Many Hard Scars

In the UK, and I suspect other parts of the world, there has been a debate on legalising, or at least giving people immunity from prosecution if they help someone to commit suicide. Pressure to actually come out and say something definitive has been increasing because of this debate and legal actions from a sufferer of MS from Bradford in the UK.

Debbie Purdy won a ruling by the Law Lords that she had a right to know what action her husband would face if he helped her to end her life. This has finally forced the Director of Public Prosecutions to say something, and the current incumbent of that role: Keir Starmer QC, has finally published a guidance paper. BBC News has a story on this.

As with anything like this there are the "PRO" and "ANTI" camps, and I think I have at least one foot in the "PRO" one for the simple reason that I think that the attitude of prolonging the life of someone with a terminal illness who has no quality of life for what ever reason is somewhat selfish.

God Forbid that I should ever end up in this situation. I doubt seriously whether I could cope with living in a state of complete immobility and pain. That said I wonder whether I could actually have the courage to take that enormous transition between worlds.

Random Thoughts 1

NHS Trusts trying to save money
Ah, the mind set of the accountant. So, to save money in the NHS, CFO's from the various trusts are going to again cut the staff they most need, i.e. nurses, in favour of those they don't, i.e. themselves! Have they never heard the saying "Better safe than sued" ? How long will it be after these job cuts that the family of someone who dies in a UK hospital sues the Trust responsible for negligence? And you can bet it won't be the people who caused the situation that will end up in jail, just the poor over-worked nursing staff again.

Biting the bullet.
Powerpoint is 25 years old apparently. From the number of PPT presentations I've had to sit through, it feels longer. Originally written for the MAC, Microsoft bought the company who wrote it in 1987. I think the person who created the slideshow on the BBC News site may be taking the **** with some of the slides.

I remember when........
Now I think I've heard everything - Glitch-hop. Seriously, being an engineer the word "glitch" means a problem. Maybe I'm getting old. :-(

Mechanical Trees yet!

I know I've said this before elsewhere, but either Douglas Adams was a visionary or he could see into the future. In the second radio series of the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, there is a character called The Wise Old Bird who mentions that all the imprisoned robots from Brontitall's first plague are working to build "continent toupees" for planets that have used up all their forests.
Now today, we get an article hitting the news stands about more ideas to reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere using mechanical trees!

I must admit, the idea of artificially reducing the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere has its merit, but it has to be practical with no long-term side effects of it's own. The two main contenders are to reduce it by filtering it out and storing it in empty oil wells or by converting it with algae using photo-synthesis.

Not too keen on the first idea. this could just be saving up more trouble for future generations, who have enough to worry about already with global warming and another nasty man-made product of excessive energy consumption.... nuclear waste.

Big Brother gone? I doubt it.

Initially, anyone of the same opinion as myself would say "At last! Some relief!" as today's London Times announces: "Channel 4 finally evicts Big Brother". This sentiment would be echoed by fellow residents of Borehamwood in Hertfordshire where the programme originates in the UK who have to endure the fireworks at 11pm every time there's a major eviction. (The Google maps image is the front of Elstree Studios.) However, I can't see that Endemol - the producers - would let a good thing go and I can quite see the programme itself dragging on hosted on a different channel for a good few years yet.

There's no doubt that it's still popular with certain audiences: the queues for the Friday night evictions at the studios testify to this, but after ten years, the format is a little tired and the production team are deliberately looking for more outlandish contestants to keep the ratings up in the UK. How the other 41 places around the globe are faring is anyone's guess!

Endemol's site states:

Big Brother is all-seeing, all powerful and getting even bigger across the globe. There is no limit to the Big Brother phenomenon.

Well, maybe there is a limit, we'll just have to wait and see.

Don't tell me you've got it bad!

I'm a regular reader of Oddee.com and they've posted an item called "8 of the World's Most inspirational People" today. Each of the people who are featured on this page are truly inspiring. Ben Underwood who could "see" with his ears, Patrick Henry Hughes who is a virtuoso musician who cannot see, Sean Swarner who has repeatedly beaten the odds to survive several bouts of cancer and Jessica Cox who was born without limbs,but gained her pilot's licence, Nando Parrado who along with 16 others survived 72 days in freezing conditions in the high Andes and Randy Pausch who suffering from pancreatic cancer made an impact on so many people with his talk on how he accomplished the thing in life he wanted to do.

One however stands out for me and that is Australian Nic Vujicic. He to my mind deserves pride of place at the top of the page because of his attitude to life. With all the so-called problems I have, they pale into insignificance against any of these people and Nic in particular. He was born without limbs and had to learn to live without them. I will eventually lose the use of mine and have to do the same.

Please watch this video and then visit his website at

http://lifewithoutlimbs.org/

We don't care! We're Google! We're the Web!

Actually, no you're not.
What you are is a company that seem to want to emulate Microsoft's sales division.

To what am I referring?

iGoogle.

Someone somewhere within the corporate nightmare that the company has become has decided "Hey we can give everyone Google Chat - whether they want it or not!" And before anyone responds, "but you can disable it!" yes, you can... but you can't hide it!

I suppose what's worse than this is that person - in their infinite wisdom/stupidy (delete as appropriate) has decided to move the tabs from the top to the side of the page, thus making the layout awkward - to say the least.

A point here people! Not everyone out here in Webbyland has super splondicious 16 x 9 widescreen monitors yet and have to put up with old-fashioned fuddy-duddy 4 x 3 instead!

PLEASE! - give people a choice or you are going to find a lot of people no longer using iGoogle!

How I hate the night.

Have you any idea what's it like to walk around as if you're drunk all the time?

I am now suffering from yet another auto-immune problem (those of you who have seen my diabetes blog may be up to date with this) which means that my spinal cord is losing it's insulation - known as myelin. This is turn results in some inflamation around where the problem exists.

So how does this relate to the title of this post? .... Marvin the Paranoid Android.

Marvin constantly complains of having a terrible pain in all the diodes down his left side. I now constantly have what I can only describe as an "un-pain" down my right side.

The title of the post comes from a song that Marvin composes at one point where his life is particularly sour:

"Now the world has gone to bed,
Darkness won't engulf my head,
I can see by infrared,
How I hate the night."

"Now I lay me down to sleep,
Try to count electric sheep,
Sweet dream wishes you can keep,
How I hate the night.

Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Marvin the Paranoid Android's "dolorous ditty", composed after being attached to the Krikkit War Computer.

Whether his pain is similar to mine, I cannot say.

I describe it as an "un-pain" because it isn't really like any other feeling I've experienced. It is essentially an absence of sensation, but it has all the mental overtones that pain would normally give - there is discomfort, there is the inability to find anywhere comfortable to alleviate the feeling. What is worse is that pain killers do not relieve it.

Because the inflammation results in anything from minor numbness to having my foot stop working at any one time. It is startling to say the least to be walking along perfectly normally then suddenly lurch sideways as your right leg either doesn't go where you were expecting it to go, or just not support your weight correctly.

I've taken to carrying a walking stick at the moment. How much of it's aide is physical and how much is psychological is debatable, but it does seem to help.