“…are no longer coded as an automatic category A. Neither are maternataxis with supposed “imminent delivery”…”

NeeNaw has just made my day.  Of course I’ll still be going to Maternataxis, I just won’t be forced to drive like Sterling Moss to get there.

The LAS are (as far as I know) the only ambulance service in the UK who still go to routine maternity calls.  Maybe…just maybe one day that will change.

I am a bad, bad person for not blogging more over the last few days.  My only excuse would be that I was preparing for my talk.  And then after my talk I was recovering.

You see – after the presentation I got accosted by a stalker who forced me to drink several pints of obviously poisoned alcohol.  Alcohol has a bit of a bad effect on me and yesterday I just couldn’t face turning my computer on.  Because of this I was only able to wave at Dave Green – I hope he understands that the lure of ‘stalker’+’beer’ is one I simply cannot resist.

Concerning the last post…

The plan was to post that picture from the event, using the Wifi at the Apple store – then at one point during the talk where I ramble on about how to prove your blog is your own I could direct everyone with a laptop to have a look at the picture.

Unfortunately something went wrong so the post and picture were somehow both delayed by 24 hours.

You can download the Powerpoint presentation here, if you are so interested – I’d post my notes but they only really make sense to me (and then only just).

Like the other times I’ve talked in front of a lot of people, I think I started out a bit rough but gradually got better as the talk progressed.  I need a bit more practice talking to large groups of people in a non-“get out of the way, I have a patient to get to” fashion.

The other speakers were excellent, Annie Mole giving an interesting presentation about why you should blog, and exploding some of the myths around blogging.  Inkycircus talked about some of the issues of running an effective groupblog.  Unfortunately Tom Coates was ill, which was a bit of a disappointment for me, as I’d love to see one of his talks.

And thanks to Londonist for letting me blather on – you can read their account of the event online.

Cute Overload

Yes I am working on my presentation.

Honest.

Well, not really – it’s a metaphor.

I’ve managed to complete the fresh install of everything on my laptop, the only problem was a couple of hours wondering why I couldn’t migrate my email settings into Outlook 2003.  I finally tracked the problem down to having installed Outlook 2002.

Meh.

However, as promised my mum and brother have disappeared off on holiday and I find myself both house and video sitting.

“Video sitting?”, I hear you ask, “What’s that?”.

My mum’s house has six televisions and video recorders – all needed to record the vast amount of TV that they watch.  Some programmes get taped to keep forever, my mum is football mad and she loves detective series.  My brother (and to be fair, myself as well) both like Sci-Fi.  Add in the daily dose of ‘Neighbours’ and ‘Doctors’ and I’m finding myself running around swapping video tapes and cable channels like some demented Pokemon collector – “Gotta tape them all”.

So I am alone in the house with only the stray cat that adopted my mum for company.  This is why I feel like I’m in prison.

Still it gives me plenty of time to write stuff – just stuff that you may not see for some time.

“Today - I shall be mostly doing a clean install on my laptop”.

And then swearing as I realise I’ve forgotten to back up some arcane, but very important files…

Lets imagine that you are old and need a bit of care in your home – simple stuff, nothing too taxing, just a bit of a hand to help you wash when you wake up.  Maybe you need help with some of the fiddly little tablets you have to take.  Perhaps you just need someone who’ll help you keep your flat tidy.

Then, for the sake of argument, lets say you’ve had a bit of a fall – nothing too serious, it’s just that your legs are starting to get a bit weak, and you don’t want to use the walking frame the hospital has given you.  You are lying by your front door – so when you use your community alarm you are able to let your carer in and then the ambulance people.

The ambulance people quickly check you over while you are on the floor – they let you know that they don’t want to pick you up if you’ve broken your leg.  So you let them examine you, and finding nothing, you ask them if they can just put you in your normal chair by the television.  You wonder why the ambulance crew are tutting at your carer for not at least putting a pillow behind your head while you were stuck on the floor.

The ambulance crew help you up and put you into your favourite chair.  As you aren’t hurt by the fall you don’t want to go to the hospital – you’ll only sit in the department for several hours before some young doctor tells you that you should be using your walking frame.  It’s easier to sit in your own flat.  The ambulance people seem pretty nice though, and they want to give you a full physical check up to make sure that there is nothing obvious that would cause you to fall.

You tell the ambulance people that you’ve been having a few falls, as your legs have been getting a bit weaker recently, but that you get around alright and that you have the community alarm button around your neck should you get into any trouble.  The ambulance people try to persuade you to goto hospital, but you refuse again.  One of the ambulance people checks various pulses and pressures and sugars and heart tracings before agreeing that you can refuse to go with them.

The ambulance person is looking around your flat and tutting at the carer again.  He doesn’t like it that as he walks around he is making a crunching noise as he crushes your tablets which are strewn all over the carpet.  It’s not your fault that you sometimes drop them, I mean, it’s not the carers job to make sure that you can take your pills.

The ambulance man then tells you that as you don’t want to go to hospital, would you mind if we got your GP out to see you.  You agree and the ambulance man says that your GP might be able to arrange to have handrails put on your walls – it sounds like a good idea as you really don’t like using the walking frame.  You tell the ambulance man your GP’s phone number but he doesn’t want to borrow your phone.  He tells you that if his Controller phones the GP then the call is recorded so if the GP promises to come out then they darn well better.  You wonder why the ambulance man is so distrusting of GPs.

The ambulance man then disappears for a bit into the kitchen, he’s talking to the carer before she leaves.  You can’t hear what he says, but his voice seems a little forceful.

The ambulance man comes back and asks you one last time if you’d like to go to hospital, you refuse and the ambulance man reminds you to use the walking frame for getting around – and also to make sure that you have your emergency button on you at all times.  He tells you that he is only a phone call away.  He picks up his equipment and prepares to leave.

You’ve enjoyed chatting to him and his partner, so you try to keep up a conversation – the only person you regularly see is your carer, and she doesn’t talk to you much – she hasn’t said a word to you while the ambulance people have been here.  The ambulance people stay and have a chat with you, but they can only stay ten minutes.  But at least those ten minutes is ten minutes of conversation you wouldn’t have had otherwise.

The ambulance people wave goodbye to your carer as she walks out the door without saying a word.

Ten minutes later you wave goodbye to the ambulance people, and you are left on your own until the evening carer comes.

Downstairs in the ambulance, an EMT’s heart breaks just a little.

When you are writing a blog, if you want to be ‘successful’ then you need to write something everyday.  How you measure success is up to you – pagehits, number of comments left, feelings of satisfaction, or however else you like to measure it.  However, what you write has to be of a sufficient quality to get your readers feeling, or thinking about, the subject of the day.  When writing for print, I would imagine that you have a couple of days to polish whatever you write.  In this way, writing for a blog is much like how I imagine it is writing a report for a newspaper – you have a deadline, you have to write every day and you have to write on short notice.

The difference would be that while most folk speed read newspaper reports without taking much notice of who has written it - This Blog Is Me.

(Which is basically what I’m going to be talking about at the Apple store).

Some days the words just flow off the keyboard – you hardly have to edit the post before hitting ‘publish’.  The ideas come rushing at you and it’s all you can do to slow them down long enough for you to type them.  You lie in bed and blog posts run through your mind.  Every sentence comes fully formed and shining into the world – you reread it and you manage to impress yourself.

Then there are the days (like today) when every word is a struggle, where you go back over every line trying to polish it into some semblance of readability.  There are days when your muse has gone on holiday, so you read through the ‘Post ideas for a rainy day’ file for something that might spark your imagination.  And nothing does.  The blog writing feels like a chore that you’d rather not do.

So what I’m saying is that I have complete respect for those people who can turn in on a daily basis pieces of writing that consistently shine.

Rotten buggers.

For the next hour or so I’m going to be in Second Life here, watching the Turkish eclipse on live cast.

Until then, can anyone suggest a way to keep two Outlook email clients in sync, similar to the way I can have my emails shared between my home computer and my Pocket PC by using Activesync?

Preferably without spending huge sums of cash on and Exchange server.