Had a letter from my consultant in London yesterday and my liver test results are good..Yay!!! As are renal, haemoglobin, white cell count, platelets plus all electrolytes, vitamins and minerals, my cholesterol is borderline high at 5.4 though, ideal range 2-5.1. So along with other recent events I’m quite happy.
Set up drum kit and going to be trawling through the garage soon looking for effects pedals, leads and pick up for my acoustic, this is my way of organising what I have before packing it up and moving to my new flat. Other things to set up will be an electronic workstation and my radio gear along with a big sort out of my tools, this lot should more or less clear up the mess in the garage.
No plans on passtimes yet, will focus on the move for now.
March 9th, 2010
Off I go again, I made a promise to myself I would keep my Blog positive this year! So here goes….
Erm…
It’s sunny today? Oh and my hours have been reduced at work, Yay! So 0830-1500 with half hour for lunch going to have to work out how get over the pay cut…hmm. Off round Chain and Angel’s tomorrow to remove a satellite dish, I will try not to drop it from the ladder 
Meant to have done a job today but didn’t, oops! Got another boiler to look at tomorrow, oddly it’s 3 doors up from Chain and Angels, handy that. Hospital 11th and 12th Feb, the NHS are putting both myself and Lisa up in a hotel in the West End so we are going to take advantage of it and celebrate Valentines early, maybe go see a show, something I’ve never done. OK that wasn’t too dull was it. Bye.
January 30th, 2010
Odd day, had what seemed to be more purpose at work today, got me thinking that I may be able to worm my way back in there if I dissolve my inhibitions. Looking back I seem to have lost sight of any momentous change, a thing I was wittering on about before Christmas, I’m still climbing those steps, but I have been for so long now I’m forgetting the reason I am exerting myself in this way, I’m worried that if I reach the top and see the view of the path ahead it will just fade untrampled, into the undergrowth.
I walked one day, I headed for the station to catch a train to work but I missed the train and continued walking, I was profoundly conscious although slightly oblique and thoughts were vague, I decided to follow a path across marshland and over styles, through woodland and eventually a mud filled alley connecting to civilisation. My final destination was a playing field, I stopped and looked around confused, and that’s when I suddenley wanted to go home. I had walked 15 miles with blisters on my feet and I have no idea why, the experience though I feel was necessary, I am free spirited and could never be contained within the faux grandeur of modern society, and I need to stop fooling myself that I could ever fit in. I have an ineffable feeling that this experience was significant.
January 29th, 2010
Here I sit in doubt about my previous aspirations, i once explained something to somebody, their reaction was, that’s Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, my thought was, who is Einstein? Do I hover on a level removed from the duldrums of modern thinking, and how do I make that sound unpretentious, or am I just plain wierd? Our time requires a change, the human race is annihilating itself and no corrective measure dreamed up by some twatty beaurocrat will ever solve the issue. So ultimately we need to endeavour a radical transformation, as I’ve felt throughout my life, it is unklikely we will be wiped out by nuclear weaponary, there are too many choices for elimination right now, consider that you may survive, and how you would implement new thinking… Just a thought.
January 29th, 2010
Regressing, feeling low and losing touch. Snap out of it Craigy!
January 27th, 2010
Hmmm, I sit here quite often writing silly words that mean very little and very few people seldom read. Occasionally I wonder, why? I used to keep a diary from about the age of 12, in it I would write the days antics in a purile fashion, a lot of bad language and I would add a few doodles, it was generally a messy affair. It changed when I was about 18 and left home, instead I would keep a journal of technical entries, often projects I was working on or thinking about, I still have a couple, even a schematic of a burglar alarm system I designed when I lived on Kings Holiday Park, last time I looked at it I chuckled to myself remembering all the problems I had with it when the problem was there, on the paper staring me in the face… the design was crap!
So I have decided to design and build myself an HF transceiver and post my progress here (on a seperate page), it will take many months of building and testing block by block, but once I acheive good results I can then work on a PCB layout. After a freebie prototype lash up board I will be willing to cough up for a dog’s bollocks multilayer board. The design wont be overly technical, I shall make use of a microcontroller for sure now I am picking up the programming techniques fast, but the general radio design will be a quite straight forward 3 stage superhetrodyne me thinks, with a not quite QRP power output but modest all the same (off-the-cuff 10-20 Watts maybe). What bands to use is another thing, anyone with any old radio mags that might be of use give me a shout, I could scan anything useful.
On a another level I have been practicing methods to improve my own well being that I wont go into in any detail, put simply I am going to be detatching myself from my own mind…? I may one day, dedicate a post to how I am progressing in my new spiritual quest, but for now terra firma is the order of the day.
All in all this is my diary Now! Still unkempt, deeper maybe, childish in places but it’s out there for anyone to read, don’t know why, probably never will, and I don’t believe I need to.
January 21st, 2010
One step away from going Part-Time at work which will benefit me beyond belief, it’s Tuesday today and I forgot college, I thought I’d cocked up my first exam in November but I got an ‘A’ so I could easily be on the way to an A* and then A level in September hopefully. Thinking of re-doing English Language as well as I seem far more interested nowadays but we’ll see, there is an adult course for Creative Writing which might be of interest, it may also help improve all the bollocks I write down here but that’s debatable.
Boiler Assesment, Low Phe Diet, UCLH London and to finish this bloody Multiplexer Test Jig are things I need to be concerning myself with in the now, but everytime I cross something off my ‘To Do’ list I seem to jot extra things at the bottom, surely that’s not the idea. So all in all, a nothing day really, bit of life padding, a pause in the daily oscillations of doubt and anxiety. Things could go either way from here.
January 19th, 2010
Felt a bit better this evening, garden flooded with sewerage today as the drains blocked and I spent 2 hours rodding and getting covered in shit, but job done. Gave my car to my nephew who’s doing a mechanics course from september, if he fixes it he has a car, a crap one, but a car all the same. Sod all else done today as bubby was a little fractious probably due to having jabs recently.
January 17th, 2010
Getting a little worried about a loss of direction and a decending darkness in my thoughts. Is this just a glitch? My diet is ongoing and little has really changed, the aspiration of December has dissloved into the ether and I am again left breathless with dysphoria.
January 17th, 2010
China becomes world’s biggest exporter
• Germany overtaken in list of top trading nations
• Chinese economy on track to grow by 9.5% in 2010
“China completed a resurgent 2009 with a huge rise in exports establishing China as the world’s biggest exporter, ahead of Germany, for the first time. The juggernaut Chinese economy also revealed record monthly imports of crude oil and a vast renewed appetite for iron ore and copper.
Trade in December, according to figures from China’s customs office, showed a massive 17.7% year-on-year jump in exports, dramatically outpacing a forecast for 4% growth. The huge increase came after 13 months of decline.
Crude oil imports averaged more than 5m barrels a day for a month for the first time in December, up by more than a fifth from November, as the country sucked in raw materials at a faster pace than expected.
Imports jumped by 56%, pushing China’s overall trade surplus in the month down by 4% from November instead of the expected 3% increase.
While some experts said much of the increase was due to seasonal factors and quirks in commodities markets, it appears that the strength of demand from China is signalling a further rise in global trade during 2010.
Imports of unwrought copper rose by more than a quarter from November to 369,368 tonnes, more than expected, while copper scrap imports jumped an even bigger 46%. Soya bean imports hit a record 4.78m tonnes in the month, with a surge in supplies from the United States and Brazil. Exports of aluminium and finished steel were also up strongly. China’s economy is predicted to grow 9.5% in 2010, topping last year’s expected figure.
The figure will be welcomed by business leaders who argue that China needs to shrug off the effects of the downturn if global trade is to recover. China is widely seen as a key engine of growth, especially as the US economy remains in the doldrums, with rising unemployment and many of its major manufacturing industries still badly hit.
However, the increased consumption of raw materials is likely to fuel criticism that China is failing to meet its environmental obligations. A dash for growth is seen as incompatible with the need to minimise burning fossil fuels and felling rainforests. Open-cast copper mining and soya bean farming on previously protected rainforest, have been top of environmental concerns for several years.
The development research centre of the state council, a leading thinktank, said China’s economy would remain robust as market-driven investment picked up while government-led stimulus spending slowed. It said real estate investment would buoy growth, while inflationary concerns remained mild.
China is understood to have bought oil contracts in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries to secure oil supplies ahead of a boom in manufacturing. US and Brazilian farmers are also understood to be ready to increase supplies of Soya beans as domestic demand from the meat industry, which uses soya beans as a feedstuff, soars to record levels.
Adding to environmental concerns, China’s steel mills undertook a massive production drive in 2009, partly in response to a $585bn government stimulus plan. Disregarding a 60% collapse in the export market, they produced almost half the world’s steel in 2009.”
This is in today’s Guardian, 15 years ago I once said in a conversation about politics that we needed to beware of China in the future, I was laughed at!
January 10th, 2010
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