No Lung Cancer Either

Not that I expected it.

I got the results of my recent CAT scan today. Lungs all clear. Normal. No action required.

Can't say I'm at all surprised. I'm not a smoker. The only risk I can think of would be possible brief exposure to old asbestos while carrying out urban spelunking missions at Uni of Qld back in the 80s and 90s. And besides, I would have figured lung cancer to do more than give me an annoying cough which has been fading away.

I do believe my doc is now planning to investigate me for reflux, on the theory that cryptic, low-level reflux may be irritating my airways and causing me to cough. I wouldn't know, I suppose. I'll co-operate, and be a good lad.

Heh. Nat and the boys are enjoying their newfound association with the Launceston Community Orchestra. They get to play actual music, and do it together, which makes for a happy house at times. I like that.

One of the pieces they play is "Norwegian Wood". Since someone asked at the dinner table what the song was supposed to be about, I sang it through for the kids. I like Norwegian Wood. It's a cool tune, and the low-key description of the encounter between the singer and the girl is reminiscent of more nights of my misspent youth than I can readily recall. Except I never slept in a bath, because I'm too damned tall for that.

Anyway, once I was done with the song, we went back to eating. Finally, the Mau-Mau looked up. She was clearly troubled.

"Why in the song didn't they brush their teeth?" she asked plaintively.

Good question. So, Mr Lennon: why didn't you include a line about brushing your teeth in your classic song, there? Inquiring five-year-old minds want to know!

The new Telstra account seems to be working well. It will be nice not to have this loud satellite modem on my desk any more. I can use the space, and it will be great to hear the rest of the house again.

I'm also in the process of changing over one of my oldest email accounts. It's a long, tedious process, but there's no point in paying for an inferior service when something better and more accessible is offered free of charge courtesy of Google. But I do wish there was a better way of shifting all my contacts across. That's what I get for using non-standard email client software, I guess.

I suppose this also marks a goodbye to Foxmail, which has been my preferred email software since somewhere around 1997. Ah well. Never mind. I didn't much like the most recent versions anyway...

Triumph!

Two and a half months. Nearly three, actually. Four separate trips into Launceston. A dozen or more phone calls to Telstra, the longest of which lasted more than an hour and a half -- and that was AFTER I got through their labyrinth of recorded bullshit.

Today I connected up the high-gain aerial I bought last week in Launceston. Bought, I should add, from the Telstra Business Office in Mowbray, and not from the almost-completely-useless Telstra store in mid-town. (By which I mean: I ordered the aerial through them in early January. I went back in mid-February and asked about it. They were very apologetic, and went about ordering it some MORE. Firmly, this time. In mid-March, I went back to talk to them again... but this time the woman at the counter hit me with her Rudeness Raygun, and I left. That hour-and-a-half phone call? It confirmed that the Telstra office in Launceston had never at any time placed an order for a high-gain aerial to my account. What had they actually done? Nobody could answer that.)

Yes, I connected that metre-long black whip antenna to the base station. And then the real fun began. Naturally, I couldn't get it to speak Internet. So I tried reinstalling the base station, but it wouldn't recognise the password that went with the username. So... gritting my teeth, I phoned Telstra.

The recorded messages were painfully useless. Particularly the one that wanted me to cite the account number. That particular bit of good cheer told me I had to say "continue" when I found the number -- but then it stumbled. And repeated itself. And stumbled again. And repeated. And I couldn't actually at any point tell it the number.

STUPID F___KING RECORDING!

Eventually I got a Telstra tech. Like almost all Telstra tech support I've ever dealt with, he had a strong accent that I was hard-pressed to follow, but we worked our way through for a bit. And then he told me that I couldn't update the password because I didn't have access to the user account.

That's right.

Two and a half months of work. I mean - the home phone is in Natalie's name, but we're both on the books as "people who can authorise changes". And this new Bigpond account -- the only reason it EXISTS is because I packed up my three kids, drove into Launceston, then waited forty minutes to see a service johnny, and then spent a further forty minutes working through the specifications of the account.

Except, of course, that the account is linked to Natalie's mobile, isn't it? And despite the fact that I was allowed to set up the account, rearrange Natalie's mobile payment details, authorise the purchase of the base station and decide which mobile broadband plan we were going to use... well, it's Natalie's mobile, right? And, you know, there's nothing on the books authorising me to have anything to do with that, is there?

I kept my temper. I asked the idiot on the other end of the line if he seriously expected me to ring my GP wife at her surgery so she could phone BigPond and spend forty minutes with a recorded system in order to authorise my access to the account I'd created in the first place.

Strangely, the pillock actually did think that was the way to go. So I asked for his supervisor.

Somewhere into the second quarter-hour of hold music, I hung up on them.

I gave 'em a few minutes. I tried again - because the recorded voice kept seductively promising that it could help me change the password. Except, of course, that every time I tried to supply my account number, the F__KING thing would stumble and repeat itself. Again.

Eventually, I wound up with another heavily accented tech. But THIS tech was far, far less stupid. Once he ascertained I was trying to reinstall the system, he told me to quit messing around, and gave me the URL of the control page of the base station/router. And of course, once I was there, it was child's play to enter the proper username and the password... and it worked like a charm.

Fantastic!

Unfortunately, the signal strength still varied between 'low' and 'non-existent', meaning that I could get maybe thirty seconds of access at very infrequent intervals. But perhaps that was because the aerial was still sitting in the house, leaning on the wall. I put it out the window, fetched a ladder, and wandered round to the outside.

With a little electrical tape, I temporarily attached the aerial to a long rod, and I taped that to the top of the ladder. The aerial was now well over the roof height. I went back inside.

Signal strength was still deeply forked. Bummer.

I thought about it for a bit. Particularly, I thought about the nasty, finicky little joiner which had been provided to allow me to connect the skinny co-ax cable from the aerial into the back of the base station. Typical piss-poor design: the connect-o socket for the co-ax on the back of the base station doesn't actually connect -- you have to put a double-ended adaptor onto it, and each end of the adaptor has to individually screw into place: one on the cable, one on the base station.

The adaptor is about three centimetres long. And naturally, they've located the connecto-socket in a place where there's a kind of shield in the way, so you really can't get your fingers in to do the job properly. I'd done the best I could... but had it been enough?

I found a pair of electronics pliers. Then I tightened the two opposite-turning collars on the adaptor... and lo! All of a sudden, the signal strength indicator jumped to 'high'!

Instantly, I jumped online and tried a few YouTube videos. (Hayseed Dixie, if you must know. They're hilarious.) And by Odin's long and scraggly beard... IT WORKED!

Like magic it worked! I promptly tried three different broadband speed check sites, and discovered that this setup is about two to three times the speed of the crappy satellite link. About 1.3mbps, as a matter of fact. Whooo-HOO!

So. Next hurdle: I went upstairs, fired up Natalie's computer, and looked for the new wireless link.

Oh dear. Nothing.

Shit.

At this point, a lesser mortal might have caved in and gone back to phone Telstra again. But not yours truly. Nope: I opened up that control-page URL again, and noodled around until I found a whole bunch of settings - including WiFi. Working with my little ASUS eeepc on my lap, I tweaked the settings until I could find a wireless signal, log on, and download. Then I trotted back upstairs, and had another crack at Natalie's computer.

Success! This time her computer not only found the new network, but logged straight on and happily took to reading the BBC news. Yes! Calloo, callay! O Frabjous Day! Genius = me!

But the job still wasn't done. Because, of course, the actual aerial was still taped to a paint-roller handle that was taped to the top of an aluminium ladder. And that configuration would almost certainly turn out to be sub-optimal in the event of inclement weather... or even me needing my goddam ladder back.

So I grabbed the coach bolts kindly provided with the aerial kit. And the hose clamps, yeah, them too. I loaded a decent drillbit into my cordless drill, found a socket spanner to fit the coach bolts, and trundled up to the top of the ladder with all my gear, plus the steel hockey-stick thing provided as an aerial mount. With balletic grace, I drilled a couple of pilot holes left-handed (since my right hand was involved in maintaining vertical integrity of myself, the ladder, and the hockey-stick thing). Then I coach-bolted the blasted thing into place on the eaves. Yay!

Up the ladder to the roof, going very carefully. I freed the aerial from the jury-rigging and duct tape, and placed it alongside the steel hockey-stick thing. Then I dropped the hose-clamps into place, and did them up nice and tight with the screwdriver I forgot to mention earlier. (Spanner. Socket. Screwdriver. Drill... yeah, lotta tools up there on the roof. Did I get them all down? Jeez, I hope so.)

And there it was. Solidly mounted. I gathered my tools and descended once more to earth. Then I put the whole lot away, and put the ladder back in the shed, and went back inside.

Miracle! The signal strength was still "high". I was still Net-enabled!

Ladeez and gennulmen, I have done it. After nearly three months, I have managed to activate and then render useful this Telstra 3G account.

And what do we get after all that effort? Well, there's our blinding new 1.3mpbs speeds. Yeeha. And there's 12 -- count them! -- TWELVE gigabytes a month available for a cost maybe twenty bucks down on the price we've been paying for 15gb a month from the satellite dudes. The thing to note, however, is that our new 12gb allowance is NOT restricted by time of day. No "peak time" bullshit, in other words.

Y'see, with the satellite people, only 3gb was available at what they called "broadband" speeds between the hours of midday and eleven pm. And if you used more than that 3gb during that period, you were 'shaped' back to 64kbps.

Can I just point out that most of the Internet -- even text-heavy pages like Wikipedia -- won't even load at 64k any more? It just sort of... hangs. And Cthulhu help you if you actually needed to access anything interactive. Ugh.

We never used our full 15gb in a month... but we frequently needed to buy expensive data blocks to avoid having our Internet access rendered useless for half of every day for the last week or so of the month. 12gb of broadband speed available 24/7 should hold us for a while.

What's that? Pathetic and expensive, you say?

Well... yeah. It is. I'm well aware of that. But it's an improvement of sorts. We'll keep the satellite maybe one more month to make sure this system doesn't have any hidden bugs - and then we'll switch over. And who knows? Maybe someday they'll connect us to that magic NBN which is only ten or twelve km down the road...

...ha. As if.

The worst thing about this situation? I'm back to dealing with Telstra again.

Fan. Fucking. Tastic.

That Was Definitely A Weekend.

It started Friday morning, more or less. Or maybe it started Tuesday night. I'm not sure.

Natalie took the Younger Son to Queensland on Tuesday evening. She had a medical conference to attend, and she felt that it would do the boy some good to hang out with his grandad (Nat's father), who is a long-time rally-driver, dirt biker, and competitive sailor.

Younger Son, as you know, was born with Attitude. Thus, for the first few nights I got phone calls (via Natalie) from the kid, telling me all about his adventures riding a motorbike, learning to swim (finally!) and so forth. All good.

Mind you, that left me doing sole parent with two kids. Still, that's not such a big deal. The only real issue was Wednesday evening, when I had to teach the ju-jitsu class. The Mau-Mau is not yet an attendee... so she caught the bus home from school to her best friend's house while I took the classes. That worked okay.

However, a very dear friend of mine had the very poor manners to schedule his wedding for Saturday. (Yeah, I'm staring at you, John.) I mean - it's not even his first! He's done it before!

Nevertheless, I wanted to attend. Of course, it was happening in Briz.

So -- I teed up a couple of minders, and I packed bags for both kids on Friday morning. Elder Son Jake went to his best friend's house for the weekend, and the Mau-Mau went to hers. (And I am undyingly grateful to two different families for that one!)

Meanwhile, I rounded up things about the house, packed my gear, grabbed a fine bottle of Tasmanian bubbles for a wedding present, and hit the road.

I got into Briz on Friday evening, and immediately incurred another debt. Another beloved friend of many years standing -- the other half of the Barnesm team, as a matter of fact, whom we shall call 'Charlotte' in honour of her unnatural predilection for Victorian literature -- kindly picked me up at the airport, and drove me out to the wilds of Fig Tree Pocket, where my sister lurks. Seeing as how Charlotte was also on the invite list to the wedding in question, we organised a pickup time for the morning, knocked off a pizza, and then she headed back home. I had a couple beers with my brother-in-law who is one of the more relentlessly big-hearted, decent, kind and funny individuals I know, and then I did The Big Crash.

So, yeah. Next day saturday. And the world being what it is, by coincidence also the fourteenth birthday of my nephew. Seeing how he's fourteen, and I had no real idea of his interests (I knew he used to like archery... and that's about all I knew) I slipped him a decent-sized bill, and then did my best impression of a Bad Influence Uncle: I taught him how to sweep the cards on his deal so that he put an ace on the bottom of the deck. Then I taught him how to keep the ace on the bottom of the deck through the two most common forms of shuffle... and finally, I taught him how to deal a card from the bottom of the deck without being spotted.

I'm not sure he realises the value of these skills yet. But nevertheless, I'm quite proud of myself. I feel I've done my duty as Bad Influence Uncle. I also taught him to cut the deck when anyone else volunteers to deal, and gave him a few pointers on how to spot a rigged game, how to avoid the most basic forms of con and cheat, and when to get the hell out gracefully to save his hide.

The wedding invite said "dress for cocktails." I did. Rum cocktails, to quote my comrade Arian, who was also at the wedding. In fact, I was the only bloke there without a tie. I hate ties. I hate suits. I don't do them. So I had my best piratical shirt, my leather vest, a gaudy sash, my baggy black Thai fishing trousers, and my black, suede, kneehigh moccasins.

Before you ask: yes. That is absolutely what I would wear to some sort of goddam cocktail do. In any case, John invited me. He knew what to expect, and he didn't bat an eyelid.

The wedding went off very nicely. There was a smattering of folks there I'd not seen in many a year, which was entertaining, and it's always good to swap bullshit with Arian. (I also left him with a message for Girl Clumsy... which should be entertaining.) The new Missus John is a gorgeous, doe-eyed lass who goes by the name of Amy, and gets the Flinthart Stamp of Approval. We had a fine conversation about "The Journey To The West", by Wu Ch'en En, and I look forward to further discussions at some time in the future. But in the meantime, the couple is off to China to have a SECOND wedding in China, for the sake of Amy's family. (Her parents were there, and a few others, but I think she has a bit more in the way of family back in the Old Country.)

I did, in fact, get invited to the China do as well, and I was sorely, sorely tempted... but the timing is not at all good, and then there's the money, and... ah, hell. At least I made it to the Brisney do, eh?

John's dad was looking pretty good, despite being 80 not out. He was, at one point, a professor of mine at UQ, teaching a course on science fiction. He's had the odd stroke over the last few years, and speech isn't as easy for him as once it was, but he's still sharp as ever, and he knows how to get his point across when he wants to. Late in the evening, after I'd had a few ales and was shooting the breeze with John, said father came out with a copy of 'How To Be A Man' in his hand, and the most wonderfully accusatory expresssion on his face. Once I finished laughing, I pointed out that clearly, not all my hours in his tutelage had been wasted...

The bride and groom made a disappearing act at a very reasonable hour, in a car duly decorated in shaving foam, toilet paper and soft-drink tins. Mme Charlotte and I trundled off not too much later, and after another couple of brother-in-law accompanied ales, I crashed out again...

... because the next morning at 0900 Briz, Charlotte collected me and we went off to Chermside in pursuit of another very dear old friend. This gentleman I shall refer to as Major Disaster for his connections with the military, and for his frequent bouts of accident-induced hospitalisation. Seriously: this man is amazing. I have seen him cut his finger on a drinking straw. He's not clumsy or stupid - far from it! He's simply one of the physically unluckiest individuals I have ever seen, and it is occasionally downright scary. I can only hope the two endearingly cute kids he has managed to raise with the aid of his good wife, Madame Disaster, have not inherited this particular problem.

I'd not met the kids before at all, since Major Disaster and co have been hangin' in Wales for lo, these many years past. But now they are returned as prodigals to the fold, and all is right with the world, more or less. Or at least, he wasn't wearing any new bandages when I saw him.

We had about an hour and a half at Chateau Disaster, and then it was off to the airport. A farewell to the lovely Mme Barnesm, and then a stint with the Deathstar, and I was home...

... about an hour and a half later than I expected. So I had to race like hell to collect Jake and the Mau-Mau from their various minders, offer up heartfelt thanks, then get home, make 'em a nice cup of hot chocolate, and put 'em to bed.

Natalie and Younger Son are due in 'roundabout midnight, at last text notification. I'm guessing the Deathstar is treating 'em roughly the way I expected. And for those of you wondering why we actually succumbed to the Deathstar, it's simple: nobody else at all flies direct Launceston to Brisbane.

Which sucks. Because the Deathstar is no way to fly.

Good weekend. Nice to see so many much-loved faces, and very fine to be part of John and Amy's big day. But... it's good to be home!

Well, I Don't Have TB

It's true. My Mantoux Test was negative. No surprises there.

Let's see what the CAT scan has to say next, shall we?

Not All My Experiments Work Out.

It occurs to me that in posting successful and interesting recipes, I give a somewhat mistaken impression of my cooking. Not everything works.

Of course, I'm long past the early, foolish stage of throwing together something new and trying it out on people. Nope: when I want to try something different, I do it quietly, and consider the results for myself.

Case in point: I was just preparing some twice-cooked pork, and I really went the indulgent path, shallow-frying the already steamed, marinated, and seasoning-coated pork-belly pieces in vegetable oil. (Normally I'd stir fry them with veg. Or even grill them.)

There was a half-packet of Udon-style Japanese noodles on the countertop, left over from young barf-boy Jake's luncheon. (He had a tasty, easily digestible soup with a little thinly-slivered spiced beef and fresh vegetables as well as the noodles.) Seeing as how I still had a pot of hot oil after the pork came out, I figured I'd chuck in the Udon noodles and see what happened.

For those who may not know, Udon noodles are a relatively thick rice/wheat noodle which you can often find in Japanese soups and stews. They're a bit chewier than your usual rice stick, and actually, they're a big favourite around here. I wondered what would happen if I dropped 'em into oil hot enough to give 'em a crunchy outer surface.

The answer? Nothing good. By the time the outside goes crunchy, the middle has become very damned chewy indeed. I may consider trying this again with MUCH hotter oil, but for the meantime, the idea is: don't deepfry Udon noodles.

To which you might reply -- why the hell would I want to do that in the first place? And I'd have to say: I'm not sure. But you never know. Sometimes these odd experiments turn out very, very well indeed. Like making ice-cream with Mascarpone instead of cream, for example. That works brilliantly.

But not fried Udon noodles. Nope. Yuck.

Hmm. There Goes One Theory...

Turns out I'm not asthmatic.

At least, that's what the peak flow/spirometry test I did yesterday insists. As a matter of fact, the doc reading the results took one look and said my lungs were in remarkable shape. Apparently one one of the key indicators was at something like 120% of expected for my age and size, while the others were not far below 100%. And given that I've been rattling and coughing horribly for a month and a half, I guess being a little below 100% is kind of understood and assumed.

More to the point, there was no significant change after a dose of Ventolin.

So -- what's up with that? They treated me as an asthmatic as a kid, and it certainly seemed to work when I got wheezy. Then I did a lot of swimming in my teens, and I did some growing, and it went away.

I know I've got occasional allergies. I discovered just last spring that if I take something like Telfast once a day, suddenly all the night-time snot and sneezing goes away. That's pretty cool.

But this cough. Yeah.

You might remember that a few years ago, after a truly amazing bout of laryngitis, I lost the ability to produce that deep, chesty cough that is oh-so-necessary when you've got a good bout of lung lurgi. It just went away. I can cough, sure, but it's all up in the throat, not in the chest, which is annoying as all fuck.

I'm pretty healthy generally, despite the best efforts of my children, so I don't usually have chest problems when I get some kind of cold, and even here in Tas, I'm usually good for maybe one decent cold per year. Two in a bad year. But I admit it: I've been expecting to get something ugly, and hard to shift, purely because I can't cough like I should. Means all that crap rattling around down there doesn't really move the way you'd want it to, you see.

Right now, the Mau-Mau has a deep, rattly cough of which I am, frankly, quite jealous. Younger Son, meanwhile, has at least temporarily freed himself of any kind of cough at all, which is great since he's being treated as an asthmatic too. Elder Son Jake, who brought the whole goddam cough home with him from summer music camp, is over it completely, but is currently lying in his bed having barfed all over the place at school this morning.

And me? Comes and goes. I can exercise effectively again, which is good, but I'm definitely not up to par. And I tend to have wheezing fits at odd times -- wheezing fits which, despite the spirometric analysis, do seem to be somewhat improved with Ventolin.

Thus, on Monday, I shall be off to have my very first ever CAT scan. Wooowee! Technology! Yay!

It's going to be a busy day. I need to get my ID at the university, and grab a couple books from the library. I need to pick up a present for Jon Strugnell's upcoming wedding. I've also gotta get a Mantoux test to rule out Tuberculosis, of all things... gotta love this medical stuff, eh?

Meanwhile: looks like three extra kids staying over for the weekend. (Assuming Jake improves. Which he probably will. Wish I knew what was going on there, though... he never throws up.) Natalie's aiming for a bike ride on Saturday, and Younger Son is due to head into Launceston for another bass lesson.

It's all good, I guess. I've still got a little bit more time this year, even adding in the extra driving around for gymnastics, and the fact that I'm tutoring a youngster in the flute. Hopefully the writing will unroll in front of me nicely...

A Somewhat Disturbing Tale

I believe I have mentioned from time to time that the Younger Son is... a little dangerous.

Nobody ever takes it seriously, though. He's the middle kid, after all. Jake is taller and much more talkative and gregarious. And of course, the Mau-Mau is terminally cute, and vivacious, and determined to be the centre of attention. Younger son is just a small-ish, slightly stocky blond boy with a mischievous grin.

Of course, if you look carefully, you discover stuff. For example: he's been helping me in the kitchen, slicing vegetables, since before he turned four years old. Seriously -- he really wanted to be involved, and he showed me that he had the necessary concentration and dexterity. He's not fast, no, but he handles a chef's knife better than most adults I know.

And for his fourth birthday he got a cordless electric drill. Okay - it's actually a cordless screwdriver, because his hands are small, but he loves taking things apart and trying to figure out how they work, and an electric drill was the great desire of his life at the time. He still has the device, with all its bits. And he still uses it.

Then there's that slight stockiness. He's going to basic gymnastics once a week now. Last week, he broke their local record for holding a reverse-grip chin-up. Watching him on the beam, you feel he might as well be trotting along open ground. They use an odd, lozenge-shaped cushion thing to force the kids to work their balance while doing deep knee bends: Younger Son doesn't wobble at all while he's doing his bit, and instead of doing a measured count of knee-bends, he just keeps going until they finally notice and tell him to stop.

He's not a talker, though. It would never occur to him to make much of these things. They're natural to him, and from time to time he expresses puzzlement that others can't do the same. But he is learning. And he has something else on his side: patience, and a devilish concentration.

They've only been back at school about four weeks. In his new classroom this year, Younger Son found that one among the various laptop computers didn't have a power supply. When he asked, he was told that the power supply had been misplaced because they'd lost the password for the computer, and they were waiting for the (harried and harassed!) IT guy to come and reset it.

Younger Son ferreted about the classroom until he found an appropriate power supply. Then he asked for permission to try and use the computer. His teacher, not knowing the little beast for what he is, apparently thought nothing of it.

The passwords for these 'puters are alphanumeric, and nine digits in length. There are some limits on the character range they use at the school, but I'm not going to detail them here. Likewise, they have some habitual patterns they use in their passwords, apparently, but again, no details needed.

It took him about two and a half weeks of brute-force password entry tests. And then one day he came home with a big grin. "All the other kids want to use my computer," he said. "But I won't tell them the password."

Of course, he'd not told me anything about the whole matter, so I had to tease the details out of him. But yes: he'd slowly, patiently, methodically worked his way through a range of potential passwords before he found it. And now he has essentially private access to the hitherto unusable computer...

He will be nine years old on his next birthday, on Christmas Eve. I have absolutely NO idea what to give him for his birthday this year...