h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Yesterday morning I was up at stupid-o'clock, and sitting on the windowsill downstairs by 8:30am waiting for "patient transport" to take me to an appointment up at the hospital.

They arrived at five to ten.

I got to the 10am appointment late, just to be told that it had been cancelled and that I needn't have bothered coming in. It seemed that I was supposed to have gleaned this information psychically, as nobody had said anything and they had sent me a reminder two weeks earlier...

It turned out that the two doctors I see when I'm up there each thought the other had mentioned it, and the reminders are sent out automatically and don't know when an appointment is cancelled.

But the day wasn't a total loss. I got an hour-and-a-half sitting in beautiful sunshine, and I managed to get ten minutes with the doc to get my meds reviewed.

When I got home I grabbed lunch and crashed for a couple of hours. Then I found a card inside the front door asking me to call the District Gnurse urgently. I called and was told they had been out in force while I was out at my appointment, and they wanted to know why I hadn't been in. I pointed out that we had agreed for them to come round on Wednesday; she responded that they had said they would be round on Monday. I pointed out that I had known about this appointment for a month, and if they had *ever* mentioned coming round on Monday I would have told them not to.

Then the day took an interesting turn...

I finally got round to trying to upgrade the OS on this machine. I set about installing Fedora 20 with MATE.

It took most of the rest of the night, as I had to try four or five different combinations of configuration options, and installing from a DVD was really slow, Things didn't work out well.

As things stand at the moment, I can boot the machine, log in as root and get online using the "Midori" browser. But I can't log in as myself (it flashes two lines of error messages and throws me back to the login prompt) and "Yum" won't run so I'm stuck with the default applications.

I have some ideas of how to fix it, but as I have to head out for dialysis in just over an hour I don't have time at the moment. I'll have a go when I get home, if I have the energy...

I watched "Andromeda", "8 out of 10 Cats" and "House of Cards".

Not being able to run Yum is a pretty serious problem on a Fedora box

Have they rearranged the appointment?

The point was that now I'm on dialysis I no longer attend that clinic. It's just that nobody told me.

On the Yum front I suspect it's a permissions problem, and I'll have a play when I get home tonight.

Good to see you, Pastey! How's life treating you?

Oh, and a bug report in passing... The icon is missing in preview mode...

Damn, I like that smiley. Kinda ironic it's the facepalm that's missing

I'm pretty good, published my first book and the sales were okay, almost finished the second draft of the sequel. And now I get to work from home writing and recoding this place

Although this place is a serious mess under the bonnet at times

Oh well done re book. My firstborn is coming out soonish. Mind you I'm self-publishing but may see if I can get someone interested in publishing Vol. 2, depending on how well Vol. 1 goes out. I'm crap at self-promotion but my collaborator is more efficient. He's doing the pictures while I write the text.

I self published this one, and learned a *lot*. I'm also very fortunate that my other half's an editor.

Getting the sales is pure promotion and luck though, so good luck!

Thanks Pastey!

I did write this up for the Post: A87818908 It might have something in there that helps

Thanks Pastey. My collaborator knows all about books, being an experienced and celebrated calligrapher, so I've left the design aspect up to him and he's sorted it all out brilliantly. The only downer is the cost, it's cost squillions to have just a thousand copies made. So it's a limited edition. But I have had many thousands of free editions made, by dint of just taking a bunch of A4 sheets to the printer and having them print them. These, I give away. My writing is studies of the vocabulary of the Bible in the original languages, and originated as talks on the radio, and they're quite in demand amongst the Bible bashing sector of the population, which is much bigger and livelier here than in the UK.

Rather than paying to have the books printed, look into print on demand services, lulu especially is very good.

I concur.

Thanks for the heads up.