Apple say "Just trust us and pay"...

Once upon a time, I bought an iPhone.   And over the years, as batteries have lost their oomph, devices have got absurdly more powerful and have got software/services have got more demanding, I've bought a handful of other Apple products -- maybe half a dozen in all.

I obviously had to have an account with Apple, and came with 5 GBytes of iCloud storage -- storage in the cloud that the various devices could use to share/exchange data.  They could (and possibly would be default) also try to back themselves up there.  Since 5GBytes was too small to back up anything much, I've always done my own backups for the things that matter, and don't keep anything unique on the others....

Yesterday, my phone alerted me to the fact that my iCloud storage was almost full -- 4.4GBytes out of 5.  "That's odd", I thought, "What is that 4.4 GBytes?".

And so far the answer is "I can't find out".

If I go to look at my iCloud Drive, I see different things everywhere I look (iPhone, iPad, Mac or iCloud.com) -- slightly different groupings or presentations of information.  They all offer me warnings saying I have 568MBytes left.  And invite me to pay for more.  Oh, and the Help pages that nominally tell me how to manage my storage also invite me to pay for more.

Somewhere -- my phone I think -- I saw something that said I have 400 MByte of WhatsApp chats (people keep sending me pictures, so MAYBE) and a comparable amount of Health app data.  And then 3.5 GBytes of "Documents and Data".  But when I try to explore the "Documents and Data", I find a bunch of directories ("Folders") which each say how much data is being used by the files in them, but excluding sub-directories.  And having spent over an hour looking in scores of directories, I don't think I've seen total more than a couple of hundred MBytes. 

So the choices Apple is presenting me with are to delete everything (yes, that is an option) without knowing what I am deleting; risk some synchronisation somewhere failing when the space runs out; or assume that the space is currently full of "good stuff", even though I have no idea what it is, and

and pay for more.

WTF!

 

My Drive Through Experience

On Friday evening (Feb 17th) I went out for dinner, then a drink (literally one), and then set off to ride home.

It was raining, but nothing out of the ordinary and at about half past eleven Iwas passing Meadowbank on my right, and approaching the MacDonalds drive through on my left.  The road there is wide — a lane and a bus lane in each direction — and there was very little traffic, so I would have been riding at something like 15 MPH in the middle of the bus/cycle lane.

I saw a car coming from town, just to the other side of the white line.  I don't know if it was signalling, but based on its road position and speed, I was sure that it was going to turn right into the drive-through.  I judged that we would reach the entrance at pretty well the same time, and if the car continued as it was, I would be clearing the entrance just in time for it to turn in without any bother.  Everything was as it should be.

But the car didn't continue as it was: it cut the corner slightly.  It wasn't going terribly fast, but I suddenly realised it was already on my side of the road, and there was no way I could avoid a collision.

My bike hit the car. My recollections is not perfect, but I think I remember seeing my front wheel crashing into the front/side of the car, followed by a brief moment of no sensation — indeed, darkness — and then the pain of my face hitting the road.

Moments after that, I heard someone — presumably the driver of the car — shouting "What have I done?" "Are you OK?", and (the cyclist's favourite, this one) "I didn't see you!".

I realise it probably made it look like I was out cold — or worse — but before I tried to move, I wanted to take stock of my situation.  I lay still, literally checking whether I could still feel, and wiggle,my toes and fingers.  I then tried slightly larger movements to to see if any part of my body would have the kind of acute pain that I guessed would signal something being broken.

As I lay there, I was aware that there were people — voices — and I could hear someone on the phone, calling an ambulance.

Once I'd completed my bodily functionality check and preliminary damage assessment, I started to slowly and carefully sit up.  A couple of people urged me not to move — citing instructions from the 999 call — but I really did not want to go back to lying in a puddle pressing the injured bits of my face against the tarmac so I finished sitting up, all the while looking out for unexpected pain.

Someone — I think from MacDonald's — handed me a pile of napkins, with which I soon confirmed that I was bleeding — not profusely, but enough to feel the blood trickling on my face — and that I had injured my right hand severely enough that even dabbing my face was painful.  I could see my bike lying on the road a few yards away, and I thought I was aware of the car being somewhere behind me.

I'm not sure how long I sat there for — at the time it felt like "five minutes", and I don't think it could have been much more than ten.

During this time, the pile of napkins was augmented by a generous quantity of paper towel, and a young woman told me she was a nurse that lived nearby, and said she would fetch me a towel.  

It was just starting to dawn on me that sitting on tarmac in the rain was not the best place to be, and maybe I should think of moving somewhere more sensible — somewhere warmer, dryer, and hopefully softer.  But then someone said the ambulance was coming, and soon after that, I heard the siren and saw the ambulance pull up.

A few seconds later, the two guys from the ambulance were talking to me — checking whether I was coherent and then helping me to stand and get into the ambulance.  

Climbing into the vehicle was a challenge: I needed to grip the handle by the door, and my right had did not want to play that game.

Once inside, the guys told me to sit on a bed/trolley, take off my coat and cardigan (and also my socks and shoes, which surprised me) and then lie down so they could examine me.

I realised I was shaking quite violently, but they said that this was adrenaline, and was nothing to worry about.  I also made a point of telling them I was on Warfarin (see  my previous blog post for the enthralling details), and they seemed to recognise the danger that this posed: if I had any kind of internal bleeding, it would not stop as quickly as it normally would, and that could be A Bad Thing.

Someone connected me to a blood pressure machine, and put electrodes on me which, I guess, were for monitoring my heart rhythm. Then one of them checked me over, telling me to say if I experienced pain while he pressed various places and moved my joints.  They also checked my cognitive state — I remember being asked a handful of "pointless" questions that included the current year and month (though not the name of the monarch, which I was more than half expecting).  They also discussed the injuries to my face — in particular my forehead.  One of them commented that one wound to my forehead was "pretty deep": when I asked what he meant by this, he peered at it for a few moments, and then said "Well, I can see your skull".

While this was going on, there was a knock on the door of the ambulance, and a paramedic arrived.  He had a brief chat with the ambulance crew, the upshot of which I believe was that they felt they were in control of the situation, and he could go on his way.

Shortly after that there was another knock, and this time a policeman came in.  He asked me my name and address, and to tell him what I thought had happened.  While I was doing that, his colleague joined him, saying that a minicab driver had seen the incident and had left his contact details.  Once I'd finished telling him my memory of the incident, he said he was going to talk to some of the witnesses who were waiting around; he would be leaving my bike in MacDonald's, that
it was likely that the driver would be charged with careless driving; and that he would be back in touch tomorrow to get a formal statement.

Then, after a couple more minutes of dabbing blood (I believe I got through a significant proportion of the ambulance's stock of gauze), the ambulancemen strapped me in to the trolley, and we set off for the Royal Infirmary.

I couldn't hear any sirens, and we seemed to be driving "normally" (steadily, and stopping occasionally for traffic lights), which was reassuring, but also a bit disappointing...

During the journey the medic with me was asking me about what I did and where I lived — not, I suspect, because he wanted the information, but because he wantd to keep me talking, and thus obviously conscious.

After what seemed like 10 or 15 minutes (and some quite astonishingly rough roads), we pulled up at the Emergency department of the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.  Someone brought a wheel chair.  There was a pause while they repeatedly told someone that they could not go into the department the way they were going, and they had to go round.  They they wheeled me into a concrete corridor where I sat for (I think) 10 or 15 minutes — long enough for me to be joined by another wheelchair carrying a young guy who sat very still and silent — during which time folks enchanged paperwork and looked me over.  I'm guessing this was to confirm the ambulance crew's assessment of my situation.

After that, I was wheeled into the body of the hospital, and into one of a number of curtained-off bays in a fairly large room where half a dozen folk in scrubs were walking purposefully from bay to bay.  After a few minutes, two of them approached me and asked me various questions about how I was feeling.  The woman then left her colleague to ask me about my medical history.  In particular, he asked what medication I was on: I replied "Warfarin", and "nothing else", he said "oh, that's good".  When I asked him why he'd said that, he said that most people my age were on a lot of different drugs.  After this, the woman returned, they spoke for a while, and then she told me she would arrange for me to have an X-Ray of my hand and a scan of my brain in case of haemorrage.  That's the joy of being on anticoagulant.

After this I was wheeled deep into the building, to very large room with well over a dozen — maybe 20 — curtained off treatment bays round the edges and a large central counter/island in the middle.

This place was "busy". In addition to the treatment bays, which were all occupied (or at least had their curtains closed) , I saw over a dozen people lying on trolleys, looking very ill, and very much like they had been there a long time.  There were maybe another 20 folk sitting around, I was wheeled into a gap in the row by the central counter and settled down to wait.  And wait...  

I asked roughly how long I could expect to be waiting, and was told that it was likely to be around eight hours...

I wasn't surprised that Friday night at A&E was very busy.  I was surprised by the average age of the patients I could see — and in particular the folk sying on the trolleys.  They mostly looked (considerably) older than me.  I don't know whether that reflected the age distribution of the patients, or whether those who were younger and less in need of constant observation were in some other waiting area.

I saw at least a dozen staff moving about my half of the area.  They wore scrubs of various colours, and with various badges.  While some were obviously medical, a significant number were doing things like cleaning and tidying (I have no idea how many blood-stained gause pads I dropped), and occasionally offering a cup of tea, or wheeling people from place to place, including those who needed to go for a wee...

Everything seemed very organised and calm — at least, provided you ignored the continual beeping of what I assume were monitoring machines — and for the most part things went very smoothly (if slowly).  At one point, though, I heard a nurse sternly rebuking a patient with "I know you've been waiting 8 hours, but he has been waiting 10 hours, and that's why I'm seeing to him before you".  There was also a Very Restless Woman who from time to time would start shouting "Nurse! Nurse!" and then start wandering in random directions, so that the staff had to steer her back to her seat.

After sitting there for "a long time" — until I'd guess about 3AM, but that is a guess — a policeman arrived and asked whether I would like to give a statement about the incident then, or would I rather wait until tomorrow.  I joked that since I didn't have any other plans for the evening, so I might as well do it now, and he sat down next to me.

We talked about my recollection of what had happened while he asked me questions and then typed a summary of what I'd said into what looked like a mobile phone.  I found myself thinking that while this was clearly a step up from a notebook-and-pen, things might well have gone faster if he had got the phone to take dictation, or even just recorded what I had said.  I mentioned the minicab driver having left his contact details, and my policeman said that he would be hoping to talk to him after he had finished talking to me.

In the midst of all this, we had a fine demonstration of Sod's Law: I had said/joked that I didn't think I would be going anywhere for the next couple of hours, But we were in mid-conversation when a nurse arrived to take me to have my hand X-Rayed.  This took maybe ten minutes (with a doctor to review it in due course), but we hard hardly resumed my statement when another nurse arrived to wheel me off to have a CT scan of my brain, to check for bleeding.

With the policeman gone and the scan and X-Ray done, I realised the exciting parts of the night were probably over, and the rest was going to be even more boring.  So I did my best to close ignore the bustle going on around me, pulled out my phone and started solving "Very Hard" puzzles on my Kakuro app.

I got offered a second cup of tea at around 6AM and then, not long after that, I got moved to a trolley, which made me realise that things were now much quieter than they had been: there were still a couple of monitoring machines beeping away, but it now seemed more like listening to a conversation than a chorus.

Finally, some time about 8 o'clock, a doctor came to my trolley and wheeled it and me into a treatment bay.  He looked at the various bits I said were sore, and when I mentioned the X-Ray and the scan, he said he would check them, too (I really, truly hope that somebody else had checked at least the scan before that exchange).  He told me that I had a "clean" cut that could be glued shut (another of the marvels of materials technology we take so much for granted).  But there was another wound was more complicated — he wasn't sure what to do about it, so he said he would clean everything up and then consult his consultant.

However, just as he seemed to be getting into his wound scrubbing stride, he suddenly stopped.  "That", he said, referring to some part of the background noise that I had managed to blot out of my awareness, "means I have to go and help with a resussitation.  I'll be back as quickly as I can...".  At which point he hurried off, leaving me in the treatment bay.

A few minutes later, a woman with an air of authority appeared, and said that I would have to move, because they needed the bay.  So I walked behind her as she led me to a chair more or less exactly where my wheelchair had first been parked some 8 hours before.

Resussitations take longer than I would have guessed.  During the coming hour and some, I got offered another cup of tea, and a bowl of corn flakes, and took myself off in search of a loo.  During that expedition,I noticed something: there are no mirrors in A&E — not even in the toilets. More than one person has said that this is not accidental...

I think it must have been about ten o'clock that my doctor got back. He took posession of a nearby vacant treatment bay for me, and then after a bit more wound cleaning, went to get a second opinion on what to do about my complicated wound.  "One suture here, one up there, one across there and one there" he was told.  And so he duly went into action, first finding some vials of local anaesthetic and what looked like an enthusiastically wrapped christmas present (albeit using plain white bpaper).  I think it  took him two or three minutes to glue the "simple" lasseration, and something like 15 minutes to administer the anaesthetic and insert the suggested four sutures, at which point his enthusiasm got the better of him, and he decided to do one more to tidy things up.

Once he'd done, he told me I should get the sutures — there were five of them, he said, repeatedly — checked, and possibly removed, in five days time.  After that, he put a bandage over the stitches and said "that's it, you can go now".

This was easier said than done, since I had no idea where the exit was:so after I'd put my shoes on, I had to ask one of the staff for directions. The way out was down a corridor, and then another, which led to a pair of doors the opened into a large waiting area in which there were a couple of dozen people — well — waiting.  

At first I thought they were friends or relatives waiting for patients, like me, to come out.  But when I noticed that beside the door I had come through there was a counter, complete with a safety screen that stretched up to the ceiling, I began to wonder whether this area was in fact the first stage of the queue to get seen — a stage I had skipped because the ambulance crew judged my condition to be sufficiently serious that I needed to be kept under observation...

On the wall beside the door I had come through there was a large display screen which was saying that there were currently 85 people (presumably patients) in the department, and that the wait time was currently 9.5 hours, though it wasn't clear whether this was the time until someone starts treating you, or until someone can avoid being caalled away by emergencies long enough to finish treating   

And so, close on 12 hours since my journey home had started, I was on my way again...

I got home about midday.  I thought about going straight to bed for a nap, but decided that this would be likely to seriouly disrupt my sleep pattern for several days, and I'd do better to just stay awake until "bed time".  So that's what I did.

The following day, I realised that several other bits of my body were sore: most obviously my thighs, but also my arms.  A noticeable chunk of my face was covered in firmly-attached, rock-hard scab, I had developed really noticeably black eyes (which got even more pronounced as the day wore on) and my top lip was so swollen that I kept whistling between my teeth as I spoke.

Obviously, in an ideal world the car driver would have had his wits about him and not doubled his drive though experience by driving through me.  But if there had to be "an incident", I don't think it could have gone much better than it did.

I will always remember the sense of relief when, lying on the road, I confirmed that I could still feel, and move, my feet and hands, and that nothing (major) was broken.  Things could so easily have been so much worse.  As it is, it looks like for the next few days I will be "sore", and less than usually handsome, but that is "it".

The ambulance got to me really quickly, and both the crew and every member of staff I encountered at A&E seemed competent and very focused on their jobs. Even the folks at MacDonalds did their best to help.

The obvious thing that could have been better was the wait time.  I suspect many of you will guess the party political comment have omitted at this point  The policeman also commented on the fact that I was not wearing a cycle helmet, and that is something I will have to think about.

Not Having a Heart Attack

At about 5AM on Tuesday the 27th of October, I got up to go to the loo.

As I got back into bed, I realised I had a slight pain in my back, a bit above and in from my left elbow.  I stretched to try to shift it, and snuggled down to go back to sleep.

But the pain didn't go.  I fidgeted to try to get comfortable, but to no avail.  And then it started getting worse, like someone was poking me in the back with their finger.  Firmly at first, and then quite hard.

I've had pretty severe pain from a "locked" joint in my back before, so I wasn't too surprised, and just tried to get comfortable and relax.  But the pain kept getting worse: no longer like being poked with a finger, more like with a knitting needle. 

No matter how I moved about, it wouldn't go.  I could feel the muscles in my back contracting hard, and the guy with the knitting needle was joined by a friend pushing a nail down into the top of my left shoulder.

And as the guy began wiggling the knitting needle about, I began to think that it wasn't just a problem with a joint in my back.  The muscles in my side were in spasm now, and it was painful to breathe deeply.

What could it be?  Could I be having a heart attack?  Could I actually be dying?  I vividly remember considering that as a real possibility.

But I could feel my heart beating slowly and regularly -- which was not what I'd expect to feel during a heart attack.  And didn't heart attacks have pain spreading across your chest?  I didn't have any of that...

But clearly something was wrong.  I had to do something... but what?  Phone Danny downstairs to come up?  Phone 999?

I hauled myself upright, which hurt a lot, and sat on the bed to regain my composure while I decided what to do.

And I noticed that as I sat there, the pain more-or-less went away, so that  after a few moments I found myself sitting calmly, breathing normally, heart beating slowly and steadily, and only the feeling of someone poking me in the back with their finger...   Which didn't at all match my understanding of a heart attack. So maybe it was just a really nasty back problem after all...

I tried lying down again.  But within a few seconds, the guys with the sharp implements were at it again. Sit up: fine.  Walk around the room: fine. Lie down: sharp pain, rising quickly in intensity.  Nothing I'd heard about heart attacks (or that I read when I searched the internet -- yes, at 5:30 in the morning, I really did search the Internet for the symptoms of heart attacks) suggested that the pain went away if you got up and walked about. So, I decided, it wasn't a heart attack.  Which meant it must be something to do with my back after all.

I remembered that lying on a firm surface was meant to be good for your back, so I tried lying on the floor.  But I couldn't do it: before I could even get nearly flat, the guys with the sharp implements were at it with a vengeance and the muscles in my back and across my belly were in spasm.

Yet as soon as I stood up, and walked around, everything went back to normal...

I really didn't know what to do: dialling 999 -- or even waking Danny -- just for a back ache seemed absurd.  So I propped myself up in bed with pillows, and  turned on the radio while I considered my options

I was actually due to see a physiotherapist that afternoon, in connection with a problem I'd had with my knee, and so I decided that the right thing to do was to  "re-purpose" that appointment to see if she could sort out my back...  But would the let me do that?  Ambush her with a completely unrelated complaint?  I wasn't sure, so I decided it would do no harm to go and see the doctor, just in case...

For the next couple of hours, until it was time to get up, I sat and listened to the Today programme, and dozed.  Then I had a shower and got dressed, with only the kind of problem I'd expect from a back problem, and set off for the  9 o'clock open surgery at the University Health Centre.  As I was walking there, I found myself worrying that the doctor would feel I was making a fuss about nothing.  After all, the only symptom I had while I was upright was that if I tried to take a really deep breath, it triggered a sharp pain just in from my left elbow.  But the memory of lying in my bed a few hours before, literally wondering whether or not I was dying, convinced me that whatever had happened deserved at least some reassuring noises from Someone Who Knows.  So on that basis, I decided to risk the charge of hypochondria, and see a doctor anyway.

At about 9:40 or so, my turn came round, and Dr. Millar -- one of the doctors at the health centre -- called me in to his office and listened while I explained what had happened, emphasising that, although I was obviously fine now, I really had felt pretty awful a few hours before. He put a rubbery gizmo on the end of my finger, and a cuff around my arm, and we watched while red and green numbers displayed that my heart rate, blood pressure and oxygen levels were all entirely normal.  Then he asked me if I'd been on any long journeys recently (only one car trip to London, almost two months before), or had any surgery (I hadn't), or whether anyone in my family had ever had Deep Vein Thrombosis.  "Yes", I said.  My dad had suffered badly with DVT -- it had forced him to retire early from the Post Office, because he found it painful to stand up for long periods.   And in fact, he had died of a pulmonary embolism while recovering from straightforward stomach surgery.

A few more questions then led into one of the most unexpected experience I've ever had, certainly in a medical context.  Dr. Millar produced a tape measure, carefully measured a distance down my right shin, and then measured the circumference of my leg.  And then did the same thing on my left leg.  I've since realised that he was checking for signs of swelling in my legs, but at the time it seemed like something out of Alice in Wonderland.

After a few more questions about my dad, he said he was "fairly sure" that my problem had just been muscular, but he thought it was worth me having a few tests "just in case".   I waited in the waiting room while he made the necessary phone calls.  At first he couldn't get through, but at around 10:30 he came out and gave me a letter to take to an appointment at the Acute Receiving Unit (the what?) at the Western General at 11 o'clock.   Getting an appointment in just thirty minutes' time, and being told it would be better if I didn't drive there, made me realise that, far from thinking I was wasting his time, Dr. Millar clearly thought there was something seriously wrong.  At which point, the penny dropped, and I realised the significance of the questions about my dad's problems...

Hailing a passing taxi got me there with a few minutes to spare.  I handed in my letter, then found a seat in the waiting area with about half a dozen other people, and prepared for a long wait.

But within just a couple of minutes, a nurse appeared and called me in.  I sat on a trolley/bed while she took several blood samples and checked my heart rate and blood pressure, and then I gingerly sat back while she attached wires to my arms, legs and body and plugged them into a machine that printed a ECG, which she took with her in search of a doctor.

Within two of three minutes, she led me into the next room where, something like 10 minutes after I'd walked into the building, a doctor explained to me that my GP had asked them to check whether I had had a heart attack or blood clot.   Based on the ECG, he was pretty sure that I hadn't had a heart attack, but he couldn't say anything about the blood clot until he got the results of the blood tests, which would be back in about an hour.  So I should go and have a cup of tea, and return to the general waiting area by about 12 o'clock.

After a long half hour trying nervously sipping at a cup of tea and nibbling a panini, I returned to the waiting area just before 12.   The doctor re-appeared, and led me back to the office.  The blood tests had confirmed that I had not had a heart attack, but the test that should have ruled out a blood clot on my lung had not done so.  My result was inconclusive, and the doctor felt I should have a CT scan.  Unfortunately, he couldn't say when that would happen: although the scanner was invariably busy, they tried to keep some slots free for acute referrals, so I'd just have to wait for one of those slots-- and it could be a long time.

The nurse put a cannula in my arm, so they could inject stuff that would make the blood flow more easier to see on the scan, and I went back to the waiting area to, well, wait.

There was a television, high up on the wall at one end of the room, but since the sound was turned right down, the procession of talking heads and adverts was not really very engaging.  Until, that is, I saw my name on the screen.  I did a double take, but saw only adverts.  Then, briefly, my name was back: the caption introduced the next section of the program as "Judge R Inder".  It seemed pretty surreal, and I found myself thinking of the television series "Life on Mars", where the main action took place in the lead character's dream, and reality only impinged through what he sometimes saw on the television.   The opposite seemed to be happening to me!  That was fiction.  But what was this?  Why was I seeing my name on national television?

The TV show (the one in the waiting room, not "Life on Mars") was in a court room setting, where two women were standing in front of a guy dressed in legal gear, who was asking them questions.   Hence, I guessed, the "Judge" part.  But my name?

It was only at the next break for adverts that I realised what was happening: the caption actually said "Judge Rinder".  But it was set in all capitals -- as "JUDGE RINDER" -- using a font in which the "R" had a particularly long/wide sloping leg, so that there was a noticeable gap between it and the rest of the word.  So it appeared, at first glance, to be "JUDGE R INDER".

Once I'd refuted the evidence that suggested I might be in some kind of dream, I still had a long, nervous wait. Eventually, though, the doctor re-appeared, albeit with disappointing news.  It seemed the scanner was particularly busy that day, so they weren't going to be able to fit my scan into their schedule.  So they would be sending me home, and I should come back the next morning, and expect to be there all morning.  Oh, and they gave me an injection of Dalteparin, an anti-coagulant, in my belly, Just In Case.

I went home in a bit of a daze, mooched about the house until about 10:00, and then went to bed. My attempts to lie down quickly summoned the guy with the knitting needle, so I propped myself up with pillows and dozed the night away.

The next morning, armed with several magazines, I returned to the Western General, where a different doctor put a cannula in my other arm, and again sent me to the waiting room.  But not that long after a nurse appeared and led me upstairs to be scanned.

Someone had warned me that because you had to go in to a small tunnel within the machine, getting scanned was a pretty claustrophobic experience.  But actually, the machine at the Western General stands like a wall across in the middle of the room, and you just have to pass through a hole in a cabinet.  So it wasn't claustrophobic at all. 

Nevertheless, the scan was an horrendous experience.  I had to lie on my back, which I could just about manage, but doing so induced gradually mounting pain.  I did my best to lie still, and told the radiographer that I was in considerable pain.  Her reply -- that that was why I was having a scan, and she would have me out of there in less than 3 minutes -- did little to make the activities of the guy with the knitting needle any easier to bear.

But then it was over, and I was back to the  waiting room, where I again had the chance to watch Judge Rinder in action. Eventually, the doctor came to fetch me, and led me to the office.  The scan had confirmed that I did indeed have a "moderate" blood clot on my left lung - an "unprovoked pulmonary embolism".  "Unprovoked" because none of the usual causes of these things were present in my case -- it had, apparently, turned up out of the blue.

But regardless of its origin, the treatment was to put me on drugs that would make my blood less likely to clot.  That would prevent the clots getting any bigger, which in turn would allow them to be broken down in the normal way.  So I could look forward to 3 to 9 months on a daily dose of Warfarin.

Getting the right dose, though, was critical, and  so I'd have to come to the hospital so they could take a sample of my blood, measure the INR and then tell me how much Warfarin I should take that night.  And I'd have to do this every day until my INR was in the target range for two days. After that, my GP would take over the blood testing, and it could be less frequent... Oh, and until they did get the dose right, they'd be giving me a daily dose of Dalteparin at the same time.  Starting right then, with another injection in my belly.

On the bus home, I tried to piece things together.  The way the pain went away when I was upright, but started building up over several seconds when I was lying down, seemed to fit with a blood clot that was only partially blocking an artery.  When I was upright, at least some blood could get past it, and so the symptoms faded and all was well.  But when I lay down, things moved so that it cut off the blood supply to part of my lung.  Which started getting more and more painful...

So I got into a routine of sleeping propped up in bed, going down to the hospital to have needles stuck in me each morning, and then getting a phone call to tell me how much Warfarin to take each evening.   For the first few days, I saw a different nurse each day, but quite quickly I worked my way through the entire staff of the Ambulatory Care department, and soon new them all by name.

I got quite excited at the weekend, when my blood test was in the right range for two days in a row, which the doctor had said would be the cue for handing me over to the GP.  But it was actually more complicated than that, explained the Woman With the Needles: before they would discharge me, they wanted to see a stable, satisfactory INR reading from a stable daily dose of Warfarin.  And at that stage my dose was still varying, which meant I'd have to come back the following day for another blood test which, sure enough, was outside the target range.  In the end, I had another full week of daily blood tests and injections in my belly while they slowly increased my daily Warfarin dose to the point where my INR was in the middle of their target range.

Each night during the first week, I found I could lie a little closer to horizontal without pain, so that by the end of the week I could get a reasonable night's sleep.  But only on one side, mind: lying on my back soon attracted the attention of the guy with the knitting needle, and I could not even contemplate lying on the other side.   But aside from that, the real only symptom I had was the short, sharp pain when I took a really deep breath.   I say "real" symptom, because I was incredibly aware of every little twinge or ache -- "was that pins and needles in my leg?", "did that brief, sharp pain inside my hip when I first moved signify anything?".

Then, as I was coming down stairs a couple of days ago -- a bit over two weeks after my Nasty Night -- I noticed that I felt different.  My arms felt "loose", and moving was easy.   And, indeed, I could take a deep breath with only the slightest hint of pain right at the very last moment.  At which point I realised that for the previous two weeks, I'd been subconsciously tensing the muscles in my trunk.

So now, I think I am on the road to recovery.

However, I've clearly got quite a way to go.  I tried going to table tennis practice on Friday, and although I didn't experience any pain, I did have to sit down for a rest after maybe ten minutes of gentle knocking up, and after doing that twice, I was pretty shattered, and very grateful for the offer of a lift home!

I must say the medical treatment I received was really excellent.  The GP took my complaint seriously, the hospital saw me within minutes of arriving there, and everyone I encountered on my numerous subsequent visits did a grand job.

At one stage, I definitely felt that they could have raised my Warfarin does more quickly, and thus saved me the time and discomfort of several trips to the hospital to have needles stuck in me. That, of course, is only natural for the one who has to spend the time and endure the discomfort without any knowledge of the problems that could be caused by getting things wrong.  But it also highlighted what I believe is one of the most important features of the NHS.

If the hospital had been a commercial organisation, they would no doubt be charging (either me, or my insurance company) hundreds of pounds for each blood test and Dalteparin injection.  They would, therefore, have a strong financial incentive to take their time over getting the dose right.   But within the NHS, I could be confident that there were no such factor in play, and that those who were cautiously inching my dose upwards were acting purely in what they judged to be  my best interest. And I think that is very, very important.

I *STILL* Hate Microsoft

Microsoft have done it again, and I have just lost most of this morning.

The problem?  Backups on my Windows 7 machine started failing.

All I got was a popup window saying that the backups had failed, and suggesting I look in the logs for details.  And when I looked in the logs, this is what I found:

Windows Backup failed while trying to read from the shadow copy on one of the volumes being backed up. Please check in the event logs for any relevant errors. (0x81000037)    

Helpful, huh?  "One of the volumes being backed up".  No hint as to which one, mind.

But, nothing daunted, I remember that Google is my friend, and I try searching for the relevant string.

And I get pages like this one http://support.microsoft.com/kb/973455#workaroundissue12

Which is obviously about the relevant error message, and is completely incomprehensible.  Now, OK, I'm not a Windows expert, but I have been using computers "all day every day" for 30 years.  But the problem description, and the solution, mean nothing to me.  So although there is a glimmer of light in the darkness, I am certainly not enlightened.

Apparently I have got a problem with a "reparse point" in my "library", and if I remove it, the backup will work.  The first problem is that I've never heard of a "reparse point".  A few minutes with Google suggests they are some kind of file system sorcery that causes files to appear to be in places where they are not, or making additional or network disk drives appearing as folders in the file system.   But knowing that doesn't help much because I have not done anything unusual to my "Library" in months.  I believe it contains "My Photos" and "My Documents" and such like, so I have no doubt added things to it.  But I haven't done anything unusual, and certainly nothing knowingly involving "reparse points".  So it is not obvious where the problem is going to be.

The instructions go on to describe how to use the Windows Command Prompt (Remember that?  This is Windows 7, mind) to identify the "junction points" (which is a synonym for "reparse point" --- why have one inscrutable jargon term when you can have two) in my system.  And I see that there are many --- about a dozen.  One of which, apparently, may be a problem, even though none of them have apparently changed in nearly three years.  So although Microsoft give me instructions on how to delete one, I still have no idea how to decide which one to delete.

So, back to Google, which finds me many other people expressing similar frustration.

But then buried away on about page 4 of a long discussion of the problem in a Microsoft forum, I notice a couple of mentions of virus checkers.  Which reminds me that, a few days ago Microsoft Security Essentials had detected a problem --- could that be it?  I had told it to remove the offending file, but...

So I look in my Security Essentials history, and it indeed tells me that it has quarantined a file -- some kind of Java exploit.  So I tell it to remove that file, and try the backup again....

And it fails again.

But some kind of virus checker problem seems a much more plausible cause of the problem than unexpected "reparse points" in my "Library".  So, at the suggestion of another forum participant, I turn off Security Essentials and try another backup --- which succeeds!

So the problem is definitely with the virus checker causing the backup to fail, and Backup's messages about inability to read a shadow volume are completely wrong.

Trick is, the virus checker history is not showing me any quarantined items.

Oh, but just a minute...   I'm asking to see "Quarantined Items" --- but there is also an option to see "All detected items"...  And yes, that is showing another problem that has been found --- a different Java exploit, in the Java cache in my son's account.  Which has, apparently, been quarantined -- though for some reason this didn't result in it showing up in the "Quarantined Items" list

So I remove this file, and run the backup again without problem.

So, after over two hours of thrashing about, I learn that if Microsoft Security Essentials quarantines a file, it will prevent Microsoft Backup from backing up your computer until it is removed.  That may, or may not, be reasonable.

But neither piece of Microsoft software warns you of this interaction, and that certainly isn't reasonable. 

"Your web site doesn't work"

The problem reports I see from some members of the public leaves me speechless.

I'm talking about problem reports submitted via ASPC's web site, using a
"Contact Us" form and selecting "Report a problem with the web site".

Until now, "Your web site doesn't work" was the most breathtaking.

Nothing at all had changed on the site for many days, and (literally) thousands of people were happily using it at the time this message was sent. So, basically, the site was fine.

So I was left to try to guess what this person was actually seeing when they decided to complain about something which was so obviously wrong that they need say no more.

But today brought something that gives it a run for its money: "lost ASPC REF NO."

A complaint which, although it gives more information, is still utterly inscrutable. Is he saying that the reference numbers are no longer appearing on properties? Anywhere? Throughout the web site? On a specific page? In emails? Or is the problem that one particular reference number no longer works. Could his problem have been solved by an appropriate use of a Post It? Or what?

It seems to me that the people who send messages like this are exhibiting a total failure to take into account the recipient's (complete lack of) understanding of their situation.

Of a kind that I think I have seen used as a diagnostic test for Autism-spectrum problems.

So, who's to say what counts as "normal"?

I Hate Microsoft Windows

I haven't said that for a while, so I thought it was a good thing for getting this long-dormant blog going again.

What's my particular reason for saying it on this occasion? Internet Explorer and Cookies.

We've written some software that uses cookies to identify users who have logged in, and I wanted to actually look at the cookies to see exactly what it was doing.

How? Well, IE 8, at least, doesn't make that it obvious how you do that, but after a brief burst of Googling, I found the answer: go to the Tools menu, select "Internet Options", and in the "Browsing History" panel, select "Settings". You get a new window, entitled "Temporary Internet Files and History Settings", from which you select "View files". Not exactly obvious, but OK. And there, in amongst 99 assorted files, were a bunch of 10 with names that started cookie:. Super.

Except that none of those cookie files had been modified for weeks, and none of them were obviously related to the site I was working on.

Puzzled, I looked again at the "Temporary Internet Files and History Settings". One of the settings, "Current Location" was the name of a folder:
C:\Users\Robert\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\TemporaryInternetFiles\

Presumably, I thought, the name of the folder where my cookies (and other "Temporary Internet Files") were being stored. And when I looked in that folder, I indeed saw the same 99 files that Internet Explorer had shown me. And no sign of the cookie I actually wanted.

So I prodded about, and after a while tripped over another folder:
C:\Users\Robert\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Cookies

Where I found 13 files that looked like cookies: 9 corresponding to the ones I had seen in The Other Place, plus a couple more that didn't correspond to anything, but that weren't the one I was looking for either.

But there was also a folder, named Low. And lo! In there, I found 98 further Cookie files! Including the one corresponding to the cookie I was looking for.

So when I looked in IE, it told me I had 9 cookies stored in one place.

But it was actually using cookies stored somewhere else, where it had almost 100!

I have long hated the way Microsoft, and Windows in particular, try to protect naive users (or, alternative, avoid putting off non-technical buyers) by hiding complexity, in such a way that turns the whole system into black magic.

But this surpasses their normal level of obfuscation. To explicitly say IE has 9 things stored in one place when it is actually using 98 things stored somewhere quite different, is not just "hiding complexity" -- it is confusing, and misleading users (perhaps dangerously).

This kind of thing just makes it more likely for people to find computers incomprehensible, and think they are beyond them.

And I think that is a nasty thing to do.


P.S. And I've just noticed that when I told IE to delete cookies, it deleted almost all of them from the "Other Place". Strangely, it left behind four that came from microsoft.com.

Standards Of Literacy

I realise I may sound a bit like Lynn Truss, but to my mind, "Say your family name" and "Say 'your family name'" are two different instructions.

They are different because one has quotes around the words "your family name", and the other does not. The quotes are there because they make a difference. And in this context, that difference is to indicate that their content should be taken literally.

So while the first ("Say your family name") is asking me to say "Inder", the second ("Say 'your family name'") is asking me to say the three words "your family name".

But this distinction seems to be lost on the people who design BT's bills related paperwork. For years, they have instructed customers to "quote 'your account number' on all correspondence".

What do they think the quotes round "your account number" are for? What effect do they think they are having on the meaning of the sentence?

It is not as if this were a letter sent out by a junior secretary in a hurry. This is in the payment instructions that have gone out with every bill for years now: someone would have been picked for the job of designing the forms, and expected to spend time getting them right.

But it is worse than that. Given the associated printing costs, and the high visibility of the documents, I cannot believe those instructions were not vetted by at least three layers of management. But they were approved. Presumably without anyone having enough confidence in their own level of literacy to query the purpose of these stray quotes.

And in fact, it is even worse than that. These bills must have been seen by practically every manager in the company (well, except those that get their phone service from one of BT's competitors). Surely some of them must have noticed something amiss. But none of them has the confidence and concern for their employer's image to have done anything about it. Do they all think those quotes are needed? Or look sophisticated? Or that so few people will notice that it isn't worth getting them removed?

Oh dear, oh dear...

Curling

I tried curling yesterday. And although I was continually aware I was flapping about on ice (and indeed did plant my backside on it once), that didn't stop me enjoying myself.

It's much more of a team game than I'd expected.

At one level, it is very similar to bowls: there is a target at the far end of the playing space; players take it in turns to launch a "projectile" towards it; and the side/team that end up closest to the target score points. In both, obviously, the skill of the player launching the projectile is in finely judging the weight and line of the launch. And, if the curler starts their stone spinning as they launch it, it will tend to travel on a curved path: it will curl. More so as it slows down. Just like the bias on a bowling bowl.

But the interesting difference is that that, once the stone is on its way, the other team members can influence its course. Sweeping the ice in front of the stone reduces the friction, and thus makes it slide further, which allows the other members of the team (as directed by their captain) to adjust the effective strength of the launch. And the sweeping also affects the extent to which the stone curls, so that sweeping (or not) at different points along the stone's travel fine tunes the aim of the stone on its way towards its target.

Fascinating.

Windows 7: One week, two bugs

Well, I've been dabbling with Windows 7 for just on a week now, and I've found two bugs.

First, it has the same "auto hide task bar" feature that Windows XP. Except that in XP, the task bar hides automatically. And in Windows 7, it usually doesn't. Don't know why. Sometimes it does. But, it seems, after a while it gets tired, or bored, and stops hiding.

Great.

Second, it has unnecessary and un-documented interaction between features.
Specifically, Windows 7 introduces two new features: Aero Snap and Aero Shake.

Aero Shake is a brand new feature. If you use the mouse to start dragging a window by its header bar, and "shake" the window, it will minimise every other window, leaving the one being dragged and shaken the only one open on the desktop. So you can see it clearly and, I guess, get at other things on the desk top at the same time. Shake it again, and the others go back the way they were. Kinda neat, I guess.

Aero Snap is a feature that, when you drag a window into the top or bottom of the screen, maximises it, while if you drag it into the side of the screen, it "half maximises" it --- that is expands it to fill half the screen. Now, XP has something like this, too, but I've never understood it. All I've noticed is that when I try to move a window, it sometimes maximises itself. Which is, to a very good approximation, never what I want.

So the Windows 7 mechanism is an improvement, in that I understand what it does. And, moreover, it only does the resize when you release the mouse button. But it does an animation the moment the mouse hits the edge of the screen, so you get warning of what is going happen, and can prevent it by dragging the mouse/window back away from the edge of the screen.

But, best of all, it can be disabled! There is a registry key (hey, it is windows, after all), and Google will find you any number of people telling you how to set it.

But there is also a tick box, which appears on several screens within the "Control Panel" hierarchy, that controls it. The box is labelled thus:

"Prevent windows from being automatically arranged when moved to the edge of the screen"

A 14-word description that does not rely on terminology, like "Aero Snap", that may be unfamiliar and off-putting to the novice user. Probably the result of much attention to usability, and no doubt the subject to extensive user testing and evaluation. Just the sort of label that one would hold up as an example of how to do interface design, if it only described what the tick box did.

But unfortunately, it doesn't: the tick box doesn't just disable "Aero Snap". It also disables "Aero Shake" --- a facility which has nothing whatsoever to do with dragging windows to the edge of the screen.

So the 14-word description of the tick box is clear, friendly, and wrong.

Thanks, guys...

Accessible Toilets: Going through the motions

So Scotrail have done it again.  Though I suspect the blame is elsewhere.
Obviously we, as a society, have to take reasonable steps to make our environment and society accessible to those with a disabiltiy. So we have ramps and kneeling busses for people who cannot cope with steps; subtitles and induction loop systems for the deaf; bleeping pedestrian crossings and bobbly ramps for the blind.
I'm sure that many of these things make disabled people's lives better. But sometimes, I get the feeling someone is just going through the motions.
One such example is the toilets on some of the recently refurbished Scotrail diesel railcar units. The toilet in one of the carriages is designed to be particularly friendly to the disabled. It is large enough to accommodate a wheelchair, with a wide powered sliding door, operated by pushing buttons. And for the benefit of the blind, everything inside is labelled in Braille. Including this...

Yes, that's right. Someone has labelled the door status lights in Braille.
I admit it was the superficial absurdity that first caught my attention: if someone is reading the signs in braille hardly needs labelled indicator lights. Or are they supposed to use the heat from the bulb to work out which one is on? 
OK, so it's not actually completely pointless: there are no doubt some people who can see well enought to know that there is a light on, but not well enough to read its label.
But Braille labels on indicator lights still feels like some kind of "legislation gone mad" arrangement.
And that's not the limit of the design problem, because the lights, and associated door controls, are located on the wall opposite the door. So our hypothetical blind traveller has to grope his way all the way round the (extra spacious) toilet area in order to find the controls to lock the door.
This, surely, isn't the best we can do for a disabled-friendly toilet.
Off the top of my head: instead of buttons and lights, have a chunky switch or lever that turns (or slides) between "Open" and "Closed" positions. And instead of putting it on the opposite side of the room, put it either on, or near, the door --- where one might expect things to do with the door to be located.
Just adding Braille to the labels on some indicator lights is just going through the motions.

Mac Air Fan, Boy!

So I guess I should confess that I've got a Macbook Air.

One of the first generation models, with the smaller disk and the less-capable graphics card, so Lewis's had it at about a third off the price of the current one.

It's nice in many ways, though at times it does tend to get rather warm, and, when the cooling fan ramps up, distinctly audible.

That wouldn't make much difference to me, since I mostly use it for typing text and occasional bursts of web surfing, except that it can be driven to working hard by, say, a flash animation running un-noticed in a corner of an off-the-screen Web page. So I've got into the habit of making sure I avoid such things. But still, sometimes, the machine starts to get warm and "noisy" (well, OK, noticeably not silent :-) for no apparent reason.

When this happened the other day, I took the time to investigate. And discovered, eventually, that part of the sound system (coreaudiod) was using over 10% of the CPU, even though there was nothing that used sound being run at all. Moreover, Mr. Google showed me that other people were also observing this same phenomenon. It seems that it is prone to running away like this under some circumstances. The problem is present in Snow Leopard, too, and can be triggered by "any" application that uses audio --- even a terminal window (can you say "bell"?)

I also found a command to restart the daemon:

sudo launchctl stop com.apple.audio.coreaudiod

I tried it, and the new incarnation of the daemon was as lethargic/inactive as you'd hope for an audio daemon on a machine being silent.

Straight away, the CPU temperature started to fall, as in due course did the fan speed,

So it seems that the 10% load was enough to keep the CPU fully powered up, and thus fully heat producing...

Good, eh!

Robert.

Windows WTF

So, on an XP machine, I was transferring a file to a files system shared from a remote machine - a "network drive".

I browsed to the directory/folder in Windows Explorer (N.B. Windows Explorer), and noticed that there was an awful lot of accumulated junk in it.

So I selected a handful of files, and right-clicked on them.  At which point I got a popup message from Internet Explorer (NB Internet Explorer) saying

This page has an unspecified potential security risk. 

Would you like to continue?"

Continue with what?  I was only trying to bring up a menu!

And why does that, or anything else, involve Internet Explorer?

On the third attempt, out of curiosity, I tried clicking "yes".

The window went away.

Nothing else appeared to happen.

Thanks, Microsoft.

iPhone Update Pitfall

Well, Apple have just wasted the best part of two hours of my time on an iPhone update.

Apple have just released the latest version of the iPhone software (3.1). It works with (i.e. requires) the latest version of the iTunes system (v. 9).

But if you (accidentally) decline to update to the new version of iTunes,the old version will cheerfully offer you the new iPhone software and try to install it for you.

And then fail, leaving the phone completely non-functional (just an apple on the screen -- it won't even turn off in that state).  Bad for the bowels, that one...

Which means you have to figure out how to force the phone to turn off (hold the on/off button AND the "home" button at the same time, for several seconds.

Then you have to install the new version of iTunes.  Then you have to turn the phone back on and connect it to the computer.  Then you have to wait while (the new)  iTunes restores your phone.  At this point your phone starts working again.  Then you have to disconnect the phone and re-connect it again and wait while iTunes re-installs your Apps.

It's all fairly straightforward.  But it takes ages, and your phone is non-functional for well over half an hour...

And all this is could have been avoided if the iPhone update had checked the version of iTunes...

Bargle.

Harry Potter and the Half-Baked Plotline

OK, so having said I was both disappointed and really impressed by the latest Harry Potter film, I guess I should try to explain what I meant.

I was disappointed because I didn't think the main plot of the film was very strong, or contributed much to the overall plot of the series.

The film seemed to be completely dominated by the kind of "background colour" events that normally surround the real plot --- Quiddich, weird minor characters doing whacky and amusing things (typically involving special effects), parties and such like --- almost to the exclusion of "the real plot."

So in terms of the overall "Harry versus The Big Baddie" plot, my first thought, as I left the cinema, was that "not a lot happened."

On reflection, that's not true. But what did happen largely happened "in the background", as a number of disjointed, un-emphasised events going on around the edges of daily life in Hogwarts. That is, I guess, the way of crises in the real world (did someone say "climate change"?) But it meant that the film didn't really build to its climax, it just seemed to have one at the relevant time, almost out of a sense of duty.

But on the other hand, the time just flashed by. When the final credits rolled, I couldn't believe it -- I even (very briefly!) wondered whether they had put the opening credits far further into the film than normal!

But no: they really were the final credits, and I'd been sitting there, completely engrossed (and, I believe, fully awake:-), for two and a half hours.

And I think that was really impressive. The last time I experienced that kind of "No! That can't be the end!" feeling was watching "Roger Rabbit" (and that was only an hour and a half).

So: really impressed despite being slightly disappointed...

Humo(u)rless Americans

There is something of a stereotype to the effect that Americans have no sense of humour, or at best, only a somehow "childish" or unsophisticated one.

But the other day, I saw concrete evidence of a cultural divide in this area that I had not expected.

I was looking for a gift for someone who was going to be convalescing for a few weeks, and I decided to get them a couple of humourous books. I don't like buying from Amazon because of their behaviour over the "one click ordering" patent, but on this occasion I really wanted a wide choice of books and quick/reliable delivery. So I decided ignore my reservations and see what they had on offer.

Since I wanted something to cheer up a convalescent, I headed straight for the "Humour" section... and couldn't find it! Which was really surprising, because I was sure that I'd seen it in the past. But although Amazon were offering 35 different categories of books, Humour was not one of them.

Upon investigation, it transpired that I had somehow managed to start the books on the amazon.com site instead of amazon.co.uk, and it turns out that the American site does not have "Humo(u)r" as one of its top-level categories.

Now, I'm confident this isn't a mistake. I assume that Amazon has determined the categories on each site on the basis of market research, or studying logs, or organising focus groups or some such. And so the differences reflect difference between (Amazon's customer groups in) the two societies.

So, for instance, while British and Americans both have "Religion and Spirituality" as a top level category, the Americans also have "Christian Books". And I'm guessing that this reflects the greater importance of Christianity in the US.

Similarly, a stereotype is no doubt confirmed by the fact that the UK has "Poetry, Drama and Criticism" and both "Languages" and "Foreign Languages", while the US does none of these, and by the US having Arts and Photography while the UK has Art, Architecture and Photography.

And maybe the fact that the US has "Outdoors and Nature" when the UK does not is a sign Americans are somehow closer to nature, and more concerned with (being in) their natural environment.

But what does the lack of "Humour" tell us? It seems to me to be an obvious top level category: there are a lot of books that are written to make the reader laugh, and "a book to make someone laugh" is clearly a natural thing for people in Britain to look for.

But that's not the case in America. There, "Humor" is a sub-category of Entertainment, alongside "Movies", "TV" and "Puzzles and Games".

So what does that tell us about the Americans see the world? Or books? Or humour?

Hmmm...

I've gone and got an iPhone!

As you may have inferred, from my previous "Windows Mobile Woes" postings, I was never entirely happy with my Windows Mobile Smartphone. But finally, the need to upgrade all kinds of everything just at the time O2 announced the availability of the new 3G model prompted me to take the plunge, and in February I got a shiny new 3G iPhone.

It's really a very nice device in many ways. It looks good --- it was literally a shiny new iPhone --- and it feels good: very solid, just weighty enough to feel important. And to go with the polished appearance and solid feel of the hardware, the software is equally polished and solid.

Polished, in that it has interface features that are not only effective and intuitive, but are also actually fun to use: the way you flick your finger across the screen to scroll things (and then watch them slow to a halt), the pinch/stretch gestures to zoom in and out, and so on. And solid, in the sense that I still don't know how to reset it --- something which sets it apart from my Windows Mobile phone, which I had to reset within a week, and more often than I could count thereafter.

But a thing about the iPhone is that it is much more than a phone, or even a phone with all the "extras" we now expect --- storing our calendar and address book, sending texts, playing music and taking photographs.

The iPhone is really is a highly portable location-aware computer that is designed to be continuously connected to the Internet. As such, it is a platform to provide users with instant access to information, entertainment and services, and the email client and highly capable web browser are the most obvious and useful manifestations of this. But in fact the stock price and weather forecast displays and the YouTube player are more revealing of the essence of the iPhone. These are nothing more than programs (applications) that the user can run to do a specific thing. They very probably use the Web to fetch the information they need, and just display it way that is more iPhone-compatible than a normal web page.

A key feature of the iPhone is that it makes it really very easy to install these little programs --- these "apps" --- to provide extra functionality over and above the basic features provided by the software on the phone itself. Indeed, the iPhone embodies an "App Store", which is widely touted as a stroke of business genius on Apple's part.

The App Store is an application that allows iPhone owners to browse, select and install new apps. Many apps are free, but, as "Apps Store" suggests, many others cost -- not a lot (60p is typical), but enough to encourage developers to contribute apps to the store, so that there is a huge range, and continually expanding, range of apps that iPhone users can download, and indeed DO download, in enormous numbers.

Apple charge a proportion of the sale price, and this has made them a great deal of money, But the real effect of the App store is far more significant: it has helped the iPhone become the centre of a culture, with a substantial community of software developers providing new apps that allow owners to add new functionality to their iPhones quickly and easily, and for just pennies. And by spending a few pounds on Apps, users are buying in to their phone, too: whenever two or more iPhone owners are gathered together, they will show each other their favourite new apps. This not only stimulates more sales for the apps themselves, but also keeps owners engaged with personalising, and singing the praises of, their iPhones.

A marketing man's dream.

Another really strong point of the phone is that it is able to determine its own location. Like many phones, the iPhone has a GPS, and, like many phones, this takes a long time to determine its location, and does not work well in cities, or at all indoors. But, uniquely, the iPhone augments its GPS with two other ways to determine for determining its location: it can ask the telephone network, which always knows the rough position of every phone; and it can use Skyhook's system for determining location based on the relative strengths of the Wi-fi networks that can be detected. The iPhone does a superb job of using all three of these mechanisms in combination, and this allows it to display its approximate location on a map within fifteen seconds, even in a city, or even indoors --- performance far better than any GPS alone can manage.

But although the iPhone has many great features, it also has some noticeable limitations. A particilarly annoying one is probably the result of contractual wrangling with the phone networks. Although the iPhone is a reasonable tool for things like handling mail and reading the web, it cannot compete with a computer with a full-size keyboard and display. But Apple's software will not allow the phone to be used to connect another computer (a laptop, for instance) to the Internet. Similarly, the need to balance battery size against the plethora of radio systems has meant that the iPhone has decidedly mediocre battery life --- barely last two days, so it really needs to be charged daily.

But although these limitations are the result of necessary compromises, others are omissions affecting eatures I would have taken for granted on any kind of iPhone-like device.

Perhaps most surprising is the lack of any kind of cut-and-paste mechanism, so that, for instance, the only way to get a phone number from the address book to a text message would be to write it down and key it in again. Nor is there any kind of "undo" for anything.

Another surprising system-wide omission is searching. It is possible to search for contacts by name, but not on words in the notes or address. Nor any way to search within a web page, or to search the diary --- you may know you have something in your diary, but you can only find what date it is by looking through all future events until you come across it.

There are also a number of other omissions: iPhones cannot send MMS messages, record movies, or allow the user to supply the sounds used for many purposes. Finger-flick scrolling is intuitive and fun, but it is ineffective for long documents and the interface provides no alternative. There are scroll bars to show the portion of the document currently visible, but they disappear the moment the text stops moving, which often means that there is no sign at all that there is more of a page or document that cannot currently be seen. Users just have to get in the habit of trying to scroll each page, just in case tehre is more to be seen. And while this may be a good way to hide secrets in an adventure game, for serious interfaces it is just plain annoying.

Reminders for events can only be set for a handful of fixed times in advance, and are signalled once, and once only, by a feeble little noise that last less than two seconds. This means that not taking your phone to the toilet with you risks making you late for your dentists appointment.

The web browser, despite supporting a wide range of features, has a seriously cut-down user interface, and among other shortcomings doesn't let you disable image downloading --- is a surprising omission from a device which is expected to frequently be used with only a slow internet connection. Nor does it allow you to save web pages, or images, or anything else you have accessed on the Internet. And although Apple provide an app for writing notes on the iPhone, that is where they are likely to stay, because (with the exception of email, calendar and address books, which will synchronise using Microsoft Exchange protocols), the iPhone provides no way to synchronise files, or indeed any other data, with another computer. As a result, various apps are being programmed to provide some kind of (perhaps manually-initiated) synchronisation of their own data. But although this is better than nothing, piecemeal manually-initiated data sharing seems inaequate in terms of both reliability and convenience.

These are not minor imperfections: they are omissions which seriously interfere with common activities. Yet despite this, the iPhone is still a terrific device that literally feels good and is actually a pleasure to use. It has taken me a while to get used to the idea of being seen to posess an icon of style, but now I'm likely to start an iPhone "show and tell" at the drop of a hat.

Who'd have thought it?

Blog? What blog?

OK, so I might have forgotten about this blog.

I thought of it today when I found myself skirmishing with Facebook, and realised a "Notes" button had appeared on my Profile page.

I hadn't ever noticed anybody using "Notes", so I could only guess that it would be something like the "Wall" feature, where you type short comments to appear on your (or someone else's) "profile" page. But how would it differ? Hmmm...

So I clicked the "Notes" button, and got a page that said

No recently added notes to display.
Use the Publisher above to add your own.

"OK", I thought, typed a test note into the type-in box above the message (the "Publisher"?), hit "Share"... and thus updated the main "Status" message on my Profile page to say that I was experimenting with the "Notes" facility. Which, while true, was not the thing I most wanted to tell the world about myself.

After a few minutes guddling about, I discovered that the button I had clicked is for controlling whether notes (anybody's notes, I think) appear on my Profile page, and so, despite the message above, the "Publisher" was nothing at all to do with Notes. And, eventually, that creating a note involved clicking a button to add a new tab to my Profile, going to that tab, and then clicking the "Write a new note" button that appears on that page.

By this point I felt I had a pretty good idea about why I'd not noticed anybody using the "Notes" facility! Without being big-headed, I think I'm smarter than the average bear, especially when it comes to understanding the world about me and figuring out how things work. And I've been using computers for a good few years. But it had taken me over ten minutes to figure out how to create a note.

The obvious question is "what is the point of providing a feature without providing any instructions or pointers to help you use it?"

Part of the answer, of course, is that there is no point in taking care and time to write instructions, because nobody will read them anyway. The typical attention span appears to be such that everything has to be immediate and obvious, or it's too difficult. Which is why, of course, so many stand-up commedians have their share of jokes about the impossibility of programming a video recorder without the aid of a ten-year-old.

And yet, video recorders still had the plethora of features that nobody could use.

So Facebook's notes are are just continuing a fine tradition of potentially useful features that nobody ever actually uses...

Is this a hint?

So, a few Christmases ago, my cousin gave various people, including me, star sign mugs. I'm sure you can imagine the kind of thing: an image of their star sign, and a list of the attributes that the start sign is said to confer. Having read my mug, I got the feeling that it wasn't manufactured by native speakers of English. My cousin swears she wan't trying to make a point -- that she hadn't actually read the actual attributes associated with Saggitarians. Honest. Optimistic. Enthusiastic. Good humoured. Intellectual. Jovial. And tactless.

Hmmm....

Gmail's "Intelligent" advert suggestions...

I'm sure many of us have heard, or heard concerns, about Google scanning mail in order to target adverts.

Over the last few days, I've seen evidence that something about this mechanism is getting weirder / wilder / whackier.

This morning, alongside an email about travel arrangements for a croquet tournament in Glasgow, it offered me an advert for kittens for sale. Maybe it perceived a potential to build on an interest in chasing balls around.

A couple of days before that, at the top of my "in box" listing, it offered me a curious cardboard tube that allows women to wee standing up. Now, I can see this is the sort of thing that any woman might be interested in. But why tell me? Was I being prompted to consider it as an unusual Christmas present? Or given that one cannot engage with a health-conscious, independent modern woman by whipping out a cigarette lighter or offering a handkerchief, is this the kind of accessory every well-prepared gentleman about town ought to carry? Or is it just that Google doesn't think email content analysis is up to discerning the recipient's sex?

Weirdest of all, though, was when it showed me an advert for Toop Exhumation Services, along side emails about an HCI conference. Not once, but twice. Now, OK, the second one was an email acknowledging by attempt to unsubscribe from their mailing list, which I suppose has a vague sense of "ending" about it. But basically, I thought, if that's the state of the art of intelligent advert selection based on scanning my email...

But then I went on to think about appropriate cues for presenting an advert like that, I began to see the incident as a symptom of what is deeply wrong with our modern "e-mediated" lives.

You see, I don't believe there is a sensible answer to the question "what kind of email content would suggest an interest in an exhumation company?"

And because of that, I don't understand is why an exhumation company is advertising on Google at all.

OK, I confess I have only a rough idea what an "exhumation company" does, and I'm sure there are lots of subtle details that could distinguish one company from another. But why do they advertise to the public?

I can see that from time to time the Police, or the Coroner's office, will need companies to do exhumations. But surely there can't be more than maybe 100 people in the whole of Britain who are actively involved in arranging them. Can there? So exhumations is a market dominated by specialist buyers. And it is probably not a market that is hugely price sensitive --- I suspect that official bodies will pay "whatever it costs" to get the job done properly and sensitvely.

But I also guess they have some kind of tendering process and approved supplier lists and what not.

So why are these people spending money on advertising to the general public?

They are surely not expecting impulse buyers: "Your mail mentioning Aunt Agnes makes me realise how much I've missed her. It's a shame we haven't got more photos of her. Oh! Here! I know..."

I assume this does not happen.

Exhumation service is not obviously a business that has much scope for increasing its overall market size: it doesn't rank high on many people's list of "discretionary expenditure".

So are they just building general "brand awareness"? When the police come to you and say "new evidence suggests your father was murdered, and we're going to have to examine his body", you won't just settle for any exhumation company! Oh no! You know who you want...

So are they really trying to ensure that "everyone in Britain" knows their name, just in case they are ever involved in an exhumation? Or are they trying to reach a few dozen professional commissioners-of-exhumations by advertising to "everyone in Britain".

Neither of these would be a sensible basis for a conventional advertising campaign: the costs involved would render it completely un-economic. But on-line, it seems, the costs are so low that there is no obstacle. Anyone can afford to clamour for our attention, no matter how in-efficiently. And we're left to live our lives amid the resulting cacophony.

The culture that put adverts on the back of bus tickets is now scribbling in the margins of our mail.

It's enough to make you want to buy a cat! Oh... what's that written on its collar?

The trains we deserve 2

Last week, I took the train through to Glasgow for the evening.

I arrived at Haymarket station at just after 10 past six, and went to buy a ticket.

"Do you want to travel on the 6:18" asks the woman in the ticket office "or wait for the 6:33, when you'll be able to use a cheap day return, which is £7 cheaper".

I had time in hand, and getting paid nearly £30/hour to sit and read at Haymarket, rather than in Glasgow, seemed a good deal. So I bought the cheap ticket and set out for the cafe...

Only to be stopped by the ticket barrier: because my cheap ticket wasn't valid on the 6:18, I wasn't even allowed onto the platform until after it had left! So I couldn't sit in the station cafe to read. In fact, I couldn't sit anywhere: there are no facilities of any kind outside the ticket barriers - not even a bench to sit on. So I had to just stand in the ticket office for 8 minutes until the guy manning the barrier realised that the earlier train had gone, and let me onto the platform.

Since Margaret Thatcher has left us a railway system dedicated to maximising ticket revenue, having to pay more to travel on certain trains is what I have come to expect. But preventing access to seats and the waiting area seems to be taking things too far. Presumably they are doing this to stop people sneaking onto the wrong trains. Which would not, of course, be a problem if they were going to check the passengers tickets.

So rather than have enough staff to enforce the complicated ticket restrictions that they have chosen to impose, they force passengers (i.e. their customers) to literally stand around in doorways until they can be trusted to go near the trains.

Customer Service, Scotrail 2008 style...

Robert.