Category Archives: Uncategorized

Uncategorized

Hacked

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My site was hacked. I am not sure when it was hacked but possibly a few months ago. I only realised when the hack was randomly redirecting access to a malware site that was getting blocked by my work firewall.

I shall write a longer post at some point explaining what I got wrong, and the one thing had got most importantly right. In the meantime, I had to restore to a backup taken a while ago, so I may have lost some comments on articles. I also deleted the 20,000 (yes 20000) registered spam users, along with any genuine ones and new user reg is locked down for now until I get reCaptcha working.

Uncategorized

Once more unto the beach

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I should really have written more over the year but long story short, I’m heading back to Cyprus for more treatment. Last time I had great gains but I need a bit more to get me over the finishing line. I’ll write more once I’m in Cyprus, because this plane is about to take off!

Lyme, Uncategorized

Rifampicin continued…

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I have had a reasonable amount of success with the Rifampicin.  My heart palpitations pretty much stopped over the course of a couple of weeks and stayed away until the end of that prescription.  My doctor put me on a doubled dose for another 6 weeks so let’s see how that goes…

In the meantime, the palpitations came back a little.  I’m not sure whether this is because I had a 4 day gap between courses or whether it’s part of a herx or otherwise caused by the increased dose.

I’m committed to flying across the Pacific at the weekend (I’m going to San Francisco for a week) — I hope I don’t get an attack on the plane 🙁

Launchpad, Uncategorized

Feeling productive?

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As the lead on the Launchpad Soyuz project, I have to deal with a lot of different tasks at the same time.  I hate this as much as the next engineer, but burying my head in the sand and hoping things will just be all right simply won’t work.

At the end of the day I was feeling really unproductive and anxious about time wasted – I’d sit back and think, what did I do today?  I felt really busy but I can’t remember what the heck I’ve been doing! Even worse, I’d leave my office at the end of the day in a bad mood and the 30 seconds it takes to get back into the house is not enough to ease the tensions, which made it hard to interact with my wife and kids.  I want to reclaim that precious hour between finishing work and the kids going to bed!

So, what can I do about this?

Three things:

1. I made a conscious effort to finish my major work items 30 minutes before leaving the office and to spend those 30 minutes doing all the simple tasks that you know you need to sort out but never get around to doing.  This has had a dramatic affect on not only how I feel when I finish, but also I get the warm fuzzy feeling of having cleared out stuff that was niggling me at the back of my brain.

2. I have eschewed technology in favour of the classic pen and paper!  I used to keep TODO lists electronically, but I found this hard to keep up with as they were always hidden by other windows on another virtual desktop somewhere.  So now,  each week I start on a fresh piece of paper and write down all the things I know I need to do, with a little box next to them.  When I’ve done that task, I can put a great big satisfying tick next to it.  At the end of each day I can see visible progress.  This is very uplifting!  I start a new sheet each week so that the TODO list is not cluttered, and it also forces me to think of anything I missed.

3. Take regular breaks.  I know, this is easier said than done.  Michael Nelson put me on to the Pomodoro Technique which while I don’t follow religiously, does give some effective tips on how to time-box your activities.

If you’ve got any more tips, or used mine and found them useful, I’d love to hear about it!  Please leave a comment.