PROJECT GUTENBERG -- Free Books On-Line

This is a wonderful place to rediscover old favourites. Hundreds, maybe thousands of out-of-copyright books have been transformed into text files that you can download free.

All the classics are there, plus some surprisingly modern things, like TS Elliot's poetry.

More techie problems ... I haven't had any email for three days. It's annoying, because I know at least one email is missing -- a little pop-up message announced the arrival of a letter from Pinky, but when I checked the inbox, it wasn't there. Gone for good, it seems. An email arrived today (just junk), the first one since Thursday.

Hi-tech is fab until it breaks down.

I'm supposed to be sweeping and vaccuuming, better get cracking. It's been raining a lot, so the floors of the house look like a continuation of the outdoors.

Grumble. My printer has been playing up for ages & I haven't done anything much about it besides fiddle around uninstalling and reinstalling and plugging it in in a different place etc etc. Finally I've decided the USB port is at fault, and I was going to phone the computer shop and get them to replace it.

But I can't find the receipt for the computer. All I can find is a job sheet for the last time I took it in, in August. I've spent an hour going through absolutely everything -- finding some other stuff I'd lost along the way, of course! But not the receipt.

Bah.

I'm going to be a guinea pig! I've applied to sign up for a research trial of this new technique for dealing with fibroids that I read about on the internet.

I went to see the gynaecologist at the hospital yesterday and showed him the stuff I printed off the website and he was most impressed. "It's always great when a patient can read up about the various treatments and make an informed decision," he said. This is so different from the way doctors used to be -- they would be angry if you let slip you'd read a newspaper article about your condition.

This doctor was also terribly excited, because they've been running this trial for ages but have had trouble getting women to join it. I'm the first patient in the Edinburgh area to want to sign up (the trial's also running in Aberdeen and Glasgow). He fetched the research sister to talk to me about it -- it's quite complicated.

First of all (next week), I have to have a battery of tests and an MRI scan to see if I'm suitable. Once the results are in (a month), they "randomise" me because it's a comparative trial; they "flip a coin" to see if I'll have the new treatment or a hysterectomy. Not quite random results, it's skewed 66:33 in favour of embolisation. Then either way, it's at least a four-month wait for surgery.

So in June/July I'll either be having major surgery with a two-month recovery time, or a procedure under local anaesthetic that will hurt like blazes for two days but be all better in two weeks. And I won't know for five weeks which it is.

Today I came over all public-spirited and spent half an hour picking broken glass of one of the walkways I frequent. I noticed it yesterday, and ticked off one dog-walker who was busy kicking it into the leaf-mold at the side of the path. At least you can see it when it's laying on the tarmac. Anyway today I filled most of a supermarket carrier bag with shattered bottles -- some of the bits covered in dog poo, yechh. There's still more further along -- maybe tomorrow.

Took this today - one of the things I like about winter!

EditPlus Text Editor, HTML Editor, Programmers Editor for Windows

Sounds good - a replacement for Notepad for HTML hand-coding freaks. Which is probably what I'm about to become.

The Smirking Chimp

This takes a while to load, but it's worth the wait, especially if you hate the Smirking Chimp, aka George W Bush.

Oh, I had a serious look at the shed doors yesterday and I don't think they're worth saving. New doors are reasonably cheap, but then you have to paint them and fit locks, plus the jams will need replacing. Hmm.

Fixed the links, heh.

The first episode of the course was a little disappointing in that it was just going over old ground to make sure we were all up to speed. It was good, however, in that I learned a few things I didn't know. We spent a bizarrely long time looking at HTML tags that are non-standard and/or proprietorial, and which we were solemnly warned not to use. Uh huh.

The course tutor is the former head of the computer department, a lively fellow who scorns the use of editors -- we're doing all our work on Wordpad, the little text-editing program that comes with Windows. Good practice, but embarrassing; with the HTML editors you just punch the buttons with the purdy pictures on them and the program does all the coding, so I was struggling to remember what to put where. (To see what HTML code looks like, click on the View menu up the top there, and choose Source. You'll get a separate window with the code of this page in it. Kewl!)

Getting up early was traumatic, I had to set the alarm for 7:30am! To complicate matters, Bertie somehow got the impression that I needed to be up much earlier than that, and barked loudly in my ear to tell me it was ... uhhh, I don't know, it was still dark, 6am? Once again, though, I'm amazed at how much you can squeeze into a day when you get up early. Astonishing.

Yesterday, I took Bertie to Arthur's Seat for a looooong ramble, plus did a bit of shopping. When I got home I realised I'd forgotten the main item I'd gone into town for in the first place -- a spare battery for the wonderful camera -- so off I went. While in town I went to my favourite bookshop, which has fallen on hard times and is for sale. It's a tragedy! I used to live just around the corner from the South Bridge branch, the main one. It has three stories crammed full of books. It's an academic bookseller, so it has an incredible range of stuff, plus classical music CDs, plus there's a good stationery department. And it's open until 10pm weeknights. Sigh. They're hoping for a sympathetic buyer rather than an asset-stripper.

I stopped by the Cameo cinema on my way home, thinking I might see Mulholland Drive, but it was two hours to the next showing. I could have seen Apocalypse Now Redux, but I didn't feel up to it. So I went home instead.

My car's dirty again. I hate housework.

I still didn't fix the links. Never mind, I'll get there eventually. Tomorrow maybe. Hmmm, better be tomorrow because I start the advanced HTML course on Tuesday and I'd look pretty stupid doing a course like that and having broken links on my website.

A productive weekend otherwise -- Anthea's kitchen looks fab with its new coat of paint, and today I washed my car. By hand, with a bucket and sponge. All the roller-brush carwashes in town were broken! Dang. But it was worth the effort, it's gleaming. Vacuumed the inside as well, it was filthy. I'm not exaggerating -- there was enough of Bertie's hair in there to construct a new dog (ok, slight exaggeration), not to mention Bonio crumbs, mud and dead leaves. And of course all the windows were covered in snot and dribble. No, not mine.

I've organised a week off later in the month, and am trying to decide what projects to attack. Inspired by Anthea's kitchen, I've been thinking interior decor. But I may tackle the shed doors too.


There are two doors, as you can see. The one on the biggest shed, on the left, isn't too bad, in that it actually works. But the wood is rotted and the paint hanging off in sheets. The window is broken, so it's damp inside. I might patch the glass rather than attempt reglazing -- it's wire-reinforced glass in a metal frame. Any advice welcome, John!

The other shed, the former coalshed, is more tricky because the door frame has pulled loose from the shed. The brickwork where the hinge bolts on is broken and has been badly repaired. The door itself is also rotted and peeling, but it's the frame that most needs doing because it makes opening and shutting the door almost impossible. This shed doesn't have a window, so at least it's dry in there.

I don't know whether to replace both doors or to try and repair them. They are solid doors (apart from the bits that are rotten!), with nice old-fashioned knobs, so I'd like to keep them if poss. I may be able to patch in new bits of clean wood at the bottom, which is where most of the damage is. There's a ceiling light in the main shed that I may try and repair too.

If this sounds difficult, the redecoration project is nearly as bad -- it involves stripping off badly-hung textured wallpaper and filling any holes/cracks in the plaster, then hanging lining paper and painting it. Big, big job.

Minor projects also in the queue: mending loose tiles in the bathroom and putting sealant along the edge of the new kitchen tiles.

I didn't fix those links, sorry. It's been one of those weeks. I did some ironing today, that was about it, apart from dog-walking of course, and obsessive picture-taking.

I couldn't sleep last night due to severe work-related stress. My mind was just fizzing too much. So at 5:30pm I got up and had a hot chocolate, read for a while and eventually got off to sleep.

When I came in to work today, the first thing my boss said was: "I'm really tired, I was so stressed out I didn't sleep well last night."
"Nor did I, in fact I got up at 5:30 and had a hot chocolate."
"You should have phoned me," piped up another colleague, "I was awake at 5:30 as well, and I got up and had a hot drink."
"I couldn't sleep either," said someone else.
"Me too!"

It was all stress-related. It is not a happy ship.

I got up reasonably early though, because it's not fair on poor Bertie to have to wait around endlessly before his morning constitutional. He's adjusted pretty well to my slovenly ways, but he does like me to get up by 10:30. He wakes me if I'm still asleep, then goes back to sleep himself while I tutu around having breakfast and reading the paper.

PA News
The old adage that money cannot buy happiness is wrong – but you need a windfall of at least £1 million to be euphoric, according to research published today.
A study by the University of Warwick found that receiving an inheritance or win of as little as £1,000 can improve people’s outlook on life, though less than £1 million is unlikely to have a lasting effect on their happiness.
The research found a strong marriage and good health were more likely to make people feel content than money.
Professor Andrew Oswald and Dr Jonathan Gardner based their research on the responses of 9,000 families in Britain throughout the 1990s.
They measured individuals’ psychological health using standard strain indicators to gauge their levels of happiness.
During the decade a number of the people had windfalls of hundreds of thousands of pounds, enabling the researchers to observe the impact.
Professor Oswald said: “There is a strong link between money and happiness, but it is a serious mistake to believe that the main influence on happiness is money.”
He said after people had received windfalls through lottery wins or inheritance their happiness and psychological health improved.
“We calculated that to turn an average person into a very happy one using money alone took £1 million.”
Professor Oswald said the factors which had the biggest impact on people’s happiness were a stable marriage and good health, while losing a job or getting divorced had the most negative effect on someone’s outlook.
The research found that women tended to be happier than men, and people in their 30s were least likely to be content.
Professor Oswald said happiness followed a U-shaped pattern, with people beginning life happy but becoming discontent in their early 30s, before their happiness recovered and continued increasing into their 60s.
end

Hah! At last, what everyone knew turns out to be true after all. It's interesting that a cool million quid is what it takes. I guess that's because you could invest it and live comfortably off the income. Or start a business, if that's what spins your wheels.

But even though the pointy-headed perfessers' research proved money can make you happy, they're careful to pour a little ice-water on the idea. "It is a serious mistake to believe that the main influence on happiness is money.” How serious a mistake? So serious it would keep you awake at night, crying and chewing the sheets? (Real linen, lavender-scented sheets, embroidered with your initials and hand-laundered every day by your live-in maid. Unless you're off travelling of course, in which case the hotel staff will organise the laundry.) Oh, professor, I'm worried I'm already making that mistake! How dreadful.

Groan. I just checked the site and the links are all wrong for the Morocco pictures. You can see the thumbnails, but they link back to my home computer, which is no use whatsoever. It won't take long to fix, it's just annoying. Sorry about that.

I spent last night hunched over the computer fixing up my website. What happened was a Very Popular writer linked to it from his budgies' page (warning: the budgies swear a lot) to Bertie's page and suddenly I had a rush of visitors. It was just like when I have visitors to my house -- I look around and realise what a slattern I am, and spend an evening rushing around vaccuuming and dusting (actually no, I never dust) and washing dishes. So I've taken away all the sad, grubby old pictures of my house before I moved in and the action shots of workmen demolishing bits of it, and I've added pictures elsewhere, of the garden in summer and trips to Wester Ross and Morocco.

Also I tidied up the design a bit -- if anyone has problem viewing any of the pages, let me know. Expect more tinkering around once I start on the web design course next week.

The new camera is wonderful, I'm so glad I finally bought it. I take it everywhere, fire off endless pictures. Often I delete them right away, but I'm learning all the time about what settings work in what situation. It has its limitations of course, but often I can work out what settings I could use on my SLR camera to get the shot. So I'll have to go out with both cameras one day and make those pictures!

The other night I went down to the marina when it was foggy and took a few snaps. First off I used the flash; big mistake.



Weird! But how great to be able to tell right away that it didn't work. The fog wasn't that thick, I was amazed when the flash made it look like scrambled egg.

So I turned the flash off and got these pictures:




This one's my favourite.

There was one picture I would love to have been able to take, but I doubt it was possible even with the best camera, because the light levels were so low. Tied up at the end of a pier was the little Maid of the Forth ferry, lit with a strong spot. Near the shore were two swans, reflected perfectly in the still water. The fog was thicker out where the boat was, so it was unearthly, like an apparition.

More than 30,000 people are already booked to sail on Rosyth’s new ferry service to Belgium, four months before it is due to start.

Blimey. I might have to wait a few years before I try it out. The article doesn't say if it's one of the ports you can take pets through. There has to be a registered vet there to inspect your pet before it's allowed back in.

The new CF memory card for my camera arrived this morning, by recorded delivery no less -- and there was no charge for postage. It's a 128Mb card, only £47, a real bargain. With everything set to minimum I can squeeze more than 1,400 photos on it. Stunning or what. I immediately became a clicking fool, and the battery ran out. Must. Get. Spare. Battery...

Mother and John, if you're reading this, thanks so much for the gardening gloves, which also arrived this morning. I've given one pair to Chad, the chap I work with who has an allotment, I hope that's ok. They're great gloves because the fabric is so thin. I've got a pair of clunky leather ones for pruning blackberries and so on, but they're too thick for weeding. The ones you sent are perfect.

The gloves I'm mainly wearing these days are the slink-skin and possum fur ones Jenny and Trevor gave me last year; it's sooooo cold! But a thaw is on its way. They've been having mountains of snow up north, with blizzards too. Some of the main roads were closed. Not a skerrick of snow here though.

booknotes

This one is really interesting. He's away skiing at the moment, but there's lots to read. Lots.

The Portal at Uncorked.org

More blogs than you can shake a stick at.

As promised, Bertie models the latest thing in 70s retro styling.



Lookin' good! Feelin' warm! But cool too, dude, real cool...