This Is Not A
BLOG!
Date: 15/12/07
Trudge...
Still here.
It's just that other things have been taking up my time.
I had my annual review with the nurse a week last Monday. Everything was OK, except for the fact that the check-up coincided with my left foot, ankle and shin swelling up again, as they have intermittently since about May this year. I was put on my honour to go and see my GP on the Wednesday. So I did.
I told him about my left hip, which has been giving me discomfort for quite a while. He wasn't convinced that that was what was causing the swelling, so I have to go for a scan in January. Things like this play on my mind, especially during the dark months.
Had to go to Bootle last Tuesday for a workshop on our service request system. This would have been of far greater use to us when the system was brought in over eighteen months ago. As it is, the workshop leader probably learned more from us.
The journey both ways was accompanied by freezing cold weather. You could tell which cars in Wrexham station car park had been left there overnight: their owners were going to need ice-picks to clear their windows. Then my connection from Chester was delayed by about eight minutes, which meant even longer standing in the cold. Even the draught which whistles through the tunnels at Moorfields station in Liverpool was icy.
If this wasn't enough, we were half an hour into the workshop (and I was just starting to get warm), when the powers-that-be decided that it was the time to hold a full-scale fire drill. So that was us out in the car park for nearly half an hour.
The journey back was similarly fraught, in that my connecting train from Bidston was about a quarter of an hour late. Bidston station is a desolate place at the best of times, but even more so when the weather's coming straight out of the Urals. We lost a further five minutes on the journey back, so I didn't get home until after 5:30, having left the house at 7:10.
Got home to find a Christmas card from my old Uni chum Greg Coombs (alias 'Del'). I hadn't heard from him for a couple of years, and had begun to fear that the melanoma he'd suffered from after travelling the Andes without sunscreen a few years ago had returned to consume him. I needn't have worried, although he has now moved to Birmingham.
I finished my Christmas present shopping on Thursday, so that's that done.
Friday meant a convivial couple of hours in the pub with my colleague Derek, our previous boss Dave and our current manager Mick. A nice way to round off the week, even if it did mean that all the flexi I'd made up on Tuesday had been wiped out by the time 3:55 on Friday rolled up.
The rest of my time has been spent on my video transfer project, where I've hit even more snags. Pinnacle Studio 10 has proven to be the crankiest crock of crap I've ever had to work with. I've had to reinstall it three times already because of various bugs and gripes.
I've also had to stop my audio tape transfer project, which I was running on the old machine. I tried to convert the same tape three times, and the .wav file corrupted each time. I think it's time I uninstalled all the programs I don't really need from it and did a severe defrag, as it's clear that 384MB of RAM is having trouble cutting it anymore. I don't want to have to transfer that project over to the new machine because it would get in the way of the video transfer shtick.
So that's you brought up to date. I'm working until Christmas Eve but, for a change, I'm taking the rest of the holiday period off and won't be going back until January 3.
Now playing: Real Synthetic Audio's show for October 1, 2007.
