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.