posted 11-08-2007 05:38 PM                    

quote: Mark Gulbrandsen

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I am sorry to read about your health issues.... How's your blood pressure? Many years of borderline high BP has for the most part ruined my kidneys (Chronic Kidney Failure).

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quote: Mark Gulbrandsen

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I recently changed Doctors because of a change in our
insurance and he caught it almost right away. Apparently new doctors are taught that even borderline high BP is bad... the old school of doctors thinks differently about it and that borderline is ok or at least better than it being high... not true! Don't let your health sag.... if your present Doc doesn't do anything for you then get another... preferably young one with a fresh mind and the latest training and ideas.... you may be better off like I now am.

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I really don't like doctors; I'd have to be really ill before I'd even think of going. I've never been one for looking after my health; I prefer to not even think about what goes on inside bodies I did once go to a post-mortem, so I have seen what the various bits look like, but I prefer to keep it all out of sight, and out of mind.

The last time I went to the doctor as about four years ago; I was getting terrible pains in my side. The Doctor was honest; he didn't know what the problem was, and a couple of days later, before he could find out they went away, and haven't come back since. I think we sometimes expect too much of doctors; they're not miracle workers.

I really don't know what this is that I've got now; somebody suggested sinus trouble. It's much worse when I'm at work, my desk position puts me within inches of a raditator so hot that I can't actually keep my hand on it. A co-worker sitting very close to me gets almost none of the heat, so he complains that he is cold, and has a fan heater on under his desk for much of the time. If I open the window then the top half of me is in a cold draught, and the bottom half is still far too hot. I also have to go out to our two other buildings, only a minute or so walk away, but still out in the cold to get there, and none of this helps even walking under those curtain hearer things just inside the doors I can feel it get worse as the heat hits me. I'm trying to arrange to move my desk elsewhere in the office. I've taken a couple of days leave today and tomorrow, and it's been much better today. There's also a lot of noise going on from building work, both inside and outside the building, which doesn't help. Yesterday was my late evening, so I was on a 12 hour shift, and it was really bad.

Now that I've just about retired from the projection room I'll be getting a bit more time to myself. For quite a while I've been working six days, with two of those being at least 12 hours, and sometimes as long as 16; I think a rest will do me good.

I'd like to have gone to the show at the Loew's on Saturday, but it was too late to get flights to Newark and back at reasonable cost on the days when I would have wanted to be there, and the hotel nearby had no rooms free on the days I wanted, so I couldn't make it, but I think that's probably just as well, I really doubt that it would be a good idea to fly before this head trouble clears up.

I have lost a bit of weight since my last picture was taken; I'm not sure how much, but I have come down two trouser sizes.

What I'm doing at the moment probably won't make my head any better either. I have a large collection of lamps, something like 600 of them at the last count, everything from fractional Watt ones to multi-kiloWatt metal halides. Last year I managed to acquire a couple of 140W SLI/H linear sodium lamps, not been made for years, never common even here, and probably nobody over there has even seen one. They're a sort of straightened out SOX lamp, and they look like this: web page Most discharge lamps will work on 240V with just a simple inductive choke ballast, usually with a high-Voltage ignitor, but these things won't, the tube Voltage is too high, so they need a leak transformer with a current of 0.9A and an open circuit Voltage of about 420V. I've finally managed to find one of these, so here's what I look like under the two yellow lines of sodium:



That thing is bright; they can put out getting on for 200 lm/W so you get a lot of light for 140W.
This is the first time I've used the camera in my laptop; I'll have to try some other lamp types with it. I wonder if it's sensitive to ultra-violet?

Mitchell and Robert, sorry I can't make it this time, but maybe next year. Glad to hear that the organ is at last working; they'd been working on it for several years when I first came over in '02, so it's taken quite some time. I've never seen the chambers, but I did see some of the parts in a room somewhere under the stage the first time I came over.

Surprisingly the GSTOS website doesn't say much about it either, but there is a picture of the completed console and a short video of it being played last week, the same one that is on the Loew's site, I think. Maybe they want to be sure that any last problems are sorted out before giving it too much publicity.

Getting the organ working is a major development, and should be a real attraction when it is in regular use. Maybe they can do some silent film shows with it sometime soon.

Did they finally manage to get the last parts, the heavy bits, of the DP-70s upstairs?