I think I need a Suunto X9i. Supposedly they've done the interface really well in it. Think mobile phone menus as opposed to the usual watch interface. Let me give you the spiel, and a picture... The upgraded X9i wristop computer features a full GPS service, including compatibility with several digital mapping services around the world. (It works with Google Earth). The mapping software allows the wearer to plan routes, print customised maps, making route and waypoint programming simple and effective. The Suunto X9i keeps you updated on your position, speed and distance travelled to ensure that journeys are easy to navigate. The X9i also features an altimeter, barometer, digital compass, thermometer and all the usual timekeeping functions. This wristop computer is the ideal companion for the outdoor explorer.
Now,I ask you, is there any reason why I shouldn't have one for my birthday, Anna? Sweetie?

I have pretty much everything sorted out now... I can post, edit postings, save drafts, upload images and other media and publish postings I have saved earlier. This posting should have a WeeMee to the left, with a 5 pixel margin on the right. Fingers crossed...

Okay, so really interesting – this post was created in Microsoft Word. Now, its not as if I'm going to write the next great novel (think Peig or something similar), but I COULD, if I wanted to ;-)

So, in nine years of having a blog, with one exception I've never used another tool to edit my posts with the exception for the back end pages of the blog itself.  The exception is a little application that I wrote on my PDA about four or five years ago that allows me to post and edit entries.  Now, my PDA is a pain in the arse to get information into, but it can be done, albeit slowly.  The problem for me has always been that I needed to be live to make a posting to this system, or I would save it in a text document somewhere and post it later.
Recently, Microsoft brought out a program called Windows Live Writer (WLW) which is basically a WYSIWYG editor for creating posts on a blog system.  It was supposedly compliant with all sorts of standards, and it actually looked like a very interesting product.  So I downloaded it, and it didn't work of course.  My blog system is proprietary, a so-called "Roll Your Own" blog.  So yesterday I set about writing an entry point page for WLW to access my blog.  It worked, kinda, and there's still some to go.  The previous post and this one were created in WLW though, and I'm getting a hold on how it all comes together too.  I use an interface schema called the MetaWabLog API to give it access to my system, and it seems to be pretty basic and work up to a point.  The point in case being that the documentation on it all is horribly sketchy.  For example, the date "Sun, 1 Jan 2007 11:23 AM" should be a legitimate date as far as this program is concerned, but it doesn't seem to work properly. There are a bunch of little niggly things like that that I have yet to sort out.
So the point is, I had to create a non-standard interface to handle it all.  It was going to parse the expected input from WLW, using everything I knew to expect from the MetaWebLog API, and give me full control from any external app that uses this interface.  Shame it doesn't seem to work.  Some bits of it are good, but some are just a pain in the arse.  So, I have to have functions that clean up the code and change it so that it fits with my way of doing this.  This is nasty, and not the way that things are supposed to be done.  Case in point if the function below.
Now, I don't know about you, but that's not how I think things should be done.  And if you go with that logic, then one of two things needs to change.  Either the whole world has to change and do it my way, or I'm going to have to change some very basic functionality on this site.

So I've been struggling with giving up smoking for a few weeks now.  I thought I had it kicked about a week after I had my stroke, but I've only recently (circa 2 weeks ago) come off the patches.  Unfortunately, I was getting my nicotine from the patches instead of the cigarettes, and that's no way to give up an addiction to something.  I knew this of course, but it seemed like the least intrusive way of getting off smoking right after I had my stroke.  So it didn't work, and to be honest I'm not all that surprised.  So for the last week I've been smoking again, and that sucks.
On Saturday I went to the Allen Carr clinic and took his course.  If you don't know who I'm talking about, then click the link and take a look.  He wrote a very famous book about twenty years ago called "The Easy Way to Give Up Smoking".  I had never read the book until last week, but I decided on Thursday that the method he uses had promise, and I booked myself on one of his courses on Saturday morning.  It wasn't really him of course, because he died last year of lung cancer.  He wrote the book and setup the clinics after discovering a way to give up smoking that relies on nothing more than convincing yourself that you actually do want to give up smoking.  He then went on and did the same thing for alcoholics and drug addicts, which is pretty cool.  However, for some reason the medical profession seems to be quite distainful of his method.  I haven't figured out why yet, and I'm sure its just a case of professional jealousy, but its interesting all the same.
So, after attending the clinic on Saturday, I came out and didn't smoke again.  The session they do lasts for five hours and includes some hypnotherapy and Neuro-linguistic programming as well as the standard course.  All in all I'd have to say it was brilliant.  I came out of there without a desire to smoke, and the withdrawl effects have been slight and managable.  Yes, I was a complete bitch yesterday, and maybe today, but that's a hell of a lot better than I've felt before when giving up.
Anyway, its a gray day, and I'm a little bit tense, and I have to go back to the hospital tomorrow (only for blood tests, but its still shite), and the programming I've been doing over the last days has been irritating me no end.  More about that in the next installment.

Right, so we know I had a stroke.  We didn't know why I had a stroke however.  Doctor Rudd sent me for an ultrasound and a lovely test called a TOE (Trans Oesophageal Electrocardiogram - an ECG from the inside).  With the TOE they stick a probe down your throat.  It's a fairly hefty probe too, not something I'd recommend swallowing for kicks.  Again for this I had a really nice doctor, a guy called Gerry Carr-White.  I had asked him would he mind mailing me the Ultrasound images, and he went one better and put them on CD for me.  Those are the ones that have been hogging my bandwidth lately.  I'll transcode them down to slimmer files soon.  Anyway, he did that and ended up being the first doctor I have ever consulted with by email.  I know it doesn't seem like such a big thing, but the convenience of emailing with your doctor simply rocks.

He discovered that there was a small stream of bubbles getting through my septum.  That's the large wall between the left and right sides of the heart. This type of defect, called a Patent Foramen Ovale affects one in three people apparently, and is usually diagnosed in babies.   The PFO is a small channel that allows a developing foetus to obtain oxygen directly from the mother through the umbilical cord and it typically closes less than a year after birth.  However, it stays open for one in three adults.  To fix it, they wanted to place a small plug in the hole.  Several years ago this operation would apparently have been really serious as it would have required opening the chest to get into the heart to do the repair work.  The heart would have to have been put on bypass for the duration.  However, today they do it far less intrusively.  They put me on a waiting list for the operation, which I bumped a little by going private.  

So, that little hole in my heart allowed a small clot to get through and into my brain.  That's why I had a stroke. Or at least, that's one of the reasons: we don't know yet where the clot came from, or why it was made.  It is likely to have formed in my legs, in the same way that a DVT does.  From there it would have passed up through the heart (through the PFO) and into the brain where it got lodged and caused a blockage.  There may be a gap in my knowledge, but I need to find out where the clot came from, and what happens to clots typically.

The surgery was pretty cool actually.  It was done in the paediatric unit as this defect is so common in children.  Another brilliant doctor, this time a pediatric cardiologist called Dr. Qureshi.  It was performed under general anaesthesia, but was fairly minor.  They thread a probe through your leg and into the heart and run a device up through the probe.  That device gets implanted in the PFO and seals off the supply of blood.  The particular device they used in me is called a STARFlex and looks like a pair of umbrellas connected together.  I don't remember very much about the operation, but I remember talking to the anaesthetist beforehand. We were talking about my blog, and she said something like "You should be feeling something now..." and then I was awake again and it was all fixed.  Just before I got pushed back up to my room, someone (might have been Dr. Qureshi) dropped a DVD off with me.  Actually it was more like on me.  Anyway, this one was of the actual delivery of the STARFlex into my heart, and again I’ll transcode it later on.  It looks pretty funky though.  

Updated 06-05-07 17:00.  I'm getting all this into a more coherent format and will post it on a single page soon.  All the media will be there to play with too.

Okay, so my operation is done, and apparently was a success.  The nice Dr. Qureshi came around a little while ago and said that everything went fine, and that someone would be around tomorrow to examine me and explain anything we had already missed out.  We’re about two months after the last entry, and probably close to the end of the story.  So I guess I’ll back up a bit, and explain everything else to you.

I don’t have internet access right now, so maybe I’ll be telling you stuff again that you already know.  Hell, there’s a really good chance you know all of this anyway, as you will have been talking to me since then and know what’s going on.  So, the last thing we had was the doctor in St. Thomas’ hospital telling me that I had had a stroke.  Shocked and stunned I think was the right reaction at that point.  Shocked and stunned, and not a little bit amazed.  They kept me in hospital basically overnight while they ran some tests and kept me under observation.  It was there that I met a very nice and apparently eminent doctor by the name of Anthony Rudd.  He basically got me through the next few months intact.  He’s an eminent specialist in the treatment of stroke, and widely published (including one book for the families of stroke victims).  This being London, I guess that makes him one of the best stroke doctors in the country, and potentially the world.  I say all of this to put the following in perspective:  He told me something along the lines of if I was going to have a stroke then this was the way to do it.  I can’t remember the exact words, but I guess he (or Anna) can correct me when they read this.  Between Anna and him I didn’t go crazy and crack up, which is nice.  Because that’s how it would have gone if they weren’t around.

So anyway, Doctor Rudd took me through exactly what had happened.  I have to go and check up the details later, but I believe I had a kind of ischemia.  There are two different types of stroke.  The first one is where a blood vessel breaks and bleeds into the brain.  That’s called a hemorrhagic infarction.  The other type is where a blood vessel gets blocked and cuts off the oxygen supply to the brain. That’s called an ischemia.  That’s what happened in my case.  The brain is like any other tissue: if you don’t feed it oxygen then it will die.
The lucky bit is that I wasn’t affected in any serious way.  The tissue in my case that seems to have been affected is in the back of the brain. It’s in an area called the cerebrum which controls among other things, parts of the visual function.  That’s why I had gone to Moorfields Eye Hospital to be checked up – my eyes were seeing differently and I was getting headaches from it.  It also may have fucked up my short term memory, though Anna assures me that this isn’t the case and that my short term memory was always that fucked up.  Either way, I started getting paranoid about it for a while, but it all seems to be getting back to normal now.  Whether this was a bona fide symptom of the stroke, or whether I was putting two and two together and making twenty five remains to be seen.  I didn’t suffer any apparent loss of cognitive function, “intelligence”, reasoning or movement.  I didn’t have any of the usual symptoms that you associate with stroke, such as lack of muscle control on one side of the face, slurred speech or disorientation.

I think that’s about all I can type right now.  I see in looking out that window at the clock typically referred to as Big Ben that it is twenty to twelve.  I’m tired and I want to get some sleep.  I also just put the nurse who came to check my stats under serious pressure – I asked her what the other type of stroke was called that wasn’t an ischaemia – and she didn’t know.  She has run off to check it up somewhere, and I feel a little guilty now.  Strike that, she just came in and couldn’t find it.  She thought it might have been an infarction but I thought that was a general term fir stroke.  I’ll leave this paragraph and we will see tomorrow.  For now, it’s time to get some sleep.

I had a problem with my PC case recently.  Actually I've had it for months, but never managed to get around to fixing it.  The top of the case has a hinged door over the CD-ROM space, which has a slight design flaw in that the hinge is a little flimsy.  The photo below shows what I'm talking about.  The door is on the top of the front panel.  Anyway, the nice people at PCICase sent me out a whole new frontage to replace the one I had.  Instead of a door, I got the whole shiny new front panel.  Thanks guys :-)