Month: June 2016

What size …

/ Tony / Leave a comment

There was an interesting 15 minutes on day time television yesterday. The crew were discussing the problem with the sizing of clothes. A viewer went to a number of high street fashion stores to purchase a pair of size 16 jeans. The idea was to show the viewers that a size 16 in one store was not necessarily the same size in every other store. Now you may be wondering about my interest in size 16 women’s jeans! Well, it is the sizing issue that interests me.

I need to buy some track suit bottoms. I wear them all the time at home as casual clothes and although they are a little ‘chavvy’ I feel very comfortable wearing them. I don’t want to spend a lot of money on them as I’m not making any kind of fashion statement. I just need them to be comfortable.

Here is where the problem lies. I know my leg length and waist size(!) and have scoured the clothes hangers in the sports wear shop. The sizes they show are: extra small (XS); small (S); medium (M); large (L); extra large (XL) and even extra, extra large (XXL). But what does that mean?

I’ll check the size chart.

What size chart?

There isn’t one.

So how do I know what size I need? Without a size comparison chart, what size does (M) or even (XXL) refer to? I thought that I should be medium so picked up three branded and one unbranded pair and proceeded to the changing cubicle. Guess what? Only one of them fitted properly. The others were either too baggy or too tight. How convenient was it that the only pair that fitted was the most expensive branded pair. I came away empty handed and very stressed… again.

Funny old week …

/ Tony / 4 Comments

I’m not going to mention Britain leaving the European Union (well maybe a little) as I think it has all been said. All I will say is that I’m very disappointed with the result. I fully expected it to go the other way but as many people keep saying “Democracy has spoken” or words to that effect. So we have to live with it. Get on and make it work. It will take a long time to convince me that the country ‘did the right thing’ but there is no going back now.

Then to cap it all England was unceremoniously dumped out of the Euro 2016 football tournament last night. Beaten by a team that, on paper should have lost. But that is what we have come to expect for a team that just does not seem to have any spark at all. Of course it is all the fault of the manager. It’s not the fault of the bunch of second rate no-hopers that were out there playing the game. No it’s the managers fault. No other industry would it happen.

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Breaking news … I have just spotted a Police Community Support Officer walking down our road

Now that is something that does not happen very often!

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Now, back to the job in hand. I have a cold. A full on, streaming, head aching cold. It started yesterday afternoon really and just got gradually worse. I can’t stop sneezing! I’ve gone through about 12 handkerchiefs today alone. One of my colleagues had the same thing last week, and I was hoping that I would not get it … but of course I did. I’ve not been to work today, and I’m staying at home tomorrow. Hopefully, I will be okay for Thursday but time will tell.

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K*** is out tonight. She is going with her sister to see Cats at the Leeds Grand Theatre. It’s not the kind of thing I would want to see, so I’m home alone. Well home alone with R*** to keep me company. Should be fun. He only came back from respite yesterday and it is all change for him. Up until yesterday, his daily routines would start from what was called ‘Day Opps’. This was an area that he and the only other ‘daily’ resident used as their base for the day. R*** also has a flat where he stays when he is on respite. The change has come about due to the other resident moving on. This means that they need to area for some other activities.

R*** is now going to be based out of his flat. We were expecting to have a bit of a rough ride with the change, but he appears to have accepted the change without any issue. I say ‘appears’, we never really know what is going on in his autistic mind when these major changes happen. The next few days will be the telling time.

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I think I have given in with Blogger. You may recall that I wanted to use Blogger as another blogging platform. It was going to be used as an outlet for a project I was working and I did not want it to get mixed up with my main WordPress blog. I think I have mentioned that I use a piece of software called “Open Live Writer (OLW)” for composing my posts. This software boasts that it connect to WordPress (which it does quite effectively) and also to Google Blogger. It is Blogger that I’m having an issue with. In OLW there is a tab, that lets you preview how your post will look, before you upload it. With WordPress, this works without a problem. However with Blogger, I cannot get it to show a preview. I know others have had the same issue, but it is a community project and so the support is a bit limited. So, after much deliberation, my Blogger blog is going.

That seemed to work quite well …

/ Tony / Leave a comment

After a couple of false starts, I eventually got an email post to look almost the way I expected. A bit disappointed that one of the text effects didn’t transpose from the email. Using a coloured font does not seem to have an effect. It maybe the email client I used (work Outlook 2010) which is getting a bit past it’s sell by date now. I shall have to try using Outlook 2016 and also try using Outlook.com.

I’ve not tried embedding an image in a post, which is the next test followed by posting multiple images. From what I understand, if I post multiple images one after each other, they will be converted into a gallery. I want to test if the same happens if I post multiple images with some text in between each image.

I also noticed, that using the Independent Publisher theme does not appear to show any tags, that I add to a post. The categories are displayed but not the tags. I dropped a query into one of the help forums because I thought tags should be visible.

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Stupidest comment I have ever heard “I suppose I will vote to leave, but I don’t really know why!”

This was in response to a question about the EU referendum. Now I know that there has been a huge amount of information and dare I say it ‘misinformation’ about this poll, but you have at least to know why you vote the way you are doing. But then that is the way our country works. Many people suffered and even died over the years, to give us the right to vote. It always astounds me that the same right gives people the ‘right’ not to vote. I could rant on for days about voting, but that maybe for another time. In a nutshell I believe that if you don’t vote, without a good reason, the you should lose that right. Not straight away. Possibly a ‘three strikes and your out’ type of thing, but there should be some deterrent.

Testing ‘Blog by Email’ option

/ Tony / Leave a comment

I seem to recall giving this a try some time ago. I must have had some issues with it (or maybe it had issues with me!) because I think I would have posted more this way. There has been the occasion when I have not had access to the internet. An email post via my smartphone would have solved the problem.

Anyway, this is just a test, so …

TEST TEST TESTING TESTING TEST TEST TESTING TESTING

Just thinking out aloud …

/ Tony / Leave a comment

I’ve had a WordPress blog account for a long time now. In fact looking back, it’s been almost ten years since my first post. There has been times when I have thought ‘…is it worth it…’ and ‘…who reads this…’ and there has been the odd time when I have just stopped writing for a couple of months. Basically, could not be bothered! But my anticipated early retirement has started me thinking, that I may have more time on my hands for writing. I am looking to go down the path of ‘creative writing’ with the intention of getting some work published. I not holding my breath on this, but I suppose we have to have a dream of sorts. To this end, I have been considering creating a second blog, which would be dedicated to my (intended) creative writing.

Many moons ago, I had a Blogger account which I was trying to use as a cross-posting blog. The idea was to upload the same post to WordPress and Blogger. It did not really get off the ground, and I abandoned the project after about four posts. There was no easy way of posting the same work to two separate without ‘copy and paste’ which did not work at all.

Over the past week or so, I have attempted to reinvigorate my Blogger account, but it still seems to be a lot more difficult to use than WordPress and the available themes not a patch on those that WordPress have to offer. This leads me to think, that a second WordPress account may be the way forward.

So a decision has to be made, and I think I am close to making that decision. Don’t be surprised if in the next month or so, some my posts have a test link to another WordPress blog.

It had to improve …

/ Tony / 2 Comments

It started when I got home Friday afternoon. I left early as K*** was taking her mother to an appointment and I needed to be home in time for R*** coming home. He’d been on respite since Tuesday and has been getting home the previous week at about16:40. So I needed to ensure that I was home in good time to allow for problems on the motorway.

The guy who had done our rendering was supposed to have been to clear up, but he can’t have done much because it was hardly noticeable. What I did see though was that he had dumped some of the rubble he had cleared in the garden waste bin. Working for the Councils Waste Management, I know that he should not have done that and that we could have our garden waste collection stopped. I managed to get most of it out and into an old compost bag which I can get rid of later.

So back to being home early for R***. What a waste of time! It was 17:40 when the taxi finally dropped him off with the drivers excuse that there had been a ‘serious accident at the roundabout.’ Now this was a blatant lie. When I got home, I checked the travel details on the BBC website, which showed that traffic on the motorway was running fine with no delays in our area. I continued to check as it can give an indication of the time that R*** would arrive home. There were no issues at all. It was a lie. K*** is going to check what time he was picked up, and she will take it from there.

The thing with R*** is that when his routine is compromised, the effect comes out in his behaviour. It’s one part of his Autistic condition that we always try to prepare for. Doesn’t always work though. He started to get a bit tetchy at around 21:00, shouting and playing his computer at full volume. We gave him some medication to settle him, which seemed to work. He became more his usual self. Went off to bed at the usual time and it was all as it should be.

Then disaster! At about 01:00 we heard him shouting, not too loudly, but loud enough to realise he was not dreaming. K*** went to see him and called me to look at his computer. Now I think I have mentioned this before, but R*** sleeps with both his TV and computer on. His TV is on a specific channel and his computer has some YouTube videos on a loop. Both are very quiet, but he always has them on. What happened was that his computer was not working. It was completely dead with no power at all. I checked all the other power connections and they were working okay. So I changed the fuse in the plug for the computer and tried again. Nothing! Then without warning, his computer kicked back into life. All happy again. I could only surmise that the computer battery had completely discharged. It was either the fuse or more likely that the power cable had come loose from the machine.

By this time though R*** had gone into partial melt-down and K*** had given him some of his PRN medication. This really calms him down, but sometimes effects his sleep pattern. It was about 04:00 that he finally settled to sleep. A long night for all of us.

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Now after ‘The Curious Incident of Laptop in the Night’ to paraphrase, I began to worry about what would happen if his computer had not restarted and was broken. He does have another laptop that he takes when goes on respite, but that is for there. He just would not accept that he could use it at home. I began to think that my ‘old’ laptop could be upgraded to Windows 10. I bought a new one when Microsoft started to push Win 10 and reduced the mainstream support for Win 7. I did not want to upgrade my machine as there was some core software that I use, that was reported not to work in Win 10.

So, I bit the bullet and decided to upgrade the old machine to Win 10 and use it as an emergency machine. I knew it as going to take a couple of hours, but what I was not prepared for was the actual time it would take. It was 10:30 when I clicked the ‘Upgrade’ button and I sat for the next hour watching what was happening. I had been told that there was very user input, and that was correct. It finally finished installing leaving me with a workable system, just under eight and a half hours later!

I am now in the process of un-installing all the software that nobody would actually use. Could be another long day.

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A quick update on my early retirement bid. On the 7th, I emailed the pension company asking for a copy of my 2015/16 pension statement. The reply I got back was short and sweet telling me that the ‘… statements were being sent out everyday, in alphabetical order and I should hear in a couple of months …’ I was going to wait until Saturday and write a more detailed email to point out why I needed the statement now. So it came as a bit of a surprise when the post came on Saturday morning to find my 2015/16 pension statement had been sent. Date of printing … 7th June. Coincidence?

A lot more than serious …

/ Tony / Leave a comment

Following on from my last post regarding Early Retirement, things have moved on somewhat. When I first mentioned it to K***, her initial response was that ‘… I should think about it …’. It has gone from that via ‘… I think you should really consider it …’  to ‘… think you should go for it…’ very quickly. She thinks that we could over-think this and although I’m not an impulsive person by any means, I think she is right.

Therefore the decision, I think has been made. I’m speaking with our service lead on Wednesday to discuss the matter, and I’ve an idea, that he is going to ask me for a date when I want to go. From what I understand, if I say I want to go at the end of … say September, then the request will go to a corporate panel on the 8th of September and then then directorate panel on the 18th September. If it passes both panels, then my last day would be the 30th September. It is that quick.

So now all I need to do, over the next few days is to pick a leaving date! I suppose this is another one of those life changing moments.

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I opened another Individual Savings Account (ISA) last week. I know that people now say the ISA has had its day with the new Personal Savings Allowance (PSA), but I can’t help feeling that my ISA is a better saving option. I’ve been saving using ISA’s for a few years now, but did not transfer the 2014/15 to my 2015/16. No idea why, but I think I just never got around to it. But I decided that this time I would. So I spent a good hour filling in forms to transfer the funds across. It seemed a little bizarre, that I had to manually fill in the details of the transfer as there was no online facility to do this at all. Bit odd in this day and age, but it is done now. Already to post tomorrow. Just need to set up a direct debit to put some money into the account now.