GPs are rubbish. Long live the NHS Walk IN Centre. I’m ill and sitting at home bored, so what else to do but blog? Here’s my tale of woe and wonder at today’s NHS…
About two weeks ago I came down with a bit of a cold. With the aid of a freshly purchased thermometer I reassured myself that I didn’t have swine flu as my temperature was normal, so I took things easy but got on with it. After a little over a week I was starting to feel a bit better and hoped I was recovered. But earlier this week a new series of symptoms started developing and by Wednesday I was off work with a rather swollen throat. With no improvement by Thursday I was fearing tonsillitis and decided a trip to the doctor was in order.
This, however, was easier said than done. I’m living for a while in Manchester due to my current project at work, but since it isn’t a permanent move, I hadn’t bothered doing things like registering with a GP here, as I’m still registered in London. OK, no problem I thought. I looked up a local GP on NHS Direct’s website and gave them a call. Read the rest of this entry »
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Oh dear, I’ve been at it again. It seems I just can’t help myself from playing with the layout and design of this blog, or dreaming up new and better ways to integrate my share streaming and microblogging (get me with my web 2.0 terminonogy!). Hopefully things should now be simpler and easier to understand, and there’s much better control for you the reader as to which bits of my musings and babblings you wish to see.
The headlines are:
I hope that all makes some sort of sense. The techies amoung you might be interested in some of the detail of how and – more importantly – why I’ve set things up like I have.
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Eyes opening, slowly. Head spinning. It’s bright in here. Lying down, pretty comfy. There’s Dave. And Nik. Everything’s very white. Where the hell…?
On Saturday night, myself and my flatmate Dave had a joint birthday party at a bar in Battersea. The night started well, with a good turn out of friends and a few drinks. However it ended for me at about 6am with a taxi ride home from hospital. So many people have asked for the story that I thought I ought to share it…
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It’s been quite a while now since I started working on BBC R&D’s North Lab. I’ve thoroughly failed to provide any updates, for which I apologise, but I think it falls under the category of “the more is happening, the less time you have to blog about it”! We’ve been ploughing ahead with our interim lab which will tide us over for the next two years or so on the existing BBC Manchester site, and planning for MediaCity:UK at Salford, which is our longer-term solution. My main focus was to be the former, but I’ve increasingly been pulled in to helping plan for MCUK; as you can probably imagine, it’s a very large project requiring a lot of effort. But perhaps we’re starting to work out just what it takes to build an R&D lab…
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BBC iPlayer is a great service, and its recent expansion in the mobile space is impressive, but the line-up has a gaping hole – the iPhone. The iPhone and iPod touch have been able to stream iPlayer content over WiFi for over a year now, and were in fact the first mobile devices to support iPlayer at all. But you can’t download programmes to your iPhone, and so you can’t watch them offline, which is a very large caveat. The issue has been addressed in blogs by people like Anthony Rose, saying:
Unfortunately, Apple keeps its DRM technology close to its chest and has so far not licensed that technology to third parties. This means that as of today, it’s not technically possible for us to make rights-protected BBC iPlayer programmes available for download from the bbc.co.uk/iplayer website in a format compatible with Apple devices.
He promised that the issue has the team’s full attention, which was reassuring. But here’s the problem – I think there’s an obvious solution, and I’ve not heard any progress to making it work. So consider this an open letter to the iPlayer team – here’s my ideas, please take them and run with them if you can, or if not, please engage with users as you’ve done in the past, and point out the flaws you find in my argument.
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It’s also easier to switch between viewing my 
