a view through my own eyes

Over the last few months mrspao and I have been watching various drama productions on TV. Some of these were made or set in the 1970s, the other evening whilst we were watching Smiley’s People (excellent dramatization of John LeCarre’s book by the way), I said that when I was a kid we had a grey one of those, but had hankered after a red one!

At work today mrspao came round to my office and placed the following on my desk:

This is now in my room at home.

Fantastic.

Thankyou mrspao.

When we moved house on the twenty second of February in the year of our Lord two thousand and seven, mrspao phoned BG to let them have the gas meter readings of the old house and the new, this was so they could bill us correctly.

Since we have been here we have had several “welcome to your new home” letters, a couple of utterly incorrect bills along with a couple of “since you have not paid we are going to cut you off” letters.

Mrspao has phoned them several times, in each case spending up to a couple of hours on the phone trying to explain that yes we have moved, confirm our bank account details for direct debits, yes its a newish house that has gas, given the serial number of the gas meter as apparently the house does not exist and torn her hair out in the process.

Apparently they have also read our non existent meter – so someone has been trespassing as well as it is on the side of our house in a garden with two locked gates and a six foot high wall…

After the success with my efforts with Canterbury City Council I took it upon myself to phone BG myself as mrspao had had enough.

They explained that their computer systems were having issues and that thousands of bills were being sent out in error along with final demands. They also confirmed that they do have our details and that a payment had been taken by direct debit the day before (mrspao checked on the internet banking – and yes they had), they also apologised and said that they would send out a correct bill in the near future.

This took around ten minutes – I think that mrspao was going to kill me at this point – perhaps I should have held onto the phone for a couple of hours.

Yesterday seven letters arrived from British Gas, welcoming us to our new home, bills and account closures and people wonder why I call them Gitish Bas.

The Lord alone knows what is going on now.

Well after the pleasure of phoning the local council a few weeks ago about council tax bills and summonses a letter arrived at the weekend.

The letter confirmed the correct amounts that were due as well as the direct debit details for monthly payments. Exactly as we wanted from the very beginning.

A couple of days ago mrspao received an email from the council confirming the above and stating that they will not be taking us to court.

No sign of an apology though – I feel that a letter to the local free newspaper is in order.

Its catch up time on the books as I finished this weeks ago.

A secret Government research facility dealing with chemical weapons has been broken into and the Satan Bug has been stolen!

Action and adventure abound in this thriller and its all good fun, however this is by no means in the same league as Where Eagles Dare, Ice Station Zebra or the Guns of Navarone by the same author.

Its readable and passed a few hours of my time but has since been sent to a jumble sale.

Nuff said.

Last night at around eleven mrspao went to bed, still being awake I flicked the channels to see what was on. BBC Four had a Genesis concert on. I decided that would do as I wanted to do other spodish things at the same time.

As I sat there with the music on loud (can do that in this house without disturbing mrspao ), I started to hope that Genesis would play some “old” tracks such as In the Cage or Afterglow, then as the wonderful Home by the Sea was being performed it occurred to me that the “new” tracks being played were recorded in 1986 and that they were twenty years old.

I don’t know why, but I suddenly felt old.

Creeping up the blind side, shinning up the wall
stealing through the dark of night
Climbing through a window, stepping to the floor
checking to the left and the right
Picking up the pieces, putting them away
something doesn’t feel quite right

Help me someone, let me out of here
then out of the dark was suddenly heard
welcome to the Home by the Sea

Coming out the woodwork, thru the open door
pushing from above and below
shadows but no substance, in the shape of men
round and down and sideways they go
adrift without direction, eyes that hold despair
then as one they sign and they moan

Help us someone, let us out of here
living here so long undisturbed
dreaming of the time we were free
so many years ago
before the time when we first heard
welcome to the Home by the Sea

Sit down Sit down
as we relive our lives in what we tell you

Images of sorrow, pictures of delight
things that go to make up a life
endless days of summer longer nights of gloom
waiting for the morning light
scenes of unimportance, photos in a frame
things that go to make up a life

Help us someone, let us out of here
cos living here so long undisturbed
dreaming of the time we were free
so many years ago
before the time when we first heard
welcome to the Home by the Sea

Sit down Sit down
as we relive out lives in what we tell you
let us relive out lives in what we tell you

Sit down Sit down
cos you won’t get away
no with us you will stay
for the rest of your days – Sit down
As we relive our lives in what we tell you
Let us relive our lives in what we tell you

Since we moved house mrspao and I have been actively trying to pay our council tax.

Mrspao phoned the council before we moved to let them know the moving date so things could be sorted out. On the day we arrived there was a letter from the council with a statement for amounts owing etc. It was utterly wrong.

Mrspao went on a crusade to sort this out and has spent many hours on the phone getting details correct and has been assured that the previously set up direct debits would carry over. You would think that this would sort matters out.

But no, altogether now we have had nine council tax bills of differing amounts, two final demands for payments which we have paid and yesterday two courts summons.

Today I phoned the council as I want to get this sorted out, so I phoned and explained what had been going on and asked why this was so enormously fouled up. They were not totally sure. At that point being annoyed I said:

“To be quite honest, considering I now have at least nine bills for different amounts and two summonses I am quite happy to go to court and pay for a good solicitor to come along particularly since we have been trying to pay via direct debit and actually do want to pay the bloody thing, I suspect that any magistrate given the evidence that we have will tell the council to shove it up your arse. Then I will take out a civil court action against the council to reclaim the charges.”

” Ah yes I see your point.”

Now that they have new direct debit details and will be confirming them, they should also be sending a letter of apology.

Yeah right. I expect I will be blogging some more about this.

Recently I bought myself a new computer, this is I think; the first new computer that I have personally owned paid for with my own money. When I was a kid my brother and I had a ZX81 and a year later a ZX Spectrum. I have had PCs over the years, but none from brand new and usuall cobbled from bits begged or borrowed and even the have had upgrade after upgrade. However my MacBookPro is all mine.

I have been using Macs in various incarnations for the last few years very happily, I also use Windows (in various versions), Unix (FreeBSD and Solaris) and Linux (Ubuntu). However I am happiest with my Mac it does pretty much what I need and I am not at all religious about operating systems or the equipment that they run on.

But there is a major flaw, no matter what Steve Jobs or any other Apple evangelist will tell you, iPhoto sucks big time compared to Google’s Picassa. Yes they are both lightweight photo management software but really Picassa wins hands down and does not explode if you have more than ten images in its library. Yes Photoshop would be nice but unless I suddenly become a student then I cannot justify the expense of a licence.

So with Macs now being Intel based and being pretty much a standard PC under the hood, Apple gave us Bootcamp so my MBP can now run Windows or MacOSX by partitioning and dual booting the disk.

However running Windows on a Mac just feels wrong, it does though run incredibly well on this laptop but with the spec I would expect it to.

Thankfully the guys from Vmware are beta testing Fusion, which provides an emulated PC on the Mac so MacOS and Windows can run simultaneously. Add in to that the new Unity feature of Fusion that was released last week, I can now run Picassa on my Mac desktop with only the Picassa window visible and not the whole PC. To top this off and make the whole lot usuable for me is that I can still keep my photos on Mac filestore and share the folder to Windows like a network share, so the whole lot is pretty much seamless.

Its sick, its silly but it is very bloody impressive and works very well.

This will do me for now as it works really well, performance is absolutely fine. Of course it would be better if Google release Picassa natively for the Mac or I become a student.

Well back to the cornea consultant yesterday and another two stitches come out, apparently the others are still nice and strong so we don’t need to worry about them going brittle and snapping yet.

Phew – I really did not fancy having them all out at once, having two out at a time is quite enough thankyou very much.

So once again, back on the antibiotic drops 3 times a day for a week and the steroids for three weeks.

Earlier though I saw the orthoptist who measured and monitored my visual tracking, we then played with prisms to try and force my eyes to look in the same direction at the same time so we can guage whether I will suffer from double vision should they be straightened out.

Eventually she advised me that she will make me an appointment to see the consultant who specialises in squint operations.

So in early August I see the consultant and the orthoptist to repeat the measurements. With waits as they are at the moment I can expect to be under the knife within six months and to have the pleasure of looking like a panda for a few weeks afterwards.

Erk!

Today I noticed a crack in the bottle of antibiotics – arse. So I phoned the chemists and explained I have enough for tonight but not after that. Apparently they will get them delivered to me tomorrow morning. We will see.