So, today's Nano pep talk was written by Lynda Barry. I have no idea who she is.

What a heap of shit. If nothing else I need to become a super-famous published author so when I stand up and say this sort of thing is shit, people listen.

The right way to arrange a meeting at work: Find out when everyone is free and schedule the meeting for then.

The wrong way to arrange a meeting at work: Kidnap everyone involved, nail them to chairs in a basement somewhere, and give the goddamn presentation whether they like it or not.

If these people don't stop cancelling on me, they're going to discover 'the wrong way' is just the tip of the iceberg. I will not have this crap hanging over my Christmas.

>=(

So, I started my Nano again*. Same plot, same characters, new structure, new style.

1104 words.

Plenty of time, plenty of time... I'll get seriously cracking on catching up this weekend.

* Because it was 7000 words of unmitigated toss. Better to restart now than later.

You know it's going to be bad when the six-line abstract has fifteen corrections:

But if conversion accuracy is needed for optimum design using a device in an application having triangular wave as a test signal, then exercise of determination of parameters of an ADC for triangular wave input is must.

Nanowrimo is underway. I don't think I've plugged it here yet.

3300 words in so far, and they're mostly shit. =/

This was too good not to share. It's an email from an academic author, trying to fax us a copyright form:

( I've tried to fax the form this time... )

Baby survives being hit by train. The train was going quite slowly, but still. A train.

I like news like this. Not because I like babies (quite the opposite, plech yuck) but because when you look at the world it's easy to believe that the only good things are the result of long, hard struggles requiring the herding of thousands (or millions) of people in the right direction, whereas shit just happens, without cease or interruption, contaminating everything unless you are extremely cautious or lucky. Probability seems to love nothing more than taking a dump in our proverbial lunchbox.

But no. Sometimes, random chance produces the good result. People fight off AIDS and cancer with nothing more than their immune systems. People find money in the street. Avalanches, earthquakes and volcanoes happen in places where they endanger nothing more than a few trees and millions of tons of snow. And sometimes, babies come out on top in close encounters with tonnes of high-speed machinery.

This is hilarious. Sadly, like all the best stories, it is also not real.

So, I'm sick. I wake up this morning hacking and coughing, with a savage headache and achy joints. Flu symptoms. Now, I'm not concerned about swine flu - I have, like, the Chuck Norris of immune systems - but a guy at work was signed off with confirmed swine flu last week, and if it is swine flu then I get a mandated fortnight off work to play video games avoid spreading the sickness.

Now, in previous adventures with the NHS I discovered that the diseased are no longer welcome in doctors' surgeries across the land. Instead, you're supposed to use NHS Direct (online or by phone) to get a diagnosis from a safe distance.

Me being me, I dialled up the NHS Direct website and did their 'Do you have swine flu?' quiz. The answer was a resounding "Maybe" along with a number to call to find out.

(The quiz, incidentally, has only one purpose - to make sure you actually have some kind of flu as opposed to heart disease, epilepsy*, meningitis or something else more immediately dangerous.)

I call the number. I then sit through ten minutes - yes, I timed it - of blurb about the things I'm going to need when I call the number, about how I should call some other number if I don't have flu, about making sure I'm not wasting NHS time, a few disclaimers, and so on. I put the phone down in the middle of this to go and make some Lemsip, and came back just in time to hear something about if you don't have a touch tone phone you're shit out of luck and should probably start picking out a coffin.**

Finally (albeit with no waiting in a queue) I get a person. He leads me through some forty questions designed to weed out anything other than flu, including several things that would have killed me (or, as he preferred to call me, "The Patient"***) while I was sitting through the preliminary phone blurb. All throughout this, it is painfully obvious that he's reading from an on-screen questionnaire. His script even goes so far as to instruct me - in no uncertain terms - that "the questions only require yes or no answers".

- I'd like to take a moment here to be uncharacteristically serious - if you're a parent, and your child is sick, or you're calling on behalf of some other loved one, what must it feel like to be deflected and quizzed and talked at for a full twenty minutes before you can find out what's wrong? For fuck's sake.

So, eventually I get an authorisation number that'll get me some antivirals. The following exchange takes place:

Me: (sliding in just before the dude hangs up) "So, do I have swine flu or normal flu?"
Him: "We can't tell you. The symptoms are identical."

He seemed like a decent enough person, so I refrained from swearing violently until I'd hung up. It went "FOR FUC-"*coughcoughsplutterblargh*, so it wasn't as cathartic as I'd hoped.

The NHS are so concerned with deflecting the people who stub their toe and call up in a panic, thinking they have anything ranging from swine flu to the black death, that they're incapable of handling a genuine inquiry. And this cost approximately ninety million billion pounds to set up. I can't help but feel that if some of that money went on hiring more doctors (or any cleaners at all) the NHS would be in better shape than it is.

*The quiz is designed so that you can fill it in on behalf of someone else, so this isn't as wacky as it might sound.

**Exaggerated for dramatic purposes.

***Which I guess makes me The English Patient, ho ho.

I am baking cookies for the first time. Cinnamon and ginger cookies. So far there have been 0 fires and 0 cases of food poisoning, although the first batch has only just come out of the oven so it is early days yet.

They are... okay. I think I should have added some lemon, though. Except I don't have a lemon. Oh, the woes of half-assed cookery in the middle of the night.