That’s it! We have found our house for next year. It is on Cannon Hill Lane, Raynes Park (not too far from Morden underground station). I saw the house when Claire was at work and decided that I wanted to move there straight away – so dragged her to see it first thing the next day, luckily she liked it too. It is next to a cricket pitch, a green and a park in a beautiful area. In fact there are about 8 parks in the surrounding area. It is a first floor conversion flat, with garden, nice kitchen, large bedroon and large lounge. It’s even closer to work for me and my bike (a grand total of approximately 8 miles).

It’s is also £55 cheaper than our maximum budget was going to be, so I am pleased about that. It’s going to be a real stretch to get the 6 weeks deposit, £100 admin fee and 1 month rent (in advance) together, but I think that would have been the same anywhere. We have put a £250 holding deposit down already which will come off the total bill – but I think I’ll still have to beg steal and borrow to get all the money together.

Anyway, here are some pictures of the house and the neighbourhood!!

My favourite guitar has died.

The head has split, so the only thing holding it in one piece at the minute are the machine heads.

So this guitar will be sent to the great music hall in the sky, but here’s a life story to send it on its way:

1. Bought in 2002 for £30 ON eBay
2. Used to compose most of the songs I have written
3. Played in my gigs with Parachuting Army Men and Hijack the Busker supporting The Modes in Durham
4. Died – 22/04/2007

Good bye, I’ll miss you!

So it’s been 16 days since I had my operation, so I thought I would record the recovery progress and add some pictures of my wounds!

Today has been the best day yet, as earlier I went on a short bike ride, probably only about 3 miles, but it was a good work out and although I found it a little uncomfortable over bumps and setting away or slowing down, I enjoyed it and it wasn’t too stressful on my lungs! So if I don’t get back to work this week, a few more cycle rides to get me moving and I’ll be back Monday week easily.

So for the photos:

Me in Hospital after the first chest drain was inserted. It’s not as bad as it looks!

My pleurectomy wound, bigger than I thought it would be and as painful as it looks!

So apart from a few wounds that still need sorting I feel much better and hope to be back at work soon!

OK, so after a few credit card issues, my lovely parents finally managed to get me my new PC to replace my broken, but well used DELL Dimension. After the disappointment of the inability to change anything hardware wise on the DELL, I decided I’d go for a nice HP Compaq dc5700 with Windows XP Pro (I’ll let everyone else test Vista first!).

All was going well, however my memory won’t go from DELL to HP (no big deal, I’ll get compatible soon!) but the main issue is I didn’t get a recovery CD. This means I’m left with one huge partition and a smaller HP set up recovery partition. WHY I hear you shout! Apparently due to licensing issues from Microsoft – but why shouldn’t I be able to reformat and arrange my operating system as I wish!? Do I need Microsoft’s permission to install a Linux partition? let alone bring some order to my huge hard drive that HP kindly provided with the product!

Don’t get me wrong, the product as a whole seems great, I’m quite happy with it, however I’d prefer to be able to organise the software as I like, rather than have everything on one huge partition and not even the option of adding a linux partition.

And finally, before anyone suggests it, the HP protected recovery partition even stops me using a third party product such as Partition Magic to rearrange my hard disk. Damn them!

Well that was fun.

I am back, after a slightly uncomfortable couple of weeks, spent mostly in hospital, following another collapsed lung. So for your pleasure, here is the full story, including all gory details. And pictures where I can find them too.

Lets start on the 30th March, when I was looking forward to seeing Dogs (a new band I like) who were playing Mean Fiddler in London. I was looking forward to going out, getting very drunk and having fun. However about 9pm my chest started hurting a little, nothing too bad, but I laid off the booze a little and carried on enjoying the music, the pain got a little worse so I moved out the crowds and stood to the side for the rest of the gig.

After the gig, While everyone decided where they were going, I made an exit and decided that since I have a history of pneumothorax, I’d pop into Homerton Hospital when I got back home and just make sure it wasn’t a pneumothorax again. So I got to Stratford, picked up Claire and we went off to hospital. Where after an x-ray everything was apparently fine and it is probably just a bit of an infection following the cold I had…

So that was that then. Normal service resumed. Despite some pain I went to the Science Museum, saw a few good exhibitions, notably the Spitfire and History of Medicine exhibits. I must also return to see “Health Matters”. Apt.

Sunday however the pain was even worse so after a discussion with NHS direct who thought it might be some thoracic infection or something and told me to go back to Homerton that day. So I went back and after an hour or so finally saw a doctor, who sent me for another x-ray, however this time the results were rather different from the last time, showing a massive pneumothorax of my left lung. Again.

You can see the lung has collapsed by the comparing both sides, where there appear to be little vessels (lung) all over the left but complete black on the right, and a larger white mass near the heart in the centre.

A pneumothorax in brief:

The lungs are lined with a double layer of membrane (the pleura) separating them from the wall of the chest. If air gets in between these two layers, called a pneumo (air) thorax (chest wall), this makes the lung collapse causing chest pain and making breathing difficult.

From BBC Health – http://www.bbc.co.uk/health/conditions/pneumothorax1.shtml

So anyway, now that the doctors finally knew what was wrong with me, it should have been a fairly straight forward few days. Not so for me though. First things first though, and on with the treatment.

After diagnosing the problem I was suddenly high on the A&E staff “to do list” and was rushed to “resus” to have a chest drain, or tube thoracostomy inserted into my left pleural space to relieve the pressure on my lung, empty the air and hopefully allow the lung to re-inflate itself.

My chest drain involved using local anaesthetic to numb an area below my left arm, deep into the muscle as well as the skin area. An incision into the skin and muscle is then made down to near the thoracic wall, and then using a metal guide, a tube is pushed through (with great force and a lot of pain!) until they actually burst through into my chest cavity. Ouch. Then a massive gush of air escaped from my pleural space, it was slightly easier to breathe and the tube was positioned, stured in place and dressed. I’ve a photo of the wound and tube on my phone, but can’t get it right now, I’ll try to add it soon.

So then followed a few uncomfortable days in Homerton Hospital, made only better my mother coming down and plenty of visits from friends and footballers alike.

However on Wednesday or Thursday the drain seemed to stop working, no more bubbles, and more pain. I was woken on Thursday morning by nurses with a temperature and obvious pain. The doctor on duty immediately called the London Chest Hospital and arranged asap transfer there for an operation to cure me. The chest drain appears to have become infected and caused the halt in recovery and pain and a fever, so later Thursday, the drain was removed (the most painful ordeal of the whole stay, this was way more painful than it should have been and was enough to never want a drain ever again) and I was transferred to the London Chest Hospital at Bethnal Green.

The London Chest Hospital was quieter than Homerton and I soon settled down, however soon the doctors came round and I found that it might not be Tuesday before I can be operated on, and during that wait I needed a chest drain. Bugger. So the drain was inserted, with a bit of drama when they struggled to get through my chest wall, but when they did, it exploded releasing a lot of fluid and blood and stuff. Tasty.

However later on after some x-rays and so on, I was told they would operate on Good Friday, the following day. That was a relief.

So after a final painful night of a chest drain (or so I thought) and a lot of pain, I was ready for the op. And after a while waiting, finding out I would wake with 2 chest drains, not just one and other assorted pre-op preparations I went off to the theatres, was knocked right out and the surgery began.

The surgery performed was a left pleurectomy, where I believe the surgeons opened me up on my back, and inserted a camera to assess the damage, then they aggravated the chest wall, resulting in the chest wall and lung sticking together much better and hopefully stopping any recurrence of a pneumothorax before re-inflating my lung, and stitching my up. I was also given 2 chest drains to get rid of any air or fluids left or building up after the operation. I can’t actually be sure what happened though – as I was asleep at the time.

After surgery I woke to mother and Claire, very out of it and not feeling great. A couple of days in the High Dependency Unit with an epidural for pain control, many drugs, anitbiotics and so on before I was transferred back to the normal ward, even getting my own room this time! Here I got through the days with pain killers, books and a little TV before finally, on Monday, 9th April 2007, the two chest drains were removed and I was discharged from the London Chest Hospital.

So I am now recovering at home, for a while, hopefully not too long, before getting back to work and shortly after that, getting back to football and cycling. Wish me luck, because I’ll probably need it!

Today I finished a web site favour for a friend of my friend Smidge. The web site is for a choir back up North who unfortunately lost the member that handled their web site. I created a wordpress managed site, using a theme which I heavily modified, new images, slight reorganisation and a lot of photoshop work. The site lives at www.northernspiritsingers.co.uk

I never saw the previous site so I am yet to find out if it is an improvement, I hope it is.

I took on the project after Smidge mentioned it in an email spurred on by what my friend Gareth created for the Ex-National Youth Choir of Great Britain web site. Thanks for the inspiration Gareth! Now after a few updates and some training on the use of the WordPress admin section, the choir can update and use the site to its full potential.

Blimey.

That is one high glass bridge. Having been to the Garnd Canyon I know how impressive it is near the edge, but actually standing over the edge is probably a completely different matter altogether. As I’m not a massive fan of heights, this will definitely be a thrill if I ever make it back to Arizona. The skywalk just out from the top of the canyon at approximately 4,000 feet, much much higher than even the tallest skyscraper so it really is an impressive piece of engineering.

There’s more information on the wiki page

So last Thursday I went all Hip Hop on your ass and went to see Cut Chemist of Jurassic 5 fame at the Islington Academy with Ruf, Anun, Hufty, Ruf’s brother Rob (I think…) and his partner Dave.

I was pleasantly surprised and will definitely carry on listening to and buying more Hip Hop, just got to remember to steer clear of all the terrible Gansta Rap and all that rubbish.

Also adding to the quality night was spending time with Hufty and Ruf and managing to get a hangover the next morning.

Something interesting Hufty and I talked about on the way home, apart from much rubbish, was how good a photograph of hundreds of people queuing single file to get on a London bus or Tube train would be. With all the impatient pushy people, I thought it would be a fantastic image to behold. Now just to work out the logistics of creating it… erm… ahem…

Well here it is, finally. After a long design and development struggle, I have finally finished the bulk of my new web site. Hopefully it is going to be much easier for me to use compared to the old on, and I can get it used a lot more. Most of it is just my own blog and useful posts, useful web design resources and techniques, but I’ll add some tutorials and music that others may be interested in.

It will continue to improve as and when I get the time, but now I’ve got a friend’s site to finish and some more AJAX work for me to enjoy.

Bleeding Flash has been a nightmare today.

Why can’t it ever be simple!! Today’s specific problem was that a trailer that worked fine standalone broke in either IE or Firefox, dependent on how I integrated it.

I’m sure it must be something withing the flash file (or possible withing some javascript, although I couldn’t see *anything* that could possibly affect it in my javascript).

The problem was that in firefox the flash movie would only play if you moved your mouse!!

“WHAT?!” I hear you yell!

After some investigation, I found that the embed method worked fine in Internet explorer, yet not in firefox, whereas the the flash satay method worked fine in firefox but not IE…

After a hell of a lot of experimenting I had to do just what I didn’t want to, and use conditional comments to determine which method to use. Bad idea, but the only way I could get round it… for now…

This is the code, line breaks marked » (in case anyone knows an easier, tidier fix!):

<![if !IE]> <object type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” data=”swf/movie.swf” width=”320″ height=”240″> <param name=”movie” value=”swf/movie.swf” /> <param name=”wmode” value=”transparent” /> <param name=”allowScriptAcess” value=”sameDomain” /> <param name=”autostart” value=”true” /> <param name=”controller” value=”true” /> </object>
<![endif]>

<!–[if IE]>\r\n
<div id=”video”> <object
classid=”clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000″ codebase=”http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/ »
shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=8,0,0,0″ width=”320″ height=”240″ id=”trailer”> <param name=movie value=”swf/movie.swf”> <param name=quality value=high> <param name=bgcolor value=#000000> <embed src=”swf/movie.swf” quality=high bgcolor=#000000width=”320″ height=”240″ name=”trailer” align=”” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash”
pluginspage=”http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer”> </embed>
</object> </div>
<!enfif]–>