Get Off My Lawn
Lowlife scum
Read carefully. It’s not the domain expiring. It’s some bullshit you never signed up for.
I wonder how many people they catch.
And then this happened
My back’s been bothering me since Y2K. I could handle that. My foot started bothering me about five years ago, debilitatingly so. After two neurosurgeons, one neurologist, a podiatrist, biokinetics, three orthopaedic surgeons, four MRIs, many X-rays, and a nuclear scan, It Was Time.
The good news is that I have 100% medical aid cover. The bad news is that doesn’t mean what you think it means — good doctors (And Dr Makan is good, no doubt about that) charge 225% or more. So I’m in the hole for about R20k of Dr Makan’s time, as well as some amount towards the klaas vakie, but it’s money well spent for professional service.
The other good news is that the medical aid fully covers the hospital (Life Vincent Pallotti, recommended) charges, and there are many.
I went into theater at around 13:30 on Tuesday. Started being aware of my surroundings maybe somewhere around 17:00, 18:00, thereabouts, up in High Care. Saw Dr Makan, briefly, at a distance, he waved, said all had gone well.
Moved down to Protea ward somewhere between breakfast and lunch the next day, all was good. Very nice staff, great (well, for a hospital) food, morphine drip, catheter… lay back and enjoyed it.
Thursday was… not so good. They started taking me off the painkillers and the drain (pipe coming out of my back and into a bottle) was really making its presence felt. So also the catheter. Thankfully Dr Makan came around, I asked, he told ’em to lose all the plumbing, and once they’d removed that (needle in my wrist, drain in my back, catheter) life was much more rosy.
So I started swapping food pics with my mother-in-law, who was in Life Knysna at the time. Crappy cellphone pics, but still.
05:30, coffee and a rusk.
08:00, breakfast.
10:30-ish, coffee and a cookie.
12:00, lunch.
14:30, coffee and two cookies nogal.
1700, supper.
20:30, coffee and sarmies.
Hobbits would like this place.
With the Medical Aid paying, everyone was cool with me staying the maximum allowed 6 days, but I booked myself out on Sunday to make Tanya’s life easier. So now I’m supposed to spend six weeks on my back…
Early in-line memory modules
Predecessor of the SIMM?
This comes from a piece of medical equipment made by the other S&W, Simonsen & Weel, Denmark, circa 1979.
Each module has 8 x AM2808PC 1024-bit dynamic shift registers, driven by a DS0025CN two-phase clock driver. That’s one kilobyte of storage per module, and you have to keep on clocking the data around the ring otherwise the capacitors making up the memory discharge and forget.
It’s a lot simpler than a mercury delay line memory, but functionally it’s not that much different.
Virgin no more
I installed Windows 3.0 for the first time today* From seven 720 kilobyte stiffy** disks. And it worked first time.
* Windows 3.1, I’ve installed countless times. Windows 3.0, never.
** Yea that’s what we call them here.
Look what I got
Mahala gratis verniet and for free, nogal.
And it seems to work, that’s indeed a 4.7k resistor.
Look at the ridiculous scale on this thing — not only uA but nA as well. Why would I want to measure a nano-amp?
I think this will become part of my permanent test setup.
Perhaps she even wiggled her toes
Lindgren liked to sit on the small second-floor balcony with a view of the sea. There is a bench in a corner of the balcony. Karin Nyman, Lindgren’s daughter, who is now over 80 and closely resembles her mother, says: “Take a look under the bench.”
It’s easier said than done. Dates, a few words and many stenographic symbols are written in pencil on the underside of the bench: “July 3, 1963. Summer. Radiant. Like in the good old days. The early summer was magical. I was here all of June and wrote “Michel from Lönneberga.” The book is now finished. We bought a sailboat, the ‘Saltkrokan.'” Lindgren must have laid flat on her back to write these words, with her feet sticking out from underneath the bench. Perhaps she even wiggled her toes, just like Pippi.