Is it naughty to take someone to hospital, who doesn't really need to go, just in order to get a fry up breakfast there?

As promised I spent Saturday going to see Van Helsing and Kill Bill 2, both very enjoyable films, although for two different reasons. Van Helsing was good, old fashioned comic book fun; Kill Bill however had me captivated by Tarrantino's grasp of dialogue and story.
Then I stayed at my brother's place to watch the Eurovision song contest (for the Americans in the audience this is a cross-Europe song contest where a number of countries try not to win by, showing off god-awful songs)
A bottle of port, a bottle of wine and most of a bottle of vodka were finished off during the night. There were only two songs that I liked; the Malta entry and Ukrainian "Xena - warrior princess and her Goth backing dancers". The Ukrainian entry managed to win, which was nice for them, but unfortunate for the Ukrainians as a whole, because they have to pay to run the show next year.
Turkey's entry was a nice bit of Ska; Bosnia's entry was sung by a spiky haired, dyed blonde boy in a pink tankini - and I'm sorry, with a get up like that you will look gay no matter how much the female backing dancers grope at you. The Russians entered their version of Avril Lavine, while Romania won the prize for "singer wearing the least amount of clothing".
As always it was the commentary by Terry Wogan which made the night entertaining - typical gems were...

"The Netherlands haven't won in 29 years - well make that thirty" - Just after the Netherlands had performed.
"Well 1 out of 3 ain't bad" - After attempting to talk live to three different countries, and failing to make contact with two of them.
"Good idea they are bigger than you after all" - After Belorus gave Russia the full 12 points.
"No they are having a terrible time" - After the presenters asked Germany if they were enjoying the contest.
And of course the near constant calls he made to be allowed to lay down in a dark room and given another stiff drink, while his commentary degenerated into hysterical laughter.

The voting went along the normal political lines, and the UK didn't get "null points" unlike last year (quite possibly something to do with a little war in the middle East this time last year). To be honest I think the UK song was like a poor Dido track on Mogadon.

A very enjoyable night ruined for my brother by a crippling hangover the next day - he has spent almost all of today laying in bed.

Now I'm off to listen to some ABBA.

I have a small problem...

I bought Pokémon Colosseum today - and I'm already hooked. (Yes I know it's a "kids" game - but I don't care, it's fun) I've read that the single player campaign is fairly short which will mean I'll soon be back to posting at my normal rate. So I spent 9 hours playing this thing (it's a lovely game it tells you exactly how much time you have wasted on it) and now when I close my eyes all I just see a blur of primary colours.

The problem is, once I get obsessed with something I find myself playing until 4am in the morning...

I'll have to give it a miss playing it tomorrow and Sunday, as I'm visiting my brother to (a) Watch 3 movies (Kill Bill 2, Van Helsing and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - I have varied tastes) and (b) Drink alcohol and enjoy the Eurovision Song Contest (If only for the sparkling, and then later drunken commentary by Terry Wogan).

Then back to work on Monday from 07:00 to 19:00.

On Sunday I'll get round to answering all the comments people have been leaving (with any luck) - I promise I won't play any more Pokémon until after I've answered them.

First off, I'd like to apologise for any rambling but I'm reconstructing memory off of my pocket pc after using handwriting recognition while under the influence of Grolsh.
I'd also like to apologise if I met you and forgot, or get details wrong or anything like that.
Now to the reportage...

A gathering of the great and the good in the Blogging world? In the middle of London? With Alcohol? How could it fail?

Quite simply it couldn't, and didn't.

Rather unfortunately I forgot that the location had a downstairs bar - so I spent the first half hour upstairs with a load of city types, eavesdropping on discussions about Anthony Worrel-Thompson until I saw some bloggy types heading downstairs.

Small, dark, hot and crowded immediately sprung to mind and I may well have turned and ran if I hadn't seen the friendly faces of Pix and Mark. So I spent sometime getting enough Grolsh (at £3.25 a bottle!) into me to combat my shyness. The first person to approach me was Steven quickly followed by Laurie (Who's blog I can't remember - sorry) and Simon. James who organised the whole thing came over (although I didn't recognise him as the mental picture I have of him is with blue hair). We had a nice chat, mainly about ambulancing and I forgot to ask him why his blog is called "imajes".
Annie Mole was very friendly although I was stunned that she wasn't 5ft tall with little brown glasses (which is how I pictured her - for some reason) unfortunately I was struck a bit dumb with hero worship there...
Gary Turner managed to escape my assassination attempt by leaving early, which was very sad as I really wanted to talk to him. Dave wondered why he was on my hit-list, although I think he understood by the end of the night. (I blogged a list of people I'd need to kill so that those of us who aren't the worlds best writers can stand a chance. A bit like a new author wanting to kill off Steven King, Clive Barker, Mary Gentle and Douglas Coupland).
I then found myself surrounded by Europe in the form of Loic and Gerard, Loic being taller than I imagined and both of them speaking better English than me. Once more there wasn't enough time to have a proper chat with them although photos were taken.
I also got to say hello to Anna and there was a resounding "happy birthday" (because it was her birthday). Josephine said "hello" although she wasn't wearing her contact lenses.

The evening thinned rather quickly, mainly due to people going to work the next day so I missed speaking to the following people.

Suw and Natalie (who I particularly wanted to congratulate on her latest post (Peace camps). But I have a phobia of talking to women in bars...
I also missed Tom Coates who seemed to be holding court in one area, I quite fancied chatting about Barbelith.
I also missed thanking Cory for the EFF work and his excellent books.
And then there were the people who I just didn't recognise/speak to/left before I could corner them.

It was midnight by the time the last of us left (the pleasures of shift work meant I wanted everyone to stay and play until I wanted to go home, but everyone else had work the next day). I managed to get to Tottenham Court Road, but missed the last Central line train - so I scrambled back to Trafalgar square where I got a night bus home. The night bus takes a route right through my "work patch" and was, for some reason full of Chinese people. I've never thought of Newham as having a large Chinese population but I suppose most of them must commute.

So serious kudos to James Cox for organising the whole thing and a big thanks for anyone who came over to talk to the terminally shy ambulance man.

When is the next one?

I've just got back from the second London Blogmeet this week. I'll post properly in the morning, as although I suspect you will all enjoy my alcohol-tinted ramblings it will ultimately be embarrassing to me later on in the day. I had a good time, and drank alcohol for the second of three times this month.
The next time I'll be drinking is when the Eurovision Song Contest is on - I'm looking forward to Saturday...

What a lot of parenthesises in that last post...

I've been coming off night-shifts and so have found myself laying in bed a bit more than I normally do - this has led to me thinking about stuff. What now follows is an attempt to be insightful, clever and all that stuff that successful bloggers are good at.

It seems that mobile computing has increased somewhat, but it hasn't become as ubiquitous as the tabletop PC. I suspect that this is because there isn't really a "killer app" for mobile computing. Sure it's nice to have calender/contacts - but for ease of use a pocket diary is cheaper, smaller and easier to use. The gradual convergence of mobile phone and pocket PC illustrates that perhaps communication is is way forward, look at how SMS texting has taken off (in Europe at least). Perhaps we need universal wifi, and make it easier to connect to it.
You don't need to configure a hundred and one settings for your mobile phone to work.
However SMS is a pain in the thumb, at least for anyone over the age of thirty. Likewise tapping out messages on a tiny screen/keyboard is tiresome and hardly an intuitive way to enter information.
The tabletop PC didn't really take off until the advent of Windows, and Windows is only popular because it is simple. I would suggest however that this simplicity is less a function of the software, as more a function of hardware - specifically the Mouse.
Give a child, or someone who has never used a computer before a mouse and within seconds they are able to control the cursor with very little teaching required. Move the mouse, the pointer moves - it's that simple, you don't need to "tab" between boxes, remember "-switches" or use a keyboard to enter command strings. Some folk are nervous if you put them in front of a keyboard, but a mouse is completely innocuous, hell even the name is "friendly"

So, for mobile computing to become more popular I suggest that a new way of controlling the hardware is needed. I don't know what, if I did I could become a millionaire. Will it involve Haptics or voice recognition (I suspect not, it'd be embarrassing to talk to a lump of plastic). I think it will be something completely new, something out of left-field that will take the world by storm. Then we will have the next computing revolution.

Personally I'm waiting for a bluetooth microwriter to show off what a gadget geek I am. Chord keyboards are in absolute opposition to what I have just written, but I'd use one.

I've got the second of the two Blogmeets to go to tomorrow. I'll be starting to fancy myself as an old hand at these things soon.

Last night we picked up an alcoholic who is HIV positive. I (still) have no real fear of HIV patients, even when they are bleeding a bit and this patient wasn’t (although they had wet themselves). The only problem is that I seem to have turned into one of Pavlov's dogs. When we found out the patient was HIV+ my stomach churned as if I were back on the PEP. It was really rather strange because it wasn't fear (I'll only have that when I'm due for my HIV test) but instead something more...biological.
The son of the patient was extremely embarrassed at the antics of his parent, and my crewmate spent some time making sure that he was alright.

One of the bizarre things about the Ambulance Service is that, in the eyes of the government, we are an "essential" service but not an "emergency" service. We are "essential" because the emergency services (Police, Fire Brigade, Coastguard) are run by the Home office - Ambulance services across the country are run by NHS trusts, and as such do not have access to the same resources as the true "emergency" services. The distinction is often slight, but can sometimes have quite important considerations for our safety.

Last night was a case in point - we were called to a patient with abdominal pain, however further information was given that the patient could be violent. There was something in this information that triggered my "spider-sense", so I was happy to wait for police assistance to arrive before approaching the house.
Four police turned up, normally only two are sent to assist us - and they told us that their computer system, and their personal experience with the householder showed him as a nasty piece of work. We followed the police to the patient and they told him that they were going to search him, and that they wanted to put him in handcuffs first. The patient had obviously been involved with the police before, as once he was handcuffed they checked to see if he had any new warrants out for his arrest...

Searching him they found a large stick, and a rather worrying looking (5") knife on his person.

All through this the "lady" of the house was shouting abuse, mainly at the patient, but occasionally at the police officers present. One quick examination later showed nothing life-threatening, so we offered a trip to hospital that the patient accepted. However as we left the house the woman shouted a few final obscenities at the patient and he told us he couldn't be bothered to go to hospital and stalked off into the night. (This was not a problem for either my crewmate or myself).

Police computers had information that he was dangerous (a number of rather vicious assaults) but our computers aren't allowed to have such data. A police dispatcher has told us that they have all sorts of information on addresses, from animal liberation protesters to members of Parliament. Again our computers don't have any information of that sort unless we enter it manually after an ambulance crew has been threatened/assaulted.

Needless to say, one such report has been sent to central office.

Tonight was exceptionally foggy, and while we were kept busy, the only job of any real note was when we stumbled across an RTA, where the driver had swerved into a fence at approx 40mph. He was rummaging in the wreckage when we found him, and refused to be assessed. The last we saw was him rapidly disappearing over the horizon. The police were not amused - but (surprisingly for our area) it looks like the car actually belongs to him. So now he'll be summoned for leaving the scene of an accident, as well as any other driving offences the police decide to throw at him.

Well, the first Blogmeet I've ever been too went well. Option #2 of my "how to spot a blogmeet" was used with good effect when I overheard someone say "Hello BastardMark".
I had some good chats with Hans, Ian and the others there. I managed to get the full story of his flirtation with spandex from Legomen, and rather shamefully monopolised Pixeldiva and Sharon. Discussions ranged from the awfulness of cheap London hotels to the concept of "comment envy".
Despite having only four hours sleep and drinking Grolsch from 2pm - I didn't get that drunk (perhaps a little tipsy) and even more surprisingly I didn't have a hangover.
It was interesting (in a Desmond Morris fashion) to watch the varying social groupings that were formed and broken over the course of the evening and how the group dynamics shifted as more alcohol was taken on-board.

Now I'm in work picking up people who think that walking down the central reservation of the A12 is a good idea, and taking a violent frequent flyer out of my area as she is banned from the local hospital.

Now I'm looking forward to Wednesday, where I will remember that the tube closes at a ridiculously early hour, that night busses are full of weirdos and a cab from Stratford to Barking costs £16.