From GenderAnalyzer:
We think http://www.valdobson.co.uk/blog/ is written by a man (75%).
Went around the Co-op this afternoon for a few things. Absorbed in the cleaning section, it took me a few moments to recognise the song that was being played on the store radio – The Rolling Stones with Let’s Spend The Night Together. Instantly I flashed back forty years, to hot, crowded rooms rank with the smell of dope and patchuli, “I’m off my head and my mouth’s getting dry”, swaying bodies, stale beer, “I’m high, But I try, try, try “, the promise of thrilling illicit fumblings in dirty sheets, “Oh my, my, my, my, my Let’s spend the night together “….
Then I came back. To a small Scottish supermarket. Four decades later. Standing in the cleaning products aisle and wondering if I should get some more cream cleaner for the bathroom.
And wondering why the hell that song was being used as background music in a bloody supermarket; I suddenly felt like somebody had got hold of my teenage diary and started reading it out over the intercom.
I headed for the checkout, furiously.
“Live like Ann Frank in a lovely Amsterdam attic”.
Entire top floor apartment located just opposite the Anne Frank house.
A very nice location, Dam square 5 minutes walk and all the major attractions, restaurants, and night life within walking distance. The Jordaan area is home to many students, artists, and young professionals. This lively and picturesque area is known for its restaurants, night life, specialty shops, and cultural attractions such as the Anne Frank House and The 9 streets, 9 small streets selling lots of items you will not see elsewhere.
Anne Frank apartment has a small roof patio at the back.The apartment comprises 2 rooms, 1 large and 1 small….
Being woken up at dawn by armed SS officers kicking down the door is optional, apparently.
…last night. The phone rang, the display showing a mobile number. I picked it up and a mechanical voice started reading out gobbleygook. It sounded like random characters, no recognisable words (apart from what sounded like ‘troll’), with a great many “semi-colon”s and “zero”s.
I eventually worked out that somebody was text-messaging our landline. However, the mobile number wasn’t listed in our address book. So it was somebody with our number in their phone either trying to text-message us whilst blind drunk, or lying on top of their phone in the middle of extremely athletic sex.
I’d like to think it was the latter. 😀 If it was you, tell me. (I’ll treat your call in the greatest confidence, of course…)
ETA: Found out what it was about. We have no mobile phone reception at all in and around the house, so we only use our mobe for emergency calls when we’re out. This morning, we went out shopping, and I happened to check the mobile for messages (something that I do only about twice a month, since everybody knows we don’t use a mobile). Anyway, there was a VCard from an acquaintance, with the same timestamp as the phone call.
So that was what the call was all about – there were lots of formatting characters in the message, and the robot had simply read them all out. Nobody was drunk, having sex or in any other way enjoying themselves.
Bum.
Getting off Verapamil wasn’t so easy as it appeared. It’s thankfully gone now, but for the last three days, I had a continual headache; looking at various medical sites, it fitted all the signs of a Tension Headache – slightly stiff neck, runny nose, getting worse through the day. And I’ve been having lots to get tense about – paying the damm coal bill, forex; additionally, the bright screen of my laptop could have been giving me eyestrain. And it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as the headaches I used to get before my thyroid problems were diagnosed – the headaches then got to the point where they produced vomiting and retching.
I was naturally worried for a while. But when one of the sites mentioned that Verapamil was a treatment, I knew what was happening – I was ‘cold turkeying’ from the stuff.
Anyway, I feel fine now.
I’ve taken myself off the Verapamil tablets; six months is long enough to try it out, and it really wasn’t doing me a lot of good. The main problem was that it made me fuzzy-headed all the time; I couldn’t think very well and everything felt ‘flat’ and dull. It was the mental equivalent of permanently wearing dark glasses and earmuffs. Reading through the Wikipedia article on it, I wasn’t wholly surprised to discover that it’s occasionally used as a treatment for hypomania – it was impossible for me to experience any strong feelings about anything. Motivation (as I’ve mentioned before on here) was severely lacking; the main reason why I’ve been blogging so little lately. Time and time again, I started a blog post, only to stop after a couple of sentences trying to remember exactly what point I was trying to make. I really envied my writing friends who were able to steadily chug out hundreds of words each and every day for NaNoWriMo. Books and reading were also a problem – I kept losing interest after a couple of chapters; I can’t think of a single book that I started during the last few months that I managed to finish.
Additionally I was getting forgetful and clumsy, with my typing becoming appalling – spellcheckers took care of most of my mistakes, but they couldn’t stop me mangling names and numbers. And I couldn’t remember quite simple things, either (like getting the online version of Transit ready, for instance). And there was the depression, which I’d rather not talk about…..
And it didn’t really stop me having tachycardia attacks either – they were just much fewer and of much shorter duration.
I’ve been ‘clear’ for five days now, and the new mental clarity is amazing – I’m thinking again! And I’m feeling rather cheerful. I’m a bit apprehensive about having more tachycardia attacks, but I’m determined not to get stressed about it.
So – on with the show!
I have finally got Linux installed on the old laptop, and am now able to blog from anywhere in the house – at the moment, I am comfortably ensconced on the sofa.
Having all but given up on the idea, after having so many failures, I discovered Puppy Linux. This runs on just 94 Meg of RAM, making it ideal for my machine with its 128 megs. Of course, there are other small-footprint distros; but for me they proved pretty useless, since in no case had anybody bothered to translate the installation menus from the original Geek. Happily, this is not so with Puppy, which deserves some sort of Plain English award for the clarity of its installation instructions and Help menus. Thus I was able to get everything installed and running in about an hour. And my laptop fairly zips along now; using it with WinXP was a pain – every operation took ages. Using Puppy, however, there’s no great difference in speed between this laptop and the desktop machine. It’s fractionally slower loading webpages, but that’s all I’ve noticed so far.
I’ve not found out how to network the laptop with my Windows desktop and printer; it will pick up and display the Shared Folder on next door’s PC (which shares my wireless network) but won’t recognise my PC. But I’m sure that’s something I’ll work out eventually. For the time being I’m just pleased to be able to surf, email and blog from the comfort and warmth of my sofa!
OK, I’m a sucker for competitions. There’s one running at the mo to find the “coolest” WordPress blog.
Irritatingly, the organisers don’t give any indication of what they regard as “cool”. So I can suppose that it’s all a matter of opinion and that this blog has as good a chance as any of qualifying.
Entering is simple:
1) Write a blog post participating this competition in your blog.
2) Get at least 5 comments. (excluding you and the spammers)
3) Submit your URL in the comment form here. (trackback could work too)
If I’m a winner, I get money and other goodies. So, put your comments below!
Just been out to fill up a bucket of coal for the night. And the Moon is looking gorgeous – nearly full and high in the sky, surrounded by hazy clouds with a hint of a full-circle rainbow.
I tried to take a photo, but my camera is so crappy that all I got was a white blob. Oh well, at least I’ve got the sight stored away in my memory.
For me, the big event of the day was an exact astrological opposition between Uranus and Saturn. So I’ve avoided getting involved in any celestial pile-ups by spending my time at the pooter, struggling to get to grips with Joomla. My long-awaited Building Websites With Joomla 1.5 arrived last week, but I was too busy before to make a start on it.
It’s translated from the German, not altogether perfectly. So there are some awkwardnesses and strange phraseology – “barrier freedom” in particular puzzled me, until I worked out that it was what the Germans call Web Accessibility. But overall, it looks like a very good buy, and I’m now busy getting the Oakleaf Circle website converted to Joomla.
Oh, yes, and there’s some sort of election going on, I think…
Think I’ll have a listen to some Einstuerzende Neubauten – gloomy Germanic post-industrial rock seems to fit my mood a lot lately (I blame Saturn).