Week of 14th April, 2014

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Monday, 14th April

This is the start of a new work fortnight, but I've booked these two days off - Mum has a hospital appointment tomorrow.

Much TV archiving done, in between clearing more files off stinker. Even with programmatic assistance, that's a slow process. But I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and I will get this done.

Meanwhile, I'm installing necessary programmes on the new Dell, which I've decided to call inspiration, all same the previous one of many years ago. Note: this is not Katy's machine - it's mine. Katy doesn't like my computer naming practices - never has, probably never will.

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Tuesday, 15th April

The roadworthiness certificate (MOT) for my car, Ulysses, expires later this month, as does his Road Tax (officially, Vehicle Excise Duty) I can't renew the tax disc without a current MOT certificate, so I've got to get this done reasonably soon.

I booked the test for today - take Ulysses in first thing (9 a.m.) and wait for the phone call to say "He's fixed", or in the worst case, "He failed. It'll cost UKPx to fix." Meanwhile, I have to chauffeur Mum to the hospital for an echocardiogram - which turns out to be an ultrasonic examination of the heart action. And the examining doctor seemed happy, although he recommended I consult Mum's (and our) GP about Ferocene(sp?) tablets to combat water retention - which I will do tomorrow.

Now to continue migrating stuff to inspiration - including M$ Office 2007. Luckily, this is not an OEM install, so I can just uninstall from stinker, and re-install on inspiration without any licence hassle.

Along about 4 p.m. came the phone call - Ulysses is serviced and MOTd, at a cost of just over UKP200, and I have the magic certificate as proof. I won't need that to actually tax Ulysses - I can do that online, and the website reads the MOT and insurance databases to ensure the car is compliant with relevant laws.

And all my data is removed from stinker. But aolpress, the software I use to maintain these pages, will not install on Win 7. I seem to recall that it wouldn't install on XP either, now I think about it, but since the installation is complete in it's own directory, I may very well be able to just copy it over, and have it work. Meanwhile, I'm typing this on stinker, editing the files on the external drive.

If aolpress doesn't work on a Win 7 machine (and yes, I know it's antediluvian, but it does everything I want) I'm going to need a new editor package. The requirements are: WYSIWYG, free-as-in-beer, must cope with a framed site - this one. Open source licence (e.g. GPL) would be good, but is not required.

A suitable Google search gave me Kompozer and BlueGriffon - neither of which will cope with frames. The W3C's Amaya might work, although I haven't tried it yet, and there are a bunch of html-aware text editors, which may have a preview function. There are also several site editors that run in a web browser - none of which appear to understand frames.

Alternatively, there is anecdotal evidence that aolpress will run in Wine on Linux. But, for the moment, this will do.

But it's 01:30 Wednesday morning, so I'll upload this and go to bed.

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Wednesday, 16th April

Well, aolPress is not quite complete in its own directory - it needs 2 .dlls that normally live in \Windows\system32: namely and to whit; jgpl400.dll and jgdw400.dll. So I copied them from stinker into the aolPress directory on inspiration, and it worked. To prove it, I'm typing this on inspiration. This is good.

Next up: an ftp application, so that I can post. I was using ftpx on stinker, which is freeware but requires registration, which seems silly. Filezilla is well spoken of, so I'll try that.

<pause>

And AVG reckons the installer (downloaded from the home site) has malware in it. I'm reasonably sure that's a false positive, but I'll look at something else.

It turns out that Win 7 (and Win XP before it) has a built-in ftp client, hidden under the "Map Network Drives" menu option. Take the "connect to a Web site to store files" option and follow the wizard. You will need the ftp site address, your username and password. Enter them as prompted. The ftp site will then show as a mapped drive in Explorer.

You can drag-and-drop files either way (to or from) but the Win 7 "Calculating required time" prompt will be its usual awkward self, especially if you're updating a file, rather than saving one in the first place.

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Thursday, 17th April

Another hospital visit today. This one is to the consultant who has charge of Mum's case after her fall. And the MRI results from last week seem to suggest that there is evidence of arterial narrowing in the visual cortex (at the back of the brain) which is likely the cause of Mum's occasional visual hallucinations. It's not something he's worried about, though.

He's ordered a nerve conductivity test (at another hospital, it's not done locally) and a 'carotid massage' to see if there's a physical symptom for the occasional slowness of heart action that was shown up by the 24 hour monitoring of her heart. This slowdown may be exacerbated by the Propanolol tabs Mum takes (for a reason which now escapes me, but is probably related to her most recent hip replacement) because this medication has a known side-effect of retarded heartbeat.

In case you think I'm harping on Mum's travails, remember she's 93,and these comments may be of use to someone in a similar situation. After all, the developed world's population is getting steadily older, on average, so more people will suffer such age-related problems.

There's one good result from all this, though - in general, absent such things as marginally successful hip replacements, Mum is doing remarkably well for her age.

I've dumped the dead HP LCD monitor at the local Recycling Centre, since the Samsung is working fine. And, in order to keep e-mail working, I've copied my mail and news archives back to stinker, so he's still doing that duty. Nothing else, though, inspiration is doing everything else.

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Friday, 18th April

Good Friday

Back to work today, on 12s. Not that there will be much in the way of short-form material - it is Good Friday, a Bank Holiday in the UK, so the 5-day weeklings won't be in.

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Saturday, 19th April

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Sunday, 20th April

Easter Sunday

Jane and Katy return from the States this morning. Their plane is expected to land at about 11:20 or so, after an overnight red-eye flight from Washington, DC.

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