The Witching Hour…

“The Witching Hour” is the first of 3 books in the “Lives of the Mayfair Witches” series by Anne Rice. The later books in the “Vampire Chronicles”, especially “Blackwood Farm”, had links with this series.

Let’s start by saying, this is a seriously big book. I’m not the quickest reader, so it was quite a daunting prospect, but the events of the last few days have left me with more time on my hands.

The book traces the history of a family of witches and their ghostly companion. The story starts 300 years ago in Scotland and concludes in the present day in New Orleans. It skips between each era quite a bit, but is drawn together by the story of the current generation. A pretty cool story and a good introduction to the family…

Cheers

Tim…

Refunds…

About a month ago I went to a cashpoint (ATM machine) to get out £50. Two days later I seemed to be missing £50 from my wallet and couldn’t figure out where the money had gone. After some thought, I realized the only explanation was that either I had left the money in the machine, or dropped it before putting it my wallet. I phoned the bank, who requested an audit from the company who managed the cashpoint.

It turns out I had left the cash in the machine, and after 30 seconds it had been sucked back and placed in the purge tray. So I’ve had £50 credited to my account. Cool!

Just got a tax bill, a national insurance bill, I’ve got to get my car taxed and serviced and Christmas is very close, but I don’t care because I got my £50 back! 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

PS. The knee is doing good. I think I might go back to work next week…

Life Update…

Well, the whole knee thing has proved a little more problematic than I thought. I’m not getting any pain and I can walk OK, but if I stay upright for too long it starts to swell, so I have to spend quite a bit of time on my back with my leg up, preferably with ice on it. This makes working from home practically impossible. I’m checking things intermittently, but I can’t really do anything useful.

The boredom of daytime TV is starting to get to me. I’m switching between TV, DVDs, reading and checking up on work. Never mind. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

I’m still alive…

Just to let you know, the operation on my knee went well. There is less pain now than there was before, which is cool. I’ve got to keep myself from getting excited and using it too much or I might end up delaying the healing process.

My pulse rate was about 59 until they said they were going to put a cannula in my hand, then it shot up to 75 :). The last time I had a cannula it took 5 attempts to put it in, but this one went in with no problems. I don’t remember anything about the anesthetic. I have total memory loss from just after the cannula was put in until the time I woke up, so I’ve lost 5-10 minutes somewhere. I was out cold for just over an hour.

When I came round I chatted to the nurses for a while, read for about 1 hour, had some food and went home. So the whole process, from first consultation to now was less than 2 weeks. Pretty cool!

I can walk fine already, but I have to be careful for a few days. I’m working from home for the next 2 weeks. I have to start physio in 2 weeks and they think it will be sorted in 6 weeks. Here’s hoping.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. Thanks for all the messages of support.

My Knee…

I’ve had a dodgy knee for the last couple of years. Anyone who knows me will tell you I’m always harping on about it. During the last six months it’s degenerated quite a bit, so I finally went off to see the surgeon to get an expert opinion. To get technical for a moment, it seems I have a buggered cartilage.

There is a lot more damage than I anticipated. I guess it’s degenerated over the last two years. Of course, I’m now having waves of regret and constantly telling myself, “You should have gone and seen him sooner, then the damage wouldn’t have been so bad!”

I should find out today when I’m going in for the operation. It should definitely be within 2 weeks, and may be within a couple of days. It’s only keyhole surgery, but I have to have a general anesthetic, which I’m not happy about. So after the operation I will have to be mega-careful with it for a few days, and can’t drive a car for 5 days. Provided I do as I’m told, I should be back to 90-95% within about 6 weeks, and that is about all I can hope for. Quite a large section of my cartilage is going to disappear, so I’m quite nervous about the longterm effects. The plan is I should be walking fine for Christmas though…

I’m going to shut up now because the more I think about it the more nervous and annoyed I get. I was sure I was indestructible! 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Piñata…

It was my nephews 5th birthday party yesterday. One of the highlights was a Piñata which was tied on to a heavy wooden curtain rail. This thing was getting hit by an assortment of people between 2 to 76 years of age. Eventually, I decided to have a go and gave it a pretty good knock… Possibly to hard… In addition to smashing the piñata, I also managed to knock the curtain rail off the wall. Of course the kids didn’t notice this, they just dived for the sweets.

I guess I won’t be invited to join in later this month when my other nephew has his birthday… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Forward to the Past…

I’ve recently been asked to do some work on some 8i instances and it got me to thinking. When a new release roles out you instantly see all the new bells and whistles, but many of the minor improvements go unnoticed. By the same token, when you’ve been working with newer versions for a while, you forget how many things you are using that were minor improvements on previous versions.

I started working on this 8i stuff and found a bunch of my scripts didn’t work as they relied on columns that were added to DBA and V$ views in 9i and 10g. That wasted some time.

I always use DBMS_XPLAN to get my execution plans, but it’s not present in 8i, so I had to start using utlxpls.sql, but it wasn’t quite what I wanted, so I had to modify it a bit. That wasted some more time.

I use some GUI tools for getting an overview of stuff, but some of these were not as backwards compatible as I would have liked. That wasted even more time.

The net product is, I ended up taking the best part of a day doing stuff that should have taken me a few minutes.

Now I like all the latest Oracle features as much as the next guy, but some of the most useful improvements don’t necessarily make it to the press releases. This experience makes me even more keen to see 11g. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…