Irreverence is Justified

Crikey. I always thought that motorbikes who skipped through between 2 lanes of queueing traffic were breaking the law. But apparently not. Sorry, motorbike riders.

Fourth, and last. There’s one on next week but I have a resident’s meeting with my neighbours and, to be quite honest, it will be more worthwhile.

The meeting this week was on pooing and peeing. Believe it or not, we were told how to sit on the toilet when taking a dump. No, I’m not kidding. We also got shown a chart about what different types of poo look like. Again, I’m not joking.

Some of the people in the room really need to go speak to a psychiatrist or psychologist or psycho-analyst; there is a lot of tension being held in and needs to be let out in some way. Even if I didn’t have something else on next week, I doubt I’d go simply because I’m really not getting anything out of it - except for knowing that a guy at my church, who also has MS, was right; don’t bother going to meetings with other people who have MS as they’ll just depress the fuck out of you.

You live, you learn. I’m going back to live life and try to forget about MS for as long as I can.

Am I reading this right?

Adult Stem Cells Offer Relief from Multiple Sclerosis.

Seems too good to be true. One has to wonder how much, if any, of a control group they were working with.

One thing (one of many, that is) that really annoys me about drivers is people trying to skip a queue. There’s a set of traffic lights that I go through on my way home from work, and there are 2 lanes that lead up to them. The outside lane turns right and the left lane goes straight ahead. About 95% of the cars want to go straight on, so what some people do is go up the outside lane and then try to push their way in towards the front of the queue, which works quite a lot as there’s a left hand turn just before the traffic lights.

I’m thinking here that I need to subject you to a crappy graphic that I have made in an attempt to describe this a little easier:

Hopefully you can follow that. The traffic is going from right to left, maybe I should have drawn it the other way around. Oh well, you’re stuck with it. There are 2 junctions with traffic lights on them and a fair few people turn left at junction [1] while hardly anyone goes right at junction [2], so people pile up the right hand lane and attempt to barge in to the left lane between the two junctions.

Today, a woman (it’s rarely a woman who barges in, it’s usually blokes) attempted to barge in when we were driving at about 1mph. Her car was literally 3 inches from my door, and as I had my window down I could easily have touched it with my hand; probably with my elbow, she was so close. And I’d just let a bus barge in in front of me, so it wasn’t as if I was being a complete git and not letting anyone in!

It’s fair to say I was rather upset, as I usually am when knob-ends attempt to push in at this junction. People wouldn’t skive a queue like this in a shop; why do they feel it’s acceptable to do it just because they’re in a car?

Road rage is likely to happen at this junction one day, not necessarily by me, but someone, as I’m not the only one who gets pissed off with this. Go to the end of the bloody queue, fool!

This week it was about diets.

Summary: there’s no evidence about anything to do with diets and MS. Sorry.

Aside from that, we got told to eat healthily and, well, watch a video with Lorraine Kelly. Sigh.

Only half the people turned up this week, compared to full houses the past 2 weeks. I’m starting to see why.

Next week we learn about peeing and shitting. I can only wonder what we might get told.

I used to have a long list of instructions on how to print photographs on an Epson RX500 printer using the Gimp. Then I upgraded the version of the Gimp and changed my printer and those instructions are all bollocks now. So here’s an updated instruction for printing photos, which I heartily recommend you follow:

1. download and install IrfanView ’cause it’s fab

That’s it. It’s unbelievably fast to run and the printing options of it are soooooperb and easy. I thoroughly recommend you get it and give it a go.

It’s free, by the way. For non-commercial use.

I’m clearly in rant mode tonight. Next it’s the turn of bus lanes.

Where I live, almost every single road has one or more of the following:

• speed humps
• bus lanes
• yellow lines

The thing that annoys me the most is bus lanes, and the fact people don’t drive in them when they are not in operation. I honestly believe that people just don’t understand those big blue signs that tell you they are only in force during the rush hour, due to the amount of people who won’t drive in them, no matter what time of day it is.

So I say - you drivers! Drive in bus lanes when they are not in service or I shall make pointy signs with my fingers!

There’s a TV programme on in the UK called Yo Gabba Gabba. The wife and I both hate it as it’s completely anal and annoying in a variety of ways. There’s one thing that really annoys me about it, though, and that’s the dubbing. Not because dubbing is bad, but because the dubbing they have done is spectacularly awful.

Why’s that, you might wonder. Or you might not, but I’ll tell you anyway. It’s because of the accent of the actor who plays the main dude (sorry, I care so little about the programme I don’t know his name) and the accent of the person who’s voice we hear. The accents are so completely different, the sounds the voice make are nothing like the shape of the mouth of the American dude.

You find yourself sitting there, watching this guy talking, but the words are not coming out at the same time as his mouth is moving. Which is what you’d expect from someone who couldn’t be bothered taking pride in their dubbing. But the fact that the American guy is making “Aahh” shapes with his mouth when the English dude is saying “Oohh” noises makes it all the more irritating.

It’s fair to say they should have just left it with the American dude’s voice. But no doubt it’s been dubbed because some minority don’t want so many American programmes on the TV. So they instead buy American programmes and dub them badly. How crap.

I’ve not bothered playing GTA IV today as I can’t be bothered with it freezing on me. Sad, really. Sad for them, that is, the Rockstar North dudes who seem to have dropped a clanger here. If they want decent QA, they can always give me a call. ;)

I was getting sick of that last theme, so I’ve changed it again. This time, I’ve gone for Sleepy Blue and I’ve hardly changed it at all from the default; all I’ve done is add in the tags for each post, removed the “pages” links and removed the author (since it’s always me).

I think it looks sweet. I’ll likely change my mind in a couple of months, but you need a bit of variety in your life.

So I was reading Ding, Dong, the (Feminist) Witch is Dead on Tom’s Big Picture today. It makes for an interesting read. But the comments make for an even more interesting read… I recommend you do, as you’ll probably find a view somewhere in there that you share.

So I’m starting to go through GTA IV again, having deleted my saved games as otherwise GTA IV wouldn’t even start (see previous posts). This time, I’m playing through “Ivan the not so terrible”, which I’ve done before, and I get up to the roof at the part where you’re about to start jumping from rooftop to rooftop and the game just froze there. And I mean completely froze. Couldn’t do anything.

When it freezed up previously, the music kept playing and the image at the bottom telling me it was loading was sort of flashing a little, but not when it froze this time.

Some suggestions have been to turn off the internet connectivity which might resolve the problem. The thing is, the internet is quite important if you want to play online, so that’s not really a very good suggestion for me.

They’d better get this patched, and fast, ’cause this is fecking annoying.

So I decided to try the option of deleting saved games. That did work, but clearly has the effect of having to go right back to the beginning again. Not ideal.

Let’s hope it (a) doesn’t freeze again, and if so (b) there’s a better way of fixing it. Otherwise I’ll be wanting my cash back.

I appear to be one of the unlucky people who are having problems with GTA IV freezing up on my 60GB PS3. It sat at the screen saying “Loading - Rigged to Blow” and it just sat there forever.

So I’ve deleted the game data from the main PS3 interface (I can’t get in to any game menus as the game has just completely stalled), and I’m currently waiting to see whether that has made a difference. I really don’t want to have to delete my saved game data as I’ll have to start all over again, but I believe that’s the next thing to try if this doesn’t work.

Postscript - it didn’t work. Time to delete the saved data; dammit.

A while back, I somehow came across something called Dropbox which seemed relatively cool. As far as I remember it, it allows you to share files between different computers, over the internet, without needing to FTP them or SCP them or any of that shit. And it also keeps a revision history of your files, too, so if you screw one of them up, you can get an older version back.

Anyway, I just thought I’d mention it as I got on the beta trial and so far so good. I’m sticking a 6MB photograph on to it at the moment, which clearly will take a little while to upload, but that’s no big problem.

If you’re interested in finding out more, go here:

http://www.getdropbox.com/

Another week, another MS Group Meeting. This was the second one in the set of five, the main topic of which was to be fatigue.

I managed to arrive on time, well, 10 minutes early, this week. The main speaker was a physio who deals with MS patients in her job. She talked about fatigue, triggers for fatigue and managing it. To be honest, it was all pretty basic stuff. Also, the “triggers” for fatigue were pretty much what you’d expect if you were healthy; doing too much, excessive heat, too much stress, not getting enough sleep. And how to deal with it? Don’t do too much, don’t go anywhere too hot, don’t do shit that gets you stressed and get enough sleep. Wow, I thought - I hadn’t thought of that.

Sheesh.

There was one MS person there who did a hell of a lot of talking about their symptoms. This person is clearly attempting to win the “I’m the most disabled out of the lot of you” prize. No matter what anyone else had in terms of symptoms, she had it, and worse. You should have heard the descriptions of how hard a time she was having walking; sounded like she could hardly stand up, never mind get out the door. So when the physio asked what walking aid she used, the woman admitted she didn’t use one. Now, I don’t consider myself badly off at all, but I had a good mind to reach in to my pocket and hand her my folding-up walking stick at this point. I just figure she was exaggerating pretty much everything, so if that’s how she makes herself feel better, then fair enough. Not what I’d do, but we’re all different.

Did I learn anything? Not a thing once again, but it’s becoming rather interesting just sitting there watching people’s reactions to stuff. I like to sit and watch people, and this is interesting.

Next week it’s diet, I believe. So far I’ve not had any diet issues at all, as far as I can tell, so I’ve not read up a lot on it. I might well learn some stuff next week. And if not, I’ll just people-watch again.

Grand Theft Auto IV arrived today. Goodbye, spare time.

I’m sitting in the courtyard, and the sun is blazing down. It was apparently 23 degrees earlier on today, according to my car. Has Spring finally arrived? The trees opposite our house, which usually are full of leaves by March so that we can’t see through them, are still bare; but there are now buds appearing on them.

Clearly, some people will claim that this is <yawn>due to global warming</yawn>.

I have difficulty understanding how to tell the difference between a flare up of previous MS symptoms, and a new occurrance. As far as I understand it, the strength of the symptoms could well be part of the key, but the difficulty I have is that the only set of symptoms that I’ve had that have been significant was when I had depression about 3 years ago. Everything else has been reasonably minor in terms of overall significance, but definitely noticeable.

So at the moment I am having balance issues. They are certainly as bad as I’ve had in the past, and they’ve been getting worse for the past 4 days. Yesterday I invoked the walking stick, today I’m feeling a little unbalanced even when sitting down. So is this a flare up or another set of symptoms kicking off?

Who knows. I’m not convinced anyone would really be able to tell me either, simply because they base their decision on information that I tell them, and I’m having difficulty putting these things in to words. So I can’t really see much point in worrying about it too much.

It’s typical timing though; the church is having their annual céilidh tonight and we’re going with our older two daughters. Today, of course, I’m having difficulty just walking in a straight line, never mind dancing.

There’s a bit of a fuel crisis up my way at the moment. One of the distributors of fuel is shutting down for a couple of days which, for some reason, means that we have to do without fuel for a month.

You have to assume this is a joke, but apparently not.

Anyway, the local bus company made a bit of a fsck up yesterday. They announced on their web site that they were going to have to cancel all bus services from Monday next week because of a lack of fuel. Their site then apparently went in to meltdown because no-one could believe their fscking eyes.

About an hour later, the message changed to announce that their fuel crisis was averted and everything was OK. That was a mad hour. Bet their phone system went loopy too ;)

If there *is* a fuel crisis, I’ll just have to work from home. What a hardship…