If you take a look over to the right of your screen between 'How to contact me' and 'Donation' you'll see a new link. I've decided to try and set up a mailing list.

Partly it is so that should the blog fail again I can let people know that I'm still alive. Partly it's for putting stuff that doesn't really fit on this blog and partly I'm wondering if some new and interesting function will come out of it.

It will be an announcement only list, with a fairly low amount of traffic. Needless to say, if you do sign up, then I won't be selling your email addresses to spammers.

This won't detract any writing from this blog, you won't be missing anything if you don't sign up to it.

Hell, given my technical skills, it might not even work.

Now - for a bit of advice, that is advice that you are going to send me, not the other way around...

I've recently moved my 'business' computing work to an Intel Macbook. And very nice it is too. However I'm wondering if I'm missing some essential 'must-have' bit of software or widget. At the moment I'm using Colloquy for IRC chat, Adium and Skype for MSN and similar (I have iChat, but have no contacts). Obviously I'm using Firefox. For writing I'm using Writeroom and SubEthaEdit (although at some point I'll get Pages as NeoOffice seems a bit flaky for me). For blogging I have Ecto and for FTP I use Cyberduck. Most importantly I've found a game of Solitaire and have managed to get World of Warcraft working (although Second Life is terribly slow).

So my question is this - what should I be installing on this computer? What is the essential, or just plain enjoyable, software should I be getting.

Any advice?

Oh yes...Big news in a few days...

I’ve just been reading ‘Ten reasons not to get a job’, (Thanks Euan) an abrasive attack on anyone who works for someone else.

Unfortunately there isn’t a way to leave comments there, so I shall comment here and hope that the author checks Technorati.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Smart people build systems that generate income 24/7, especially passive income.  This can include starting a business, building a web site, becoming an investor, or generating royalty income from creative work.

Which makes Doctors ‘not smart’, which makes Airline pilots ‘not smart’, which makes anyone who does physical work ‘not smart’.  It makes *me* ‘not smart’.

If you start your own business then you are employing people who you consider to be ‘not smart’.  Hardly a way to build employee relations, and if everyone follows these rules then there will be no-one to employ.

I see people who make money off the backs of others every day (I do a fair number of jobs in Docklands), they need ambulances just the same as everyone else.  It’s a dream that everyone becomes creative geniuses investing in other people – but without actual *workers* there is nothing to invest in.

I’d like to see this idiot tell the person who empties his bins that they are ‘dumb’, or even better the policeman who stops him for speeding.

We can’t all live on designing web sites or making ‘inspirational’ announcements.

Some of us do physical work.  The difference is that some of us enjoy it or get worth from it.

I think that makes us ‘dumb’.

(I have no idea why I found myself getting angry after reading this.  Perhaps a subject for self examination).

 

July 22nd, 2003.  I started blogging.

While it was only three years ago, it feels that I have been blogging all my life – one of the side effects of having such a poor memory.

---

I did have a considered blogpost for today, it was about looking through old photographs of girls I’d had a crush on at school or at my swimming club and wondering where I might be today if I’d actually managed to go out with any of them.  I wondered how my life might have changed if I’d married and had children, its a near certainty that I wouldn’t be blogging, or indeed that I’d be in the ambulance service. 

However it was vaguely maudlin post and not very interesting to anyone but myself.

Then last night I had a job that seemed much more fitting…

---

The call was to a 28 year old female who had ‘Fallen down, unable to get up’.  So far, so dull – we drove to the house on blue lights as, for some reason, it was rated as a high priority job.  As an aside, one of my pet hates is that a little old lady who has fallen over and is stuck on the floor without any physical injury gets a very low priority, while a 20 year old with a cough is often a high priority.

So we arrive at the house, grab our bag full of equipment and make our way inside.  A man is standing outside hopping from foot to foot.  He’s saying something about ‘she’s had it’, and , ‘funny breathing’.  We fully expect to see a woman laying on the floor having a panic attack.

We climb the stairs into a room full of mattresses and clothes lying around the floor.  There are four females in the room.  Our patient, her sister, a next door neighbour…

…and a newborn baby girl, still attached to the mother by a glistening umbilical cord.

Time to switch into action mode.

I jogged back to the ambulance to get our childbirth delivery packs while my crewmate started to assess the patients, he is only a couple of months out of training school but handled himself really well.  He cut the cord and I looked after the baby while he took care of the woman.  My immediate impression was that everything had gone smoothly.  The mother had minimal bleeding and with a bit of rubbing on my part the baby soon ‘pinked up’ and didn’t seem to be in any sort of distress.

I spoke to our Control on the phone and they promised us a midwife.  In a case like this, what we normally do is get a midwife out to assess the mother and child and do the normal things that occur in the hospital, then if they are happy with both patients we can leave them at home.  Much nicer than taking them to the hospital when the dangerous part is already passed.

However, the midwife seemed to be taking a bit of a time to arrive.

Here is a rough time-line.

00:10 Baby born.

00:15 We arrive, experience mild panic.

00:16 Cord cut, everyone is happy.

00:20 Ask for midwife.

01:00 Ask where midwife is – Control tell us that there is difficulty in getting one.

01:30 Still waiting

02:00 Are informed that there is a midwife who will come out.  Midwife is waiting for taxi as there are no ambulances available to bring her to scene.

02:40 Midwife arrives, does various technical things.

03:00 We are clear from scene and are ready to do another job.

 

The mother was in occasional pain from needing to deliver the placenta and didn’t want to hold the baby.  The father was worried that he would drop the baby.  So it was up to me to cuddle the baby and keep it warm while awaiting the midwife.  So for three hours I was left holding the baby.

Thankfully the baby was very content, it didn’t cry at all.  As I was looking down at probably the fourth job where I have had to deal with a birth at home it occurred to me that the child was born just as my own ‘baby’ turned three years old.  It seems that the Universe sometimes has a sense of poetry.

Strange the things you think when you have nothing to do for a couple of hours.

---

I have an idea of why the call didn’t come down to us as a ‘birth at home’.  I imagine that the sister phoned for the ambulance, said something about the patient lying on the floor, which the calltaker then typed into the computer.  Then the sister told the calltaker that the baby was coming out and so the calltaker had to talk the sister through the fun and games of childbirth.  They were then so busy that while they bumped the priority of the call up for immediate dispatch, they forgot to type in that the woman was having her baby.

Perfectly understandable, and it’s nice to be surprised every so often.

My attempt to write a review on the Edinburgh fringe preview with Deon Vonnegut and Adam Kay.  I think I need an editor.

---

An evening with two performers, both of which use music in their shows to various degrees.

James Lark is a talented chap, writing, acting and composing are just a few of the strings to his bow.  In The Rise And Fall Of Deonne Vonnegut he mixes music and comedy with great effect.  The show is about a failed songwriter and his final performance.  Starting as a member of Pink Floyd he takes us through the decades stopping off at The Bee Gees, French cross dressing and Andrew Lloyd-Webber before finishing off, quite literally, where he started.

A polished performer, the surreal life of his subject easily comes to life.  The singing and playing fit well with the monologue and James keeps the audience captured throughout with songs about cardigans and cheese.  While very funny, the show sometimes verges on pathos centering, as it does, around the career failure of the titular character and his descent into depression.

Adam Kay’s performance as the ‘Amateur Transplants’, while also using music, was very different.  Unlike ‘Vonnegut’, Adam’s humour is much more of the schoolyard variety, concerned with ‘mucky stuff’, such as sex, disabled girlfriends and a new Gay Pride anthem.

Many people on the internet will have heard his ‘London Underground’ song, some may have heard the more medically based ‘Paracetamoxyfrusebendroneomycin’.  The show is similar in that the humour is mostly based around the songs.  His drole delivery and timing of the jokes between the songs are also spot on.  There is much swearing in this show, and I can imagine some people being offended by some of the subject matter.  However it does highlight the very sick humour medical professionals often use to make it through the day.

Where the show excelled was in the short pieces, using music that is well known (Celine Dion’s song from ‘Titanic’ or James Blunt) with altered lyrics, Adam makes a punchline in a couple of bars.  These one-two punches, intermingled with the longer pieces, keep the laughs coming.

It will be interesting to see how the more medical based songs perform when there are fewer medics in the audience, something that Adam is aware of and so the content of the show may change.

The real barometer of how much I enjoyed myself at both shows is, quite simply, this – while the theatre was small, boiling hot and had uncomfortable seats, this was forgotten once the shows started.

An excellent pair of shows, and I would recommend anyone at Edinburgh to take time out to watch them.

 For booking details –

The rise and fall of Deonne Vonnegut

Amateur transplants

---

Disclaimer – Both James and Adam are published by The Friday Project, I am also published by them.  Once upon a time I wanted to do a medical/ambulance based stand-up.  Having seen the amount of work that goes into it, I’m not so sure…

I *think* I've fixed the whole 'render everything in black' and 'don't show the comment box for entering new comments' bugs.

My fingers are now crossed that everything is alright as it's a right pain to work my ambulance job and then come come and work a javascript debugging session.

I am well aware that people do this for fun.

I am not one of those people.

(Although I do enjoy mucking around in C++ occasionally).

I particularly dislike things that go wrong for no apparent reason. If I change something and break it then it is only to be expected, but these problems have seemed to occur due to random changes in the bedrock of reality. Ho-hum.

I'm still pondering how difficult it would be to move this blog...

---

As a public service announcement, can I ask all parents/guardians to please keep a close eye on their children during this summer weather. The local ambulance crews have had two very nasty incidents involving children in the past two days.

As quite a few people noticed, this blog disappeared yesterday leaving a black screen and a few tracking pictures the only evidence that there is a blog here.

Thankfully Neil Harris (a talented and heroic reader) managed to discover that a */script* tag had gone missing. For this I am eternally grateful and should we ever find ourselves in the same general location I would be honoured to buy him a beer.

At the moment I'm looking at importing my Blogware posts and comments into a Moveable Type system, mainly for backup purposes, but also because this is the second time in as many weeks that this blog has gone *pffft* for no discernible reason.

(And the second time I've needed to rely on the intelligence of my readers).

I'm considering starting up an announcement style mailing list, something to cry through should the blog go down again (and perhaps somewhere I can throw out the stuff that doesn't really fit into this blog). Who knows - maybe I'll give it a try...

The other reason that there wasn't any blogging was due to a personal problem.

A couple of days ago the fingers in my left hand started to tingle. Then my right hand decided to join the left and develop similar 'pins and needles'. It was quite unlike anything else I'd experienced. As this seemed to be systemic I started to worry about electrolyte imbalances and the like. You see, all medical people are secret hypochondriacs, a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.

So I got my bloods tested - which turned out to be fine, and the problem has settled down pretty much on my own. I'm guessing that I picked up some wacky sort of infection that causes inflammation of some nerves. The doctor also examined me for carpal tunnel syndrome type illnesses, thankfully all findings were negative.

If I cut my leg open I'd probably stitch it up myself - but with something that I can't see/explain my mind starts running through all those little traps that will keep you awake at night.

Finally - My email over the past two weeks has been playing up (again...I know...) So if you have emailed me and expect a reply, please do let me know so I can avoid being rude.

There has been any blogging for the last few days because of illness, something that I'll go into in a post later today (probably after work, unless I get an ambulance that breaks down...)

So in the half hour before I need to leave for work I thought I'd quickly mention a few things.

Craig (from Crog's Blog) let me know that 'Rest Area 300m' has dedicated a pothole to yours truly. I can easily imagine how such a pothole could be made with ambulance tearing out of there at high speed.

Towards the nearest kebab shop.

The other interesting thing is that I've had a bit of my work published in the Press Gazette. It's an edited version of my 'The Perils Of Citizen Journalism' post. You can find it on their '/Discuss' section. I'm being paid for it as well - once we sort out the tax that is.

I got my prizes from wining those Medgadget polls, a couple of rather nice books. The box that they came in was so battered it was easy to believe that they had come halfway across the world.

I'm using Ecto to write this, so if it's a bit screwy, I'll need to adjust some preferences. Once more - after work.