Ear Wick

Yes, “Ear Wick”.

Doesn’t sound nice, does it?

That’s what I’m currently enjoying - a wick, in my ear, to do some “wicking”.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve had quite a nasty ear infection. Strictly speaking, I’ve had two nasty ears infections: one in each ear. Actually, if I’m to be 100% accurate, I’ve probably had about five ear infections as they’ve been bouncing back and forth. Regardless, it’s been unpleasant.

Thanks to a doctor who appears to enjoy a “hands off” approach to curing ear infections - and by this I don’t mean he amputates the bits at the ends of people’s arms - I ended up visiting the local hospital today so that the experts could have a look. The wonderful woman at the Ear, Nose, and Throat clinic at the Royal Infirmary has taken some steps to sort me out.

By which, I mean she inflicted quite a lot of pain on me, and has left me in more discomfort than I was prior to visiting her. But, as they say, no pain; no gain. After inserting some sort of ear-widening device, she proceeded to hoover all the nasty, infection-debris from my ears. This is a weird sensation - you can hear, and more alarmingly feel - bits of icky gubbins being forcibly extracted from your ears. She did this on both ears, using increasingly wider widening tools each time.

But I’d had this done before. It was fine: I knew what was coming, and in all honesty looked forward to it; once they’d been hoovered, I’d feel better, right?

Sadly, this time the infection was sufficiently nasty as to close up my left ear. This explained why I couldn’t hear very well. In order to combat this unhelpful closure, a wick was inserted into my ear. And by inserted, I mean rammed. Hard. And, as I said in an email to my boss following the experience, it hurt like a very hurty thing.

And there’s nothing like applying the prescribed drops into the ear, placing cotton wool neatly inside - as advised by the nice woman at the hospital: this would absorb the drops that I’d put in - and discovering that your ear is now bleeding, thanks to the forced insertion of said wick. Blood from the ears - particularly my blood, from my ears - is something I’m not particularly fond of.

New Year’s Resolutions

Number one: blog more. Lately, this place has gathered a few cobwebs, and I’m not happy about that. Things are going to change. I might start posting less specific rambles and rants, as the mood takes me.

Number two: catch up on review material. I’ve got piles of DVDs and CDs to get through for review on Blogcritics, so I need to jump on that in the new year.

Number three: classified.

Number four: classified.

I’ll let you know how three and four pan out…

Normal Service…

…will be resumed shortly.

Apologies for the lack of updates over the last couple of weeks; things have been busy.

I’ve got a raft of updates coming soon; I’ll be introducing a review feed so you don’t have to see rubbish like this appearing in your RSS reader of choice. I’m also planning to make it easier to find the RSS link (it’s over there…on the right…down a bit…got it!), and to provide an explanation of RSS for those that perhaps haven’t yet been introduced to its wonders.

In terms of reviews, I’ve got Chocolate and Incident On And Of A Mountain Road from the Masters of Horror series, X-Men 3, and I’ve even suffered the horrors of Andre The Butcher, so you don’t have to. I’ve got two Doctor Who reviews coming, and hopefully a third after tonight. And to top it all off I’m going to a preview showing of Hard Candy on Monday, so that’ll be up asap too.

So, much to come - just bear with me while I sort all this tedious work stuff out and things will be back on track before you know it.

Aerial installation fun

I can write this now. It's taken far longer than I thought it would, but I've finally got digital television in every room of the house. After two weekends worth of leaping about in my loft (thanks Dad), drilling, cabling, connecting, disconnecting, swearing, exchanging, and fiddling, it's all working. Having my wife run up the stairs to excitedly proclaim that "there's no interference when I use the microwave" (curse those wireless video-senders) makes it all worthwhile!

My main problem was the damned Philex SLxM (or SLx4M or somesuch) masthead amp I bought from Maplin. To cut a long story short, the third one works Attempt one provided us with an amp but no instructions (there's some special jumper voodoo required to get the thing working), attempt two yielded a faulty box (as we eventually found out, after much fiddling of jumpers), but attempt 3 rewarded us with a crispy digital picture in every room.

Lessons learned:

• Never say "we should be done in 5/15/24/30 minutes/hours".
• Never say "this bit should be easy".
• You need the braided copper bit around the outside of the coaxial cable (this is a source of genuine hilarity among those "in the know" isn't it Ashleigh/Mark?).
• Ethernet cable = better than wireless.
• You can connect an extension lead (with a us-UK adaptor on the end) into your ADSL microfilter and have it work.
• The correct jumper configuration is every open except the powered output and the input

So, in answer to the question I asked myself before I started this whole job, "yes, it can be done". I'm 22 miles away from my digital transmitter, with clear line of sight, and a Triax Unix 52 aerial in my loft gives me a damn fine digital picture.

30 Boxes

It's an odd title, but 30 Boxes is one of the neatest web apps I've seen for a while. It's basically just an online calendar, with Ajax up the wazoo, and that oh-so-trendy Apple shade of grey. Play with it for a while though, and you can tell it's had some thought put into it.

You can add "buddies" to your calendar, and allow them to see items in your calendar that aren't marked as private. I can already see a use for this, because I can enter all my upcoming gigs (watching, not performing) in there, and all those lucky people who are coming along can see when they are. You can also store private appointments, so those personal little things aren't broadcast across the web.

Something I'm sure an awful lot of bloggers will use is the "share my calender" type functionality. This allows you to drop a block of html on your site, and it will scrape the next few entries from 30Boxes and display them for the world to see. I just know this is going to be a popular feature.

The site is quick, elegantly designed, and isn't terribly clunky. It's actually quite minimalist; it doesn't throw hundreds of garish buttons at you, and hope you click the right one.

The only thing I think I need to do to make this a perfect solution is to find some way of syncing it with my desktop calendar (which is Outlook at work, and doesn't exist at home). The ideal would be to enter things either on my phone or 30Boxes, and have the middleman (Outlook) sync them up. Wouldn't Activesync plugins be nice?

A single console philosophy

In the past, I've always owned every console on the market. There have always been platform exclusive titles like Resident Evil, Devil May Cry, and Metal Gear Solid, to name only a few, and the thought of not being able to play each platform's gems was enough to make me own every machine. Even if they did sit, barely used, waiting for that next great title to come along.

In the last six months, since the birth of my son, I've had precious little time or desire to play anything on any of my consoles. At one point, prior to his birth, I owned everything: Xbox, PS2, Gamecube, DS, PSP, and PC. I had numerous MMORPG subscriptions, and enough time to justify them.

The DS was the first to go. The PSP was so shiny, so versatile, and so much more powerful than the DS that it seemed silly to keep two portable gaming systems. So I waved goodbye to the DS, despite a desire to play Metroid, Nintendogs, and other platform exclusives.

Next, the Xbox was traded-in ready to make way for its second generation evolution, the 360. I could cope with not playing any Xbox releases for a few months because I could pick them up for the 360 and play them in backwards compatibility mode.

Then my online subscriptions got cancelled. Everquest 2, Star Wars Galaxies, World of Warcraft, The Matrix Online (yeah, like that was a hard one to give up) all got axed due to lack of time or inclination to play. I still retain a City of Villains sub (more on that in a future post) because it's sufficiently undemanding to make it worth continuing.

Having given up my Xbox, and my DS, and having not powered up my PS2 for an age, I started to wonder whether my multiple console way of life was feasible, or, indeed, worthwhile. "Is it really that important to play everything, on every platform?" I thought, and with that set out on the road to a single console philosophy.