Thursday, December 06, 2007

And then there were none


swe200608200005
Originally uploaded by pcgxk
It's seems ridiculous that I should be writing this so shortly after Kipper died, but it would sadly appear that I am no longer the owner of any cats :-( Daisy disappeared last Saturday, and despite Sarah's valiant efforts of leafletting the entire neighbourhod and phoning and talking with anyone and everyone, there's not a trace of her. To say I'm gutted is an understatement.

I may be proved wrong and yes, as people keep telling me, maybe she'll just turn up randomly one day, but in truth I doubt it right now. If it had been Kipper then I'd be unconcerned as he'd be living it up happily in someone else's house enjoying extra strokes as he could get them.

But in truth Daisy was so timid that there were very few people apart from us that she'd even go near, so in all reality the outlook is not good. I guess the usual categories of traffic accidents, predators and just general health may have taken their toll. I'll probably never know.

Fuck.

Sunday, November 11, 2007

Looking Back from where we came


Looking Back from where we came
Originally uploaded by pcgxk
So here's a shot from us trekking in September in Stora Sjöfallet. All the photos in the set are from Anders, Greg and Sonya as my camera broke on the 1st day, so many thanks go out to these guys for sharing!

Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Catching Up


Catching Up
Originally uploaded by pcgxk
This photo sums up everything that was wonderful about last weekend. I love the photo, but I love what it represents. 3 days just hanging with Steve and catching up over good food and a few drinks. What more could one ask for?

Life and DNS redirects

So, finally after much frigging about my new DNS seems to work. This is a small personal triumph against technology which has been challenging me, but as Sarah likes to remind me, I love it really!

There's a 5 month gap of posting where I wonder what happened, my xbox is STILL at the repair factory, and life's brought many strange things in between.

I've trekked through the Swedish mountains tied to a Reindeer, kayaked through the Stockholm archipelago, passed another tech interview and got a new job within Microsoft, watched Elk at night in the Forest, camped in and enjoyed the Swedish outdoors, watched palce beat Sheffield United in the flesh, met Barnaby for the first time and generally wondered what will come next.

Winter has arrived now, it snowed at the weekend and things are closing in. I love it! Seeing Steve was fantastic last week, and as everyone constantly reminds me, the weather in Barcelona is fantastic - which it is, but in fact the heat and sun just made me pine more for Sweden.

With Sarah being pregnant now, there are obvious changes to life afoot, but fuck me, I don't know what they are, and for the moment, well I just have to wait and see what happens. You can't say fairer than that.

Sunday, October 21, 2007

XBox games and features

We'll, carcassonne was good, catan was fantastic as well, but all in all, I've played very little recently as my xbox is one of the many needing to be repaired. I'd like to tell you that sending it to Microsoft for repair was simple, but it wasn't! On the 3rd attempt though it finally made it to the courier, and is sitting in the Q in Germany now awaiting its turn.

Saturday, May 12, 2007

New XBOX games and features

and I forgot to say that the other thing I've been loving this week is new games and features on the xbox 360. I'm just so mad for xbox right now, especially after they released catan on xbox live last week. It's just real catan, but available day and night, but of course you can still play with your friends as well, which is pretty cool for me when all my board game contacts are in other countries. And carcassonne is coming out next week as well...bring it on.

And MS have integrated messenger services into the dashboard as well now, which I think is quite cool.

Notes from a grey corner of Sollentuna

Sollentuna is where I live for the un-initiated. It's currently a grey spring day, but the nights are short and the days are long right now as we approach mid-summer.

This week has been one of work, but with planning for my 5 week holiday / training period away from work, which starts next Thursday, and then I'm clear free until 25th June - nice!! I'm off to Munich in 10 days for some cool Windbg training, and then its outdoor activites all the way.

This week I've been enjoying playing with a new LastFM subscription, especially after pandora was turned off, but frankly it blows pandora away anyway in my opinion, and I'm completely mad for it. You can see the widget in the right hand bar here.

Last week I met a very cool Syrian guy who owns a fruit and veg market down the road from here, well when I say met, I went to his market and got talking to him, because he had a great selection of interesting produce, and being from the middle east he understood the need to stock large bunches of just about every herb there is, and to naturally sell everything for half the price of a supermarket. I felt like practicing my Swedish as well, so we chatted for ages. I'm off there in a minute to go and buy a shed load of ingredients and hopefully spend the weekend cooking.

Saturday, April 28, 2007

Holiday Planning


Obviously bearing in mind the events of the previous week, it's been a fairly crappy and boring week. The penicillin has been doing its job and my hand appears to be much better, but its been taking its toll on me in other ways, so I've been off work all week.

In the last couple of days I've been able to use the computer again (a bit) with one hand, so I've been doing some holiday planning for June, both because it needs to be done and because it always cheers me up :-)

Currently I've got the following events planned:

Beaver Watching Trip (in canoes)
Moose Safari
both whilst living out in the woods a few hours west of Stockholm.

Then I've got a couple of kayaking trips planned, one one dayer and one two dayer, camping out in the northern archipeligo.

In addition to that I'm planning to take a 5 day trip island hopping in the southern archipeligo, hopefully with Sarah, although she's supposed to be working, so this is up for debate I guess.

Finally I'm planning to walk some of the Sormlandsleden which is a big national trail that starts south of Stockholm. In between I'll just chill in Stockholm and hopefully do lots of cycling and swimming.

Bring it on!



Thursday, April 26, 2007

Kipper's Story


swe200608200003
Originally uploaded by pcgxk.
This is not exactly a pleasant story to say the least, but I kinda feel the need to write it all down.

At about 6pm on Saturday, I was sitting in the computer room laying out loads of paper on the floor, preparing to do my swedish tax return for the first time. Kipper strolled into the room in his normal fashion and sat down on the papers like any good cat should. I pulled them from under him and had a chat with him like you do with your cats and then noticed that he was making a really funny sounds from his throat and that he was breathing really heavily, but with his mouth open. He sounded like he was in real difficultly. I looked it up in the ever reliable "catopedia" and it didn't sound good. Removal to vets immediately seemed to be the overall summary. I spoke to sarah downstairs and came back up 5 minutes later. He still looked the same, but then as we came into the room he coughed up some blood. Definately time to go to the vets.

I put him in the cat box, left Sarah at home and headed for the emergency room of the Djursjukhus (Animal Hospital) which is about 20 minutes drive away. He sounded the same in the car all the way, very gravelly breathing.

When I arrived they did a quick interview at reception and then I saw a vet about 30 minutes later. I spoke some fairly bad swedish to her, but I'd looked up most of the key words before leaving home (breathing, coughing etc). She looked at me and spoke some english and said along the lines of "Are you prepared that this is probably not a good diagnosis". Unfortunatley I already was.

She checked him out and then we took him for some xrays. He'd coughed up more blood by this time and was having a harder and harder time breathing. Giving a non sedated cat an xray is not exactly an easy or pleasant thing to do, but I put on my lead apron and held him down so we could get it done immediately. I was getting increasingly emotional down as I had a real bad feeling about what was coming.

We finished the xrays and I took him back to the little vets room we were assigned to. Then it all kicked off. He was starting to make some really bad noises and look really distressed and he was rolling around from side to side. I was trying to calm him but it wasn't going to happen. The he shit himself and started to cough up loads of blood. He got out of my grasp and ran to the corner of the room and started rolling around there. Then he pissed on the floor as well and I ran to get the vet. They sent a nurse in to clean him up whilst I spoke to the vet, we were looking at the xrays and she explaining to me that he had loads of fluid in the chest and all sorts of other unexplained things, such an enlarged heart and that it was basically not good at all.

All this had happened in about 2 minutes and we'd swiched to some english at this point to talk about medical stuff. Then we heard some anguished screams from both nurse and cat and I said to the vet "Are you trying to tell me that you have to put him down, but you're breaking it to me slowly?" and she confirmed what I already really knew. I said to her that we should just do it straight away because he was by this time obviously in so much distress and he just seemed to be dying there and then anyway as his body gave up completely, but he was doing it in a shed load of pain. So we rushed back to the room where he was and there was a bad bad scene of blood and bodily fluids everywhere. We grabbed him and it took all 3 of us to hold him down, as he was fighting so much for air at this point, and 30 seconds later it was over, relief to all, but especially to kipper.

It goes without saying that by this time I was more than a little upset and they left me alone to cry for a few minutes and decide what to do next. Obviously I needed to tell Sarah, but there was one final twist of the knife before that. In his last throws of distress Kipper had sunk his teeth into my hand quite badly, a double sided bite, which the vet informed me meant I had to go to casulty immediately to get penicillin for as it would definately become infected.

So I had to ring Sarah and tell her all of this, and explain everything, and then we had to go a sit in casulty, which I can assure you was not where I wanted to be right then, until about 3am.

Since then I've been taking the penicillin and sitting at home feeling rather blue. We'll never actually know what caused it, but the most likely thing appears to be some form of cancer or virus that cats get, which just goes un-noticed. He'd been happy and jolly in the weeks and days leading up to this, and we really had no idea. Subsequently I learnt that he had been sitting differently and the fashion that he had been sitting in meant that he was potentially having trouble breathing, but it just goes to show, as beyond that he was just his normal self. Then one night in the space of 3 hours he died.

It's amazing how much you become attached to your pets, and hard to explain to someone who hasn't done it, as some people just say, "well you can buy another one", or "it's only a cat", but suffice to say I don't think of it like that. A pet like a cat or a dog is something that you share your house and your life with on a day to day basis, and of course the thing about any such pet is that they give you unconditional love.

Obviously I'm trying to remember him as pictured above, as this is how it should be. He brought great joy to my life.

Saturday, April 07, 2007

Woodpecker


Woodpecker
Originally uploaded by pcgxk.
Here's the local woodpecker who' often knocking around the garden. I've been trying to take some bird photos from the bedroom window, but even with a tripod to stop blurring, my little point and click camera in maximum zoom and maximum resolution isn't quite up to the job of getting a sharp photo. You can see from the others on flickr that they're nearly there, but after cropping and touching, they're still a little small and not that crisp. An interesting experiement though. it's the only time I've ever noticed that my camera is not quite up to the job, but that's cos the majority of the time I do just point and click, so I won't be rushing out to buy another one soon. I like the new features on flickr though that allow you to look at statistics of who did what with which camera when.

Dual Boot Ubuntu Linux installation

Hey - don't tell my employer but I've just installed the latest Ubuntu distro, which so far has been very simple and interesting, but I haven;t been able to use it yet. When I say simple, it's actually taken me nearly 2 days and 15 attempts, but this was entirely not the fault of the linux side of things, but the fact that i was trying to repartition my desktop to keep the windows side of it running and create a proper dual boot image. In the end I had to defrag the windows drive about 5 times to move all the space to the front of the drive and then run a couple fo chkdsk passes to fix some minor errors, but after that the install went smooth as silk. It'll be interesting to compare the 2 in the coming weeks.

Sunday, March 18, 2007

The Ski Season has finished

Well and truly...after we got back from Sälen its rained or been warm every day, the last of the huge snow ploughed snow piles disappeared last week, and all that is left now is big pile of grit. It's pissing it down now as I look outside.

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

The view from high up in Sälen


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Originally uploaded by pcgxk.
This is actually atop the mountain at Tandådalen, on the one clear day that we had there. The skiing was great all week though, averaging about minus 5 each day with some fresh snow for several days at the beginning of the week. Perfect :-)

Monday, March 12, 2007

Wisdom Teeth

So I have my wisdom tooth removed on Friday, so I'm sitting around at home right now eating mostly soup and codine tablets. I think I was quite lucky really and although it hurts like hell and I can't eat, I think I got off fairly lightly as I only had to have one removed and I think it all went to plan. However this wasn't to say that I wasn't completely shit scared beforehand.....

Either way I've got a couple more days booked off work before I return, so I'm sitting here in a slightly dozy drugged state catching up on some correspondence and acting as a cat flap, which for the uninitiated is defined as opening the door every 5 minutes for one cat or the other to go in or out.

Sunday, January 28, 2007

The Ski Season has started

Well the stockholmski season has started anyway. We went up to here http://www.vasjobacken.com/ yesterday, which is about 7km up the road from home. I bought some skis during the week so got to try them out for the first time. We're going out to buy some skis for sarah today, as she's got the bug of "not queuing". Hopefully this week we'll go up after work a few times, as its open til 10pm every night.

Skiing frenzy here we come :-)

Thursday, January 11, 2007

Blog reorganisations

So , I've changed my template again, but I seem to have lost a few posts in the process. I've got to say though that I like the new blogger, and I've been waiting a while for it, cos I always assumed google would throw their development weight behind it. Hopefully it'l be more stable now, I'm certainly enjoying the new interface and features.

Maybe I should be using livespaces if I was a good MSFTE :-)

I've been browsing various cool things from Vegas CES this week, and its interesting to see that MS have some cool things going down...obviously I'm a total xbox live convert, which I did write about last week, but the post got lost and I couldn't be bothered to re-type it....but the thing we've been checking out this week is http://labs.live.com/photosynth/ which I think is way cool. The question is I guess is whether they'll chose to link it into other photo sources such as flickr etc, or whether they'll market it as independent. For example I was interested to note that the new Ford / MS tie in which allows you to do all sorts of computer based tasks inyour new ford is compatible with ipod as well as zune and other media players.

It's strange because for a server based person like me the whole desktop / interface / OS / macs are cool / linux is best / MS is the devil type of argument passes me by. I mean I'm aware of it but I don't get concerned about it like some people do - maybe this is my naivety...

Everybody's sick right now

Well, me, and the 2 cats, which is probably a bit depressing for Sarah....I've got the usual stomach upset, winter vomiting type of thing, although not as badly as last year, but it struckme coming home from go-karting in stockholm last night, and frankly it was not a pleasant journey -feeling marginally better now though - a bit up and down.

Kipper is going to the vet on tuesday because he has another fighting wound, on his neck this time, but it just won't heal because he keeps scratching it. We tried bandaging it at the weekend, but as you'll know if you've ever tried badaging a cat, they're very good at getting them off straight away, so we're taking to to the professionals next week.

And daisy seems to be just like me, throwing up and looking miserable, maybe we've exchanged diseases!!

Hopefully I'l be well enough to go and see everyone in London next week though.

Everybody's sick right now

Well, me, and the 2 cats, which is probably a bit depressing for Sarah....I've got the usual stomach upset, winter vomiting type of thing, although not as badly as last year, but it struckme coming home from go-karting in stockholm last night, and frankly it was not a pleasant journey -feeling marginally better now though - a bit up and down.

Kipper is going to the vet on tuesday because he has another fighting wound, on his neck this time, but it just won't heal because he keeps scratching it. We tried bandaging it at the weekend, but as you'll know if you've ever tried badaging a cat, they're very good at getting them off straight away, so we're taking to to the professionals next week.

And daisy seems to be just like me, throwing up and looking miserable, maybe we've exchanged diseases!!

Hopefully I'l be well enough to go and see everyone in London next week though.