Passing time

The Easter fortnight was my negotiated opportunity to take a last holiday away with my family before the onset of my next round of treatment. In the end, some of that time actually got spent doing chores at home that we’d been putting off for a while, but we also managed to get away to France, which was great.

Whenever I visit France I realise that the French have a much healthier approach to their work/life balance than we do. Of course, that doesn’t change the harsh realities of life – they’re all doing the same mad working weeks that we are – but in their case, they actively dislike it, and try to retain some of the traditions that we’ve long since cast aside. I quietly envy them that. And their wine. And their patisseries. And their weather!

And now I’m back to waiting for news of the date of my next operation, which should be sometime within the next few weeks, and trying to finish off some of those chores I mentioned earlier (mainly the complete redecoration of my study) while also trying to keep on top of work.

Life is never dull!

State of mind

It’s been a long time since I last posted anything here about my treatment. Actually, it’s been a long time since I posted almost anything here. And I’ve been pretty distant and difficult to contact in the real world too.

I could make a series of high-minded excuses, but actually the truth is much less prosaic; after the latest series of updates from my consultants I’ve been struggling to come to terms with my current situation, trying to work out what to do next, and how. And fundamentally I’ve not been coping too well; I’ve been acting rather like the archetypal “rabbit in the headlights”.

Tuesday will be the 3rd anniversary of my original cancer operation. I’ve been fighting medical problems for almost all of that time, as well as the 6 months prior to that while I was being diagnosed. And it’s fair to say that I’m tired. I’m tired of the hospital appointments, the consultations, and of being prodded and poked, injected, bled, and scanned. Of being outwardly positive and cheerful, even when I feel depressed and negative. And above it all, I’m heartily sick of still not being well again.

And I feel guilty for feeling like that, especially when actually I’m one of the lucky ones who seems to be surviving his brush with cancer, unlike so many others.

If this were a different problem I’d take a break and come back to the fight refreshed. But there is no break with this; at the moment it’s my new normal. So I have to just keep on going. But unfortunately this also seems to be an inflection point in my treatment; I need to make some irreversable decisions on the direction of that treatment, and they all seem to lead to fairly disagreeable end points. Which is not helping much.

So, to the friends and colleagues I’ve not been in touch with for a while, or been short and irritable with, I’m sorry. I’ll try to do a bit better. And since, according to Dorothy L. Sayers, a “trouble shared is trouble halved”, so I’ll even try to post a bit more here too.

Printer statistics (ongoing)

Time has been passing. And I’ve studiously ignored the warnings from the printer, and kept on sending it jobs. Which it has kept on printing. Beautifully.

I’m now at a total of 885 impressions (348 mono and 537 colour) and despite complaints that the magenta cartridge is now also “low”, there seems to be no difference in the quality of the output. I’ve now got replacement black and magenta toner cartridges “waiting to go”, but see no reason to install them until the print quality starts to actually degrade.

I’m cynically starting to wonder if Lexmark have set the warning levels artificially early as a means of promoting toner sales. It will be interesting to see if the printer enforces replacement before the toner actually runs out, and how much toner is left in the cartridge at that point…

Printer statistics

My Lexmark laser printer started complaining about low toner in the back cartridge today. I’ve had the printer just over a year, but even so, I was surprised that it had got through 2500 sides of text (what the black cartridge is rated at) so quickly.

So I checked the statistics. The 543DN has an inbuilt web server that provides all kinds of helpful information, including the fact that my cartridges are:

• Black: low
• Yellow: 80%
• Magenta: 30%
• Cyan: 50%

There is lots of information on the pages printed, including average job length, job type, etc. It turns out that I’ve printed a total of 519 jobs, of which 474 are 1 or 2 pages long. My longest job was 23 pages.

I’ve printed a total of 312 mono A4 sides, and 499 colour A4 sides, for a grand total of 811 sides overall.

And because my “2500 sheet high capacity black toner cartridge” is nearly empty after only 811 sides printed, this is where I can point out that the old adage about “lies, damned lies and statistics” is absolutely true, and the definition of a printed side (as used by the printer manufacturers) has no standing in the real world whatsoever.

If I assume my cartridge statistics are correct, 811 real world A4 impressions costs me all of a black cartridge, 70% of a magenta, 50% of a cyan, and 20% of a yellow. A total of 2.4 cartridges at £60 each, or £144. Which is 18p an impression. Which seems expensive, but given my preponderance of colour printing, perhaps isn’t as bad as it first seems.

The sound of silence – briefly

Yesterday we packed our middle daughter off to a week of pony camp. She’s only an hour away, but it’s the longest she’s been away from us. We were suitably apprehensive.

But when we arrived we were met by a lovely set of event leaders, who helped “A” settle straight in. She’s bunking with loads of other horse-mad girls, and even as we were walking away, she was heading straight for the stables.

I think she’s going to have a good time!

But back at home the house has been surprisingly quiet. “A” loves her music, and whenever she has a spare second, tends to be practicing on either the piano or flute. Recently she and “J” have been vying for who can master the Michael Nyman piece, “The Heart Asks Pleasure First”, and the sudden silence around the house is somewhat unnerving.

But to counter that, “P” has managed to prove that she really does know her multiplication tables off by heart, and earned herself her longed-for saxophone.

So tonight the house was echoing to the sounds of the saxophone instead. And boy is it loud!

Half term break

I planned this last weeks vacation with my family on the spur of the moment nearly 9 months ago, more as a means of using up some of my accrued vacation than out of any real desire to take this particular week off as holiday. However, in practice I seem to have needed it more than any other vacation I’ve had this last year. I found the fortnight leading up to it particularly difficult, with a lot of travel, and consequent long days.

Add in the stress of recent developments in my health, and I’ve been struggling to cope. So it’s been a huge relief to spend a week away from the trains to London, the office politics, and the pressing concerns of my customers. Instead, I’ve been able to spend a week catching up on my sleep, recharging my batteries and spending time with my family. It’s reminded me of the important things in life.

I’m now looking forward to the challenges of work again next week, but it’s definitely tempered by the thought that I clearly no longer have the stamina to burn the candle at both ends, let alone while lighting the middle at the same time.

I’m going to need to improve my time management, prioritisation and delegation skills if I’m going to maintain a good work-life balance and keep my health intact.

Green printing?

This week my trusty old Canon IP4000 inkjet stopped working. Changing the cartridges and running deep cleaning cycles make no difference. The print quality has been slowly falling off for some time now, so my suspicion was that the print head had finally died. I suspect the printer must be something like four or five years old now, so it’s not perhaps not unexpected.

What was unexpected was the cost of a replacement print head; the cheapest I could find was nearly £70. Add in another set of cartridges at £30, and it becomes significantly less expensive to just buy the new replacement model printer from Canon (the IP4850) at about £75 delivered. Which is just completely ridiculous.

In addition I’ve always been frustrated that the inkjet cartridges always seem to run out at an alarming rate. The manufacturers quote the capacity in pages of 5% coverage (340 pages, apparently), which may be representative of average business use, but decidedly unrealistic when you have three children printing lots of full-colour diagrams as part of their homework. I doubt that I got more than a hundred pages before one or another of the colour cartridges started running dry. Keeping the printer supplied involved the frequent advance purchase & stockpiling of cartridges.

Of course, printing technology has moved on in the intervening years, so I decided to do a proper examination of the options available against my expected printing requirements over the next few years. This is heavily influenced by the needs of my daughters who are entering the stage where they will be doing a lot more homework as part of their GCSE and A levels, and my need to produce the occasional “customer ready” document at home.

My requirements; Linux support, excellent black and white performance, automatic duplex (saves so much paper!), the ability to print colour diagrams, and a volume of approximately 200 pages per month. Long term cost of ownership is more of a factor than the purchase price, and we have no requirement for photographic printing, as we print photographs via a bureau.

To my surprise, the latest generation of SOHO colour laser printers compete very favourably with inkjets on total cost of ownership. There is no doubt that they are still more expensive, but to compensate for that, you get better print quality, faster throughput, and the convenience of much longer between (more expensive) toner cartridge changes.

In the end I narrowed the choice down to either the Canon IP4850 inkjet, or a Lexmark C543dn laser printer. Both had excellent reviews and represented the best fit for my expected needs for their respective technologies. However, finding a supplier offering the Lexmark with a 50% discount pretty much decided the issue; £150 delivered, with full capacity toner cartridges installed is hard to beat.

I took my old Canon IP4000 down to the recycling centre yesterday. It felt really wrong to be “throwing away” something that with a little maintenance is basically capable of continuing to provide good service. But economically it just didn’t make sense. I felt very un-green.

Meanwhile the Lexmark is installed on my home network and working beautifully. I spent some time fiddling with the printer settings to reduce the toner intensity levels and the timeout period before the printer drops into its lowest power-saving mode, both of which ought to help me save money. It does mean a twenty second delay before the first page is printed while the printer warms back up, but once running it churns out paper at 20 pages a minute, so overall it’s a lot faster than the old inkjet we were used to.

Energy usage

I’ve been tracking my homes annual energy usage for several years now. For the last few it’s been fairly stable at around 19,000Kwh gas and 6,500Kwh electricity.

This year, with our new central heating boiler and maximised loft insulation, the figures are 15,500Kwh gas and 5,800Kwh electricity.

Taken together this reduces the carbon footprint of our home from 7.05 to 6.02 tonnes. The drop in gas usage is responsible for most of that, and is very welcome indeed. The electricity drop is good news too, though apart from forever going around turning lights off after my kids, I can’t account for any real changes in our usage, which is odd. However, I suspect it could be easily accounted for by something as small as using the oven a little less each week.

Now, if only I could find some reliable figures for the UK average to benchmark myself against…

Female stag beetle

And on the 10th July (was it really so long ago?!) we came across this little beauty, also in the undergrowth around the house:

Hopefully this means the continuation of their species, at least for this year.

Stag Beetle

For the last few days we’ve had this not-so-little chap keep turning up at different locations around our garden:

At about 3inches (8cm or so) he’s pretty huge, and very impressive. It’s taken a good 6-8 years for him to reach this final stage in his life, and he really needs to find a mate this summer, because he won’t make it through the winter.

Sadly these beetles are becoming more and more rare. I’ve only ever seen one a few times in my life. They’re considered endangered across most of Europe, and are a protected species in the UK. Given that we seem to keep rescuing him from various “scrapes” that he gets himself into, I can see why. Yesterday we found him stuck on his back on the front doorstep, waiting to be eaten by any passing bird. Today I rescued him from some flower pots that he’d apparently fallen into. Although he’s an amazing sight, I hope I don’t see him again, and that he just manages to get on with his life, and continuing his species.