On Wednesday I was told that a mole that was removed from my left forearm about a month ago was in fact a melanoma. Melanoma is a form of skin cancer - a relatively uncommon and dangerous type, but fortunately curable if picked up sufficiently early.
I don't have all the details yet; but the impression I get is that my mole didn't look like the classic pictures on the internet - neither my GP nor the dermatologist instantly recognised it as malignant. I need to have a wider border of tissue removed from my arm, now that it has been diagnosed, which is mildly annoying after having spent a month healing slowly.
I'm not sure how this is going to affect me. Mostly I just don't have any information; I try not to spend too much time contemplating my own mortality.
Posted: 27 Apr 2009 00:00 |
I wanted to improve my night life, so I joined the Rugby & District Astronomical Society.
This evening there was a talk on Norman Lockyer by Mike Frost - a topic of particular interest to me, because our computer naming scheme at work involves famous historical figures from Rugby.
Posted: 19 Apr 2009 00:00 |
No, this is not an exotic seafood/glass recipe.
Yesterday (well, Tuesday evening) I was sent down to Poole to set up a caching proxy server for a customer... on Windows. Working with a Microsoft operating system is a little bit unusual in my open source support job, but hey, it pays the bills.
It turned out to be surprisingly easy (or rather, my preparation had been sufficiently thorough). We'd budgeted the entire day to set things up - but I had Squid running by 9:20am, and was authenticating against Active Directory by 10am (with a choice of methods; single-sign on with NTLM or prompting the user for credentials). So we had coffee. By 11am there was log rotation and we had tweaked the config file, and by 12pm there were HTML reports of all the accesses (which was originally going to be the optional bonus if-we-had-time feature). So we had some more coffee, and I caught an early train home.
We should add Windows to our squid commercial support page. I wonder how many more potential enterprise business customers there are - Squid is of course an excellent replacement for Microsoft ISA Server.
Posted: 09 Apr 2009 00:00 |
I was lazy with cooking over the weekend - on Friday I had leftover lasagne for lunch, so just cheese and crackers in the evening. On Saturday I was down in Hastings all day, so didn't cook. On Sunday evening I had frozen pizza (ew), but used the 18 minutes while it cooked to boil an egg, chop some lettuce, and prepare a basic vinaigrette. (1tsp Dijon mustard, 1tbsp white wine vinegar, 3tbsp olive oil, salt and pepper, mix.)
This evening - mushroom risotto.
After chopping up the onions, mushrooms and garlic, fry them in olive oil in a large enough pan. (The garlic can go in last for 30s because it's prone to burning and so on.) Add the white wine and the rice. Keep stirring.
Once all the liquid has been absorbed, add one ladleful of the hot vegetable stock. Repeat that last sentence for about 20-30 minutes, until the rice is cooked.
It worked! But there was too much for me to eat at one sitting, even though I was using minimum quantities of rice and stock. Could have been served with grated Parmesan cheese.
Posted: 06 Apr 2009 00:00 |
This evening I made lasagne, loosely following a recipe from Gordon Ramsay. I'm not going to type it out, partly because I didn't follow it to the letter; I still don't have fancy stuff like oregano or bay leaves.
My cheese sauce needs work, but the end result was edible, surprisingly. There's half of it left for lunch tomorrow. Some bits of the lasagne sheets seemed like they were still hard, which was probably the result of not quite being covered in sauce or something. I need to invest in a set of scales before I can work with actual quantities.
I had a minor disaster while washing up, involving broken glass and a medium-sized olive oil slick... which is actually the second time I've knocked a glass bottle off that shelf. I think a reorganization of my cupboards is in order.
Posted: 02 Apr 2009 00:00 |
The new kernel mode setting feature in Linux 2.6.29 is relatively easy to enable, although at this point there does not seem to be much in the way of documentation.
You will need:
First, install the new kernel and the experimental x.org packages. Add 'i915 modeset=1' to /etc/modules. Ignore instructions elsewhere on the web about adding stuff to kernel boot lines - I reckon these have no effect, unless they were/are necessary for Fedora. You can either reboot, or stop X and reload i915 with the right option.
Now enjoy the fast VT switching and nice framebuffer console for five minutes before you notice that the experimental X.org packages broke your keyboard layout!
Posted: 02 Apr 2009 00:00 |
I haven't taken much time on cooking for the past couple of nights. Last night I just used a sweet-and-sour sauce from a jar, and had chicken with quick-cook rice. I don't think that counts as cooking - more like a ready meal by stealth. As a concession, I bought whole chicken breast fillets and diced them myself. It seems to help if you use a sharp knife.
This evening I cooked an omelette (with three eggs - there's a standing joke in the family concerning my brother once having cooked a one-egg omelette) and frozen veg, so I must have been done in under five minutes. I'll write something if I find a variation that's more eggciting...
Also this evening, I looked at Debian's status in relation to the Linux Standard Base. No one seems to certify Debian stable releases, and no one is running nightly LSB tests on Debian. I wonder if I can get that changed.
Posted: 01 Apr 2009 00:00 |
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Tim Retout tim@retout.co.uk
JabberID: tim@retout.co.uk
I'm afraid I have turned off comments for this blog, because of all the spam. Let's face it, I didn't read them anyway. Feel free to email me.