Ring tone your body

This story has been sitting in my draft pile for a while but I'm still no closer to adding any value to it, so just read it for yourself!

Palm bears fruit

This is what I've been after: the impressive mobile email connectivity of RIM's Blackberry on a Palm OS device. I get to keep all my lovely Palm software and read my email wirelessly; and edit attachments...

Iron curtains and glass walls

Pervez Musharraf's recent observation that a new iron curtain was being drawn between the Western and Islamic worlds is a valid one, pointedly allusive to Israel's security wall against the Palestinian territories. How can anyone believe that segregation will bring about lasting peace? But as ever the issue is not just prejudice -- on both sides, if you look at Sunni criticism of Allawi for being un-Islamic by meeting an Israeli government official -- but prejudice compounded by poverty. Islamophobia and the collapse of Africa will persist while they continue to serve the vested interests of global conglomerates, with oil companies (in particular Shell) holding the poor in their thrall. It's a new mediaevalism.

Tune Easier

I've spent the last week gazing over fuschia bodies and rolling flab (or should that read golden sands and rolling dunes?) of the Tunisian coast. The resort location made tourism more difficult than anticapated, though we did manage to find our way to the impressive Bardo. The isolation seemed to suit most visitors however, who seldom ventured from the hotel lest they miss out on the Louis Armstrong impersonator on his bontempi.

And foxes might fly...

On Wednesday evening our local police officer was meant to discuss with residents how best to tackle drug abuse, burglary and other crime on our inner London estate. He didn't show, despite having a month's notice to make the meeting. Why not? Because he was moved to Parliament Square to control people running riot over the withdrawl of their privilege to hunt foxes with dogs. While these people whinge about no longer being able to trample all over people's property with the excuse that they want to savage an animal that eats their rats, I have to walk past urine on the stairwell and abusive children every day. How bad did they say the countryside is being treated?

Re: tiring

As the cabinet reshuffles thanks to Andrew Smith's timely resignation just before he was meant to present the pensions bill, I came across the article proposing some radical action for the pension time bomb. It made me laugh, but in a serious way.

Similar Minds

Here's a fun / sort of interesting thing to do while your colleagues and clients are off playing polo; indulge in a little introspeciton. There are a wealth of pyschometric tests out there, some more serious than others. I particularly liked discovering which leader I'm most like.

Pending patience

This is getting ridiculous. I have previously commented on the mad rush to patent technologies under as general terms as possible, with the largest players (Oracle, IBM and in particular Microsoft) being the main culprits. But now Microsoft is claiming that it has invented using a keyboard to access hyperlinks. Excuse me while I barely contain my contempt. This patent was filed in 1997 (though submitted only a week ago). Did I imagine using a keyboard to navigate a Lynx browser in 1993 at least a year before Internet Explorer was released? Wasn't Lynx highlighting a link the same as giving it a focus? What is this all about? Shall I patent the internal combustion engine? A comprehensive list of patents Microsoft is currently applying for can be found here, with some of the other main perpetrators also described.

Bush by numbers

An interesting tirade from the Independent into Dubya's double standards.

Keeping tabs on tags

Thought I'd point you in the direction of this article from The Register about David Blunkett's proposal to track offenders outside prison. It offers some more technical insight into how the scheme would(n't) work.

Silver Threads and Golden Needles

Yet more on my cancer, which seems to be pre-occupying me somewhat. There's a cure. I am absolutely livid that no one has pointed this out to me before or offered me the chance to pursue it, but there is a cure.
Typically with neuroendocrine pancreatic tumours, octreotide is prescribed to control spread (meta-static disease). This can be measured because the tumour is functional, that is it takes up the octreotide. This treatment even reduces the spread of the tumour in 6% of cases: very successful in this field. Interferon is also used, either in alpha or beta form. It appears that it's rarer to prescribe this, as it has some side-effects and shows no more benefit than octreotide, but if the tumour is non-functional (like mine) and won't take up octreotide, this is an alternative for controlling (though not curing) metastatic disease.
But I've now discovered that if you combine interferon with somatostatin, there's a much better rate of progression according to this Swedish study. Seven of eight patients involved in the trial benefited from this combination of drugs with partial response or stabilization. A previous study had also shown how even non-functional tumours benefited with a 50% response that lasted for nine months.
There are multiple side effects and it would probably mean three injections a day without any guarantee that it'd work or how long you might be injecting yourself. But with new methods to measure spread this is an option that I will certainly raise with my oncologist, rather than just waiting for the inevitable.