Inside View

Alphabet Soup

REGULAR READERS know I'm a fan of Problem-Oriented Medical Records. I work with an ICT programme specialist who has plans to enhance the IT support structure for Irish medicine. A few days ago, I read about Scoble discovering an electronic cow in a hospital. If these things interest you too, here is a listing of slang guaranteed to help you understand your charts the next time you're in hospital.

* 3H enema - Enema that is "high, hot, and a hell of a lot." Reputedly given to patients who give staff a hard time.
* 10th Floor Transfer - dying (floor number is always the next number on from the highest floor in the hospital).
* (Acute Lead Poisoning) Air-conditioned - Multiple gun shot wounds.
* ALS - Absolute Loss of Sanity (nutcase)
* AQR - Ain't Quite Right.
* AST - Assuming Seasonal Temperature (dead).
* BMW - Bitch Moan & Whine.
* Bugs in the rug - pubic lice.
* Bury the Hatchet - accidently leave a surgical instrument inside a patient.
* Chocolate Hostage - constipated.
* CRAFT - Can’t Remember A F*cking Thing.
* Eating In - Intravenous feeding.
* FTD - Fixing To Die.
* God's Waiting Room - intensive care unit and/or geriatric unit.
* Hi 5 - HIV positive ("V" being Roman for 5).
* Incarceritis - becoming dubiously ill when arrested or in court.
* Negative Wallet Biopsy - (US) patient transferred to cheaper hospital because of a lack of funds or no insurance coverage.
* OB/GYN - actually means Obstetric/Gynaecology, rumoured to mean "Oh Boy-Got You Naked".
* OPD - Obnoxious Personality Disorder.
* Pumpkin Positive - a penlight shone into the patient's mouth/ear would encounter a brain so small that the whole head would light up.
* Rule of Five - if more than five of the patient's orifices are obscured by tubing, he has no chance.
* Stream team - urology dept.

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View the complete list at the Messy Beast.

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Would you freeze-dry your pet

QUESTION FROM the back room of this blog: Would you freeze-dry your cat? Or embalm her in your coffee table? Or make him into a pet pillow? So many choices, aren't there?

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That's Sam, the world's ugliest dog, who died earlier this year.

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Walkman Phone Beats iPod

FACT: Third level multimedia students starting their award or degree years prefer to manage their music and take their pictures with their phones. In Tipperary Institute, the SonyEricsson Walkman phone rules the roost. Its megapixel images of Ireland are sprinkled throughout Flickr with shots taken during both day and night. As a music player, it's sweet and simple. It can be cabled over to the campus network where owners drag and drop tracks directly onto the phone. The college even gives away free power to recharge phone batteries, which guarantees a full day's listening when on campus.

Pixsy Finds Irish Blogs

TIME MAGAZINE calls Pixsy one of the coolest 50 websites on earth. Some analysts believe visual search is the fastest growing segment of search on the web today. If you want to monetise that audience, you need to populate it. Pixsy's image locator fingers hundreds of images when asked to locate Irishblogs. Pixsy doesn't find everything tagged with every label but it appears to locate items with word stems already located in its lexicon. For example, it won't find Tom Raftery but it does find Raftery with hair. Knowing this, I'm thumbing through some of my images and giving them appropriate surnames.

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MCD Oxegen Burning

REFLECTING A CULTURE of legal posturing in place of careful consideration, MCD initiated a lawsuit against the largest collective of Irish online. According to Scrudu, fewer than a dozen Irish bloggers have noted the story. Not unexpectedly, the MCD action has stifled some discussion threads at boards.ie but what might not be expected is the self-inflicted damage MCD has incurred as a result of attacking pop culture at the water cooler. More than anything else, the discussion at boards.ie connects people throughout every county in Ireland. It takes just little ripple at boards.ie to wash over every ticket-buying twentysomething in the State. Has the MCD executive suite considered how long it might take to recover from the chill brought about by legal proceedings?

These Cats Rock

An official Record Store Cat. Part of a litter you need to see. Reminds me that I have to make videos of Jack, the stray tuxedo.

Wondering if photos are stickier

TIME WILL TELL whether the YouTubes of the world attract and keep a paying audience but in the meantime, one thing is certain: the mainstream photo-sharing sites are well on their ways to holding onto paid subscribers and attracting multiples of more of them. When talking with Robert Scoble, Thomas Hawk mentioned his work with "developers at all the photo sharing sites and that they tell him that their main problems are keeping up with the huge increases in traffic (doubling small numbers isn’t that hard to keep up with, but when you double millions of users that’s a HUGE problem to work around)".

Best App for Blackberry

BLACKBERRY OWNERS should check out FreeNews, one of the smartest applications I've used on my mobile phones. In fact, you don't need a Blackberry -- smartphones run FreeNews. If you like to read your news sources while on the move, FreeNews can deliver full feeds to you through a one-button sync. This is less effort than required to launch a river of news browser. Once you sync--something I do in less than two minutes for more than 80 newsfeeds--you carry your entire river of news with you. In my experience, I can stay updated with the flow of information on Irish websites, specialised keyword alerts, new bookmarks in my del.icio.us network and inside information related to public works projects. Because the newsfeeds download onto your Blackberry (or smart phone), you can peruse what you need while on the subway or flying. I read my newsfeeds aboard Irish Rail and Aircoach (or Air Couch, as one visitor called it). This idea appeals to readers of Tailrank and that news aggregator carved out a little space to hold a cluster of related content.

European Health Insurance Card

AS JUSTIN MASON notes, if the Irish government "had a simple and usable online application process, perhaps they wouldn’t be plagued by other sites attempting to offer that service for what is really a quite reasonable EUR22 fee". Like many others, I heard pile-on press coverage of www.ehic-card.eu deriding the charging of a fee for a free European Health Insurance card. At the time, my only reaction was value-for-money. If you need your health insurance card, is it worth the money spent online to get it before the three week period elapses for the government to get you one? I pay agencies to expedite paperwork all the time. Paying a service fee for a health insurance card normally means you get it faster than the normal rate. Such is the efficiency of the private sector.

Create election promises with Bullshitr

NOT ONLY CAN the “Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator” generate “bullshit-compliant products and services” with the click of a button, but you can modify the output and make the results into very credible election year manifestos. Always attentive to the beating drum of the exit strategy, Bullshits offers links to related services that point aspirants to all of the tools needed to “sell your company to Yahoo”.

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Mike Arrington -- "Bullshitr is good for a laugh"
Empty Bottle -- "Hey, kids! It's the Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator"

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