The perils of being young and medicated

Hey, I got pretty worked up over this so I felt I had to take a rage-dump here. (Note: rage-dump being a term of Futurama origin I believe).

For those not in the know, I require a fairly regular prescription. I'm not going to go into details. The usual response I would produce when asked what it's for, I would respond, "anti-depressants" and that usually stops the questions. I'm not actually prescribed them but for the purposes of the curious that is what I "take".

Right, setting-the-story and I've required a prescription for quite some time now, I believe I may have been around 13 when it first started, maybe younger. Anyways, back then my Mother would go to the doctors to hand in a repeat prescription. A few days later it would be ready to be picked up and off to the chemists to be ordered. Most likely, another day as my stuff would have to be ordered in (I'm special like that). Obviously as I got older, I started to take over, fine you're thinking. It was not a problem when I was at school, then college and then University and even my part-time job post University, because I would have time to visit the doctors/chemist to make these droppoffs/collections yada yada ya.

The problem has arisen thanks to myself being in fulltime employment now. This means that the doctors is only open Monday to Friday, and you've guessed it, the opening hours being those that I am at either work, or travelling to/from - i.e. no way I can physically get there on a normal working day. And so the fun begins...

The first nuisance was with having a prescription, it required me to book an appointment with the doctor when it came to registering. And when i finally sorted that out, the doctor didn't have a clue who I was or what I was prescribed. Literally there was a golden opportunity to score some meds, unfortunately I didn't have my fast-thinking head on (I rarely do these days it seems :s). I was also add that the doctor was super helpful explaining how easy it could be to make handing in and then collecting a repeat prescription. I'm not sure I'm into naming and shaming here and the legal ramifications of doing so. Expect a potential edit later.

With that mini-fiasco out of the way, the next step was setting up the collection service. Actually, this part was utterly painless. Thanks alrgely to this dear old lady who understood immediately my situation and sorted myself out no problem. The chemists are open on Saturdays thankfully so it's easy to pop down and pick up the rpescription. I've been given a phone number for the chemist to which I am to ring to authorise them to pick up my prescription.
The next step is what gets my blood boiling.

This is the first time I've used the service, so with any luck it'll be pretty streamlined after time. I've been advised to give the chemist a call to let them know when my prescription will be ready. I posted my repeat prescription through the surgery letterbox this morning and I was hoping to give them a call quickly just to find out when the prescription would be ready to collect. I thought I'd give their prescription number a call. Well guess what? The number is only available between 10am-12am and then 2pm-5pm. I had the pleasure of listening to a recording metion that thanks to demand the line would be only open druign those stated hours, and how I should not leave a message. I was pretty tempted. I'm sure I can't be the only one who would potentially ring during their lunch hour, I mean come on.
Frustrated I headed back to my work desk, noted the more general, appointments number and planned on giving that a call, it would only be a very brief call. I gave that a ring, and that's precisely what it did: ring and ring and ring and ring.
No luck there, clearly noone had the foresight of answering a phone joining the lunch period as people aren't gonna call then? don't be silly!...

Fortunately, I had to pop down the road laterthat afternon, so I could make the calls then, so hopefully that's all taken care of. We shall see come Saturday, when I come to pick up the prescription. It's never smooth sailing is it folks?

Just to reiterate my main point and a reminder of the title of this post, I can't be the only person in this situation, i.e in full-time employment and requiring a (semi-)regular prescription. The truth is how could I be, but it seems like choices have been made which make it very hard to use my local GP. Quite recently, GPs came under pressure thanks to a pay increase but fewer surgery hours, and add to that the fact that callouts have been greatly reduced. There was call to extend these hours and I am in complete favour of that. It doesn't have to be by much, perhaps one day in the week the surgery stays open till 8pm, or there is a Saturday morning surgery. Just something that makes visiting my GP easier. I guess I should be thankful that I don't work on Saturday too, or else I would be pretty much entirely screwed.

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New DLC announced!

S
o in a bid to get more content here rather than me adding more bells 'n' whistles to an already bloated bell and whistle page, I'm thinking about setting up regular weekly posts. For now, I'm thinking I should have a sports-oriented set of posts, obviously detailing the teams/sports I'm following and any rants or praise songs I may want to add there. Another obvious one would be to have a set about games, bit of a no-brainer. Another one could easily be a music type one, and I think that would do very nicely.
I'm thinking it might be quite pr0 to have these regular posts occuring on the same day each week, so we could have a gaming Monday. That would be quite smart, the name "gaming monday" however is not. So, any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, I'll get to work on my own ideas, and then I will ignore any suggestions and stick with my ideas cos there are da best!
Also these special posts give me the opportunity to try out adding some images to the post titles (seriously I cannot stop tinkering!) so that might be something quite smart, we'll see how it goes. speaking of images, I do also want to throw in soe more pics to spruce the place whether that be ones taken with the phone (yikes!) or ones pinched from the Internet, and if that is the case I will quote my source like a responsible author.

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Added Flickr Slideshow!

H

ey, just a quick post to say that I've added the Slideshow page element so it will now cycle through a couple of pics from my Flickr page. I've just uploaded a couple of pics off my mobile phone, so whilst the pics look alright in the element, full page they look pretty cock so apologies.
When I get a bit of time I will do some more posts, I've quite recently been dropping into rant mode, so it's always good to share that with the internets...
Take it easy.

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New header image...

O
h my god! I've just spent a fair chunk of the morning, sorting out the header image on this lurvely blog, and man am I fed up with Internet Explorer. I was getting the image being rendered perfectly in Firefox but I was getting rather bizarre behaviour from IE7. Thankfully, with Microsoft copying Firefox, there are addons available in much the same vein as extensions in FF. So I went off and downloaded my first (and probably last) addon for IE7. That being a DOM inspector much like ones already available in FF.

Anyways, firing that up and returning to this blog page I started to diagnose the problem. Strangely enough it was flagging that there were margin and border properites being applied although I knew from staring at the CSS in another tab that those attributes had long been commented out. Seems IE7 does some weird caching of CSS stuff. Anyways, I went back in, explicitly told IE7 not to stick any margins, borders etc in places and voila! both browsers render it pretty much the same.
Man, it's like having to guide a child round the shops. "No! We must go down this aisle dammnit!"

Time to recover from IE-induced stress *sigh*
Take it easy

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Gym me up Scotty!

Yes another blog from work, just keeping it brief, heralding the imminent return of the Gym Impressions posts which had a short-lived history last year. Obviously, since moving I have not been able to keep up my regular attendance at Wem's excuse for a gym, but rejoice! I have joined my local JJB fitness club and pretty swish is it too.

Obviously the amount of people is a lot higher, i.e. more than 1 but with that there are more machines and apparatus for me to look very cool struggling away, sweating like a bastard, I belive is the term...
I am of course taking my mini mp3 player along with me, as I am not partial to the dance rave-a-thon themed music they have booming out. So this would mean a chance to stick on some choons and jog the night away. Speaking of which, Reuben's "We're all going home in an ambulance" is an absolute must for upping the pace. It starts playing and I reach for the speed up button = winnar! Other possible gym reviews coming up would be Motion City Soundtrack's latest venture "Even if it kills me", (mmm, no emo vibe going on there, lol) and Tellison's "Contact! Contact!" which have been recommended to me by Adam, has a lot of promise.

In other news, the look of the blog needs a bit of work, I changed the header image as I was annoyed that the image wasn't stretching at higher resolutions, and even post-change it's actually no better. Do not view this at 1680x1050 like I did with my shiny new monitor, it's scary! So I will put aside a bit of time to sort that.
I also want to spruce up the site with a few more pics. Blogger have produced a Flickr slideshow widget so I need to populate my Flickr account, and get that happening. Unfortunately, as I discovered just before I went to the NFL london game last year, my digital camera has stopped working, so I was left to cope with my mobile phone camera, which is frankly a bit rubbish. Anyways, I have some pics on there, some fun, some a little random from my travels on the train.

A lot of my stuff has been broken, or in need of replacing when it came to the move, and I'm slowly working through all my material goods. The first thing that needed replacing was the weak 14" TV - I now have a lurvely 37" HD TV monster! (again pics have been promised for some time...). I have just replaced my 15" monitor which my Mother broke but refuses to admit to it. So the next thing I need to replace is the digital Camera, and I'm also hell bent on finally getting myself an iPod classic, it will happen, maybe after next payday.

That's enough of my lunch hour spent blogging, time to go eat. So yeah, look forward to Gym Impressions blogs coming soon, and I also want to have a positive rant about the xbox 360's latest dashboard update so check that out.
Take it easy.

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An Apple a day keeps Microsoft away...

Hey hey hey! Just doing a mini-post from work, a habit which I could possibly develop if workload is low, but anyways, here was me saying I would blog more, and oh crap! we're already a month down of 2008. My friend Adam has decided to go on a solo
holiday to Amsterdam, and he's documenting his travel adventures here, so go check that out, it's got lots of lovely pictures (which can be enlargened oh yes!) and it's well written, but I've got a slight bias there.

Anyways, Adam was going through selling a lot of his stuff, and naturally being one of his good friends, I got first dibs on some of the stuff. I got a few games, Halo 3 legendary edition (yes, the one with the helmet! :D) and the ultimate amongst the list is the Mac Mini. Slightly embarassingly I have not properly set it up, but what began with mere curiousity to the Apple approach, is slowing becoming fanboy status of the sliding scale. I'm not there yet, but I would only keep Windows for games and really the only games I stick on my PC have been WoW and the football manager series, and it is possible to get Mac versions for those, and if that's not enough, thanks to the Macs being Intel-based, it's much much easier to get Windows apps or indeed Windows to run natively without any hacky emulators and the like.

I am slowly going to make the transistion. Although not really an Apple product as such, but around the same time, I've been checking out some podcasts. It kinda started out with ExtraLife Radio (please check out this guy he is super talented, so much so a part of me resents him) and having that play whilst I've been working through the tiresome later stages of the career in Forza 2. Oh yes, please check out the rest of the site, the web comic he makes is absolutely pr0, I stumbled on it thanks to the heavy WoW content much earlier on, but basically it's a geeky comic, so win!
This led me to check out iTunes, again with the Mac influence (I've tried it before and found it rather clunky compared to Winamp). Anyways, I will eventually get an iPod classic (I know, too many Apple products), so it's good for me to get familiar, make sure all my music is added etc. Anyways, I have to say that using the iTunes store to find podcasts is awesome, so I've added all my old subscriptions and a couple new ones, like the Jonathan Ross one which I still need to check out.

I also took this opportunity to check out the diggnation podcast which is really really good. I've got the HD one so I can enjoy it in all it's lovelyness through the 360. Anyways, it's basically two guys (which actually work for digg I later discovered) that have a chat on a couch over some popualr digg stories drinking beer. It doesn't sound much as a concept, but it's pretty godamn entertaining, and the two boucne off each other really well. It's so good in fact, I've downloaded some of the back catalogue as I really don't mind the chat about old stories such as the Halo 3 4 player online coop announcement etc etc. Yeah so check it out, I did it and think it's awesome.

All this podcasting stuff got me thinking that maybe I could knock one together, just have it be a light-hearted topical chat/rant show. From my limited past experience it is best to have 2 contributors, just 1 and it's just a monologue, not that great, any more, and there's just words everywhere. So, I'm appealing to the intermawebs to see if someone would like to be a co-presenter of some kind. Scott Johnson of Extralife seems to simply record his skype conversations, so it wouldn't be too hard to get up and running, and plus it would mean that I would be posting to here more often, so it's all good. Comment me up and that would be cool.

Anyways, posting in my lunch hour when I really should be lunching.
Take it easy

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