Smartphones – geek toy or useful tool?

Over the last few months I’ve been spending some of my time looking into Web 2.0 and the mobile internet. On the back of that I’ve found myself being pulled into examining some of the social networking services on the web, which has naturally led me to the whole Twitter phenomenon. And I have to admit that having now spent some time using it, I just don’t “get” it. Or at any rate, not for it’s purported purposes *

There seem to be two main classes of “normal” (ie, non-celebrity) user for Twitter out there; the people who are using it as a very restrictive instant messaging system (and this class of user seems to lock their updates and strictly manage their followers), and the people who seem to be “collecting” as many followers as possible, and broadcasting their every thought to them in the hope of becoming some sort of celebrity themselves.

And this brings me to how these people do that broadcasting, and the real point of this post; the more prolific “tweeters” appear to feel the need to broadcast their every thought, no matter where they are or what they are doing; and the only convenient way that they can do that is by using internet-enabled smartphones.

And I find that very interesting because IBM gives me a smartphone; a Blackberry Pearl. And it’s dreadful. It’s not powerful enough to do anything useful with the internet, the screen is too small, the keyboard is unusable, and the battery-life almost non-existent. And yet, because it’s supposedly been designed with the internet in mind, it’s also a very poor mobile phone, with absolutely terrible usability. In short, it’s the worst of all worlds. It’s so shockingly bad that I’m thinking of actually spending my own money to replace it with a really good “ordinary” phone.

This then got me wondering; who are smartphones actually targeted at? I see lots of people with Apple iPhones, but with a single exception (my oncologist) they are all owned by people who I would class as “geeks” who work in the IT industry. Is that because that’s just the people I happen to see with them, or are they much more widely accepted? And if they are more widely accepted, are those people actually using them for productive work, or (like a lot of Apple products) are they just being bought because they happen to be stylish, and therefore desirable to be seen with?

One thing’s for sure; from my initial perusal of the current cellphone market it’s looking like all the major manufacturers are concentrating a huge amount of effort on creating ever more complex smartphones. I suspect that it might be extremely difficult for me to find a high-end mobile phone at a sensible price that isn’t a smartphone. Which leaves me wondering if the solution to my quest may be to buy an older (second-hand?) high end mobile phone from the times before smartphones became the “in thing”.

I’m actually quite tempted to see if I can track down an old Nokia 8810, simply because I had one about 10 years ago when they were the pinnacle of mobile phone design, and loved it. All it can do is make phone calls and send SMS messages, but it did both of those things exceptionally well. Using an 8810 these days would certainly be making a statement, if nothing else! Given that thought, any comments or suggestions for ordinary “non-smartphones” that you’d particularly recommend, along with your reasons why, would be welcomed!

* – the thing that I do see Twitter being very useful for, is to act as a cheap and simple notification fabric for applications that want to notify people of events via SMS. For that purpose, it’s great, though probably not what Twitters creators were expecting it to be used for.

Update on cycle 8 (part iii)

Not a lot to report on the side-effects front, other than the fact that the hiccoughs seem to have gone away. Everything else is continuing as I discussed in my last post. However, I had a really good weekend from a social perspective, though to counteract that, I had a less-than-fun experience managing my ileostomy. It’s all swings and roundabouts!

One of the reasons for the weekend being really good was that a friend I made in hospital got married on Saturday. He’s been concerned about being well enough to get married and go on honeymoon since I first met him back in March, but he’s stuck to his treatments, done as he was told (well, mostly!) and got well again. It was great to see him and his new bride looking so happy. And the contrast to how he looked back when I first met him in March when he’d just got out of intensive care, is staggering. So good luck Nick and Angie – here’s to many more years together!

The other reason for it being a special weekend was that we held a small family gathering to celebrate my eldest daughters birthday, which is actually later this week. She officially becomes a teenager (“Whatever!”) despite having been looking, acting and behaving like one for at least the last year already. Still, it was a nice opportunity for a large proportion of the family to get together around the table and take some time out together.

Unfortunately my ileostomy decided to intervene, with my output suddenly going extremely high. I’m not entirely sure what caused this, but I suspect a combination of something I ate the previous day and this cycles chemotherapy drugs finally kicking in. Whatever the cause, this resulted in my bag failing (never a nice experience) and thereafter I was having to empty the replacement bag almost constantly. Apart from being very frustrating and inconvenient, this also meant that I was dehydrating rapidly.

In addition, when my output goes very high it also makes me very physically tired, which on top of my recent lack of sleep meant I was struggling, and didn’t notice when I missed taking a set of my ileostomy management tablets. Which of course just made a bad situation a whole lot worse. Fortunately, having realised my mistake I was able to spend the rest of the day catching up with my tablets, which helped my output slowly drop back to more normal “high” levels.

In the end things finally got back to normal around 2am this morning, which means that I’ve actually had more sleep last night than during the previous few nights. And the really good news is that this morning I seem to be back to almost normal output levels again, which further reinforces the suspicion that the primary cause of my high output was probably something that I’d eaten.

These treatments must affect each person very differently, but I must admit that managing my ileostomy is by far and away the worst part of it for me. Still, with a little luck I’ve only about 6 more weeks before having it reversed. Which will be a real red letter day for me!

Update on cycle 8 (part ii)

Just a very quick update on progress, as I’ve relatively little to mention.

So far there have been no major changes in the side-effects of this cycle since my last report, apart from my hiccoughs. Unfortunately they seem to have got significantly worse, and in fact are turning out to be worse than on any of my previous cycles. I’m finding that they are definitely triggered by eating or drinking anything, as well as frequently coming on spontaneously too. So the worst of both world there. They are also much worse in the evening (though I have no idea why) and I seem to always get a major attack after taking my last set of tablets each night around 11pm.

Last night I was awake till nearly 4am with them, and it was 3am the night before. As anyone who’s had long-running hiccoughs will testify, the actual attacks themselves are not very pleasant. But the fact that I’m now also losing so much sleep is proving hard to cope with too; my patience, even over the smallest of things, is not what it normally is, or should be.

And of course the people who really have to bear the brunt of my irritability are my long-suffering family, who are being tested even more this week than normal, for which I feel both guilty and very sorry.

Update on cycle 8 (part i)

So, a day and a half have passed, and as seems to be the norm, the symptoms have changed and morphed. No new symptoms though, so I know what to expect, and to some extent how to mitigate them. So not all bad news.

Tiredness is still present, but not as bad as when I first came home from the hospital. I suspect that the extreme tiredness I experienced then is quite temporary and a result of the infusion. I am also getting up earlier now too, as I’m trying to pull my weight and run the kids to the bus stop and school so my wife isn’t quite so overloaded in the mornings. That and the fact I’m getting to bed later (see below) means less sleep than I’ve been used to, so perhaps that’s also contributing to my general tiredness. The good news is that I can just go back to bed and sleep as required, so it’s simple enough to cope with for now.

Hiccoughs are back! Unfortunately they’re in the “long running attack” form, which is not good. They still seems to be triggered by me swallowing anything, and unfortunately my last set of tablets, which I take at 11pm, seem to be triggering hiccoughs that then run on for several hours into the night. Last night was 3 hours worth, which wasn’t much fun. It also means that I’m not getting to sleep as early as I’d like now that I’m trying to get up earlier and help out with the school run. Still, if these hiccoughs follow the pattern of previous cycles then hopefully they’ll fade away during the first week or so of the cycle.

My peripheral neuropathy is still the worst that I’ve experienced to date. My hands and fingers in particular got to the point where they were so painful that I ended up spending most of yesterday with skiing gloves on. I have to say, they might look silly, but the relief from the pain is wonderful. Unfortunately the gloves do rather limit what I can do; typing, reading, any sort of “fine tinkering” is out the question with them. My feet continue to be uncomfortable, and to blister and peel. As with previous cycles there’s very little I can do except put up with it and ignore it as best I can. The “slush puppie” sensations when drinking anything cold continue as with my previous cycles. I’m back to drinking a lot of tea, and taking my tablets with warm water again. I’m looking forward to being able to drink lots of long cold drinks, stuffed full of ice when I finally get off all these drugs!

I currently have very little sensation of taste again. C’est la vie. Combined with a complete lack of appetite, it’s back to eating mechanically again. While trying to look for the silver lining, I’m assuming that this is probably good for the diet anyway.

The inability to get warm seems to have gone away again. I’m wondering if that was another side-effect of the IV infusion. Either way, it’s a welcome loss, as it wasn’t much fun being curled up under a heap of blankets, feeling freezing cold and shivering, despite knowing that the temperature was perfectly normal.

The three bags of glucose seems to have done the business on my arm. The pain and swelling are going down fast. The sensitivity in my arm is much reduced, and I can now wear sweaters etc without discomfort. Looks like it will hopefully be all gone within another couple of days. So saying, the friend I’ve not seen for a few weeks who greeted me with a firm handshake yesterday didn’t get quite the expected reaction from me. He was mortified when I explained the situation too. So sorry John, I should have “ducked” your handshake and explained the situation, but I just didn’t think about it at the time!

Finally, I’ve kept the best news to last; my ileostomy output seems to have dropped on this cycle for some reason. I don’t actually care what the reason is, it’s good enough for me that it’s just dropped. It’s making the day to day management of my hydration etc much easier, and making life in general much more pleasant. It’s also a huge relief, as I would likely have been in real trouble if my output had gone even higher than it was on the last cycle.

If things continue like this through the rest of this cycle then I can see how to cope. Then I just need to start gently pushing myself back to full health; raising my exercise levels, allowing the drugs to steadily work themselves out of my system (apparently it can take several months for them to fully dissipate) and getting myself ready for my ileostomy reversal operation. That is rapidly becoming my next major target – as that is what forces me to take high doses of codeine, which is what prevents me from getting back to work and a normal life.

So, come Christmas I ought to be fully replumbed, off almost all my medications, and getting ready to go back to work. I feel like a kid again, looking forward to the arrival of gifts from Santa Claus. Except in my case the Santa Clauses all work for the National Health Service!

Start of final chemotherapy cycle

Despite the best laid plans of mice and men, I ended up in hospital for most of the day today. Unfortunately there were multiple consultants in the hospital running their private practices, and the nursing staff were stretched to the limit again. Despite getting my bloods done yesterday, and being cannularised almost immediately, it still took 90 minutes before my oxaliplatin turned up. Add in three hours infusion, and some messing around at the end, and it was another 6 hour session.

Still, it’s the last one, thank goodness. Just need to get through taking all the tablets over the next fortnight and I will be finished. Symptoms are the same as previously, but considerably more intense again.

Tiredness is very pronounced. I got home and had to go straight to bed. Will be interesting to see if this continues through the cycle, or if it’s just a short term effect from the infusion itself. At the moment I suspect the former.

The peripheral neuropathy is very bad. My fingers, hands, feet and throat are all playing up much more badly than before. My fingers are actively painful, and typing this is difficult. I have little sensation in my fingers, but feel sharp pains in each finger as I strike the keys on the laptop while typing. Walking is very uncomfortable. I hope this eases off, as it will be very difficult to cope with everyday tasks otherwise.

I’m also currently shivering. I can’t seem to get warm again. I know the temperature is actually comfortably pleasant at the moment (23-25c depending on which currentcost I trust!), but my body doesn’t seem to agree for some reason. I’m going to curl up under the blankets again after I finish typing this to try to get warm.

No idea about taste yet. I have absolutely no appetite at all at the moment.

Also no sign of any hiccoughs yet. I suspect that if I do experience them, they will be triggered by eating and drinking; I’ll let you know when I finally get to that point.

Despite getting nearly 3 bags of glucose to the 1 bag of oxaliplatin, my arm is very sore and tender. Wearing a sweater is very uncomfortable where the sleeve touches my arm. However, I need the sweater for the warmth, so no real choice there. Still, at least I remembered to take some medical adhesive remover (basically an alcohol-based spray) to the hospital, so I could loosen all the sticky tape that the nurses had secured the IV lines with. Last time when they pulled all the tapes off I was close to tears. This time I was able to loosen all the sticky tape first, reducing the pain substantially. Interesting that none of the nurses knew of the existence of these sprays. Score one for me.

The elephant in the room is going to be how this cycle affects my ileostomy. I was high output for most of the last cycle. I really hope that it doesn’t get any worse on this cycle, as I’ve very little room left for manoeuvre. Still, I figure I ought to be able to put up with pretty much anything for a fortnight. Just a matter of focusing on the end result, and getting on with life, one day at a time.

I’ll post some more in the next day or two as things start to (hopefully) settle down.

Cleared to start cycle 8

I had my blood drawn this morning, and met my oncologist this evening. My white blood cell count is fine, so I’m cleared to go ahead with my final chemotherapy cycle tomorrow.

I’ll have one more meeting with my oncologist in about a months time to see how I’m recovering after the end of the chemotherapy, but he tells me that he is very pleased with my progress to date. Apparently he “threw the works at me” in terms of the strength of the treatment, and I’ve been a “model patient” in terms of how I’ve coped with it.

Which is nice to know, as I don’t think I’ve ever been a model anything before!

Toys!

I’ve been monitoring my whole house power consumption for some time using a currentcost meter, connected up to my home server. However, I’ve been meaning for a while now to pick up a meter for measuring the power consumption of individual devices to help me fine tune my power consumption. This week my local Aldi were running a special offer of a (fairly sophisticated) meter for £8. Turns out that it can measure voltage, current, mains frequency, power consumption, and power correction factor, which indicates how efficient a device is. Since then I’ve been wandering around the house measuring things, trying to work out what we leave running all the time that we actually need to turn off.

So far I have been unable to find a single “wall wart” adaptor that uses *any* measurable power when idle, despite the media talking about how we should all go around and disconnect them all. Things like my powered speakers for my laptop however, draw 10w all the time. Ooops.

And while I was in Aldi I also picked up one of these blood pressure monitors too. I wasn’t sure how accurate it would be, but on trying it out, it seems to give approximately the same readings that I’ve seen the nurses record during my hospital visits. So it may well be surprisingly accurate.

However, my view is that I’m less interested in the actual readings, and more interested in any marked changes in the readings; because if I see any significant increase or decrease then I’ll be needing to go visit my GP anyway.

End of cycle 7, start of cycle 8, I hope

Tomorrow is the last drug-free “resting” day of cycle 7. It’s also the day when I have my blood tests and the meeting with my oncologist to determine if I’m healthy enough to go ahead with cycle 8. My final cycle.

I must admit that I’m not looking forward to cycle 8 … I’m really starting to reach the end of my patience with the chemotherapy. Although the physical effects are all individually manageable, the combinations are hard work. And lately for me, I’m finding that it’s more and more difficult to remain mentally positive. This treatment seems to wear everyone down eventually; some people struggle with the physical effects, but for me, it’s worn away at my mental reserves.

However, there is no alternative. And it is my last cycle. And I really want to get it done, as it signals the end of the chemotherapy, which is a major step towards getting my life back to normal again. So lets hope my white blood cell count is high enough to allow me to have my final IV session on Tuesday.

After that it’s just two more weeks of drugs, and then I’m finished with the chemotherapy. Then I can concentrate on the reversal of my ileostomy, which will (finally) allow me to get back to a more normal life, including getting back to work.

Archiving data files to DVD

IBM has been using Lotus Notes as its email platform for the last 14 years or so, and during those years I’ve seen the size of emails increasing dramatically, mostly due to the ease with which people can attach large (and often unnecessary) attachments. IBM meanwhile would like us to minimise the size of our mail databases to minimise the cost of storing all this email across the corporation. However, at the same time, keeping many of these emails so they can be referred back to is very useful. Consequently I’ve been archiving all my email from my mail database to my local mail archive database. Unfortunately, the larger that database has become, the slower it becomes for certain classes of operation, such as opening or searching it. The actual file that represents that database also starts to become very unwieldy for the operating system; my email archive database was nearing 6GB in size.

I recently decided to do something about it, and split that single large mail archive database into a series of smaller archives, each covering a two year period, limiting the size of each to a GB or less.

I currently back these up to my NAS, but I’d like to have extra copies somewhere less accident-prone than spinning media. A couple of sets of DVD’s, preferably stored “offsite” from where my NAS and laptop are kept (ie, at work, not at home) seems like a good extra insurance policy. Which leads me to the question of how to burn some very large files to DVD under Linux.

It turns out that Ubuntu comes with dvd+rw-tools already installed, which provides command line utilities to do everything that is required.

dvd+rw-format -force /dev/dvdrw Formats the DVD-RW, allowing it to be used. Doing this too often can seriously shorten the life of your DVD-RW media, and it isn’t necessary to format before each reuse – just overwrite the old contents with new data.

growisofs -Z /dev/dvdrw -R -J /etc/*.conf Initialises and writes an initial set of files to the DVD-RW. If there is already data on your DVD-RW, this will overwrite it.

growisofs -M /dev/dvdrw -R -J /var/log/*.log Adds some more files to the DVD-RW. On a DVD-R I believe this will create another session, and write the data into that.

Note that with DVD-R media you skip the formatting step, then use the same growisofs commands as with DVD-RW media, EXCEPT it appears that you can’t easily add files to an existing DVD-R without creating a multisession DVD-R, which looks like it could be a heap of pain. I figure it’s probably best to just save all the required files in a single write.

For maximum compatibility, close the DVD-RW off with growisofs -M /dev/dvdrw=/dev/zero once all the files have been written to it, and just for completeness, it’s possible to get detailed technical information on the contents of any optical disc, by using the command dvd+rw-mediainfo /dev/dvdrw

Note that in all cases, these commands must be run by a “normal” (non-root, non-sudo) user, and the DVD media must be unmounted at the time.

Mobile broadband on Karmic Koala Alpha 6

Today I decided to try out the latest code drop for the next release of Ubuntu. This will be released as Ubuntu 9.10 next month, under the codename Karmic Koala. There are some rough edges, but so far I am extremely impressed. This release has moved to some very new technologies, and yet even at this early stage almost everything is basically working.

Under the current version of Ubuntu getting my USB mobile broadband modem (a ZTE MF627) working was quite awkward. It required quite a lot of configuration work, and the installation of some additional programs. Whereas under this newer version it is almost (but not quite) working out of the box. One simple configuration file needs to be added, called /etc/udev/rules.d/ZTE.rules, containing the single line:

SYSFS{idVendor}=="19d2", SYSFS{idProduct}=="2000", RUN+="/usr/bin/eject %k", OPTIONS+="last_rule"

Once the system has been rebooted (or udev restarted), inserting the USB modem causes the udev system to automatically detect it, and switch it to the correct mode, at which point Network Manager recognises the broadband modem becoming available, and allows you to configure it with your provider details. From then on you can connect by simply selecting the mobile broadband connection in Network Manager.

All very simple. As it should be.