Unblogged October

Happy Hallowe’en! It’s been quite a busy month, with a few days out, but I’ve also had some time to relax at home. In particular, I’ve been able to catch up with my RSS feeds in Feedly – at one point, I had over 250 unread items, but brought this down to 0 last week. We’ve also had the half-term break this week.

Heating

After the not-so-autumnal start to the month, we finally relented and turned the heating on during Sunday 11th. I say ‘we’ – it was a unilateral decision on Christine’s part, but the house has felt more comfortable with the radiators going on. And they’ve definitely been needed; whilst I’m not yet at the stage where I need to have my heated blanket on whilst working, I have been feeling the colder weather.

Another seizure

Sadly, I’m up to seizure number five, which happened in the evening after our day out at Legoland and Sea Life. There were some factors in this – it was a big day out with a lot of walking, I’d taken my Levetiracetam late that morning, and I’d taken a lower dose than I should have by accident.

However, the ‘good’ news is that the seizure happened after I’d gone to sleep, which my neurologist tells me shouldn’t affect the 12 month seizure-free period that I need to have to be able to drive again. Some people do only get seizures when they’re already asleep, and this shouldn’t affect your driving because you shouldn’t be driving when you’re asleep (note, this does not constitute professional or legal advice).

I’m keeping a log of my seizures and any factors that may have caused them, in the hope that we can build a picture. Of course, I hope I don’t have any more, and whilst a night seizure has less impact, I still had a sore tongue for a few days afterwards.

I’ve had another ENT appointment and we’re potentially getting closer to what might be triggering the seizures, but I’ll need more scans first. Hopefully, this will lead to some kind of treatment and will stop the seizures for good, but we’ll see.

PHP2Shell

Like most people running WordPress, I had PHP2Shell to deal with this month. This was a pair of critical vulnerabilities in PHP, where details were leaked early. As such, I took this site offline for around 24 hours, until the patch had been released and made it into the Linux distro that this site runs on.

I’m somewhat fortunate in that I’m running a relatively recent version of PHP. That meant that patches were available; older versions are unsupported, and so server admins would also have to update PHP and potentially other underlying software first. I hope that a side effect is that more sites will now be running newer PHP versions, and may therefore run faster. It seems like most web sites running PHP are back online, but not yet all.

Secondary school application

Today was the deadline for getting our ten-year-old’s application for secondary school submitted, which we made in good time. In fact, our local authority’s online system remembered many of the details from when we applied for their primary school place seven years ago, which was handy and sped the process up significantly.

In the end, we only visited one school, which was their first choice. They seemed to really like it, and so we’ll keep our fingers crossed that they get in. It’s also the closest to where we live, and the one where most of their friends will probably go too.

So that was October. Roll on November tomorrow, which promises to be another busy month.