• I went to the dentist this morning. I’ve been going to see Andrew fro about eighteen years now. He is brilliant – very gentle and understanding. He’s quite often got the needle in and out before I realised what was happening.

    Something went a bit strange with my filling this morning. As Andrew put the anaesthetic in, I felt something wierd trickle down the back of my throat. I had a little rinse, lay back in the chair and felt as though A band had been placed across my throat and it was beginning to tighten. Standing up and walking around, I felt a bit dizzy and felt myself begin to panic. I sat down and breathed slowly, trying to calm down. Then I felt I was going to be sick. Luckily I wasn’t.

    Five minutes later I felt okay, but didn’t feel the anaesthetic had numbed the tooth, so Andrew put in another injection. This one worked – back at home my tongue has never felt so swollen.

    It’s not easy being a wimp, y’know?

  • I woke up this morning and realised that I had only a few days to get my newly published titles registered for this year’s PLR. That’s the Public lending right that pays me a tiny amount of money for every book that gets borrowed from libraries. Luckily my books get borrowed a lot, so it soon adds up to a very welcome sum of money that I immediately hand over to the tax man as I get paid about the same day as I have to pay tax. I remember my Dad always used to complain about his pay rises in the army. The day his pay went up, so did the rents and mess bills!

    Any way I collected up the titles to be registered and what a shock – 49 new titles this year! Most of these are reissues of old titles and titles doubled up as hardback and paperback, but it’s still a lot.

  • 4670The latest on the Hewlett Packard 4670 scanner:

    I emailed the CEO and Prsident of Hewlett Packard, Mark Hurd, from their website to ask them to update the drivers for this wonderful scanner, so that I can use it again with my Apple Mac. I had an email back from Customer relations asking for a few more details. Actually I was surprised. I thought I’d get a, “Sorry, this product is no longer supported,” email if I was lucky.

    Then this morning I received a phone call from them. They explained that the machine was out of warranty so if it was broken I would have to pay to get it fixed. I told them it worked fine on windows (although not with their scanning software – I had to download the Gimp to make it work.)

    So later I got a technical guy phoning me for further details. I don’t think he knew the product really and didn’t quite understand the problem. But I ws quite impressed that they took the time to phone at all.

    The scanner is quite unique. I imagine they stopped making it because it is easily misused and they probably got loads of people asking for their money back after their kids had dropped it on the floor. But it is quite brilliant for scanning things that are not sheets of A4 paper. You place the sscanner on top of the thing you want to scan and, as you can see through it, you can line it up just how you want it.

    Looking at forums online, it has a great and passionate following. all of whom can’t them them to work with modern macs. The drivers were written for Power PC chips and macs are now intel. If the software were made to run on Rosetta, that would help. It’s not an old machine and if they built a replacement, I would upgrade. But they don’t, so I have to make do. As they don’t make a replacement, I feel they should still support it, especially as it was heavily marketed at the Apple Mac user.

    I know stuff gets old, but if you are not going to make a new version, please let us keep our old scanners going, HP. It would be criminal to have to throw away a perfectly good machine. at least can we have third party TWAIN drivers? It’s the chip change that is at the bottom of it all.