Email on mobile phone

I now have email working to and from my mobile phone, but only through an Australian email address that I almost never use. Of course I can forward other addresses to that one if I want to check all my mail using my phone while I'm in hospital or travelling without the computer. In theory I can also read web pages on the phone itself, but I'd have to be fairly desperate to try that on such a small screen. Next step is to get the phone working as a modem for the computer, for use in remote parts of the country when I can't find some other connection.

Ubuntu upgrade to Gutsy (7.10)

I upgraded to Ubuntu 7.10 ("Gutsy Gibbon") last night. OpenOffice.org and Thunderbird both stopped working. Probably not coincidentally, those are the two programs where I had been using versions that I self-installed (because I wanted a more recent one than was in the repository). Spent some time solving those problems. I installed Thunderbird from the repository and it works, so that's good. OpenOffice.org was more of a problem. Previously both my self-installed OOo and the one that came with Ubuntu worked; after the Ubuntu upgrade both versions of OOo crashed continuously and in the same way. A bit of research revealed that many people are having the same problem, but the cures vary a bit. I finally uninstalled both versions of OOo and reinstalled the one from the repository, after which that one worked fine. It's not ideal for my work writing documentation, because the icon set is different from the standard OOo set, but that's of minor importance because someone else is now redoing all the screen captures in a consistent style for the OOoAuthors books. Other than those problems (now solved), everything seems to work okay. I checked things like the DVD player to make sure it hadn't also broken, but it was fine.

New mobile phone

I got a new mobile phone. I didn't want one, but the CDMA phone system here is being replaced early in 2008 by something called NextG (for Next Generation: how Star Trek-ish!) so I had to get a different handset. I've been putting off getting one until the phone company offered me both an acceptable phone (the early models didn't have various features I wanted) and an inducement that appealed to me. A month or two ago they started offering a Nokia 6120classic phone with the Symbian operating system and all the features I wanted (as well as lots of other features of no interest to me). This week I received their latest inducement offer: $100 credit on my phone bill, so I decided to go ahead and make the switch. The phone has more features than many of my former computers and my cameras. I'm sure I'll never use most of them! I spent some time with the instruction book, learning a few of the most-needed features.

Expatriates voting in US elections

I just learned that I can vote in the US Federal elections next year! I had always thought that I couldn't, but apparently the law was changed a few years ago. Now Americans living temporarily or permanently abroad can claim as their "voting residence" the state in which they last voted in the US, whether or not they ever intend to return to that state, or have any other connection to it (property, business, etc), and registering to vote does NOT carry any obligation to file a tax return in that state. This information was sent to me in a note from the "Voting Assistance Officer" at the US Consulate in Sydney, which referred me to the Federal Voting Assistance Program's website. It's really interesting how things have changed: for many years I got the distinct impression that the US government actively made it difficult for people to vote if they lived abroad; now they are actively encouraging and helping people. I haven't decided yet whether to register or not. Meanwhile, a date for the Australian federal election has finally been announced: 24 November. The campaign has been going on unofficially for several months now, so it's good to finally have a date set. The "news" during election campaigns is even more boring and tedious than usual.

Marina construction update

Vast amounts of digging and moving of dirt is going on.

Hip + related medical stuff

Trip to Mackay today: the surgeon says I'm doing very well. I walked in without using a cane or crutch, so I suppose that helped. We filled out the paperwork for the next operation, so that's all organised for 6 November. This time we'll stockpile only 2 units of blood instead of 3, and the surgeon has agreed that unless I really, really need the blood, I won't get it back (because of the bad reaction I had last time). He thinks I might have had a reaction to one of the additives; the risk of another bad reaction isn't worth it for a routine transfusion. I had gone in prepared to argue that point rather strongly, but I'm very glad that I didn't need to. I also mentioned the muscle cramps I've been having intermittently in the operated leg, and he said (a) that's normal and (b) his recommended treatment is to drink tonic water, the kind with quinine in it (he said many brands remove the quinine, so I need to check the label). I said "I suppose I shouldn't be too generous with the gin" and he laughed. Lastly, I asked about the edema in my left knee and he said (a) that's normal, (b) be patient as it will eventually go away and (c) pressure stockings might help. We had quite a long chat about this and that, because his next appointment had cancelled so he had plenty of time. For example, we talked about how much people differ in their reactions to chemicals. He said he had always disbelieved the idea that food dyes caused behavioural problems in children -- until one of his own children showed unmistakable symptoms that could be correlated precisely with comsuming certain processed foods and soft drinks. His other child shows no symptoms whatsoever from eating or drinking the same items. Afterwards Eric and I stopped at the blood bank to drop off paperwork, and I chatted with the head nurse there about my reaction to the transfusion last time. She showed us the list of additives used in their blood storage packets; Eric will be looking them up on the Internet later. After that, we went to the store in Mackay that sells Apple computers, so Eric could look at the new 24-inch iMac. It has a shiny, very reflective screen, which he doesn't think he'll like.

Marina construction update

Most of the water has now been pumped out of the enclosed area and the mud is drying. As these photos show, digging equipment is removing the mud from some areas and dumping it in other parts of the site. Under the gray mud (which varies in depth) is a layer of clay or other (brown) dirt, which is being used to construct access roads (probably temporary). Lots of dust and noise is coming from this work. It's slightly better than the pounding noises when the metal barriers were being hammered into the dirt, but the beep-beep-beep of the backup warning signals on the trucks and other equipment is seriously tedious.

Technical editors' website redesigned

After months of off-and-on work on my editors' website (setting it up in WordPress), I've finally got it to the point that I'm ready to reveal it to the world. And so I have! http://www.jeanweber.com/newsite/ The design (template) breaks in Internet Explorer. I don't have the time or energy to figure out how to fix that. I'm no longer doing this professionally, or with a view to attracting clients, so I've decided to be bloody-minded about it. I put a note on the first page that says "get a browser that supports standards". Some pages are out of date, so I still have a lot of maintenance work to do, but at least the major conversion work is done... except for the old newsletters, which will gradually be converted or absorbed into the main site.

Marina construction update

Here are some recent photos of the marina construction going on below us. For some weeks the construction site has resembled an open-cut mine, which in a way it is. The area to be deepened has been enclosed and the water is being pumped out. Digging equipment and trucks (exactly like those used at open-cut coal mines and other mines) are trans­ferring mud, dirt, and rocks from one area to another that is being built up for eventual use as housing, a resort, a boat terminal, and so on. The dust and noise are quite impressive. This sequence goes from left to right across the bay.

Hip: staples out, all well

Eric drove me to Mackay yesterday to have the surgeon remove the 17 impressive-large staples from my leg. His camera failed at the critical moment, so I don't have any photos of the instruments used, but they were a set of needle-nosed wire snips (almost identical to the ones Eric uses for electronic work) and tweezers. The surgeon said all is going very well and I can have the other hip done whenever I want. We agreed on November 6th, assuming all is still well at my next checkup on October 4th. I'm using only one crutch now, and getting around the apartment quite well, albeit very slowly. Now I can carry my own cup of tea, or plate of dinner, from the kitchen to the table. I'm trying to walk around as much as possible, as well as doing the set of exercises the physio gave me, to strengthen the leg as much as possible. Unfortunately, the pain in the other leg is hampering these efforts a bit. We discovered that the before-and-after x-rays were on CD as well as film, so here are some images. Before: After:

Hip hooray!

Had the operation on 27 August as scheduled. Arrived at the hospital at 10:30, filled out paperwork, showered, donned one of those fetching hospital gowns (and a reasonable bathrobe), and sat around waiting for quite awhile after unpacking a bit in my assigned room. At around 1:30 pm I was wheeled away, bed and all, to pre-op, where I remained for only a few minutes before being taken in to the operating theatre. I was returned to my room around 5:30 p.m., more than an hour later than expected. The surgeon explained later that the x-rays had shown I needed a size 1 hip socket replacement. However I actually needed a size 0, the smallest one. I assume they had to get one from stocks and sterilise it before finishing the operation. I was fully awake, and Eric says I was showing good spirit on my return, despite a drip, two drains, a catheter, a pressure cuff on each lower leg (squeezing at half-minute intervals), an oxygen tube in my nose, and a heap of monitor gear connected to me. I wasn't exactly comfortable, but neither was there much pain. However, when the nurses started transfusing my own blood back into me around 9 p.m., I suddenly had considerable pain in my hand. Indeed, I let out an involuntary shriek that probably could be heard through the entire hospital. Opinions varied on what the problem was, so everyone spent some time adjusting the drip rate, adjusting the position of my hand, and so on. The only thing that helped was a slow drip rate (55 ml/hour max). Unfortunately, that wasn’t one of the choices: a rate of 150ml/hr was required to get all the blood into me before it warmed up to the point where it had to be discarded. Eventually a shot of morphine reduced the pain to a tolerable level and they managed to get two units of my own blood into me. In the morning I felt fairly good, all things considered. The physiotherapist arrived in the afternoon to get me standing and then walking in place. Apart from an incident on the second night when I had to argue rather vehemently with the nursing staff for adequate pain relief, the staff were friendly, helpful, and at times quite amusing. The food ranged from good to excellent. I had a private room. It’s mainly a day surgery; few patients remain overnight and the place is remarkably quiet. The surgeon visited several times a day (his office was at one end of the corridor, and the operating theatres were at the other end). Almost as soon as I was detached from an amazing amount of postoperative torture devices, and less than 48 hours after the operation, I was doing laps around the hospital hallways on crutches and practicing stair-climbing. I got home today. I'm getting around on the crutches well, and didn't have any trouble getting up the 35 steps from the carpark to the apartment (veeery slowly). I'm allowed to stop using two crutches or even one crutch as soon as I feel confident that I don't need them. BTW, the crutches are a type called "Canadian" and they are very comfortable to use, with a moulded hand grip.

More hip problems

Ten days ago my left leg took a turn for the worse (nerve pinch in hip, apparently) and Hurts Like Hell much of the time, despite various medical treatments and codeine tablets (fortunately available without a prescription here in Australia). I've been spending most of my time lying in bed, although that isn't always an improvement over sitting up. Eric has reorganized my desk so I can lie in a recliner chair, type, and use the big monitor. The distraction of working is good for me, though the codeine makes my brain fuzzy at times. Monday we went to Mackay for the first round of blood collection (in prep for the op). To my surprise and relief, riding in the car was less uncomfortable than sitting in any of my chairs (or lying in bed) at home! So I made it there and back, and the bloodletting went okay (no dizziness or whatever, not that I expected any). I've phoned the surgeon's office and suggested that, given the change in my left leg, I'd like to have that hip done first. I have an appointment with him next Monday (when I go to Mackay for the second blood collection) to discuss this and fill in some more paperwork.

Hip surgery plans

I saw the surgeon today and liked both him and the private hospital. He confirmed that both hips need replacement, and opined that the pain in the left knee is probably caused by problems in the left hip, so most likely replacing that hip would fix the knee as well. I liked the surgeon: he was very straightforward, no nonsense, but pleasant. Not a hint of "talking down" to me, and answered questions with what I considered an appropriate level of technicality (not too much nor too little). And there was no delay getting in to see him at the time of my appointment -- somewhat unusual in my experience with specialists. The hospital is small and does mostly day surgery. Most of the 25 or 30 rooms are private. It does not have any cafeteria or food service other than what the hospital provides, so Eric will have to pack a lunch when he comes to visit. I am having the first operation (on the right hip) on Monday, 27 August (5 weeks from today), and the date for the other one will be decided later. I may be able to have that 2-3 months after the first, depending on how quickly I recover. I am going to be very impatient for the next 5 weeks to pass! One reason that I can't have the first operation sooner is that they want to stockpile 3 units of my own blood to use in transfusions during the operation, and I can only give 1 unit each week. This means Eric will have to drive me to Mackay (2 hours each way) one day a week for the 3 weeks before the operation, to have blood taken. Unfortunately there are no facilities closer to home to handle this type of blood donation. I received a packet of information from the company that produces the replacement hip. This info included a DVD of post-surgery exercises, which I am still going through, and a credit-card-sized card with the patient's and surgeon's names, date of operation, etc, for me to keep in my wallet to show to security people at airports and other checkpoints. Eric and I stayed Sunday night with friends in Mackay. Turns out that K had built the surgeon's swimming pool last year. Small town!

More laptop progress

Today I got the DVD player working, using VLC. This involved a bit of mucking around, since some of the necessary software isn't hosted (for legal reasons) on the Ubuntu website. Once I found the (very good) instructions, which included where to find the s/w (on a site called Medibuntu.sos-sts.com, for "Media, Entertainment, and Distractions in Ubuntu"), the rest was easy. Not that I watch DVDs very often, but it's nice to know I can. I had not managed to get the DVD player working under the earlier version of Ubuntu, but that might just be that I didn't put enough effort into finding what I needed (I never found Medibunt before today).

New laptop

I wasn't going to buy a new laptop, really I wasn't. But -- as has happened before -- Dell had a sale of just what I wanted, so I gave in and purchased both a laptop (much smaller than my others) and a new monitor (much larger than my other one). The laptop is an XPS M1210, relatively lightweight but with all sorts of goodies on it, some of which may be more challenging to get working under Linux than others. The monitor is a 24" one with lots of USB and other ports. Later I'll look up the specs or post a link for those of you who want to know all the technical details. I repartitioned the hard drive for dual-boot and a shared partition with Windows, installed Ubuntu 7.04, installed the Nvidia driver for Ubuntu, installed the printer, and got the big monitor working with it (as the main monitor, not a second monitor; it came right up when I installed the Nvidia driver). Most of my data files have been copied over, though there are a few things still to set up (shared Thunderbird files, for example). I'm delighted to report that Ubuntu's installation from the desktop CD has improved with each release, and several things that I previously had to do manually are now handled by the installer -- like enabling the wireless networking (it was detected like the ethernet and just worked, no drama), switching between wireless and ethernet (automatic), mounting the shared drive (no more manual editing of fstab!), and some other things that I forget. It was a good distro for newbies before, but now it's even better -- I feel much more confident now that I can hand a CD to someone (except the totally clueless) and they would be able to install it successfully without assistance.

Cold weather

We just had the coldest June day on record, or something like that. Cold, here in the tropics, is of course relative (a Minnesotan would laugh), but the high was somewhere around 15C and it rained off and on too. Every store in the area sold out of space heaters several days ago (except for some large, expensive ones) -- this was a "hot" topic on the local evening news. It's not too bad indoors, but I am wearing my outdoor jacket and my hiking boots as well as long pants and several layers of shirts and sweatshirts. I've dug out every blanket and quilt I can find and put them on the bed; good thing we have cold-night camping gear! I even managed to find in my hoard of stuff a long-sleeved, warm nightgown, though if this keeps up I may opt for sweatshirt-and-sweatpants in lieu of winter pajamas.

Australian National Science Fiction Convention

Eric and I flew to Melbourne on 6 June, a few days before the Australian National Science Fiction Convention being held there over the Queens Birthday weekend of 8-10 June. We had a great time catching up with old friends, attending book launches by old and new friends, and wandering around part of Melbourne. One night I gave a demonstration of OpenOffice.org to the Victorian group of the ASTC (Australian Society for Technical Communication). In the process of answering some questions, I discovered some changes in the user interface that I hadn't noticed before. (I've only been using v2.2 for 10 days or so.) Fortunately they were not changes that I should have written about in the books I had just published. Some days I could walk reasonably comfortably, but other days I couldn't (arthritis). I have an appointment with an orthopaedic surgeon next month to discuss surgery, but in the meantime walking is not fun. However, we did wander around the city a bit and discovered a small museum in an old (historic) building that had been preserved when a new modern shopping centre was built around it. In the museum was a display that I had never seen before, but Eric says he saw something similar in the movie Minority Report. Instead of a touch screen, it had an area in front of the display where you waved your hand to point at choices (hold for a few seconds to activate the choice) or move sliders around on the display. It didn't seem to work very well (or maybe I was too quick in my movements or something), but in general it was very cool and fun to play with. I also got to the Birkenstock store and bought a pair of sandals with a heel strap, to supplement the ones I have that don't have a strap. The latter are great for indoors, but I can't drive or walk any distance in them because they often slip off. I learned that I could send my old sandals to Melbourne for repair or to have the sole replaced when the tread is too worn. These shoes cost a lot, but they seem to last forever, and their arch support is very good (a requirement for me). We stayed at the Hotel Grand Chancellor on Lonsdale Street, not far from the convention hotel, the Rydges. The hotel room had broadband (at a price), so I used it a bit. As is typical of too many hotels, the room had very few electrical outlets, and those few were poorly located. Even though there was a desk with a decent lamp and an ethernet cable, it had no spare electrical outlets anywhere nearby; the only ones were behind the bed, which is along a different wall, some distance away. Considering that everyone these days wants to charge a mobile phone (if not a laptop computer), this is definitely user-unfriendly! I could have unplugged the lamp to plug in the laptop, but I didn't want to be hassled with climbing under the desk all the time. So Eric bought a cheap 4-outlet powerboard from an office-supply place at the corner. We usually bring a powerboard with us, but this time we forgot.

OpenOffice.org Impress Guide published

Today I published a new OpenOffice.org book in the OOoAuthors series: the Impress Guide. Michele Zarri (from Italy) and I researched and wrote most of it. I learned a lot of useful things about presentations while writing it. I use Impress occasionally but had never taken the time to learn more than the absolute basics. Free PDFs are at http://documentation.openoffice.org/manuals/oooauthors2/ Printed copies can be purchased here: http://www.lulu.com/opendocument

Another live WordPress website

Friends of OpenDocument's new website just went live. http://friendsofopendocument.com/ I learned lots more things about WordPress while doing this site, because I wanted to turn the old news items into blog entries and I had to tweak the template to show the blog info on the static pages. I was really happy to find a theme that had almost the same colours that I had used in the original site, so the existing logo fit right in. I just had to tweak the colour for the header background a tiny bit to match the logo. I'm also quite pleased that I was able to figure out so many things without asking anyone, just searching the web for info.

Taming OfficeOrg.com website redesigned

My first WordPress-based website is now live: http://taming-openoffice-org.com/ It still needs some tweaking (both the content and the navigation), but I'm generally happy with it. I learned a lot working on it, tweaking the CSS and some of the PHP files (especially the header and sidebar). I never want to use a template or theme the way it was originally designed! ;-) I read a lot of how-to's and other online info to get as far as I did. I found some WordPress extensions that have helped a lot, but it's obvious that I need to learn a lot more about PHP to be able to do much more personal customizing. As I expected, this WordPress-based site is much easier to keep up-to-date than the old site was. I'm thinking about adding a blog for OOo-related topics, but considering how rarely I blog on any topic, I'm not sure it's worth doing. Meanwhile, I've started working on the updated site for Friends of OpenDocument. I chose Taming and Friends as the first sites to convert, because they have smaller amounts of existing content compared to my other websites. I'm really keen on revising Avalook and Technical Editors' Eyrie, despite the huge number of pages, but I want to learn what I'm doing with something less daunting. I've found really nice-looking templates for those two sites, so that's encouraging me to get to them soon.