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.
Filed under: Blog | 1 Comment »
17
November
2006
Just dropping a short and sweet article on here to offer up some links to a mod of a GBPVR skin I worked on today. The RSSReader plugin allows a user to display RSS feeds, on their TV and has inbuilt ability to show items such as flickr photo streams.
However the skin I use, which is the excellent Nuoro, didn’t have support for the RSS plugin, so the interface wasn’t integrated very well, untill now. With no documentation I hacked this together, also hacking in a version for the widescreen sister version of Nuoro, which is called Sassari. They are really excellent skins and I hope these small downloads give users using either one of these skins the beauty of this really nice interface when reading RSS feeds on their TV.
Downloads
Screen one
Screen Two
NB: These are mods of the BlueMCE2 RSS skin by Danka, which have been integrated into Sassari and Nuoro, to install for Nuoro, simply extract the compressed files to the Nuoro skin directory, making sure they stay in a directory called “news”.
Filed under: Projects | No Comments »
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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