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| Monday, November 16th, 2009 |
warren_ellis
|
11:44a |
|
lj_spotlight
[ ljspotlight ]
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9:39a |
Spotlights: Homepage Spotlight 11/16/09
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) givesushopeIt's that glorious time of year when we reunite with loved ones (we neglected all year), stuff our faces to excess, and pass out in front of the TV. Perhaps a recalibration of the thanksometer is in order. A spin-off of the popular GivesMeHope.com site, this community invites you to document moments of kindness, generosity, and pure human love in 350 words or less. |
lj_spotlight
[ ljspotlight ]
|
9:38a |
Spotlights: Homepage Spotlight 11/16/09
veggieslackersDespite its mainstream appeal, Thanksgiving is not for everyone. There are those struggling with food disorders, for whom this day causes endless conflict. There are the cash-challenged, who can't afford the gluttony we've grown to expect. There are the lonely, who don't have loved ones nearby. And let's not forget the vegetarians, who decry the animal cruelty. But there's one more group we often overlook: the terminally lazy! This community of lazy vegetarians offers easy recipes for an animal-friendly feast. |
lj_spotlight
[ ljspotlight ]
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9:37a |
Spotlights: Homepage Spotlight 11/16/09
fashinJust in time for holiday shopping season, this fashionista community brings you the world of haute couture in the form of sumptuous photos, video clips, and candid commentary. There's also a sugary sprinkle of mainstream movie discussions and debates on such pressing social issues as manicure styles and celebrity colonics. If you need a break from the daily grind to indulge your girlie side, this is twinkly pink on steroids. |
warren_ellis
|
9:32a |
T-Shirt Of The Week #004: SPACE BASTARD
TOTW is basically a joke that Ariana and I pull each week in our joint guise as the International Electrophonic Unit. Basically, we take some of the stupider things I’ve said on Twitter and elsewhere, often in a state of extreme alcoholic refreshment or severe sleep deprivation, and put them on a t-shirt. Ariana set up a Cafe Press store (because this is a joke and engaging with a serious maker of t-shirts would be less funny to us), and… well, once a week, here we are.
Through this website and this Cafe Press store, we’re going to release one t-shirt a week. It’ll go live on Monday… and it’ll die Sunday night — midnight UK time, more often than not. Each one lives for a week, and then it’s replaced by the next week’s shirt. Until I either run out of dumb ideas or Ariana’s brain explodes.
So, every Monday, I’ll post the new shirt here, and you can peer at it more at http://www.cafepress.com/electrophonic.
Anyway. I present to you — this week by popular request on Twitter — T-Shirt Of The Week #004: SPACE BASTARD:
We also offer a couple of perennial items. Mostly because I wanted one of these for myself:
(And also a MAN COOK MEAT WITH FIRE "splatter-shield", because Ariana’s crazy)
Thank you for your kind attention.
(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.) |
warren_ellis
|
6:49a |
Station Ident: This Is Monday
I’ve had the throwing-up-and-falling-over virus since Friday morning. Broadcasting may be bitty, because I’m still doing the falling-over part from time to time.
This is Warren Ellis dot com. Good morning.
And this is the brilliant Ellen Rogers:
(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.) |
| Sunday, November 15th, 2009 |
warren_ellis
|
4:42p |
And So Goodnight
As I can feel unconsciousness coming on, I leave you with this:
Photo: Tazlimur
Costume, Hair/make-up: Jessica Rowell
Model: Zoetica Ebb
Couch courtesy of Allan Amato
(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.) |
|
random_reality
|
9:14p |
Mr And Mrs Sundin
http://randomreality.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2009/11/15/4381348.html A couple of days at work and then two days off where my brain refused to get out of idle means that I've seriously fallen behind schedule for NaNoWriMo. If I don't have the chance to get going then I'm unlikely to 'win'. Still, even if I don't finish the 50,000 words by the end of November, I'm still planning on finishing this thing.
What I do with it once it's written may be something... interesting.
-----
It would seem that Judith’s lead has paid off, she’s leading be down some cobbled Swedish backstreets to a bar where I’m to meet a family that is dodging their responsibility to the ‘Home Care Plan’. They have a relative that is comatose in hospital and while they should be taking care of him, instead they had sold everything and gone underground.
Judith is ahead of me, and I’m watching her short ponytail swinging left and right in from of me. Every few steps she takes another puff on the cigar that she has clenched between her teeth.
She was late back to the hotel last night, I heard her crashing into the ajoining room at 4am. This morning she smells of sweat, smoke and alcohol. She’s also in a grumpy mood.
“In there”, she has abruptly stopped and started pointing at a tiny ramshackle bar, “I’ll be in later, I just want to make sure that we haven’t been followed. Lots of dodgy bastards around here.”
She then ignores me and pretends to take an interest in the clothing shop opposite the pub, staring deep into it’s large shop window.
I enter them pub and it’s so dark it take a moment for my eyes to acclimatise to the dark. Sitting at a table, a bowl of bacon pasta in front of them are the two people I’m here to see.
Mr and Mrs ‘Sundin’, (not their real name), are essentially on the run from the law.
Every family in Sweden (as in much of the developed world) has a responsibility enshrined in emergency legislation to look after any close relative that becomes affected by CLBD-7. These laws were passed to enable hospitals in countries with socialised medicine to continue providing care for those unaffected.
One year ago Mrs Sundin’s mother failed to wake up from a night’s sleep, since then she has been comatose.
The law says that, once all other causes have been ruled out, the nearest relative takes on the responsibility of caring for that person, be that in their own home or by purchasing private healthcare. Either way the state isn’t going to help you.
The Sundin household is not a rich one, Mr Sundin tells me that he has work as a freelance web consultant and Mrs Sundin gave up her work as a secretary when her mother became ill.
The thought of having to look after her mother filled Mrs Sundin with fear, she tells me, she has had no training in how to care for people and hates the thought of having to spend twenty four hours a day looking after a ‘vegetable’.
She says that she tried, her mother was transported home by ambulance only a few hours after the ‘Home Care Advisor’ had left the family home, the advisor had told Mrs Sundin about pressure sores and cleaning incontinent patients as well as how to change the food bag that led directly into her mother’s stomach. She counts herself lucky that she got that advice as soon afterwards the Home Care Advisory Service suffered a number of cutbacks making people rely on advice from the internet.
After one week Mrs Sundin tells me that she had stopped crying, that instead all her emotions left her and she settled into the routine of turning, washing and, after her mother was incontinent, changing the bed.
She tells me that her home used to smell nice, that it was clean and presentable - but that now it only smelt of urine and shit and talcum powder.
She tells me that when she was working she used to spend time socialising with her work-mates, every Friday the staff at the small insurance office where she worked would go out to a local bar for dancing and drinking. Now, as she was not at work, she never went out except to get shopping.
Two months into the care of her mother and she finally snapped. No-one to turn to, no one except her husband to help, no support from the government all wore down her resolve and she started to make plans to run. She tells me that she no longer saw her mother as her mother, instead she saw her as a lump of meat, there was no spark of recognition. Sometimes her mother would open her eyes and Mrs Sundin would stare into them hoping for some spark of intelligence. But it never happened.
Mr Sundin had made a number of contacts in the internet community so when it came time for them to disappear he knew people that could help them. They sold the house, placing Mrs Sundin’s mother in a short term care facility, they then took the money and vanished.
Mr Sundin tells me that they had to make deals with several people from outside the law. Those are his exact words, ‘outside the law’. These people, and he doesn’t elaborate any further, gave them new identities. Now Mr and Mrs Sudin have new names and a new address, the house that they rent is much smaller and Mr Sudin had to give up his job, the web market is too well connected for him to take his new identity anywhere else. Mrs Sundin returned to secretarial work, although she doesn't attend the Friday night drinks at her new workplace.
Mr Sundin now has work in a postal office.
As for Mrs Sundin’s mother, I cannot say. In Sweden they have large warehouses full of comatose patients, stacked away and looked after by minimum wage carers. The death rates are terrible there, but it is all the government can afford.
Mrs Sundin doesn’t know if her mother is still alive, she knows that she’ll never find out.
If the law ever catch up with Mr and Mrs Sundin they could be put in prison for up to ten years. Mrs Sundin tells me that she would rather be in prison than tied to a house looking after someone who doesn’t recognise her any more, feeling the love for her mother, the woman who raised her, slowly ebb away.
I leave Mr and Mrs Sundin at the bar, nursing their drinks, eating their pasta. Judith is still outside, still smoking the same cigar.
We head back to the hotel. |
warren_ellis
|
2:09p |
Moon Wiring Club: INFORMATION SERVICES
I love Moon Wiring Club. And not just because I got their new record this weekend, which I am going to play tonight because I’ve been sick and/or unconscious with some weird bug since Friday morning. Oh no. (What if it cured me?) No, I love them because they do things like this, too:
In 1982, Gelographic RadioTelevision co-broadcast a test transmission for the tentative BBC5 channel.
Although the station idents were deemed a massive success, sadly the only known survivors of this viewing were unable to be traced, due to radiation issues. This archive footage has been recently unearthed, and provides a tempting glimpse into what those who watched through the smoked glass were able to see.
The musical accompaniment, acclaimed in some quarters, features on the new Moon Wiring Club album ’Striped Paint for the Last Post’, due ’sometime’ November. Certainly before the feast of Syllabub in any case.
Remember: confusing electronic music is a great British tradition.
(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.) |
warren_ellis
|
2:00p |
Links for 2009-11-15
- Help Phoenix Marie
"We are raising funds to get urgently needed medical treatment for our beloved friend, Phoenix Marie. She has been battling a life-threatening progressive heart valve disease since 2006, when she had her first heart failure and near death experience. With no insurance to cover her, Phoenix sold almost all of her valuable belongings and clothing and did eBay sales for half a year in order to see a specialist and receive the tests and costly x-rays needed to diagnose her condition. Her heart disease was a congenital defect (from birth) that was apparently misdiagnosed in childhood as harmless and left unchecked…"
(tags:people )
(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.) |
warren_ellis
|
11:23a |
Apple Files Patent On Evil
Apple has filed for patent on a technology they call an "enforcement routine," that’ll display ads on pretty much any device with a screen and demand that you view them — or else you don’t get your device back:
Its distinctive feature is a design that doesn’t simply invite a user to pay attention to an ad — it also compels attention. The technology can freeze the device until the user clicks a button or answers a test question to demonstrate that he or she has dutifully noticed the commercial message. Because this technology would be embedded in the innermost core of the device, the ads could appear on the screen at any time, no matter what one is doing.
(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.) |
| Saturday, November 14th, 2009 |
warren_ellis
|
4:00p |
Links for 2009-11-14
(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.) |
| Friday, November 13th, 2009 | |
random_reality
|
10:32a |
Sweden
http://randomreality.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2009/11/13/4379321.html Sweden has long been held as a perfect example of socialised healthcare, that and the UK. I went there to find out how Sweden coped with the first outbreaks of CLBD-7
I’m speaking with a Doctor Anders Kask in a beautiful park. Judith meanwhile is next to some trees aggressively smoking a cigarette while watching some young men play football. She’s got her back to me and I think it’s the first time she hasn’t had her eyes on me. I swear she waits outside the toilet for me to finish, eyeballing the other patrons to see if they are international assassins.
I ask Dr. Kask how the healthcare system of Sweden coped with the early days of CLBD-7.
“Like everywhere else we didn’t know what was happening”, he says in thickly accented English, “People going mad in the streets, emergency rooms filling up with what we thought were psychiatric patients. And of course those who just slipped into unconsciousness.”
For the first time I’ve heard a doctor mention those who died. We are so fixated on those that were left alive we often forget those who died.
“It was the unconscious ones that we tried saving first - it’s all about triage. Triage is this wonderful idea thought up by the French in the first world war. You deal with the most serious life-threatening cases first, then the less serious and finally the walking wounded. We’ve been using it for years and it’s a good way to deal with problems coming in quicker than you can deal with.”
“In an emergency room setting you deal with unconsciousness before you deal with psychiatric problems, the unconscious patient can not wait to be treated. So you put your resources towards helping them while the other patients wait.”
“But there is one part of triage that often doesn’t get spoken about, and that is for the patients for which you can do nothing. You don’t treat them at all. The dead are dead and they remain so.”
“Of course, if we have the resources we attempt to resuscitate the dead - in 2010, the year before CLBD-7 we have a cardica arrest survival rate of 10.7%. Not a good rate, but better than a lot of other places.”
“What we didn’t know was that the unconscious ones were beyond our help. And even if we did know, how could we be sure that it was this new disease and not something that we could assist with?”
“It turns out that of those people showing symptoms of, er, I believe the colloquial is ‘being Clubbed’ around 20-30% would become unconscious, never to re-awaken, another 20-30% would become increasingly violent and the rest would follow normal, if rapid, onset of dementia. Around half of those who became violent, your ‘zombies’ if you will, further progress to a more normal dementia. Those who do not? Well, you have to decide what to do with them.”
But in those early days we didn’t know this, so we would have people brought in by ambulance deeply unconscious, some from stroke, some from diabetes, some from other causes, but a vast majority of them would be due to the disease. We had to treat them all the same, rule out the obvious causes and then find beds for them if they remained unconscious.”
“All the time of course our emergency departments were filling up with deeply psychotic patients”.
“So we were terribly stretched, in a normal week we might deal with three, maybe four or five patients who were persistently unconscious. Those who did remain so would normally go to the intensive care department. The ITU in my hospital has eight beds, and barely enough staff to run those beds. You see, it is not enough to merely have the physical bed, you also need the doctors and nurses and cleaners and all the others to staff that bed. Even working twelve hour shifts you need a minimum of four nurses to look after a bed for a week. And that isn’t counting the cover for annual leave and sickness.”
“And our staff weren’t immune to CLBD-7 themselves.”
I remember when one of our senior nurses was found by his wife unconscious in bed, he was brought in to us and when he was wheeled through the doors it was all we could do not to stop and stare at him. We knew then that the chances of him ever waking up were nearly impossible. We also knew that there were no beds in the hospital, no beds in any hospital.”
“It still shames me that he would be the first person we put on the general wards.”
“Until then, every unconscious patient went to ITU for one on one nursing care, now were were having to use general medical and surgical wards. While the nurses there did their best, they weren’t very well trained in the care of comatose patients. They also didn’t have the staff numbers, one nurse for eight or more patients? How could one person with some untrained helpers look after that many high dependency patients?”
“It started with the sudden deaths of the comatose, we were later to find out that many of these had died from an occluded airway, ‘swallowed their tongue’ if you would. This was because the ward nurses didn’t have the experience of keeping a patient’s airway open, not eight of them at once.”
“Then came the pressure sores, if you cannot move your body then where it touches the mattress, or even another part of the body, the circulation of the blood is restricted and the tissue starts to die. The position of patients should be changed every two hours at a minimum - and it just wasn’t happening, the nurses were too busy. Once a pressure sore happens the skin breaks down and falls away, and then it gets infected and starts to eat away at the patient.”
“I remember one woman who had a tiny spot of a sore on her sacrum, her backside. But the decay went much further, far up along her spine. She had a tunnel, a cavern, running along her back that you couldn’t see. Each day the nursing staff would dress that little spot wound, knowing that there was nothing that they could do for the metre long wound hidden just beneath the skin.”
“The thing I remember most? The terrible smell of infected wounds, Staphylococcus aureus was a big killer in those days and we barely had enough IV antibiotics to give them. After all you can’t give pills to a comatose patient. You would walk onto the ward and the smell would be like a physical wall - I can see why our predecessors thought that disease was carried by smells.”
“So we did our best, until the beds filled up, and then we made more bed, camp beds. Wards that were designed to hold twenty patients would hold twice that number. But the number of staff could not increase, where would they come from? Every country was having the same thing happen. The nurses that we employed from overseas were heading back to their home countries to look after relatives, and that meant our staff numbers dropped even more.”
“And CLBD-7 wasn’t the only disease, we still had people attending hospital with heart attacks, strokes, gall bladder problems - and they all wanted, and needed to be seen.”
“I think the American hospitals had it somewhat easier than us - their insurance companies stopped paying out for CLBD-7 treatment and so the hospitals would discharge them for patients that could pay. I don’t know what they did to those stricken who had no relatives to look after them. I mean, I have heard the stories, the terrible stories of ambulances taking them to places out of the way, under bridges and the like and just leaving them there, but I find it hard to believe that such things really happened.”
“It took us longer. No one in parliament wanted to propose what we knew would have to be done, and sure enough they got voted out the next year - but it saved many lives. The ‘Home Care Plan’ was passed and now anyone stricken who had a family would have to be cared for at home. There were some attempts at training the relatives as to how to look after the sick - but the funding soon ran out and so the information was put on the internet.”
“No one knows how the health service survived. I think that for a little while we just stopped worrying about death, just accepted it and did what we could to prevent it. We aren’t back to pre-outbreak levels, I don’t think that we ever will, but we are slowly recovering.”
I looked over to where Judith and the footballers had been, the field was empty and I couldn’t see Judith at all.
A few minutes later she sends me a text message to tell me to make my own way back to the hotel as she was following a lead.
|
| Thursday, November 12th, 2009 |
warren_ellis
|
5:43p |
Conan! What Is Best In Life?
"DAY-GLO HUMAN UDDERS!"
(I feel I must point out that these are really not what are best in life, and that Molly Crabapple should be arrested and probably waterboarded for making me look at this.)
(And also this.)
(Cowgirls. Honestly.)
(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.) |
news
[ theljstaff ]
|
1:53p |
LiveJournal Major Notes: Notes, Tweaks, Bug Kills, LJ_Cares!
Notes augmented
We've enhanced and de-bugged Notes. If you haven't tried it yet, now's the time! You can create a private note when you ban multiple users. You can also delete multiple notes at once. Lastly, paid users have the option to add a note (visible only to you) whenever you add or remove a friend (guaranteed to avoid embarrassing social mishaps). If you don't currently have a paid account, you can upgrade now! It only takes a few minutes and costs less than a bad shopping mall haircut (plus, it's way more fashionable)!
Product tweaks and bug kill
- In another effort to zap spam, comments containing links from domains LiveJournal deems untrustworthy are now automatically screened
- If you sign up to get notifications of the Writer's Block question of the day, you'll now see the daily question in the email notification, so you'll have a little extra time to ponder before you post. You can subscribe to Writers Block notifications here
- The issue causing random comments to vanish has been fixed!
- If you visit a LiveJournal page and get prompted to log in, you'll be returned to the same page after you sign in (Thanks, Dreamwidth)!
- If you don't edit the timestamp for an entry at all, the entry timestamp will indicate the time the entry was posted instead of the time the Update Journal page was loaded
- Comments with paddings/backgrounds render correctly within the comment box (and will no longer wrap outside the box and break frames/margins)
New FCK fixes rich text editor!
- We've updated our RTE (Rich Text Editor) to FCKeditor version 2.6.5
- When switching from the RTE to HTML editor, links for syndicated feeds are no longer broken
- RTE now functions properly in Safari 4.0
- An extra line/space will not be auto-inserted whenever you switch from RTE to HTML editor
- The insert image link now works correctly in all browsers
LiveJournal Cares
We’re pleased to introduce you to lj_cares, a new LiveJournal community dedicated to raising awareness and funds for U.S. charitable organizations that improve the health and well-being of people around the world. Each month, we’ll spotlight a nonprofit that is making a significant global impact through medical research, public outreach, and/or humanitarian social programs. Charities will be selected in accordance with the U.S. calendar of national health observances based on a high rating (of over 60%) on Charity Navigator and global scope of impact.
In this, our inaugural month of November, we will celebrate national adoption month by offering a charitable virtual gift (priced at $2.99) to support Love Without Boundaries, an organization that saves the lives of orphans with life-threatening diseases and places them in loving homes around the world. LiveJournal will donate 100% of the proceeds from the sale of charitable vgifts (we'll cover the cost of credit card transaction fees). To learn more about Love Without Boundaries, please visit lj_cares and read about how they helped save Baby Kang and the Rainbow Twins from fatal illnesses, who are now thriving in nurturing families. You can purchase your Love Without Boundaries gifts in the Virtual Gift shop.
Papered in postcards
A couple of weeks ago, we asked you to send in postcards to surround us with LiveJournal community. Thanks for coming through! We've received postcards all the way from Germany, Finland, and Canada and from all over the US, including Texas, Florida, Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Indiana, Hawaii, and Oklahoma just to name just a handful. We're thrilled with our improved decor.
Please keep the love coming for one more week by writing to Frank the Goat, Esq., c/o LiveJournal, Inc., 539 Bryant Street, Suite 210, San Francisco, CA 94107. Be sure to include your username, since we'll be drawing the names of ten random contributors next Thursday to win paid account credits!
Photos of the week
We have more dazzling images posted by talented LiveJournal photographers from around the world. We're hoping to span the entire globe, so please continue posting and tagging. Of course, you can also sit back and enjoy the view at lj_photophile.
You can see a sample of this week's gorgeous photos and check out spotlight communities and awesome user content after the jump!
( Read more... )
Curtains
We thank you, once again, for joining us. See you next week! |
warren_ellis
|
3:00p |
Links for 2009-11-12
(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.) |
warren_ellis
|
2:54p |
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random_reality
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12:13p |
Two Rumours
http://randomreality.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2009/11/12/4378504.html A short break from the NaNoWriMo posts so that I can tell you about two rumours that I've heard. Note that these are rumours, if I had the time/energy/inclination I'd check them out to see if they are true, instead I'm just relying on the trust I have in the person who told me them.
If anyone knows if these rumours are untrue, feel free to let me know.*
Rumour number one is that a man from the Department of Health visited the ambulance service recently and told people that the moment the government changes (i.e Britain has a collective brain fart and a memory wipe of the last tory government and votes in the Conservatives) the London Ambulance Budget will be cut by £25 million.
This despite hitting our (stupid and clinically irrelevant) targets, despite ever increasing calls and despite the suspected pigocalypse of everyone calling an ambulance when they thing they have swine 'flu.
Additionally, somewhere out there in 'I could find it if I had the energy to Google it-land', is the government plan that a certain percentage of A&E ambulance work should be done by private ambulance firms paid for out of our budget and you can see that we will be going for the cheapest bid, which is never a good sign of quality.
Oh, and I nearly forgot - we have the Olympics coming up soonish.
-----
The second rumour is to do with a bit of our kit changing. This rumour however has been repeated by several people, including officers. The rumour is that because too many are going missing we will be doing away with our electronic blood sugar machines which are quick, accurate and easy to use in any circumstance. Instead we will be going back to the old chemical dipsticks that you have to wait two minutes for the result, and the result is a range of values that you read by comparing the colour of the stick to a chart.
Which doesn't work all that well, I think, considering half the time we are working in 'less than optimal' lighting conditions.
Also the dipsticks are also apparently far cheaper. And much less accurate.
Instead money is being spent on filter masks to protect me** from a milder, less fatal 'flu than is normally present at this time of the year.
-----
So, less money, less effective equipment and more calls. Probably less training due to the lack of money (training is normally the first thing to be cut). I can see us going back to being men with vans and bandages. Except of course that someone in government wants us to do the GP role on the cheap, but without the training is that really safe?
Expect deaths.
-----
To be honest I'm getting past caring. The few improvements that we've had in the service have constantly been overshadowed by new policies and ways of working that seem to exist only to destroy morale and chase unscientific government targets. We are being expected to do more for a frozen pay and with equipment that is falling apart.***
Why should I care any more? I can't do anything to change anything. Instead I should just turn up to work, pick up people who think that they are sick and take them to hospital. Then come home and watch some TV and forget about the feverish children that I couldn't record a temperature on because we didn't have a working thermometer.
Why should I get angry over it when I can't change it?
-----
*LAS management don't talk to me, they mostly ignore me, so I don't expect any confirmation/denial. Here is a challenge to my management - deny that either of these rumours are going to happen - here and in public. I'd ask you myself, but the organisational chart is so complex I don't know who'd I'd need to talk to.
**Sadly not only is my face such a strange shape that I can't get a mask to properly secure, but in attempting to get it fitted I managed to break my glasses.
*** An example - We drove the newest ambulance in the fleet, around 1,500 miles on the clock. We had to take it off the road twice in two days for various faults and, looking at the logbook, these were not new problems. Thank you Mercedes. |
| Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 |
lj_maintenance
[ dwell ]
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2:00p |
Network Maintenance: Saturday, November 14, 2009 at 04:00-06:00 UTC/GMT
EDIT@08:16 UTC/GMT. Wow. That was ugly. I expected it to go for 30 minutes and have maybe 1 minute of broken connectivity. Instead it lasted over 4 hours and we had 10 minutes of downtime directly related to the load balancer upgrades and then another 5-10 minutes of downtime when our primary Pingback database server crashed and the secondary couldn't take over; which could have been indirectly caused by the network upgrade missing a self-VIP. Anyways, we're up, we're working, the load balancers are barely breaking a sweat right now and I need some food and a shot of whiskey. I don't even *like* whiskey!! Thanks ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) mhwest and dnewhall for helping out! --- On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice. Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials. We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait! As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work. |
warren_ellis
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10:04a |
HAPPY()SAD
I’m not sure how the universe has withstood Rich Stevens (DIESEL SWEETIES) and Ariana Osborne (SHIVERING SANDS, this site, designing various things of mine at Avatar) teaming up to produce a t-shirt, of all things… but this is the result.
Available to order now, ships in 1 - 2 weeks.
(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.) |
warren_ellis
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9:52a |
Simon Reynolds’ NOTES ON THE NOUGHTIES: Beard Rock
Simon Reynolds is one of my favourite writers. It’s funny, really: I agree with what he writes maybe half the time, at best, but he says it so fucking well, and in such a way that I always have to think about the subject again.
He’s now doing notes on the decade at the Guardian, beginning with a piece on "beard rock." I was, I admit, hoping for a clue as to why I find Will Oldham so inexplicably creepy, but, you know, it’s a fun piece anyway:
…beardedness is tantamount to a visual rhetoric, almost a form of authentication, as though the band are wearing their music on their faces…
(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.) |
warren_ellis
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9:34a |
SHIVERING SANDS: One Week On
So, one week later. Copies of SHIVERING SANDS are now starting to arrive with people — I found this on Kat Foisy’s blog this morning:
(If you want to send me a photo of you posing with SHIVERING SANDS? Email it to my dump address at warrenellis [at] gmail dot com, along with your website address or twitter ID or whatever, and I’ll run it and your link here)
A week since launch of the book. We’ve sold, I believe, a little over four hundred copies. Given that the production of the book involved 1) me culling from seven years of jabbering and sticking it all into a couple of RTF files 2) Ariana flowing all that into a single file and spending a couple months’ worth of spare moments fiddling with it 3) Ariana uploading the thing, ordering a proof and spending an hour checking it over… we were well into any definition of profit by the end of day one.
It is, of course, the long game that pays off. It’s interesting to look at the first week, but it’s not defining.
A persistent criticism of my interest in POD has been that only writers at my level of cultural awareness can make any kind of success out of it. And some of them will now be saying, well, even Warren Ellis can only move 400 copies in the first week of a POD project. But, for one thing, it is about the long game. For everybody. The book doesn’t go away. And, for another, if I’m not aware enough of you to order that POD project — whose fault is that, really? Because, I’ve got to tell you, I wasn’t born with a book deal in one hand and an exclusive comics contract wrapped around my other flipper. Hell, when I was starting out, there wasn’t even an internet.
SHIVERING SANDS is published through Lulu.
(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.) |
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random_reality
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3:19a |
A Written Statement
http://randomreality.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2009/11/10/4377409.html I really need to get hold of a proper written statement so that I can make sure the format and language is more realistic, rather than sounding like one of my statements to a coroners court. What this hopefully shows is that the story is not going to be all first person/interviews.
-----
Personal report of Cpt. P. Almert, Bureau des Impôts 12th March 2011.
On the date in question I was commanding an armed fire-team at Jersey Airport. Our duties for that day were to provide a rapid response to any situation that required a less than lethal/lethal response.
I was initially informed of the incident by officer Tregourny, he had called for general assistance over the radio to the arrivals terminal. As we were nearby I instructed my team that we would provide this assistance.
On arrival to the scene I saw that a number of passengers were bleeding, in the confusion and panic of the public it took me approximately four minutes to reach officer Tregourny. He then indicated two people who seemed to be the cause of the disturbance.
The adult male had gained possession of an asp and was using this to attack member of the public, I later learned that this asp was issued to officer Hawes (deceased).
The adult female was attempting to scratch anyone who approached her, as I watched she removed a shoe and brandished it as a weapon.
At this time I did not see the female child.
As the scene was unsecured with large numbers of the public still present it was my decision to utilise less than lethal options.
Officers Ferruge and Halls advanced upon the two adults and with assistance from the rest of the fire-team subdued the two assailants with incapacitant spray and non-lethal blows and control techniques.
It was then I received a call from our control desk that another attack was happening in the female toilets of the arrival terminal.
As the rest of my team were still dealing with the two adults I made the decision to attend the scene on my own in order to secure the safety of the public. I knew that as soon as the rest of my team were free to assist they would make their way to my location.
I approached the female toilets with my issued incapacitant spray in my hand. From within I could hear the sound of a female screaming.
I entered the toilet and made my way to the end stall. It was there I found the female child biting into an adult female’s stomach. My instant assessment was that the wound that the child had caused was immediately life-threatening.
I shouted a warning at the child and she turned to look at me. Her mouth was covered with blood and in her hands she held viscera of the adult female.
As I prepared to use the incapacitant spray the female child leapt at me and knocked me aside, my spray was also dislodged from my hand.
I was knocked to the ground and the female child turned to attack me again. I was aware that this child had the chance of inflicting serious or life-threatening injuries to me. I was also aware that the attacked female needed immediate medical attention.
I then discharged my pistol into the female child three times, all three rounds striking the child in the chest.
I believe that the female child died immediately from these wounds.
I then radioed my team for assistance and called for immediate, urgent medical assistance for the attacked female.
I later learned that the attacked female died from complications of surgery. |
| Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 |
warren_ellis
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11:02a |
Scripts
People often ask me what comics scripts look like — or, at least, what my comics scripts look like, as there is no industry standard for comics scriptwriting. I have a few scripts up here on the site, and you’re welcome to download them. I write in OpenOffice and save in RTF. Beginning writers may find it instructive to compare the scripts with the published work.
(Please, don’t ask to be shown other scripts instead. These are the ones I have available. Okay?)
MINISTRY OF SPACE #1.
DESOLATION JONES #1.
DESOLATION JONES #7.
(Yes, JONES will be back one day.)
FELL #1.
(And so will FELL.)
(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.) |
warren_ellis
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9:47a |
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