So...

While I'm being published here in the UK, my publishers are looking for someone to publish me in America. If anyone can help them (and by extension help me) you can drop me a line on the usual channels. Or talk to The Friday Project. (Just so you know they don't *need* help with this, it's more like widening the search).

For those that are interested in signed copies - we may be providing them as a service direct from The Friday Project. Otherwise I may be able to *cough* sort something out under the table if that is what people really want.

The book is 280 pages...but I'll save the big sell for closer to the release date.

This is the 'big news' that I mentioned earlier.

'Da book' has been printed and bound.

It actually, physically, exists.

The shift from something ephemeral into an actual object is a bit of a shock. I have a copy with me now and I am stunned to see my words printed on a page. Blogs are hugely important, but words on a screen don't have the same resonance as a physical artifact.

I must admit to a small desire that crossed my mind earlier. To go into a bookshop and, placing my book amongst the others, see what it looks like surrounded by authors that I respect.

Instead I think I'll wait the 18 days until it's released to see them in the shops proper.

It's a strange feeling this, not really excitement (as I think my job has raised my threashold for 'excitement'), neither is it really 'pride', as it hasn't seemed like work at all. Instead it's just a feeling of 'the warm and fuzzies' - probably soon to be nausea as I read the reviews...

I'd just like to take this moment to thank, not only my publisher, but also you dear reader. Without you folks making this blog so popular I'd never be in this excellent situation. For that I thank you all.


(Rumours that I introduced myself as 'the talent' at a recent PR meeting are absolutely true).

-=-=-=-=-
Sent from a mobile phone, probably from the cab of an ambulance.
-=-=-=-=-

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...

Dr Ben over at Badscience proves why I'll never be out of a job...

I've mentioned before about how we in the ambulance service have procedures in place for the elderly who we suspect of being at risk. If there is a risk of abuse or violence then we can fill in a form, fax it off to Control as soon as we reach a hospital and the team in Control will make sure that Social Services are made aware of our concerns.

It works pretty well to be honest - I've done a couple of these 'vulnerable adult/vulnerable child' referrals and have gotten good feedback on most of them.

Unfortunately there is no easy way to alert social services to a 'non-emergency' cause for referral.

We were called to an elderly lady who had gotten out of bed and had slipped. She had fallen on the floor and couldn't get up. Also in the house was the woman's sister, also in her eighties. Her sister had tried to help, but the patient was heavy and the sister was frail. Our patient was stuck.

I'm more than happy to go to these sorts of calls (a 'Nan down' call) mostly because if the cause of the fall is a simple trip or slip we can pick them up, check them for injuries and more often than not leave them at home. The patient is happy to be off the floor and not being dragged to hospital, and we are happy because we feel that we have done something useful for a change.

In this case it was a simple slip that had caused the patient to fall and she had not hurt herself. We picked her up off the floor and after an examination were more than happy to leave her at home.

I asked the patient and her sister if they had any carers, anyone who came in and helped them with the day to day stuff. She replied that there was a district nurse once, but that she had disappeared without doing anything.

With my inexpert eye I looked around the flat. I could see where some handrails could be useful, where some modifications to the bath could improve safety and where a better bed could prevent a recurrence of the fall. The patients could also do with a community alarm.

(Community alarms are great, the person wears an alarm around their neck and if they fall over or get into trouble they can activate it and we turn up to help them).

So it appeared that someone had been there once, but since then the sisters had dropped off the radar.

There was no way that I could justify filling in a 'vulnerable adults' form for this, they weren't 'vulnerable' they just needed a proper assessment to provide some things that would make their life that little bit easier and safer. If I filled in one of those forms it would take time and resources away from those who really did need immediate action.

Unfortunately I'm stuck - we have no pathway in place to involve social services in any way other than in an emergency fashion. Our Emergency Care Practitioners can refer patients to social services, but only if they live in certain postcodes (where PCTs fund the ECPs - it all gets horribly complicated).

The LAS could do with improving this - we need a way to bring patients to the attention to the social services that doesn't require it being an 'emergency'. Lets face it, we see hundreds of people each day (around 4,300 calls each day at the moment), who better to keep an eye out for people who might be at risk, yet who haven't yet had any social services input?

Maybe the social services don't trust us to to their job for them? Maybe they are so over-stretched that they can't deal with a raft of new referrals that we would make?

Well - in this case I've 'cheated'. I gathered the patient's details, spoke to a friendly receptionist (actually all the receptionists at the hospitals are friendly) so I could get the GP details and I've now written a letter to the GP detailing my concerns. I've done all I can do about this situation which means that I can sleep at night, but wouldn't it be better if we didn't have to 'cheat'.

I hope that the GP/social services doesn't get snotty - I hate having to shout at people...

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).

 

On Monday (after some prodding from certain readers of this site…) I took up an offer from Ian to go canoeing on Regent’s canal.

It was a beautiful evening, just cool enough at half six to be doing some physical work, something I try to avoid doing as much as possible.  While I have paddled before (some Welsh rivers and a bit of time in the Mexican sea), it appears that canoeing is not like riding a bike, in that you can’t pick up where you left off.

Thankfully the club is understanding about those who aren’t the strongest paddlers – they have a welcoming attitude to people new to the sport.  After a bit of pottering about I began to remember some of the important things about balancing in the water and the effect that the wind has on your ability to travel in a straight line.  I managed to get the thing pointed in the direction that I wanted to go, and off I crawled.

The first thing that I saw was a dead fish floating in the water.  This was soon followed by a dead duck.

No matter – things die all the time (often when I’m around), so after a bit more paddling, only occasionally ending up spinning on the spot, I managed to take in the greater part of that little section of Regent’s canal.  There is a nice-looking canal-side pub, I saw some baby moorhens being protected by their parents.  A police ‘Serious Assault’ information board and a stencilled bit of graffiti under a bridge.

Then. under a lovely sunset, Ian and I chatted about various things – very relaxing after a couple of busy night-shifts.

It’s something I’d like to do again, unfortunately, as with everything else in my world, it all depends on shift patterns.  There are lots of things that I’d like to do but if it requires commitment (like martial arts), then it’s very hard to arrange when rotating shifts get in the way.

Oh well – such is life.

---

My mum and brother are away on (another) holiday for nearly two weeks, they are off looking at bears in Canada or some such.  This of course means that muggins here has to once more tape around 60–70 hours worth of television for them.  Including poxy bloody neighbours.

I’m waiting desperately for NTL to bring out their PVR solution (as the PVRs on the market don’t work with their cable box do they?), whenever I try to get PVR working on any of my computers it always ends up failing (and don’t get me started on MythTV or anything else Linux based for that matter).

So if you are in Canada and see a mad looking woman and her balding son, give them a wave – and if you can direct them to the bears they will be very grateful…

After they come back they have a day at home before we all head off for a family holiday in the Dominican Republic.  Gawd knows how they are going to cope without someone taping all the telly for them.

(Yes, that description of them is my revenge for being stuck at home).

It's 5am, and we are attending to the now traditional early morning 'maternataxi'.

Two women leave the house, one is obviously pregnant while the other is wheeling the pregnant woman's case.

'Hello', says my crewmate motioning to the pregnant woman, 'You must be our patient'.

The patient nods an affirmative.

'And you', he continues to the woman following, 'you must be her mother'.

'Erm, no', she replies, 'I'm her sister...'

I would like to apologise to all the people in that street for waking them up with my laughter.

My crewmate was a tad embarrassed and of course I didn't let him forget it for the rest of the shift.

Would you like to see the shiny new cover for my book?

Well here you are.

(Apparently it will be embossed).

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.