They're breeding I tell you

I know I know, 2 weeks is an unacceptably long time between blog entries.

Spring has definitely sprung and we have started spring cleaning. Daylight savings starts this weekend. The trees are full of blossom and the weather is getting warmer.

On Friday I drove to Hamilton with Tamara and Rebecca (a friend of the family) to see Mum who is in Waikato hospital and to attend a meeting with her support team.

They told us that there is no way she can go home nohow as she can't look after herself without assistance and she needs to go into a Rest Home until she has recovered enough to go home. At that I have to admit I thought that this simply isn't something that would happen, as once she was in a rest home, it was unlikely she would ever escape.

Mum is quite sure she does want to go home. She is fully in possession of all of her marbles and Peter and I agree that as she is a grown woman it is her decision if she is prepared to take the risk and we are quite sure she fully understands the situation. I understand that what she wants is quality of life rather than quantity and what she wants is her TV, her own remote control, to eat what she likes and to be able to do her jigsaw puzzle.

So it is up to us to figure out a way to make it possible. We are looking at having a full time carer live in and respite care provided by a private service for when her carer needs to go out/take a break. There is a private local hospital just a couple of streets down that she can stay at when her carer has a longer holiday.

We've been told she will be released on the 8th October.

Vik has been sick with the man flu and Kate and Tamara have the milder version of the same thing that is caught by women. So far I've managed to hold it off and hopefully will at least escape it until everyone else has recovered so they can nurse me in return. The girls are still going to Uni but are feeling pretty knackered.


Until a couple of hours ago there were three RepRaps fully or nearly fully assembled and a fourth still in kit form in the house. we are temporarily down to 3 as Vik has flown off to Wellington today with Darwin as tonight it the Open Source awards and he has been asked to show Darwin off.

Phoenix (the child RepRap) is now fully reassembled with the exception of one crimp which we are waiting in Jaycar for. It is a very different beast then the RepRap child we took to US and was trashed by the TSA, about 50% of the parts have been redesigned to be tougher and replaced.

Shiny is taking form and now looks like a RepRap. There's still a fair bit of work to do until its running though.

Shiny

I think its fair to say that any novelty associated with air travel has well and truly worn off for Vik and myself.

Last week we both flew to Wellington so Vik could be interviewed by radio New Zealand about the RepRap. Despite it being a radio show, they wanted the RepRap there in person so we lugged Darwin along. This involved arranging a lot of shuttle vans as usual taxi cabs can't fit the RepRap box in their boot.

I'm glad to say that Darwin behaved itself perfectly and happily printed a ring while we were at the studio. As usual Air New Zealand looked after it well and it arrived pretty much in one piece (Vik forgot to fold down the opto flag before shipping but you can't blame the airline for that). We came back with QANTAS which were a little rougher and it needed about 20 minutes of care and attention before working again after coming home.

I think we are both becoming pretty familiar with Wellington City Central, but this time it appeared to be on a go slow and service at most places we went to was poor. The same can't be said of the General Practitioner (a pub) which was excellent.

when we got back there was the laser cut kit for the new RepRap which will be made out of Perspex. Vik and I individually named it Shiny so Shiny it is. The Perspex was cut by Ponoko who did a great job but to protect the finish each piece was covered on both sides by sticky paper and it was a mind numbing 2 hour job to peel all the pieces.

As this is a new design, some bits aren't quite right and have needed alteration, or will need to come from a new cut.

On Sunday we went to see Mum at Waikato hospital. She is now in the Rehabilitation ward (Kate found it very funny that her Grandma was in Rehab) and as a result is getting some great physiotherapy. She looked really well and her new Parkinson's meds have completely eliminated her tremor.

Skateboard bone

Kate is not a happy person. On Tuesday she was running for the bus and took a nosedive. A trip to the A&E and resulting X-ray showed that she has broken her wrist. The bone she has broken is the scaphoid which is commonly known of as the skateboarder bone. Within 24 hours I had heard two different reasons why it has that nickname; the nurse says its because scaphoid sounds like skateboard and several other sources say it is called that as it is the most commonly broken bone by skateboarders (its the bone you usually break when you put your hand out to catch yourself).
She has a plaster cast and has to go back and have another X ray after a fortnight. The also has abrasions on her knee, hip and wrist. All in all she is not a happy bunny.

I've been talking to a lot of people recently about doing web sites. The sort of website we specialise in are ones that do something rather than just sit there and ones that need to interface with other systems. This has become easier these days with tools like Drupal and Joomla which do much of the work for you.

Yesterday after taking Kate to have her dressings changed, we spotted (rather appropriately) a nice dresser in the window of the Salvation Army store which we promptly bought. It looks like most Welsh dressers except instead of having clear glass, the glass is frosted and brown. Very 70s which is perfect for us and will go with the rest of our 70s furniture. Its being delivered Thursday next week. What I really need now is a nice 70s dining table. Our current is a decade newer and is a basic melamime covered chipboard thingly. I like the 70s stuff which is still mostly wood (although chipboard is sneaking in by then).

Sunday Driving

On Friday we were woken up by a phone call from my brother telling me that Mum had fallen and she had a suspected broken hip. The diagnosis was confirmed later that day and she was supposed to go into surgery on Friday to have a hip replacement.

On Saturday we were told that she hadn't had the surgery yet and could go into surgery at any time so we stayed at home but when we got the same message on Sunday morning, we hopped into the car and headed out to Waikato Hospital in Hamilton.

Peter had given me clear instructions and I had no trouble finding her. She was on a drip giving her fluids and pain relief. The latter must have been effective as she couldn't remember which hip was broken. She really wasn't that interested in company; I suspect it was morphine she was on as she was also on oxygen (morphine decreases breathing) and she was pretty sleepy.

We also have noticed that the right side of her face is loose and she is slurring her words as a result. The hospital didn't know she had a TIA a couple of months ago and didn't look into whether a stroke was the cause of the fall.

Peter has medical power of attorney for Mum and has on her request signed a DNR. Ever since we were children she has made it clear she didn't want to linger on in old age if she couldn't get around or had dementia. She is still pretty clear of mind but the Parkinson's is seriously damaging her quality of life and we haven't tried to talk her out of it.

So we are all worried bunnies.

Very Tired

I've had a very busy last couple of days with both my main customers having a lot of work to do including another DR test that lasted from 11:30pm to 5am. I managed about 1 hour sleep in the middle but Vik decided around 9am that I would suffer dehydration if not given tea and woke me up (I can't say I was fully appreciative). I will have another late night tonight as it is curry night.

Tamara has been worrying for the last few days as she heard on the grapevine that AUT will be stopping the major that she is doing (Human Anatomy and Physiology). She eventually went to see the people in charge who confirmed that while they will not be taking any more students in for the course, they will allow all existing students to complete it.

All four of us have a cold. Its one of those colds that makes you feel grotty but doesn't actually stop you from doing anything.

I was startled today by a loud crash from the laundry/workshop. The RepRap had got greedy for filament and pulled the roll off the ceiling. No damage done but if you look at the image of the bed corner bracket (right), you will see a line about 1/3 down where it shows.

Since Vik has modified the RepRap to single step rather than half step the Z axis when we had the issue with tall objects it no longer graunches and is now much quieter. He has been able to print at night with no complaints.

We have been printing the parts for the new child RepRap much denser than the previous child which hopefully will make it much more resilient but this doesn't appear to have made the builds take noticeably longer to complete.

Storage solutions

We've spent much of the weekend looking into dealing with storage. Firstly we looked into improving the spare room cupboard which is has no shelving. We use it as a linen cupboard so this has resulted in us splitting stuff into separate bags which are labeled and sorting things into those bags. It hasn't worked very well as it can be hard to find the bag you want and they can get heavy. We decided to make new shelves out of some of the Quadro that we still have since the kids grew up. This has involved taking down the Quadro desk in the spare room and constructing the new shelving inside the cupboard.
Secondly we've stuck shelving up in the laundry/Vik's office. This was tricky as there were a lot of pipes and wires behind the wall and the stud finder was getting all confused. we got there in the end and now have somewhere to put washing powder, tools, spare RepRap bits etc.

Talking of the RepRap, things have been busy there too. Vik's spent the last three days working on a laser cut design (based on one by Ian Adkins www.bitsfrombytes.com) for the custom parts. This has now gone off to Ponoko to print.

We've finally got a printed Y motor bracket. The third attempt also nearly finished and then there was a flash of lightening and a huge clap of thunder that rattled the floors and the build died. Vik says this has nothing to do with divine opinion and more to do with a lack on memory so he increased the virtual memory and the 4th attempt worked. He's also printed a rather snazzy card holder that I think is going to become the RepRap thing to have.

Must have been designed by a man

On Thursday it was time for the second most dreaded check up by women, the mammogram. Its recommended that all women over 45 have a bi-annual mammogram which the government pays for and I'll be eligible for those come November, but as I've had a lump removed (benign), Its recommended that I have one annually.
As I have medical insurance I get to to the pleasant surrounding of St Marks breast clinic rather than the back of a mobile clinic (i.e. modified container) but the experience of placing one's delicate bits in a vice to be xrayed is never pleasant.

The good news was that everything was OK, expect that I have lymph nodes the size of golfballs in my armpits. They look normal and this is probably the result of a virus I have, but they may want me to come back and have a needle biopsy just to be sure.

Thursday was a long day as I did a DR test for one of my clients. It was what they call a confidence test which means that we switched over to using the backup system, ran it for an hour and switched it back. As we were proving the system still worked (it hasn't been tested since the last upgrade), we did it in the wee hours when they weren't busy so I'm have plenty of time to iron out any bugs. There were a few things to look into, but over all the test was successful and I got to bed around 2am. Next Wednesday, we will do the real thing, where they actually ship the staff off during the day to spend a whole shift working at the DR call centre just to check its all going.

For those readers wondering what DR is, it stands for Disaster Recovery and it basically translates in this case where the company is question has a whole spare call centre that they can use should something happen to stop the main call centre working. Its very important to ensure that the spare call centre works and most importantly can pick up exactly where the main centre left off as they have staff out at various locations doing work and they don't want to lost track of where they are, or lose any jobs that have been called in but not done yet.

In my years I've known 7 cases where we've needed to go to DR. One was due to a murder on the doorstep of the call centre so the next shift couldn't get in, one due to air conditioning failure (you still can't run large rooms of comouters without air conditioning to keep them cool), one due to an important computer dying and the other 4 were all cases where the phone system has gone down as a result of a man with a digger.


On Thursday Vik printed and fitted a belt tensioner to the RepRap which has improved the quality further and printed a couple of spare opto flags which look really good.
The RepRap is now having another go at a new Y motor bracket. this is third. The first was trashed by the bug that resulted in the head trying to go through the build (I've added a photo of that to Wednesday's blog); the second was printing last night when the RepRap just stopped for no reason. Below is a photo of it printing with the stalled build next to it, followed by an image of the belt tensioner in place.