Saturday, February 26, 2005
What a week.Monday started out with a trip to the hospital which left me feeling really angry.
You may recall some months ago I mentioned having a lump ...er... putting it bluntly... on my bollox. Well, the treatment I was given didn't seem to do a whole lot, so a month or so ago I went back to see a different doctor, who decided it was probably an epididimal cyst, and made an appointment for me to go and have an ultrasound scan at the hospital.
So when I got there, talk about being treated like a piece of meat.
There were two guys, one a (greek?) doctor who's only interest appeared to be football, and a techician running the machine, who had all the communication skills of a house brick. To make matters worse, just on the other side of a partly drawn curtain where a bunch of other people who seemed to be using the room as an office, and they kept walking through while I was laying on the bed with my bits out, being poked and prodded at.
So... after being made to feel generally very degraded, the doctor announces that yes, it is a cyst, and I ask if it's anything I should be worried about. his reply was "Yes................. in around 2098." Now excuse me, but when I'm looking for information and reassurance about something that I find quite worrying, especially having been made to feel like a worthless piece of meat that barely warrants a "hello" when they walk into the room, I find having a joke about it not only inapropriate, but downright disgusting.
Anyway, moving on.
On the way home, it snowed, which I rather liked, but I somehow managed to lose my bearings and got lost along the maze of cycle paths on the wrong side of town. Heh.
On the plus side, it snowed all day, and that night I went out and took some photos.
Here's an example....
Certainly one of my better night shoots.
What else have I been doing?
Ahhh.... Babylon 5.
Yup, I've had my eyes glued to the tv, working my way through the box sets for the past couple of weeks... every spare minute I've had. It really is that good.
Saying that... I'm a bit concerned with season 5.
They obviously knew they were gonna be cancelled at the end of season 4, and so basically completed all of the really important aspects of the story, leaving only a few loose ends. They could very easilly have left it right there, and you wouldn't have been left feeling short changed and left hanging.
Then they got picked up by another network, and continued with season 5. Trouble is, having already completed the main story, I was concerned that 5 would feel tacked on... and to be honest, the 4 episodes I've seen so far feel very much like that.
I just hope it improves. I'm not writing it off yet.... but so far, it doesn't look promising.
I've mentioned before that Andrea lives some distance from me. Around 105 miles away, up north, to be a bit more specific, meaning we only get to see each other at weekends.
So, up till now, we've been running up huge phone bills, speaking to each other every night in the week.
Well, we've found a solution to that.
During the week, I tried to initiate an audio chat with Andrea using msn messenger, but it wouldn't let her accept the call as she didnt have a cam or mic. So... next day she goes out and buys a cam and mic, and we duly tried again.
The results were... variable. Cam to cam with no audio was excellent, brilliant frame rate. However, as soon as we fired up the audio, the cam frame rate dropped down to a crawl, and the audio was very choppy, and broke up enough to make holding a decent conversation almost impossible.
I figured turning off the cams would improve the audio, but no... still very choppy and broken. Pity.
However....
For the past year or so, I've been hearing about a program called Skype, which a number of people have been using for audio chat, and have said is *very* good.
So, I figured why not give it a try. It's free, so what is there to lose?
Andrea and I duly downloaded, installed, and signed up to it, and oooh boy, is it ever good.
I've used a number of audio chat programs in the past, all with fairly decent results, but this absolutely stomps all over them. It's way better than phone quality audio. In fact, without exagerating, it's like being in the same room. Better yet, if you buy credits (which I haven't done yet) you can call people's home phone using it, for a fraction of the cost of dialing them on your own phone.
Anyway, to top all of this off, we discovered it's possible to run skype for audio chat at the same time as using msn messenger to run webcams, and the cam framerate is almost exactly the same as running msn webcams with no audio at all... ie, very fast.
The end result was that we can now chat for hours, face to face, with near realtime (and excellent quality) cam images, and audio like we were in the same room.... and all of this costing absolutely nothing.
Good stuff :-)
Labels: annoyed, medical, photos, webcams
Steve 5:21 PM [+] (0) comments
Friday, February 18, 2005
After a week of fairly frenzied.. umm.. activity, I'm taking a couple of days to catch up on 'me' time.I'm half way through season 2 of Babylon 5 now, and it's turning out to be quite excellent... and just as I'd been told, it's the storylines and characters that make it all hang together so well. The acting varies from fairly dreadful to really rather good in places, the sets are on the cheap and cheerful side, and the effects are showing their age... but the overall result is much greater than the sum of its parts. Good stuff.
Andrea demonstrated her skills at video gaming this week, taking the pad on Mario Kart 64 and showing she's no 'okay, I'll have a quick try' player. She fairly put my own abilities on that game to shame.
For me, this is very exciting, as I've been missing a competative playing partner for a long time. She's now honing her skills on Gran Turismo for a couple of weeks before challenging me to some serious racing. This being my absolute fave game ever, and something I pride myself in being very skilled at, I'm really looking forward to facing her on it.
Labels: games
Steve 11:06 AM [+] (0) comments
Friday, February 11, 2005
I made another impulse purchase while in town yesterday.Now everyone who knows me knows I'm a bit of a geeky sci-fi fan, been into Star Trek and suchlike for as long as I can remember.
Thing is... the one series I never really managed to catch on TV, just coz it was on at unpredictable times, was Babylon 5. Over several years, I think I only ever caught around 3 or 4 eposides... 5, absolute tops... though I really liked what I saw.
So, they've had the DVDs in the shops for some time now, quite often at budget prices, but each shop only ever had a couple of seasons at any one time, and I figured if I was gonna watch them, I wanted to watch them in the right order.
Well, yesterday, as luck would have it, I stumbled across a shop which had all 5 seasons, 4 of which were at bargain prices, and I knew I'd never get an oportunity like that to get the whole lot in one go at a sensible(ish) price.
£170 later, and I have probably a months worth of B5 to watch. All I gotta do now is find the time to watch them all.
Today's been the usual friday rush to get the place respectable looking and get shopping done before Andrea gets here.
What's extra nice is, she has a week off work this week, so we'll have more time to do stuff, and won't feel so restricted by the ticking clock come sunday afternoon.
It should ease the phone bills too, coz by god do we ever talk for ages on the phone during the week. It's actually rather amazing how much we have in common, without even realising it quite often. Many's the time one or other of us will say "You're me, aren't you?" as we seem to have lived paralel lives, with similar upbringings, experiences, and hence attitudes and responses to stuff.
We're both virgos too, and if you really wanna know what happens when two virgos who're a good match get together... well... go look it up :-P
Steve 7:07 PM [+] (0) comments
Wednesday, February 09, 2005
Seems the switch from night to day mode hasn't been entirely succesful after all.I'm finding myself going to bed very early, but waking in the middle of the night for a couple of hours, going back to bed and getting up fairly early... but feeling absolutely shattered.
The trouble with this is, it leaves me feeling quite grouchy, and I'm having to be careful not to be offish with people when they've done absolutely nothing wrong.
It'll pass in a couple of days, but right now, it's quite difficult.
Labels: sleep
Steve 4:11 PM [+] (0) comments
Tuesday, February 08, 2005
After staying awake for waaaaay longer than my body found agreeable, I managed to flip from night to day mode in one night last night. Wasn't easy, but I did it.So today I got up at 5am(ish) and sat around till a reasonable hour to text Andrea.
I'm liking this very much. So we may be 100 and something miles apart, but there's something very nice about being able to have a chat in the morning over breakfast, as opposed to me being fast asleep till the middle of the afternoon.
So after chatting again on the phone while waiting for a bus, I nipped into town to pay the rent, and while in town I chanced upon a new toy... and a bit of a bargain too.
Now I've always liked the idea of handheld games consoles, but have never really been too grabbed by the usual Nintendo thing. So how chuffed was I when the retro gaming shop I often visit had a stock of brand new (though long discontinued) NeoGeo Colour Pocket consoles, boxed, with 6 games for £80?
It's retro, it's fairly exclusive, it's certainly different.... and best of all, among the 6 bundled games... it has Metal Slug. I've been a fan of the Metal Slug series of games since I started playing them on a NeoGeo emulator on my pc a couple of years ago.
Much fun.
I should look and see what the other games are (haven't even bothered to look, coz I've only been interested in Metal Slug)
Pac-Man, King Of The Fighters R2, Fatal Fury: First Contact, Neo Turf Masters and Samurai Showdown 2.
Not bad going for a bundled collection.
Labels: consoles, games, sleep
Steve 11:52 AM [+] (0) comments
Monday, February 07, 2005
Yup.I like weekends.
What happened?
Ummm..... yes. Quite a lot, in fact.
Steve 6:05 AM [+] (0) comments
Friday, February 04, 2005
What to write? What to write?There aren't enough hours in the day to fit everything in lately, so updates here are a bit sporadic.
Lordy! Am I getting a life?!!
A little web based sideline of mine seems to be proving quite a hit, which is fun to see... which reminds me, I must update certain details on various of my websites.
So now I'm sitting here munching a tuna sarnie and gearing up to hoover and wash the dishes. Yikes!
Andrea's coming over later tonight. Funny how a week seems to drag while you're waiting for it to pass, but seems to have shot by when you get to the end of it. Especially when you realise you still haven't done half the stuff you'd planned.
Steve 7:30 PM [+] (0) comments
Tuesday, February 01, 2005
Today was quiet.Didn't do a whole lot... mostly because I slept untill around 4pm. 14 hours... yeash. Dunno how I got away with not having a headache when I woke up.
Chatted with Andrea on the phone, and boy, can we talk for england, which is nice, and then waffled online for a bit.
Counting the days till friday now. She lives some distance from me, and since I don't drive, it mostly limits us to seeing each other at weekends. It's worth the wait though, coz she's lovely.
Oh yeah... there's a fun website I've been playing with for a few months. Dunno why I haven't blogged it till now.
Racing Frogs is a really simple concept, and doesn't actually do a lot, but once you get into it, it's strangely compelling. Even more fun when you know a few people who're playing it too.
My last frog retired a week or so ago, and finished 7th overall, out of around 106,000 frogs. Not bad going.
Steve 2:50 AM [+] (0) comments
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