Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

I took a bunch of photos yesterday. We went to the park in the afternoon. These photos were all taken with the HTC Touch Diamond. After the first few photos I decided to play with the settings and see what could be done.

Here is Erin and a shot of the kite flying. Erin climbed the light pole to the top and Mercedes got on the base of it.

Erin blowing out her candles on her birthday cake on her birthday the other day. My little girl is growing up fast. She is 7 now and a little livewire bundle. When you hold her she clings like a monkey, and you can feel every muscle and tendon is just wiry – she is bursting with energy and hardly ever sits still.

She loves to jump up to me to get a cuddle and she springs off the floor and into my arms and wraps her arms around my neck. Usually this is followed by her wriggling back down (all too soon) and she is off and running at the next thing. She has endless stamina, I think she will be a good long distance runner. Erin also loves to draw. She often comes in and borrows my whiteboard markers – making a little box on the whiteboard to draw pictures for daddy.

I love her!

Well it was stupid really. I have had enough experience with emergency departments now that I should have listened to my inner voice of reason and not bothered going.

Anyway – I didn’t. Late Saturday night my Uvula decided to get inflamed and swollen. I was a little worried when I tried sleeping that I couldn’t breath and was choking on it. After some will I? wont I? games I rang my doctor father in New Zealand (waking him at 4:45am his time) to ask his advice. He suggested going to the hospital. I don’t think my father has ever waited in a public hospital emergency waiting room. He is always on the other side of the wall. Anyway forgetting this fact I then ran the local hospital 24 hour nursing line. They advised the same thing. So now all I had to do was decided if I could drive without choking, passing out and crashing thus killing myself in the process. After some more will I? won’t I? I decided against calling an ambulance and drove myself the 20 minutes to the hospital. I parked and went in at 3am. After being seeing in about 10 minutes by a nurse who oohed and aahed and said “my yes it is swollen we will have to get a doctor to see you” I sat and waited. Fortunately I took my walkman and 2 books. I had finished the first book, and was starting on the second at 7AM. at 7:25 I was seen by a doctor who took all of 5 minutes to examine me and tell me to go home and take 2 over the counter anti inflammatory pain meds. Bah Humbug!

I went home took the meds and went to sleep.

I am recording here for evermore my intention never to go the hospital again unless an ambulance takes me! My advice for anybody is that if you can walk or drive chances are you don’t actually need to go to the hospital. Wait and it will be all ok. If not the ambulance will get you anyway.

And if I had done some Googling before I went I would have found this fantastic advice at http://swollenuvula.blogspot.com/ and these yummy pictures.

Following the mishap of my Nokia N81 (broken screen) I needed to obtain a new phone. As I had another phone that was out of contract I was able to get the new HTC Touch Diamond. This is an awesome touch screen phone. The apple iPhone is basically a poor copy of the HTC touch phones only running substandard software including the Music crippling DRM iTunes software. In reality there is no comparison. The iPhone is an iPod with a phone application attached. It does the internet badly (no java or flash support) has no Bluetooth (OK it has bluetooth but you cannot use it to transfer files or data – isn’t that he point of bluetooth?), cannot MMS pictures, has a very bad battery life and you have to install and run iTunes before you can even use the phone application. The HTC Touch Diamond by contrast is first and foremost a Smartphone. That is, it is a PDA phone  running the Windows Mobile 6.1 software. Not only does it have the full phone functionality that every mobile phone should have, it combines this with the PDA capability of Mobile Office, Word, Excel and PowerPoint, integration with Outlook and Exchange, SMS and MMS, photos and video (using a 3.2Mega Pixel camera) has a touch screen interface including some cool scrolling applications just like the iPhone has. Data connectivity includes Bluetooth, Wifi, multi-band Phone (3G, GSM and HSDPA). GPS can be integrated easily (using an external device which is good because it doesn’t then rely on cell coverage). Possibly the only poor comparison to the iPhone is the internal storage is fixed at 4GB. The battery life is also poor, but it can be replaced unlike the iPhone!