Thursday, May 15, 2008

Texting costs are 'out of this world'

Text messaging costs four times as much as receiving information from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. It cost £85 to obtain a megabyte of data from Hubble, 595 km (370 miles) from Earth, as opposed to sending a 5p text, which works out at about £375 per megabyte. Scientist Nigel Bannister, of Leicester University, said: 'Hubble is by no means a cheap mission - but the mobile phone text costs were pretty astronomical'.

Posted by Olivia :: ¶ 15.5.08:: 10 comments

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Friday, May 09, 2008

Bits n Bobs

At this very moment I am watching on BBC Four a documentary about the Crooners (Sinatra, Deano, Nat King Cole et al) and they've got to Tony Bennett.

The narrator said, "Tony was born in 1926, at the height of the Great Depression..."

Tell me what is amiss with this line. And somebody fire that researcher. And the narrator for not spotting it. And the producers

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I thought of so many things to share with you today.

I was the last person out of the office at 6.30pm. Don't worry, I left at 7pm last week, as two consultants were quibbling over whose work I got to do first, but I was only the second to last then.

Well, if someone gives you meeting papers to copy, assemble, and bind for the last post at 5pm, and it's 3pm, then they're not going to bind themselves and they are just going to have to go on Monday.

What's more the master copy was out of order and I spent half an hour unmuddling myself and reshuffling the papers. I think I got it right. I've only just got the hang of assembling these things, and am now just about familiar enough with administration reports, Trustee reports and accounts, quarterly reports, business plans, and so on, to be able to look at them and understand what they are.

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Last night I had a dream. I was seeing all manner of 20s/30s jazz and dance being performed onstage. It was like a mishmash of "Anything Goes", "Thoroughly Modern Millie", the Charleston, Fred Astaire, and the Radio City Rockettes.

I started crying and wailed, "See? I told you I was born in the wrong decade!"

Oh to live in the 20s


When "sex appeal" was invented. At this early level I think I'd be in with a chance!

How to dance the Black Bottom


How to dance the Charleston



My Dad taught Vanessa and me the Charleston one day at the dorms. (He had been a dancer in his youth and was a champion at the Twist.)

The flappers were pretty wild 80 years ago, considering that Queen Victoria was still alive when some of them were born. But despite their so-called wildness, if we went back in time would we find them surprisingly naive? Or would we be scandalised at just how louche they really were?

What do you think?

Labels: miscellaneous

Posted by Olivia :: ¶ 9.5.08:: 20 comments

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Saturday, May 03, 2008

Mini Med School

That was a long-ish hiatus, and I never even warned you!

So, what's been going on chez moi?

Not much apart from work.

I ended up working until 7pm yesterday to tie up loose ends, as it will be a long weekend with Bank Holiday Monday coming up. I took today off to go to the hospital for my long awaited echocardiogram which was recommended after my electrocardiogram last month. Damn, but the ultrasound thing really hurts - in searching for the best image of my heart they keep kneading the probe into all that sensitive tissue upholstering my female ribs. Go on, have you ever heard it described that way before?

It was a lovely sunny morning in the upper 50s to low 60s (avg 15C) so I wore a nice Ralph Lauren t-shirt and my cotton safari jacket. I preferred to briskly walk the 45 minutes (including getting slightly lost) rather than take the Tube or bus, both horrific roundabout journeys lasting an hour. Got hot and removed the jacket, and when I arrived I was sweating - for the first time in MONTHS! It felt great!

Anyway, I walked unscathed through Harlesden, appropriately comparable to Harlem, or more likely the South Bronx. I did receive a number of stares for looking distinctly out of place.

I arrived the alloted 15 minutes early but ended up waiting an hour even though there were only a handful of people in the waiting room (unusual for the NHS).

The reason I was given this test is because on my visits to the doctor after the shingles, the nurse was unhappy with my blood pressure and heart rate. When I was a teenager, a doctor said she thought I had a heart murmur and should get it checked out before I have children. A few years later another said he could hear a distinct click and whoosh and thought I had mitral valve prolapse (MVP), which is when the mitral valve doesn't close properly, flaps about a bit, and allows blood to seep back into the chamber (mitral regurgitation). This results in a higher risk of infection, so for instance, before going to the dentist I'd take a prophylactic course of antibiotic tablets the morning of the procedure, and then again afterwards. Bleurgh. This is to protect against any bacteria that might get into the bloodstream through the gums. More recently this treatment has been found to be unnecessary.

There are also frequent flutters, skipped or extra beats, and tachycardia (rapid heart rate).
MVP and tachycardia are often symptomatic of a condition called dysautonomia. It is a fickle and varied state, an imbalance of the autonomic nervous system, which regulates the glands and unconscious functions such as breathing and digestion. I have little control over my adrenal glands, for instance, and so it takes very little anticipation to have me awash in adrenaline but because I don't need to run anywhere, I must endure a half hour of weak knees, shaky hands, and some breathlessness due to the hammering heart until it wears off. What's more, sometimes just a half thought can cause my heart to leap. Finally, I sigh a lot and I'm really really easily startled - even if I know someone's coming I can hit the ceiling. Other symptoms of dysautonomia are easy bruising, forgetfulness, frequent headaches, fatigue, panic attacks, joint discomfort, fainting, orthostatic hypotension (dizziness when standing up) aaand so on. For me, personally, the unwanted "fight or flight" state ties for worst with the 2-hour periods of tachycardia when I can sit there feeling as though I've just stepped off the treadmill, only without the sweat.

Then there's the fatigue. Days when you wake up feeling drugged after a long struggle to wake up, somehow glued to the bed because your limbs are deadweight. You drag yourself to work, fighting for every step, then sit glued to the chair, holding your head up with an effort. Lifting your hand to the desk is almost out of the question. You just want to fall face forward into the soup, so to speak. For me, such episodes usually last until mid morning or early afternoon, when it seeps away and then suddenly I bounce up ready to start another day just when everyone else is winding down.

But we very often present as normal people since the symptoms are not always simultaneous, so on good days I doubt whatever happened on bad days. In this way you can go for years without treatment or acknowledgement. You also don't want to walk into a doctor's surgery sounding like a hypochondriac. My current GP is a classic product of the NHS in that the last time I was there and tried to bring up a few of my long-term complaints she clinically shot them down, making me feel rather foolish, and then sat there looking defiance - I think they train them as I've seen it on other British docs' faces before - and probably thinking, "I dare you to come up with another one." This is so that she can get me out of her office in the allotted 10 minutes.

It is 180 degrees from my doc in Houston, who told me that no question was ever a stupid question, so one day I brought up everything that had been troubling me, and in this way he was both kind doctor and reassuring therapist. I left the office that day with a bloody cauterised sinus but all aglow with confidence inside, rather than the mumbling booby I was at my GP last month.

It's ironic since because, let's see, in the US I may have gone to the doctor about 6 times in 14 years. Here, thanks to all the stress and malaise I've been about 6 times in 5 months.

On the other hand, there I went to the dentist every six months. Here, I've been unable to find one so haven't seen one since I visited my old one last time I stopped in Texas (2004).

What's more, I've been to a hospital twice this year (for the ECG and Echo). The last time I saw the inside of one, apart from visiting people, was when I was a few months old and had aspirated some milk which led to an infection and high fever. (Preemies have lazy swallowing reflexes).

Hm. This post became so much longer than I had intended. I always do this when I think I have nothing to blog about. Therefore I ought to blog more often.

Labels: health, rant

Posted by Olivia :: ¶ 3.5.08:: 11 comments

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Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Workaday images

The office last week was in chaos. Work backed up on Friday as we packed crates to be moved a short walk down the road over the weekend, to the new office in America Square (I know, a positive omen?). Monday, further business and more jeans-wearing as we unpacked and got dusty again. Tuesday I got some work done but wasted lots of time looking for things. I am still faffing about with the printers which don't work properly. I think that tomorrow, though, I will be able to catch up all the way.



Ibex House, an original 1937 Art Deco office building on The Minories. I post this for comparison with our new office:


America Square, our new office building just off The Minories. I like to call it modern Art Deco. Even in the fact that no detail is overlooked. The lifts are shiny, with lots of blue LED lights. I will have to try to take more photos. You enter the spacious lobby through revolving doors, and pass your card over what looks like the barcode reader at a checkout, set into stainless steel posts, and then "beep, whoosh" the little frosted glass gates slide open and you can enter.
Also the bathrooms - floor to ceiling frosted glass doors. Modern sinks sitting on the countertop. Bright clinical light so you can see the speck in your eye, yet not unkind to your complexion like the old fluorescents.




In the shiny lift, where you have to present your card in order to ascend to a floor
I look so serious! I am not sure I am allowed to take photos in this building, but I'm probably making that up.



Just outside Tower Hill tube station is this sundial
In the background you see part of the Tower of London



Wembley Stadium in the distance, left


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Today I was hot in my coat for the first time! I have a sneaking suspicion we might be approaching spring!

Posted by Olivia :: ¶ 23.4.08:: 13 comments

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Saturday, April 19, 2008

Is it spring yet?

When I left the house yesterday to go to work, I kept getting whiffs of manure. I thought someone had mulched their garden, but that's not really done around here. Walking up the street I kept glancing backwards and into the distance over the hill, as if I were expecting to see a giant stinky airship, I don't know! In addition to the usual grey sky, cold wind and dampness there was a light fog, which is forecast to last all week.

I was right to trust my instinct as I read in the paper that evening that this is the time of year when French and Belgian farmers usually do one big fertilisation of their fields. The smell had built up over the Continent for days during still conditions before a brisk wind came up and moved it to southern England.

Londoners spent all morning thinking they'd stepped in something, and the radio switchboards were alight with people wondering what on earth was going on.

Pepe le Pew, that's what!

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Anyway, it will rain for the rest of the weekend so the whiffy air is gone. But it's so cold, so grey, so damp, so windy! I'm still in layers, and my tired wool coat, and my tired cashmere scarf, and my tired 4 paris of black boots... :(
I'm thinking the extra daylight was a trick and it's still January.

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The Union Jack flies at the Ritz

These boys are guaranteed to light up my day! Two legends on one stage!

Labels: video

Posted by Olivia :: ¶ 19.4.08:: 14 comments

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