Fine Till You Came Along
Posted by Ceri Davies Fri, 11 Aug 2006 23:54:00 GMT
Murphy didn’t wake up this morning. There are no words that fit here.
Never call a cat Murphy
Posted by Ceri Davies Mon, 07 Aug 2006 22:27:00 GMT
“Lucky should be avoided too”.
So said the vet when we picked up Murphy yesterday morning.
This photograph is from two weeks ago, but he doesn’t look much different facially, except that the swelling in his right eye has gone done some.
He is blind, very skinny, somewhat atrophied and currently on liquid food only. When he eats, it goes up his nose and he has to sneeze it out.
I was worried that he hadn’t been to the toilet in 24 hours, despite his huge intake of water, but this evening he graced us with some dark matter and urine.
Frankly, I’m finding this pretty hard to deal with. I was explaining how I felt to Stef just before dinner, saying that I felt that he was just sitting there until it was time to walk or stick his face in his food again. He probably heard me, because then he started walking around yelling at stuff, just before bumping into it. He hasn’t stopped in two hours. This is, at least, some progress and he needs to get some kind of exercise.
Stella is freaked, and can’t believe that there is another cat in the house, let alone one behind a closed door (we never close doors).
tcpdrop for Solaris
Posted by Ceri Davies Mon, 31 Jul 2006 19:29:00 GMT
Some guy asked on comp.unix.solaris for a tool for Solaris that could drop a TCP connection without killing the associated process.
I pointed out that we had tcpdrop(8) from OpenBSD which did this, whereupon Casper Dik informed me of the existence of the TCP_IOC_ABORT_CONN ioctl which does the same job on Solaris.
So I did a dirty port of tcpdrop(8) which you can download if you want.
It’s been tested on Solaris 9, but might not even compile on other versions. You get to keep both pieces if it breaks.
Dukkha
Posted by Ceri Davies Sat, 29 Jul 2006 18:26:00 GMT
It looks like the cat will be OK. He is still in the vet, and there is still a question mark over his eye sight, but he might be alright.
In order to keep our shit balanced, one of Stef’s close family is dying. Like the man said, “life will not break your heart, it’ll crush it.”
Tied to machines that make me be
Posted by Ceri Davies Sat, 22 Jul 2006 00:26:00 GMT
Wednesday night, just before midnight, the phone rang. After nearly nine months being AWOL, a vet in Bridgend had found Murphy, still wearing his collar with our contact details. Bridgend is quite far from here, even if you’ve had 9 months to find it.
As the name suggests though, there was bad news. He had been found because he had been in a road traffic accident, and a pretty nasty one too. He had fractures to his upper jaw, his lower jaw, his palette. His good eye was inflamed and there is a possibility that he has lost or will lose sight in that one too.
The specialist had said that there was no hope of resetting the fractures in the head and that it would be necessary to just wait and see how (and if) they heal before knowing the next step. I’m not sure how good large amounts of opiates are at dulling pain, but they seemed to think that he wasn’t suffering at present.
After getting over the shock, I managed to get to the vet to see him today. They had discovered more problems. Just seeing him again after so long was emotional enough, and although he looked slightly better than I had expected, the damage to his eyes was worse than I had hoped with, cruelly, the worst of it on his good eye. Of course he’s having to be fed via a tube, so his neck was bandaged where it had been inserted. He has made no effort to stand, although his legs seem to be sound. Also, his tail has been damaged which, as we learned with Stella some years ago, can often cause the loss of bladder control in cats. Again, the vet is at a loss to predict how this will pan out right now.
We had a chat and I brought him up to date on what has been happening since October. He wasn’t too talkative and didn’t want to be drawn on what he’d been up to, but under the circumstances this is understandable enough. I believe he recognised me, or at least my voice, too.
I agreed with the vet that we’d wait the weekend to see if he could get some healing done in that time, and when Stef gets back into the country on Monday we’ll go back and see him, perhaps for the last time again.
Recovering from his loss was difficult the first time round, but to have him come back to us in these circumstances is simply cruelty. It has taught me this, however: if you are going to start crying and bewailing, do it before you hit the motorway. Also, never cancel insurance on a missing pet — having to consider finance as a factor at these moments is bitter indeed.
The yolk's on you
Posted by Ceri Davies Sat, 24 Jun 2006 20:05:00 GMT
Note to self: no matter how much she cries, no matter how much she begs — never, ever let Stef crush rotten eggs by squeezing them.
At least not in the house…
A Wild Goose Chase
Posted by Ceri Davies Sat, 17 Jun 2006 19:44:00 GMT
We were walking around Roath Park lake today, admiring the sunshine and eating our ice creams.
Roath Park sports a large and varied collection of bird wildlife, including swans, ducks, cormorants and at least three types of goose.
At 1645 on the dot, every goose on the entire lake ran, waddled or flew to gather under the same tree on the western bank. There were at least one hundred geese stood around under this tree for a couple of minutes and then, just as suddenly as they had all rushed there, they started to wander off back to whereever they had come from.
There is no reason for this. Nobody was handing out food, they weren’t doing anything when they got there, and no other species of bird followed suit.
It was completely awesome and bewildering. Hope I get to see it happen again some time.
Shell scripting for DBMS vendors
Posted by Ceri Davies Wed, 14 Jun 2006 19:52:00 GMT
I recently had cause to arrange for Oracle’s RDBMS 10g to be started at boot time. This led me to despair somewhat at the state of shell scripting in general, and I will rant a little on that subject. This isn’t really intended as an attack on this particular script, but these are the issues that arose from it.
The Oracle installation provides a couple of scripts named dbshut and dbstart that look like they’ll do that job. Indeed, the top of dbstart states:
# This script is used to start ORACLE from /etc/rc(.local).
The corresponding RCS log from the import tells a different tale:
$ svn log -r99 dbstart
Password for 'ceri':
-------------------------------------------------------------------
r99 | ceri | 2006-06-09 15:27:33 +0100 (Fri, 09 Jun 2006) | 5 lines
Add a bunch of scripts used for looking after our databases.
Mainly culled from our live systems, with the notable exception
of the Oracle provided utilities dbshut and dbstart, which are
as out of the box here (and therefore do not work).
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Prescott job 'interests' Johnson
Posted by Ceri Davies Fri, 02 Jun 2006 11:38:00 GMT
No shit - if I could get a job that carried no duties and a country mansion, that would be pretty “interesting” to me too. You don’t even need to maintain a web site anymore.
As a little yang to that yin, the Conservatives are looking pretty retarded today as well.
