Because of my incoming bandwidth woes lots of folks are donating money via the ‘Donate’ button that is down the bottom of the sidebar to your right.  First off I’d like to thank all of those people, it’s much appreciated and will make the financial hit I’m about to take that much easier.

Some people have asked why I don’t move the donation button a bit further up the screen and make it more obvious.  Maybe it’s time to break out those good old *blink* tags…

The thing is…I don’t like asking for money, it has never been an intention of mine to make money from this blog.  The whole ‘money’ thing is perhaps a little embarrassing. 

(Although if I could charge £1 a year to each reader, I’d make more than I do driving around picking up drunks…)

So the donation button will stay small and hidden away – and if you want to send me some money I’ll be grateful for it, but I won’t be asking for it.

This site was down for a while last night, I did try to let people know that I was working on the problem with a slightly altered title graphic...



It's quite simple really, every month I use about 15-20Gb of bandwidth (which is a silly amount as all the graphics are hosted off-site, so that's 15-20Gb of text).

When I signed up with the hosting company (MyOstrich) the bandwidth limit was something like 1Gb.

Unfortunately for the last three years or so I appear to have 'dropped through the cracks', so I haven't been charged yearly renewals, nor have they noticed the huge jump in my bandwidth through becoming an *cough* internet superstar *cough*.

So yesterday they realised. And shut me down.

Cue a frantic email halfway across the world, where I pleaded for help. I'd just like to thank the extemely helpful Tim at MyOstrich for sorting out my problem very quickly. I'm in his debt...

...quite literally because I'm now at the point where they work out how much money I owe them. I suspect that Mr Barclaycard is going to take a bit of a hit at some point in the near future.

I've been offered free hosting by the lovely Friday Project, but that would mean...

a) Setting up a Typepad/Moveable Type/Other Third party software.

b) Migrating everything across from my Blogware blog.

c) Trying to get the URL to redirect (which will be tricky as I don't 'own' it).

The thing is that I really like Blogware as they are a superbly friendly and helpful company with an excellent bit of software - so it looks like I'll be adding another big number to outgoing expenses this month, what with my £500 bill for new spectacles.

Good job I'm paid such a huge amount of money...

Can someone please explain Livejournal Syndication (which is something that has apparently happened to this site).

Why is it that Livejournal users can't just visit the original site, instead of having a copy in their own little island of the internet?

More importantly, is this something I should be happy with, or should I be upset?

How can I easily read comments that people leave on this syndication?

Seriously - I spend nearly no time in 'Livejournal-space' and have no understanding of the why and wherefores of it.

If there is one thing that will rub me up the wrong way on the job, it's 'gawpers' - more so if they insist on providing not so helpful advice.

A case in point - yesterday I attended a call to a young lady who had suffered an epileptic fit in her hairdressers. Now epileptic fits are not pleasant things to have happen to you, and it's embarrassing at the best of times. Often you can vomit or become incontinent. You can injure yourself if you fall over onto something hard and when you do stop fitting your behaviour is often bizarre and aggressive.

All in all, what you don't want is twenty people standing around the door of the shop staring at you and pointing and talking about the patient.

Nor do you want members of this crowd kissing their teeth and commenting that the ambulance staff who are getting their equipment from the motor should "hurry up".

When a certain ambulance person tells you that you should leave the area as it isn't a public circus, you really shouldn't get arsey with them.

It's just a damn shame I had to look after a patient rather than have a blazing row with some jumped up girl who thinks it amusing to mock the defenceless patient.


Breathe...and relax...breathe...and relax...

It's why, when in a public place, I always try to get the patient in the back of the ambulance as quickly as possible, you have just got to love our tinted windows for patient privacy.

(Once I did have a teenager push his face up against one of our windows to try and see inside. A quick bang on said window with an oxygen cylinder soon stopped him and gave him a sore nose into the bargain).

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I had a look at the changes to 'Da Book' suggested by the copy editor - all of them help the posts work better as a book rather than as a series of blogposts over time. Things seem to be happening really rather quickly at the moment.

For the past few days I have been…

a) Working (With absolutely no jobs of any interest what-so-ever)

b) Sleeping (And for some reason my body wants to sleep for thirteen hours each day)

c) Studying (For possible ‘promotion’, but there are so many obstacles in the way I’m not too hopeful)

Consequentially I’ve had little time to blog, and little to blog about apart from some big subjects that need a proper look at rather than a half hour stream of consciousness type.

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However there is some good news – I have my new crewmate!  I no longer turn up to work wondering where I’m going to be sent to work, nor wondering who I am going to be working with.  Today was my first shift with them and I had a whale of a time.

Job One was to a patient who refused to talk to us except to demand that we took them past one A&E to one further out of our area.  I wasn’t even told why I was called.  He rated an 11 out of 10 on the annoyance scale.

Then we chased around a number of garages trying to get our ambulance fixed – I believe that it is the oldest motor in the fleet.  It frequently breaks.

Job Two was to a woman who had been punched in the face by her partner, who had then stolen her shoes.  The police looked after her.

Job Three was a lovely job – a woman with mental health problem had thrown petrol over a community policeman, she had then locked herself in her flat where she threatened to set light to herself.  We were sent to stand around and look pretty in the sun while the police pulled her out and arrested her and the fire service unrolled and re-rolled some hoses.  To be fair it was a well controlled situation which entertained the locals and annoyed the patients social workers who thought that it was ‘a circus’.

Still, at least she didn’t set herself alight…

Job Four was to a lovely little old lady who was found confused and wandering down the main street.  Luckily for all involved we discovered her identity, and so she just had to wait in A&E for a little while for her relatives to come and pick her up.  She was lovely, smartly dressed, pleasant to talk to and completely batty.

One of those little old ladies you just want to hug.

 

I may revisit one of these stories later – it depends on how much time I have over the next few days.  I live in hope.

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On ‘da book’ front, I have the copy-edited version to have a look at, which will no doubt take a couple of days.  It’s a bit tricky having two jobs (and an addiction to World of Warcraft) to deal with at once.

A quick thank you to one of the police cars of Newham.

There we were last night - driving on blue lights and sirens to a job which would ultimately prove to be as dull as ditchwater.

I'm racing down Barking road, I always race to high priority jobs, it's what I'm paid to do.

Ahead of us, at the junction with Ron Leighton way there is a police car. They see and hear us coming, so they pull over to let us pass. Just then another car decides to overtake the police car in the middle of the junction, pulling out in front of us we have to slam on the brakes to avoid driving into them.

I may have honked our horn at them.

So it was with much merriment that I saw in our rear view mirror the police car pulling the car over in preparation for a jolly good talking to.

We were laughing about it for the rest of our shift.

So if anyone from Newham police read this (and I know that some do), a big thanks from this particular LAS crew.


I also wonder if the driver of the car is that rarity in Newham - someone with a valid license, road tax and insurance.

An absolutely easy shift last night.  One patient was a little old man who was “not right” and had “vague eyes”.  His wife was terribly worried about him, but I suspect that there was little seriously wrong with him.  We then got sent to a two week old baby with a flaky scalp.  Once more a nice an easy job, where we didn’t even have to carry the patient.

Then we were sent to “54 year old male with chest pain”, the call had come from a public telephone box, so I wasn’t too surprised when we received the update “Patient has been drinking”.  The area is a local haunt of our homeless alcoholics – there are public toilets, a nice churchyard to hide and sleep in and a number of off-licenses to buy their cheap tramp-juice.

Both ourselves and the FRU spent some time driving back and forth trying to find him, with no luck.

We got back on station before being sent on a similar call in the same area – I suddenly had a brainwave.

“I bet it’s John Smith”, I said, “He’s an alcoholic homeless guy, normally as good as gold, but he calls us when his hostel kicks him out for drinking”.

We got an update – ‘Patients name is John Smith’.

Once more we chased around the area looking for him, at least this time I knew who we were looking for.  Once more he had given us the slip.  I’ve never known him to act like this.

Still – next time I see him I’ll have a little word in his shell-like…

Yesterday I had a nice little trip outside of London to Basingstoke.  Why there I hear you all ask – well, I went to visit a warehouse, the warehouse that my book will be distributed from.  MacMillian Distribution to be precise – the people that handle the Harry Potter books.

I went along with two of the editors from The Friday Project, Clare and Heather who are as lovely as they look.

To be honest, a lot of what was talked about went over my head, MIDAS and Vista are apparently some electronic way to order books, although that is just a guess on my part.

The real fun for me however started when we saw the server room – I’m enough of a geek that I had a small ‘nerdgasm’ over seeing two miniframes running in a heavily air-conditioned room and hearing about their off-site backup and disaster recovery procedures.

We were then shown the warehouse floor, where there are absolute tonnes of books all being moved around by forklift trucks.  It is here that the books are stored until they are sorted out into the orders that are shipped out to various shops.

Did you know that if you ship a wooden pallet of books abroad it has to have been impregnated with an insecticide?

And did you know that China won’t accept any wooden pallets at all – they all have to be made of plastic.

I also discovered that prison labour is used to process any returned books, and that recycled books are used to build motorways.  Yes – motorways are partly made of paper (which might explain a lot about the state of the UK’s roads).

We saw the system that they use to make sure that every book reaches it’s right destination (they weigh every book in their catalogue, then weigh the boxes as they go out – if there is a discrepancy then the box is re-checked).

Luckily we avoided the busiest time to tour the warehouse, all the forklift drivers were having lunch – otherwise we would have been dodging between these pallets being moved around at high speed.

I learnt about the way that Weatherstones orders books, and why they might not have a book you want in stock (apparently it’s called ‘C’ stock, which means that they only have one copy in stock at a time – and it takes three days to order a new copy).

It was great – it felt like a school trip.

Here is the thing though – at some point in July, one of those pallets is going to be full of my books – with my book title on the pallet sheet, and with my words written on bits of paper inside the shrink wrapped container.  Then they will travel down the conveyer belt where they will get sealed into boxes and sent on their way to bookshops around the country (where I shall be obsessive-compulsively rearranging the shelves to make sure my book is at the front…)

It makes me feel weird in my tummy.

(Oh – and when they are due to be released they don’t keep the new Harry Potter books in Basingstoke – it’s in a top secret location and they have security guards sitting on top of them…)

Back to the real world of ambulance work tonight.

 

All pictures can be seen in Hi-res on my Flickr Page.