Today has been most bizarre. I had a restless night suffering from abdo/chest pain that was aggravated every time I move in my sleep. I had popped something yesterday at work and was in excruciating pain for about fifteen minutes before settling down to an annoyance.

This morning I was finding most tasks difficult and I was ordered to present myself at the Infirmary for a check. Very strange being on the receiving end I must say.

I got a very thorough check up which proved to be enlightening. My blood pressure was through the roof but the doc reassured me this was because of the pain I was in. Otherwise despite my weight I seem to be in tip top condition, in fact although I joked about the excess fat I was carrying the medics described my build as "heavily muscled"; talk about diplomatic.

So after poking and prodding and x-rays and blood tests it appears I've torn my anterior abdominal wall and perforated my diaphragm. Pumped full of drugs (not used to opiates, I've been spaced all day) and sent home.

So now I'm in pain if I'm sitting (but not lying or standing), belly breathing, twisting or stretching, bending, coughing or bearing down. It's bloody annoying. And distracting.

I've just had to dispatch one of our chicken who was disembowelled an hour or so ago by assailant unknown, probably a fox but a badger is possible. As well as leaving poor Hettie in that state they also made off with Star. I need a decent hi-power air rifle like I used to have (a Falcon pneumatic carbine).

I'm angry that Jane and I both thought the others had locked up the chickens tonight. It's happened before with no ill effects. Now we are left with just the one, Choo Choo, who seems pretty traumatised by the whole ordeal.

Jane thinks we shouldn't get more as they were pets but I see it otherwise (though I was the one against getting them in the first place). I'm off to have a little weep.


ETAAfter some research I reckon that this has been the work of a badger rather than a fox which makes anything other than passive defence of the chicken coop moot. The GOOD NEWS though was we found another hen, Star, wandering around at four am. So now I'm about to e-mail a supplier to replace Hettie. All the more tragic as she was the one that had been rescued from the side of the road after all her other companions had been slaughtered by a fox(?).

I designed a vehicle for the Spica Sourcebook project a while back, it is based on the concept of a Combat Lander, an orbit to ground personnel carrier that also provides fire support.

So I came up with this rendition of it in Daz|Studio today. Not quite there yet but a start.

Tonight whilst walking Lucy at an ungodly hour I noticed how clear the sky was and then caught the track of a satellite passing south to north (it couldn't have been anything else, it was far too fast). I looked North West and caught Arcturus shining bright low in the still lit sky and turned to walk past the castle again and spotted a bright light low in the sky.

It was intense. like magnesium burning. It didn't fade like a similarly bright light I saw last night and thought as a very bright meteor. I checked my starry night widget and couldn't find anything to correspond to it's position. Any ideas? It could have been Jupiter I suppose but it was really bright. Of course given the amount of military air traffic of late it may have been a very distant helicopter with a searchlight but out on the Cheviots? At 1am? And it was static. Any ideas?

On the social front I'll actually be out drinking in Edinburgh tonight, my old friend Chach is getting hitched in a couple of weeks so we are holding the World's Smallest Stag Night. I don't actually know where we are going but for some reason my friend John wants us to go to Rose Street :( Dirty Dicks in fact which looks like every Edinburgh tourist trap I've ever had the misfortune to step into.

CERN will activate its particle accelerator the Large Hadron Collider. When activated, it is theorized that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and "missing links" in the Standard Model of physics and could explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass. The verification of the existence of the Higgs boson would be a significant step in the search for a Grand Unified Theory, which seeks to unify three of the four known fundamental forces: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force, leaving out only gravity. Typically such momentous scientific achievements are inaugurated with profound words, such as Neil Armstrong's "One small step for man, one giant leap for all mankind", or when Oppenheimer famously quoted from the Bhagavad Gita upon the first test of a nuclear weapon. No doubt the Directorate of CERN will have prepared something similar to match this historic event.

However, we the undersigned feel something simple will suffice. Upon activating the LHC for the test, we advocate the opening words be,

Commence Primary Ignition!

a call back to the 1977 movie "Star Wars" when the villains destroyed the planet Alderaan with their Death Star.

Some would charge that this does not convey a sufficient level of respect for the process at hand. However, given that particle physicists gave up on seriousness years ago ("strange" quarks? Honestly people) we feels it reflects the current standard quite well. Additionally, given the difficulty scientific research is having in getting sufficient funding in the current political climate (e.g. budget cuts at Fermilab in the United States) trying to link vital scientific research with the military-industrial complex can't hurt.

Further, in the event that the sum total of human knowledge painstakingly amassed over course of history is wrong and the scientific illiterates are correct and this experiment does result in "opening a gate to hell", "blowing up the planet", "creating a stargate to another dimension", or "granting the antichrist newfound powers" etc etc etc then this deliberate link to the destruction of a planet will allow the scientists to claim they knew this would happen and they meant to kill us all the entire time. The ability to still proclaim the experiment a success regardless of the outcome will prove helpful when procuring the necessary funds for the next mega-experiment.

Sign up to the LHC Activation Petition here.

Sorry everyone, as of this post I'm going friends only.

I will give the reasons on a later post but if you want in then comment and tell me why.

I'll also be going back to change all my previous posts to friends only.

A request to any Edinburgers out there. Professor Chuck Gannon is stopping off in Edinburgh on his way to Dundee for this year's Transatlantic Studies Association conference and I'm buying lunch.

It has been a long time since I've done lunch in Edinburgh and somehow think that I won't get away with using the Teviot Union. Can anyone recommend a pub for lunch in the city centre? It can be Old or New Town, or even the top of the Walk. Wireless access would be a boon too.

Chuck has written a number of papers many touching on Science Fiction but his "Rumors of War" on techno-military speculative fiction is excellent. He also had a couple of pieces published in the "War Worlds" anthologies as well as producing some of the best supplements for the Megatraveller RPG. He is currently awaiting the publication in the first in a series of SF techno-military thrillers.

I've not picked it up yet but I've just snagged a Powerbook 520 on freecycle. This 1994 vintage laptop is going to be great fun to mess around with.

I've decide to start collecting a few vintage macs, they appear so often on freecycle and e-bay it would be criminal not to pick some up. I just wish I'd got my hands on the old macs I saw in a skip in Galashiels a few weeks back.

Oooh, wasn't expecting her to appear so soon. I won't bother with spoilers, it was enjoyable hokum with story elements that it feels RTD has overused for Dr. Who.

..so I've been reading Conservapedia.

That's better. LOL

Oh, yes. Since my Janey Lou is expecting our third I've given up the dreaded fags again, cut my alcohol intake to virtually zero and have stopped the chocolate. So far no ill effects and I'm only writing this to remind myself that I can do it.

The ciggies shouldn't be too difficult to beat as long as I keep away from too many high stress moments. I was off them for four months last year before the bike rage incident set me off. Prior to that I was off them for over a year leading up to and after the birth of Tommy, I can't think why I started again then. Boredom or stress.

The booze I can take or leave. My drinking is an infinitesimal fraction of what it was when I worked in Dryburgh. Gone are the days of drinking vintage Veuve Cliquot till 4am, no more cocktail experimentation, my whiskies sit untouched and the vodka no longer resides in the freezer permanently. I'll content myself with the occasional nice beer or even a decent cider.

Continuing on the health front I've calculated that I'm 39kg (or 85lb) overweight so expect to see me updating this regularly. I may have to do more than just adjust my diet but try some significant lifestyle changes. I have gone Atkins in the past and seen excellent short term results but I may have to look at what and when I'm eating more. I'll probably cut meat down to once (or perhaps twice) a week and have two fish portions a week too, the rest of the time I'll stick to vegetables and cereals (supplemented by our eggs).

Time to get back in the excercise groove again too. Prior to joining the service I was hitting the gym 3 or 4 times a week minimum, now it is whatever excercise the job provides which is usually several hours of sitting on my butt interspersed with short sharp moment of extreme exertion. I've used a userpic that shows me from 18 years ago, I'm the short one. And I thought I was overweight and unfit then!

Back to work, my powerbook is still luverly.

I've spoke to my friends, some gamers others not and they all have shown a positive response to the idea of having a game of D&D. We've kind of agreed to using the D&D 3.5 rules even though the last version any of us played was a heavily houseruled version of the 1st edition AD&D rules.

I've been roped into being the DM and everyone wants a fairly light hearted dungeon bash. I could dig out a published adventure but I've decided to put together a quick and dirty dungeon set in the pseudo historical Border region, using real places to provide the backdrop. I've changed the names of a lot of the landmarks and villages but they are all fairly recognisable. The dungeon will be set below the monument on Peneil Heugh which looks ominously like a dark wizard's tower at the best of times.

Conpulsion is on this weekend too, I might see if I can look in.

It's really a little early to make announcements but Jane and I discovered on Friday that our third child is on the way.

This time we're doing things on a shoestring, no more expensive travel systems and other gear. We'll use a lot of stuff left over from the other two and see if we can get some of the stuff we gave out to other new mums we know.

It's all a bit unexpected and quite exciting.

Coincidentally on Friday I delivered a lovely baby girl called Page. Or I should say that I arrived just in time to catch her coming out. It was her mum's first and although our response time was only four minutes she came flying out, no pain relief. Well done to mum.

Associated Press are reporting the death of Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeon & Dragons and responsible for a considerable chunk of my misspent youth.

Just when I was about to pick up a set of polyhedrals and play a game with my friends again this news comes along. A big loss even if he was no longer a major player in the industry.

The iBook saga continues. It has after several weeks of messing about been decided that either the hard disk is finally kaputt or that there is a loose connector. So it is now in the"shop" having a new hard drive installed, 120GB to replace my 30GB.

I would have done this myself but it really is just a wee bit fiddly, especially compared to the new MacBooks. So CMYK are getting my pennies for the labour whilst I supplied the HD.

Of course this is all out of love and nostalgia for my old iBook, in the next couple of days I should take possession of a spanking not-quite-new 15" PowerBook. Cancom, who do Apple refurbs, have been flogging all sorts of stuff on e-Bay; from iPods to 17" Powerbooks and they all come with 3 months warranty which is ample to iron out any bugs.

I've also picked up Virtual PC7 for next to nothing. Any use? I was thinking of trying out Campaign Cartographer on it.

I've downloaded the latest incarnation of x-journal, the free lj client for OS X. It seems to have acquired some extra features and does most of what I want it to do.

Of course I've still got macjournal 5 which I haven't fully explored but xjournal seems handy for everyday posting and I can always archive onto macjournal later.

Chuck Gannon is an American professor of English, taking a sabbatical from St. Bonaventure University. He's a Fulbright Specialist in American Literature and Culture and the writer of several academic publications. One of my own personal favourites I've mentioned before, Rumors of War & Infernal Machines. If you are a fan of either techno-military speculative fiction or perhaps just the plain old techno-thriller this one's for you. Absolutely fascinating.

( There now follows some Traveller RPG stuff that'll bore the pants off most folks )

So it seems that my erase and install procedure may not have been necessary, dammit.

I've had a couple of other failures since my re-installation and they were becoming more frequent. I was becoming more worried that I was looking at a logic board failure again (tragic and expensive) or a hard drive that was broken in some way. All my checks pointed to it not being the logic board and when the whole thing went kablooie on Tuesday night (kernal panic every time I started up unless I booted into the install disk) I realise that the problem lay on the start-up disk somewhere. But using disk utility didn't seem to help. In fact it looked like I was needing to swap out the drive and pop a new one in (which to be honest I didn't mind, I could do with a decent size drive- 30GB although reasonable for what I use the iBook for just doesn't kick it anymore).

So at work yesterday I took it to my friendly neighbourhood Apple Engineer, not very far from the station. Explained the issue, he ageed it probably wasn't the logic board but said he''d check it over, try to salvage the data and install a new drive. An hour later he called to say that it was ready to pick up, the primary system directory had been corrupted on the start up disk and he had rebuilt it using Disk Warrior and should be working like new. Excellent.

(I'm still thinking of upgrading the hard drive though)

Ok, so this is a beta but I’ve finally downloaded UFO:AI. This is a fan based project which is recreating the feel of the old X-COM games for modern operating systems. There are still quite a few bugs and my iBook seems to run really hot when I run it but it is bloody good.

So far the main issues seem to be crashes in the tactical screen (a complete lock up), overheating and missing text file on my copy (but if I play direct from a disk image in the .dmg file it has the text).

The crashes are annoying though. They result in a hard restart which is messing with the permissions on my hard drive. I hope they come up with a solution soon. Check it out though.

In today's Herald this article by Neil Cooper caught my eye. Neil's reviews and articles are always quite interesting and I had heard this one had been delayed since before Christmas whilst the lawyers wrangled over it.

The Theatre Workshop in Edinburgh is a fantastic place. Its community theatre was excellent covering a wide range of subjects and was thoroughly inclusive in its membership. Although I may disagree with the accuracy of things like Black Sun Over Genoa and find the rampant proselytism of its artistic director regarding issues such as Palestine, Ulster or Disability hilarious there is no doubting the earnestness of TW's convictions. There has been work with various ethnic minorities in Edinburgh, active inclusion of the disabled both as part of the production staff and as an audience long before the Disability Discrimination Act.

But there is a darker side to Theatre Workshop. One that people rarely talk about but within the industry is well known about. An atmosphere of intimidation, manipulation and outright bullying surrounds Hamilton Place. Partners and outside actors have spoken of terrible relations with management. Former employees are reticent to talk about their experiences but at least one has told me that their final days there were made very unhappy. They told me that, like many other former employees, there is no way that they can complain about their experiences without irrevocably damaging their own reputation.

And now I have to wonder where £3.5 million of Scottish Arts Council money has gone? A single production in a year? Ridiculous, most venues can manage 5 or 6 per year, even the average touring company can manage around 3 or 4. Is Rae worth his salary as artistic director if he fails to produce the goods? I have a one word suggestion.

AUDIT