What good is money to me?

16/08/13 06:34 [Friday]
I went to bed last night at 8.30 and although I was awake briefly on and off during the night I felt when I got up soon after 4 that I had had enough sleep. Recently I noticed a contrast in my mood from one day to the next, and concluded the marked improvement was due to having a good night’s sleep in between. Now this morning I feel on an even keel and have been revolving questions in my mind in a way impossible if I am lacking sleep (as not infrequently I have been over the past twelve to eighteen months).
What I was thinking about was our finances. We seem to have incurred a lot of expenditure the past month or two, and now we are recovering to a more balanced budget I am asking myself what it is I would wish to spend money on: in effect, what is the point in having money?
One of the conclusions I came to, in fact in trying to establish where the money had gone in recent months, was that we - Dawn too - are eating much better than before April. From mid April we have been on a 5:2 diet in which you are supposed to be dieting only two days out of each week but in practice the book makes suggestions for the ‘non-diet’ days as well. Medical people have verified this diet and, as I say, by restricting your intake of carbohydrates two days a week you can successfully lose weight without suffering adverse health consequences. What I have found is that eating the meals suggested in the book provides such variety of taste and overall food experience that I am much less tempted to eat inappropriately between meals. You are allowed treats between meals, but even the treats are designed to satisfy a desire for varied taste and texture without being too fattening: things like celery and houmous, and low-fat cheeses. It appears to me that the way I used to eat - putting on several stone in weight (this partly blameable on the Risperdal medication though) - was based on being at a loose end and filling time. This still applies, in the sense that I do not have a life which is especially busier than it was, but by eating this diet satisfying a desire for variety I can add interest to life without adding calories. Over four months I have lost just short of a stone, and they do say a steady but continuing loss of weight is a desirable aim, and then the loss is less likely to be easily reversed.
But to go back to the original point of where our money has been going: I noticed that from April our expenditure on food has shot up, and in association I have been making many more trips for food shopping (mainly to Asda at the Merry Hill shopping centre a bus ride away). (I said my life is not especially busier than it was, but to a degree it is since I have been getting more outings to the shops.) The main part of the increased cost to us of food I believe comes from meat. Previously as regards meat I was living almost exclusively on pork and chicken. Now we hardly ever have those meats, but do have a lot of beef and lamb. This in combination with the inclusion of much more fresh veg, and also the use of spices and herbs to improve variety of taste in meals, gives the basis for my saying that I am eating much better.

In summary it is the case that variety of experience provides almost all of what is a pleasure in my life. In the years following the deaths of my parents I could afford to travel about a lot, mainly within Britain and mainly by train, staying in hotels and all this providing variety of experience. I miss doing that. Yesterday I realised the last time I had been far afield and stayed in a hotel was April 2012 when I went to Edinburgh for two nights. Dawn doesn’t like hotels, and it is true we have something of what I like in travelling north (mainly north, although some of the family are in London and nearby) to see her family, and staying in their homes dog-sitting, more often than not. Also we go for day trips to Worcester, which I enjoy.
Anyway, the answer to what by choice I would spend money on - as well, now I think of it, as occasionally updating the technology I own (something again I did rather to excess in the years immediately following 2003) - are more trips to a greater variety of destinations (in Britain except that I would like to see Dublin again), stopping nights away from home as would naturally be appropriate.
Life is pretty good as it is, I have to say, as we do get to travel in going to see Dawn’s family. In fact we have such a trip coming up in the next few weeks, so that is something for me to look forward to.

Recent events in my life

06/08/13 07:30 [Tuesday]
I have been scanning my diary from July 2004 and I suppose it is this which has led me to think of once again setting down in a diary my day-to-day doings. In recent months - years, in fact - I have felt I should only bother to write stuff down in a blog if I have thought it through and it is something I consider ‘clever’ and which other people might consider clever. However reflecting on events in my life over the past few months - years, in fact - I come to understand readers of my blog (and whether there are any interested enough to ‘follow’ I don’t know but one thing I suspect is that people I used to talk to on the internet in the early 2000s and perhaps friends from longer ago than that may from time to time catch up with what is happening with me, or try to) will have little clue what I am about.
On the other hand I am infected a little by Dawn’s reticence, for example in mentioning events involving members of her family in a blog which is public, and more realistically than in 2009-2010 I am concerned with security of various species (for example in saying where I am going to be from time to time). I have to say these concerns - reticence with information and something which sounds like paranoia over ‘security’ - are typical of the schizophrenic personality type (if I can put it like that) and those of us with genetic predisposition have the personality type even at times we are not diagnosed with the illness.
Also I have more immediate concerns, and specifically I mean putting the kettle on for coffee and in addition making toast, so I shall break here.
06/08/13 07:57
We are hoping to move to the little town south of Doncaster where Dawn grew up and where many of her family still live. She misses her family and I myself can see the desirability of being near someone who can support us as we get older. Our bungalow in Kingswinford has been on the market since late 2011, but the market has been slow. We found a buyer and had arranged to move in early April - even paying the removals firm - but the buyer of our buyer’s house pulled out at the last minute so we are still here. Our buyer is still interested and will move in here if and when he sells his house. In the meantime we have had to put the bungalow back on sale - because there is no telling if the buyer we agreed with can sell his house, or when - and in fact we have a viewing in a day or two from now.
The other thing I find mainly to be in my head this morning is our recent trip to Redcar. We went to look after Dawn’s sister’s dog and house while she was on holiday (with her partner and others) and in truth it was a holiday for us too. Redcar, for those who may not know (and I didn’t until say eighteen months ago), is by the sea, but it is no longer a very popular resort because the region is heavily industrial.

Dog-sitting is something we find ourselves doing occasionally, and when we go to see Dawn’s family (for the purpose of dog-sitting or otherwise) we also try to catch up with other friends of Dawn’s in the area. I get to spend time with other people when under other circumstances I might be on my own a lot. In fact for the first year Dawn was living near her family and not with me - she ‘ran off’ as I put it in the summer of 2010 because of my outlandish behaviour before I was on the present medication - that is when I was seeing nothing of her, I used to go to a day centre on the basis that without that life would be completely empty. (I have to say though that the seeming emptiness of my life that year was largely caused by the higher dosage of Risperdal I was on. I would stress to professionals - if I were ever in a position to tell them - that while dopamine-blocking drugs have very desirable effects at the right dosage it is essential to find the right dosage for the individual.)
Many days over recent months I find myself doing the shopping, mainly at Merry Hill shopping centre. This gets me out when I might be bored at home, and another piece of advice I would give (if it were within my remit) is that however lacking in motivation patients might be it is a very good thing if they can engage in some variety. The thing I would also say, though, is that they should strive - possibly with professional help - to find some way of getting this variety which suits them and does not make them over-anxious or negative in other ways. I say that because in the 1980s I was compelled to go to a day centre which I detested and which made me very anxious and very depressed - given the medication I was on and the dosage, a major contributing factor in my unhappy state of mind - because my psychiatrist did not want me at home doing nothing all day every day and he did not strive to accommodate my own interests and inclinations.
What I gather from my Twitter feed is that many people think present-day mental health services are failing in numerous ways, but my experience is that the way patients are treated is immensely better than some decades ago. The fundamental reason is that patients have a voice and the powers-that-be listen to what they want and what they don’t want. Some of this improvement comes thanks to technology: that is people who may be backward in coming forward find it easier to have their say on some version of computer forum, and even before social media took off there was the possibility of using technology to survey the wishes and experience of mental health patients in such a way that the results were accurate and meaningful (instead of the patient mumbling ‘I’m OK’ meaning ‘Leave me alone’).

Twitter diary for July 2013

This is to be found at http://www.colinbrough.co.uk/July_2013.html

Twitter diary for June 2013

This is to be found at http://colinbrough.co.uk/June_2013.html

My ideas on Character Recognition

Character Recognition Summary written 06/03/13 10:26 [Wednesday]
Since my teenage years I have been interested in visual perception: how humans (and animals) see things and recognise them and thereby negotiate the world. Rather than go into the entire history of this interest of mine, though, my intention here is to summarise the programming work I have done over recent years to implement ideas I have had on how particularly humans view the world using their eyes.
In 2006 the computer I owned was capable, for about the first time since I had owned a computer, of doing in a reasonable time the lengthy computation I needed to compare printed characters (that is characters with exemplars to try to identify what the characters were, from the alphabet) according to a formula I had thought up for a measure of similarity. I published on my website a description of my ideas with some specific results from what I may call experimentation. Towards the end of 2006 I was grappling with the problem of printed characters running together through over-inking instead of standing separately, and thinking in terms of the aspect ratio characters have on average as a method for trying to separate individual characters.
This led in a natural course to my trying in 2007 to vary the greyscale threshold for distinguishing black from white in such a way as to separate out characters one from the next. Instead of looking for seeming characters with an aspect ratio in a particular range though I had the idea of measuring how fragments of black emerged with a raising of the greyscale threshold and preferring the range of threshold where the fragments appeared most stable. This had the advantages that the estimation could be done locally for neighbourhoods within the scan (so that shadows across part of a document would not throw the estimation out) and that the method could be applied to general images and not just pictures of objects within a known range of aspect ratio.
By 2008 instead of using the raw greyscale for each pixel I was doing what I call a ‘blackdensity’ computation so that black pixels locally to a given pixel will increase the measure of blackness at that pixel. By taking a local average in this way (but an average where closer pixels have more weight) mistaken measurements from the scan at particular pixels are evened out. One thing coming out of this methodology was that peaks of blackdensity (‘saliences’) could be counted and the way the count varied as resolution varied could be observed. This led to the hope that there would be a ‘natural’ scale of distances (that is, resolution) for a given pattern imaged so that the same object seen from different distances - giving the same pattern of saliences but scaled differently - might still be recognised.
From 2009 to 2011 because of the condition of mind I was in I got bogged down in too much detail and the work on ‘Visual field analysis’ was in abeyance, except for the general idea emerging in my mind of using a measure of ‘busyness’ of fragments to indicate how useful was the information contained in the pattern. The correct way to measure information in a greyscale pattern I now think is to compute what I call the clustermeasure. This has a formula very like the similaritymeasure which I was using in 2006, except that similaritymeasure is for two different patterns being compared. One thing I did achieve in 2009 was a very lucid explanation of clustermeasure and its additive simplicity as new clusters are added.

More details may be accessed via http://www.colinbrough.co.uk/Character_Recognition.html