Hospitality

Yesterday Dunkan went into hospital for a biopsy. First they took away all his painkillers, and refused to give them back. Then they kept him waiting for the morning and afternoon, in a lot of pain. Before telling him they wouldn't be doing the biopsy till the next day (today), and in the meantime they'd keep him there for observation.

Today, they kept him waiting all day - I don't know whether they eventually gave him something for the pain - before saying they wouldn't be doing the biopsy today either. But probably tomorrow, and they'd like to keep him in overnight.

He decided he'd had enough, and went home. The hospital will get in contact to arrange the biopsy.

It seems this is not an unusual story, for Portsmouth's Queen Alexanda Hospital. The site makes good ironic reading.

I once knew a terminally ill woman who was in great pain. When she had days to live, the doctors refused to prescribe her morphine, in case she became addicted.

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Donna (Dunkan's partner) is starting to feel the strain of caring for a sick man and a 2 year old on her own. I'll be taking over baby duty for a few hours, tomorrow and/or Monday.

They have at least now recieved the allowance I helped them apply for.

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The rest of life continues...

I'm downloading and cataloguing all the free VSTs I can find on the net - about 100 so far.

Kamakura has a new-look blog. Like most new looks, it's recreated an old look. Makes me think of computer displays circa 1990.

Dino will be at Crufts next year. So if you read about a small brown and white blur upsetting the poodles and rousing the retrievers to revolution, that'll be him.

John M's getting the cheap new printer I recommended, because the old one took up a new career as paper shredder. So if the new UKP50 one is just as crap as the old UKP30 one, it's my fault.

I've been neglecting CW over the last week - just perpetually distracted. But with any luck, there'll be a romantic walk in the park on Saturday, followed by a romantic drinking too much in a pub that tries desperately not to be seedy, and a romantic staggering back to his place and wondering why we split up 15 years ago.

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I've been getting to know SynthEdit. It's a remarkable program, even just using the basic set of modules. There's a lot of slightly eccentric musical ideas I want to implement, like a device for slightly randomising the pitch, amplitude and timing of sequenced drumbeats to give a more "human" feel, or an LFO controlled variable speed delay for echo effects a la Joy Division's "She's Lost Control".

Of course, if I want to make professional quality, low CPU, stand-out plugins, that means getting much better in C++, which isn't impossible. The best plugins though involve assembly language coding, which I haven't done in 12 years and was never much good at anyway.