Post op week 2

I must admit that I am pleasantly surprised by the lack of pain from this op on my hand. The previous three ops all had me taking pain killers for weeks and my hand was totally useless as the slightest pressure on my thumb or fingers was extremely painful. This time round, it took until the morning after the op for the anaesthetic to fully wear off and my fingers to start moving again but when it did I was pleased to find that there was very little swelling, hardly any bruising and very little pain. Within three days I was using my hand to type with one finger. Now apart from the clumsy great pot on my hand and not being able to grip anything properly I hardly notice the op at all. I also don't need to take any more than my usual dose of pain killer to keep my arthritis under control.

I haven't managed to do any work on my network due to my hand but I have been busy doing other bits of upgrades. I have rejoined Skype using a wireless head set and web cam bought from eBay. The camera is tiny but give a good image even in the dark due to the LEDs that supply illumination. The web cam is compatible with Skype but not with Yahoo messenger so I can talk to some of my friends and customers but not others.

The wireless head set is a multi purpose one. It can be used for online audio/visual chat, It can be used as a baby monitor although wearing a headset all the time isn't my idea of comfort. It can be used wireless headphones to listen to music or DVDs without disturbing anyone else so it wasn't bad value at just less than £6. I haven't worked out how to wire it in permanently to my system as crawling about under the desk is a no no with this pot so it is just plugged in to the front mic and earphone connectors for now where it seems to work perfectly once I had told Vista what it was and where it was connected.

Earlier this week I was reading an article about how to make curved corners in CSS. It looked to be a lot of hard work just to make boxes with rounded corners so I thought I would have a go. I set to and designed a template for a web page called Curved Corners which you will find here if you want a look Curved Corners Test Page . It is a bit rough and ready at the moment but it wouldn't take much work to make it fully functional if anyone out there would like a site built using it.

I often find myself grinding my teeth at the claims of WYSIWYG web site editors who claim to be able to write perfect cross platform code first time every time. The simple fact is they can't as the following example will show. On Curved Corners is a small piece of code that produces a search box like this:-

<li id="search">

 <h2>Search</h2>

  <small style="margin-left: 25px">Search this site</small>

    <form id="searchform" method="get" action="">

 <div>

   <input type="text" name="s" id="s" size="15" style="height: 27px;" />

   <input type="submit" value="Search" style="height: 29px;" />

 </div>

    </form>

</li>

What this is supposed to look like is this :-

What you get is this in Mozilla :-

In Internet Explorer 8 you get this :-

And in Avant you get this:-

I am told that the WYSIWYG editors can sort this out but I think the above examples from my template show they are not quite as good as they claim. When I have debugged the code and made them all look the same I will let you know what had to be done to the CSS and HTML to get it right.

On Tuesday the heavy pot comes off, the stitches are removed and a light weight pot put on for the next four weeks. I am hoping that I will get a bit more use out of my hand although I will have to care full not to over use it.

Post Op

We had a bit of a scare when we turned up for the op as my BP was too high for comfort but the Anaesthetist decided that it was OK to go ahead, The op was straight forward so I now have a very heavy pot on my left hand and I am trying to learn how to do everything one handed.

I have managed to edit a new article for my web site all about User Accounts and Passwords. I know some of my readers have concerns about how to secure their computer from intrusion both deliberate and accidental so there should be something for everyone in here. A word of warning, some of the recovery techniques described in the article could in the wrong hands do some damage so think carefully before you implement them.

Typing one handed is a bit tiring so I hope you will excuse the brevity of these few words.

New Articles

As my regular readers will know, I do spend some time trawling the web to find articles that I know will be useful or interesting to my 'customers'. This time I think I have found something for everyone.

I find the Telegraph Boot camp a fertile source of articles that, with a small amount of editing, can be made into very readable tutorials, hints & tips and sources of programs and materials. This month Rick Maybury (Boot Camp's author) has rounded up some of the best Freeware programs from around the web. I have often been told that Freeware is a load of rubbish but it isn't so. There is some rubbish out there but in the main the programs and utilities fill in the gaps that the main software houses leave or would find uneconomic to write for as they have a limited audience. A second source of material is those authors who like to find an idea, write a program to develop it and then ask others to add to what they have done. A good example of this are two famous programs The Gimp and Picasa which you will find on the computer of any serious digital photographer.

Rick split his offering up into eight weekly parts but I have tried to draw it together to make it more readable and the programs easy to find so you will find a menu page for the main groups and then individual pages for those groups. The groups are :-

• Handy tools and utilities
• Pictures and graphics
• Audio and multimedia
• Privacy and security
• Networks, Internet & email
• Alternatives to Microsoft programs
• Odds and ends

You will find the menu page here Freeware Menu Page. Not all the pages are up on my site yet (there are nine in all) but I hope this little project will keep me busy while I converless.

This is the week when I have the next op on my hands. I am usually looking forward to an op because I know exactly what the surgeon is going to do and I am intensely interested in what is going on. This time I don't feel that way at all, in fact I am very apprehensive about the whole thing. If my hands weren't so painful and there was another form of treatment available I think I would seriously consider giving the op a miss and trying something else. In this case there is no alternative that I know of so on Tuesday morning I will be lying on the table and hoping the op doesn't go on too long.

Network wise I was called to a computer that had its sound card replaced and was misbehaving when it was re-connected to the Internet. It had a relatively new motherboard with two network adaptors. When just one of the adaptors was connected to the router the Internet connection was painfully slow. However if both adaptors was connected to the router and then the resulting network connections bridged Internet browsing became blisteringly fast. This will be old hat to large network technicians but small network and home networking technicians like myself often miss out on these snippets. When I got home I thought I would see if it made any difference to my own network. My motherboard has two gigabyte adaptors so I ran an extra cable to my hub and enabled the second connection. It took about three minutes for the computer to recognise both connections and to bridge them but the hub took all that in its stride and now have a bridged connection running at a full 1 gb speed. It has speeded up my Internet connection noticeably but the real gain is when I move big files around my network - they now don't doddle about at 20 to 30 kbps they are moving at several megabytes a second. I think I will spend some of my enforced rest time after Tuesday rethinking the layout of my network and seeing just which of my computers will benefit from 2 network adaptors and which can be safely left with one.

I may not be adding to my blogg over the next week or two as typing one handed is a right royal pain so please keep an eye on this blogg and I will be back as soon as I can use at least one finger in my left hand.

Another project finished

I have just uploaded the final files of my latest project. It is an updated website for a person who is heavily involved in providing the support for dyslexic children and adults especially those who have problems with Maths. If you want a look you can find it here after 10 am on the 9th June.

Dr Chinn also writes books about problems with maths and I have been involved in typesetting them. A new set of five books has just been released. They are :-

• What to do when you can't Add and Subtract
• What to do when you can't Learn the Times Table
• What to do when you can't Multiply and Divide
• What to do when you can't Tell the Time
• What to do when you can't do Fractions, Decimals and Percentages

They can be bought from Egon Publishers at this address.

Now this project is out of the way I can concentrate on getting ready for the op on my hand next week. I don't know why but I feel very apprehensive about this op. Unlike previous ops I have known exactly what the surgeon is trying to achieve. This time we won't know what he is going to do until he has opened up my hand and seen just what has gone wrong with the joints at the bottom of my thumb and wrist. As the op is done under a local anaesthetic I will be able to discuss with him what he finds and listen to what he proposes to do about it. Some of my friends and colleagues find this a bit too much to take in but as an ex-nurse I am not a bit squeamish and I am too interested in the procedure to be bothered about feeling faint or sick.

I didn't finish the upgrade of my network even though I now have all the bits. My hands were too painful to hold the components and the tools. The bits will still be here once the op is over and my hand has healed and I hope I will be able to finish the upgrade then.