Review of Life

I’m having a bad asthma day for no reason whatsoever and it’s getting me down. It stings my chest and makes me very wary of walking anywhere. Hopefully it’ll subside at some point – my reliever inhaler (this week I are been mostly using Turbutaline by Bricanyl) is working but it’s struggling. I wonder if I’m due a slight cold or chest infection. I say slight because there’s no other real indication of what it might be.

So, asthma is bloody awful. I see a nurse about it every 3 to 6 months and my condition goes up and down so much that my medication changes incessantly as well. My fault, I must admit, I’m not particularly “into” taking medicine and taking something long-term and daily leaves me very cold indeed. I know this is a pathetic excuse, there are people with far worse things going on in their lives that have to take medication many times daily for their well-being. All I should have to do is take a single preventative inhaler once a day and I can’t even manage that.

So what exactly am I reviewing here? I suppose I should rate Asthma a 3/10 – it’d be selfish to suggest anything lower than that, it’s not crippling, it’s not making me bleed out of my eyes… but to those who just think it’s an excuse for people to get out of sports at school – it really is quite horribly painful and scary.

How many people die from asthma?

Each year around 1500 a year in the UK and 5000 a year in the US die from asthma, usually after very severe asthma attacks to long existing sufferers but sometimes quite out of the blue to people who have never before exhibited symptoms. Quite scary. But, if it’s well managed (and mine should be) then you should be very happy and healthy, barring the overeating of burgers and voles.

It’s now nearly 8.30 in the morning which means I’m a little less drowsy and irritable than I was just 2 hours ago when I had to get up. Forgive me for sounding like a miserable git but frankly, 6.30 in the morning is just not a fair time. I feel like I’ve been kicked in the eyes and the chest, stamped on the head and told that coffee is just an illusion. That’s pretty awful.

6.30AM is for mugs. I look forward to any day when I can leisurely rise between, ooh, say 2 to 3 in the afternoon. That’s about right, nice and warm under a duvet – sounds perfect to me.

Hey-ho, so I come back to my own site every so often just to see how few people have visited the site. This is the real difficulty of starting a new blog, it’s difficult to write, difficult to make sure you’re giving yourself enough time to write new stuff to review, and then no-one comes.

I’m not disheartened yet, long way to go before that, but it’s probably the hardest thing about blogging. Personally I chose not to use an off-the-shelf blogging package which gives me a fair few headaches when it comes to getting traffic right from the beginning. Wordpress (for instance) seems truly excellent for just getting one’s website immediately into search engines and “pings” to various blog aggregation services. The trade-off, in my case, is that I can at least custom build EXACTLY what I want to without any restriction. If I can imagine it, I can make it do it. Kind of.

Starting a new blog is also difficult because it’s hard to make sure you’re writing about the stuff that:

a) is actually interesting to anyone who isn’t your mum
b) is interesting and fun to write about
c) doesn’t take too long to research or do

So for me it’s all about making sure I’m doing what I said I’ll do: review everything I can that I come across and feel moved to do.

Starting a new blog gets 5/10 for me. It’s early days so my feelings are pretty much so-so. Fingers crossed traffic will pick up and I get some real people on here, perhaps even posting :O

Love to y’all.

Just came back from a day-time jaunt to gamestation to look for some xbox360 games. Didn’t get a game in the end, couldn’t decide.

BUT, what I did find is that mid-afternoon in Leeds can be pretty crazy. Sweet:

“The chavs are out, they’re running about, they’re going to punch and bite and spit that ear out.”

One guy had a beautiful Evander Holyfield thing going on with (half) his ear whilst to the left and right were people who were clearly positioning themselves for a fight. You ain’t never seen so much Kappa. Loverley. Interestingly, and beautifully, Kappa is also the following:

Kappa – a water sprite that looks like a lizard

Sorry if you think this is terribly unfair – Leeds is a lovely town, I’d just steer clear of bus-stops at school finishing time. And honestly I’ve nothing against townie chavs, just so long as they stopped being so damned threatening and moronic.

OK, so I’ve been in work for nearly three-quarters of an hour now so I’m calm and collected. My journey as a whole was fine, no problems there at all – until the point where I had to park. Just to give you an idea, I park in a multi-storey of about 9 levels (it can be quite dizzying!).

The deal is that at 8.45am the car park is going to be full. Everyone knows this, and if you don’t, you certainly know it after you’ve driven to at least the third level. I had the misfortune to be driving behind someone who appears to either:

a) have not driven before
b) be unfamiliar with the concept of car-parks
c) have not driven before in a car-park

I’m going to be kind and suggest the c) might be the right answer. Either way, we went slowly. Let me emphasise that properly: slooooowly. At each turn, we had to stop, look to see if there were any spaces, then drive on. Sloooooowly. All of which meant a great deal of braking, hand-brakes on slopes and eventually a convoy of about 8 vehicles behind me. The guy behind, I could see, constantly shaking his head, presumably in bemusement.

OK, OK, so maybe I’m being melodramatic. Doesn’t sound too bad, right? Right! Except for the fact that when the driver did find a space, brakes were slammed on and reverse was selected. The driver then decided to reverse directly at me at a silly speed. Argh!

So that’s it for me, from now on I’m going to expect the worst from car park driving. I was interested to know the percentage of accidents in car parks. It occurs from my looking around that that question doesn’t have an answer but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was stupidly high. Not when you consider the stupidly bad driving one sees.

So, driving in car parks: Not set my temper at best, going to give this one a 0 out of 5.

Thought as my second and proper full review I might just review blogging as a whole. Yep, rather introspective, there’s the obvious possibility of the whole infinite-depth-mirror going on, but I thought it worth at least getting down my thoughts on the blogosphere.

Most of the time, I think blogs are a massive waste of internet. OK, that’s a huge generalisation, but I have a rather horrid way of seeing blogs as too easy to set up by people who have too little to contribute. C’mon, that’s not that shocking, surely you’re thinking exactly that right now!

The problem, for me, most likely stems from the way in which I use the internet. If I come across a blog it’s usually because I’m searching for an answer to something, usually a technical web-programming type question (I’m a web developer). So I search for something and get results back which are hundreds of peoples attempts to describe their way of tackling something similar to the problem I’m having. But it’s confused, unreliable, poorly written and infuriatingly scant of details that would actually make it worthwhile.

Let’s be fair, I’ve seen some great blogs and some of them are completely unworthwhile. Take a good friend of mine’s website: www.consolecuties.com – it’s a complete traffic whore, trying to get visitors from posting nipple-friendly content. To be honest it’s pretty fun, I think if there was a community of half-a-dozen or so people contributing it’d be great. But then is that really so different from your classic discussion forum?
Then you get industry gurus blogging about important things, like Matt Cutts: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ – great stuff for those who are interested in all things Google but otherwise boring.

I don’t know – I still think that in general that people who write on the internet are doing so without trying to be a world-class author so perhaps I should give them a break. You take the percentages of start-up, shut-down blogs – the whole blog abandonment rate is somewhere between 60% and 80%… that’s way too high to suggest there’s a great deal of good blogging going on.

Personally I’d like to see us get to a point where you can’t “start” your blog until you’ve posted 5 entries. That’d learn ‘em.

Anyway, we’ll see how I get on. Hopefully I’ll be around in a week or so but you never know.