Today Ziggy had his trip to the vet for his x-ray. We took him in at 8:45 this morning, howling like a banshee in his cat box. Honestly, if Schrödinger had used Ziggy in his experiments, there would never have been any doubt as to  whether the cat were alive or dead, he would have been able to tell just by listening!
So we booked him in and were given instructions to phone in the late afternoon to see how he’d got on, then come in for another consultation at 6 to discuss the results. Unfortunately, cats have to be given a general anaesthetic for x-rays because there is no way that they’d stay still enough otherwise, that’s why Ziggy had to be there all day.
At 4 we phoned and were told that all went well and Ziggy was coming out of the anaesthetic now. So far so good!

At 6 we went back to the surgery and nervously met with the vet.
I’m going to tentatively say it was good news! It seems that Ziggy doesn’t have a tumour at all! It’s actually swelling around a nasty fracture to one of his wrist bones, and friction abrasion to the head of the radius. A fairly serious injury for a four-legged animal but one that should heal naturally with minimal intervention!
So we’ll be keeping him dosed up on analgesia and anti-inflammatories and regular check-ups at the vet for the next month or so and see what happens. All being well it will sort itself out and the swelling will go down. If not we may have to return to the vet again and perhaps think about some kind of intervention to help it heal.
So a huge and very heartfelt thank you to those wonderful people who left a little something in the tips jar, you made a big difference and lightened the load on the vet’s bill today. We still had some way to go to make up the shortfall and it has left us short on other bills this month, especially as our horrible car has started signs of dying died (a strong stench of sulphur, repeatedly blowing fuses, three new scraping and clunking noises and a gearbox that pops out of gear without warning!) but your donations lessened the pain considerably!
A million times thank you.

Usually I’m not too keen on asking for donations, but circumstances are forcing my hand so I’ve placed a tips jar on Odd-Fish.
As I’ve mentioned before,
several UK Internet Service Providers including the one I’m with, Virgin Media, are installing spyware called Phorm on their servers in order to track its customers we habits, read their email and generally look over our shoulders in order to give us ‘more relevant advertising’ so I’m moving ISP to a small company who have pledged that they will never implement Phorm or anything like it. Unfortunately, moving ISP involves the purchase of a new telephone line and new broadband modem and router, an expense I really don’t need right now because of my other, more important reason for the tips jar.
My cat, Ziggy, an eleven year old huge tabby tomcat has developed a lump on his ‘wrist’ and is now only using three legs. The Vet says it might be a tumor (hopefully benign) but he has to go for an x-ray and possibly other tests then surgery if it can be removed. The x-ray alone is going to cost between £100 and £300 ($190 to $580) so I am throwing myself on your mercy.
If you enjoy my little corner of the web, if Odd-Fish makes you smile, please leave a couple of pennies, whatever you can afford in the PayPal tips jar so that I can still eat once Ziggy’s vet bills are paid.
Thank you in advance.

It seems that currently, 3 major UK internet service providers (BT, Virgin & TalkTalk) and an ex- adware/spyware company called Phorm are joining forces to install highly invasive hardware on the ISP’s servers designed to intercept your browsing for the purposes of targeted advertising.

The technology seems iffy at best and wide open for abuse.

There’s a simple layman’s guide that explains why this is bad for internet users and what we can do to prevent it’s implementation right here and if you object to every page you visit on the ‘net being read over your shoulder and then reported to the highest bidder, you can sign the UK Government petition to protest against it here

On Wednesday and Thursday visits to Odd-Fish took a major upturn. Instead of my usual 8 to 10 thousand daily page views I got 31000 for Wednesday and 37000 for Thursday all thanks to Stumbleupon users liking the ‘Strife & Nightlife‘ comic.
Delightful though it was it caused some headaches.
My image host, Servage, decided that I was using too many resources and pulled the plug on me without warning.
I had to desperately move everything to different hosting as quickly as possible. Of course all this happened during an upturn in traffic so lots of people got to see a comic site with no damn comic.
I specifically chose the host I was using because of their huge bandwidth allowance- 5000gb a month but it wasn’t because of bandwidth they killed me. Oh no, I’ve only used 83gb at the time of writing this. No, they pulled the site because I was getting too many hits at once, or to put it another way, my site was too busy and it slowed their server.
If a simple comic site can do that I hope no one they host ever tries to run a business on their server! a few too many customers shopping at Christmas and bang goes their site.
What the hell is the point of having five terabytes of bandwidth if the server can’t cope with user load to match!
What REALLY got me angry was even when the traffic rush was over and I’d moved some files elsewhere to lighten the load they point-blank refused to unsuspend my account until the 12 hour punishment period expired. What sort of crappy customer service is that? Way to piss off your customers guys!
Anyway sod them. I’m closing the account and going to a host that doesn’t power their servers with Sinclair Spectrums.
Rant over. Smiling now.