Heart Attack Procedure [Phoney]

I received as a circular email.  I thought I’d post it in case it’s true … and soon found (many thanks to Michaelm) that it is in fact false (see www.snopes.com) and is an e-urban legend …

Heart Attack Symptoms

Not every heart attack symptom is going to be the left arm hurting. 

Be aware of intense pain in the jaw line. You may never have the first chest pain during the course of a heart attack. Nausea and intense sweating are also common symptoms.  60% of people who have a heart attack while they are asleep do not wake up.  The pain in the jaw happened to me and woke me from a sound sleep.  I was one of the fortunate ones.  Trust me when I tell you its pain unlike anything you’ve ever experienced before.  Given a choice between natural child birth and a heart attack, pain-wise, it’s much easier to have a baby. Let’s be careful and be aware. 

The more we know, the better chance we could survived… A cardiologist says if everyone who gets this mail sends it to 10 people, you can be sure that we’ll save at least one life. Read this… It could save your life!

Let’s say it’s 6:15 pm and you’re driving home (alone of course), after an unusually hard day on the job. You’re tired, upset and frustrated.  Suddenly you start experiencing severe pain in your chest that starts to radiate out into your arm and up into your jaw.

You are only about five miles from the hospital nearest your home.  Unfortunately you don’t know if you’ll be able to make it that far.  You have been trained in CPR, but the guy that taught the course did not tell you how to perform it on yourself.

How to Survive a Heart Attack when Alone

Since many people are alone when they suffer a heart attack, without help, the person whose heart is beating improperly and who begins to feel faint, has only about 10 seconds left before losing consciousness.  However, these victims can help themselves by coughing repeatedly and very vigorously.  A deep breath should be taken before each cough, and the cough must be deep and prolonged, as when producing sputum from deep inside the chest.   A breath and a cough must be repeated about every two seconds without let-up until help arrives, or until the heart is felt to be beating normally again.  Deep breaths get oxygen into the lungs and coughing movements squeeze the heart and keep the blood circulating.  The squeezing pressure on the heart also helps it regain normal rhythm.  In this way, heart attack victims can get to a hospital.

Tell as many other people as possible about this.  It could save their lives!

Punishing us for their failures

I’ve been away from blogging for a while.  I’ve just finished and handed in my MSc Thesis and am now in a new area of employment.  However, I have a small stack of posts to make having bookmarked a range of sites in my favourites …

 Bugged Bins without the Backup

Doesn’t it really annoy you when someone punishes you for something that you didn’t do?  That’s how I feel about this whole ‘bugged bin’ thing.  Where we live, there is a relatively basic recycle collection.  They do bottles, paper and some plastics but don’t do card or plastic bags.  So; I build up a stock of cardboard or plastics and take them to the recycling site say monthly.  What really annoyed me when I took my plastics to the site was that there was no facility for their disposal!  Instead, I was told to put them in the ‘landfill’ section and be done with it.  What a waste!

So – now the government wants to fine me for not recycling?! (see bugged bin and ‘pay as you throw’ articles).  I’m sorry, but did I miss something here?  I really want to recycle but there just isn’t the support network.  The government should be making the provision and I bet there’d be a slow but sure increase in the uptake.

Anyone else feel the same?

Smiley/Grumpy Speed Cameras

There’s a particularly nice ‘muse’ (perhaps even a mild ‘rave’) on the “The UsefulTechnology Blog” (click it for the link) about those speed cameras that aren’t ravaging extortionists but actually smile or frown if you’re good / speeding respectively.

Lovely Jubberly.

Short-cutting around the web, IE7-style

Fantastic rave about the tidy new IE7 and some quick keys …

Quick message: Download the new IE7, it’s fantastic.  Also – see this page (link) where there’s a good rundown of some keyboard shortcuts that’ll make surfing smooth and lovely.  Click on the logo for the IE7 webpage. 

Do we call it hand-ism?

Rant about discrimination against the left-handed amongst us!

It wasn’t until my A levels when we were learning about chemical ‘chirality’ (the issue that made thalidomide dangerous and allow the manufacture of Spenda the sugar-that’s-not) did I realise how much handedness pervades our world.  In a discussion with my A level maths teacher I solved the age-old problem (well as old as I was, anyway) why my laces always came undone … because I was left handed, I was tying a ‘granny-bow’.  A quick switch from left-under-right at the beginning to right-under-left and my bows were symmetrical beauty and stayed tied all day.

So what gets my goat in the 21st Century is companies like LOGITECH who refuse to accept that there are left-handed people out there who need support and, it’d be nice, if we could have decent mice.  [Sorry for the cheesy rhyme.)  At what point did making a product for only a part of the population move from commercial prudence to ethically acceptance?

So: I want to build a list of these terrible discriminating companies (and links to the offending articles / websites etc.).  Beginning with:

LOGITECH

Anyone else?

When is a planet not a planet? [update]

When it’s a Disney dog?!

Poor old Pluto.  I remember when the loveable but somewhat slow-on-the-uptake cartoon dog had the honour of being the only cartoon character (that I can think of) that had a planet named after him.  I know … it wasn’t named for that Pluto but for some mythological one who was a bit older than Disney.  But when I was a child, clearly it was the dog that was the preferred explanation.

Anyway – thus is the way.  Due to some otherworldly objects that are bigger than poor Pluto, the Interstellar object formerly known as a Planet (TIOFKAP?) is now a “Dwarf Planet”.  So I am sure future children will be wondering how it was that Snow White managed such an interstellar journey, and imagining that, given the 247.something-earth-year-long year that Pluto has, it’s not wonder she slept for so long; and given the distance from the sun – no wonder she didn’t have much of a tan.

Or something like that anyway.   Here’s a nice version of the new map (courtesy of the BBC), and a link to the BBC article.

[Update: 25 Aug] Pluto Uprising …

Well, well well – now there’s something I didn’t expect.  There seems to be a large uprising regarding the demotion of our little friend.  Have a look at this next BBC article.

"World’s Worst Blog Ever" Award goes to …

… The Windows Live Messenger team

You know what it’s like … you come across a decent and free piece of software that seems to be hitting the development nail on the head, so you decide that you’re interested and try and find out more.  What happens?  The world comes collapsing down around you as you find the world’s worst blog ever.

Well done to the Windows Live Messenger team.  Stretched photos through an RSS feed, annoying pox-like emoticons everywhere … yes, if you have a ghoulish fantasy to look at disgusting things then have fun: click on my grumpy.

They don’t even talk about Windows Live Messenger very often either.

Sudden rant about …

… forwarded emails and becoming a spam-target

I kept this rant in an email from a friend back in February this year …

Do you really know how to forward e-mails?
- 50% of us do; 50% don’t.   

Do you wonder why you get viruses or junk mail? Do you hate it
Every time you forward a e-mail there is information left over from the people who got the message before you, namely their e-mail addresses & names.  As the messages get forwarded along, the list of addresses builds, and builds, and builds, and all it takes is for some poor sap to get a virus, and his or her computer can send that virus to every E-mail address that has come across his computer. Or, someone can take all of those addresses and sell them or send junk mail to them in the hopes that you will go to the site and he will make five cents for each hit. That’s right, all of that inconvenience over a nickel! How do you stop it? Well, there are two easy steps:

1. When you forward an e-mail, delete all of the other addresses that appear in the body of the message. That’s right, delete them. Highlight them and delete them, backspace them, cut them, whatever it is you know how to do. It only takes a second. You must click the “Forward” button first and then you will have full editing capabilities against the body and headers of the message. If you don’t click on “Forward” first, you won’t be able to edit the message.

2. Whenever you send an e-mail to more than one person, DO NOT use the To: or Cc: columns for adding e-mail address. Always use the BCC: (blind carbon copy) column for listing the e-mail addresses. This is the way that people you send to only see their own e-mail address. If you don’t see your BCC: option click on where it says To: and your address list will appear. Highlight the address and choose BCC: and that’s it, it’s that easy. When you send to BCC: your message will automatically say “Undisclosed Recipients” in the “TO:” field of the people who receive it.

Have you ever gotten an email that is a petition? It states a position and asks you to add your name and address and to forward it to 10 or 15 people or your entire address book. The email can be forwarded on and on and can collect thousands of names and email addresses. A FACT: The completed petition is actually worth a couple of bucks to a professional spammer because of the wealth of valid names and email addresses contained therein. If you want to support the petition, send it as your own personal letter to the intended recipient. Your position may carry more weight as a personal letter than a laundry listname and email address on a petition.  

So please, in the future, let’s stop the junk mail and the viruses. 

I don’t think I could have put that any better myself.  Apart from saying ‘got’ instead of ‘gotten’ …

So, here’s an idea: send this to everyone you know! (but strip my address off first if you got it by RSS Feed). This is something that SHOULD be forwarded. Sudden rant over.  Have a nice day!

Random muse about …

… Excel 2007 Beta ‘Data Bars’ and ‘RTL’

You know when someone designs something that seems to be such a good and obvious idea, but they just do it in a way that you wouldn’t expect? I had this experience when reading a blog post about the new ‘Data Bar’ capability in Excel 2007. The idea is that you can have an in-cell graphical bar-like display of the values in the cells.  Very good idea.  But, for some reason, to me they seem to be back to front: given the numbers are normally right aligned, I’d expect the right side of the cells to represent zero and their length extend left.  In practice, they’re reversed.Very odd, I said to myself.  Then I read the blog post at http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2006/08/17/704… and was amused.  This was asking whether those who might use Excel in a right-to-left (RTL) configuration want data bars reversed or not.  As what I must cal an “LTR user” (guess the acronym …), I thought the data bars in the RTL screenshot much more intuitive, so I said so.

Anyway … there you go.

Random muse over.

Discovering new words: ‘Hackathon’

In my line of work, I find myself moving regularly between organisations that are full of people who hark back to previous times when people were less segregated at work and more collaborative.  People complain about being overworked and underpaid, and feel no loyalty towards the organisation.  This said, they are surprisingly proud of the organisation and defend it to outsiders no end.

This has, over some time, set me thinking about ways in which people who work together can get to really know more about each other and what makes them tick.  Develop their teamwork, if you like.  This may not increase the pay or decrease the work, but it could go some way towards making work less awful.

So … I happened upon a phrase ‘hackathon‘ in a description at the Plaxo Blog (they call it locally a ‘haxo‘ … how nice!) and decided to look it up.  Wikipedia define it as:

Hackathon is an event when programmers meet to do collaborative computer programming. These events are typically between several days and a week in length … sprint is used to describe shorter events … which typically only last a few days.  Another name … is codefest …

This got me thinking that such an activity could benefit my organisation.  I’ve been involved in similar days where everyone is working on a specific set of tasks, brainstorming, banging heads together (not literally), having a laugh over the kettle in the corner … it works best in a nice big room or open plan area, especially when this is the usual work space but people are used to ignoring one another despite the lack of physical walls.So … I intend to try it.  Not in the near future, necessarily, because I’m in a lone job at present.  I am not sure for the best name, though.  I like ‘hackathon’ slightly because it paints the idea of ‘hacking through’ organisational red tape to get something novel done.  However, it doesn’t really suite my organisation.  I might consider a ‘brainfest’, ‘teamfest’ or ‘groupworkfest’ but these are quite clumsy.

I’ll be working in Operational Analysis (OA) soon, so perhaps an ‘OA-fest’ would make most sense … ideas welcome!