I have just spoken to Mum. Her doctor came to visit and filled her in on the Stem Cell blood tests. Whilst the indicator tests were OK, it would appear that the Stem Cell count was not really high enough, and the numbers do not seem to be rebounding as fast as they should. If they are not high enough tomorrow they are looking at sending her home and then giving her some more chemo after the Long Weekend. At that time they would then try giving her StemGen generate the Stem Cells.

The chemo after the long weekend would be less severe than the chemo she has had to date - probably CHOP. The side effects for the StemGen seem to be slightly nasty, but certainly nothing compared to Chemo itself.

Once the Stem Cells have been collected she will be out of hospital for 1-2 months, and then go back in for the implantation. When she is back she will be in for about a month.

The Sydney South West Area Health Service has a PDF file for people wanting to link to their WWW site. The PDF is Here. I have not filled in the form, and I am pretty sure that it is bogus.

As a way to show how stupid this is... I believe that people in hospitals should wash their hands. I will offer a 30 second training course for $10 per person on how to wash their hands using soap and water. This does not include travel expenses. And the Sydney South West Area Health Service endorses handwashing as a great way to prevent infections and the transfer of disease.

That paragraph violates their linking policy. How dumb!

I have been doing some programming with Bluetooth on the PC. I was amazed that there are at least three different Bluetooth stacks under XP. They are Toshiba, Widcom and Microsoft. Of these Microsoft seems to be the one that I would use first, and Toshiba is the last. The API's for these stacks seems to be poorly implemented. There are some stacks available. The best (because it is free) looks like the one from 32feet.net, but the important thing is that this only works with the microsoft stack.

Of course my laptop only talks Bluetooth. So what to do? I picked up a USB Bluetooth Dongle from PressDigital, and this uses the Microsoft Bluetooth Stack under XP SP2. This is exactly what I wanted. Now I can do the programming I need to do! And the thing just worked. None of this rubbish that I have had with the Toshiba or Widcom drivers not working. This one just worked. It is good when Microsoft does things properly.

Audigy 2ZS Video Editor

I picked up a Soundblaster Audigy 2ZS Video Editor from PressDigital yesterday and I must say that I am really impressed. Normally I am not one of these people who buys high-end sound cards, or video cards. Well, apart from the Soundblaster 16 I think it was when I was at Uni, but who could really call a Sound Blaster 16 a high end card? Whilst the card as 192 KHz sampling and all sorts of other audio features, these were not what interested me.

I was more interested in the Video capabilities of this card. Yes, you heard right. Video! The Audigy 2ZS Video Editor actually has great video capabilities. It is not one of these devices that has 768 MBytes of DDR3 RAM or a large nVidia graphics card. No, but it is amazing none the less. You see, the card does TV input and output. Not TV tuner, just TV, and by keeping to the basics it does a very good job at it.

The device (and it is a device since it connects to the PC using USB2) digitizes and processes the video on board. It firstly captures the video, then fixes up any timing information between adjacent frames. Then it does noise filtering, adjacent frame compensation and then motion compensation. What this means is that the video signal that is captured is rather amazing. For all intents and purposes it appears that the original signal has more detail than the tape it was captured from.

It does not work quite as well on tapes that have been copies from other tapes - for instance a compilation of all the camcorder shots moved to VHS, but the quality is still rather good. Somewhat better than my DVD recorder could ever do. And because the work is done on the device, the PC only needs enough computing power to store the video to the HDD.

The unit comes with all sorts of video editing and managing software, but to tell you the truth I have not even looked at those yet. I am mostly interested in Capture at the moment, and it does a really good job at that. Later on I will start editing start and stop zones from the tapes I have digitized.

At High quality MPEG a VHS tape will take up about 4 GBytes per hour. This is a lot of data, but the space is small compared to the size of all the tapes.

All in all this is a card I would certainly recommend.

My birthday today... Mum is home but she has a temperature so the doctors have asked her to come into hospital. I have the flu so she will be wearing a facemask. I need to have a quick shower to get rid of some germs and then take her up to the hospital. Not sure how long she will be in.

I have been having some dropouts on my Westnet ADSL 2+. The dropouts have been really bad in the last few days, and I decided to fix things. I use a Billion Bipac 5102 ADSL modem. This is one of the cheapest on the market, and aparently one of the best. It was able to go with full speed ADSL 1 as well as ADSL 2 and 2+. And it has been fairly good at doing this. Apart from the dropouts.

So I downloaded the updates from the Billion Web Site. The Billion router does not have the ability to backup the settings so I wrote the important settings in my notebook, and uploaded the settings. Then following the instructions I gave the modem a full reset. Well, that is what I did after I could only get the status page to come up. So then I followed the instructions and to do the basic settings, and my laptop connected to the modem started working. Then I needed to set up the DMZ settings.

Well, there is a step missing. I needed to change the IP address of the modem. That probably took the best part of an hour the first time. If you do this incorrectly you need to start again.

That is where things got fun. You see, I like to send all my traffic to 192.168.2.30; but the modem is 192.168.3.249, and there is a gateway at 192.168.3.1 to route packets through. But if you went to enter the gateway address of 192.168.3.1 into the routing interface it would decode this as being an external address. There was no way to make it route to a internal address.

After many hours I worked out I should just point the DMZ to 192.168.3.1, and have the NAT use this address on the firewall rather than 192.168.2.30. But to get this far I needed to work out that I could ignore the Virtual Server configuration in the settings.

The only way I worked this all out was having one laptop to monitor the operations of packets coming in, and the other to configure the modem. This happened at 11pm after starting at about 7pm.

Then I needed to get the packets going outgoing. This took another hour - and I needed to set up masquerade on the firewall. This did not totally work. Actually this did not work at all, so I unplugged the network and just had my laptop and things did not work. I found I had turned RIP routing on. Turning this off fixed things around midnight

I had my birthday party last night, and it went well. A few people could not make it, but it was fun none the less.

I want to concentrate on the menu since I found a great combination of foods that made cleaning up easy. And since it was going to be me cleaning up predominantly by myself, that was an important concideration.

For starters we had some finger food. Some brie, chips, and some lollies from the 'Natural Confectionary Company'. This all went down really well, and the food was served in disposable bowels. I also had some Homus with lebanese bread but up. The homus came in three small tubs together allowing me to open only as many as were needed.

Then for the mains we had BBQ Steak, Salmon Cutlets and Sausages. The Steak and Sausages were half price since I went shopping at the right time, and i think they discount them once they have been on display for more than 3 hours or something. This does not affect the food at all, and saved a heap of money. The salmon was from a fish shop with the idea that each piece would be cut into two. Cooking the salmon on the BBQ involved covering it with oil and cooking it just like a steak.

To reduce the washing up, disposable plates and cutlery was used. Desert was a pavlova which a friend brought across. This was delicious, and really hit the spot. I ended up taking the leftovers to church this morning which went down well too.