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15
May
2008
Unfortunatly the US presidential race just took another nasty turn with Senator John McCain’s melanoma coming out of the shadows and into the sunlight.
Already Barrack has used McCain’s survival as a swipe and he’s not alone as I’ve seen bloggers across the web pick up on this too. While it’s good that melanoma is now getting some higher profile names mentioned and thus getting mentioned in the press etc it has to be upsetting for John as it wouldn’t affect his ability to do the job at hand.
Ewan Mcgregor
Recently a much loved British actor spoke of his run in with skin cancer, but details seem vauge and as such I can’t work out if Ewan’s run in was with Melanoma or Non-melanoma, we can only hope it was either the latter or a very shallow melanoma. It was a good positive story hopefully which will encourage young men in particular to seek advice from their GP if they suspect something is wrong with a mole or group of moles.
Scotish Football - Celtic Legend Tommy Burns Dies
Story has been around today in fact. From looking into the story, again details are a little vauge, it looks like we’ve lost another high profile melanoma warrior. From what I can make out Tommy Burns was diagnosed with melanoma in early 2006. The story has been getting coverage but melanoma has not been mentioned, so the public in the UK are now unable to tell why Ewan Mcgregor will make it and why the odds were stacked against Tommy.
There is no difference being made in the press as to why Non-melanoma is a lot less serious than Melanoma, so I feel I should recap that it’s all to do with the direction of growth. Melanoma’s dig downwards into the lower layers of skin, so action is needed as soon as possible, non-melanomas tend to stay in the upper layers of skin and are as such a lot less life threatening.
If you are concerned, google “The ABC of melanoma”.
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English Football - Bobby Robson
We can only hope Bobby Robson will carry on with his not so recent discovery of a very rare melanoma skin cancer.
A list of famous people who had melanoma
- Eva Cassidy
- Pat Sharpe
- Bob Marley
And Non-nelanoma
While it’s saddening that more people are being affected by skin cancer, it is a great opportunity for the media to start educating people about skin cancer and not about the sun. We can only hope anyway.
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24
January
2008
Midlanders, get the chance to break a world record this summer for the world’s largest montage of photos. The arts council have teamed up with the BBC and flickr to ask people to submit any photos which depicts life in this part of the world.
www.inthebigpicture.co.uk
The website also offers the latest photos to be added and tips and tricks on how to improve your photos and is managed and maintained by a member of the Birmingham Flickr group. The result will be a massive whacking huge slab of canvas/paper with all the moderated photos placed on it, think of the million pixel project. The results will be shown around the region! The project is mostly powered by flickr, but people don’t need flickr account to take part, cameraphone pics and scans are being accepted.
Picture this with flickr on Ch4
This comes hot on the heals of Channel 4’s involvement with flickr on picture this and last years BBC 4 series where flickr users were able to add photos to a group which showed a random slideshow of shots on the BBCi interactive TV service.
If you have a camera, pick it up and use it, they need 90,000 images by June.
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21
April
2007
I was in Bristol this week for accessibility training from Nomensa, I learned a decent amount of stuff and had chance to double check if the kinds of things I was doing were the right things to do in terms of writing accessible HTML.
It was a great day and many thanks to Emily for delivering a great training session, really useful. I will back track eventually on what has happened and why this site seemed dead for a while. I have a new job, which going forward I’m really excited to have and thus work has been taking a lot of my attention and time and that’s where the trip to Nomensa came from, however it’s all good, got Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) in York soon, that should be fun, but I can rub off some accessible approaches to SEO there now.
I think also I’ve managed to fix the css on / images off issue with one of the image replacement techniques, allow me some more time and I’ll do a proper update on this with examples. Based around the Phark method there must be a way (with JS) to detect when images are off and thus write a new style rule into the DOM for the text-indent line and when JS isn’t there my theroy is that a :hover pseudo class can snap that text back into the viewport when focus is given, my only issue with that is does :hover get focus to something without a mouse, so can a keyboard tab press bring focus to an element and trigger the :hover, I’m sure it can. If you understood that congratulations, you are a top notch web developer! I haven’t tested, the code is not there, however it’s the kind of thing you think of when in the fast lane on the M5 coming back from Bristol as the sun sets, again that is if you are a geek like me.
Photos
Anyway to conclude this unneeded waffle, if you don’t want to read my geek speak but have got this far then after the training session was over I wandered around Bristol city centre obviously camera in hand, groovy place, fountains and water falls a plenty, so as a reward for getting through the brain dump, here are some photies to look at:
The use of water in Bristol is amazing, click for more photos
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3
April
2007
I’m considering an open letter to anyone willing to read it to urge a better response to skin cancer in this country, why because the awareness isn’t working and it’s not because people aren’t listening, I know people listen and people are concerned.
The ABC of Melanoma isn’t getting through, it’s not even being given a chance to reach people, this is shameful and equates to failing another generation of young people on skin cancer, condemning at risk people to later detections of melanoma.
At every level the educators have fallen into the “human induced global warming” trap, in that the message is very narrow and a small part of the bigger picture. It’s not working because the messages aren’t diverse enough and everyone follows sunSmart and hardly tries to shift focus on to skin and skin exams.
It’s rather like pinning all your hopes on the notion that a reduction in CO2 will stop bad things happening to the weather, it’s a false economy and doomed to fail. For me the two are running parallel to each other and I’ve been able to see a radically different perspective; there is an indoctrination on prevention in all this and everyone is missing the bigger picture that we need to be focusing on skin and not just protecting skin from UV but also looking at what happens after the sunburn or the suntan.
The solution is simple:
Detection, Detection, Detection
Sunsmart, the leading light that everyone follows, launched today, with the focus firmly back on “preventing” skin cancer not detecting it or making people aware of what it looks like and why it’s important to act urgently. As an at risk individual I feel let down again and even more so because it’s gunning down melanoma under false pretenses, you have to be seen to be doing something to slow the deaths from skin cancer which are higher here than in countries which have a huge issue with it, yet you don’t educate about how to spot a skin cancer early, you prefer to tell us what we know that the sun is dangerous and add the mole bit on at the end.
We also can’t stop or prevent people from doing something enjoyable. I enjoy a bit of sun, the perception out there is catching the sun makes you look better, you can’t change those thoughts and connotations overnight and you’ll be fighting a loosing battle against the urge to tan anyway to the detriment of a national skin cancer screening service which actually will help us beat skin cancer.
This is why I’m pinning my hopes on SAFE (Skin Awareness For Everyone) which I really do think has a really good chance at success if they don’t emulate sunSmart.
There’s not enough connotation around skin cancer to get people to think, about checking their skin. We have TLC for Breast Cancer and national screening programmes for it to detect it, yet detecting skin cancer doesn’t involve harmful scans, it relies on our eyes so it’s a non starter why isn’t skin cancer being detected early and why is there a shameful lack of focus on screening and detection?
I really honestly don’t get it where are the ABC of Melanoma campaigns and the insistence on yearly skin check ups, none of that is happening, until that happens then sorry we really aren’t taking this seriously enough and more young people may loose their battle with melanoma because the educators would rather talk about how dangerous the sun is as opposed to supporting us to get our cancers found and detected early on.
Get moleAware.
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20
February
2007
If by any chance you have been checking out my photo pages here, you’ll have seen some manic activity on those pages for sometime now. I appear to have fallen in love with a photo sharing community site called flickr, which has become a very social place to be.
First Black Country Flickrmeet
Sunday just gone was the first Black Country Flickrmeet, which I organised and drummed up membership for, I was truly astonished by the number of people who had been brought together, by the flickr site and our interactions within the various groups, to walk my route around Walsall taking random photos. The day was a successes and not only showed the ability of a social network to arrange such an event but the idea of democracy carries through as members are encouraged to add their own ideas for meetings and the whole thing kinda works in a nice way.
Here are just some of my own photos from the day, which you can view more of on this page, but you’ll find a lot more in the flickr group
Don’t forget to check out the actual black country group on flickr for more.
At first flickr appeared just to be a site for uploading and hosting photos, but because of the social aspects it became much more than that. I was soon joining groups left, right and center partly to gain an audience for comments on my own photos, which at the time were event based, but also to discover other works to be inspired by them and as a by product of that I gained contacts and a social network.
Social documentation through photography
The most surprising thing I got from flickr was the sense of community, feedback and belonging. Not only was it a place to be inspired, pick up new tricks and figure out why shutter priority matters so much, it’s just a great place to hang out in. The great city of Birmingham is home to a vibrant photographic community and some members of the Birmingham group, like Pete Ashton, spun off a meetup group where members could arrange to meet and have a wander around the city centre, taking photos in a group, giving a sense of belonging as well as being able to document the city as it changes. The meets are almost like social documenting.
Inspired by this I decided to help set up a similar thing for the surrounding area to the North West of Birmingham known as the Black Country, all of my higher and further education was carried out in the Black Country and I’m fond of the area as much as I am of Birmingham.
So yeah, much more than just photos.
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27
December
2006
I trust everyone is doing ok over the holidays? I can imagine that to many people going through any kind of uncertainty the best gift you got this year was a tomorrow and may we live the whole of the coming year with that perspective.
There is a reason for this post, because just before the holidays I was invited to a radio interview about some extremely important news about later stage melanomas and how the cancer spreads. Although I was dialed in we ran out of air time for the story but the scientists are figuring it out. This is the story Cell protein holds key to melanoma spread, and here is an excerpt:
“When the level of this protein inside a melanoma cell drops, the cancer cell changes its behaviour: it stops growing and ‘blends in’ with its neighbours. This makes it less likely to be affected by chemotherapy drugs, which are designed to target fast-growing cells.”
It was a story of hope, but it did however send a bit of a shiver down my spine because not only am I in this boat, I know many people, many young people who are too and the general perspective the people around us have is that once the doctors cut the mole out the cancer is cured, that it’s happy days from there on. Whereas most of us know it’s only the start of an epic story, our own war on terror, because as suggested by this research the cancer almost knows it’s under attack and blends in, gets its head down and floats about as slowly as the original mole grew. I often thought of it as an ambush waiting to attack and it’s easy for anyone to say carry on with your life as normal but they aren’t living with this knowledge. Finally we all have some evidence to back up our concerns and finally the doctors are getting a grasp on why melanoma isn’t gone when it’s “gone”.
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8
December
2006
Ok, ok this might be a post with a considerable amount of bias, but a great new book entitled “Practical PHP and MySQL” has been published by a talented author and friend.
The book guides the reader through eight web applications, looking at the issues surrounding each type of project. A useful resource for new and seasoned PHP developers if you are thinking about that new PHP book, then have a goosey-ganders at this one. Flicking through the book you’ll find references to close friends and the language style and presentation is quite relaxed and entertaining.
The book reminded me of how majorly into PHP we were at university. Jono had set up a PHP server at university so that we could write our final year projects in the language, at the time I was developing on and maintaining my own PHP server at our student house as was Jono. You’d often hear both myself and Jono SSHing into our Linux boxes, hosted on our 56k dial up connections back home, from within the uni lectures, compiling new features into our PHP installations, editing apache config files with really flaky versions of vi, and generally playing around with our code, when we should have been listening to something about Director or Lingo or something like that.
The whole LAMP ethos shows that the open source projects which fuel the system are viable technologies and have stood up well in the server market place. With the likes of ruby on rails and even PEAR and Smarty, PHP has become a major part of the web development environment, it still is remarkable how prevalent ASP is when you consider how less restrictive using a LAMP system is, puts cold fusion to shame anyway!
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30
November
2006
I’ve been asked recently quite a lot how my quote “health situation” is going and thought it was worth a quick update. I know why people don’t like to say the C word, but really it’s ok, it’s fine you can say cancer, so say it!
Within the limitations and frustrations of our national health service, things are going well in fact the whole thing is not even an interesting story any longer. I wait three months go for a check up strip semi naked, they check for secondary tumors, have a little prod around in my groin, frown a bit, but not much, I proceed to ask about scans and get flatly refused. Then they tell me to come back in three months and that I should carry on as normal. I do feel now that melanoma is just an addition to my life, a new topic, a new motivation, it was scary for a time but I’m seeing it as an enhancement to my character, something to be proud of and not scared of.
The only update really is my GP now has to share the check up routines, which means I have to make a frustrating phone call “can I book an appointment to see you in three months”, to which I get a reply “well no, we can’t give you anything longer than 48 hours in advance”. Good old Blighty.
At 6mm I thought my time here was up
I can’t explain why my melanoma(s) haven’t returned given how deep my biggest primary tumor was, and to a certain extent because I’ve not had any further diagnostic tests like lymph biopsy I feel like I’ve been robbed of the chance of finding out if I have stage 3 cancer instead, which would mean we could do something about this cancer other than having a chat about it. But do I need to explain why I’m surviving a 6mm melanoma? Isn’t that a great story in its own right that I’m here to blog about it?
Major UK soap deals with melanoma skin cancer
Something of a mini revolution is happening. It’s not just skin cancer anymore, we are hearing about the “M word”. I would like to divert your attention to the British soap Corrie, which is running a melanoma storyline. It has been such a strange year because on a few occasions I said Corrie could run this storyline, but I hope we can now feel we can talk about this and start to get some action on getting people to check their skin not their SPF.
Girl who lives in the dark
However good or bad my melanoma is, mostly on the surface it’s good, I don’t have XP and for that I’m forever thankful, even if I had a red skinned childhood at least I could go outside. I saw a documentary on SkyThree titled “The girl who lives in the dark”, and it’s the most extreme form of XP I’ve seen, in fact it’s the only time I’ve seen what out of control melanoma looks like, if it is melanoma at all. The girl who lives in China had to have heavy surgery to remove huge tumors from her face and the Chinese doctors, led by a British doctor who had given up his annual leave to go over to China to save this girl, managed to prevent the tumors from returning to her skin. Her skin cells and what I assume to be melanoma cells will be stored in research labs in the UK and may yet prove to be the basis of a cure for this horrific (yet so misunderstood) disease, or at least an understanding of how this disease really works, because it remains a mystery.
The end? No way, it’s just the beginning and as for that book I’ll write about this, well you are reading it now! “Beating melanoma, a manifesto for positive change” has a ring to it, the world needs a book to really spell it out, that the messages on skin caner are too simplistic and often skip over issues relating to melanoma.
Filed under: Melanoma | No Comments »
29
November
2006
Strangely it has taken over a year for people to catch onto the fact that if you are looking at Birmingham on Google Earth you are seeing images which are at least three years out of date. According to gEarth we still have a brown car and a fish pond you know.
“WHERE’S the Bullring? That’s the question on the lips of many proud Brummies logging on the Google Earth to find the new cityscape strangely missing. Elsewhere, Masshouse Circus roundabout is still standing and the Forward statue, which was destroyed by fire in April 2003, can still be seen in Centenary Square.” Source
I’ve often commented about putting a massive “G” on the roof of our house, the ultimate “hello world” but thought maybe the satelite will never return to remap us. Personally I like the old version, I can remember when the area was a massive hole in the ground and I like to see the walkways which took us over the construction sites, the transformation is a massive part of our city and people are too quick to forget what it was like back then. However what is missing from this article is the fact that lower resolution images showing the glass bullring complete were available but they seem to have been over written by even higher resolution images, which are out of date. But do Google’s suppliers have Brummies in their team? Most likely not and it’s not going to be a quick process to acquire those images. About this time last year some parts of Birmingham in gEarth were enjoying a fine summer while other parts were enjoying a bright and vibrant autumn and even now you can see areas of the city where the shadows point in different directions.
What is also missing from the article is the technical understanding of how the system works, and that always saddens me, that people aren’t prepared to understand how or why something works or even motivate people to find out. I’ve heard comments such as “is that real time? can we see people moving” …. this isn’t like the movies or an episode of Spooks there are limitations, it takes some time to map and remap the world guys and cloudy days when the satellite may be overhead make the pass useless.
What an amusing article, I just wasted 5 minutes typing about.
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8
November
2006
Hey guys, firstly sorry for the almost month long outage of planet melanoma. A couple of weeks after setting it up in October, the computer which runs it crashed on me big time, hence I wasn’t able to do a planet run.
The planet is now back (here is the link) I had to redo the templates and stuff, it’s all very geeky but I have learned to back up my files now. The summer is finally over, after hanging on with an indian summer type breeze, we are now crunching our way through the autumn leaves, marching on towards winter.
New addition to the planet
Please welcome Helen from London, England. Helen is just starting out with blogging and is also at the start of an uncertain time after diganosis. Unfortunatly we have another young person affected by this, but together in the blogoshpere we can share our experiences, look for information, support each other and quite possibly push for better awareness.
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