Saturday 17 September 2011

gardiner-smith.com, new home

The gardiner-smith.com domain  and hosting (mostly used for the our mail addresses) have been hosted by the same service for over 10 years and the services have not change one iota in that time and I was still paying the same price.

Nowadays, e-mail messages are much larger and I had been having quota problems so I decided that I would look if I could get a better deal. I first tried my existing mail/web host service (flump.net) and discovered that they were still talking about the same packages as I got 6 years ago with spaces measured in MB still!! What is more they have not updated their site in 4 years, I think maybe they have lost interest.

After a quick look around it looked like hostpapa had one of the best deals with pretty much unlimited space/bandwidth and a great set of services for €2.95/month. Compared to my 250MB limit for about twice that. They also offered a free domain for life (as long as you stay with them I guess) so I was able to transfer gardiner-smith.com from from register.com to tucows (host papa's registry) at no cost. Their pre-sales on-line support was excellent and instructions for set was clear

Planning the move was quite nerve wracking making sure that the break in service was as short as possible but I need not of worried. I was given an ip address at host papa which allowed me to set up mail accounts and stuff, then once the auth code had been requested &  received from the old registry (requiring a phone call and them pleading with me to stay for 10 minutes)  and passed on to the new registry all I had to do was wait. I backed up the old mailboxes and up a redirect on my old mailbox so I knew when that stopped redirecting the new domain address had been propagated. It all took 4 days from signing up to being transferred (with no loss as far as I know). Most of that time was just waiting for the internet to propagate my new address through the global DNS. Now a lll I need to do is shut down the old service.

Upshot is I am now running gardiner-smith with hostpapa. No homepage yet, but you can look at some photos of my new grandson and our China holiday at http://gardiner-smith.com/pictures/.

If all goes well over the next few weeks I might go back to hosting my own blog rather than using bloodspot. Mainly depends on how difficult the migration is.

p.s. The more observant may have noticed a few posts from my old 2002/2003 architecture blog just for nostalgia's sake.


Thursday 8 September 2011

Your Good Healtth

Or mine actually.

Given the origins of this blog I thought I should mention the current state of my health four years on from that fateful day 1n 1997.
  1. I am still alive: This in itself is more than I could have hoped for and I seem to well into the long tail of the morbidity statistics for my condition. Sometimes it is hard to imagine that I am terminally ill.
  2. Side Effects from my condition or treatments: It is difficult for me to tell which is which, and the doctors can't tell either.
    - My Brain-Speech connection still has problems and I lose words and forget names more than is normal (or was normal for me). It may be getting worse, but it is definitely a slow progression ifit is. It is the only thing that still scares me, the idea that I might at some time lose my ability to communicate.
    - I still have some insensitivity on my right side but either it has got better or I have gotten used to it, I think this was a by-product of my biopsy, but as I said nobody can prove it one way or another.
    - I still get headaches on the left side of my head in the mornings, on waking, several times a week, but they are not severe and they usually go away within 30 minutes.
  3. Drugs: I only take Timonil (Carbamazepine) 300 twice a day as a precautionary measure against seizures. This to make sure that my regular EEG doesn't show too much craziness in the damage areas (see plot below) because if it did  I would be banned from driving. (Given the drugs I am more likely to get banned for other reasons, but more of that in another post perhaps).
  4. Monitoring: I am now down to 2 check ups a year which comes down to alternate EEG / MRI appointments. Sometimes I feel embarassed taking up the time of the guys and gals at the hospital just so that Professor Neuro can say "No Change"
Just in case anybody is interested here is my latest EEG from yesterday:
Interesting bit is around 3:47 where the sensors (FP1-F7, F7-T3, T3-T5, T5-O1) around my damage get a little crazy,
but not crazy enough to worry Prof. Neuro thank goodness
 P.S. I have added a tag Health so you can track just the health stuff




Tuesday 6 September 2011

More Ooh & Aah pictures from Jayden

Just Me
Me Again
Just me and Mum
with Mum and siblings




with Nanny (& u. Joss)

Nanny Again
With Aunty Amber

Sunday 4 September 2011

Extending th Moser arm - Jayden Tyler

Just a quick blog to announce:

Jayden Tyler Moser



Arrived at 12.02am in Baden Weighing in at 3.3kg (7lb 4oz for the imperalists), 49cm long, quick birth mother (Kayleigh) and baby are fine.

This extends the Moser arm of the Gardiner-Smith's to 3.