The responses from eBay/PayPal and Microsoft on the other hand are Not Good.

eBay/PayPal allow a purchaser to open a dispute. From the email sent by them in response to The Git’s email explaining the issue:

In  the  Resolution  Center  you  can:

*  Report  a  transaction  problem  and  communicate  directly  with  your  seller.

*  Respond  to  a  transaction  problem  and  communicate  with  your  buyer.

*  Resolve  an  account  limitation.

*  Report  unauthorized  account  activity.

*  Ask  us  to  investigate  a  transaction  problem

Unfortunately, this requires a Transaction ID and since The Git paid by credit card, he has no Transaction ID. Which is why he emailed eBay/PayPal. After The Git repeated himself, the message finally got through. The response now is “send us an email”. Duh! What does this idiot think I did?

Microsoft’s response started off well:

Dear Jonathan, Warm greetings from Microsoft Customer Service Australia and new [sic] Zealand.

but deteriorated. They suggest that I should have purchased the software from Microsoft, or one of their authorised resellers. This idiot doesn’t seem to know that neither Microsoft, nor any of their authorised resellers have the product for sale. Worse, at the head of the list of resellers is harvey Norman (aka Hardly Normal). Several years ago, The Git purchased a computer game from Hardly Normal for the Gitling. The software refused to install because it was labelled “For sale in the USA & Canada only”. The price sticker had been placed over this label so that it could not be read!

Upon returning to the store with the software, The Git was informed that all he had to do was change the computer’s Regional Settings to the USA, or Canada and all would be well. The Git told the sales idiot that all would not be well. Several of the Gitling’s applications were sensitive to Regional Settings changes (Excel for example). What The Git wanted was software for the Australian market, not greyware. The sales idiot responded that all of Hardly Normal’s software was greyware, putting paid to The Git buying anything from that store again. Microsoft, it seems, would prefer us to purchase greyware, rather than legitimate software.

Fortunately, eBay/Paypal eventually saw sense and The Git’s $60 was refunded.

“It’s turned out nice again!” — George Formby

The end of the decade found me broke and contemplating Living the Good Life. I had always more or less carefully tailored my income to maximise my leisure-time. Leisure to me was eating gourmet food, including at restaurants (where my long hair was not always appreciated), buying and reading good books, and conversation with people who could think through things rather than merely air their prejudices and fornication.

My source of income at the time was painting landscape pictures to compete with the sterile prints sold in department stores. My long haired friends went from door-to-door selling the paintings and gaining an occasional commission for a painting from a favourite photograph. They also sold prints of my pen and ink drawings. (You can grab one here, though be warned, they look much better printed than on-screen.) The sales staff paid me for what they sold, keeping the balance in their pockets.

The sales staff kept approximately 30-35% of the money taken and each week I paid bonuses to the top salesman or woman. And that person sometimes made more than I did as I had considerable manufacturing costs. That didn’t bother me in the least. I was making several times per hour than I had as a clerk, and above all, I was happy. We were all working less hours than the ordinary Joes, approximately twenty hours per week in my case. I was particularly happy with the business model: everyone was in control of their own income.

Occasionally, sales would create demand for pictures beyond my capacity to provide, so I would pay wages to someone to help make the canvases. These were manufactured from reject linen table cloths from a laundry glued to plywood and painted with gesso and were very much cheaper than the canvas panels sold by the art suppliers. The prints were mounted on acid-free mat boards imported in bulk from the mainland.

Not everyone was happy, however. Some people were incapable of understanding how to sell the paintings. The sales staff were in essence entertainers competing with television. If the evening’s TV shows were popular, like Starsky and Hutch, sales were down. If there was shite on TV, the reverse was true. Invariably, when sales records were broken, it was a Tuesday night! When given instruction, the people who couldn’t sell very many would say, “I couldn’t say/do that! I’d feel silly.” The instruction, by the way, wasn’t in the form of scripts — just general approaches that one had to weave into a personal approach. The best sales staff were very creative people, often talented artists or musicians. Many, if not most went on to bigger and better things.

Some of the unhappiness was in the “poor starving artist” community. While the poor starving artists waited forlornly for the world to beat a path to their door, The Git beat a path to the door of his clients, many of whom became repeat customers. (God, I would have given my eye teeth for a computerised system to replace the card file I used to track customers and paper spreadsheet to keep track of my costs!) The poor starving artists and people who couldn’t sell, or be bothered selling, became increasingly vocal in their opposition to my business. They declared that I was ripping off both the public and the sales staff.

Regarding the former, I introduced a cooling-off period before it was made law for door-to-door sales. The advantage to this is well illustrated by the following. The Git had accepted a commission to paint a picture of the Arthur River from a photograph. A week or so after the sale was consummated, Terry, who was particularly good at procuring commissions, phoned me: “The client’s unhappy with the painting, but it’s a commission”.

“Give him his money back and double the price,” The Git said. The painting had taken twice as long to complete as anticipated. Such things happen when you’re having fun!

Terry was delighted with the result! Fifteen minutes later, he sold the painting to the next door neighbour who was far from annoyed when he discovered what had happened. We have no idea what the person who commissioned the painting said when he discovered he could have doubled his money. Terry went on to co-own a chain of paharmacies Australia-wide after he finished his pharmacy degree. Here’s a picture of the fast version of Arthur River:

The image quality isn’t all that flash because of the camera flash in my phone.

I was losing my talented sales people to bigger and better things and finding it hard to recruit replacements. Hobart is a small community of only a couple of hundred thousand. Then disaster struck. My top three sales staff had taken my advice about drink driving and caught a cab after their Friday night celebration. The incompetent taxi driver rolled the cab, killing Kahm, breaking Andreas’s femur and Robert went into a 20 year depression as a result of Kahm dying in his arms.

Kahm was the most truly happy person we had ever met. His sister phoned and asked, “Was he laughing when he died?” Indeed he was. Kahm taught me one of the most important lessons of my life: Carpe diem! (seize the day).

The ensuing two years were a trial by fire, quite literally at times. My office/home/studio was attacked by an arsonist. The end of the decade found me wondering how I’d been suckered into “selling” $AU40,000 of my artwork to a company that immediately declared bankruptcy. I couldn’t pay my bills, so had to declare bankruptcy myself.

The business that cost me $AU300 to start and made $AU300 profit in its first five days was defunct. My wife had left me, having pocketed the last three months’ rent, and I sold my precious books for less than the four most expensive had cost me. The stamp collection returned considerably more and I managed to break even. I contemplated suicide.

One book I hadn’t read yet, I kept: Og Mandino’s The Greatest Miracle in the World. It saved my life; thanks Og, wherever you are! Ah, the power of the written word!

I still had one asset left and I decided to do something about it before my now ex-wife remembered it. We had a rather tasty collection of vintage wine and I commenced to drink it. A somewhat blurry few weeks later found me invited to a garden party by a long-time friend, Jane. As we walked along the street, I asked about the fifty dollar bill tucked between her breasts. “Oh, that’s for whoever proposes marriage to me,” she hinted. As usual, I ignored Jane’s hint, preferring her friendship to a life of mutual misunderstanding.

Also, I must have had a premonition. At the party was the most stunning woman I ever met. I don’t mean in the Hollywood Movie Star sense; it was something else. Not, I hasten to add that Marguerite is unlovely, just not boringly glamorous. Almost our first words to each other were: “Ain’t never getting married again”. It was four years before we eventually took that step.

Margie (usually SWMBO in my blogs) and I share an interest in gardening although mine was untested at that time. Curiously, I had picked up two issues of an organic gardening magazine while passing through airports that just happened to be the two missing from Margie’s collection. We decided that since I was likely to remain poor for the near future, that we would be better off living in the country. Finding just the right place took almost twelve months.

The farmlet we bought was a hovel on 10 acres of good, strong land. For two years I renovated the cottage and developed a small market garden almost entirely with hand tools. Only the initial ground-breaking was done with power machinery borrowed from neighbours. When Margie conceived The Gitling, we decided to plunge fully into “poverty” and she gave up her job in the city. Our frugal life was tough, but we frequently reflected on how sorry we felt for the poor “rich” people as we toasted each other with home-made wine, and ate a gourmet meal made entirely from food that we had grown for ourselves.

When we had dinner guests, they would invariably say: “That’s the best lamb we ever tasted”. It would amuse me to tell them that it wasn’t lamb — it was goat! But only after the meal was finished.

A particular friend, originally from America, took a trip back to the States around this time. He said that Thanksgiving was particularly hard to endure. His sister had proudly prepared the meal “from scratch”. This entailed instant mashed potatoes, frozen vegetables and frozen turkey. My friend said all he could think about was helping me slaughter the animal were were about to eat, and picking those peas, and dig those carrots, and it was all real food with real flavour.

I suspect, though this is verging perilously close to New Age bullshit, that food cooked with a wood fire is qualitatively different from that cooked with electricity. I can readily explain the flavour difference between organically grown versus conventional with hard science, but not the difference that the wood fire seems to have on the available energy from food so cooked.

When for several years I became a proselyte for the the organic farming movement, I would talk science to the farmers and agricultural scientists. But when I talked to consumers, I talked politics:

“If you grow your own potatoes, you have done several quite important things. You have removed the necessity to earn the dollars to buy those potatoes and if your income is subject to your control, you can then choose to pay less taxes. If, like me, you grew them organically, you have no need of the agrochemical inputs and so you have reduced the income of the agrochemical companies and in turn their taxes. You have had useful physical exercise that improves your health and so reduces the necessity to visit the doctor. You have saved transporting the potatoes from the farmer’s paddock, to the warehouse, to the supermarket and home, reducing the amount of fossil fuel burned. The most profoundly political act you can make is not to vote for Tweedle Dumb or Tweedle Dumber, or protest about what you can never control, but to grow your own food and take control of your own life.”

When asked about the certification of organic produce, Vermont’s Eliot Coleman said: “Get to know the first name of the person growing your food, then you won’t have to worry about how it’s grown”. A wise man.

When we took up our land and cottage in late January 1982 we were left almost penniless. Even though it cost us only $AU26,000 Marguerite had to borrow from the bank, remembering that I was still a bankrupt and therefore wasn’t able to borrow. Margie also owned a small block of land that she put up for sale, though that took several years to sell. The first priority after helping the neighbours fight bush fires, was to make a garden.

At the top end of the block, over a hundred metres from the cottage, there is a dam and immediately below that is where I made my first garden. The neighbours lent us a short length of PVC irrigation pipe to siphon water to the parched ground. We had arrived in the middle of a drought. I knew next to nothing about gardening excepting what I had read, but we managed to be moderately successful, and I began my writing career at this time. Grass Roots magazine paid me the princely sum of $AU5 per full page article and I think I managed to persuade Organic Gardening magazine to pay me occasionally too.

While I learned the gardening business, I discovered an excellent way of reducing demand on our income: brewing my own beer. While making beer from brew-kits was economical and pleasant, I set out to invent a way to extract my own malt from malted barley. The key to doing this is very careful temperature control and the usual method is with accurate, thermostatically controlled electric heating, and this was beyond our means. We purchased a very large stainless steel saucepan that justified its cost because of the wide variety of uses to which it would be put. At various times it has made stock from soup bones, jam, soup, ham and bacon among other things. Not just beer.

I made a giant “teapot cosy” for the saucepan using an old bedspread and worn out woollen pullovers. By pitching the cracked barley malt into water at the upper temperature range that the enzymes will tolerate, and leaving the saucepan snuggled up in the “teapot cosy”, conversion of the starch to maltose would complete overnight. Incomplete conversion leads to cloudy beer.

When I did a time and motion study, we were saving more than double the wage paid to labourers when I costed the beer at the same price as local normal beer. In fact, whenever we had a party, we noticed that the revellers invariably drank our beer and left the commercial beer they had brought with them. Boutique beer being double the price of normal means that in reality we were “earning” four times labourers’ wages and it was tax free. I was tempted by a wealthy friend to brew for him at normal pub prices, but the illegality of this prevented me taking him up on his kind offer.

Most of the labour cost of production was in bottle washing. Wine doesn’t need the secondary ferment to produce gas and froth that beer does, so I decided to make wine. We bottled approximately half the wine in a fermenter, and the other half we drank from the fermenter. Wine matures more rapidly in bulk than in bottles, so we usually had plenty of large food-quality plastic buckets with snap-on lids sitting quietly in the laundry. The wines were “country” wines: blackberry, rhubarb, red currant, black currant, elderberry, and plum. They have the happy characteristic of maturing more quickly than grape wine.

Robert Wright once wrote in a magazine article:

“The point where more wealth ceases to imply more happiness is around $10,000 per capita annually—roughly where Greece, Portugal, and South Korea are now. Above that point, additional dollars don’t seem to cheer up nations, and national differences in happiness hinge on the intangibles of culture. The Irish are appreciably happier than the Germans, the Japanese, and the British, though less wealthy than all of them.”

For more than two decades, our average annual income was remarkably close to $US10,000. While the popular image of our “peasant” lifestyle is one of unremitting toil, this is far from the truth. True, we did not drive a recent motor car, but we did have  current generation (not cutting edge) computers, a decent home-made hi-fi music system, and a comfortable, albeit dilapidated home. Did we feel deprived? Far from it.

A little over a decade ago, we came to the conclusion that although our lifestyle worked well while we were young and fit, we needed to think about the onset of the sunset part of our lives. Few people realise that the old age pension schemes the western social democracies promise us are thinly disguised Ponzi schemes. We needed to prepare for our old age independently of government.

Initially, I went back into the conventional workforce for 16 months managing a computer training office and training end users myself. The job kept me from home for 12 hours a day (includes commute time), five days a week for $AU36,000 a year, a slightly above average income here in Tasmania. Out of the $AU36k, I was paying approximately $AU12k in taxes leaving $AU24k. Commute cost was $AU2k using public transport. Despite pressure from the boss, I refused to buy a vehicle that would have cost 5-10 times as much. That left around $A22k, or approximately $US13k at that time. I had more than doubled my time away from home for a net increase in income of around $US3k. The garden was neglected during this period and we often had to eat tired old supermarket stuff. While the cost was probably considerably less than $US1k pa, the lower quality certainly added to the decrease in happiness and overall lower feeling of wellbeing of that period.

During that employment, the business was charging my time out at $AU80/hr. So I started my own, more focussed computer training business charging a similar rate. The money accumulated in the closing years of the twentieth century enabled us to build The House of Steel. Building our dream home saved around $AU150k, money we didn’t need to earn and pay tax on. Neither did we need to borrow an enormous amount from the bank that we would have to pay interest on. We did however borrow some and that led to a realisation; you can leverage borrowings to grow more money.

After we moved in to our new home, we finished renovating the cottage we had inhabited for over twenty years and sold it and half an acre of our land for $AU140k. We now had some $AU500k in cash and assets. These assets have enabled us to purchase two rental properties that, needless to say, we manage ourselves. Unfortunately, this income falls somewhat short of what we will likely need over the next decade, or so. A brief re-entry to the salaried workforce several years left The Git grumpy and dissatisfied, leading to his decision to return to writing for an income. And a considerable elevation in his spirits.

Thought for the day:

There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true. — Henry Fielding

Thank you! I’m impressed with Yahoo – they didn’t SpamCan you. There’s fame for you, if you like.

I’m also medium impressed with your hairs. There appear to be several of them, and they appear to be quite elongated. Not as many as I’ve got, of course, but longer and thicker. Longer and thicker is a good thing, I guess, when you start getting up there in years.

Publishing. Isn’t that a bit like starting a deck-chair-hire business – on the Titanic?

Actually, hehoomustnotbenamed (but whose initials are RBT) has had some interesting stuff to say or link to, about e-publishing. He makes some sense, although you need to sort through what IS, in the USA, vs what IS in Australia. His arguments about e-publishing on Amazon at $2.99 per copy, or even down to $0.99, where it becomes just a “who cares, what can I lose” button-push, are thought-provoking. There are authors out there who are raking in many hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, just because not only are they competent authors (as so many are), but also because they’re decided to sell electrons cheap, many times over.

Don

Well Don, if you are going to have a hair-raising experience, it’s best to have plenty of hair I always say

The Git made some predictions about publishing a decade ago and the detail is proving as fascinating as having seen some of it through a glass darkly.

eBooks are certainly a success story; “We know that ebook uptake, as measured in sales or their percentage of publishers’ revenues, has doubled or more than doubled every year since 2007.” But note that nearly all of these sales are for fiction. The Kindle and its kindred devices are not kind to graphics, making them at this time unsuited to certain kinds of publication, even some fiction (think maps for example).

Print-on-Demand (POD) has transformed the market for books that sell in relatively low volumes. This area is dominated by non-fiction. The big advantage of POD is that low inventory costs somewhat offset the higher per print and bind cost. Amazon could never have the millions of books for sale that it does if it had to warehouse thousands of copies of books that sell in relatively small volumes. There’s also less moving of books from place to place prior to purchase.

The downside of POD is that affordable books can only include a small number of relatively low quality greyscale images. While you can have full colour, it is prohibitively expensive since every page must be printed on a full colour printer.

An increasing number of authors are self-publishing using POD. The printing/book distributing company invoices the author for the cost of books distributed and pays the author receipts for books sold. A number of authors report double the income on sales compared to the royalty they would have received when dealing with a regular publisher.

Blogging too is a form of publishing; it’s just insanely difficult to raise any significant income from it. Worse, the more time you spend writing a blog, the less time you have to write revenue-raising material. Worse still, the longer you blog, the more difficult it becomes to keep your audience amused with fresh material. And if you thought things couldn’t get worse still, you are wrong; the longer you continue to blog, the lower your Google PageRank becomes. PageRank is important if you want to have Googlers find your page near the top of a search.

So, now you know why The Git has moved his blog here, and left most of the older material on the sturmsoft website. Gradually, the old material there will be replaced by samples of published material and invitations to purchase. Ashwood Books will also publish more draft manuscripts and solicit feedback from readers so that the end product will be more finely tuned to readers’ needs.

Blogging is actually an addiction that The Git would most likely be better off without. However, it is fun, and The Git hopes to strike some sort of balance between writing for a living and finding time to indulge himself here.

References

Four years into the ebook revolution: things we know and things we don’t know

Self Publishing and Printing Your Own Book

Thought for the Day

It’s so much easier to suggest solutions when you don’t know too much about the problem. — Malcolm Forbes

Just as The Git left off blogging, he had tried out MS FrontPage 2003 for creating his pages and liked it very much (with some caveats). The tabbed interface was the main attraction. The other aspect of all the Microsoft software The Git appreciates is that the dictionary is the Australian Macquarie Dictionary, not UK, or US dictionaries.

Of course FP 2003 is now considered old hat and Microsoft don’t sell it. Actually, The Git didn’t need the binaries, he already had the CD. What he needed was a Product Key. After a little searching The Git found a chap selling what he claimed was the download version, full product on eBay for the reasonable price of $US60. The Git paid his money and proceeded to download the software. The download was borked, but we won’t go there yet. Inspecting the setup.ini file displayed the Product Code string in the form XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXX which is clearly incorrect. The leading and trailing parts have twice the number of digits as a valid code.

The Git contacted the vendor who told him that he had to run the setup.exe file he had modified to eliminate the need for the purchaser to manually enter the Product Code. As it happens, The Git’s DL had borked before the setup.exe file had dlownloaded. Two further attempts were also dismal failures. The Git had no intention of running the executable; he was curious as to what the payload in that file was. The vendor has refused to divulge the Product Code, so The Git has contacted eBay and Microsoft.

So why not use Expression? The Git hears you asking. Well he went to City Software, a Melbourne discount software seller he frequents from time to time, and discovered the following:

Microsoft Visual Studio Premium 2010 – (Save $809.00 off RRP) — $8,721.00.

Yeah right. Like he really wants to blow that kind of bread.

So how about Corporate Software? “Search Results For: Expression Sorry, no data was found for those search terms.”

CorpSoft have Microsoft FrontPage 2002 + BONUS Publisher 2002 for $AU170, but The Git wants FP 2003, not 2002 and he loathes and detests all versions of Publisher he has ever been forced to use. It might be the case that Publisher 2002 is a fine product, but so is Adobe’s InDesign which The Git already owns.

And to add to the misery of this week (which hasn’t really been all bad), Peter Neilsen died. Peter was one of the nicest gentlemen The Git has ever been priveleged to befriend. Among his many achievements, he started one of Hobart’s first BBSs when The Git first started computing. He also managed to keep his legal wife and a de facto happy back in those dim dark days. The secret to the uccess of this arrangement, he claimed, was having the first wife choose the second. About a decade ago, his next door neighbour stabbed him several times, and he lost both a kidney and his spleen. After leaving the hospital, he moved interstate and I missed his company badly.

Problem Solving

Popper’s passion was problem solving. Not pseudo answers to hypothetical problems, real solutions to real problems. Popper notes the propensity of some academics (and others) to proclaiming: “The results of research indicate the problem to be much more difficult than originally thought. Here is how we failed to produce a satisfactory solution, demonstrating just how difficult the problem is.” Many social programs also fall into this category of non-solutions: educational reform has resulted in declining literacy and numeracy; crime has increased following the introduction of new crime control methods; economies decline as more government controls are introduced; all this despite the best intentions of those charged with their control.

Problem Solutions

Popper claims that most interesting problem solutions are not final. Following rigorous testing, they will eventually fail, providing the impetus to invent new and better solutions. The ideas for problem solutions come from the fertile imagination of individuals, that is they are guesses. Some guesses are good and are readily corroborated by observation and some are bad, being falsified by observation. Merely seeking corroboration will not generate new and better problem solutions. The best solutions are those we seek to falsify, but pass the tests we devise to falsify them.

Some people, like my Creationist friend Fran who helped build The House of Steel, believe that problem solutions come from God. He would pray to Him for the solutions to problems that inevitably arise in the building of a complex house and the answers would just as inevitably come to Fran, via his mind. Others believe that problem solutions are discovered, rather than invented. Sort of like Douglas Adams’ theory about humour. He claimed that there are humour bubbles floating about in the air, particularly in East Anglia, and that’s why tall people are much funnier than short people. When asked to explain Dudley Moore, he declared that proved his point entirely since he, Douglas Adams, was 20% funnier than Dud.

Another theory is that everything is predetermined, an inevitable consequence of believing that causality explains everything. Since the causes of future events have already taken place, all future events are immutable. Our attempts at problem solving are merely the result of the illusion of free will.

Problem solutions have a tendency to generate new and different problems. According to Hans Zinsser in Rats, Lice and History, the unusual rapid rise of Christianity may have been a response to despair in the general populace caused by a series of pandemics in the first centuries of the Common Era. The maintainers of Christian dogma took alarm at the increasing disparity between their calendars and the seasons. Surely, if the dogma was correct, and few doubted this, God would be annoyed if the Holy Days were being kept on some other day. Since the pandemics never went away for very long, this was manifest evidence for God’s annoyance. Isn’t justificationism wonderful?

The solution to the calendar problem was to encourage astronomy. While careful, scientific scrutiny of the heavens produced the desired result — better and more accurate calendars — it also had some unfortunate consequences. It split the Christian dogmatists into two warring factions: those who supported the newer, more accurate calendar and those who opposed its introduction, because, well, it was contrary to dogma to actually change things that were obviously put in place by God. Explaining things (justification) was OK, but change? Ptui!

There seems to be a perennial tension between two opposing viewpoints throughout the known history of the human race. One is that life is a zero-sum game and the other that life is not a zero-sum game. The zero-sum game believers consist of the controllers and those willing to be controlled: sheep and shepherds. The sheep are happy because, well, they have been told by the shepherds they should be. Anyway, after they have been eaten, they can pass on to a better place if they have been good little sheep and a worse one if they have been b-a-a-a-a-d sheep who don’t believe that life is a zero-sum game.

Justificationism

In his writing, Popper continually argues against what he calls justificationism — that is, the propensity to attempt to merely confirm one’s prejudices. Put simply, this takes the form of, for example, the proposition that all swans are white. Justification merely requires enumerating all the confirmatory sightings of white swans. Black swans in Tasmania can either be taken as a falsification of the original proposition, or be dismissed by declaring that observations of Tasmania’s black swans are merely anecdotal, or no ornithologist has ever seen a black swan.

Finding confirmations demonstrates the utility of an idea, but will never demonstrate its correctness, or nearness to truth. We can watch the sun rise in the east and set in the west until we are blue in the face, but that does not prepare us for the experience of passing beyond the Polar Circle where the sun does not rise and set every twenty four hours all year round.

Conclusion

Ultimately, Popper’s ideas are anti-authoritarian and anti-dogma, thus threatening those who would have us live by The Official Rules — in a word, Despots. It should come as no surprise then that his ideas annoy the sheep and their shepherds.

Thought for the day:

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen, and thinking what nobody has thought.

Albert Szent-Gyorgi

The Git carefully backed up the database and when he deleted the WordPress application, he was assured that the database backups would remain. They didn’t. So all that work and comments from readers vanished. Fortunately, with Google’s cache, the recent posts were retrieved. The old stuff can remain where it is.

Right now, the Git is frantically setting up a publishing company to publish his books. More on this later.

Many years ago, one of the Git’s favourite albums, “Out of the Blue” recorded by Mackenzie Theory was damaged at a party. It was far from a best seller, but it was cutting edge Prog Rock. Rob Mackenzie, Cleis Pearce and Paul Wheeler were friends; the Git cannot recall the name of the bass player. The inside cover photographs were taken by another friend, David Few.

A few days ago, Steve the Friendly Snail gave the Git the CD release of Out of the Blue. The music is just as good as when the Git used to frequent places like the TF Much Ballroom to hear them play

So, “What’s been happening in The Git’s life?” you ask.

• My mother died (old age)
• My little brother died (cancer)
• My best friend died (cancer)

The Git has been hospitalised for:

• Cancer (cured)
• Broken leg (cured)
• A heart condition (tachycardia — controlled)
• Acute bronchitis (cured)
• Stroke (dunno what’s happening until November!) Story here.

The Git has retired! Yaaay! He still:

• Gardens a bit
• Eats and cooks gourmet food
• Enjoys his glass, or three of wine
• Reads a lot
• Does computerish things
• Thinks and philosophises

And he intends to post here semi-regularly again. Shifting all of the old posts into the WordPress CMS took some doing, there’s over 2,500 not counting the House of Steel, gardening book and other miscellany littered around this website. Right now, he’s changing the posting dates on each of those files to the original dates those blogs were written.

There’s a lot to write about

Friday Night

I awoke in what was obviously a moving vehicle. Someone was calling my name and asking me questions. I answered the voice, but whoever was speaking couldn’t hear what I was saying. I could hear my responses, but he couldn’t. I wrinkled my brow and he asked me to signal if I could understand what he said. I did and commenced signing words using the sign language Roland, Neil and myself had learned as teenagers. He said he couldn’t understand sign language. After some frustrating exchanges limited by the yes/no format, he handed me a clipboard to write on.

Our communication improved somewhat, but the jolting of the vehicle made writing difficult. He explained that I had suffered a stroke. From time to time, he tested the strength of my limbs, flashed a light in my eyes and it was clear that my left arm and leg were considerably weaker than usual. Mainly I dozed on the way to the hospital and wondered how debilitating my new condition would be. I had intended to finish the woodshed extension on this weekend.

At the hospital, I was subjected to much the same requests and manipulation of my arms, legs, hands and feet. At some point, I also had my head inserted into a scanner of some description. Later, I was told that the brain scan indicated that something had occurred in my brain, presumably a blood clot. Sometime during the ensuing few hours, my ability to speak returned. Every time I dozed off, there was another voice waking me up to ask the same interminable questions. I remember thinking how stupid they must be to not remember what I’d said five minutes ago.

Saturday

Eventually I fell asleep; briefly. I returned to wakefulness as if trying to swim through cold molasses. The voice calling my name was strident and I obeyed the commands hoping the voice would go away. I tried to explain that I was very tired, and I was finding it extremely difficult to stay awake, but the voice didn’t seem to care.

Suddenly, a loud, piercing, urgent and shrill beeping kind of noise started up. It hurt my ears and made understanding what was being said to me impossible. I asked for the noise to be stopped and a very loud female voice yelled at me that there was no need to swear; there were children and ladies present. This made me very angry and I said that if they shut the stupid sound off there would be no need for me to swear. The female voice said that I had made the noise by bending my arm. I pointed out that I had bent my arm because that was what the doctor had told me to do. Female voice continued to berate me and making a concerted effort, I stood up.

I said as firmly as I could that I was not prepared to put up with what they were doing to me and that I was leaving. Unfortunately, I no longer had any clothes other than my trousers, underpants and socks. Another female, who seemed somewhat more rational than the previous two, told me I was free to go. But go where, in the small hours of a cold Hobart morning? If I was patient, rational voice said, there was a bed reserved for me and I would be able to sleep. As badly frightened as I was, I did my best to calm down. Being told that my wife was on her way helped.

Someone tried to get me to take some Lipitor. The heart specialist had told me that when I was prescribed this drug by the hospital that it was irrational to prescribe anti-cholesterol drugs when the patient had normal cholesterol levels and an excellent ratio of HDL to LDLs. Following his advice, I had stopped taking it and the short-term memory problem I had been experiencing went away. Why, I asked myself, do they want me to lose my short-term memory? It couldn’t possibly be for atherosclerosis since a recent angiogram had shown my arteries to be squeaky clean.

Eventually, Marguerite turned up with my clothes. My recollection of the next few hours is very blurry. I had been awake for over 24 hours and every time I started to fall asleep I was awakened.[1] Presumably, whatever had happened in my brain was also taking its toll.

I was given a barely edible lunch. I asked if I could have some cheese, but was told no, I had to eat what I was given. I asked the nurse for my meds: anti-hypertensive for my blood pressure, beta blocker for my heart condition and NSAID for my osteoarthritis. I was told that they hadn’t arrived from the pharmacy. I pointed out that my wife had brought them in with her and they had been taken away from me. Nothing doing.

A doctor came to see me and subjected me to the same limb manipulations and shining of lights in my eyes as everybody else. I tried to explain how I was feeling, but she didn’t want to know. I was particularly anxious about not being allowed to take my meds. My GP had told me it was very bad juju to miss my anti-hypertensive and beta blocker. The hospital doctor said I could have Tramadol for the pain. I asked if I could go across the road at lunch time. My favourite Chinese restaurant has recently relocated there and they serve excellent food. Under no circumstances was I to leave the hospital she told me. She also told me that I might not have had a stroke after all, but a seizure. When I later told a nurse that she had said this, the nurse said that only an idiot would believe that. “Look at your face”, I was told. When I looked in a mirror, my left eyelid and the left side of my mouth were drooping. I used my phone to do a bit of Googling on the internet and that confirmed the nurse’s diagnosis. I could find nothing about those symptoms in conjunction with seizures.

Later in the day, the physiotherapist came to see me. He was the first person I had conversed with (apart from my wife) who seemed to have any sympathy for my plight. He relieved a lot of my anxiety. He had me walk about for some minutes and announced that I was fine to walk wherever I wanted to go. When I told him of my desire to have a seafood Laksa at Dumpling World he said it would do me the world of good, so that was where I had lunch with my wife. I told him what had been happening to me and how badly I felt. He said he would have the Grievance Officer see me on Monday.

When I returned to the hospital, I asked about my meds and was told that they still hadn’t arrived from the pharmacy. Again I was told that they didn’t want me taking my own meds since “providing free meds is hospital policy”. When I said that this was contrary to my GP’s advice, I was told that GPs don’t know what they are talking about. I was given a Tramadol. It killed the physical pain, but the side effects, a gone-away feeling in the stomach and dizziness, increased my feelings of anxiety. I noticed that when the nurses did the obs that my blood pressure was increasing. I wondered why, if I had suffered a stroke, weren’t they doing anything to control my blood pressure, or allowing me to take my meds that would?

At dinner time (a sorry affair that was largely inedible), I managed to eventually prevail on a nurse to allow me to take my anti-hypertensive and beta blocker, but not the NSAID for my arthritis. The nurse who did this agreed that I should take the essential meds next around the middle of the following day before returning to the usual early morning routine.

I resolved to talk to my sister (a highly qualified nurse specialising in neurology). She later confirms my impressions and suggests I fly to Melbourne and she will ensure that I receive appropriate medical treatment.

Sunday

Breakfast was dry toast and water. Prisoner number 102045065 could have had jam, instant coffee, apple juice, sugar (lots and lots of that), cornflakes, milk… I asked if there was cheese and was told no. They are definitely in favour of Type II diabetes around here. Reading the obverse of tomorrow’s menu confirms that. They recommend lots of high GI food, rather than protein and fat. I could have drunk the tea, but the water provided was tepid and the tea made from it undrinkable.

Somewhat to my surprise, I was given my NSAID! The morning obs have my systolic blood pressure at 190! I was told not to worry about it; “it’s only a little bit high”. Why are they treating me as if I’m some kind of idiot? Isn’t anything over 180 extremely dangerous?[2] Is it not the case that high blood pressure is a primary factor in provoking strokes? My anxiety levels have gone through the roof along with my blood pressure. My confidence in the medical abilities of these people has plummeted through the floor. I am dismayed and frightened.

Marguerite and I went to Dumpling World for lunch. I had seafood, rice and fresh, stir-fried vegetables; delicious. We decide that it’s probably best to let the doctors do their tests, just in case they are correct that I have had a seizure, rather than a stroke.

After lunch, I asked for my meds. It wasn’t until some hours after lunch that the nurses finally accede to my requests. So much for taking them with food!

Monday

The nurse won’t let me have my NSAID because it’s the “wrong dose”. I explain it has to be the correct dose since the drugs being given to me are those prescribed by my GP and provided by me. Apparently the hospital doctor disagrees with my GP. The “correct” dose is 100mg rather than 1,000mg so I can’t have one. She does give me my antihypertensive and beta blocker. And yet more Tramadol. She returns later and gives me my NSAID; my GP had apparently prescribed the correct dose after all. But now I’m off my face on bloody Tramadol. Why anyone would take hypnotics for recreation is beyond me. I feel dizzy, faint and can barely think straight. My stomach performs flip-flops and tears roll uncontrollably down my cheeks. I feel very depressed.

Late morning a female doctor (not the same one as before) arrives with a young male intern. I attempt to explain how I’m feeling, but they don’t want to know. She says what happened on the weekend had nothing to do with her! She berates me for leaving the hospital on my walks and for taking Tramadol. I point out that I didn’t want to take Tramadol; it was given to me instead of the NSAID that I wanted to take. She says it’s depressing the threshold for having a seizure. Now I feel even worse than earlier. I can barely understand what she is saying to me. All I can think of is getting the tests over and done with so I can go home and have a nice hot bath.

They move me to another ward. We go through a door that locks behind us. I ask about this and the nurse tells me that it’s to keep people in for their own good. I ask why I am being put here and she says that it was the only spare bed. I sit on the edge of the bed and recall that there was a list called “spare beds” on a display in the neurological ward where I was before; there seemed to be quite a few spare beds. This is not the neurological ward and I am a neurological patient. Presumably I need neurological nurses, not nurses who specialise in dealing with patients who need to be locked in. I go to the nurse at reception and query what is happening. I am told that unlike the other patients, I am free to leave whenever I wish. All I have to do is press the button at the side of the door and the door will be opened for me. I return to the room they had shown me, collect my belongings and return to reception. I ask for my meds. The nurse tells me that they are not my meds; they belong to the hospital. Now I am really panicking and go to the locked door. I press the button, but the door remains locked. I press the button several times, but the door does not unlock.

I phone my wife and try to tell her what’s happening. I suspect I am incoherent; I’m now so badly frightened I can’t stop shaking. Marguerite agrees to rescue me as soon as possible.

When Marguerite arrives, one of the nurses explains that yes, I am free to leave any time I want. So why won’t they let me leave if I am free to leave? I need to sign a consent form. So where is the form? I want to sign it. We are told that we have to wait until a doctor arrives with it. We wait, interminably it seems to me, but in truth “only” two or three hours. One of the patients approaches us and says, quietly, that if I want to get out, I need to calm down. If I remain in my current state they are just as likely to get a couple of heavies to come and “deal with” me. I breathe slowly and deeply and suddenly recall some sage advice I received from a friend some years ago.

I take a pen and some paper from my bag and approach one of the nurses. “By what Authority are you holding me?” I ask. The nurse looks startled and says he will have to find another nurse to answer my question. The other nurse, when he arrives, seems just as startled when I ask the same question: “By what Authority are you holding me?” He goes to the telephone yet again and this time the doctor arrives within a few minutes. I sign the form and Marguerite asks, yet again, for my meds. I explain that since they are mostly as yet unopened packages, I cannot have the prescriptions filled until I have used a sufficient amount. After a brief delay, my meds are returned to us and we beat a hasty retreat.

It’s not every day that you get to play the lead part in a Franz Kafka novel, albeit one Kafka never got around to writing. I wouldn’t recommend it; not even to my worst enemy.