Andrew Royal

Livejournal all but abandoned now, only a handful of people seem to post to it. Still, it's a good place for lengthy exposition such as I'd like to do today.

Some time last year I started getting indigestion shortly after going to bed some nights. I found that I had to sit up for a while and drink a lot of water for it to subside. It didn't happen much, only when I ate something in the evening, and ultimately seemed to go away, so I didn't think much more of it.

Then I started having trouble swallowing during dinner. Shortly after starting eating I'd feel some food blocked in my throat and have to stop eating for a while as I waited for it to go down. A couple of times it wouldn't go down at all and I had to sprint to the loo to throw it up. As soon as I started to think I should call the doctor it went away again, so again I just left it.

But it got worse. I started doing this kind of retching when I went to bed, and it kept me awake at nights. The day retching turned to vomiting I called the doctor.

First I had a blood test, and nothing was found so I moved on to a gastroscope. This is not something I'd recommend, unless you like the idea of someone thrusting a cable into your duodenum. Thankfully that also turned up nothing, no scarring or lumps which could suggest something really nasty. However the geezer did notice that my lower oesophageal sphincter was spasming. Also, as they initially pushed the camera down my oesophagus I vomited and one of the orderlies questioned when I'd last eaten. The plot thickens.

Next a barium swallow. This isn't as bad as the dreaded barium meal, I just had to swallow a mouthful of the barium solution and the doctor could see the problem straight away. It's a condition called Achalasia, which means that my lower oesophageal sphincter doesn't relax properly after swallowing. Food gets stuck in my oesophagus, which is distending into what the doctor described as a second stomach. Lovely. Apparently no-one really knows what causes it, and the underlying condition can't be cured, but it can be treated for a full symptomatic recovery. I've read different reports on its rarity, from 1 in 20,000 to 1 in 200,000. Either way, it's fairly rare.

Since then I've seen a private specialist and he's referred me on for another test, an oesophageal manometry. It's a bit annoying that as I already know what I've got from the barium swallow test, in fact it could have been inferred from the gastroscopy, though as I understand it they need it so they can do another test after treatment for a comparison.

So what treatment can I expect? It's almost certainly going to be surgery. No-one likes surgery, but by the looks of it that'll sort it all out and I'll be back to normal, so I'm hoping that's what'll happen.

And I'm hoping that'll happen soon. It's a progressive condition, and boy has it progressed. I'm vomiting on average 5 times a day, every meal is a challenge and over the last month I've lost weight at a rate of 1kg a week. Bending over is very uncomfortable, and when you have young children (P.S. I now have 2!) that's something you find yourself doing a lot. On the specialist's suggestion I'm having solids for lunch and only liquids for dinner, and soup got old after 2 days of that. If I do have surgery I'll be on a soft diet for a month, but after that I'm having a f***ing banquet.

What annoys me is that the whole process is ridiculously slow. GP suggests a test, writes to a clinic, they write to you with an appointment, you have the appointment, they write back to your GP with the results, you have to guess if they've received them and call back on the right day. And if you have multiple tests, you keep having to go round this loop again and again, taking about 3 weeks each time. I wouldn't mind so much if I had something minor and stable, but for a progressive condition you want it sorted before it progresses too much, y'know? Over Christmas basically nothing happened for 3 weeks, and only then because I had an extremely bad day and Kath started calling private specialists. I mean, I know it was Christmas, but 3 weeks just to send out a letter? And why is everything done by post in the 21st century? Thankfully now I have gone private, which I'd previously hesitated on due to the excess on health insurance, things are moving a little quicker. But the oesophageal manometry leaflet says I should wait 2 weeks after the test before seeing the specialist. WTF?

Anyways, I'm hoping I'll be able to get the surgery booked in next month and hopefully it'll all be behind me come March. Fingers crossed.

In which Andy attempts to make up for only posting one entry in the last year by explaining something very simple in a needlessly roundabout way

In September we went on holiday to France. Kath's dad's late cousin's wife (I think - she'll hereafter ne referred to as "Linda") owns a house in Monteran, West a bit from Avignon. It's fairly big - 8 bedrooms, 2 kitchens, pool etc. and she lends it to friends and family throughout the summer. Very nice, we had lovely weather, lots of stone floors for Chloe to graze herself on, but this entry isn't a holiday blog.

I'd quite liked the idea of an email free week, but I took my netbook with me to use as a charger for various USB devices and inevitably used it to check my work email. And I'm glad I did, turns out our company was bought out a few days into my holiday, by Hitachi no less. It wasn't quite a case of returning from a holiday to find the sign over the building changed and your pass not working, but still a little disorientating.

Anyway, one of the new perks available to us is a free health check with BUPA. For some reason I was one of the first booked in (are they trying to tell me something?) and that happened last month. The results weren't too surprising, with almost everything's a bit beyond what it should be. My ECG was if anything abnormally normal, but my waist is too fat (should be half your height apparently), BMI is too high, body fat percentage too high, "bad" cholesterol too high, and most worrying of all blood sugar so high they had to check I'd really been fasting. Good fasting blood sugar is below 6 doofers. Above 7 is diabetes, I was at 6.7 which is called Impaired Fasting Glycemia, also colloquially known as pre-diabetes. Not good, but thankfully it's entirely reversible. Key things are to get my waistline down, and cut back on the refined sugar intake.

It had gotten to the stage where I was having a bar of chocolate and a can of Coke every day, damn you subsidised vending machine, so I shouldn't be too surprised that my blood sugar is high. I've gone cold turkey on that, stopped using the sandwich van, started bringing healthier lunch from home, replaced lunchtime crisps with fruit, and started taking a rather brisk 30-minute walk every lunchtime. And in spite of it being Christmas with the inevitable lunches that brings, in spite of visitors always bringing chocolate and cakes which we have to eat up of bin, in spite of too many childrens' parties, I've done pretty well - I've lost 4kg, give or take, I've brought the belt in a notch and it's still loose, and I easily fit into the waistcoat I had to breathe in to fit into last year. I'm also just generally feeling better, I no longer get an afternoon crash where I need some sugar to wake me up. Huzzah!

So now I sit at 84.4kg, down from 88.4. I decided a long time ago that my right weight is a bit below 12 stone, so 75kg is my goal. If I can keep below 85 through Christmas, hopefully I can start heading towards that goal starting January, no doubt be poncing about in my Speedos come summer. It'd be nice if I could fit into my 32 inch trousers again, but let's get real. It's all about willpower - sometimes I feel really hungry and I get weird pains like there's someone inside me taking a pickaxe to my flab. I've acquiesced once or twice, but generally I can distract myself from the craving. I'm doing pretty well on the walks too, I've not missed a lunchtime walk since I started, and I keep telling myself that the day I start making excuses is the beginning of the end, so no excuses. In spite of it being winter I've been lucky with the weather so far, no doubt when the snow starts falling it'll be harder.

I'm finding I have little time to do much at all these days, least of all update the old eljay. First entry of the year and it's mid April? That's the permanent account put to good us that is. As I'm doing some stoppy-starty work at the mo, I'll make a quick update on everything in the gaps.

First little Chloe. If I become one of those parents who never shuts up about their kid, I don't care - she takes up most of my time, so what else should I talk about? She's now 17 months old and it's flown by.

She started walking at 10½ months, which I'm told is on the early side. She'd been standing up and shimmying along things for a while, then one day she walked across the room to me. From there she was walking a few steps then falling over (like Maggie Simpson) for a bit, but quite quickly started walking everywhere. Now she can walk she's got a lot more freedom, so can explore more, do what she wants to do, and entertain herself a bit more. The flip-side is worse bumps and falls, and she's got a lot more wilful. The absolute worst thing was other parents whose kids hadn't started walking, they'd say to their kids things like "Look at Chloe, that's what you should be doing!" which to me sounds awful. How do you react to that? They'll walk when they're ready, but then that's easy for me to say. I just hope I never get that pushy.

She's now sort of talking, but it's hard to say if or when she's made the transition from not talking to talking. She's been doing baby-babble for ages, and sometimes your imagination makes you jump to conclusions. For example, she'll babble something like "Etish!" and I'm wondering if she's trying to say "it is", "what's this?", "lettuce" or "fetish". She definitely says "daddy", "yeah", "up", "down", "duck" and "ear", "ding-dong" is the doorbell, "tick-tock" is a clock or watch, and we think "mino" is her word for "mummy". Every now and again she'll say something very clearly once, but never say it again, for example "shoe" or "butterfly".

The big problem we have with her is shyness. I was a very shy child, so it's possible she's inherited some genetic disposition towards it. She's fine with me, Kath and Premila the childminder, she's warming to the extended family and strangely seems more comfortable with my half, but there's one or two staff at the play 'n' learn that she's inexplicably petrified of. Not sure what we can do about this really. She's normally better if we let her walk over to people in her own time rather than us carrying her to people, so I guess patience is the key.

In other news, I took a week off at the end of March, the old use-up-your-leave-at-the-end-of-the-financial-year chestnut. We took the opportunity to decorate Chloe's play room, in fact our first complete redecoration of a room without that aid of Kath's dad. Near the start of the week we realised we were never going to get much done without some extra help to look after Chloe, so we drafted in my mum (ain't retired parents great?) who turned up on Wednesday. In general there was too little planning, and too much dithering. We decided to keep the ugly dado rail on grounds that removing it would require the plaster to be skimmed, but then Kath rang her dad who reckoned we could make do with just filling in the holes. It's quite scary how much plaster came off wit the dado rail, but in the end we got a pretty smooth finish and you'd barely know the dado rail was ever there (unless you already knew it had been there and knew where to look). Overall it looks pretty good now, just need to mop the floor and move the furniture back. I'm already pondering the next room to do, but before then there's a lot of outdoor painting to do while it's sunny...

Other than that, not a lot to say really. No exciting cooking exploits to tell of, other than making dark chocolate caramel shortbread which was dead easy and gorgeous. I got a PSP for Christmas, but hadn't appreciated quite what a dead platform it is - it's surprisingly hard to get popular titles. I've got Disgaea 2 now, plus eventually got hold of FFT:WotL (buggered if I'm typing out the whole title, though ironically commenting on that is taking more typing time than typing it out in full would have done in the first place, and I'm wondering how much crap I can spout between one pair of parentheses before my abbreviation looks truly ridiculous in contrast) and FF: Crisis Core, so I'm fairly content. Plus I got the first God of War which is fairly entertaining, and a crappy Mario Kart clone that came with it and is bugged to f@#k. Otherwise very little gaming going on, I'm playing Hostile Waters again as Brighty reminded me of it, Fallout: New Vegas sits waiting to be played, and I'm itching for Shogun 2: Total War and Dragon Age 2. TV-wise it's all about the Chuck, The Cleveland Show and my guilty pleasure - Glee. Very little on the film front, we saw Paul on a rare evening off and jolly good it was too.

Royal wedding coming up, don't give two tugs of a dead dog's cock but Kath's talking about going to a street party so Chloe doesn't "miss out". Miss out on what exactly? Mindless conformity and simpering over an anachronistic institution/overrated tourist attraction? I don't think that's something I could grin and bear my way through. I might be able to get out of it with the offer of more painting?

I've been playing a ludicrous amount if Disgaea DS recently. I got Disgaea for the Playstation ages ago, but didn't get all that far. When it was announced for PSP and then DS I thought it'd be the perfect game for mobile platforms - turn-based, can play it in short bursts, can put it down any time. Shame there's no save anytime function, but at least you can just snap the DS shut to save power if you need to stop playing while you're in the middle of something. So I've been playing it on the bus, in front of the telly in evenings, in the kitchen while something's cooking. In total I've racked up over 600 hours on it.

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Crikey, getting down to less than an entry a month here...

I've always liked Star Trek, though never been a rabid fanboy. I've watched the original pilot, large chunks of the original series and the next gen, and almost all of the first couple of series of Enterprise. But I never really got into DS9 and from what I saw of Voyager I really disliked it. I did see a special compiling all the Borg episodes of Voyager and really enjoyed that, but that's because it's the Borg - quite possibly the best villains in any series ever.

As it's based on gut feeling I'm not entirely certain why I've disliked Voyager, but I'm pretty sure it's the crew. It's got to be the worst crew of all the series by some considerable margin. Janeway is the worst captain, she lacks charisma and that raspy voice literally grates. Harry Kim, Tuvok, B'Elanna and Kes aren't particularly bad, just rather insipid. Tom Paris is just a smug pr*ck, though the actor that plays him (Robert Duncan McNeill) now directs and produces Chuck and the like so must be a sound geezer. Do B'Elanna and Paris have a relationship going on? I'm sure they're meant to, but have absolutely zero chemistry. Neelix is particularly annoying, and makes me want to throw things at the telly. Seven of Nine seemed like a cynical way to boost ratings (no, no, no... that skin-tight gimp suit was to help her skin regenerate...), though as she brought some epic Borg episodes with her I can forgive that. Chakotay isn't too bad, in fact I quite like him, but the only real stand-out character is The Doctor who's great. I've loved everything Robert Picardo's done since Inner Space, but this is his best rôle. I think he's my favourite medical officer of the lot, edging out even Bones.

But as it's shown daily on Virgin 1 Channel One, I've started getting into it a bit more recently. Ultimately it's still Star Trek, with its fantastic universe and some great stories. I'm even beginning to warm to the crew a bit more. Though I dislike them individually, Tuvok and Paris make a great double-act. I like Seven's journey, though I'm wondering if she's a bit too much like Data. I'm even beginning to appreciate Janeway's almost maternal captaincy, if not better than other captains it's distinctive I guess. Neelix still pisses me off though, the episode where he got practically killed and had Borg nanoprobes injected into him had me wishing he'd stayed dead.

I went to a wedding a few weeks ago which had a butterfly theme, all of the tables were named after butterflies. Turns out the bride has a thing for butterflies, but turns out that unbeknownst to us she's not a girlie-girl but a sci-fi geek. How cool would it be to have a Star Trek themed wedding? OK, not cool at all. But there's geek-cred in being seated at the Worf table.

Chloe was being ultra-cute yesterday. Whenever we're driving anywhere at the weekends, I usually sit in the back with Chloe and entertain her. She has this cuddly snake thing attached to her car seat, and the snake has various toys attached to it. I held up a turtle toy for her and kept saying "turtle!" For the first time she started trying to mimic the sound. OK, it sounded more like "bubble", but the fact that she's trying is quite pleasing. She didn't have so much luck with "butterfly", but gave it a go.

She's now crawling at breakneck speed, and is getting very good at shimmying along knee-high objects and from one object to another. She can walk holding on to me with one hand, and she sometimes seems to forget that she needs to hold on to something and stands there for a few moments holding on to nothing. I'm sure she'll be walking soon.

End of August/start of September we went on what approximates to our annual holiday. The first week we did a Baby World Tour 2010, then we spent the second week in a cottage in Cromer. It's the first time we've been away with Chloe for more than a weekend, and it was a bit over-ambitious. The boot of Kath's Seat Ibiza Cool could manage a suitcase, pram and a travel cot before it was full and could only take a few plastic bags stuffed into the gaps. The other back seat was piled high with plastic bags containing bibs and such, and random bits and pieces like the invaluable Bumbo™ seat. Chloe didn't like being in a new place every night and found it difficult to sleep, which in turn kept us awake. But towards the end Chloe was much happier and we got the car packing time down to a solid 2½ hours, so we survived.

First stop was Hereford, for Kath's cousin's daughter's 21st. A lot of Kath's extended family was there, including Kath's auntie Dot who'd come down from Scotland, so it was a good chance for them to see Chloe. Hereford itself is quite a nice place, and you can say what you like about Travelodge but I got the best nights' sleep of the entire fortnight there. Then on to Kath's parent's place in Birmingham, where we did pretty much nothing for two days. After that we went to my mum's place for four days, where we spent most of the time seeing the sights of Boston apart from one day in Skegness with my dad. My sister popped in late on Friday night but we had to leave before lunch on Saturday so I didn't see much of her.

Cromer was pretty much what you'd expect from an English seaside town in early autumn. Actually the weather wasn't too bad and we did spend a little bit of time at the beach, but on the last day it chucked it down. Amongst other things we went on a steam train (cos Chloe loves trains, even if it is just the attention from other passengers that she likes), went to an Amazon Zoo (with torrential rain for that authentic rainforest feel), and got some award-winning fish and chips (a seaside essential). We also spent a lot of time in the swimming pool, which Chloe really enjoyed. The beach was fun, though we didn't spend a lot of time there and Chloe kept trying to eat pebbles.

In other news, I made potato gnocchi yesterday and think I finally found the perfect recipe. Put the potatoes back in the pan on a low heat after you've drained them to get rid of moisture? Genius! Pleasing results too. Even Chloe liked them, and she usually doesn't think much of potatoes. I've been watching the Great British Bake Off, salivating and craving to do some baking now. Kath won't let me though, says we're too busy with the monster and vast backlog of housework :( Oh and thank f*** Jas was kicked out before the final, she was possibly the most irritating person in a TV series since Jade Goody, but oh no, they had to bring back the eliminated contestants for the last day and she had a chance to talk sh1t and not know when to shut up once more. Gah. Also I'm replaying Fallout 3 and finding loads of stuff I missed first time round, I've played 500+ hours of Disgaea and have stopped faffing about and started power-levelling, I'm immensely enjoying the new series of Merlin though annoyed that it doesn't come on iPlayer soon enough, and I'm looking forward to the final episode of Chuck tonight.

Quick life type update:

Chloe continues to grow. She's partly weaned now, loves cottage pie, but still has a fair bit of milk especially on bad days. She just started crawling last weekend, and can walk scarily fast if we hold her up. She doesn't really talk, just burbles noises which approximate to language. She sometimes says something which sounds a bit like "hello", I think she's trying to say "daddy" but it comes out "eddie", and she can almost say "duck" (not her favourite animal, but it's easier to say than "giraffe"). She's just generally lovely. Last weekend we got some professional photos taken of her, we get to see how they turned out on Friday.

That's pretty much all there is to talk about. She takes up so much time, to the point where we barely have time for weekly chores let alone home improvement. And we desperately need some home improvement, not least some major baby-proofing, especially since she became mobile.

I've just started back on the C++ again and it's much more enjoyable this time round, as I've got over a lot of the Microsoft bollocks that keeps hindering me so I can concentrate on making it actually do stuff. It's now reached the point where I can extract meshes and render them, which isn't much to show but it's been such a struggle getting to this point I'm pretty chuffed with it. After countless stabs resulting in a blank screen and no idea why, seeing a wireframe comfy chair built out of three separate meshes came as quite a relief. Hopefully it'll now be much easier to extract the UV map, add skin, extract normals and tangents, set up the lighting and bump maps, then extract the bones and start animating...

Crikey, the eljay neglect is getting worse. Time for my yearly football post.

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At last, I have teh internets again!

We've moved house, and we have a slightly bigger baby.

More when I've got over the my-god-it-works!!! joy and read 116 emails (and got back from the pub I was meant to be at 10 minutes ago...)

My netbook came with a shitty nerfed version of Xandros Linux, which I've never particularly got on with, so for a while I've been thinking about replacing it with a different distribution of Linux. Being a bit nervous about rendering it unusable, I wanted to practice on a PC built from spare bits first, but it seems my spares aren't up to much so that's not happened. So the other week I bit the bullet and installed the Intrepid release of Ubuntu using an installer designed for netbooks called Easy Peasy. It's chuffin' brilliant, and my netbook's gone from being the spare internet terminal when someone else is using the desktop to something I use all of the time. ( Collapse )

I've now FINALLY got gcc, gtk+ and a load of OpenGL libraries working, so I can practice my coding on the train. DOSBox is available as a package from the default Ubuntu sources, so it was dead easy to get up and running: ( Collapse )

ePSXe took a bit more work, but the Windows version is a lot of work too. ( Collapse )

But ePSXe hasn't been a great success. I've not got the sound to work yet, though that's just a matter of finding the right plugin, and the controller emulator doesn't seem to like the eeePC keyboard so the arrow keys don't work if you map to them. Hmmm, maybe they were mapped to the alphanumeric arrows...

Worse still, when I upgraded to the latest release of Ubuntu (Jaunty) it broke the OpenGL hardware drivers, so it falls back to "classic" mode which I'm guessing is a software driver, and it's dog slow. So the OpenGL demos have slowed to a crawl, as has ePSXe which was also using an OpenGL graphics plugin, though reverting to a software graphics plugin improved things a little. It's some problem specific to the intel graphics hardware in the eeePC, and it's been fixed for the next release (Karmic), but it doesn't look like it's going to be fixed in Jaunty. It's something in the kernel, so I could just upgrade the kernel, but then would all the old packages work? I think it could really screw up my system. I can't roll back, I'd have to reinstall to go back to Intrepid and I really can't be arsed. So I guess I'll wait until Karmic is out at the end of October, as I'm not too keen on the idea of installing an alpha release.

EDIT: I haven't checked back about the progress of this problem for a couple of weeks. If nothing else, LJ is great for reminding me to revisit things. Searching again, there's now a page on how to revert to the Intrepid Xorg driver. Huzzah!

I also tried installing FFVII through Wine. It actually worked really well... the install process that is. When I tried running the game it didn't like the isos, kept asking me to insert the CD. I can probably get round this with a proper CD emulator, but there's next to no point if I'll just hit the OpenGL problem again.