I have the good fortune of being the co-chair of this.

It is traditional, when removing a beard, to take off portions at a time and admire the result. I have removed my beard.

It is a legal requirement that during this process you need to do your best impression of Ron Mael. Sadly my bathroom now looks like I've been holding badger baiting contests in it. And can I just say that, unlike Mr Matthew 'rough and tough' Fox, no shaving or skin care products were used apart from a razor, some water and a pair of scissors.

Yesterday Google released it's 'Streetview' service in the UK. This allows people who use Google's mapping website to look at panoramic photographs of the areas covered.

The first place that I looked was for my house, sadly the Google camera car stopped one street away. I looked for my Mum's house, and again the photographs stopped one street away.

Then I looked for my ambulance station.

View Larger Map
All very clever, and as the streets are public, not a problem. Anyone with nefarious purposes are better served by actually visiting the place in question. For example, in these pictures of our station, you can't see the security cameras...
But then I thought about the road outside Newham hospital, had the camera car been down there?

Sure enough they had, and what was shown was a patient being unloaded from an ambulance.

Now, I'm not too sure if the road that the hospital on is public property or not, but ethically there is surely an expectation of privacy when you are on an ambulance or being wheeled into A&E? It is this expectation of privacy which is important¹.
Being a bit busy I just twittered about it and thought nothing more about it.



However it would seem that someone with a bit more energy behind their ethical standing took notice of it and reported the image to Google, and being generally good guys, they quickly removed it.
Then today I saw exactly the same picture printed in The Metro, with a screaming headline about privacy concerns. Really, if they were that concerned about privacy, they shouldn't have printed the picture along with the story...
I suspect that someone on the Metro reads my twitter feed (actually, I personally know someone who does, but they are quite smart and are unlikely to have been involved in printing the picture). But what it does show is the surprising speed of information via various 'social media' networks.


¹Here is an excellent guide for UK Photographers and the law.

Good news on the kidnapped MSF workers front - they were released on Saturday. If I didn't have things like rent and bills keeping me here I'd love to join MSF.

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Time until appropriation by a marketing company for a TV ad? Probably less than three months.

Thru-you.

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De-Baptism.

Sticking your tongue out at Pascal's Wager.

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While pondering 'what next' for my literary career (such as it is) Suw's thoughts on cliffhangers dropped into my RSS reader. Made me reconsider the structure of the fiction that I want to write.

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Dementia with Lewy bodies - tagged as 'research'.

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Welcome please 'A life in the day of a BASICS Doctor', they've just started blogging, but it looks like one to watch.

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GREG RUTTER'S DEFINITIVE LIST OF THE 99 THINGS YOU SHOULD HAVE ALREADY EXPERIENCED ON THE INTERNET UNLESS YOU'RE A LOSER OR OLD OR SOMETHING - A fairly comprehensive list of things that make up the internet's subconscious. Trust me and avoid the NSFW 'bonus' links at the bottom. Some things cannot be unseen...

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You are reading Freakangels, right? How about the forum where I tend to only lurk because everyone else there is smarter than me?

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When they start talking about the credit crunch and start throwing about those huge numbers, remember that

A million seconds is 11 days
A billion seconds is 32 years.
A trillion seconds is 32,000 years.

(From William Gibson's blog)

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Why, as a shift worker, I'm fcuked. It's why I get annoyed at obnoxious patients - those of us who work shifts give up our health for the ungrateful swines.

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The Danish government seems to be doing something helpful for it's sick shift workers, somehow I can't see the British government paying compensation to our shift-workers. They'd rather spend their money bailing out the banks. Sadly this would not be without precedence.

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Attack of the badly photoshopped mutants soon to be invading the telly.

I have ideas. Terrible, dark, painful ideas.

But I'm not talking about those today. Instead I'm talking about the ideas that I have about doing things with the internet. It was as I was looking at some of my hosting providers I realised that I have a terrible habit of having a good idea, registering a URL and then utterly forgetting about it and/or just not having the time to do anything with it.

Here are some of the URLs that I own and short notes on what I wanted to do with them.

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Ambulancenews.com
Ambulancenews.co.uk

This was going to be a site where all the ambulance news in the UK would be posted up. I realised that I wasn't a news editor very early on in my blogging 'career' and so the sites have lay fallow.

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blogher.org.uk

I was thinking about running a UK 'Blogher' conference - a place for women who are active in the blogging/internet world to have a bloody good chat and learn from each other. I suspect I'll never have the time, or expertise, to sort this out. So I throw it open to anyone who is interested in doing this.

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blogmeme.info
blogthoughts.info

Heaven only knows - I got these URLs years ago - I suspect it was going to be some sort of blog scraping site - or maybe a groupblog.

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blogwear.co.uk

My brilliant 'get rich quick' scheme - a 'one-stop-shop for purchasing blogger related items, if you wanted a Scaryduck t-shirt, you could come to this site and get one. I'm still trying to think about such 'accessory goods' for this site, it's a shame I don't have a logo that I can stick on mugs and then sell to my readers. Perhaps I should work on it...

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bluesandtwos.org

It was going to be a weekly webcomic. Unfortunately it all fell through due to lack of time. However I am working on some new scripts which may see the light of day, perhaps under this URL. Ultimately I'd need an artist. Either that or throw them up under a Creative Commons license.

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britishwarhammer.com

This was going to be a fan site/Podcast for the Warhammer:Age of Reckoning online game. Unfortunately Warcraft dragged me back with the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. W:AR is a bloody good game though.

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godsoflondon.net

Another blog - it was going to be an 'encyclopaedia' detailing the 'small gods' of London, such as the God you pray to in order to find a parking spot, or the God that you give offerings to in order to avoid the attentions of the free-paper distributor on the street corner.

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jobblogs.net
workblogs.net

Aggregation site for people who blogged about their jobs.

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healthpodcasts.org

Was going to be another aggregation site for... you guessed it, Podcasts related to health.

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knightsofalbion.org
londonvampire.net

realheroesunion.co.uk

Three gaming/guild forum sites - one for City of Heroes, one for a Live Action Roleplay game and one for a guild I set up in World of Warcraft. Knightsofalbion and realheroesunion may still be active...

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micropodcasting.org

Aggregation site of Podcasts lasting less than five minutes. Hour long podcasts are fine, but sometimes you just want something to dip into.

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randomreality.org

Pretty much used for hosting images and the like for this site to avoid potential bandwidth issues - when I can be bothered I'll set up a redirect to this blog.

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randomrealityforum.com

I was going to run a forum based off the website, something that never really happened, although there is an empty forum over here that I was going to run but then realised that there wasn't really a direction for it, so what would be the point.

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stimcast.com

Potential Podcast named for Stuff That Interests Me. Never even got off the ground.

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unvarnishedtruth.co.uk

Either a political activism blog, or a website for a Roleplaying game I was going to run. Think 'X-Files' crossed with 'Network'.

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urbanmagic.org

I think I was drunk at the time. Possibly related to Godsoflondon.com, only detailing the fictional miracle workers that live in cities. Think 'Neverwhere'. May have been a gaming resource. May have also been a way to link up the various 'Magikal' practitioners of London. Have a guess.

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90secondreview.com
92ndreview.com
ninetysecondreview.com

Not actually dead. The idea is to have a 90 second video podcast reviewing books/gadgets/technology/news as a way to present ideas in small chunks. After I stalled following a few example episodes I really should get working on it again. Especially now that I've found the power lead for my camcorder and read a book on Final Cut Express.

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cctvsafari.com

A site that would have encouraged people to document where CCTV cameras were placed. I still have the first post sitting in a folder on my computer somewhere along with the pictures of the 40 CCTV cameras I passed on the way to my local newsagent.

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endoftheworld.com

I was drunk at the time. I think I was watching 'I Am Legend'. Dunno. I'm so good at this internet stuff that I can arrange Domains after two bottles of wine. Just don't ask me why I arranged them.

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mentalkipple.com

Supposedly a blog of all the non-ambulance things that I fancy writing about. It would be updated more if I had a shade more free time. I think I may turn it into a pure short fiction site. Get me into practice for the potential 'Book Three'.

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theshadowring.com

Another World of Warcraft gaming Guild site. But no-one joined so has sat there gathering dust. Nobody loves me. *Sob*.

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tomreynolds.net

The complete collection of all my writings, including Twitter updates. Mainly put in place for those who use RSS feeders that can't read the RSS feed on this site.

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txfromfuture.com

I may still get around to doing this - essentially it was going to be the homepage of the Twitter feed of transmissions sent supposedly from the future. Part apocalyptic, part war-story and part Utopian hope. All in under 140 characters at a time.

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humansforskynet.com

This site I really want to do. A cynical/ironic 'mock news' approach to encroaching technology. 'Campaigning' for universal databases and bar code tattoos in order to 'fight crime and terrorism' - in reality to allow the highly advanced AI computer system of the future to enslave mankind. The NHS database is a fine target for this. I'd love to still do this (in part because I think it's important), but... I think I need partners for this one.

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As you can tell, I have the ideas but seldom follow up on them, partly because of a lack of time and partly because it's awful tricky doing these sorts of thins on your own. So, lets open this out for people - if there is anything you would like to give me a hand with, anything that you would like to take on yourself or anything that you think shouldn't be allowed to languish in the back of my mind while I grind reputation in world of Warcraft, please let me know. I'd especially like to take humansforskynet.com into an actual physical form, perhaps as a group-blog.

Of course, the big idea that I had that I know I haven't the technical skills to handle would be the Amazon-like site that lets you collate and download any e-book from the number of publishers that create such things. There are e-books out there that people can't find because they are on the individual publishers website or because the Waterstones e-book search is so awful it makes my eyes bleed.

But it's hard to do any of this when large chunks of my time at home away from work are devoted to recovering from the previous twelve hour shift. My sex drive sadly died last year for much the same reason, but I need to fight having my brain just turn to mush and drip out my ears.

Don't I?

I'm currently being hypnotised by this - it may just be the painkillers talking...

Fifty People, One Question: London from Crush + Lovely on Vimeo.

I am a known lightweight when it comes to laughing gas.

The evidence...

So, when you are a patient in my ambulance it really isn't in your best interest to breath this painkilling and euphoric gas so hard and fast that the majority of it is blowing out your nose.

Into the cab.

Where I am.

Because if you do, I will be getting high like yourself - and feeling sick...

(Currently struggling with a post that is resisting being beaten into shape and tackling statistical analysis for another, as yet unwritten, post).