Chris Sheppard

Went to Tescos in Hemel Hempstead on Saturday for breakfast, and arrived at the cafe at 7:30am to see no-one in the queue and dishes full of sausages, bacon, fried bread etc all ready to serve. We were then told that they didn’t open until 8:00am. Now, the food was all prepared, I don’t know how long it had been sitting there, on a hot surface. In order to keep it hot, they have some pathetic pigmy lamps above the food, presumably so it doesn’t get too hot.

We obediently arrived in the queue 25 minutes later and were still kept waiting until the stroke of 8:00 and were served what I’d describe as a tepid breakfast. Everything had managed to reach the equilibrium of room temperature, presumably so as to not burn us. The lady asked if we’d like a fried egg or toast becasue they cook those to order. Fantastic I thought, at least something would be hot. She duly placed 2 slices of bread onto a tray and they slowly decended into a machine and disappeaed from sight, only to emerge a few minutes late completely black! They were then placed on the plate so they could quickly cool off as well before you managed to get any butter on them. The temperature of the plate didn’t help. The plates were also placed on this hotplate, but because there were about 50 plates between the hotplate and my plate it was unlikely that much heat would actually make it through to the top.

Its St Georges day today. I notice Google hasn’t bothered to mention it again this year. Unlike St Patrick’s day of course. I’m afraid I hardly noticed. More seriously, its now exactly 6 weeks since Alan Johnston was forced at gunpoint into a car in Gaza. He is the BBC’s Gaza correspondent, the only western journalist to be permanently based in Gaza in Palestine. He has been reporting about the suffering of the Palestinians for 3 years now and was due to finish his stint at the end of March.

I wonder about the intelligence of the people who abducted him. Here was a man who was keeping the situation that the Palestinians were in, permanently in the public eye. And what to these intellectually challenged people do? - they remove him so he can no longer report on the situation. Very bright. They also alienate those who are sympathetic to their cause. - Like me.

There was a report a few days ago that the Palestinian Security people now know where he is being held and who’s holding him. If this is true its about time they did something about it. They also say Alan Johnston is still alive. Everybody certainly hopes so. What a mess the world is in.

St George died as a Christian martyr, I hope Alan Johnston doesn’t die holding the flame of truth and free speech in such a troubled part of the world.

Update Alan Johnston was released in the Gaza Strip after 114 days in captivity. See the BBC News item

Something really sad happened today. Gary McKinnon, the alleged Pentagon hacker, has lost his appeal against extradition to the US on hacking charges. Now this is a prime example of how the technology divide can cause unbelievable injustice. Basically the British establishment don’t understand technology, or any science for that matter. Its full of lawyers and economists and arts graduates who haven’t got a clue. Now the US military say Gary McKinnon is a cyber terrorist and they want to try him for breaking into the Pentagon computers and causing millions of dollars of damage to their computers. So the pathetic British establishment is kowtowing to the US like it always does and extraditing him to the us where he will serve 60 years for frankly having done absolutely nothing. And the disgusting thing is, its the UK government that is handing him over.

Here in the UK, some yob can murder someone in the street and end up getting 6 years for ‘manslaughter’ and and actually serve only 3 years. I’ve heard of even more lenient sentences. Yes, this same profession of legal people can’t overturn the most stupid extradition request to sentance a UK citizen to 60 years for doing basically nothing - “But the US military said it was terrible therefore it must have been”.

So what did he do? He clearly broke the law. He’s not denying this. Basically “he visited” 100’s of computers owned by the US military (Just like you are visiting this one) and when faced by a request for a username and password, he ran a program that tried lots of different passwords until he gained access. He then looked around at many files to see if he could find any information on UFOs. He didn’t actually cause any physical damage, he didn’t delete any files, he left everything as he found it.

However the Americans are so embarrassed by the ease with which he broke in, showing up their pathetic lack of security that they want to exact revenge. Basically he did them a favour - he showed how easy it was to gain access and caused a huge shake up in their computer security and caused them to make it half decent for a change. The UK authorities seem to have no-one who is prepared to take on the Americans. We have a weak Prime Minister who does everything they want and that seems to filter down to the rest of the establishment.

Patrick Mercer was the Tory shadow defence secretary until today, when he was sacked by David Cameron. He was sacked for being racist when he was interviewed in the Times:

When he was in the army, he had met “a lot” of “idle and useless” ethnic minority soldiers who used racism as a “cover”… that being called a “black bastard” was a normal part of Army life. In his interview with the Times, Mr Mercer said of the
black men he had known in the Army: “They prospered inside my regiment, but if you’d said to them ‘Have you ever been called a nigger,’ they would have said ‘Yes.’ “But equally, a chap with red hair, for example, would also get a hard time - a far harder time than a black man, in fact.”

Patrick Mercer used to be an officer in the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters regiment was just describing what life was like in the Army. He was telling it as it is. He was not being racist, just describing the actual situation. So why was he sacked. Basically Cameron had to sack him otherwise the media would accuse Cameron of condoning racism. Even though Patrick Mercer was very fair with everybody, and since this incident has been backed by many black soldiers who served under him, the media and also some labour MPs have twisted it round so it looks like racism.

I hate this sort of thing. I’ve been reported about a couple of times in the local newspapers and they all got the facts wrong. Jack Straw’s comments were: “The comments are breathtaking and dreadful and Mr Mercer’s resignation is appropriate.“

So here again, we have people in authority who ‘don’t get it’, pontificating about something, and because they are ‘important‘ what they say goes.

One of the main debates at the moment is how to solve the problem of traffic congestion. There has been a petition on the Downing Street website demanding that the Government scraps the idea of taxing cars per mile of travel. 1.7 million people have signed the petition supporting this. I didn’t sign it, because I disagree. I didn’t realise I could sign to say ‘no, go ahead Government!’. Anyway, I think there’s a lot of selfishness creeping in here.

For a start, we are gradually destroying the planet through our use of carbon fuels. Now, I’m as guilty as anybody. But despite this, there are too many cars on the roads. The normal answer of building more roads is not solving the problem.

Now I know this is an old chestnut, but we used to have a brilliant transport infrastructure. It was called the railway. Then some idiot politician decided to appoint an economist to run the railways. His name was Dr Richard Beeching and he bascially shut down more than 8000 miles (12,875 km) of track and 2000 statins on the railway, and it continued even further after that. This frankly wrecked the system and forced people to use cars and lorries instead of the railway. It was considered uneconomic at the time but, boy, I wish he could have seen the real cost of shutting down so much of the railway.

So lets be big boys and admit that running down the railways was a bad idea and put a big proportion of the green taxes into expanding the railways again. we should be aiming to get everything off the roads and on to the railways, so that the only motor transport is to get from your home/office/factory to the railway station and back. And while wer’re at it, the rest of the green taxes can go into free bus/coach transport!

There’s a news item today about the fact that Cumbria will be the first region in the UK to switch over from analogue TV to digital TV. The transmitter in Whitehaven will be switched over on October 1st 2007. The item on the TV news described the complete cock up by the government, in its attempt to help the ‘old and vulnerable’ to get their TVs sorted out with set top boxes. Basically, they will have to change the law because the Data Protection Act prohibits the Department of Work and Pensions giving details of the ‘old and vulnerable’ to the department that is going to help the ‘old and vulnerable’ get their TVs ready for digital broadcasts. The law will be changed several months after the switch over. Nobody will be surprised about this.

However, nobody seems to be bothered by the great chunks of the UK who can’t receive and digital terrestrial broadcasts however many set top boxes they buy. In fact, where I live in the Peak District, I can’t even receive analogue TV except for BBC1 and the reception is awful. Its better in the winter where there’s fewer leaves on the trees.

At least analogue TV is trying to get through. Some Digital Radio isn’t even bothering at all. My local transmitter in Chesterfield transmits at 6W, just enough power to not quite reach the edges of Chesterfield itself, let alone the rest of Derbyshire. Oxfordshire’s Beckley transmitter in contrast covers Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Buckinghamshire.

It looks as if the BBC might have to recommend that everybody use Sky, its main competitor as satellite is available to everyone.

August 2nd 2006 is the day I had my colon removed. As you know from previous posts, up until now I’ve been rather ill with Ulcerative Colitis. Well finally the medical profession have given me up as a bad job and passed me over to the surgical team to remove my colon. They have not just removed my colon, they have also built a ‘pouch’ out of the end of my small intestine, which will replace my rectum. This also had to be removed as part of my colon.

The reason they can’t just remove the diseased part is that the good bit of my colon will also get Ulcerative Colitis if they leave it there. The operation is called a restorative procto colectomy - which means that I will have a illeostomy bag for a few months while the ‘pouch’ bit heals  and then they will put it all back together again hopefully.

OK what did I think of it all then? Well the operation took about five and a half hours and afterwards I felt terrible. I felt so sick for about 3 days afterwards. I also could hardly move. Now I thought that once you had the operation, after a few days you are up and about. What a shock I had. Not only do they remove half your digestive system, but they also render you completely immobile. Initially you can’t even roll over in bed let alone get up and walk. Finally after a week or so you can stagger to the loo, and as soon as that happens they say “Right, Mr Sheppard, you can go home now”.

I have to say, the care I received from the staff at the John Radcliffe was fantastic. The nurses were absolutely brilliant and so were the doctors, I feel very privileged to have some of the top people in their fields looking after me. (Tell me, what is the point of going private?) As an observer, all I can see is the medical staff trying to get on with their job while the Government does its utmost to interfere and  make their lives as difficult as possible, while bleating on about how much money they are costing.

Well all I can say is thank you very much NHS, I feel really cared for and looked after. That sounds a bit sarcastic. Its not meant to be. I really do feel very cared for by the NHS

Well, my experience with prescriptions has reached new heights of ridicule this month. A few days ago at the end of June, we moved from Oxford to Derbyshire, in fact we actually now live in the Peak District. Due to my massive drugs requirement from the NHS I need frequent top ups with drugs, hence an inevitable visit to the doctors.
Having got over initially being treated as an asylum seeker as I had little documentation and “we’ll have to wait for your notes” etc etc, the doctor finally agreed to give me some more drugs. I actually only needed 4 folic acid tablets to last me 1 month. Now this is the kind of drug the NHS likes to prescribe because we patients get stung for £6.65 and it will cost about 20p for a 20 tablet packet.
However, not content with this amazing profit, the doctor actually prescribed 4 tablets, so the pharmacist had to cut out 4 tablets from the strip. Thus rendering the rest of the strip of tablets probably unusable. This must have saved the NHS 16p I only needed 4 tablets because I was due to have an operation in 1 month. I know the NHS never cancel operations these days but you can never tell.

OK, this isn’t about ringing anybody up, this is about using the Internet to find out the telephone number of a business. To be specific, I wanted to find out the non emergency number of the police in Oxford so I could report a car which looked as if it had been stolen, then crashed and then dumped outside our house

I first tried BT (www.bt.com) and at the bottom they offer “The phone book” and then helpfully “Find a person” and “find a business”. So I clicked on the latter and duly entered police and Oxford. It first wanted to clarify that this was the Oxford that you find in Oxfordshire, as opposed to the Oxford you might find in Stoke on Trent or did I really mean Oxford Circus in London.

Once we had clarified that it then listout out all the entries it had for “police” in Oxford. After some entry headed Oxford City Council (which if I had read it properly would have been the right one) starts off with the Anti-terrorist hotline and then lists all the telephone numbers for the Hertfordshire Constabulary! I’m not kidding. After headquarters, its followed by ’stations’ Baldock, Berkhampstead, Bishops Stortford, Borehamwood etc etc.

So I decided to try YELL (www.yell.co.uk) which went the opposite way. This told me “2 results for police, No results in Oxford so your search has been widened to Oxfordshire” How ever did Morse manage. Clearly St Aldates Police Station doesn’t really exist. Whatever do they do in that building opposite the Courst Of Justice in St Aldates. Their next suggestion was “Henley Police Station” Well done YELL, you are several miles closer than BT can manage. To be fair to Yell, the next entry was the right one, and to be fair to BT the first entry under Oxford City Council was also the right one but it was completely confusing. What has the Thames Valley Police got to do with Oxford City Council

I’m in the process of buying and selling a house and can’t wait to tell you how wonderful solicitors are. My own solicitor is not only handling the selling of my own house but also handling the purchase of my new house - all at the same time. Now, he was instructed with these two transactions in only March this year and after only 9 weeks he called us into the office to sign the documentation, as he said, “because we are ready to move”. Very exciting this was.

Now, poor lamb hadn’t actually had the time to read much of the stuff, so when we arrived he needed to read each document before telling us the answers to our questions. But never mind. The trouble is despite the fact that I told him at the begining of April that there was a problem with the boundaries, he hadn’t noticed until we saw him that he was only dealing with half the property. However, and this was the fantastic bit, he had noticed that we didn’t own the access to the house and therefore coudn’t get in the door. What would we do without him. I’m so glad he told us because I’d really quite forgotton that this was exactly the problem I tried to explain to him in early April, unfortunately he wouldn’t listen because he said it would be all sorted out when the ‘deeds’ came in.

As he’s such a brilliant chap, he’d got straight on to the sellers solicitor and queried this, hadn’t he, well er no actually he hadn’t. Still he’s been very busy, his office was absolutely covered in files and folders; he must find it really difficult to find anything.

No matter I rang him the next day to check things were progressing and he told me that the sellers solicitor had that very day written to tell him about the second Land registry document that they had forgotton to send him. Unfortunately both of them had forgotton again about the little strip of land that allows you to get to the front door but it was OK because I’d found that for hime so he didn’t need to worry. I’d found it by going to the land registry website and putting in the postcode - bit tricky really.

I wonder when we are going to exchange contracts

I can’t wait to tell you how wonderful solicitors are.

I have to say I have a bit of a love hate relationship with my GP surgery. Basically when I feel they are looking after me, I love them and sing their praises, but the rest of the time they are driving me MAD!

I’ve attended my local surgery for the past 21 years (plus) and I can see that some aspects of it have really deteriorated, yet others have improved. They used to open late and they used to open on saturday mornings. This meant that I was able to go there without missing work. Now I have to go during work time which means I lose money. 20 quid per hour probably doesn’t seem much when you are on £80,000 - £100,000 per year as GPs allegedly are.

The thing that really annoys me to death is their policy on prescriptions. Basically you are only allowed to ring up to request a repeat prescription between the hours of 12:00 and 16:00 hours Monday to Friday. I rang up today and it was 16:30 and the receptionist wouldn’t take the prescription because I was half an hour late ringing up for it. Years ago you could ring up any time. Not only that but if you deign to ring at the right time they won’t have it ready for you until the after 2:00pm of the day after the next day. So ring up 12:00 midday on Monday and you can pick up the prescription after 2:00pm on Wednesday. However, I don’t finish ’till 6:00pm so they will be shut then and ….. Grrrrrrrr!

I have to admit that there’s a ton of work to be done during those 48 hours. The receptionist will have ticked some boxes to pick up the items one requires.
She will then click a button and the prescription will be printed out. The doctor then has to …..wait for it ….. sign the piece of paper! How does the doctor manage to fit it all in? The receptionist will have already checked that the patient is allowed to have this medication as its all preapproved in the notes. So in view of all this work, its probably pretty good to get it  done so quickly. I just marvel at how they used to turn around a prescription in a day - years ago - because back then they had to write out the prescription by hand as well.

While we are on the subject of value for money, I took in my NPPL (National private pilots licence) medical certificate to be countersigned in the autumn. They wanted £100 for doing it. I asked around the flying community and nobody had ever been charged that much before.

We have decided to move to the Peak District! A bit dramatic I know but it’s not just becuase of the prescriptions.

As mentioned in a previous post, I’m really sad about the NHS. But I’m really angry about the way successive labour governments have completely screwed up the education system in this country. And intervening Tory governments have done nothing to repair the damage. Just like the NHS they continue to out do one another in see who can mess it up the most.

Having screwed it up for everybody else, its now not good enough for Tony Blairs children, so he sends his own children to a selective fee paying independant school. What staggering hypocracy. It says in the introduction to ‘The Oratory School’ on their website;

“Boys enter the school either at the age of 13 through the Scholarship
or Common Entrance Examinations, or at 11 by a brief, informal
interview and examination, or by direct entry into the Sixth Form
depending on GCSE results.“

And now he is ramming a new Education Bill down our throats that makes it illegal for state schools to have any form of selection. Yet paradoxically, by doing this, the Labour government is actually forcing the ‘Good’ schools to only have wealthy parents children, and poor parents children will only be able to go to the duff schools.

The reason for this is that the children are now only chosen by their proximity to the school. Therefore house prices in catchment areas of good schools are much higher than similar houses near failing schools. At least if the allowed academic selection it would allow children from poorer families attend the so-called ‘good’ schools.

They really can’t see beyond the next election can they, or maybe their party political prejudices blind them to the reality of what they are doing.

For serious amateur photographers, some shocking news was announced today. Konica Minolta have decided, after 103 years to quit the photography business. You can read al about it here. Personally I’m stunned having just purchased a Konica Minolta Dynax 5D SLR! Its the most fantastic camera I have ever used.

I was a bit  concerned when the merger was announced between Konica and Minolta in 2004, because I could see Konica must be struggling as they manufacture photographic film and paper. I wonder if this has pulled both companies down. The are not closing down completely, just concentrating on other aspects of their business, medical imaging and photocopying etc. They are transferring some of their digital SLR assets to Sony who are bring out a new range of cameras in the summer using the Minolta mount lenses - so hopefuly, Minolta lenses are still going to be made. They say in their announcement,

“…In this relation, we have decided to withdraw from camera business (except for digital SLR cameras and interchangeable lenses produced for Sony.), such as film cameras and digital cameras, within Konica Minolta Group as of March 31, 2006. …”

I wonder if reading this again, they are going to stop making all film cameras and all digital cameras but will carry on making Konica Minolta digital SLR cameras which Sony will market under their name. I hope this is a correct reading of the announcement, as I feel very sad that one of the most technically advanced cameras on the market should just be dumped.

I feel really sad and upset about the state of the NHS. As a ‘user’ of the service for the last 50 odd years I have watched as the health service has deteriorated over that period. Successive governments and professional bodies have joined forces to create a synergetic partnership of incompetence. Each body seems to stuggle to outdo their predecessor in screwing things up. Anyone who works ‘on the front line’ must be very demoralised and disheartened to see the authorities putting bigger obstacles in the way of them getting on with your work.

I’ve just spent nearly 2 weeks in hospital at the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford. The standard of care from the staff has been absolutely fantastic. The doctors have been trying everything to sort out my disease and the nurses and other staff have worked hard to make my stay as comfortable as possible. And now we hear on the news that the Oxfordshire NHS has overspent by £15 million this year. What do they mean ‘overspent’. Basically I assume some bean counter who knows nothing about anything (probably a politician then) has decreed that Oxfordshire NHS receives £Xmillion for this financial year. They spent £15 million more than this. What does that mean; the bean counter guessed wrong? Oh no, patients are to be denied care so that the bean counter and its political masters don’t look stupid, because obviously that’s most important. Other things that are more important are spending billions on messing things up in Iraq so that we are keeping that jerk in the White House happy.

Listen UK Government, we don’t want choice for where we go to hospital, and we don’t want you to waste our money in Iraq. What we want is for the local hospital were we live to provide us with the medicines and care to make us well. We don’t care whether you think they have spent more than you think they ought to have done. They obviously didn’t spend it on big nights out and lavish dinners for international guests like you did at the G8 summit in the summer, they spent it on keeping the NHS going. Are you listening Mr Blair. Or is this a master plan to deny Gordon the chance to play at being PM.

Askern Fly-in is the last fly-in of the year for the MW Club. As mentioned previously my one desire has been to get back into flying and I had a real treat this weekend. Everyone seemed keen to encourage me to fly my machine and I’d like to thank everyone for their efforts. Primarily to Mick for building such a fantastic machine, then to Toby and Bob for taking me up and giving me a great experience. Bob particularly for pushing me until I could roughly get a circuit right without killing myself. The photo above shows me coming in for my first attempt at landing. The flying was terrible but I got the approach reasonably good, perhaps the nose is a bit high. Anyway, my next 2 flights, the flying improved immensly and the approach and landing got worse! I can’t wait until the Spring when I can start getting my licence back.

I really can’t believe it, but I’ve just bought an aeroplane. As long as I can remember I’ve wanted to fly. As a teenager I was passionate about flying and could bore you with everything you didn’t want to know about aeroplanes, particularly RAF ones, in fact I knew everything from the early days of Sir George Cayley to the present day, the present day being about 1969. In 1970 I won a flying scholarship through the air cadets and got my PPL. Unfortunately I’ve been unable to afford keeping my licence current, and so put it to one side and concentrated on my wife and family. About 13 years ago, I picked up a copy of ‘Flyer’ magazine and all my previous dreams came flooding back. I rejoined the Popular Flying Association and got involved with a group of builders and flyers of aeroplanes designed by a chap called Mike Whittaker. They called themselves the MW Club. Anyway, it was at their annual fly-in this year at Cheddar that a friend had decided to sell his beautifully made MW6. I was the first to offer to buy and the deal has been struck. I’m so excited I can’t believe it. I feel like a little boy. I looked up at someone paragliding this evening and instead of thinking, “I wish I could do that”, I thought, “I’ll be up there soon too”.

Just a few problems to solve first. How do I get it down from Doncaster. I need a car with a towing bracket. (You aren’t allowed to put a towing bracket on a Ford KA.) Second, where do I keep it, and finally where do I go to get my licence back. I was marvelling at what good value the aeroplane was. But it might be more expensive after all as I need a new car as well!

Although 52 years old, I seem to be addicted to electronic gadgets. So each birthday and each Christmas I’m looking at saving up for a “something or other” which will be some electronic device. When I was a teenager, it was a hi-fi system, and being in the days of exclusively analogue electronics, we talked about wow and flutter, total harmonic distortion, signal to noise ratio and the like. Unfortunatley I was unable to afford the decent stuff and had to put up with very definately ‘low-fi’ equipment. I just tried to ignore the hiss and the hum from the rather low spec amplifier and speakers. 2 years ago I was saving up for an iRiver MP3 player. Actually I wanted the iRiver because (just to show my geek credibility) I wanted to play Ogg Vorbis files as well as MP3.

Now being digital and solid state, wow and flutter must be pretty well zero. THD is so insignificant, they can’t even measure it and signal to noise ratio is so high that 1970’s hi-fi manufacturers would not believe the figure. This device, which is smaller than a Pritt Stick also contains a radio of unbelievable quality. So it performs all the functions of a 1960’s juke box/radiogram, but doesn’t take up any of the living room. The sound is absolutely fantastic and it records really clearly as well. The only thing is, that the plastic navigation knob has snapped off and it can’t be used properly any more. What a disaster. Update: After emailing iRiver support and asking where I could buy a new switch they asked me to return it to them for repair. What a great company. Well done iRiver.

My phone is a Nokia 9210. This wonderful device allows me to log on to my server from the top of a mountain and fix problems. It also lets me download emails, tells me when to get up and it can send and receive faxes. It will display word documents, excel files, and basically do most office tasks. It is also a phone. But it is a bit of a brick. And now the buttons aren’t working properly and so its getting a bit unreliable. What a shame.

My camera is a Minolta Z3. Again a marvel of technology, there’s nothing wrong with this camera at all. 12x optical zoom, 4M images, and as whole host of clever features. Only trouble is that it can’t seem to focus in the dark, over exposes sunny shots when on automatic and can’t seem to photograph purple, the colours always come out blue. How frustrating.

My son James has just bought a Sony Ericsson K750i. What an astonishing phone. It will just fit into a box of Swan Vestas and can do everything above really well except word documents and faxes and its only got a 4x zoom. How much smaller can technology get. That’s 3 brilliant gadgets in one tiny bar of chocolate. How wonderful!

I’ve been sending out a number of emails to my MEPs about software patents, there are 8 MEPs who represent me in the South East. I’m disgusted to discover that only 2 MEPs could be bothered to reply. My local MP, Andrew Smith, always replies to my letters and has also rung up to make sure he was covering the issue properly.

UPDATE Software patents were thrown out by the European Parliament MEPs on Wednesday and you can read all about it here

Now the Labour party has won the election, they are determined to carry on headlong into implementing their stupid policy of issuing ID cards. Not only are they going to be foisted onto us whether we want them or not, but they are also going to charge us £93 pounds each. (Actually a lot more than this, as mentioned later)

I predict that this will be another Governmental IT disaster, but unfortunately several billions of pounds will be wasted before the project is abandoned. Frankly I don’t care whether we have ID cards or not from a personal privacy point of view. I already know that too many people have my private information. What concerns me is the Government’s obsession with the idea that this will solve ‘idenity theft’, and their total ignorance of the technical problems. It will in fact make identity theft more dangerous.

Lets look at the scenario. Someone steals your identity. Now the Government ministers think this is impossible. (Its not. But then what do you expect when we have self confessed technophobes running the country. As they don’t understand the technology, they are insisting that we have it, when all the experts around them are telling them it won’t work. I assume ‘not listening to anybody at all’ was tucked away in the manifesto somewhere.)

Sorry, I digress. someone has stolen your identity. (I’ll explain how later). You have overnight lost all your money, probably your job and shortly your marriage when your wife finds herself thrown out of your home.

You go to the bank and find all your bank card no longer works. That was easy, your thief just got your bank cards changed to a new number and posted to a new address, using the ID that they now control. You protest. “Sorry sir, we don’t use a statement from the electricty board and your birth certificate to prove who you are any more, they were too easy to forge, just your ID card suffices. I’m afraid we have no record of you on your system. In fact sir, would you mind taking a seat.”

This is so that they bank can ring the police because they have just discovered that your ID card brings up no records so you are clearly an illegal immigrant.

After protesting your innocence, you manage to get police bail, and go home to find a ‘For Sale’ sign outside your house with a police car, and your wife and family out on the pavement. Your wife is under arrest for hitting the policeman who was involved in evicting the ’squatters’ from your house. The ’squatters’ are you and your family.

The authorities won’t believe your story because your ID card doesn’t show up on the National Database anymore. OK I’ll leave how this is achieved until later. Lets look at the technical aspects.

The government set up a pilot study by the UKPS, The UK Passport Service, to see how users would react to being scanned and fingerprinted. Apart from user reaction, they also found out that fingerprinting only validated 81%, facial scans were 69% and iris scans were 96%. They didn’t seem to understand that unless one of the biometric tests provides 100% validation then the whole system doesn’t work. Did you get that Labour Government THE ID CARD TECHNOLOGY DOESN’T WORK. What is the reaction to this unsurmountable problem; they are pressing on with it through parliament. What bit of “The ID Card technology doesn’t work” don’t you understand, Charles Clarke? Apparently there were 6 people of whom no biometric test worked at all. What do we do with these ‘misfits’?

Added to that, the LSE has just produce a report stating that they have miscalculated the cost of the cards and they are £300 not £93.

I have been a bit under the weather of late. To be specific, I’ve been ill since Christmas. I won’t go into details but I have a disease called Ulcerative Colitis. If you are interested you can look it up on Google. Anyway, a Japanese company called Asahi Medical, have developed a new treatment for UC using something called the “Cellsorba™ Leukocytapheresis column”. Several thousand Japanese patients have had this treatment and you can now get it as a matter of course if you are Japanese and live in Japan on the Japanese Health Service. No so almost everywhere else on the planet. As a result, Asahi Medical are offering trials to various hospitals throughout Europe to try and get it accepted more widely as a treatment for UC.

Living in Oxford, I’m treated in the UC Clinic in the John Radcliffe Hospital. They have been offered a trial and I became the first person in the UK to try this new treatment. Due to Doctor - patient confidentiality, they can’t tell you who I am, but of course blogs are causing all sorts of confidentiality problems. Look what Apple does. One of the things that the Internet has done is to make medical experts of all of us. You can hear about a disease, look it up on the net, and become an expert in just a few minutes. So obviously I wanted to look up exactly what Leukocytapheresis was and what happened when you had it done.

Guess what, the Internet failed me. It’s full of reports on case studies about various trials, not a single one really explains what happens to the patient. Now I know you are not really interested in this, but after all that preamble, this blog is going to tell you exactlywhat happens. Incidentally, If I’d only gone to Asahi Medical’s website I could have found out quite a bit - see here.

Basically, the doctors think that UC is caused by the white blood cells (Leukocytes) attacking the colon. So the idea behind this new treatment is to take your blood out of one arm, put it through a filter which filters out these cells, and then put it back in via the other arm. The machine they use for this is similar to the machine they use for dialysis for kidney patients except you don’t have to have the treatment for so long.

Now the thought does cross your mind, why have you got all these white blood cells in the first place if they cause so much trouble. Well of course, you don’t mention this to the doctor because clearly there is a reason and you don’t want to look a total idiot asking such a stupid question. So after asking the question, I discovered that apparently, these are the cells that ‘protect‘ you from other illnesses, viruses, etc. They (the Leukocytes) just think that the colon is an infection and should be got rid of. Same sort of problem as when you have a organ transplant. So by filtering them out, they can’t attack the colon so it gets better but you are now left open to all sorts of other diseases that happen to be floating around. Brilliant.

Anyway, the ‘treatment’ consists of 5 weekly sessions where you have about an hour or so of this blood sucking process. Look at the diagram on the Ashi Medical page and you will see the general layout.

Here’s an image of me going through it. You can see the cellsorba column near the centre of the picture full of my .. er .. well blood actually!
So, what’s it actually like. Well the worst bit is the putting in of the needles, you obviously have one in each arm and the are about 1mm in diameter, so not the sort used for a quick blood test. They are incredibly sharp so if the doctor puts it in quickly, then there’s the tiniest of pricking, however if he dithers about its more uncomfortable (ok, it really HURTS!).

After that, you just have to lie there for an hour or so while your blood is pumped out of one arm, through the machine and into the other arm. As the blood is returned (minus your white blood cells) it’s quite cold so they cover you up to warm you up a bit. Hence you can’t see the tubes coming out of one arm and into the other in the photo.

One thing that astonished me was the design of the machine. It’s a general purpose machine so that it can do all sorts of ‘blood pumping’ operations including dialysis and leucocytapheresis. The display shows the various pressures and can log them, but the doctors tend to write them down on a notepad every few minutes. They can if they wish get the machine to display the log of all the pressures and how they have varied through the proceedure. I would have expected a usb or serial or RJ45 ethernet connection so that this can be downloaded. However there’s no such facility! You have to copy the readings off the screen!

Lets ignore the machine design deficiencies; how effective is the treatment. Well, it didn’t have a huge impact to begin with for me. Frankly, I started referring to the ‘placebo’. Usually with clinical trials, some of the patients have a ‘pretend’ treatment which has no effect so that the results with the real treatment should show a definite improvement. However, after the 5 treatments, I’m definitely better than I was at the beginning but unfortunately not completely better. The down side is where do we go from here?