Dear world, could all you people who just LOVE putting loads of embedded inline images in your email signature, or using "cool" "email stationary", please just stop it.  

It:
  1. takes up space, especially when you email me like 20 times a day, and we inevitably end up with reply stacked on reply because I forget to delete your signature so that replies are containing many copies of the inline images
  2. causes problems for email clients like my Thunderbird which quite often gets stuck trying to re-attach your inline signature images when I reply
  3. is just a complete and utter waste of time, nobody reads those damn things, even if they do, they don't need to read them EVERY SINGLE TIME YOU SEND THEM AN EMAIL

Alternatively, has anybody got a good solution for Thunderbird, or IMAP in general, that can be used to strip only signature images (perhaps by determining common occurrences of images across emails or something) from messages automatically?

 

As many will know, I am a Type 1 Diabetic.  

That means in simple terms through no fault of my own when I was in my late teens my insulin producing cells of my pancreas decided to go out of business.

I produce no insulin of my own, I take insulin every time I consume anything containing carbohydrate, and must test my blood glucose level every few hours in order to maintain a good level of control to try and minimise both the short and long term problems associated with fluctuating glucose levels (potentially resulting in death at both ends of the scale).  A functioning human body can control it's glucose with very good precision, in contrast a Type 1 Diabetic is trying to hammer in a carpet tack with a sledge hammer, it works, but inevitably you get it wrong, a lot.

To have any chance of getting it more right than wrong, I use a Blood Glucose Meter, these devices use single-use "strips" which are inserted into the meter, then a drop of blood is added to the strip, and (through an electro-chemical reaction taking a few seconds) this is interpreted by the meter to display the amount of glucose in my blood.

Naturally, these strips are not really cheap (somewhere around a buck a strip, multiple that by 6 to 10 strips a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, for the rest of your life...), but of course Pharmac subsidises these vital necessities of a long and healthy life, as it should, in a socialised medical system such as ours (there is a lot more that Pharmac could and should fund for we long suffering Type 1 Diabetics, but let's not get into that).

Originally I had an original "Glucocard", a truly venerable device (if slow), it was the benchmark nearly 20 years ago.

Then some years later I purchased a "Glucodisc" which was a real upgrade, the strips being contained within the device (on a rotating foil card holding 5 strips, or was it 10) meant one less thing to carry, it had test memory and produced averages on the fly.  

But Pharmac in their wisdom, a number of years ago decided that the Glucodisc test strips would no longer be funded, this made the Glucodisc worthless, as paying sticker-price for strips was simply not economically viable.  So I was forced to choose from the range of funded meters, of course there was a range, as you'd expect, different people have different needs, right?  

I chose the Optium Xceed, and despite my misgivings with it not having self-contained-test-strips, it has proven a good meter, it stores 450 results, produces 3 different averages (although not the A/B averages that I remember the Glucodisc could, to tell you what was happening at different times of day), it is very small and pocketable (almost walletable) and while not self-contained, the strips are individually sterile foil-wrapped (on a perforated sheet of 5) like the old glucocard, so are still fairly convenient to slip in your pocket/wallet.

Fast forward a few years, I'm on my second Xceed now, the first having finally bitten the dust through being sat on, walked on, slept on, and generally abused.  I'm still happy with it, in fact I was thinking about getting a third one soon since my current one is looking a bit raggedy now too.

But today, I read this:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/6489930/Pharmac-money-saving-plans-alarm-diabetics

Pharmac are doing it again.  Withdrawing funding for my meter's strips.  Not just my meter in fact.  Virtually every single diabetic in New Zealand!

Their brilliant plan is to give a monopoly on supply of test strips to one manufacturer and their own meters, "CareSens".

A quick look at the CareSens meters (pretty much unknowns!) shows without much investigation that they are NOT AS GOOD AS THE EXCEED and probably not as good as many of the other meters that we currently can use under subsidy.

If you want the one that stores 250 results, then it's physically MASSIVE.  My tiny Xceed stores 450 results.

If you want one that's smallish (but nothing like the Xceed), it only stores 10 results!  That wouldn't even give me a day of results sometimes, let alone a useful average!  What's the point of it, 10 results, what?!  How is that even useful to anybody.  TEN RESULTS?!

The strips seem to come in a plastic (like photographic film type) canister rather than be individually wrapped.

I don't want to carry a bulky canister with me everywhere I go! My Xceed strips are foil wrapped, I can take 1, or 2 or 5 in their foil wrap with me slipped in my wallet without any problem of contamination.

Even with the larger meter, you only get a 14 day average 

My Xceed can display averages of 7, 14 and 30 days.

So pretty much Pharmac is throwing out any notion of choice, we are going to get what we are given, and what we are about to be given is a glucose meter which is vastly inferior in comparison to many of those which we ALREADY OWN AND USE.

Short random blog post...

Search dicksmith.co.nz for solder
Sigh.  Yes, Dick Smith doesn't sell solder any more.  

Strange to think that once upon a time Dick Smith Electronics actually bought out David Reid Electronics, another real electronics chain, and then promptly started down the dumbification process which they have now nearly completed.

Thank goodness for Jaycar etc.

Dear People From The Future
Use gtk-theme-switch2 to change from Oxygen-Molecule to some other theme, Oxygen-Molecule caused me  massive CPU usage for Thunderbird and *some* other GTK software.  Oxygen-Molecule-Flat works fine.


So, I made the really stupid mistake of thinking that it was time that I could put off an update of Ubuntu no longer, and set about updating to 11.10.

Now, lets set aside the fact for the moment that once I saw (let alone tried to use) Unity I installed kubuntu-* and switched to KDE after many many years of being a Gnome user (much has been written by others on the rampant stupidity that is the Unity interface).

Anyway, after a lot of messing about, I'm now at a state that I'm happy with, EXCEPT, well, lets look at the screenshot and see if you see a problem [click for bigness] - the ever delightful Traylor Howard is not a problem...


Do you see it?  

That's right. Thunderbird is using massive amounts of CPU, matched or exceeded by Xorg (when Thunderbird is running).  Note that I have taken the screenshot with Thunderbird ONLY on the "select profile", WHAT ON EARTH IS IT DOING?!  

It gets worse if you actually select a profile (even a brand new EMPTY one); it will sit there eating 95-100% of CPU, it works, but when it's not doing anything, it is chewing CPU like a crazy thing.  

Luckily I have 4 cores, but having two of them being effectively run at 100% all the time is NOT conducive to multi tasking.  Not to mention the occasional "pauses" it causes, just locking everything for a second or two.

So far I have found two programs that cause this behaviour.  Thunderbird, and Unison.

Ideas anybody?!

Update 1 

Now for something really interesting, if I maximise the thunderbird window, CPU usage falls right away to normal (0-1%), if I un-maximise it, it shoots back to 100% again.  And it ONLY works if you use the maximize button in the window bar, if you just resize to cover the entire screen, it keeps the 100%, but click the maximize button and it falls to zero!

Update 2

Now that I know it is to do with maximized vs unmaximized windows, my Google search has produced some new fruit... http://robpetti.com/?p=100

Update 3

Update 2 works.  The problem is isolated to the Oxygen-Molecule GTK theme which is supposed to match the KDE Oxygen theme.  The Oxygen-Molecule-Flat theme seems to work fine, as do other "normal" GTK themes.

Hurrah!

So today I filled up my bike at a Shell station, specifically, Shell Blenheim/Curletts road in Christchurch, and after I had paid the usual exorbitant amount for the tank of gas, I got on my bike, put on my helmet, and my gloves, and pressed the starter.  

It didn't start.  

I tried again.

It didn't start.

I turned the lights off (headlight laws and dicky charging systems do not go together well) and tried again.  Still no go.  

I tried some various other things, but long story short, the battery just didn't have enough grunt to spin the engine fast enough to get vacuum going to get fuel to the carb (bike has a vacuum fuel cutoff) and to get it to fire, a jump would probably do it.

So, no problem thinks I, I'm on the forecourt of a service station, I'll just borrow their jump start pack, surely they have one, I mean, it's a service station and I expect people having trouble starting is a common enough occurance after filling up, why wouldn't they have a jump start pack.

Oh, they had one all right...
"you'll have to buy one",  
"but I only want to use one for 10 seconds to start my bike so I can get it home"
"sorry, we only sell them"

Sod that.  So I parked the bike around the back and walked the 4k's home.

Bring back the small garages, the places where the people working there actually know about vehicles, who are helpful, who have even the most basic tools and ability to assist their customers who might need a helping hand after spending thousands of dollars with them over the years.

A new Coke flavour just got released, or at least I just saw it today in P&S.  Coke Zero Vanilla.

Verdict: nice, but not as good as the old Diet Coke with Vanilla.  I miss Diet Coke with Vanilla.  Vanilla Zero is somehow, harder, not as "smooth" tasting as I remember DCwV.

C'mon Coke, bring back DCwV!
 

A long long time ago, I had a couple of BNZ banking accounts, and I also had a BNZ credit card.  Back in the day, the BNZ internet banking was pretty lack-lustre, you couldn't transfer to other people ("Internet Banking Payment" in the modern parlance), and mostly the number of transactions you could view in the reports was only a few months.

Anyway, I closed the normal banking accounts with them long ago and went to Kiwibank who did not suffer any of these issues, but I kept the credit card.  Through a cock-up at the BNZ call center back in the day, they messed up the internet banking on the credit card when they closed the other accounts.  

I had forgotten about those limitations by now, and you'd think that they'd both have been fixed by now, probably at LEAST 5, maybe 8 years later, I mean, at the time the other banks I was using, WESTPAC and Kiwibank both did not have limits on the transaction history.

So today, since I'm procrastinating on my GST return, I decided to pay a visit to BNZ and get the Internet access reinstated on that card so I could download the last 6 months transactions, filter them in a spreadsheet, and enter them as appropriate.

Getting the access added was no trouble, it apparently just needed a password reset.  The guy told me about a special code-sheet card (multi factor authentication) which would be sent out, but I could skip that for the next month.  All good.

I come back home, and after procrastinating some more, login to the BNZ banking and select the date range for transactions, 1/4/2011 to 30/9/2011.  It gives me 2 pages.  Hmm.  You're kidding.  The limitation still exists, it doesn't give me any transactions from before July 2011!  

I try the Export function instead, figuring that at least THAT should give you what you want, right?  NO!  If you want a transaction older than July, you must be crazy, the world obviously didn't exist before July according to the BNZ.  Oh it lets you select 1/4/2011 as the start date, it even tells you it is showing or exporting transactions from that date, but it doesn't actually do it!

BNZ, what, are you running this server on a 30 megabyte MFM hard drive or something?  Is disk space really that limited?  Come on!  Seriously now!

PS: I also found the "Download Statements" link.  Guess what, if you wanted to download a statement from more than 12 months ago, you must be mentally deranged because clearly humanity had not evolved to the point of a banking system before July 2010 at the earliest.  And they are PDFs.  Good luck getting that into a spreadsheet or accounts system without retyping. 

High time I closed out this BNZ nonsense and went with a bank that has internet banking at it's forefront.  One of these days I will stop procrastinating and get around to it.  And my GST.

When Google+ was released, I joined up, I'm not one for social networking, or networking (of the people kind) of any type really, but hey, it was Google and at the time it wasn't full of young beautiful vapid facebook type people, I had vain hope that it might become, to coin a phrase from an ipredict forum thread, "an elite ghetto".

Where am I going with this.  Oh right.  Anyway, I made a couple of posts to my feed or whatever you call it, and I was found by some people who I had worked with in the past and they added me in the first couple of days, I added them back.

After that, I pretty much forgot about it, like I say, not big on the whole putting-your-life-out-there thing, work is more important.

So today, I had to login to my gmail account, which I use just as a "something is borked with my regular mail, try sending from gmail" and hadn't looked at in ages, there were piles, and PILES of messages informing me that so-and-so had added me to their circles.

Looking at my circles, it tells me that 946 people, that's NINE HUNDRED AND FORTY SIX, people have added me to their circles.  Seriously.  946.  And I don't know ANY of them that I can see in a quick face-scan.  Why?!  Why are these people adding me to their circles.  At first I thought "probably a new take on marketing spam or something", but I clicked through to a few profiles, and... they just seem like normal profiles. 

My only assumption is that people are just blithly adding any possible remote suggestion that Google has as for people they might know in some way, and that eventually my name (and by extention eventually every other person on the planet) comes up in that suggestion list.

That is retarded!  Why would people do that.  Not only do they not know me from a bar of soap, but I'M JUST NOT THAT INTERESTING. In fact, I'm not interesting at all!  Think of something really amazingly interesting, and I am the absolute opposite.

I think this is the URL to my profile or something...
https://plus.google.com/u/0/112850805511005419452/posts

Gah.  I just don't get people.
 

I just had to order a new EFTPOS card, my current one lasted just over a year, it is so worn out that the mag stripe is physically worn off in places, right through to the base media, the signature is long gone from the panel, the printing on the back is worn off, and the laminations front and back are starting to peel away too.

Not that I mind particularly, as long as Kiwibank waive the fee, but it is pretty inconvenient not having the card for a few days while they punch out a new one.

I don't carry cash, so I use my card at least once a day, it lives with my other cards, in my pocket.  Those other cards don't get as much use, which is lucky because when my EFTPOS refuses to work I can rely on my credit card to be functional.

So how long do your cards survive people?  Are there any that you have noticed are worse than others in the longevity stakes?

I was the subject of magnificent almost-crash today.  

Against my usually better judgement I decided to take the car out for a spin on a weekend, usually I leave the weekends alone because the roads are covered in half blind Sunday drivers, especially on this particular road.

Anyway, I'm humming along, and come up behind a couple of slow pokes, so like a good driver I check my mirrors, and a head check and look in front, and indicate, and pulled out to overtake them, I'm coming up something just short of 70mph passing the first car, a big land cruiser or something.

Suddenly, holy freaking crap the guy I'm overtaking, who I'm right next to, has decided to swing out into me going to overtake the car in front of him!  

Next few seconds are a bit of a blur, but suffice to say in an effort to not die a painful death there was a lots of tyre smoke, a little sideways driving, and eventually I regained control and got it all pointing the right way again.  I don't think it swapped ends entirely.

If I'd been in that situation on my motorbike, one of two things would have happened, 
  a) I'd have had enough room to carry on
  b) I'd be dead

Once I regained my composure I saw that the other driver looked to have stopped on the road a few hundred meters up.  I considered going to have words with him/her, but decided that discretion was the better part of valour and that my state of mind might not be conducive to cordial discussion, hopefully they got enough of a fright that they won't pull out without having a damn good look in a hurry.

So, drivers, 
CHECK YOUR DAMN BLIND SPOTS!
small low to the ground cars and motorbikes over taking you might be there!