead. I don’t think I can take much more of this; it’s making me feel queasy!

2009 Here I Come

And so to the New Year. What does 2009 have in store for me? Well first and foremost, a lot of coursework. I’m expecting to be snowed under pretty much solidly for the next two months, but once it’s complete I’ll never have to do coursework again! L and I are celebrating with a weekend break to Brussels in the Spring, the result of hard saving and a small Lottery win last year.

In the Summer I’m expecting to complete my degree and then things get weird. For the first time in my entire life, I have nothing planned. I went to uni as soon as I’d finished school, and so I’ve been in education solidly for the last 18 years of my life. Every year I’ve known that come September it’ll be back to school, 6th form or university. This year September won’t be back to anything. How bizarre!

Obviously I’m hoping to repay the extensive investment in my education over the last 18 years by my parents, teachers and the State by getting a job, but what job? Perhaps this time next year I’ll have the answer to that big, looming question.

For now though it’s still 2008, and what better way to finish off the year than by wishing you all a

Happy New Year!

Oh thank goodness, I thought he’d never stop!

Merry Christmas

to all my readers!

Honda FCX Clarity

Some time ago I wrote a post detailing what I thought might be the future of energy consumption in this ever more environmentally aware world that we seem to be occupying, and if your browser handles the transition from my old blog platform to WordPress a little better than mine does, you might still be able to read it. For those who can’t, or would rather not trawl through the archive for October 2007, I stated that thanks to massive advances in technology, electric cars might soon replace petrol and diesel ones.

I went on to list the example of the Tesla, a battery powered, electric motor propelled roadster, which had been featured on the BBC’s technology show, Click. Well, it seems that a year and 2 months on, Top Gear have finally caught up, as last week they conducted a review and test drive of the Tesla, and were reasonably impressed.

However, they then went on to show a video of James May reviewing the new Honda FCX Clarity, which he thinks is the most important development in the history of cars in over 100 years, and you know what? I’m inclined to agree with him. In fact, I feel so strongly about this, that I’ve spent all of 10 seconds on YouTube, and have found a clip of his report for you to watch. I appreciate that it is 8 and a half minutes long, which in internet terms is nearly a year, but if you have even the slightest interest in cars, the environment, climate change or the future, I really think you need to watch it:

Now, is it just me, or is this the key to solving that cornerstone of the global warming problem, car emissions? The technology in this car could, as I understand it, be rolled out to every single vehicle type on the road, just as soon as the fuel is available to supply it. It could, I think be rolled out to ships as well. Many new submarines are already using hydrogen fuel cells as their main source of propulsion. Trains already use electric motors to turn their wheels, so why not replace the overhead power lines and diesel generators with fuel cells instead?

Planes, I admit, may be a different matter. The dangers involved in carrying compressed hydrogen would have to be overcome, as would the extreme power needs required by modern jet engines, which perhaps electric motors simply cannot deliver yet. But this technology isn’t finished. It can still be adapted and improved for different purposes, with the result that one day we could see all our energy needs met in this way.

There is still a long way to go before hydrogen filling stations are as abundant as petrol stations, but it is happening slowly. Even if governments continue to reject the option of forcing car manufacturers to adopt this technology by law, the market itself will create the demand for these cars, and soon too.

I can’t say when the hydrogen pumps will get fitted at your local Tesco Petrol station, nor exactly how much it’ll cost, but I sincerely hope that by the time my trusty Ford Fiesta is due for retirement, I’ll have the option of switching to hydrogen. And if that option is there, and it’s affordable, I hope I won’t be the only one asking to whom I make the cheque payable!

(Have you seen any petrol stations offering hydrogen yet? Would you consider buying a hydrogen fuel cell car next time you visit the forecourt? Do you see this as the future, or am I getting all excited about nothing? Comments below please)

Just saw this over at Steve Clayton’s blog and thought I’d share:

(This is an embedded Youtube Video and I’ve absolutely no idea whether it’ll show in your RSS reader. If you can’t see anything please click through to the site for the full experience)

A very amusing comment on the miniturisation of Technology I’m sure you’ll agree.

It’s 24th December 2003 and my 15 year old self has just arrived home from a 12 hour shift at Waitrose. I enter the lounge to discover the family tree is up but not decorated, the ceiling decorations are nowhere to be seen andmy family are rushing around like maniacs trying to get the house clean before Christmas Day. I’m left to decorate the tree by myself, whilst the ceiling decorations lie forgotten in a box somewhere. By the time I’m finished it is bed time and I am tired and cross and finding myself pretty short of Christmas cheer.

Back when I was a kid, Christmas was the biggest deal of the whole year. I’d have my list written in November and would be unable to sleep by mid December due to the excitement building up in me ahead of the big day. That all changed that year, when I discovered for the first time the harsh reality of Christmas for adults. It’s a lot of work for a very short day of relaxation and happiness.

Subsequent years have proved almost as bad, with long working or uni hours and ever more preparation to get through before the 25th. Last year was my first Christmas in my New Flat, and with it my first tree, decorations and everything else. To this day I still feel a slight pain in my fingers when I recall tying lengths of thread to several dozen new baubles over the course of about 4 hours one evening. As for presents, I finally fell into that worst category of men, the Christmas Eve panic shopper!

This year things are different. I now have a girlfriend, L, and like all girlfriends her mission in life is to organise me (with my whole hearted support, naturally). We spent an entire weekend buying and wrapping presents a couple of weeks ago and I now have nothing left to buy for anyone this year, apart from L herself, who has come in under budget, but I’m working on that.

When I returned from Plymouth on Sunday night I considered going to bed, but, in the spirit of organisation I stayed up til half 1 in the morning hanging ceiling decorations. It reminded me why my parents have always been less than enthusiastic for this task, as I’m finally reaching the point in my life (aged 22) where climbing on furniture to stick drawing pins into the ceiling just doesn’t hold the same appeal as it once did.

The tree, also, is planned, even if not yet bought. For the last few weeks I’ve been working extended shifts at work, which have seen me not getting home until around half past 8 every night. This ends tomorrow (Thank God) and I’ll be leaving work at 3pm on Thursday, driving to B&Q and crying over the cost of Norwegian Spruces. The idea is that by the time I drive L back to Bristol for the holidays on Saturday, the tree will be standing, covered in working lights and ready for us to decorate together, just to prove that we are a real couple who do couply things together.

Tonight I think I’ll write the dreaded Christmas cards, of which I have 3 large boxes, having bought new ones without checking to see if I had any left for at least 2 years in a row, as I discovered the other day. Wrapping paper will also not be a problem, as it seems to my (not entirely scientific) estimates that I should have enough to wrap a double decker bus, should the need arise.

My point, besides possibly irritating all those less organised people with my gloating, is that for the first time in years, when Christmas finally arrives I shall be ready, happy and enthusiastic about the day. I’d begun to think that Christmas was just a colossal waste of time and energy, but a little festive planning has left me as excited as a child all over again. And no, I won’t be working a 12 hour shift on Christmas Eve this year. I’ve elected to finish on the 22nd, so as to enjoy the holidays that bit more, with no more stress and planning to be carried out by The Big Festive Deadline.

Happy December Everyone!

Earlier today I was sat in an unusually sleepy lecture on Consumer Buying Behavior in Tourism. The lecturer was trying, in vain, to get the class to contribute and kept putting questions to the students to try and get them thinking and responding to what he was telling them. Afterwards he remarked to me that he really wished that students would make more of an effort to challenge lecturers about what they are being taught.

“Back in my day, students used to be rebellious. They argued with authority and fought against ideas they disagreed with. These days young people have become commercialised conformists and all their individualism has gone.”

He then went on to tell me about how his peers, outraged by the siting of a US Missile base near their home, had chosen to protest by storming the place and pulling down the fences. It didn’t change anything, but at least they were able to make a point. There was a strong sense of idealism and anger at the establishment for permitting what they saw as injustice in the world.

This got me thinking; why have we moved from a world where students were on the forefront of political and social debates, always making their opinions known and campaigning to change the world, to one in which students don’t even bother to question the information being spoon fed to them in lectures, never mind take an interest in current affairs or speak out against injustice? Why don’t we ever rebel? Is it simply laziness? Is it the consequence of living in a consumer entertainment world, where no one ever has to think for themselves?

Quite possibly, but I have another suggestion that I wish to put to you today, oh dear reader. Could it be that these days there simply isn’t anything to rebel about or against? Could it be that we simply don’t need to make a stand anymore?

Perhaps the biggest single difference between my generation and the previous generation of university students is that right now, in 2008, life is pretty sweet. Back then there were real problems to be concerned about. There was a Cold War going on. Serious, very real threat of a Nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the West. There were wars that actually affected people in the West; the Vietnam War for example, where large numbers of soldiers were dying or being brutily maimed. There were periods of wide spread civil unrest, power shortages, povety. Lots and lots of thing to get angry about.

And we just don’t have that anymore. Yes there are still Nuclear weapons and other WMDs in the World, but no one is really expecting them to ever be used. There are still wars, but they are a long way from here, and thanks to the reduced size of the military and better risk assessments, most people don’t know anyone serving over seas, and far fewer still can name anyone who has actually been killed or injured in battle. As for power shortages, I can’t remember the last time there was a cut here, and the petrol pumps rarely threaten to run dry.

The fact is that life is pretty good. Okay, the economy is in recession, but since most students don’t have stocks and shares or large morgages, they remain relatively affluent. I get annoyed when I see my electricity bill. I can feel my blood pressure rising when I get stuck in traffic or when I can’t find a parking space at the supermarket, but that is as bad as things get for me these days. There just isn’t anything that makes me really angry, and there isn’t anything I’d pick up a plackard for just now.

One day this happy little problem free world will again be punctured by something terrible and outragous, and when that day comes I think the student population as a whole will be rallied to do what it can to fight the powers that be once more. But whilst times are good I suspect my lecturer is going to becoming yet more frustrated by the care free, unquestioning nature of those who enter the classroom.

What do you think? Did you ever rebel against anything when you were a student? Would you do so now? What gets you angry enough to speak out? Answers in the comment box please.

Hello and Welcome!

This is the first post written exclusively for the new version of the blog, which is still very much in the development process, but which I think is ready for me to start posting again. For those who are still working their way over from the old version of the blog, hey there! It’s ok, you’re in the right place! It’s still me, Ignorminious, although as you can see, the name of the blog itself has been changed, for reasons which I will explain in a moment. But first a warm hello to everyone who is finding the blog for the first time, you are very welcome indeed. Don’t forget to check the About page for more information.

Now, time for a little house keeping I think. The new blog comes with a new URL for the RSS feed, which is as follows:

http://ignorminious.co.uk/feed/

Got that? Good. The URL for the site itself remains unchanged, despite the change of site name and a complete overhaul of the site itself. As those of you with eagle eyes will have noticed, I am now using WordPress, rather than the scripts that I wrote specifically for the old version of the site myself. This should offer me much greater functionality and usability, as well as improved security for you guys, as WordPress should prove fairly resistant to the hackers who made my blog life a misery by constantly hacking the site databases and either posting rude messages or else deleting large sections of the archives, which was an utter arse to fix. Yes, I do consider myself posh  enough to use phrases such as “utter arse”, so if you don’t like it you can jolly well sit on a hot buttered crumpet and swivel!

This, for those of you reading off the site itself, is not the final design for the site, nor even my design. This is one that I downloaded from the WordPress Theme Directory to make everything look nice until I develop my own custom theme. I hope you approve. The name change is mine though, and although I don’t intend to shell out for a new URL for the site, I shall be using my Ignorminious alias less often from now on, as it wasn’t proving memorable enough to ever be widely adopted, and it isn’t much fun to type in either, as those who’ve tried it will know.

I’ve done my best to import my old posts into the WordPress system and have met with some success. They are all here to a greater or lesser extent, but many are suffering from formatting errors that I simply won’t have time to fix, and for which I apologise. Right now though I’m more interested in looking forward than looking back, and there are many exciting improvements still to make.

So thus concludes my first post! If you have any thoughts about the new blog, why not drop me a line or two in the comment box, or perhaps just say hi? It’ll be great to hear from you

In September 2006 I launched my blog after several weeks of intense coding effort. It was born out of the bordom that followed the completition of my previous web project, and I was proud at the time that it was entirely a project of my own coding. Over the following months I gradually added to it and improved it in ways that many bloggers thought were stupid. After all, it was taking me days to code what others were adding in minutes, thanks to plugins.

Over the years the site grew and grew, and as it did so, it began to pop up on the radars of hackers. Ever since then I’ve been the victim of regular hacks, which have wrecked the blog and cost me countless hours to repair. It is for this reason that I have taken the painful decision to end development of my blog as it is, and switch over to the Word Press content management system. This will offer me a range of exciting new features previously unavailable to me, as well as the security of water tight coding that won’t let people hack me every few days.

The site will be offline for a while whilst I convert to the new system, but I hope to be back before long with a fresh new design and a blog that everyone can enjoy for a long time to come.

Thank you very much for the support you have shown me over the last 2 years.

Those of you who were reading in June this year might remember that I made an impulse purchase of a new domain name, on which I proposed to host a site showing myself in a professional light.

Well, the other day (ok, about two weeks ago now) I finished the main build of the site and let it go live. There are still a few small bugs to fix (the search box doesn’t work) but the site is there and therefore I feel I should promote it.

At some point I’ll make a point of adding in lots of links to the new site in appropriate places on the blog, but for now, if you fancy having a look, please click through to http://markglover.co.uk and have a nose around.

If anyone has any comments about the site, positive or negative, please use the contact option to drop me an email, or comment on this post, as I’d love to hear from you!

Well, time for me to go to another seminar, so as the guys at Warner Bros used to say:

That’s all for now folks!

usual things. Adverts for viagra, a Nigerian Prince wishing to give me all his money, a bank telling me that there is a problem with the account I don’t even have with them, an angry Ebay user threatening to sue me for the non arrival of the laptop I supposedly sold them. The usual stuff that I’m sure each of you gets as well.

That is OK. I expect to find such stuff. It is only to be expected that antisocial individuals with far too much free time will waste it finding ways to annoy other people. None of the emails should be taken seriously, because even the people who write them never expect to get anything out of it.

What I find slightly more concerning is that other junk mail. You know, the paper kind that someone has to actually take all the way to your letter box. Remember that junk mail? It was the most annoying thing in the world before computers came along and upped the bench mark.

That sort of junk mail isn’t from a nobody who still lives with his or her parents. That kind comes from real companies and costs real money to produce. Lots of money, actually. So what confuses me is why these companies seem happy to distribute these leaflets and letters without paying any attention whatsoever?

I ask this because since I’ve been living here, I’ve received quite a number of these things that not only aren’t applicable to me, but couldn’t possibly be applicable to anyone else living in my flat.

The most common of these is, of course, estate agent adverts. I probably get one of these at least once every three days, and not one of them is any good to me because, like every other person living in my building, I rent my flat. And because I rent it, it isn’t mine to sell, which means I really don’t need an estate agent just now, thank you.

I also don’t need my windows replaced. One of the joys of living in an apartment block is that all exterior fixtures are the responsibility of the owner of the whole building, which means even if I did own my flat, I couldn’t have my windows changed unless I bought the rest of the building too, and had the whole lot changed. Which I’m not going to do, obv.

For the same reason, no thank you, I don’t need you to repair my roof. Or fit a new television aerial to it, though it’s very sweet of you to offer.

The stair lift was a good idea, and one that I was actually considering, right up to the point that I remembered I live on the ground floor. I feel quite sorry for the various companies who waste their marketing budget trying to sell myself and my neighbours cheaper gas. If they’d done any research at all, they’d have noticed that the building is electricity only, which means my gas bills are pretty much as low as they are ever likely to go, although if they would like to pay me for the gas I don’t receive, I’d be more than happy to consider it.

Perhaps my favourite so far was the catalogue I found on my doormat this afternoon, displaying what it assured me is the best range of electric wheel chairs in the South West. Whilst I don’t doubt that the products in question are good quality, I’m perplexed as to why the distributor actually came into the building, noticed the lack of disabled access, looked around and saw that every single person living here is under 30 and no one is disabled, and then decided to leave everyone a catalogue anyway. Talk about a job’s worth!

Have you received any junk mail recently that you felt perhaps should have been targeted more precisely at someone else? If so, why not tell me about it in the comments box?]]>

For reasons I’ve been unable to explain, entries have been popping up in completely the wrong order for weeks, and it has brought the site to its digital knees.

After about an hour of troubleshooting with a friend of mine, we discovered that there has been a change in the coding standards for MySQL database queries. It is only a small change, but it broke everything.

They’ve decided that everywhere I’ve written a ‘ in every database look up I’ve done for the last 5 years, I’ve now got to replace it with a `.

That’s right, ‘ must become `. That pointless little decision, which wasn’t picked up in any error messages has cost me around 10 hours of troubleshooting time over the last couple of weeks.

Thanks a bunch techy people!

I’m going to bed.

Goodnight.]]>