I woke up this morning after having pretty much been asleep for the previous forty hours. All of yesterday barring an hour or so in the morning and the evening, and most of the previous day. Its all a result of having been vaccinated against a bunch of potential killer diseases. So, with three injections, I was vaccinated against TB, Diphtheria, Polio, and two others I can't translate; one of which is part of the standard vaccination sets given to children here, and one to counter the disease carried by tics which you can encounter in the mountains here.
I continue to be impressed by the quality of medical practice here, and the complete absence of payment except to out medical insurance group. Don't get me wrong, we're paying about two hundred euros per month for that medical insurance, but it seems to be very comprehensive. For example, most of our drugs are covered, all of our medical costs (so far) and access to specialists is particularly easy. I wanted to get a follow up test done for my cancer, and instead of needing to be referred by my GP, I can simply pick up the phone and call a specialist.
I have to admit to a certain amount of cynicism about medical things when we came over here first. In London, we paid nothing for our medical costs either, but the conditions of the hospitals and GP practices were positively Victorian. I have seen both sides of that system too, both the beautiful (private room in Westminster hospital overlooking the houses of parliament) and the ugly (public room in the same hospital where there were eight of us in a ward), and even the best of them left a lot to be desired. Here in Germany you have to pay for medical insurance, and its typically pretty damn expensive, but you really get what you pay for.
Oh, that reminds me of something. There is apparently no blood test for the type of cancer I had (seminoma), but they took blood from me every time I went back for a check up. Have to go look at my medical records and see what they were looking for...
The process of going through this blog and re-tagging / categorising every post is a long and relatively boring one. However, some interesting posts have come back to me. One of them refers to a post I made on May 21st 2002 about blogging at work. Another is about being demoted the same week, and a bunch of others all grouped in the same month. That period in my professional life was a time of great change and stress.
My entire team had been transitioned into another department and we were very fucking annoyed about it for many reasons. We felt that we were coming from a different culture into something more stifling than we had previously experienced, and we didn't like it. I was ostensibly the team manager, although I think there wasn't much management needed with the guys I had working with me. We were a very hard-working bunch of guys, and all seriously good at what we did. Consequently we liked to play hard as well as working hard. It was our way of letting off steam. Our work culture was very stressful, and conducive to burning people out, and we really needed an outlet valve.
The department we moved into wasn't like that. They weren't typically under the kind of pressure we experienced in our team. Part of the reason for this is that we were working to schedules made by our parent company in the US, and they had the luxury(?) of making their own. So, while there was a general bad feeling on our new floor, we felt particularly abused because of the change in circumstances forced upon us. I know I thought some pretty awful things about my manager at that point. With hindsight, I regret those and am glad I never actually said anything to him. It would have spoiled what eventually became a pleasant relationship with a very interesting guy. Anyway, at the time I got seriously disillusioned about my job, and the company I was working for. I stage-managed the creation of a new position for myself in May 2003 and deserted my team.
I just wanted to say I'm sorry. I suspect at the time you all thought I was maybe a bit fucking selfish to leave you all in the position you were, and I wholeheartedly apologise for that. We have all moved on to better things (except you Sparky, get your arse in gear!) and have all kept in touch over the years, so I don't think any permanent damage was done. However I don't ever remember asking you all how my leaving affected you. I hope that you don't think I wasn't thinking of you all, for it simply isn't true. I hope you can understand why I had to leave. I had to get out of Technology before I ended up coming in one day and going postal. That wouldn't have done any of us any good.
One more thing... you absolutely should take the photos Dave. The reason the Killing Fields are still around and have not been built on is that we need to remember just how fucked up mankind can get. We need to remember so we won't allow it to ever happen again. Take the photos, make them good ones, and never forget.
According to a group in the US, the price of gold has ben kept artificially low for the last few years. This would be good news for us :-) Linkage
10am. Are we done with London and ready to go then? Well, I guess so. We've been running around for a while getting everything sorted, running through checklists and just Getting Things Done. The post is supposed to be redirected from today or maybe even tomorrow. It doesn't help that some came through the letterbox today from the dentist we had requested our records from and closed our accounts with. There's a minor panic was just averted in the other room when we discovered that we had too many clothes to bring with us and not enough suitcase space. We're going to be overweight on that flight to DE I can tell you. Nothing we can do about it though, our stuff is not going to get there for about a week, maybe two and we simply have to have enough stuff to last us through. It may be even longer than that too - everything we have is going to be stored in Anna's parent's basement, and we might be able to leave it all boxed until we find somewhere to live.
17:53. It seems like the end is in sight. I kept the PC and server running and they're all that is left now, apart from the laptops which are coming with us tomorrow. I have to disconnect the speakers, which means moving all the furniture so I can take up the carpet so I can get the wires. The line from my DSL router to the socket runs under another piece of carpet around the wall and that has to go too. The server needs to be taken down and disconnected (and I have to go through the disks in the array and make sure they are secure. I never managed to get hold of an HDD shipping case (the kind that manufacturers would ship them to OEMs in) so I'm going to leave them in the server and write "FRAGILE!!!" all over it in luminous radioactive poison. That's about it I think. Power strips and cables are all that remains I think.
This is the last post I will make from this flat. That is really only starting to sink in. I have been so busy with the logistics of this move that I may have forgotten to be excited about it for the last few days. Wow. Last!
That last entry was written in Sauce Reader too, so its certainly proving versatile. So, what's been going on for the last few months then?
Well, I finished my radiotherapy, with no problems and no serious side effects. I was seriously tired on both Fridays, but other than that there was nothing. The hospital was a dream - get there, wait for two or three minutes, go to the room and get zapped, leave - all in all I wasn't there for more than 20 mins each day. The longest part of the entire procedure was when I lay down on the bed of the machine and they lined me up in the right position. To get me in exactly the right point each time, they had tattoed five small points on my body. Three in a line down my stomach, and one each on my left and right sides. between them they form a reference to some points within my body that they can iridiate with millimetric accuracy. They points also define three dimensional space, so they could treat me from underneath too. The time consuming part each day was to line me up with some lasers criss-crossing the room so that they could then run a standard program through the machine. The program would consist of instructions like "move to a point x,y,z and irradiate for twenty seconds". Clever stuff. Anyway, it was easy. I have to go back next month to have some more tests done, and hopefully that will be the end of my cancer. Fingers crossed, touch wood, etc etc.
Anna is away at the moment, on a dig in a place called Barcombe, somewhere down south of London. Seems like she's having fun from what she tells me. They've got great weather too, though its a bit changable at the moment.
I bought a new wireless network last week, and it arrived yesterday. Its a netgear wireless / wired router with a built-in aDSL modem. Translated that means that it does the work of routing the interwebnet connection around the house, instead of the desktop machine, It should in theory be faster and more effecient. I'm not sure about that yet though... I downloaded some stuff and it seemed slower than usual. Have to get some files from a known place soon and start tweaking. It should also have better protection against intrusion than what I had previously. We'll just have to see about that one :-)
The radiotherapy is almost finished now, there's only one session to go. I haven't suffered any side effects other than tiredness, for which I am eternally grateful. I even stopped taking the anti-emetic drugs last week. The tiredness can be a bitch though. I slept for 20 out of 24 hours of Friday, which was a killer. I did wake feeling seriously refreshed though.
It looks like we're all set to go to California this summer :-) More about that later, but the plan is to fly to San Francisco, and take two weeks touring between there and Los Angeles.
So very tired. I've just about gotten the documentation I was supposed to have finished for work finshed at last. Now I have a couple of weeks of backlog cleared, and I can get on with the development work I was handling a couple of months ago. Except... my radioterapy starts on Tuesday, and I don't know wif I'm going to be in. I hate not knowing stuff.
Interesting reaction yesterday when I tol people in work about my results. Universally all of the guys said something like "congratulations man, that's great". Universally all of the women gave me a hug and screamed "Yayyy".
So, which do you think I prefer working with...?
So I wasn't alone in not smoking for the last week. Most of the rest of my course did the same, though there was one girl who didn't. She had a bad week, and had to move house or something. Hmm... I want a cigarette now. You know, the feeling is more one of disappointment than anything else. I try to remember what I'm missing, and then get this flash of pleasure when I realise that its a cigarette. Then I remember that I gave up, and I'm disappointed. Addiction is a strange thing sometimes.
Thirteen and a half hours to my results.
I just noticed (ok, so I did have to count) that I've written more than 50,000 words of blog in the last 4 years. And you know what? It isn't interesting reading. Some of it is, but for the most part its just a load of crap. I will have to do something about that. What though? It's not as if I have a boring life. Its just that I don't want to talk about much of it. I'm by nature a fairly private person, and unwilling to share a lot of my experiences with an audience. I'm also shit at allegory, so that isn't a device I can use. Have to think about this.