Good luck Sailor

 Personal  No Responses »
Jul 292010
 

Now this is a slightly more hopeful post than I thought I would be writing today. On Tuesday our new kitten Sailor started acting strangely. He wasn’t eating and was very sleepy. I took him to the vets but they couldn’t find anything wrong with him so they sent me home and said to see how he was the next day. The next day he was worse. Luckily I already had the day booked off so I could keep an eye on him. I booked him another appointment at the vets. I had to move the appointment forward as he was getting pretty bad at this point. His back legs had gone floppy and he was just lying on his side staring into space.

The vet decided to take him in for tests. A hour or so later I got a call informing me Sailor’s kidneys weren’t working properly. For some reason they weren’t filtering correctly. The vet was fairly sure he wasn’t going to make it. They kept him in for more tests and  night crew called us to ask if they could perform a few treatments that might help. We, of course, agreed. We went to sleep last night fairly sure that we would wake up to a call telling us he had died in the night.

The morning came and the phone rang. Sailor had made it through the night. He was a bit happier, his bladder was filling which was good and he had even eaten. His blood, however, was still seeing no improvement. Jordan and I decided not to go into work for the morning as we could see us having to make a decision about his future. Later in the morning the vets called again saying they had tried everything and couldn’t think of anything else that might help but they could refer him to a specialist.

So within an hour we were on the way to The Royal Veterinary College near Potters Bar with a very poorly kitten. At the hospital we handed Sailor over and spoke with the vet. He wasn’t quite as pessimistic as the local vet but he was still very cautious. His blood contained a huge about of potassium. Apparently too much potassium can stop a heart instantly so he could just drop dead. They are keeping him in for 5-7 days. This is at a cost of two to four thousand pounds. Luckily the 14 days cooling off period for our insurance ended on the Monday. A day later and we wouldn’t be able to help him so much.

So we are waiting to see how things go. There is still a chance things could go horribly wrong but we are a little more hopeful than last night. Even if he doesn’t make it through we know we have done all that we can.

Wish him luck.

Fat

 Health, Personal  No Responses »
Jul 192010
 

So I think I’m at a bit of a junction in my life. On the one hand I could keep being lazy and eating badly and end up with a bit of weight and health issue in the near future or I can do something about it now.

I’m fairly realistic. I know that I’m not going to get a gym membership and go three times a week. I’m also not going to stop going to restaurants or having half a large Dominos pizza and lots of beer on Friday night.

This leaves me with slightly fewer options but I don’t think it means instant failure. Lifehacker posted these tips recently which aim to get a little more exercise into daily life. I personally like the idea of parking further away. Jordan already gets annoyed that I do this a lot at Tesco so I might as well start at work. There is a pretty huge car park at work too so it should actually add a fair bit of walking to my day.

Tonight Jordan and I went for a bike ride. We only went for five miles which isn’t really that far on a bike but at least it’s something. We have decided to do this a couple of times a week and hopefully we will actually keep this up if we’re both doing it. The only issue comes in winter when both of us be very reluctant to venture out into the cold and rain.

I also have a friend that wants someone to do weights with. I suppose this could be a good opportunity to actually gain some upper body strength – something I lack to a embarrassing level. It’s just that I find the idea of lifting heavy things for an hour or so incredibly boring.

This is my main problem. I don’t enjoy sports. It probably doesn’t help that neither do many of my friends. I’m sure if we got out and played something it might be quite fun but it’s difficult to rally everyone together. I enjoy walking but that doesn’t really burn that many calories. What I do enjoy is reading, watching films and fiddling about on the computer. All things I can do happily from my sofa.

I’m hoping that writing this down will commit me psychologically to doing a little more. I don’t want to be someone that complains about my weight and doesn’t do anything about it. I’ve done that for long enough. I know I’ll never be skinny. I enjoy beer far too much for that. I just don’t want to be so big it’s damaging my health. I do that enough with the booze

Sailor boy

 Personal  No Responses »
Jul 132010
 

Last Friday we picked up our second cat. We originally replied to the advert about him a couple of months ago, just after he had been born, so we’ve been waiting to get him for a while. The advantage of getting in touch with the owner so early is that we get pictures of him as a very young baby.

It didn’t take him long to settle in once we got him home. He was running round like a mad man within a few minutes. It wasn’t long until he was crashed out on the bed. We’ve named him Sailor after Nicolas Cage’s character in the David Lynch film ‘Wild at Heart’.

Over the last few days we have been slowly trying to introduce him to our other cat Fritz. Fritz is a little confused by the situation. He’s given Sailor a good bat with his paw a couple of times but that’s really to be expected. The vet reckons he’s just showing dominance. Lets hope so. We have decided that if things don’t work out within a few months we might have to look into alternatives. But I doubt that will happen.

Events like this just prove to me that Jordan and I should never have children. Jordan was trying to tell people that looking after him was just like looking after a new born baby. Jordan would be in for a shock if she had children…

Learning Perl

 Geek, Programming  5 Responses »
Jul 012010
 

In February I started an Open University degree in Computing. During my first module I had to learn some basic Javascript for a couple of assignments. I have been wanting to learn some programming for ages now but as usual it got left by the wayside with the new job and life in general. That is until it was forced upon me by my studies. It didn’t take me long to pick up the code in course materials and I ended up finishing the two Javascript assignments two months early as I just had so much fun with it.

As I had two months free before my course caught up with me I decided I’d look at starting to learn another language. I asked around and was suggested Perl by Jordan’s step dad, Dave. He’s fairly biased due to the fact that he is huge Perl evangelist but I thought I may as well as there is a huge amount of free material around and the Perl community seem like a very fun group.

I started off reading a few chapters of Beginning Perl by Simon Cozens. Whilst it had the definite advantage of being free I felt that the style didn’t really suit my learning. It was also in .PDF format and I am too cheap and environmentally conscious to print out 400 pages so it wasn’t the most convenient learning resource. Preferring to have a book I can carry around sans computer, I ventured online and bought Learning Perl published by O’Reilly.

This book felt like a much better match for me. Over the last few weeks I’ve been reading it in my lunch breaks and for an hour or so after work. I’ve been through it once and I’m just going back round and going over everything again to make sure everything gets stuck in. Of course I don’t think that I’ll be able to remember everything straightaway but I think reading the book through  two or maybe three times will stand me in good stead for the next step.

I actually really enjoyed my first go through the book. I found myself getting excited about what the next chapter would bring and the sense of achievement that comes from figuring out how to complete each of the exercises makes you want to charge through. The pace is excellent. I’m fairly techie but my programming knowledge leaves a lot (not alot) to be desired and I never felt like I was being left behind. A few passages might have had to be read twice but I put that down to my lack of experience with the Unix command line in most cases.

From here it looks like I’ll be moving on to Intermediate Perl which is the most logical step. Once that’s done I’m curious about looking at the Perl DBI module which allows Perl to talk to databases. As I’m training to be a database administrator at the moment I think that tool may just come in handy one day.

It’s really exciting to have such a huge amount of potential knowledge out there to learn and explore. My only regret it not trying this out earlier. Things might have been very different had I actually put the effort in as a teenager…

Anyway… onwards!