a view through my own eyes

So 48 hours post op now. Yesterday afternoon felt pretty good until my eye started to ache.

Painkillers last night sort of helped until I woke up in the night with some rather weird dreams which left me in a rather confused state. Thankfully Sirius was his friendly self which seemed better than waking up mrspao and disturbing her as she really needed her sleep.

The GA has worn off, I know this as I can feel my eye (it hurts), I have nausea and I can feel down my throat where an airline was placed so I could breathe during the op (not mentioned the last bit before as there is only so much freakery that mrspao can take at any one time).

So now just gently dozing in the main, peering at email periodically as it keeps me in contact with my friends and listening to the radio.

Is what the other first 8am booked patient said as Mrspao and I settled down in the waiting area.

Mrspao was not impressed and went for a walk.

I think you get the tone of the nervousness felt by the other lad who was also being done that day as that was the tone that he generally carried on with, full of horror stories (we all have some about eye stuff I guess) and peculiar attitudes. When the nurse booked him in and asked whether he had transport arranged to go homewards he demanded that the hospital supply patient transport or a bed as walking back home was just not going to happen. I could tell that the staff were going to love him. The nervous energy seemed to radiate from him, now I am not saying by any means that I was at quite my most casual and laid back – but I don’t think I was too far from it.

After an hour of final-pre-op stuff they hauled him in to be knocked out. At which point they informed me that they were going to do me first but it was in everyone’s interest to just get him out of the way where he couldn’t wind us up and the other patients coming in and out to sort out initial pre-op stuff, so I would have to wait for a couple of hours. That was fine by me, I settled down with my book. Amusingly when they did my blood pressure and pulse, my BPM was back down to 59 from the 74 registered a couple of days previously at the pre-op appointment – so I must have been more relaxed. I certainly felt it.

I won’t go into the details of all and sundry, but at one point to give mrspao something to do instead of peering at the seed catalogue and knitting they asked her to put the pressure stockings (only knee high) on me. This led to much merriment from the other patients (mostly elderly cataract patients) as I announced that was I only used to Mrspao taking my clothes off of me.

So op done, still somewhat rather spaced out from legitimate use of heroinopiate based drugs, but who is complaining? The eye is sore which is hardly unexpected and I have a shield and pad over it at the moment which I have to take off today when I start putting the eye drops in. So a picture may appear later if it is suitably impressive looking.

At the moment, no lifting, carrying, bending, looking down or washing up for the next few days. Then back for a post op session on Thursday.

Back at the beginning of December I was booked in for more surgery on the eye (steroid induced cataract op and removal of a granuloma on one of the muscles from the squint op) and was told that it should be done in 18 weeks in accordance with Government targets. Accordingly this mean that the operation had to be completed by mid April at the latest.

Two weeks ago I had a regular appointment about my eye and that very day I woke up with again a very red eye. So in terms of timing it could not be better. Consultant takes a look and say that although the op is booked to be done in due course he is getting it bumped up the list as the granuloma is looks like it could burst soon and that will not be pretty.

Since then I have called the waiting list people for the eye unit a few times only to get no answer, called the consultant’s secretary to be told that she cannot get hold of the appropriate person either but will keep trying every few days. Sigh.

Wednesday out of curiosity I call the waiting list people and actually manage to get hold of the right person who manages they eye operation lists told that they know nothing about this being urgent and it will be done in due course so by mid April and they will let me know when a date has been booked. Grrrr.

Two minutes later I am on the phone back to the secretary and explain that the waiting list people are around, so she takes my mobile number and promises to call back once she has ‘had a word’. Five minutes later she calls back and tells me that I will be done in two weeks time on the 4th of Feb and a letter confirming that will be in the post that day.

There are times when I am really glad that I have a particular phone number.

A couple of weeks ago, mrspao’s laptop died much to the annoyance of mrspao as it was full of her photos and stuff. Most of which were backed up elsewhere – but some were not. Investigation revealed that there was a disk error, whether just filesystem corruption or something worse was unknown at the time as the laptop failed to boot.

After trying to boot in ‘target mode’ making the laptop an expensive firewire disk and mounting it on one of my Macs – revealed that something was seriously wrong as the filesystem failed to mount. A rummage round for the AppleCare CD for my laptop revealed a bootable CD that boots into TechTool – this at least recognised the disk and reckoned it could restore around 25% of the disk but not which bits of the disk. It also confirmed physical failure on the disk. So we abandoned that plan and kept it as a last resort.

At this point it was time for some serious Googling – this revealed that the tool for Mac disk maintenance is called Disk Warrior. So given the cost and balancing it against the worth of the data (priceless kitten pictures) we ordered a copy.

A day or so later it arrived, turns out that you get a bootable CD that boots a very limited version of OSX with customised disk drivers that bypasses the usual filesystem drivers and can read your disk directly, so we set the thing going. An hour or so later a report is generated confirming that there are physical errors on the disk, but also usefully providing a file browser so you can rummage round and see exactly what is available. In this case mrspao’s data was all accessible, so connecting an external USB drive which automounted and then copying the files off through the file browser (no not the Finder as this is not even running) mrspao’s data is all saved.

Phew, and I become a hero husband.

In addition to this Disk Warrior when installed on the native machine – defragments an HFS+ Journalled volume, fixes up permissions and broken plist files which on my own laptop has improved disk performance no end.

At the end of the day Disk Warrior is not a cheap bit of software but it did do exactly what it claimed to and has proven worth every penny. Overall I am fairly certain that it was more cost effective to purchase and do the work myself (of which there was not a lot) than sending the laptop off to a service centre. I cannot recommend Disk Warrior highly enough.

It has been an odd few months, yup nearly three months since I last blogged and to be honest I just haven’t felt like bothering. No not like that, I am not depressed or anything like that I just really have had no interest in blogging. The same to be honest can be said for taking photographs as well.

There have been a couple of occasions when I nearly deleted the blog altogether but decided not to as I am aware that it gets read from time to time with people looking for cornea transplant related things, so probably best to keep it if it helps get someone through the uncertainty etc.

So time to catch up a bit.

Sam and I went to Paris for a weekend, I was ill – the first clue was I didn’t order beer with my lunch, the second was I didn’t eat my lunch. Come the evening I had a temperature, fever, and ached everywhere. Later that same evening I was hallucinating (I am not saying what!) and spent half the night in the bathroom. Returning home the following day was survivable (obviously), and further investigation when Sam got ill on the Monday revealed that we both had swine flu and that is despite my best efforts at eating bacon sarnies.

A close friend who is deaf moved in for a month and had a cochlear implant, she can now hear for the first time in over twenty years – neither Sam, myself or most of her work colleagues have ever been able to have a conversation with her before. Utterly astonishing.

In the last three months we did get a kitten, the black one called Sirius, Minerva his sister turned out to be a brother with lung problems so Regulus is no more. Sirius however is an utter bundle of fun and makes the other cats look so old. I think tomorrow will be Christmas tree day, so no fragile ornaments on the tree this year.

Work has been crazy busy, it has been a year since I changed job and I have no regrets about leaving one university for another. The entire DNS infrastructure over our four sites was swapped on my first anniversary to complete phase one of a project, the DHCP service over the sites gets completed in early January – so nothing important that could break almost everything should it go wrong. Kinda hoping for teflon coated trousers for Christmas.

George has been mostly good on the whole, this had an infection/virus that turned the eye red overnight but that is being treated now and surgery is being booked to sort out a couple of other issues with the same eye. The week has been stressful with George and now it is time just to flomp.

The electronic part of the Enigma-E has been completed (thank you mrspao) and worked first time (yes I do have pictures), with luck I will soon have time to start building the case for it. The Enigma-Uhr is not working though and the battery is flat in my multimeter so this will have to wait until I have been to Maplins (dangerous) which has just this week opened locally (yay) next to a KFC (very very bad).

My aim to read a book a week this year was scrapped due to apathy, but now is gaining a head of steam, I will make up a list at some point to see quite how bad it it was this year.

More can be found over here.

So this week at work has been booked in for the last month or so as time to migrate the OS X Open Directory from the Tiger Xserves onto the Leopard Xserves and a whole load of other work in the grand scheme of having a unified OS X desktop service comparable to the Windows service.

After Plan A for the migration went to pieces, we dropped back to Plan B (the Apple recommended way) and had to live with resetting user passwords back to defaults, which was easily scripted (dscl for the command line junkies) but we wanted to leave the passwords as is as it it the nice thing to do. Incidentally Plan A involved taking a manual LDAP dump, a password dba dump, munging the encryption keys and then doing a fiddle to get the passwords imported and Kerberised – so naturally it didn’t work. Anyway Plan B was successful so all is good in the world.

Then the RAID battery died and things got interesting, so I phone AppleCare – yes no problem we can send out a new battery for a d-i-y job but we want a credit card details in case you don’t return the faulty parts.

Errrr no

Alternative is to send an engineer who will do the work and take the knackered bit back.

Yup, that will do.

An hour later I get an email from Apple: sorry but we can’t send an engineer as you are more than 40 miles from London, but we will send the parts for free.

Sigh.

But it turns out that the local Apple Service site will send an engineer out under AppleCare for Xserves.

Result.

So why on earth did Apple themselves not tell me that when I phoned?

PS: Snow Leopard is really rather shiny.

If we happen to get his kitten…

…she will be called Minerva McGonagall.

If we get this one, it will be probably be called Sirius.