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11th
May
2007
Just been playing around with one of the most handy websites I’ve found in recent months, especially useful for travellers or for those wanting to communicate with people overseas – TimeandDate.com.
This site gives you accurate and detailed information about the time and weather for just about any point on the globe. You can customise it to reflect your own preferred cities and formats (eg I changed the temperatures from farenheit to Celsius so I can understand them) and you can make a custom World clock page that you can share with others. The one I made is here – it has the current time for all the stops we’ll be making on our big trip in July. Clicking on the name of each of the cities brings up a whole wealth of current information about the conditions there.
A very simple looking site, but incredibly useful. I love these clock applications for some reason. In addition to this site I have 3 cities in the toolbar on my Vista computers (one of the cool new features of Vista allowing multiple clocks) and at least 2 world time programs on my Palm Treo with little maps and multiple times listed. Very handy indeed.
Categories : Internet, Links, Travel |
11th
May
2007
Was just talking to a drug rep and she asked whether I saw more diabetes or depression (since she had drugs to treat both!) – and I had to answer that I see way more depression. I just assumed that was true for most doctors but according to her, she gets an even mix of GPs who say they see a lot of depression and those who see hardly any. Now part of me wishes I fell into that second group as I really don’t much like mental health (when I was a surgical trainee I was ashamed to admit to the fact that I won the Psychiatry medal in med school). But unfortunately (for me anyway) patients with these problems seem to keep coming to see me, which I guess must mean I am at least doing something right? I could never be a psychiatrist though, it must be depressing listening to all these terrible life stories all day long. I’d stick to mums-to-be, surgery, and babies any day if I had the choice… but the thing about General Practice is that I don’t get to choose the patients, they choose me. Which is important to keep in mind.
Categories : General Practice |
11th
May
2007
While I’m in a blog tinkering mode, thought I’d have another look at my Google Analytics stats, which I’ve had going for a couple of weeks now. Over the last week my pageviews have been trending upwards, with 1.55 pageviews per visit (ie each visitor is viewing an average of one and a half of my pages), Google still accounts for 50% of the referrals, and the number one page aside from the front page is still clearly my post on the Fender VG Strat, which is pleasing. Hopefully I’ll be able to post my own review of the guitar at some point in the future, in addition to just linking to others.
Categories : Housekeeping, Internet, Personal |
11th
May
2007
I don’t think I have yet posted a full itinerary for our big trip in July, but it’s mostly locked in now so I’ll get onto that soon. But over the last few days there’s been some interesting new developments – I’ve had some emails regarding our Uganda Medical Team in October, and it transpires that many of the babies in the new babies home in Kampala are not doing so well and some have even died. It’s unlike me but I got a bit upset when I read about that. We will definitely make this a focus of our efforts in October, but I’ve decided to visit the Bulrushes babies home in July with Jenni for at least a day or two to see if I can offer any help. This will be in addition to Jen’s time in the Sanyu Babies Home that we have already planned.
The other thing I’m really excited about is that it is looking very likely that we will be visiting Gulu, in the north of Uganda during October. Gulu is the epicentre of the refugee crisis in northern Uganda due to the 20 year civil war with the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army. Many many thousands of people, especially children, have had their lives torn apart by this horrific struggle. Many have been killed, maimed, or been psychologically scarred by abducted and forced to become child soldiers. Many more have had to leave their homes in fear and lost any hope of an education or future happiness. Ever since I first heard about this catastrophe I have felt a strong pull to go there. October’s visit will be for only a few days but hopefully we will be able to minister to at least some people and sow the seeds of more work in the future. Despite this I feel a strong urge to want to do more. I find myself tempted to buy lotto tickets so that we can afford to move over there for a few months or longer. Haven’t won a cent so far though 
Nevertheless it will be interesting to see where this all takes us in the long term. At present it’s all still too unclear.
Categories : Africa, Personal, Travel, Uganda |
11th
May
2007
As you may see, I’m still playing with this twitter site. I think it might be tricky to strike a happy medium of twitter use – either a person will update it far too much with mudane and boring details (like me at the moment) or it will be neglected.
But at least it gives me a method of very quickly providing an update to the blog, perhaps keeping it much more dynamic. In terms of integration, in addition to the right top sidebar giving you my most recent twits, I’ve also set it up so it automatically posts a Daily digest of my twitter posts into the blog proper. And there’s also a receiprocal function so that every time I write a normal blog post like this one, it will send a notification to twitter. There is also an rss feed of my twitter posts here.
Anyway it’s an interesting experiment. The other trap is to get sucked in to reading other people’s tweets, most of whom are anonymous but do include some familiar names like Barack Obama. I could imagine this could easily become quite distracting and addictive. Anyway, back to my patients.
Categories : Housekeeping, Twitter |
