Just a brief note - I've had a few kind emails commenting on the lack of posts and checking to see if I was ok. I've had this flu/cold/cough thing that's been doing the rounds and it basically knocked me out for a good two weeks. I'm just getting back on my feet now, though I'm still coughing away. Hopefully normal service will be resumed over the next few days...
It's rather hard to believe, but I've been blogging now for 5 years. My first post was back on February 1st 2003, starting with "Welcome to my blog. Since everyone else appears to have one, I thought it was about time that I did as well." I've followed that up with another 2,787 posts, so I post (very roughly) twice a working day. I looked back at a few posts from that first month of blogging and the more things change, the more they stay the same.
A student was suspended for swearing at Ask Jeeves (as it was). Apparently he couldn't get the information he wanted, so he wrote a rude email, ending with threats of bodily harm. He used his school email address, which wasn't so smart.
Yahoo! changed its homepage layout in order to cram more advertising on.
We finally discovered how the Google Pigeon Ranking worked.
Google added the alert function, and on the same day I asked the question "Is Google's continued dominance going to continue indefinately?" I could have checked with Smoogle, which was the site for smart news and tools about online search. Only it's dead now.
What lessons have I learned? Post early and post often seems to work well. I've always preferred shorter, snappy pieces, rather than long opinion filled pieces; I guess I started as a link blogger and that's what I do best. After all, if you voice an opinion you always have to remember that you could be 100% wrong, and it's down there on the screen. I've always tried to be honest in my assessments and constructive rather than cruel with my criticism, and always take the line (when I do) of 'I think you could', rather than 'You must'.
I really appreciate the people (that's you) who read the blog, and take time out to comment, put me right, add information and chide me when I'm totally wrong. Most of all however, I remain continually humbled by the many people that I don't know who are prepared to take time just to offer a word of support now and then when things get rough - both Jill and I have been moved to tears sometimes by your kindness in the difficulties of the last year, and though I can't always say it individually *Thank You* will, I hope, suffice.
Right, enough of that! Back to search engines, Web 2.0 and the rest of it.
BBC NEWS | England | London | Fire forces hospital's evacuation. I've had a few calls on this, with regards to Jill. Just to let everyone know that this is the London site, not the Sutton site where she is being treated, so although she was at the Marsden today we weren't affected. Of course, we don't know what the knock on effect is going to be - I'm sure we'll find out in due course.
For those of you without an interest, move on to another post. :) For those who want to be kept up to date with how Jill is doing, you may want to go along and view her new blog: Riding the Rollercoaster. She's going to be updating it in order to let people know how she is, what she's doing and so on. We thought it made more sense to do it that way than have me popping posts into this weblog now and then.
Briefly however, she's now on a trial at the Royal Marsden - not the one she originally wanted, but a different one, for reasons she explains. If you want to know more - feel free to visit and comment.
Too Much Information? Ignore It - New York Times. This was an interesting article that I got from the always amazingly useful and informative (and nice!) Steven Cohen over at Library Stuff. It's something that I hear quite often 'I don't have enough time to read all this information, or to keep up to date or blah blah blah.' I don't really understand this at all. Admittedly my entire job is based on keeping up to date and knowing what's going on, but I can't do it all. It's simply not possible. As you know, Jill's not at all well now, so the amount of time that I spend doing work stuff is shrinking almost daily, but I still find time to look at stuff. So, without further ado, and created on the spot, here is my list of things you can do to keep up to date and informed.
1. Don't try - ignore it as the article says. Don't waste time looking at the news in detail (unless you particularly enjoy it and it's relaxation for you!) I listen to the radio once or twice a day, and I tune in when it's time for the news. If it's not in the 2 minute summary then quite frankly I don't need to know about it. I'll also take a peek at the BBC headlines once a day as well, and those are the only news items that I'm going to look at. I don't go out and find the news now, I expect the news to come to me. So I also
2. Set up RSS search feeds and email alerts. Google is great for this. (Yes, I do say good things about Big G now and then!) Anything I really do want to know about I'll set up a search for, get an alert sent to me, pull the RSS feed into Pageflakes and will look at that. It's personal to me, which makes it interesting and I want to look at it.
3. Read headlines. Speed reading is great. Don't read an entire thing. Go for the headlines, first line in a paragraph and so on. If you need more, then read. Chances are that you won't. A good writer can summarise. And who wants to read a bad one?
4. Don't download email. Most of my email I'll read on the server and delete it there and then. It's only if I want to actually reply to stuff that I'll download it.
5. Do it there and then. Don't put it off, cos it isn't going to work. OR - do put it off, whack stuff into a folder or bookmarks or whatever to come back and do later. Revisit this every month, delete everything in it because it's now out of date. After all....
6. Out of date is out of use. No point in keeping stuff that you've not looked at in your RSS readers. If you haven't looked at it in a couple of days then you won't. Just junk it.
7. Don't use email if at all possible. When I can, I'll get people to IM me. A client wants to know if I can work on the 19th - email 1. I reply to say no, but the 20th is fine. Email 2. She replies and says 20th is fine. That's email 3 and email 4 is me saying 'You're booked in'. I can do all of that inside 2 minutes on IM and we're all sorted.
8. Technology isn't always better. I put all my appointments onto a large wall chart/calendar. That's it. If I'm going to a meeting I'll make a note of when I'm not available in my PDA, but that's the lot. If someone wants to date then I'll get back to them. Technology just doesn't work for me here, and I'm not about to try and make it.
9. Mostly it doesn't matter. If it does matter, it'll come around again. People are really good, because they know my mind is elsewhere and will nag me to answer something or do whatever. If they don't, it wasn't that important in the first place. Sure, you do miss out on stuff now and then, but that's going to happen anyway.
10. Get into the mindset that 'it's not you'. Sure, there IS stuff that you need to know about, and that's your job to find it, and keep up to date with it. Everything else is the responsibility of people who want you to know. It's up to *them* to get to you. Mostly you can just ignore them, or send them a form email. I look at a lot of email from companies and people who want me to play with their products and write about them. I'll take a quick read through and either write about it there and then or just ditch it - it's not my problem.
Just a few ideas - try 'em out.
Thanks to everyone who has emailed or commented on my recent post regarding Jill. I'm not making the comments public for obvious reasons, but have read all of them - thank you so much. We're still obviously in a state of shock at the moment, and waiting for the chemo to start - she's also deciding if she's going to volunteer for any of the trials that are available. We're going to have to quite radically re-think our lifestyle over the next few weeks and months, but we'll think about that a little bit further down the line. I've not been able to reply individually to comments/emails so please forgive me for that, but they are all tremendously helpful, so thanks again.
Nothing in this post is anything but bad. The MRI scan confirmed that Jill's cancer has spread into her liver and is at such an advanced stage that it's both inoperable and terminal. She's going to be going onto chemotherapy which provides a life expectancy of - on average - 2.5 to 3 years. Without it we would be talking months, 6 at best. So now we know. Really not sure what else to say at this point.
For those of you wondering what the situation is regarding Jill, read on. For those of you without that interest, skip to the next post.
We met with her consultant yesterday, and the news was disappointing after the hopefulness of last time. It does look after all as though the cancer has moved to her liver, but they're still not 100% sure, so she has to have another scan before they decide what they do next. This is obviously very upsetting to say the least, and not the news that we wanted to hear. Consequently it looks as though we're in for a long haul with this one. There are lots of different alternatives and ways forward, but we won't know what until the results of this next scan. When I know I'll pass the news on. In the meantime, please keep thinking good positive thoughts!
Jill is now out of hospital and home again. There is both good and bad news. The bad news is that it looks likely that the cancer has spread to her liver. However, it's an interesting organ since you can manage without a lot of it, and it does tend to grow back. She'll certainly need chemo, and possibly another operation, but we've yet to go back and see the specialists to decide on the next stage.
The good news is that tumor she had came out very easily, and they got all of it. The other good news is that the specialist thought it might have spread to other places as well, but it doesn't appear to have done. She has had a rough few days of it as you'd expect, and has a very impressive scar (don't worry, I won't photograph it and put it on Flickr), and it's taken a while for the bowel and digestive system to sort itself out.
Which is the most information I can imagine that anyone wants of a medical nature! She's recovering well, and has really been boosted by the cards, notes, postcards and messages of good will that she's had from so many people. To be honest, and I hope you'll understand, it's going to be really hard to reply to everyone individually, and in some cases we don't have full names and addresses. However, we're going to be working on her 'positive wall' in the next few days and putting all the cards etc up there and when we've done that I'll take a photograph so that everyone can see.
This is obviously an incredibly difficult time, made all the more so when the 'c' word is involved. However, she's very resilient and together with your positive thoughts, we will get through this. Again, and at the danger of being repetitive, *thank you so much*, each and every one of you who has taken time to care - it's very humbling, and in a world that is so often full of apparent hatred and selfishness, this really goes to prove that while that does exist, there are many more people who just care for others.
I'll do my best to keep you updated, and my apologies for not having done so for a while, but I've been spending most of my time with her in the hospital or running around doing things at home, or failing any of that - sleeping!
Thanks, Phil and Jill.
Thanks to everyone who has been kind and thoughtful enough to contact us, or send Jill a card, or leave a comment (I didn't publish the comments, but I've read every one and they really help). Jill's operation is set for August 2nd, after which we'll know more about exactly what the situation is. At the moment it's just a question of sitting around in Hell's waiting room really. I'll try and post work related stuff, just to keep my mind on other things, but it's really hard right now. Once again, thank you all so much... it really helps to know that there are people out there who do actually care.
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