Topic 3 - Twitter

3 - Twitter

what an amazing gem of a service, it is everything to everyone. Even people that didn't 'get it' are now addicted, even though they probably still don't get it!

3.1 - Twinglish

One of the most noticeable things about Twitter is the the false prefix of TW to the beginning of words such that a 'meet-up' organised over Twitter becomes a 'Tweet-up', amongst many others - it is a sort of forced spoonerism or a clever attempt to engineer portmanteaus. Unfortunately, due to this endeavour by the founding users of Twitter, I recently committed the ultimate faux pas in a client meeting (nonetheless) - I was discussing Twitter along with their on-line chat service. I, in a rather Freudian spoonerism joined twitter and chat, and i didn't form Chitter!

3.2 - applying Twitter

Twitter can be applied to almost any situation, whether you just want to keep everyone updated with your every move (or 'movement') or just tell people about a specific event. I push Twitter to my clients as the chance to communicate with end-users, editors, bloggers, anyone on a more personal basis - for the sceptical I say just to use the search feature and look for what people are talking about and very soon they see the value.

3.3 - My Twitter

I am @drneilravenhill (http://twitter.com/drneilravenhill). I tweet about everything, from my personal interests to my professional clients, or even general news and science stories. I engage with the community and my followers as much as possible - some days I don't turn Twitter on as it can be a little consuming.

3.4 - Biggest achievement

My biggest achievement with Twitter to date has been a Tweet-up (now you know what that means) in Chicago at an international conference. I met with people that iI probably would never have met and have established many good friends as a result. I also think that this is one of Twitter's biggest achievements - dispelling the doubters that it will drive a wedge in social face to face contact - i think it is almost the complete opposite, it really brings disparate groups of people together whether locally or around the other side of the world!

I think that is it for Twitter for now, next is ... i still don't know, so keep looking and see what i come up with. Also, please feel free to send me a message or comment and let me know what I can ramble about next!

Topic 2 - LinkedIn

Well lets see if we can keep this on track now with LinkedIn, followed by Twitter and then, well let's see what those two inspire!

2 - LinkedIn

I like LinkedIn but it is more difficult to write about in a non-professional way, so please excuse the 9to5 overtones. Why do I like LinkedIn, well it is simple, there is nothing difficult about it - you link with people and exchange information. You can pay a monthly premium for additional services, but the normal version is just fine for me (for now)!

2.1 - Instant profile

Just a simple set of forms get you going an you can place as little or as much info as you like, including a photo - one single photo - no albums or tagging. There are also no games - phew! One similarity with Facebook though, are the existence of groups, and you've probably guessed it, these tend to be collections of similar minded people on the professional level, so Universities, large companies, in fact almost any possible collective! Once you have a profile, you join the groups and connect with people - as many or as few as you want or can!

2.2 - Recommendations

One of the most important features, as far as I'm concerned, is the ability for your contacts to write recommendations about you - I am normally very reserved when it comes to such things, but I decided one day to ask a few of my contacts whether they would recommend me. I was hoping that I might get one or two people to respond, but I was pleasantly surprised with over 30 responses all with glowing recommendations! I was (and still am) very humbled and thankful.

2.3 - Questions

Need and answer? Want to take a poll or judge opinion? then just ask the question and people will answer. It is amazing how many people feed back on all questions - such a nice group of people. I suppose it helps that you get to award 'Best Answer' status and since LinkedIn is essentially a profiling site, people like to collect such accolades - I have one such prize!

Anyway, I think that that is about it for LinkedIn for now, the only other thing to say is go and try it and feel free to link-up with me: http://www.linkedin.com/in/drneilravenhill

Well that experiment worked well!

I will blog again, and I will do it daily, promise.

-- Sent from my Palm Prē

To Blog or not, that is the question!

Well, it's been ages since I lasted posted to my blog and I feel bad (really bad in fact) about that! So, in an effort to say sorry to the blogosphere, as well as anyone that might actually read what I write, I am going to try to blog daily for a while and see what happens. I haven't got a clue what I am going to write but hopefully my creative juices will start flowing and .... well you never know!

I am not promising long posts, or even anything that is informative, but I see it more as an experiment with a simple hypothesis: Am I disciplined enough to post to my blog everyday! I think having an experimental goal will help (me being a scientist and all!), although the Null Hypothesis that would better reflect a brief experiment like this is probably a lot closer to the truth - I am not disciplined enough...! (hmmmm). So here goes with Topic 1:

1 - Facebook

I find Facebook a very useful tool, but also one that can fill many hours with mindless nothingness (a bit like TV Soaps!)! But that is all a matter of self-control and also poses the question of whether it is good or bad to do something that offers no real value? And then that opens further questions which make me wish I had never even gone done this path of evaluating my time usage! So moving on....

1.1 - Dad and intuitiveness!

I have been taking my Dad through Facebook today as he wants a good way of sharing photos etc with the family and to me Facebook was a good solution, not because it is the best, but because most of the family are already on it! One thing I realised very quickly tough was that the Facebook user interface is terrible! There seems no reason to the structure and things are not always ordered as I would expect them to be - I expect there are many people that go on about such things as I know that people always moan when changes are made. This is similar to a topic that will come onto to tomorrow - LinkedIn (Topic 2) - where the change in interface has, in my belief, taken some of the professional feel away. This is probably completely irrational, but it is a 'change' and such things always have fans and opponents - hence why there are so many course on Change Management in the business setting!

1.2 - Family tree

One 'app' that I have been slowly toying with is the Family Tree. It is intriguing and certainly one of these functions where you suddenly find that hours have passed and you haven't moved! I was filling in some my family members who have moved on to the celestial plane, and for some reason I was mildly shocked when the screen asked me for their death dates and location of death! All useful and practical info, just took me back. I know very little of such things, although I could probably find some of them out - I have decided that such detail is the realm of the dedicated family historian and not a have-a-go hopeless like me.

1.3 - Games and 'Love Hearts'

It took me ages to decide to join Facebook, after all I am already profiled on many professional social media sites and I tweet. One of the reasons for the tardiness of my membership is the myriad games and stupid (lovey dovey) apps like sending love hearts etc. I can't be bothered with all this overtly superficial blurghhhhhh, so I certainly avoid these, but I do wonder if I come across as a snob or killjoy for acting like this, oh well!

1.4 - Mobile access

Now, to end on a bright note: I do really like the fact that I can access Facebook from virtually anywhere, but especially my phone. I can take a photo very quickly with my phone and within a couple of minutes (depending on connection speed), it can be live for all my friends to see and comment on. Or if I wanted to just update my status I could also do that with equal ease.

So, with that I will end today's ramblings and start to prepare for tomorrow's post on LinkedIn - yes I am taking this seriously by actually thinking and preparing things

After thought, please feel free to invite me as a friend on Facebook, just search for me, you can't miss me.

Summer is coming - better get the Log Cabin up!

Last week I was completely immersed in building a Log Cabin at the bottom of my garden!

 

Why?

 

Well, we need the space - I have ‘stuff’ stored at various people’s houses and it is about time I bought the stuff back (and I’m sure they’ll be glad to get rid too!).

 

So I thought I’d post some pictures of the cabin for you to digest and a short description follows:

 

I got the cabin from www.simplylogcabins.com, it is an Gudrum Emma 2 cabin and is 3.6m x 3.6m. I went for the additional shingle roofing as it looks better and offers the practical advantages of better waterproofing and additional thermal insulation. We (my brother-in-law, my Dad and me) installed a wooden frame, as per a standard decking installation and placed 18mm moisture resistant chipboard on the area where the cabin would sit, the rest (outside the cabin footprint) is being ‘decked’. The log cabin was really very easy to put together as the double tongue & groove planks just need a few gentle knocks to lock into place. A few of the planks were warped so took a bit more manipulation but on the whole the whole thing went up really quickly.

 

The floor and roof have been insulated and we shall see whether this is enough for the winter months. The 19mm T&G floor of the cabin is assembled inside the cabin walls (rather than under the footprint) and has a small cavity where we placed 25mm xtratherm insulation boards. We insulated the roof on the outside to keep the T&G effect of the supplied roofing slats. Therefore we battened the roof with standard roofing batten and placed the same 25mm xtratherm insulation in the spaces, reforming the roof surface with standard 18mm chipboard. The roof was then felted with the supplied material and then covered over with the fantastic additional shingle roofing material. Doing this ‘on top’ insulation did mean moving the fascia boards up a bit but they are wide enough to cope.

 

We also ran electric and network cables down to the cabin, which was a job in itself as our property layout meant running 6.5 mm² twin & earth mains cable (plus the Cat5e) into the loft, out through the soffit into a conduit with many bends which travelled down one tiled wall, diagonally across a flat roof, down to the ground, across some concrete and then was buried under a thin patch of earth running down the length of the garden. This power was connected to a spare 30A RCCD in our main consumer unit and into a garage consumer unit in the cabin to split the supply 6A for lighting and 16A for ring main.

 

As well as the cabin purchase I used my local Buildbase store (www.buildbase.co.uk) for the timber, insulation and gravel; my local ScrewFix store (www.screwfix.com), a number of different local B&Q stores (www.diy.com) as well as my very local hardware shop (Smiths Brothers) for all second fix items such as wiring, lights, decking, screws etc.

 

So all in all a very pleasing project and relatively easy to do.

 

Neil's Cold or 'Why not to use Antibiotics!'

A few weeks back I Twittered on the cold that had taken over my body, partially at the request of some followers but also from some sense of 'Science Crusade'. Doctor's surgeries get blocked up over winter with people suffering from the common cold. many people expect to be given some sort of miracle medication to cure them; may go away with antibiotics, which are often not needed and worse still can increase the occurance of bacterial resistance to antibiotics.

This later point is worrying as there is growing evidence to suggest that 'over-prescription' of antibiotics was a strong contributor to the rapid increase in the generation of bacterial strains resistant to multiple antibiotics E.G. MRSA (methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureaus) and VRE (Vancomycin Resistant Enterococci). These 'superbugs' have become a global healthcare nightmare and we must all, Practitioners and Public alike, adjust our use of what are essentially life saving medications.

My Tweets:

1. common colds are caused By 'viruses'. viruses have no means of replicating themselves and must therefore invade a host = you
   
2. once in a host a virus will hijack the host's molecular machinery to replicate itself thousands of times in each cell
   
3. viruses are essentially a length of DNA or RNA encapsulated in a fancy protein coat. they come in many shapes and styles
   
4. viruses take away all your energy, making rugby very difficult. I know i'm not very fit, but today was difficult!
   
5. next morning and things are worse - very little sleep due to a completely blocked nose damn virus!
   
6. KEY POINT - ANTIBIOTICS, SUCH AS PENICILLIN, WILL NOT TOUCH THE COMMON COLD SO PLEASE DON'T ASK YOUR DOCTOR FOR ANY!
   
7. just to clarify - antibiotics treat bacterial infections not viral ones. Viruses are almost impossible to kill with medicine
   
8. the body's reaction to a virus is usually advantageous to that virus - e.g raised temp gives quicker production turnover
   
9. Viruses are pretty amazing, as they hijack a host's normal processes for their own benefits. Some are 'kinder' than others!
   
10. scientists use adapted viruses to deliver test molecules during research or even 'genes' as treatments. e.g for #CF
    
11. Virus still there, but definitely fewer effects now. Still wish that something could've taken to get rid of the virus!
    
12. But there are no medications that can effectively defeat a virus - the only thing you can do is ease the symptoms
13. So use: painkillers (Ibuprofen, paracetamol etc) for the aches; cough mixtures for any cough (i find Glycerol ones best)...
    
14. coughing is an essential part of clearing mucus/phlegm from the airways, so use Guaifenesin to make it more effective
    
15. use vapours (Menthol ones best) to decongest nasal passages - I find that Phenylephrine meds don't really work for this!
    
16. Please Note - These are just things I do to help my colds - please always read labels and heed proper medical advice
    
17. I also like to max on sugary foods to give me the energy boost to keep functioning. But rest is best for faster recovery!
    
18. Finally though, remember that Antibiotics don't help cure colds! (had to say that again - it is very important)
    

I will continue to Tweet and Blog about the issues following this 'Cold' in the hopes that there is eventually better understanding by the populus about antibiotics and why your doctor may not be so quick to prescribe them nowadays!

What a week!

Well what can i say except Thank Goodness it's Friday! The main reason for this is the complete loss of internet at work due our broadband being 'ceased'. Those that are aware of telecomms type stuff will know that that is not good - we should be back up and runnning next week - why can't it just be switched back on!

So losing internet isn't really that bad on it's on, but with it comes the loss of email into the building and therefore the use of Outlook. Instead, we are borrowing a connection from the nice guys downstairs and making do with an antiquated webmail system. Somepeople have enjoyed the break from email overload, but i find it disheartening for many reasons!

Anyway, fingers crossed for a speedy recovery next week (probably following a number of calls to the tech guys!).